My Uganda Letter

Hi. I guess I'm a little nervous about making this first post. It's one more step towards making this summer a reality, which is sometimes terrifying to think about. But Eleanor Roosevelt said to do one thing every day that you are afraid of, so here I am. I really am thrilled to be going to Uganda this summer; it's just surreal, in the way that as a little kid you wait and wait and wait for Christmas all year long, until you're waking up Christmas morning wondering how it finally arrived. Exactly three weeks from now, my Christmas morning begins, and it will last for three months. How amazing is that? I can't wait.

I thought I would start this journal off with an account of how I got here. This is a letter I wrote to friends and family telling them about my trip this summer and why it is so important to me. Rereading it now, I can already see my naivete on the page. There is so much I don't know, so much I will learn. If anything, the most valuable part of preparing for this trip has been a gradual realization of how much I am ignorant of. A stripping down of the pretense of knowledge, leaving the kernel of me bare but sturdy, braced for anything and ready to soak up everything.

Here is my letter:

The first thing that drew me to Africa was the music. I saw an African children’s choir in concert as a young girl, and the rhythm of the drumbeats and voices echoed in my heart. I have wanted to go there ever since. Learning about the war, famine, disease, and poverty that challenge Africans daily both saddened me and gave me a deep respect and awe for their determination to continue to find hope and joy in their lives. A desire to use my talents and privileges to give them access to basic necessities like clean water and food began to grow in me. This desire took root and has blossomed in Uganda, where a civil war has raged for over two decades. The organization Invisible Children revealed to me, as well as to the world, the horrors of this war – one of the longest-running wars in Africa – including the use and abuse of children as soldiers, servants, and sex slaves. I was deeply touched by the sufferings of these people and their children, and as a result have been actively supporting Invisible Children since I discovered them in college. At the same time, Invisible Children has encouraged me to believe that I can make a real difference in the lives of Ugandans, even if only through the contribution of a few dollars a week. Equally strong is my belief that the people of Uganda can make a profound difference in my own life. They already have in many ways, but I feel that I can still learn much from them about living and joy, hope and strength. I have the opportunity to travel to Uganda and live there for three months this summer through a non-profit organization called Light Gives Heat. The group assists a community of 150 women who have fled the ongoing violence in northern Uganda. Most of these women are widows with many children, and their main source of income is selling jewelry made from recycled paper beads. Light Gives Heat saw the need of these women to pay for food and for their children’s school fees, so the organization began to buy their jewelry at three times the cost of production and sell it here in the United States. They called the project Suubi, which means “hope” in the Ugandan language: a fitting name for the nurturing and inspiring environment it creates. As a volunteer, I will be living in the community of Suubi women helping to buy the jewelry, teaching English and literacy, and building relationships of support with them. However, my desire to help the Suubi women runs deeper than a longing to volunteer. In the past year, I have learned that traditional ways of life are being endangered around the world. I am particularly passionate about food and the time-honored ways of growing it that are disappearing, often because of greed and violence. My compassion for the war-stricken communities in Uganda has led me to wonder about how their ways of growing food have been affected in the last two decades and if I could play an active role in restoring their ability to sustain themselves through farming. This is my dream-turned-reality: Not only will I be volunteering in Uganda this summer with the Suubi women, getting to know them and building relationships with them, but I will also be delving further into the impact the war has had on their traditional practices. I want to travel to their homes in northern Uganda and see for myself the effect violence has had on their ability to farm their land and grow food. Farmers risk getting shot by either the rebel army or their own government if they venture outside the village to their fields, so the relationship they have with their land has changed, probably for the worse. I will talk with the women and their families, documenting the precious traditional knowledge that is in danger of being lost forever because they cannot farm and pass skills on to the next generation. This documentation will be part of my senior project as an Environmental Studies major at UC Santa Cruz – a compilation of the knowledge of the Suubi women, research, and my own observations. Hopefully my senior project will make a real, positive impact on the communities I visited by giving insight into how they can best retain their traditional ways of life in the aftermath of war.