Photos

For anyone interested, I've started up a Picasa account and have put some more photos online. Please feel free to see the results of my beloved new camera here. (At least I hope so - let me know if the link doesn't work!)

Yes, Google is slowly sucking me into its lecherous grip. I honestly had no idea how many different websites and programs they were in charge of until I signed up for a Gmail account for work recently and suddenly found myself prospectively signed in under that account name on all manner of different websites and services, from blogs to Picasa to maps and on and on. It might seem handy to have all your website accounts combined under one username and password, but I'm not sure I'm happy with finding myself pre-registered with websites I've never used before, or with everything having to be interconnected.

Not to mention how annoying it is when like me, you have two different accounts - personal and work - and can't use any of these damn websites at the same time with different names. So I can't let blogs or photos slowly upload in the background (I'm in Africa, remember) while I work away on my work email, for example. It tends to get in the way of my sneaky use of internet at the office for things I should be doing on my own time!

Privacy? What's that you say? Let Google buy Facebook and their plan for world domination shall be complete.

Bety Cariño

I learned just this morning that another colleague of ours from Front Line died tragically yesterday. Bety Cariño was a courageous human rights defender from Mexico, who came to Dublin just over two months ago - with G who I mentioned last week - to take part in the Dublin Platform. Yesterday she was shot and killed while travelling in a humanitarian caravan which was bringing aid relief, food supplies and teachers to a small town blockaded in recent months by paramilitaries in Oaxaca, Mexico. The caravan was ambushed and fired upon; an international observer from Finland, Tyri Antero Jaakkola, was also killed. Others were wounded and many remain missing. No one knows if they too have been killed or kidnapped, or if they are hiding in the bush.

Being a human rights defender from Mexico is a particularly difficult, even deadly, profession. Bety faced the additional risks that came from her belonging to an indigenous community, and from being a woman. Both the indigenous and woman are particularly vulnerable, mostly thanks to economic disadvantage and the threats of stigmatisation and violence they face from the authorities and from society itself. During her time in Dublin, she spoke so eloquently about the problems facing her indigenous community in their struggle for autonomy and access to their lands and resources that her testimony was truly poetic. At a party at the Jameson Distillery late on a Friday night, she took to the stage and held the whole room spellbound as she sang a song from her community. I took some pictures, one of which you can see above.

You can read Front Line's report on Bety's death here or read more about the attack in which she was killed here. It is reported of the caravan in which Bety travelled that:

The caravan was carrying food, water, and other basic necessities to San Juan Copala, which has been subject to a paramilitary blockade that has prevented anyone from entering or leaving the community since January. In addition to carrying much-needed supplies, the caravan was meant to accompany teachers who were returning to classes after paramilitaries denied them access to the community nearly five months ago. The caravan included representatives from the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), Section 22 of the teachers union, the Center for Community Support Working Together (CACTUS), Oaxacan Voices Constructing Autonomy and Liberty (VOCAL), two reporters from the Mexican magazine Contralinea, and international observers from Belgium, Finland, Italy, and Germany.

I hardly know what to say.

Mbale II (the rest of it)

Road outside our hotel with Mt. Elgon in background

Mbale was an interesting trip – it was great to get out of Kampala and see some of the rest of the country, even if there was very little time to really see the town or the countryside because we were, of course, working. Hence what I saw was limited to the view from the window of our car, or from the bus that my colleague Sharon and I took to get back home. Even still it was fascinating – I hate to use the term “real” Africa (the urban being just as “real” as the rural and home to far more people), but Mbale and the long road from Kampala conform to the image of Africa in the West. There were red roads and green fields, laughing children, women with bundles on their heads, poverty, chickens, cows, goats, and yes, grass-roofed huts.

