Arrived in Kampala

I am now in Kampala, Uganda. I am working with two NGOs on three different projects.

With Life in Africa, I am working on an art/book project with children who have been displaced by the civil war in the north. The project collects their stories and own illustrations of the war there and their journies to Kampala. Most have lost family members to the war. And most live in the Acholi Quarter of the city.The project made me feel very uncomfortable at first. I felt that the organization was exploiting the children's pain to get income. But once i started working with the kids, i realized that they had lived through this. and they seem to deal with it every day with people at life in africa, most of whom are also from the north. i spent a long time today with an eleven year old girl named poitagat whose sister was gunned down in their garden by rebels. her friends and her managed to escape, hiding in a tree. one of them came down when she thought the coast was clear and was also gunned down. they stayed in the tree almost the whole night. those are the kinds of stories these kids are telling. i don't know what to say to it. they talk about these experiences and then they want me to play soccer with them. it's all very surreal. The project still seems exploitative in many ways. But, it does raise money for the kids and the organization. And, exploitation of pain is somewhat of the MO here in Uganda... especially with aid and development organizations.

The two other projects are with Outside the Dream. With one, I am teaching computer, web design, and photography classes to orphans who are sponsored by the organization.

With Stephen Shames, the director of OTD and the photographer I work for in NYC, I am also working on a short documentary with the children and the director on two of the children's stories. Both of those children are former child soldiers from the north. More details to follow. Tomorrow, I'm heading to Mbali. I may be going to Gulu next week, which is somewhat at the heart of the violence in the north. I have mixed feelings about travelling to a place where there is continuous militant violence. And, I have not decided for certain if the project merits the trip. But at the moment, I am leaning towards saying it does.

In the meantime, Kampala is one of the most interesting and safest (though simultaneously most chaotic) cities I have visited. The language, Luganda, that I am learning here is also quite difficult to learn in the early stages. The grammar is based on an extremely complex system of prefixes, so that singular and plural words sound entirely different to me. As do the various tenses... and so do the various conjugations of verbs. Today, I cooked my first Ugandan meal for myself and a few students. I made posho (a mesh of cassava and corn meal) and beans. Dry, but tasty. The fruit here is extraordinary, but definitely too sweet for my tastes.