I was away for 12 days.  Left M with her daddy and her grandmother here in Oman and went to Kenya once again, but solo this time, partly to finish up work and partly to look into a new project.  Waving goodbye to my daughter as I got in a taxi to go to the airport was possibly one of the hardest moments of my life.  I had tears streaming down my face as I turned away, even as she kept on waving and waving, unsure of what was going on.  I think the anxiety I felt wasn't so much about worrying about her, weirdly.  My anxiety sprung from a terror that I wouldn't ever see her again, that something would happen in our time apart to prevent a reunion.  A plane crash.  A car crash.  A bomb going off in Nairobi.  I was somehow more worried about myself than about her, and I desperately wanted to see her grow up.  But, I have made it home in one piece.  Time went by fast, I was so busy.  And there were no plane or car crashes.  There was one bomb but it was in the bus park, where I never had to go, because I had access to a high end vehicle for travel; it was aimed at regular Kenyans not at expatriates.  And M was happy to see me again.  She wasn't angry; she was just happy to have her little family all together and whole again.

The best outcome of the time away was the growth of her bond with my husband.  The two are now best friends forever and seem to almost have a secret handshake when they meet and depart.  My husband is now an expert at getting her to sleep at night and getting her to sleep in her own bed.  And M is becoming a big girl, no longer a baby, but a real toddler.  Almost walking.

Our days in Oman are numbered.  Only three months and we'll be traveling back towards the UK, then America and then heading South after that for our new home.  It is exciting.  But we're not really ready.  But we'll be getting ready soon, soon.....

There is, of course, a lot more discourse to read on the Kony 2012 debate/critique.  Read Marianne's blog post at Zen Under Fire for a more well-rounded take on the video, on Invisible Children and more links to more discourse.  She did her homework much better than I did.  I do apologize, as their work on the ground has expanded and they do hire a lot of Ugandan staff and try to help children in northern Uganda in multiple ways.  I still feel their talents in film-making are wasted though, and that they should have continued to focus on that in other places that need to be brought to light for the world to see.  Again, take Kenya, where an al-Shabab bomb has gone off at the bus station over the weekend.  And now I hear rumors of a new port to be built in Lamu to take goods into Southern Sudan on some superhighway through the north of Kenya - what motivations is that giving politicians running for office up there who are rustling things up and causing conflict to get into power?

As for your comments, Peter (for some reason I can't reply under your comment today so I respond here), I largely agree with what you are saying.  I guess what it comes down to with Invisible Children is that I don't trust them.  The biggest reason I don't trust them is that they can't have spent time up in northern Uganda and not figured out the larger picture of the story - so why do they present it so simplified?  Why do they somehow deceive their audience? 

Is it for the greater good that they think will come out of their campaign?  But I highly doubt it would be a greater good.  Did killing Osama bin Laden make a huge impact in Afghanistan?  I'm not convinced.  A greater good for Uganda might be to encourage them to vote Museveni out of office in the next election that I'm sure he will find some way to be in even though his original term limit has long run out.  I don't know.  But I think the reaction of Ugandans is the most telling to pay attention to.  And most of them seem to be angry.

 

Joseph Kony.  I had never even heard the name until I had been in Uganda for a few weeks.  I told people back home where I was going for 2 years as a Peace Corps Volunteer and the only reactions I got from people were exclamations about Idi Amin and HIV/AIDS – so I somehow knew about those atrocities.  But Kony was new.  A book floated around our group at training, “Aboke Girls” – and Kony suddenly came alive, a word I knew.  It was a hard first 10 weeks as it was, adjusting to living in a completely different way than we lived back home, and this book fascinated, gave you nightmares as you tried to sleep under your net with the intensity of the crickets and the owls outside your shuttered and locked window, night dancers and rebels kept at bay.  (If you’ve seen the Invisible Children videos by now you know the magnitude that the very true stories of the children abused by the rebels can illicit).  Ugandans at our training site in Mityana, south of Kampala, however, just sort of chuckled when you asked about it, not offering much in the way of explanation or apology – just that it was was it was.  Most had never been in the north themselves.  And we ignorant PCVs soon found out that we were not allowed to go up there anyways.  We were threatened by our security officer that if we went up there it was possible he’d be taking us back home to America in a body bag.  This was just a tad bit over the top, I realized (I’m often told I’m naïve), and maybe only made us more curious…

