A Recount of the Last Couple Plus Weeks

Thursday morning, Dec. 2nd, I jumped on a boda boda with my backpacks and attempted to balance all of the weight so that I wouldn't tip too far back when the boda accelerated or too far to any one side when we turned.  Reminded of Jim's words just before I left the Conservation International office in San Jose, Costa Rica one day some 3.5 years ago - Don't let yourself become another statistic - I told the driver to ride safely.  I had a keen interest in reaching my destination and not just becoming another one of those 50 lives sacrificed to the boda gods every day here in Uganda.

I was destined for the UWA office and a green pick-up truck maneuvered by Geoffrey, originally from the far east now married to a girl from the far west and settled in her village.  Geoffrey took us across kilometers of tarmacked, poorly tarmacked and untarmacked roads between Kampala and Bwindi-Buhoma.  We would spend hours in Kampala before even hitting the Northern Bypass.  First there were road tests for the funny sound the car had been making, then we had to pick up his wife and son, and finally to the Park chief's house to pick up a blanket (no offense, but that was kind of ridiculous....he made us drive an extra hour or so through traffic to pick up a blanket for him at his house to take to Bwindi with us when he could oh so easily throw that in his vehicle when he goes to Bwindi himself).

There were stops along the road for roasted cassava, cold bottles of water, and market days (which you can spot from a distance as a colorful conglomeration of peoples along the side of a road with foods, wares and old clothes piled between them).  Geoffrey knows all the shortcuts through town that avoid traffic and can move the vehicle across any terrain no matter how potholed or torn up by rains, but ultimately darkness wins all.  After almost taking out a grown man walking along the side of the road in opaque darkness with the car's side-view mirror, we stopped in Fort Portal for the night.

We parked along the main drag and asked for lodging, went to the first place we were told and took the first two rooms they showed us.  We sat down at the motel restaurant to order food, but it turned out there was nothing I could eat.  On the entire menu that was listed on the wall, there were really only two items to choose from - fish or cow.  I chose to leave.  Geoffrey and I walked around the town through three restaurants before we found one that offered rice and beans with no meat in it.  Rice and beans have gotten me through Latin America, I suppose they'll do here in Africa as well.  Geoffrey ended up eating kalo, a mixture of ground millet and cassava with water and steamed to form a sticky thick paste that you pinch with your fingers and dip into sauces.  It's too bad the sauce had lamb in it because I really wanted to try the kalo.  Foods you eat with your fingers are endlessly fun.

The next morning we rose with the sun and hit the road sans breakfast, stopping in Kasese for tea.  The waitress asked us if we wanted chapati with our tea and we all said yes.  Less than a few minutes later she would return to tell us that there was no chapati.  Food industry in this country is such a tease.  They're constantly supplying you with menus of dishes and things that they don't have.  Oftentimes I don't even ask to see the menu, I just ask what they have that day.  Then I sift out the vegetarian options and choose.  Usually this means either beans or gnut sauce.

What followed Kasese would blow my mind.  We were driving through Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP) and so close to the Congolese border.  You could see trucks and taxis loaded up with people and things crossing back and forth across the border busting down this road that slices straight through QE.  Meanwhile, all around you is wildlife en vivo.  Elephants, water buffalo, cobs, baboons, bush buck, rabbits, warthogs and hippos.  I was exuberant at the sight of every one.  This was the first time I'd seen such animals in the wild (minus rabbits I guess).  I deliriously texted Joe my excitement since I knew that he was somewhere in QE at that very moment too.  Was he seeing what I was seeing?!?  I was so glad I'd left Kampala and was finally here where the wild things roam.