This was all a bit of a contrast to Kampala – a cosmopolitan and sophisticated city with every modern convenience. Everyone has a mobile phone, internet access is everywhere (and although its slower than home, its not as bad as I had expected), and I couldn't tell you how many flat screen tvs I've come across. Everyone is glued to the British Premiership, a fan of either Man Utd, Chelsea or Arsenal, and crowds gather in bars and outside shop fronts to watch the games screened live on satellite from South Africa. The girls who work in the guesthouse are glued to Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, American Idol and, hilariously for me, Latin American telenovelas with names like “La Tormenta”, gloriously melodramatic and dubbed in bad English. Kampala's nightlife is hopping and four wheel drives are ubiquitously gridlocked in the horrendous traffic, driven not just by the ex-pats – muzungus, white people – or their drivers, but by locals.

All of this is camouflage. I've seen the shanty towns and the slums from the window of Margaret's car, and the children selling Chinese-made rubbish at traffic lights, and the marabou storks rummaging in the litter. When we left at 6.00AM to go to Mbale, I was shocked at the crowds of people already out on foot on the roads, but as the others explained to me, those who live hand to mouth on daily labourers' wages start working as soon as it gets light in order to make their day as long and their earnings as substantial as possible. But its so easy to forget all this when you live in Muyenga – which I could easily compare as an equivalent to Foxrock or Dalkey in Dublin – and work and meet with Ugandans who have university degrees and masters, often from abroad, and successful businesses and careers. I've been to two or three houses which would rightly be regarded as mansions in Dublin. I've been chauffeured around by private drivers, and have come to think of armed guards at the door as normal. And Muyenga isn't even the high-end area of Kampala; no embassies here.

Mbale was not like that, and it was refreshing. There was an affluent side to it – we hung out in the evenings at a swishy country-club style hotel with excellent food and a swim-up bar – but it was not the norm. The streets were heaving at all hours but there were very few cars, and rather than the hoards of boda bodas which buzz eternally around Kampala, bicycles with a padded seat over the back wheel were the most common form of public transport. Everyone else was walking. Street markets were not limited to certain places and corners as they are in the city, but lined all the roads and streets, and most of the shops – narrow, dark and concrete - spilled outside and did their business on the pavement. Men were gathered in groups almost everywhere, either bored or shiftily looking out for an opportunity. Women were working. Children were running around. Goats and chickens wandered around the main streets. In some places the road was almost choked with pedestrian traffic, and was usually unpaved. Everything was happening all at once.

Bicycle taxi stage. Next to the guy in yellow in the centre is a hanging hunk of cow - a normal Ugandan butchers

Everyone was hawking everything, nowhere more so than at the bus park, where a slow procession of men, women and children circled the bus and our windows in unwinding repetition. They sold everything: food (chapatti, samosa, mandazi (doughnuts), grilled chicken, bananas), newspapers, mobile phone credit (this was quite a handy one, I thought), books (most of the book sellers had only one or two sad, lost books each - if you looked but didn't like what they showed you, they would return a few minutes later with a different selection), and then all kinds of random rubbish which had no place on a bus. I saw nail clippers, combs, hair accessories, cheap kitchen accessories, razors, plastic jewellery, bars of soap, and all manner of plastic Chinese-made tack, which men carted around on their backs on huge wooden display cases which towered over their heads, so that they would reverse up to the windows of the bus for potential customers to have a look.

We drove down country roads a few times on our way to various places. Every road off the main street is a country road. As the bush generally begins directly behind the row of buildings which line the road, most of the streets of Mbale felt like a street scene erected on a film set, with nothing at all behind the front, falsified walls. The country roads are busy, but not with cars. People are coming and going, to and fro, all taking their time. Its true what they say, even in Kampala – no one, and I mean no one, is in a hurry in Africa. I walk as slowly as it feels physically possible for me to walk, and I'm still overtaking everyone before me.

Human traffic (guy on mobile phone on the right!)

