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…  ;-)

Just after Christmas in 2007, Kenyans went to the polls to vote for president - choosing either the already ruling Kibaki or the opposition leader Odinga.  The result was gray.  And people got angry.  And people died.  Over a thousand people.  Some burned to death in a church on New Years day 2008, mimicking the horrible scenes of the Rwandan genocide.  Thank goodness it never went that far.  But, how did so much violence erupt? 

Well, the International Criminal Court announced today that it will try 4 prominent Kenyans for crimes against humanity, stating they have enough evidence to try them.  Meaning that the leaders of the country most likely played a key part in the violence - inciting their supporters to tribal conflict, possible because of the tribal tensions that Kenyan leaders have stoked since its independence, using the fertile land of the Rift Valley as the prime prize.  It is a bit disconcerting that it is now 4 years after all the violence.  It has taken long for justice to emerge somehow from the chaos that was.  And perhaps it is too little too late, as in the mean time, the Kenyan Government and the African Union have urged the ICC to drop all the charges, rendering them more meaningless in the eyes of many Kenyans.

Today in Nairobi around lunch time I definitely noticed a quiet.  The street vendor where I normally buy my lunch of githeri and sikumawiki was sitting listening to a radio, her customers a trickle instead of her usual steady stream.  It even seemed that there were no Somali refugees out today on Church St. in Westlands on their way to the IOM or UNHCR offices.  All were attentive to their TVs and radios to hear the ICC's ruling at 1:30 Nairobi time.  And afterwards, it did not seem that there was any real jubilance in the streets nor was there tension, from what I could tell.  Those Kenyans I talked to (on this side of town) nodded and breathed more relieved than anything, saying it was good that Kenyatta and Ruto be tried.  Justice should prevail.

Kenya is in the midst of a lot at the moment.  It is basically in a war with Somalia, though it isn't broadcast as such.  And the terror threat in Nairobi is in the RED RED RED.  Our embassies tell us not to go to the malls or big grocery stores because Al Shabaab is planning a terrorist attack like the one that happened in Mumbai at any moment.  When I first felt the full magnitude of the warnings at a recent NGO meeting I thought of my daughter and said, what in the world did I do bringing her here.  But then, at the same time, you can't stop living your life if your life has brought you to Nairobi for  a month so be it.  And just avoid the places where people congregate at busy times.  That said, the ICC ruling so far seems to not have made a big dent in anyone's plans.  And the election will go on this year, somehow.  It will be interesting to see how the year transpires.

It was after the post-election violence that my old organization started projects up in Turkana in northwestern Kenya.  Turkanas living in the lower Rift Valley were sent back to their ancestral home by the bus-loads and dropped off in the middle of the desert up there with nothing.  Now that I'm back in Kenya to help my old organization wrap up all its reporting on their drought response here, I find that we are still working in Turkana with these same IDPs.  Most have stayed there for 4 years now.  I don't think many would ever go back given the level of violence they saw.  So they have to find a way to make a life back up north.  I took a bunch of portraits in an IDP camp in Katilu when I was there in 2008.  Here are a few.

We were all packed up and ready to leave the hospital with our new daughter when I got a call from a friend in Sohar saying we might want to wait a while to start driving home; there were protests going on at the 'globe round-about' that were stopping traffic.  I couldn't believe it.  I was so ready to go home and get out of the hospital.  We decided to head home anyways, and avoided the round about in question, making it home ok and without too much delay.  But then that night we heard that the protest had become violent with deaths reported.  It was shocking to think that sleepy little Sohar had suddenly come under the international eye because of violent protest.  But there we were and thus it was.  Globe round-about was in the first stages of becoming 'reform square'.  

The next morning another friend text to say we could come stay in their more secure compound if we wanted as there was still disturbances going on in town.  At our house we saw no evidence of any protest, we were far enough away to still be bathed in mostly quiet, except for the birds.  So we stayed.  Later that morning, another call, saying that the Port company was sending its expat employees to Muscat.  We were encouraged to also go, considering our new baby.  The last think in the world I wanted to do was leave home after just getting home.  I wanted to figure out life at our house with Malaika.  At the same time, if anything happened, I would never forgive myself.  This conundrum, combined with lack of sleep that I also wasn't used to, caused some tears that day.  But we ultimately knew that staying in our house was likely the safest place we could be and so we stayed.  

A week later, the protests are still going on.  They are not violent anymore, and those evacuated to Muscat have returned.  But Omanis are still gathering and listening to speeches and calling on reforms from their Sultan.  Dan, the history teacher at Andy's school, has been faithfully going over to the round-about each day to see what's happening and talk to people about the situation.  He has been regularly posting the results on his blog (which I have mentioned earlier).  We are all relying on him now to tell the story and I refer you to there if you are curious what is happening in Sohar today.  He has done an excellent job analyzing the situation as straight-forwardly as possible and trying to see all sides.  So, I will not try to do so myself at this point!  

I suppose it has made me think about places in the world where current events are chaotic and dangerous and realize that babies come into the world every day, where environments can change at the blink of an eye.  Many arrive amidst chaos and danger and mothers have to cope in ways much more hectic than mine.  And to that end, women in Africa are often on the front line of danger, though not in the international spotlight.  I've been checking up on the blog of a midwife in Southern Sudan every now and again as well, which gives in depth birth stories of rural Sudanese women.  And I am amazed at the strength depicted in each one!

It's Saturday night at the Duffield house in Sohar.  That means that I've made pizza and my husband, Andy, has stocked the frig with beer so that we can have people over to watch Premier League football, seeing as there isn't really a sports bar around to cater such pleasures here and my husband is slightly addicted to it.  Our most consistent visitors are Dan & Jillian, an American couple who work at Andy's school and have been happy to start following English football seeing as American sports are only on TV here in the middle of the night (though we did get up at 3:30 am last week to watch the Super Bowl).  Andy likes to say it is like he gets an extended weekend (school's off on Thurs-Fri).  It's a good little tradition we have going...  And I'm not too bad at following players and teams, despite being American, since my trip to the World Cup last summer!

Tonight Dan & Jillian brought over yet another gift for Baby Girl Duff - 2 little Manchester United jersey one-sies with 'Duffield' printed on the back.  So perfect!  Especially as I keep teasing my husband that our little girl can be just as great a football (soccer) player as a boy could be.  Well, at least, with me as her mother, I hope she won't be too afraid of or too into her looks to enjoy playing sport, as I sometimes perceive is the case with many girls in England (or else they are branded as 'lesbians').  We'll have to borrow some Red Sox, Celtics and Patriots paraphernalia from my nephews for our girl this summer on our visit to America to round her out a bit more...  Anyways, tonight it was a Machester Derby...  How great was that last goal by Rooney?!  Finally he shows some brilliance again...

Dan teaches history to the secondary students at their international school, and so we pondered the jubilance of the last 24 hours or so in Egypt, as history seemed to have changed course in the span of 18 days.  Dan talks about how he is teaching history as it happens through this story on their blog and reflects on it much better than I could, including how it hasn't made too much of a ripple here in Oman due to the relative economic and political stability they have here.  

I have almost completed putting pictures up on this site!  It has been difficult to know which to display and which to hide.  But I am slowly getting somewhere.  Little by little putting the pieces together and hoping the future will provide ample opportunity to take many more good ones!