After QE, we weren't far.  A long stretch of bad dirt road later we finally reached Buhoma.  I wasn't going to be making it to Ruhija where the Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation (ITFC) is and where I had originally planned to go.  But it was okay, a free ride is a free ride.  I was dropped at the ranger station, registered with the park people and met the man in charge - John Justice.  JJ as I'm going to call him for now is the Community Conservation Warden, but since the Conservation Area Manager (presumably the man with the blanket) is on leave, he's in charge.  I sat in front of him for some minutes, awkwardly aware of all the dust and sweat that had coated my skin over the last two days on the road, as he read through the letters that I'd so bureaucratically collected in Kampala until he looked up at me and said, "So you're doing research?"  I nodded.

After explaining who I am, what I'm doing and what I plan to do in the next days and year, we set up an appointment to do an interview the next morning and I was deposited in the care of Alison, a ranger from their Rushamba outpost now on leave and hanging around Buhoma, his home village.  I had been hooked up with a banda at Bwindi View Rest Camp for the next few days until Monday morning when I could catch a ride to ITFC in Ruhija with JJ.

Alison would be my guide for the rest of the day, taking me around town, showing me the community hospital set up by some Californian (Dr. Scott they call him) and the trading centers where I could buy things, introducing me to the Local Council Chairman, who we did an interview with as the sun was setting over the green mountains, and the local primary school (where many of the children's school fees are paid for by international sponsors, tourists who had come through Buhoma to see the gorillas, saw the "children in need" and offered to cover some of their educational costs).  The whole town is filled with community development projects sponsored by outsiders, many of them ex-gorilla tourists with a bleeding heart.

I spent the next day interviewing JJ about park management and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (BINP) in the context of the greater Central Albertine Rift Transfrontier Protected Area Network, community participation in park management, community development and community relations with the park.  Then later I met with the Communications Officer of the Bwindi Community Hospital, returning to my banda in the darkness, crossing many curious locals on the dirt road up.  I greeted them with the one word in rukiga that I had learned, "agandi," and listened to them respond "nige" as smiles of amusement spread across their faces at the discovery that the muzungu speaks in familiar tongue.

Sunday, I decided, would be a day of rest....which means, I was determined to hike into the forest.  I found Godfrey, the tourism warden, in his office and asked to do a hike.  You can't just walk into the forest here, you've got to go with a guide (aka armed rangers), someone who can protect you from whatever it is that you might come across....mountain gorilla, forest elephant, poacher, etc.  Usually they carry old Russian hand-me-downs, but I'm not so sure who they actually get them from.  Probably a whole mixture of countries from the so-called North or West, pick your cardinal direction, who've moved on to more advanced mechanisms of death and maiming.  Firearms: conserving for generations.

2pm, I met David and a couple from Switzerland? by the information kiosk and we set off with 2 other armed rangers into the forest and up the mountain toward a 3-tiered waterfall.  In other words, one water way with three falls and a nice little pool at the top.  It was nice to be hiking in the jungles again, shake off Kampala and to be reminded of all my days in the forests of Central America.  The beautiful thing about rainforests is that you don't actually have to walk anywhere to find yourself surrounded by such a diversity of life and species that sometimes I find myself in one spot for ages before I turn around to go home in the waning light.

This wasn't one of those days, I had to get back to Bwindi View.  I had promised Phenny (the owner) that I would help show him some things online, places where he might be able to advertise his rest camp and tourism services, and to try and connect him with the Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) coordinator so that he might be able to get a PCV to help him develop a sustainable ecotourism business here in Bwindi.  We went to the Gorilla Research Clinic owned by Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), an organization started by wildlife veterinarians hoping to better protect the gorillas from zoonosis by improving the health of local communities.  One of the founders, Gladys Kalema, is a bit of a female veterinary celebrity.  I first heard about her through the WWF in Washington D.C. and then here and there from other organizations.  I had spoken to her earlier that day on the phone and CTPH just happened to be doing a couple workshops in the Bwindi area, so I was put in touch with one of their other founders so that we could meet up.

