Seeking Refuge: Uganda: A Day in Nakivale Part 2

I believe I left off with us looking for a family to interview. In order for our report to be consistent, we have broken down each zone into the predominant nationalities that live there and have to be sure that we interview 3 families from each of those nationalities. So, as we head into the village, I tell FFH we need to first find a Congolese family.
Africans have a sixth sense for identifying where people are from. If you lined up a group of Europeans and asked me to identify from which country they came without ever hearing them speak, I would fail miserably. FFH on the other hand has no problem differentiating between Congolese, Rwandese, Burundian, or any other African nationality.
He gestures to a woman wearing a blue t-shirt and a bright, multicolored kanga around her waist. She is sitting on the ground peeling cassava with an 8 inch knife while her children wait around to grab pieces that miss the pot into which she throws them when she's done. We walk up to the woman and Furahaha crouches down to offer her an always long, East African greeting. He appropriately decides to speak Kinyarwanda to her after recognizing that she is Nyamulenge (a tribe from the Eastern area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo bordering Rwanda). After a few minutes he tells me she has agreed to let us interview her. At that point she has already hopped up off the ground and carried her cassava and pot into her home where she sets up the one, small, wooden bench she has. Then she motions for FFH and me to come in.
Regardless of nationality, every time we have interviewed a Nakivale resident, they have been incredibly hospitable. They will invite us into their home or offer us often the only two stools they have while they sit on the ground for the entire 45 minute interview. The Eritrean community has gone as far as consistently inviting us back so they can make and serve us fresh coffee and popcorn. I hope I don't forget the kindness they show to strangers, and that I take some of these lessons in hospitality back to the states with me.
We sit down on the bench in her home; a mud hut with floors and walls smothered in dirt and cow dung; a concoction that suffocates the small bugs they call "jiggers" that eat away at the skin on their feet. There are pots and jerrycans piled in the corner opposite a mud platform that is clearly used as a bed. I have FFH explain the confidentiality of the interview to her, and that she is welcome to continue preparing her food while we chat. All 3 of her children gather around. She sits down on the ground, picks up her knife again, and we begin.

A typical home in Nakivale.
The tarp being used as the roof is given to them by the UNHCR when they first arrive.

While the questions we ask in these interviews are always the same, the answers we get are always different. I start by having FFH ask the women some biographical information; their name, their age, their nationality, when they came to the settlement, their marital status, how many children they have, the children's ages, if their entire family is united or if they were separated from children or relatives while fleeing, and if they are looking for any missing family members. We try our best to make the interview somewhat conversational so the women feel relaxed and know that we care about their story and aren't just searching for coded, one word answers. After the biographical information we ask questions from seven different categories: livelihood, education, recreation, health, water, communication, and security.

Questions regarding livelihood are typically straightforward. Most women tell us they are farmers, some others work odd jobs like washing clothes or cleaning for other Nakivale residents, and occasionally they own and operate small shops. This woman is a subsistence farmer. Her husband was killed in the war in Congo and her two youngest daughters and one eldest son were taken by soldiers. She is living by herself with her 3 other children, selling part of her food rations to buy school materials, and working in her farm to feed herself and her children. She tells us she is looked down upon and even abused by male residents because she is a single mother.

Three girls that were sent home from school after having a
stripe shaved in their hair because it was
said to be too long.

We move on to ask questions about education to find that there is little access to either. Most residents complain of the distance their children have to walk to school, the large class sizes, the language of instruction, and the apathy of the teachers. This woman quit attending school in Congo when she was married at age 13. Her children are in Primary 1 (P1), Primary 3 (P3), and Primary 6 (P6) at the "nearby" primary school, a 45 minute walk from their home. There are over 100 students in each of their classes and they are taught in English and the local Ugandan language Runyankole, neither of which her children speak. The two youngest go to school without uniforms (the mother can only afford one for the eldest child) and worry that they will be sent home every day. It is the national policy in Uganda that every child is to wear a uniform, however it is also forbidden for a teacher to send away students who can't afford them. That law is being consistently ignored in Nakivale as nearly every child without a uniform reports being publicly sent home from school at least once a week. When they aren't chased away, her children typically come home from school with no more than 1 page of work written in their notebooks. She is considering keeping them home so they can start working since they aren't learning anything at school. She asks us, "What good will Runyankole do for them when we return to the DRC and everyone speaks French and Kinyarwanda?"