That was March 2003.  By June we were all at our own individual sites spread around southern Uganda, when murmurs of fresh rebel movement started to reach our ears. A bus arrived in my town with 'refugees' from the north, people fleeing fresh violence.   My friend Megs had to leave her site because they were reaching as far south as the Teso region in eastern Uganda where she lived.  She came to stay with me in Iganga for part of her time in exile, and soon became a close friend.  The antagonism didn’t seem to last too long, though the stories emerging were just as powerful and disturbing.  The rest of my Peace Corps experience passed pretty peacefully with little mention of the north or that it was any different from the south.  I suppose, living in Uganda, posed a multitude of intensity on its own without rebels to worry or care about.  Seeing a friend’s sister die in childbirth along with her still-born son because the hospital was incapable of helping her, losing a language teacher and his wife to AIDS and orphaning their daughter, seeing a scorched body by the side of the road that no one would touch because he was a thief punished for his crime of stealing a chicken, or seeing the hollow-eyed haunting looks of babies with malaria who needed blood transfusion in the Iganga District Hospital; these were enough things to make sense out of without thinking of rebels or the people in the North.  Of course to counter all that were all of the wonderful things about Africa that we lose touch with in the West – spontaneity, the fact that you are never really alone, the easiness of smiles and laughter from everyone even those with so little, the simplicity and prosperity of a subsistence farm, everything shared, and the importance of relationship. 

It wasn’t until I was finished with Peace Corps and working for a faith-based NGO in Kampala that I started to think about the North again.  It was 2005 and I was now allowed to go up there as I wasn’t considered a ‘government employee’ under the US Embassy anymore.  And most of my organization’s work in Uganda was in the North – partnering with the Church of Uganda in Gulu, Kitgum, Lira and Arua – really considered the most vulnerable area of the country.  On my first visit I quickly regained my curiosity as to why – there were HUGE Internally Displaced People’s Camps and that was about all that there was outside of the big towns.  And these weren’t pretty.  And the children were so abundant and so dirty and fly ridden and ragged and at the same time so happy to see foreigners in big white trucks, it was overwhelming.  But the first words out of the mouths of our partner staff in the North about the problems in northern Uganda weren’t about Joseph Kony.  They were about President Museveni.  They felt like it was this president who had put them in these camps, imprisoned them, kept them from their farms, from being able to sustain themselves with dignity.  He kept the camps policed and with curfews and caused just as much fear as the rebels did.  So here were the Acholi and Lango people of northern Uganda – afraid of both one of their own who became a rebel and used children from his own tribe to fight, and of their president, who had ousted one of their own(Obote) in order to gain power before Joseph Kony came to any prominence.  And all they wanted was to be able to go back to their land and farm and prosper in peace.

Working in Kampala, among the NGO community, I started to hear other rumors about the whole situation in the North.  That Museveni was a brilliant engineer of the situation, creating a bigger problem in order to get the attention of the UN and bring in more aid money to Uganda.  Food aid was huge in Uganda – all to feed the large IDP population in the north.  And it was said that Museveni made sure that all the food was bought from the southwest of Uganda where he came from and delivered to the IDPs up North, kept off their farms by the police, in pretense of protecting them from rebels, who for the most part were operating in southern Sudan more so than in Uganda by this time. 

It was just before I had taken the job in Kampala that the first Invisible Children movie came out.  For the most part, it was moving, and it seemed like a very good thing to bring attention to the issues in northern Uganda.  However, what I remember most was their shot of the kids sleeping in the hospital – a particularly moving shot, sweeping smoothly overhead of all the children in the middle of the night revealing their vast numbers.  A friend from Jinja who worked with video media a lot commented how they couldn’t have gotten that shot without some good equipment.  A remark that struck against the cord they were trying to promote throughout the video – that they were just a couple of guys with a video camera that stumbled upon the scene in Gulu by chance.  And I was taken aback by end of that first video – requesting money without really saying what it would be used for.  But they did help raise awareness.  I remember thinking at the time that they should go on to film other atrocities in the world and continue with what they were good at – the artistry of the video.  At some point in time I ran into one or two of the Invisible Children guys in Kampala on a night out.  They were young – younger than me, and I felt pretty young then still – and my biggest impression was that they were over-confident and generally new to African soil.  They thought they had it all figured out in northern Uganda, but all of my instincts told me that there was so much more to the story.  They talked of their new NGO, and I tried to pick up on what their work would accomplish, but it was a bit of a muddle, not as focused as I’d imagined coming from people claiming to invest in children with psycho-social stress and lack of opportunity.