I missed Stephen in Buhoma, but caught up with him just in time to catch the tail end of a workshop on employee health and wildlife protection that Tuesday when I was in Ruhija.  JJ had dropped me at ITFC on Monday afternoon while on his way to Kasese for a regional meeting.  ITFC is a research center on the top of another gorgeous mountain on the edge of BINP.  Douglas and Miriam are the bossman and bosswoman; both seem like really nice and interesting people.  They met here in Uganda years ago, but have spent loads of time working in Indonesia and other parts of the world with forests and communities.  Douglas had supported my Fulbright application twice, so I was happy to finally meet him.

I also met a bunch of other researchers living at ITFC doing all kinds of different projects from Max Planck Institute mountain gorilla research to studies on sustainable takes of multiple use resources and field work on rodents as vectors of disease between wildlife and human communities.  I was put in the girl's room at the student dormitory, which I shared with Saada, and in the other rooms were Patrick (rodent study) and Joseph (multi-use research).  That first night I joined Emmanuel and Joseph at the local cantine, the restaurant at the Ruhija Community Rest Camp.  Apparently the cantine is where it's at.  It's a small community of researchers in Ruhija, so during the day everyone works and at night, we get together for dinner at someone's house or drinks at the cantine.  It's a good group of people and after 4 days mostly alone in a banda in Buhoma, I was happy for the company.

I would only have a handful of days in Ruhija before I moved on from there as well.  Basically, I caught the first ride out on Friday morning.  Douglas and Miriam were a bit shocked at the shortness of my stay, but I explained that this is just a preliminary trip to do some scoping and that I wanted to make it to Mgahinga Gorilla National Park (MGNP) and QENP before I return to Kampala with a friend on the 16th.  In other words, I had to make tracks if I was going to squeeze everything in.  The ITFC vehicle made the trip into Kabale on Friday morning, taking me and my bags with it.  I spent a few hours in Kabale meeting with people at International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP - an alliance of three NGOs, WWF, AWF and FFI, and sort of the Oz behind the whole transboundary PA network) and Bwindi-Mgahinga Conservation Trust (BMCT - the organization through which a lot of international money has been funneled into Bwindi-Mgahinga to avoid government graft) before squeezing myself into a saloon car to make the 2-hour trip between Kabale and Kisoro.

A saloon car is your regular old 4-door sedan but used as a means of supremely uncomfortable public transit.  Literally, there were 4 in the front of the car, 4 in the back plus bags and a baby, and the trunk door had to be tied down just to keep everything inside of it in.  The driver was half hanging out the window and half sitting in another man's lap.  Two were squeezed into the passenger seat and I was somewhere in the middle in the back, each of us with our bags on our laps...we're all strangers, but in this situation, the personal comfort zone is 0mm.  The last to get into the car was a woman with her baby, which she immediately passed off to the guy on my right despite the fact that he was a complete stranger.  For almost the entire ride, I thought it was his baby.  When they got out of the car at different places, her taking the baby with her and with little display of any kind of personal relationship, I realized that they were as new to each other as I was to them.  To my left was a Ugandan soldier stationed somewhere near Mt. Sabinyo (the volcano whose very pinnacle is what I like to call the African Crown of the Continent, meeting point of Rwanda, DRC and Uganda).  Through him, I tried to get a feel for security in the DRC just west of the Ugandan border, because on my next trip I'll be headed that way.  Upon reaching Kisoro, we each slowly and achingly managed to move our cramped bodies out of the car and on to our final destinations.  Mine: UWA information office.

At the UWA information office I met with Yonah, who I had warned via mobile phone the day earlier that I'd be coming through.  Through him I met the Tourism Warden, Chemonges, who was the current man in charge since all of the other senior wardens were on leave.  I spent a few hours with them and the bathroom - something in the pizza or chapati that I'd bought in Kabale was out to get me.  Through Yonah's urging I finally took an herbal med, although he was convinced that I should go to the pharmacy and buy "black charcoal," some sort of medication for upset stomachs.  I skipped dinner that night.