One of Nakivale's most crowded P1 classrooms
with over 300 students.

A swing set on a playground built by Right to Play;
the organization that left in 2012.

When we move on to discuss recreation we ask her what activities her children are able to be a part of. She tells us that they jump rope at school. Furahaha asks her children gathered around if they have any chance to play sports at school and they tell him that there are no sports teams for them. Only the older boys (18 - 23 years old) are allowed to play football and that they don't have sufficient equipment for even that one team. For quite a few years Nakivale was fortunate to have the organization Right to Play providing materials and organizing teams in the camp, but at the beginning of 2012, the organization left. It is unclear why they pulled out of Nakivale, but since then the fields have become overgrown and the football nets have become rusted and abandoned. The settlement residents simply cannot afford to maintain the facilities or purchase balls. The children desperately want to be coached and have teams. We gave a ball to one kid we became quite close with. His name is Justin. When he showed the ball to his friends, they all started jumping around and thanking us. I've never seen the kids smile that much.

Justin's team after we gave them a real football
(see the black and white ball being held by the boy in the red plaid shirt).

After recreation we discuss health. The primary health issue facing every family is malaria. It is the number one killer of children in Nakivale. We did not interview a single person who had been exempt from the disease. Malaria, a disease that is contracted through a mosquito bite, can be relatively well prevented if you head indoors when it gets dark and sleep under a mosquito net. Unfortunately, not many residents can afford a net. No one in this woman's family sleeps under nets, and they have all contracted malaria at least once. She also told us about the poor quality of medical care at the clinic. She said that whenever someone goes to the public clinic, they test them for malaria, send them home with panadol (a European painkiller and fever reducer) and tell them to go buy Malarone (the medication they actually need) at the small pharmacy at the center of the camp. We have discovered that these same doctors own the pharmacies people are being referred to. They are stocking their private businesses with medication that is supposed to be free to refugees at the public clinics. We have heard this same story from from in every village of the camp.
Next we discuss access to and quality of water. There are a number of sources from which residents collect water. Some retrieve it from taps, which provide water that has been pumped from Lake Nakivale, treated, and distributed. Others collect water straight from the lake. Fewer collect water from bore holes (less than 10 in the entire camp) and from swamps. Those who collect water from the taps complain of how unreliable it is (as I mentioned before, they attribute this to GIZ staff who steal the fuel that runs the generators), and that it is a thick consistency and gives them itchy skin rashes. Rania and I shower using the same water the residents do and even I fell victim to the skin rash. The woman we are interviewing today walks about 30 minutes to get her water directly from Lake Nakivale. She has few complaints about the quality of the water (after she boils it) but says that many people are eaten by crocodiles. Throughout all of our interviews people reported that around 10 people, on average, are eaten by crocodiles each year. However, the refugees in Nakivale have been innovative and have started digging a system of canals to direct water away from the main area of the lake to allow safer retrieval. It's incredible how innovative and self-reliable people here are.

Siblings pumping water from
one of the settlement's few operating bore holes.

