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.”

God is good

I’m working on a feature on egg donation and infertility in Uganda. Last week I took a boda across town and got to meet with a Ugandan doctor who loves Jesus and loves his people and began Women’s Hospital International in Kampala to give back to and serve his countrymen – er, countrywomen.

Just like in Kenya, so much of a woman’s life and status is wrapped up in her ability to bear children. “If a woman doesn’t have children of her own, the she’s (…) regarded as not a woman, in a sense,” Dr. Tamali-Sali said to me. “She can’t propagate the next generation, therefore she’s useless,” he said in reference to the cultural attitude toward infertility in Uganda.

I also worked a good chunk of the week extracting the names of people awaiting prosecution from a 253 government white paper. Not my favorite job ever.

I have been shifting away from news and towards writing more feature/enterprise articles. It’s really interesting but a LOT more time and work!

Over the weekend, Zoe and I went to a rugby game at the Kampala Rugby Club. Pirates vs. Cubs. The Pirates had two incredible tries scored off of breakaway runs and ended up winning the game. The guy standing next me had 20,000 shillings bet on the Cobs.

We also met up with Agnes, a Ugandan girl who also attends Stanford, at the rugby game and hung out with her and her friends afterwards. I enjoyed it a lot.

Patrick’s little daughter Melanie has a heart defect. She has been in Mulago Hospital for the past 2 weeks. Patrick’s family is making preparations for her and Sarah (her mom) to fly to the US for an operation next week. Penny has been helping their family and staying in the hospital so it has just been Zoe and I at home. Melanie is just three months old. Please pray for her and her family in this time and that the operation in the US will be successful.

I can’t believe it’s almost August. I love being in Uganda and I’m enjoying the experience at the Monitor a lot, but there have also been times that are hard and really lonely. I am learning a lot of trust and reliance on God through everything and can truly see Him at work in my life.

This post is all over the place. But the bottom line in my life right now is simply this:

God is good.

Can't begin to catch up on everything, but I'll try to do better from this point forward. :)

It was wonderful to see my family and Jason and we had a great time together rafting the Nile and...BUNGEE JUMPING over the Nile just this morning.

Now I'm back in Kampala and back to work tomorrow.

More soon. :)

All in a day's (week's) work

It has been a CRAZY week! With 36 hours of work in the last 3 days alone, 7 articles published, and my first front page story! (Can you tell my week has been dominated by work?)

It’s also been a good week! I am learning so much about journalism and Kampala and getting to see so many different places and meet so many people (albeit as a pen-in-hand, probing reporter rather than a sight-seeing tourist).

My “beats” for the week have been healthcare, justice, and poetry.

First, healthcare:

On Monday Kenya had its first case of the H1N1 virus (“swine flu”) and on Tuesday I was assigned to follow-up the story with more details and the relevance of the case for Uganda. Wednesday, I did another follow-up on the situation and Thursday, Uganda had its first case. Because I was already covering “swine flu” I went to the press conference, called all my sources, and wrote the story on my own. And the story ran on the front page on Friday! (I feel kind of bad being so excited about swine flu…)

http://www.monitor.co.ug/artman/publish/news/Swine_flu_confirmed_in_Uganda_87423.shtml

Yesterday, I worked on some more follow-up on the H1N1 virus and went to Mulago Hospital to see whether they really were “ready” as the Ministry of Health claimed. The first photographer who was supposed to go with me passed the job off to another guy (I think he was afraid of getting swine flu…even though the man who has it is in Entebbe Hospital) :) and together we headed across town to the Hospital to see what we could find. The Publicity Officer did not want to show me the “isolation unit,” admitting that it wasn’t in the best shape. Finally he gave in and showed me. Turns out the “isolation unit” is 8 make-shift tents without beds, mattresses, or nurses present in an area with overgrown grass and a broken down fence (but I was assured that it would be ready by Monday…hmm).

On Wednesday I also went to another press conference for a new “Texting4Health” initiative aimed at increasing health awareness among Ugandan cell phone users.

And the justice and poetry?

The Principle Judge of Uganda, Hon James Ogoola, just published a book of poetry (Songs of Paradise: A Harvest of Poetry and Verse).

Justice Ogoola is a prominent judicial figure in Uganda and known for his stance against human rights violations and injustice. (One of his poems (about the horrors of torture) was read last week at the UN Day for Torture Victims that I covered).

On Wednesday, I went with Charles to the High Court to interview Justice Ogoola about the book and about some of his politics (can I also just say that transcribing 12 pages of a taped interview from a scratchy tape that rewinds to a place that actually comes later in the interview is not such a fun job! Oh how I wish I had brought my own digital recorder to that interview!)

Justice Ogoola is also a Christian and his poetry is centered on a message of faith. It was really interesting getting to meet him in person and talk with him, and really cool too to see someone like him giving time and pleasure to poetry as well as to the many issues affecting the judiciary in Uganda right now. I was very inspired!

On Friday, I went to the book launch of his book at the Serena Kampala Hotel. It was a really formal, fancy event and truly a celebration of art as a whole I enjoyed covering something “creative” rather than just “hard news.”

I also did a book review of the book (it came out today in the M2 insert - http://www.monitor.co.ug/artman/publish/coffee-break/A_judge_s_poetry_87483.shtml)

It has indeed been a full, busy, and rewarding week!

I’m learning to “cultivate” my sources, and am now on a first-name basis with the Country Representative for WHO and another representative from the Uganda Ministry of Health. It’s also been great getting to know the other reporters, writers, and editors at the office and gradually gaining their trust. Sometimes it it’s intimidating to be told, “cover this” and have no idea where to start with calling people or finding background information, but it’s also an exciting challenge.

I’m learning my way around town (largely on bodas) and gaining so many vantage points into this culture and country.

On Friday, after a crazy boda boda ride across town, I walked off of the dust and clamor of the street and into an auditorium at the Serena Hotel where quiet music was playing, distinguished guests were gathering, and yes, the air conditioning was running. Two hours later, I walked back outside into the heat and diesel fumes and caught another boda back to the office where I piled into a car with five men (we were later pulled over by the police, and one of the men had to get out…) and was dropped off at the Hospital to see their “swine flu” isolation unit.

All in a day’s work.

It’s also interesting watching the news at night and seeing a press conference or event that I covered. Maybe one of these days I’ll be on TV. :)

It has been so nice to have some down time this morning to drink tea, eat mango, and catch up on emails. Our neighbor came over for tea and it was good to get to know her a little better.

Penny is gone for the day and this afternoon, Zoe and I are going to explore more of the city (without notebooks and pens!) and then meet up with some people from the Monitor for a movie in the evening.