The next day up at Mgahinga, I did an interview with Chemo and the Community Conservation Ranger (also conveniently a Local Council chairman), had lunch and caught a ride with Chemo back into Kisoro town.  I stayed the night in Kisoro, catching the first bus out in the morning to Mbarara.  From Mbarara I would hop on another bus up to Katunguru where Joe and the others picked me up at the roadside intersection.  Along the way I met people and tried to learn different words in different languages.  About 10 minutes before Joe picked me up, I experienced my 3rd marriage proposal since arriving here in Uganda.  The man works for UWA and wanted to know what it would take for me to take his proposal seriously so that I would go with him to his village, meet his family, meet his neighbors and friends, and of course, the clincher, when would I take him with me to the US?  That day I learned how to say "I don't want to get married" in rukiga, which unfortunately, I forgot how to say moments later.

In QE, I stayed in Mweya with Joe, Lu and Yafit at a research house.  Lu is a wildlife veterinarian who also teaches at Makerere University in Kampala.  He's German but has been here for decades and knows loads about the human-wildlife conflict around QE and the political ecology of conservation in Africa in general.  Yafit is a biology student who came here to work with Lu because of her interest in big cats.  Joe was in QE setting up and checking wildlife camera traps.  I would spend the next few days rolling through the savannah with them and James (an expert with the radio collar tracking devices and a savannah 4x4 race car driver...not really, but he drives like a madman), checking camera traps, tracking wildlife (saw my first lion and leopards in the wild) and visiting a farm where a lion had devoured a calf in the middle of the night and a hippo had destroyed a corral.  The presence of large predators in this area made all of the human-wildlife conflict scenarios that I was learning about in Bwindi-Mgahinga that much more contentious.

Out here, many local community members see things as My Life or Wildlife.  Human-wildlife conflict is a daily battle, full blown warfare in my opinion, which means that the tension between humans and protected areas is sky high.  UWA and the NGOs struggle daily to try and show people the benefits of the protected areas, setting up revenue sharing schemes (which is probably mostly lost to corruption because of its district-based distribution mechanism) and educating on the values of wildlife and ecotourism.  But the villagers, whose gardens (aka farms) patch every inch of land all the way up to the park's borders, often face constant crop/livestock-raids by animals coming out of the parks to feast on the cultivated delicacies of their neighbors.

UWA and the NGOs who are charged with dealing with human-wildlife conflict often don't even show up when locals report animal raids and do little if anything to help.  Villagers are left to their own means, which include setting all kinds of animal traps, sending their children out to guard the gardens instead of going to school and killing endangered animals out of revenge. Poaching is a whole other hairy story and I have only superficially begun to delve into the issues of oil extraction and mining in the region.

I'm back in Kampala now with these and others issues swimming around in my brain.  I have chosen the topic that I'm going to write on while I'm here and many of these things will not be highlighted in that paper, but I know that if I don't focus my research, I will be lost in this place studying socio-ecological dynamics for years on end.  What I'm worried about is that despite all the studies and the people actually trying to do something, nature will lose and with that, humans too.  All those stunning animals and dense tropical mountain forests that I have seen in the last couple weeks or so are so perilously threatened and the forces are so much greater than even just the livelihoods of the villagers who live around their peripheries.  The driving causes of all of the environmental endangerment and extreme poverty comes from places like where I grew up, the U.S., Canada, Europe, etc.  The resources we demand, the arms that we supply, the colonial infrastructure that remains...it's like Yoshimi and the Pink Robots.

Rearing to Go!

