The end

Today was my last day at the Monitor. Tomorrow morning I leave for Kenya to spend three weeks in Nairobi, Kijabe, and at home before heading back to the US on the 18^th.

Reflecting back over this summer, I am amazed at how much I have learned and how I have grown and changed. I have been stretched and challenged in so many ways, met so many amazing people, and overall had an incredible summer in journalism and Uganda.

Shout outs to Megan for being my most dedicated reader, to Jason for being such a huge support this summer (and for all the money you spent on phone cards!), and to everyone else who has followed along with me this summer as well.

Love,

Sarah

Rwanda: Land of rolling hills, no plastic bags, and boda drivers who wear helmets

My seat partner on the night bus to Kigali didn’t know English, and I don’t know French, so beyond “hello” and sharing our names we weren’t able to verbally communicate. But we both had digital cameras and bonded as we snapped photos out the window in the morning. At one point, he held up the camera and pointed at me questioningly and took my picture and then I felt like a needed to take his back. So now a Burundian man named Joey has a picture of me on his camera and I have a picture of him, leaning against his window and holding up his fingers in some mix between gangster and peace.

Rwanda is beautiful! Huge hills and valleys and so much green farmland! One of the first things I noticed about it was how clean it is – especially compared to Uganda and ESPECIALLY compared to Kenya. There are no plastic bags allowed into the country; the authorities even searched our bus for them at the border.

Another of the first things I noticed when we arrived in Kigali was that the boda drivers wear helmets AND have helmets for their passengers. Shocked? I know, I was too.

I took a boda (and wore a helmet!) to meet Zoë and Jenny and we went out for brunch.

We spent all of Sunday afternoon at the Genocide Memorial in Kigali. Outside the trees, plants, and fountains all represented something related to Rwandan history and the genocide. At the bottom of the grounds huge mass graves held the bones of countless people, some of whose names were listed on a huge placard nearby. Fresh flowers had been recently laid on the huge slabs of concrete covering the graves and several floral arrangements were wrapped in ribbon that read simply: “Never again.”

Inside we listened to modules that traced back through the history of the genocide and saw dozens of pictures and artifacts from it. It was strange being there right after I was in western Uganda. One of the things that stood out to me most about the genocide history was that at one point the Huto restricted the minority Tutsis to only 15% of leadership positions…a frightening similarity to what Museveni just proposed in Bunyoro region.

At the end of the memorial was a section dedicated to the children who had been killed. A plaque on the wall said, “To our beautiful children who would have been our future.” There were pictures of many of the kids who had died, some blown into large photographs and others hung in rows along the walls. Another plaque said that some of the pictures were the only one family’s even had of their children – given up for the memorial. I cried in this section. A picture of two small sisters, another of a smiling little boy, another of a baby who had been killed by a machete in her mother’s arms.

It was heavy heavy stuff.

Both nights we stayed in a hostel called St. Paul’s. It was clean, safe, and perfectly located in the middle of the city, AND it was $4 a night each, though we only had two single beds…

On Monday morning we decided we should get an early start in order to squeeze in as much sightseeing as possible. We aimed for 7 and were proud of ourselves for leaving St. Paul’s at 7:15.

When we arrived at the bus station about an hour later to catch a bus to Butare, a town in southern Rwanda, they told us the bus left at 7:30 and we were just in time. Turns out Rwanda is an hour behind Uganda in time and we had actually gotten an early start at 6:15! But it worked out really well because we had just the perfect amount of time in the day to pack everything in.

Butare was about 2½ hours away by bus. We visited the National Museum there, had lunch, and then rode the 2½ hours back again. But we did get to see a significant chunk of the country since Rwanda is so small!

When we got back, we caught a taxi to Nyamata church, another genocide memorial created in memory of the people killed there, who were trying to take refuge inside the church. We arrived at dusk and although all of the regular tours were done for the day, the escari still showed us inside.

All of the benches were stacked high with piles of dirty clothing from people who had died. There were just piles and piles of it. In the ceiling there were bullet holes and underground there were little rooms filled with bones and skulls. No glass windows like at the memorial here, just shelves and shelves of bones.

It was too much to see at once and we left trying to process everything.

When we got back to Kigali we caught bodas to Hotel Rwanda just to say we had been there and then went to a little Indian restaurant for dinner where they serve chapattis and call it naan…

Tuesday morning our bus left at 5:45AM and we arrived back in Kampala about 11 hours later, exhausted and dirty.

