Getting back into blogging
I have continued my trend of adding new blog entries once every 4-6 months, but though I'm not big on making new year's resolutions, I do want to start blogging more this year. It will be a bit more difficult though, I don't have the tech support I once did, but hopefully I can slowly by slowly come to reconcile my fears of technology and learn how to used these complex learning machines.
So where do I find myself in 2013? Still in Montreal for the moment, but I have a plan to spend more months this year in Uganda than in Canada. I will be doing research for my Masters thesis in Anthropology as well as continuing my activities with the women's groups with whom I work through Beads of Awareness and also Kleos MFG (micro finance group). I am obviously extremely excited to gain more experience and learning through research and practice.
But for the meantime I am in Montreal, in a classroom a few days a week, in the library not often enough and too often, watching the snow melt, wishing I could be farming. Which is silly; no one is farming in Gulu right now, at best I\d be building my hut or making bricks. Or most likely just fooling around, visiting firends, disturbing Vicky, and teasing little kids. And learning Luo, so in many ways not that different than how I will be doing my Masters research.
If all goes according to plan then I will be in Uganda from May ( for the mango season) until December. I am still waiting to hear if I will be able to get any funding from the government or the university, I still have a few ideas for how I will support myself there, and start investing in my future there, in terms of land, livestock, maybe one day a car. Probably a motor cycle first. My parents definitely won't like that, but like many of the things I don't want to discuss with them, I'll try and hide it, more or less. Like discussions of malaria, TB, the government, traffic, and civil unrest there are more than a few topics that I don't talk too much about with them, and when I do mostly in a joking manner. Unfortunately such issues combined with poverty and HIV still tend to dominate much of the media representation of East and Central Africa. I won't ever deny that there are certainly many problems which are extremely pressing and intolerable in Uganada, but there are also similarly appalling issues in Canada that are silenced in the media. The success stories, joie de vie, and tosee cases where the West can learn from Ugandans and other Africans get virtually no visibility in western media, unless it is somehow connected to an international organization, instrument or aid agency, or connected to a tramautic or appalling media report and this is the isolated or rare case of people overcoming and resisting. And yest in the West we have the polar opposite- we only want to air our dirty laundry of poor governance, human rights abuses, environmental degradation in the appropriate minority or alternative media sources, and the mainstream press instead largely offers us puff pieces in which the commercial, corporate and political agendas are poorly masked, if at all.
I am very confident that when my parents come and visit me at some future date in Uganda they, like me, will fall in love with the place, the people, the food, so many different things, and part of what they will appreciate is the difference. I wish that image, of difference without judgement or imposed ethics and epistemology could be more present and visible in the media and the conversations in the West about Africa and other far off places. My advice to anyone is please, go and see for yourself, and ask the people there themselves the questions you have.
