Hello to you all
I write this message in a somber mood, unlike my other e-mails which saw me excited to explain anything and everything that i have across in my travels.
I have had a week filled with a very harsh reality...one that i certainly knew existed, but now i have faces to go with the stories, and tears cried on my shoulder.
I have now worked two weeks with a refugee organization here in Kampala. As previously mentioned I am very frustrated with both sides of the organization....However thursday and Friday saw me working at InterAids Medical hostel. Patients live in said hostel while receiving treatment at the only truly functioning national Ugandan hospital. I have cried everyday.
My job up to this point i have been fairly removed from clients, except for several intake interviews that i have done. Intake interviews are done when a client arrives in kampala. We have to explain to them that if they are living here in the city they will get NO HELP from UNHCR...zippo. i started to explain this to an 18 year old Sudanese boy whose father was recently murdered...he didn't want to stay in kampala, so i had to tell him that he has to get to Nakivale settlement...about a 5 hour drive...on his own. He doesnt have money to take a bus, and I dont know how he is going to get there. it took me a lot of willpower not to pull out every shilling I had on me and shove it at him. I ushered him out the door of InterAid and waved him goodbye, wondering if he would make it.
At the medical clinic things quickly got worse. Thursday i arrived and was showed around. The matron told everyone that they could approach me with their problems, which made me very nervous because well i am not a doctor...and dont know anything about medical issues. The matron turned me loose on the hostel and i started walking around the wards (rooms...) the first room held two women (verry young girls actually) who had their babies with them. The babies heads were swollen to a size much too large for their emaciated bodies. in broken English one girl explained to me that there was too much water in the skull and that the doctors had installed tubes to drain the water. One girl lifted the coverlet and showed me the tube snaking along the skull of her 8 month old baby. A Sudanese guy i recognized from working the front desk popped in. He explained to me that he had joined the SPLA (Sudanese rebel faction) in 1987 when he was 13. he was a leader at a munitions depot when one night he was smoking and the cigarette didn't go out completely and the munitions depot blew up. The SPLA thought he was a subversive and tortured him. He showed me his scars. He told me that he had some mental instability due to his torture, and asked me what he could do. I (surprisingly) had a good answer for him. i gave him the name of a local organization that works with torture survivors, drew him a little map, and he was very happy. I was happy because i had an answer to his question.
I then went and hung out in a room with Sudanese women and their children. All of the little girls had cancer. Chemotherapy is not an option here...While i was in the room playing with them patients began arriving from the hospital. An old frail looking woman stumbled in and curled up on a bed. Through a translator i was able to determine that although she looked 70 something the woman was only 40, and that she had breast cancer. A fully covered somali woman walked in and spoke INCREDIBLE english, asking who the caretaker of the elderly woman was. She explained that the next day (friday) someone who spoke both english and her native tongue needed to go to the hospital with her, as she had not been treated that day because no one could talk to her. She had simply laid in front of the hospital all day. The somali woman, called Dalmar, became my guide of sorts.
After lunch on thursday many of the men at the clinic wanted to talk to me. They asked me if there was cancer in America...i had to sit and explain them that even in America, their dream of dreams, where everything was supposed to be perfect, there was no cure for cancer. Their faces fell. Slowly the conversation turned to rights. They asked me what their rights were, and what they could do to claim them. I gave them a quick synopsis, and told them that the only suggestion that I had, since they knew their problems better than I ever could, was that they needed to organize in the camps and select a leader. A Sudanese man looked at me and said no no, we have done that, but out leaders and their families disappear. I sat in a sort of shocked, upset silence. I asked the man for the name of the settlement camp he was in, as well as the names of the men that have disappeared. He wanted to give me his name as well, but I was afraid that if the wrong person or people figure out that he was telling me, he would disappear too. So I could not take his name.
The thing that most frustrated me Thursday was that refugees have NO knowledge. No one tells them how UNHCR works, what they should do, who they can go to (which is clearly no one)...they are told to perpetually wait. For years.
Friday i was back at the med hostel. The babies with large heads and cancer-ridden children had all been taken back to their respective settlements. The Somali woman approached me, weeping. Apparently the breast cancer woman had died in the night. No one gave her any treatment. Dalmar and I hung out a lot on Friday. she is 22, like me, and has severe blood clotting and heart valve problems. I asked her what had been happening in Somalia when she fled one year ago, expecting a general account. She told me that there had been fighting, and that her father had been suffering from heart problems so one night she went to the pharmacy to pick up his drugs. When she returned home her entire family was dead. When she arrived at a refugee settlement in Uganda she was not placed in the Somali section, as she is a minority, so the other Somalis would not accept her. She stays in the Rwandese section of the camp and has no one that speaks her language near her. As of Friday I had not given anyone here money. But Friday I pulled out a 10,000/= note, about $5 USD and handed it to Dalmar as she walked me to a motorcycle taxi (bodaboda). This action immediately made her start sobbing, and I made her promise that she would save the money until she really needed it. I am not the type of person that believes throwing money at a problem fixes it, because money is only a temporary fix to poverty, but the settlement life is SO hard, she has no money for school or anything and if she sells anything the money isn’t disposable income, she has to use it to buy soap and other necessities. Maybe it was foolish, but I just felt like she really needed it, more than I ever possibly could.
Friday night I was just so bummed out. I went to an Acholi dance troupe with some friends and we went out to have a nice pasta dinner and some wine (I needed that wine bad!!), and no Grandma Wegner, I don’t drink white Zin. anymore, no worries. During dinner I called my parents out in Yosemite/ Sonoma and bawled on the phone about my week while pacing the streets of Kampala (past prostitutes…everything I do in Kampala has to do with prostitutes, which is illegal here).
Saturday night I went dancing…and by dancing I was in a night club but my primary activity was keeping boys away from me. Sunday I was a lazy piece of junk and sat around. My roommate Sara went to a four hour church service (no sarcasm there, im dead serious), and was not in a good mood when she got home. For dinner we went and had nachos…meaning guacamole and wonton noodles instead of tortilla chips, and then went to watch football (tottingham v. Chelsea) and drank some more wine. I went home and immediately went to bed.
My plan now is to quit InterAid…the stupid internship that I worked so hard to get!! But not because I dislike the place or the peoples, but because I want to focus on the disparity between human rights policy and human rights on the ground concerning Refugees…clearly they are very different things. So I believe that Friday I am leaving to visit my friend studying FGM (female genital mutilation) in Kapchorwa, then I will go to Lira for about a week, then down to Mbarara/ nakivale refugee settlement.
Tomorrow I have to go schmooze office of the prime minister in charge of refugee issues, David Apollo Kazungu, into letting me go to the settlements. I have to be vague about my reasoning for going because if I just say that I want to investigate human rights violations that might not go over so well…
The rainy season has officially arrived, and my blood has now thinned because i am chilly in the 65 degree weather here after a storm. Also grasshopper season is upon us here...they are HUGE....but i cant wait to eat them because they have become the bain of my apartment dwelling existence
I hope everyone is doing OK! I am shopping for your Christmas presents as we speak…
Sharon
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