Lake Nakivale

The final section of our interviews is my least favorite: security. For the most part residents in Nakivale feel very safe; at least relative to the environment from which they have come. However, we are told the occasional nightmare. Some Rwandese residents have been abducted from the camp to be returned to Rwanda and be thrown in jail or put on trial (primarily for being Kagame's political opposition). Other residents have been thrown in jail in the settlement simply because they had a disagreement with their neighbor who was in a position to pay the police to get rid of them for a few nights. One woman was even imprisoned for 2 nights with her 9 month old baby. But none of these stories compare to the fear both Rania and I feel when either one of the women we are interviewing or one of their daughters is pregnant. As I am speaking to this woman I realize that that is the case. It is barely noticeable under her loose top, but she is pregnant. As FFH begins to ask if she knows of any women who have been victims of sexual violence, she looks down at the cassava she is cutting and shakes her head, yes. We ask if she can tell us how many women and what happened. She puts down the cassava but doesn't lift her eyes from the ground. She slowly begins to explain that about 4 months ago she was collecting firewood in the hills just beyond the settlement when she was attacked by 2 men. They raped her and 2 months later she found out she was pregnant. We ask her if she was alone and if she knows who the men were. She tell us that she was with one other woman who was able to run away, and that she thinks they were Ugandan men. She did not go to the police because she does not trust them and did not believe they would do anything.
It is important to note that while we have interviewed many women who became pregnant by choice, women, especially in the remote areas of Nakivale, face a very real and present threat of sexual abuse. Rania and I are struggling to address this issue and have started by telling any men in the family to fetch firewood themselves and by telling all female households to travel in large groups anytime they have to walk a far distance.

Following the interview, FFH and I thank her for sharing her time with us, ask if there is anything else she'd like us to know, and explain that her answers will help us create a program to help her children. She tells us there is nothing else and thanks us. We say goodbye to her kids and then leave. We begin looking for another family to interview.
We go through this process 6 or 7 times throughout the day. Hearing new stories, writing down more information. We take maybe a 15 minute break to grab a mandazi - a dense sweet roll - for lunch and then carry on. We continue interviewing households until about 5:00 pm. Then, we walk to the nearest area with shops (often 2 or 3 miles away) and find another boda to make the long trek back to out hotel before it gets dark.

We head straight to our "restaurant" and drink tea until Rania and Boss get back. Once they return we order dinner - often just fried Irish (potatoes) and beans - and exchange stories from the day. Once we've finished eating, we send FFH and Boss home on a boda and Rania and I return to our hotel. The back gate to our rooms is locked once the sun goes down, so we have to enter through the main entrance in the bar. Every night, without fail, there is a group of 6 or 7 men drinking bottles of 2500 UGS ($1) Nile Special beer and watching old American music videos - typically a cycle of Jennifer Lopez, Boyz II Men, and Celine Dion - on a 12 inch tv (the bar has a generator that runs at night). Rania and I consistently make fun of Furaha and Boscoe for their obsession with love songs and music videos - African men are all hopeless romantics. We slip through and say hi to Mafuka who is the big and bold woman who runs the bar, while we simultaneously try to avoid being seen by any of the men.

Our shower.

It is no later than 7:00 pm and we are exhausted. The sun hasn't quite stolen all of my energy so I decide to take a shower. I grab my basin, jerrycan, shampoo, and soap and head to the "shower". Our shower consists of a wooden pallet for us to stand on and a curtain that acts as a door. It is located directly across from the toilet shared by the two of us and the bar crowd, so I always have Rania block the entrance from any drunk men who might confuse the two. Bucket after bucket of cold water feels nice after a long day in the sun. I shower completely in darkness and rinse out as much of the shampoo as I can. I get dressed and head back to my room. Rania and I stay up another 15 minutes or so chatting and brainstorming solutions to some of the problems we heard today. Then, by 8:30 pm, we brush our teeth next to the goats tied behind our rooms, spend a good 10 minutes washing the red dirt from our feet, wish each other a good night, and close our doors.

As I lay in bed under my mosquito net I hear people shuffling back and forth past my room and the faint sounds of Celine Dion's "That's the Way It Is". I close my eyes and try to decompress before I fall asleep. I remember the faces of the women and children I met today. I reflect upon their stories and hold back the tears for the children who have lost their childhood and the mothers who can't do anything about it. I try to make myself numb to certain elements. I know I can't become consumed by the sadness and empathy I feel for each woman and child I looked in the eyes today. I cannot let it discourage me and I cannot let it paralyze me. I pray that as I feel heavier each night, these women feel lighter because they were able to tell someone their story. I must force all of this to motivate me, because tomorrow morning when I hear the roosters crow, I get to wake up and do it all again.