There were children everywhere. This is the case in Kampala too, but in Mbale there are presumably less children in school, and nowhere else for them to go but their homes and the roads. The children in school wear immaculately clean, brightly-colour uniforms and both boys and girls have their heads shaved (this is in fact a requirement of school uniforms here. We thought we had it bad not being allowed to wear jewellery!). The children not in school are generally grubby and happy, playing outside together. “Hi muzungu”, they call after me cheerfully. “Muzungu how are you?” The very smallest ones wriggle and dance with excitement and squeal “Muzungu! Muzungu! Muzungu!!!”

Three children hanging out in the grounds of a local college, quietly looking after themselves

These guys were lined up playing on their fallen tree, and started waving when we drove past, so we stopped and waved back

Kids who presumably should have been in school play outside an abandoned house while a maid from the hotel next door serves lunch on trays from a restaurant across the street

The house had not been finished but was full of women doing laundry and possibly families squatting

People are tending the small plots of land outside their homes where they grow frilly green rows of cassava, potatoes and banana trees (which supply both the sweet bananas we eat and the unripe, larger ones like plantain which are steamed to make matoke, as common here as spuds are at home). The plants grow on raised mounds of earth so that the gardens look something like egg cartons. Chickens are pecking at the growing plants for bugs. The houses are tiny, sometimes shacks, sometimes tin-roofed, but in truth no one is ragged or dirty – clothes are bright, colourful and neat, and no one takes a blind bit of notice of our four wheel drive bumping past on the way to somewhere else. No excitement, no resentment, just getting on with it.

Malaria

Tomorrow (April 25) is World Malaria Day. Normally this wouldn't have meant much to me - if you're signed up to as many mailing lists as I am you start to realise that every day is the World Day of something or other - but as I have just moved to a country where malaria is a serious risk, I have started to see it quite differently.

Last week a colleague of ours passed away quite suddenly. He had come to Dublin in February to participate in the Dublin Platform, a conference run by Front Line every two years which brings together over 100 human rights defenders from around the world. G was from Burundi and was a brave, articulate activist working on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights - not at all an easy thing to be in Burundi or indeed in Africa. He set up and ran Burundi's only LGBT organisation and was also worked against AIDS/HIV, that African scourge. He was funny and mischievous, so he stood out amongst the many participants and I have good memories of him (including one slightly scandalous anecdote that I won't repeat here!). He was a young man, and last week he died of malaria, a treatable, preventable disease. Needless to say I was completely thrown on hearing the news.

Only a few days later, one of my colleagues started feeling unwell while we were in Mbale - a terrible headache, nausea, stiffness, fever, weak. The poor thing was a little scared and emotional, not knowing what was wrong with her and being so far away from home, facing a long, stressful journey by bus back to Kampala - and on top of all of that, she had to look after a rather green Irish girl on the trip! It turns out she too has malaria, and is convinced that she contracted it by sleeping without a mosquito net for one night while away on a previous training workshop.

Both of these incidents brought home to me the imminent and serious danger of malaria out here. I've been eaten alive by the mozzies once or twice already (we have a love/hate relationship: I hate them venomously, they love me unconditionally) and since these incidents have been hastily swallowing anti-malarials and obsessively tucking and re-tucking my mosquito net in at night. But not everyone can afford malarials or take them on a permanent basis, and there are plenty of people - including Joan, who I mentioned here previously - who cannot afford nets or repellent, even for their children.

Project Blackout are running a campaign this weekend asking you to change your Facebook profile photo to a black square to mark World Malaria Day tomorrow. Its only a small gesture but it doesn't cost anything or take up much time. You can access the Facebook page here or else copy the picture above.

Mbale I (the professional bit)

I spent the last three days in Mbale, a large-ish regional town in Eastern Uganda. This was my very first trip to “the field” (not just in Uganda - ever), or as everyone so charmingly puts it, “up-country”, which altogether makes me feel rather colonial. The purpose of the trip was to put in an eastern stop on a training and dissemination program which the Human Rights Centre is running for the month of April, during which they have organised a series of workshops across Uganda.