My visit to Western Uganda

Wednesday, 9AM:

My matatu is flying down the road between Kampala and Kagadi and I am happy. Happy to be seeing more of the country and happy for what’s ahead. Outside, a man pushes a bicycle laden with jackfruit down the road and a woman works with a hoe in her garden. Red ant hills interrupt the otherwise green landscape of banana trees and lush foliage. The matatu blares music from her loudspeakers and I feel like it is the soundtrack to my life. The wind blows in through the window and a little girl dances in the street as though she can hear my music.

Tuesday was a big day for me. I turned 21 and had my second front page story in the paper (about dropout rates in girls’ education). I also received an assignment to travel to Kibaale region in Western Uganda and write some stories on the heightening tribal tensions between the indigenous Banyoro people in the area and the non-indigenous “Bafurukyi.”

Since I am not a member of either tribal group, my editors decided I could make an unbiased assessment of what is going on in Western Uganda. The responsibility of the assignment has me a little worried, however. The Bunyoro “conflict” has been at the center of the country’s spotlight for the last several weeks and I confess I haven’t been following it as well as I should have. Now I have just two days to “get to the bottom” of it all.

The articles are for the Sunday paper and my editors gave me the assignment at around noon on Tuesday. For the next several hours I frantically tried to get the budget for the trip approved (which required chasing down a bunch of signatures all over the office), read some background on the conflict, about which I knew very little, and leave for home so I could pack for the two-day trip. By the time I arrived in the taxi park right at five, with my money, clothes, and a fancy Monitor camera (yes I was also supposed to be the photographer on this trip), all of the Kagadi taxies were already gone for the day.

I had been planning to travel to the trading town Tuesday night and get an early start reporting on Wednesday, but instead I had my birthday dinner as planned with Zoë and Penny and left my apartment at 5:30AM on Wednesday for the four and a half hour trip to Kagadi.

10AM

My matatu is still flying down the road. I am still happy. I am also covered in salt from the roasted cassava root I bought in Mubende town where we stopped briefly. The matatu driver honks generously at passerby and approaching vehicles, sticking his hand out the window to wave vigorously whenever we pass another taxi.

The matatu pulls onto a dirt road and we close the windows to keep out the dust. If we slow down, I will be sitting in a small furnace. 100 kilometers to go.

10:30PM

I am sitting on my bed in Nuel Guesthouse trying to type up some of my notes and I am exhausted. I arrived in Kagadi at about noon and met up with Francis, a Monitor correspondent who knows the area and came from Hoima to help me arrange interviews around the town. From 12:30 to 8:00 I talked with people in the town – a school headmaster, the Resident District Commissioner, a local elder, the director of the NGO, World Voices Uganda, the FDC District Chairman, a secondary head teacher, and other local people in the community.

I also traveled to the resettlement village of Kasasa where I interviewed the chairperson of LC3. Kasasa village is composed almost entirely of migrant populations to the area, all worried in light of the President’s recent (very controversial) proposal that all upper leadership positions in the region should be restricted to the indigenous tribe.

Local villagers gathered around us while we talked and as more and more people arrived, I wondered about the audience, unsure as to why so many people were there. When I finished the interview, I discovered that the reason for the gathering was a village council meeting – which I had been delaying for the past 30 minutes with my questions to the keynote speaker.

We finished and I stood up, the people eyed me expectantly. “They want a speech,” Francis informed me.

“A speech?” I asked, unsure of what I was supposed to say.

“Just tell them who you are and what you’re doing,” Francis said.

And so I did, explaining in English that I was a reporter who had come to the area to find out for myself what was happening between the feuding tribal groups. Someone translated into Rukiga for me and the people listened expectantly.

When I finished, an old man stood up and did a dance. He walked over and grabbed my hand, pumping it eagerly.

I came to this place as an “objective, third-party,” but as I drove away, sandwiched between Francis and the boda driver while we bumped down the narrow dirt road and the sun set in the distance, I felt a huge weight of responsibility settle on my shoulders.

Thursday, 11AM

I am again driving down the road, heading this time towards Kibaale town. I interviewed more people in the morning and am now heading to the police station and district headquarters to get more comments.

There are ten of us packed in the tiny five-seater car and my shoulder is neatly nestled in the damp armpit of the man next to me. I try not to think about it.

11PM

My notes are spread out around me in the dim bar of Hotel Classic, my guesthouse for the night. My computer is plugged in to possibly the only outlet in the room and while several men play pool to my right, I am desperately trying to make sense of all of my notes and information and begin writing my stories. I will leave for Kampala at 6 in the morning and am beginning to feel the pressure of my approaching deadlines.

I have seen so much in the last two days and talked to so many people. My interviews have traced back through history to British colonialism and Buganda control. One man told me how his office building was burned the first day he took political office. Another related that he was beaten at the polling stations last elections.