About six months into my new job, things started happening pretty quickly in northern Uganda.  The ICC put Kony on their list of wanted war criminals, peace talks were organized between the government in Uganda and the rebel leaders out in the bush, I think all of them taking place in Southern Sudan.  Ripples of fear that the rebels would retaliate back on Ugandan soil, but they never really did, or whatever incidents that did occur couldn’t be proven to be their work.  The ICC decision about Kony seemed to act mostly kind of like a stick to prod the Ugandan Government to start ending the imprisonment of the north.  And it started to work.  Even though the peace talks largely failed, the LRA seemed to move farther away from Uganda.  Plans were made to allow the IDPs to return home slowly by slowly.  The international NGO community flocked to northern Uganda.  Gulu became a town full of NGOs and even our partners in the north started to get more funding than they knew what to do with at first.  Trying to juggle so many donors is never very easy especially when your infrastructure is small to start with and most of the funds aren’t supposed to boost your administrative budgets but go directly to IDPs returning home.    

I also started to noticed the new Invisible Children vehicles – shiny new silver Hiluxes with their logo large and in charge – around town, one crumpled like tinfoil on one side due to some accident that must have taken them a while to fix (first golden rule of NGO work in Africa – keep your vehicles in good working order).  Their NGO had grown a lot very quickly.  I noticed them because of their celebrity status, almost, but stopped asking too many questions as I had a lot of my own work to do with our partners responding to food crisis around East and Southern Africa, and I got the feeling that they didn’t really care about my work when I ran into them.  And time went on and I sort of forgot about them.  And things got better in northern Uganda for everyone who lived there.  The true breadbasket of the country was being opened up and plowed again.  Museveni was still in power and I’m sure still finding ways to make it benefit him and his regime as much as possible.  For one thing, the improving security in the region helped make it possible for the oil industry to set up camp on Lake Albert, and the road infrastructure Museveni condoned improved the speed at which goods could be carried to the new country of Southern Sudan.

So to come back from a trip to the field in Kenya yesterday and have a message in my FB inbox from a good friend from college who I hadn’t heard from in a long while asking me what I thought of Invisible Children took me by surprise.  And then I saw the posting of the new video on my husband’s FB wall (he came to Uganda in 2006 and we met there) and started to understand.  But after watching about 10 minutes of the video with bad connection, I just turned it off.  It was already making me angry.  It seemed to purposely belittle the complexity of the situation all-together.  When I feel this is so important to try to understand if we are to ever succeed in helping Africa at all – if we as foreigners really can.  I really don’t understand what Invisible Children are trying to do with this video or how they possibly think they can help.  Their NGO probably didn’t make much of a real impact in the everyday lives of northern Ugandans, is my educated guess.  But their videos have a profound impact around the globe.  They should have identified NGOs and local CBOs that had been working in northern Ugandan throughout the entire crisis and who knew the situations on the ground very well and also how to do development work very well through their proven experience, to give the funds they collected even with their first video.  So now what they will do with the new set of funding is a mystery.  I feel like they just need to move on from northern Uganda and go and make documentaries of other parts of the world if they dare.  For example - go up to northern Kenya right now and make a movie about the politically-charged violence happening there to try to bring awareness and keep another violent election from happening in Kenya this year.  Don’t make this your life’s work if you don’t want to really be in the thick of things day in and day out with the people you are trying to help.  Just go on making documentaries of other needs in the world and then send the funds to those who do, especially those that employ lots of Africans or locals themselves – they do the best work that I’ve seen (see www.omwabinirescuesteps.org) among orphans and vulnerable children on this continent. 

I'm not even going to go into the other parts of the debate - the involvement of the US Government or the possible increase risk of violence in Uganda - it is all just a bit much.  I guess it comes down to the truth that "justice" is not a simple term to define - the bigger context always has to be understood and normally when it is, there is no right party or no wrong party, no demon to fight, but just a lot of humanity staring you in the face tripping and falling and jumping in their will to survive - Invisible Children included.  And even me, I am very aware that all I write is generalizations and intuitive thoughts on an organization that I myself did not research or understand properly.  I apologize in advance for anything I got wrong.

There, Peter, that’s my two cents worth of thought…  ;-)