The main aim of the workshop is to gather together local human rights defenders and activists and to tell them about the laws and mechanisms available to them to help them in their work, specifically the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, the international system based around the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, and the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, as well as a little about local laws and provisions. The reason there is only a little time spent on local provisions is of course because there aren't many.



The Declaration was passed in 1998 by the UN General Assembly. It is not legally binding but it basically gathers together various rights and protections guaranteed in other human rights instruments which are binding and puts them together in a way which is geared towards getting States to recognise that defenders are legitimate actors in society and that they are entitled to protection. The Human Rights Centre recently translated the Declaration into seven local Ugandan languages and the training program is one of the main thrusts by which they're taking it out to the communities. A human rights roadshow, if you will.

Incidentally, the training program has been funded by Trócaire (for those of you not of the auld sod, Trócaire – which the Ugandans pronounce tro-care as if it was French! - is one of the main Irish development aid organisations, and enjoys a very high-profile presence at home as one of the traditional recipients of popular charity donations). When I inquired about the arrangements for the hotel and expenses for the trip, my colleagues told me not to worry because the hotel would be covered by the funding for the program. So I found myself in the strange position whereby the money that I myself had thrown into the Trócaire box last year had come back to find me in Uganda so that I could teach Africans about human rights. Brilliant!



In fairness, I did have a similar feeling last week when I learnt that the Human Rights Centre itself is largely funded by Irish Aid, the development wing of the Dept. of Foreign Affairs. I would have been chuffed to see where my tax-payers' euro were going, except that in recent years my poverty-stricken choices of employment have meant that I have yet to qualify to pay tax. A charity case employing a charity case, if you will. What can I say; I'm happy to do my part to cut down on social welfare bills. Thank me later.

The training was quite a success, at least to my innocent eye. With 30 participants we were at full capacity, and the distribution was good in that we had a cross section of civil society: journalists and radio broadcasters, students, health officers, clergy, an elected official and a representative of the police, in addition to the employees of human rights and community organisations. They varied in age from their twenties to their seventies, and not all of them had degrees or training or human rights 'careers'. But all of them were receptive and keen to learn, happy to debate and constructive in their ideas and suggestions.

Spot the muzungu in the corner...

In the afternoon the participants split into three groups to brainstorm. The three separate identifications of the key problems and difficulties, and their suggestions for change and initiative, were remarkably similar; its not that Ugandans don't know what's wrong with their society or how to fix it, or that they don't have a vision for what they'd like to achieve. Neither did anyone romanticise the whole thing - no one mentioned the words 'change' or 'hope' or 'dream', or wrung their hands. But no one knows where to start.







By the end of the afternoon many participants looked visibly satisfied at having this confusing muddle of half-information and misunderstanding set right in their minds; hearing about the avenues of entry into this remote and distant international system is stimulating, but far more thought-provoking is the prospect of using this new information and sense of authority on the subject the next time the authorities come knocking. If defenders haven't heard of the Declaration previously, neither have the police or the local heavies. An authoritative-sounding defence can be very useful, even in a remote town like Mbale - particularly when the laws are written clearly in your own local language. All our booklets of the Declaration were snapped up on the way out the door.

Afterwards we went to a local radio station recommended to us for its political discussions and topical shows. Radio remains the predominant means of communication in Uganda, at least outside Kampala, and each of the training workshops so far have been followed by an hour-long phone-in talk show. I had been impressed initially by my colleagues' savvy media connections, getting on talk shows all over the country. They laughed at my enthusiasm – time on air here is paid for, and we had essentially bought an hour's advertising in a talk-show format. Still, it was fun to sit in the booth with our headphones on, even if I couldn't understand a word of what was being said. True to our policy of maximum engagement of the community, the broadcast took place primarily in Luganda (one of the most common Ugandan languages, dominant in Kampala, which my colleagues speak) with the presenter translating a lot of the comments into another language more common in Mbale – to my shame I must admit that I can't remember what it was called. I make a bad reporter!

My colleagues Robert and Jacques with the radio presenter. In the background is a poster of one of the Tribal Kings

The talk show will be followed by a series of ads encouraging people to know their rights and to contact the Human Rights Centre, which will run in three different languages.