Yet, although the country is in uproar about the President's recent proposals for the area, when I visited Kagadi I found a small town like any other. A butcher cutting meat for his customers, two women chatting in a shop, children playing together at their school. Hardly the "tribal war" some are talking of.

At the same time there is tension under the surface, especially among the leadership. One man proclaimed that the president is purposefully stirring tribal tensions to advance his own agenda, another declared boldly that tribal lines run deeper than national lines as they were instituted by God, not man. I have heard some pretty crazy stuff and taken pages of notes.

When we stopped at the Kabaale police station today for a comment from the district police commander, I saw two young men, arrested that day for hacking their father to death with a panga. Apparently he had 3 wives and 38 children and the boys wanted a share of his land…no it was not related to the stories I’m writing, but as I looked at the boys – 16 and 21 years old – sitting on the floor in the same police office as I am, my heart broke a little.

Land, oil, wealth, politics – all play complicated roles in this place, and now must also play into the stories I am writing.

How now to sift through it, understand it, and compact it into only several stories?

Saturday 12:22 AM

The special hire I called twenty minutes ago has still not arrived to pick me up from the Monitor office and I am exhausted. Including travel time, during which I read over my notes and tried to process what I had been seeing, I have worked 51 hours since Wednesday morning.

This morning, I traveled back to Kampala and met my editor to discuss the trip.

“Write four stories,” he told me, explaining what he wanted and sending me back to my desk.

I wrote, he read, we talked, I wrote some more, and some more, and some more. And now its past midnight and the stories are done – or mostly done, I’ll be returning in a few hours to meet with my editor for any last edits before the paper goes to press.

5PM

The deadline has come and gone and the stories are finished, laid out across three pages, and printed as a Special Report in the early edition of the Sunday paper. I plan to go buy one in a couple of minutes.

I know that I will look back on the last several days as one of my best experience in Uganda and with the Monitor. I have seen and learned so much in such a short time! And these are the pieces I know I will be most proud of – in spite of the probable typos that were missed as a result of the quick deadlines.

But right now, I am exhausted and glad to be home…

…for a few hours anyway. At 11:30PM I’m taking a bus to Rwanda for the next several days. Zoë and our friend Jenny left last night and I’ll meet them Kigali in the morning.

I think I'm ready to just be a tourist for a few days.

On beautiful islands and handwashing towels

On Saturday Zoë and I stepped off the streets of Kampala into a quiet beach camp on Lake Victoria. Or, more accurately, we took two matatus, a boda, and a three-hour ferry to a quiet beach camp on Lake Victoria.

Hornbill beach camp is in the Ssese islands, a scattering of islands in Lake Victoria that are reachable from Entebbe only by a once-a-day ferry. The islands have beautiful forests and white beaches and Hornbill is situated right on the beach. For Shs15,000 (about $7.50) a night, we stayed in a little banda with two beds and mosquito nets.

The scattered bandas were painted in colorful designs and small tents were pitched haphazardly around the camp. The long drop, sink, and showers-without-doors stood on one side of the camp and the tiny kitchen stood on the other. Hammocks were slung in trees down near the beach and a large campfire burned nearby each night.

As Zoë described it, the camp had character. :)

On Sunday we walked into the tiny village of Kalangala for chai and chapattis and then spent the day reading and relaxing on the beach and in the hammocks. Both nights, we watched the glorious sunset over Lake Victoria and then ate dinner by lamplight with some fellow campers – a French family the first night and two British Uni students backpacking through East Africa the second.

Monday morning we took the 8AM ferry back to Entebbe and made our way back to work. The weekend was relaxing and beautiful, it was a nice change from bustling Kampala and I enjoyed the time away a lot.

Work continues to be busy. Last week I did a story about health workers who survived Ebola and were supposed to have been compensated by the Ministry of Labor, but haven’t been…, attended the launch of new HIV/AIDS publications, and wrote a story about a radio journalist being pressured by the police after broadcasting an episode on unresolved murder cases in Uganda. The last couple of pieces I’ve written have only been published as briefs, though, which has been a little frustrating.

Melanie returned home yesterday (they are finalizing their plans to head to the US for surgery later this week) and Penny is back with us now too. She was admitted to Makare University and will be beginning there in a couple weeks.

Here are two discoveries I’ve made about myself lately:

1. I hate washing clothes by hand. Especially towels.

2. Shillings make me stingy. I think it’s the fact that everything is in thousands.

“The camp makes all its money on food,” I complained to Jason on the phone yesterday. “Dinner cost – I did a quick calculation in my head – three dollars!”

“Three dollars?” Jason said.

“Oh,” I said, “yeah.”