Monday (29Nov), I finally received all of my research letters and identity card from the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, which means that I was immediately on the phone trying to find out how I could get myself to Bwindi as quickly as possible.  Turns out the directors of the Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation in Bwindi-Ruhija were just coming back from leave and on their way there, maybe Wednesday morning, but they would have to stay in Mbarara for administrative meetings and things.  I was welcome to join if I wanted.  Then I met Festo at the Uganda Wildlife Authority, he's the Transport Officer....a.k.a. the guy who knows where all the UWA cars are going...and he told me that a car just happened to be in for repairs and that as soon as it's done, I'm on it and off to Bwindi.  So, I was stoked...I had a ride!  And with UWA!  Maybe I could even get loads of delicious information about conservation in Uganda and protected areas issues in the region.

So the next day I went to Immigrations with my stack of documents and a wad of cash (costs $100 for a Pupil's Pass....aka the research visa).  What I thought would take months of bureaucratic administrative paper pushing, mostly with papers going nowhere, took only 2.5 hours.  I think I just got supremely lucky though and asked the right guy where the copy machine is.  He ended up taking my documents, making the photocopies, submitting them to the immigrations people and 2 hours later, I had a visa.  I walked out with a visa!!  This is unheard of.  So many people had told me that this would be such a difficult process....that it would take 2, maybe 3 months even.  A lot of Fulbrighters never even make it through the process.  They just exit the country every 3 months and deal with paying tourist visa fees every single time.  I really didn't want to do that, especially if my research might take me across to DRC and Rwanda more than once or twice.  Single-entry tourist visas could really rack up the bills.  I don't know who in Immigrations slipped who what, but somehow the visa thing worked out all too easily.

Crazy thing happened right after I left the building though.  I was there on the street negotiating with a boda boda man for a ride to UWA where I was meeting Dada for lunch and the guy wanted about 2x what I wanted to pay.  So, some haggling later, he drove off.....and not 20 feet away, he hit another boda boda with a passenger on it, a rather large woman.  All three went flying to the ground, bodas on their sides, woman looked really painfully unhappy.  Her shirt had flown up and the rolls of skin scraped across the neither smooth  nor clean asphalt, her facial expression oozed hurt.  A small crowd gathered round, picked them all up and set them right again, so not much later, they were actually all on their way again.  I was a bit dazed though....I mean, if I hadn't stopped him, he wouldn't have been in that exact place at that unfortunate time and maybe there would be no accident.  I couldn't help but ask myself if it was my fault.  Or, we could have settled a price and I could have been on it...on the ground, like that woman, maybe worse.  Someway, somehow, I was a part of it....although to any outsider, I was just another spectator on the side of the road.  Just the day before, the security guy at the Embassy had given me a small fatherly talk on buying a motorcycle helmet if I'm going to be engaging in risky boda boda riding.  And of course, ABSOLUTELY NO BODAS AT NIGHT, strict Embassy rule.  Yessah.  Eh, so now I'm seriously contemplating getting a motorcycle helmet.  Of course, I'm still also contemplating getting a motorcycle....but you know, just to make my field work easier.  Anyway, I ended up taking the slow/long way to UWA....2 taxis (aka matatus).

Wednesday, I got a phone call from Festo that the UWA truck would be leaving on Thursday morning.....so get ready, I was going to Bwindi!!

Into the Impenetrable Forest

Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.  It used to be the Bwindi Impenetrable National Forest before they upped its protection.  Impenetrable forest definitely has a sweeter ring to it, but I guess NP is stronger legal status, so we give and we take.

Bwindi is one of 8 national parks in the Central Albertine Rift Transfrontier Protected Area Network.  Of the 8 NPs that form the CAR TFPA Network, 6 are in Uganda....hence, my current country of residence.  The CAR TFPA Network started out as an initiative being promoted largely by the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, an alliance of three INGOs (the World Wildlife Fund, Wildlife Conservation Society and Flora & Fauna International) created specifically for the purpose of protecting the trinational habitat of the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei).

What started out as cross-border collaboration on the ground between the park wardens, rangers and other NGO or research staff, was signed into some formality through a trilateral Memorandum of Understanding between the three protected areas authorities (Uganda Wildlife Authority, Office Rwandais de Tourisme et des Parcs Nationaux (I wonder if it will be translating its name into English now that it's made English an official language) and the Institute Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature.  They're now in the process of drafting a treaty between the three governments.

I enquired about this treaty.  The CAR TFPA Network has been proposed as a possible peace park, but the peace element is not currently being considered in this treaty.  The focus is wildlife, peace would only confuse and complicate.  Of course, I have to respectfully disagree, a peace mandate for an area like this would be instrumental.  Not only is it a place that has a history of conflict, but it is still suffering from different forms of warfare.

Communities living on the border of the parks are literally in a battle against the wildlife and protected areas.  Just heard a story yesterday of how a Ugandan woman had a baby child in a village near Queen Elizabeth NP (usually called Queen or QE for short) and one day a hyena came in and snatched her baby, ate it I presume.  Ever since then, the villagers have been poisoning the hyenas.  There are now maybe 200 or so individuals left.  What used to be a common species in the region has become critically endangered.  Joe was glad to have photos of the now rare encounter.

Just across the border in the DRC they are still fighting a twisted version of the Rwandan genocide mixed in with ethno-political battles of their own, with wildlife, natural resources and the environment paying for the petty tiffs that arise between the egos of men.  As the East African saying goes, "When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."  I won't drag on about the rapes, tree slaughter for charcoal, conflict timber, conflict diamonds, coltan for cell phones, or the number of displaced peoples pushed into already highly populated lands or even the protected areas themselves....there are enough reports to indicate that there's a problem.  It's not proof that I'm seeking, it's answers.

I've just started to read a book that my friend Hana gave to me in Eastham, MA when Robby and I passed through on our roadtrip this summer - Blue Clay People.  It's about this guy who went to Liberia in the middle of Charles Taylors' maniacal reign to run the largest food aid program in the country.

*Side note: speaking of food aid, Atsuko recently told me that Moroto the village she is working in, has just been put on a 40-year food programme by the UN.  For 40 years, the people of Moroto will want not and need not in terms of basic alimental sustenance.  I'm horrified at the thought.  The next two generations of Moroto will grow up completely dependent on the UN, with little motivation to do anything.  The development/aid community used to think that if you could supply for the basic needs of a community, it would free them up to do other things, like education, which will help them elevate their economies out of subsistence agriculture where their lives are at risk to the whims of clouds and rains.  So food aid programs proliferated and yes, while it might save lives today, it does nothing to build the future....at least, not a more sustainable future.  What it does is build dependency...what I call "disabled communities."  They cannot function without assistance.

So anyway, Blue Clay People....I'm at the very beginning, where the guys has just arrived with all his ideals and visions of living with the poor, "fighting poverty while saving rainforests," but instead finds himself swept up in the expat life of serious luxury (not just relative luxury, but crazy luxury by any European or North American standards.....big houses in gated compounds, servants, maids, drivers, SUVs, etc.), where with words, "Do it," he can distribute food to villages he's never seen before.

I am not living anywhere near those means nor am I in charge of any kind of programme with that kind of backing, but I do live in a nice flat and Christine comes and does my laundry and cleaning for me once a week.  I've also been here one month (2 days shy) and have yet to go out "into the field."  I can't help but feel trapped in the city; I really didn't come here to live it up expat style with all my research coming from libraries and the internet.

Thankfully, I'm leaving tomorrow.  I've introduced myself to the Transport Officer at the Uganda Wildlife Authority and he tells me that a car from Bwindi is here now for repairs.  It's supposed to be done today at about 1pm, which means that it'll be off super early tomorrow morning and taking me with it to Bwindi!  Conveniently, I have also just reached the part in the book where food aid man (can't remember his name) leaves the capitol for the bush.  I'm not exactly heading upcountry through checkpoints guarded by child soldiers, but I also have little idea of what to expect.  A la PILA, "you never know until you go."