It all might not sound like much, but its remarkably simple to carry out, once you have the funding to do it – and in relative terms there's very little cost involved other than travel, accommodation and hosting expenses. If the funding is there for follow up – for coming back in six months or a year, for staying in touch with participants, for arranging other meetings for them to organise together and take their ideas further, to draw other participants in – it could be the start of something.

Stay tuned for the non-professional bit of Mbale to follow...

Night Storm

My afternoon's plans have been disrupted by a passing thunder shower. I sat on the terrace after breakfast dipping my toes in the sunshine, enjoying the return of good weather and remarking to Cassva about how much hotter it was today compared to the damp of yesterday. I went to take a shower but when I emerged into the sitting room half an hour later, the angry darkness of the sky was reflected so fiercely in the mirror that it leapt out and grabbed my attention. I was supposed to go to view a house about 20 minutes walk away, but one look at the darkness over my shoulder in the mirror told me otherwise.



The rain seems to follow an identical pattern which I've seen repeated at least four or five times during the last week. Naturally, the first time it happened was in the middle of the night, so that I woke with a fright, disoriented and clueless as to what was happening.

First comes a dramatic drop in temperature, and wind; a strong-willed breeze entirely at odds with the placid calm of the good weather here. We don't have panes of glass in the windows in the guest house; instead, there are horizontal slats of glass which work in the same way as a Venetian blind. They're almost permanently kept open – it truly amazes me that the climate here is so stable that houses can be built without need to provide for even the hypothetical possibility of bad weather – but even when closed they obviously don't seal. Hence the noise of the wind in the middle of the night was much the same as if I had been sleeping outside – and because of the density of leafy foliage surrounding the house, the wind makes quite a noise. Almost exactly the same noise, in fact, as crashing Atlantic storms make in the tossing, towering eucalyptus tree outside my parents' back door; I was instantly back in bed as a child, cowering under the blanket during a storm. Which in truth was almost exactly what I was doing now.

The air rushed and burst in through the window in the sitting room and out through the window in my bedroom, and then back the way it came. Back and forward, pushing and pulling through the rooms so that my mosquito net swung like a hammock on a rolling boat and the curtains billowed madly, giving shape to the wind. I heard thunder booming distantly away to the west and knew what was coming next. I thought the first faint flashes of lightening were just my eyes flickering in the dark, but one or two big ones set me right. I counted madly, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four... almost as a mantra to keep me safe. They were mostly very far away but as the storm progressed, the thunder rolled for a while at a steady eight one-thousand before peaking at a few brief, bright four one-thousand booms.

Lightening in the company of other people and electric lights can be exciting and a little thrilling. Alone at 5am, it is a different matter. I've never really lost a primitive child-like fear of lightening, an inherited condition like some ancestral awe of the inexplicable. Lightening and storms were the only thing that scared me witless and rigid as a child – they heightened the terrible loneliness and isolation of the night, the encapsulation of each individual in the darkness. The whole world takes on a different contour in the small hours; depression and anxiety magnify, we admit truths to ourselves which are inadmissible in daytime, time itself slows down and crawls. As adults we comprehend this as feeling like the only person left alive in the world. As children, we only know that there are terrible and eternal truths about our condition revealed in the dark. As a child I only woke at night and trembled during storms, and thus storms still take me back instantly to that primordial place of fear.

The rain began pelting down. Buckets of it, gallons of it. It sounded like a waterfall was passing overhead, like the whole River Nile was falling out of the sky. I suddenly realise that the windows are open – no rain is coming into the bedroom but the sitting room could be getting soaked for all I know. So I summon up very great courage and get out of bed and tiptoe to the next room, fighting the urge to cover my eyes with my hands.

I tip-toe, because fear always generates the bizarre but all-powerful instinct to make as little noise as possible. Who am I afraid of waking? Why don't I just turn on the light to reassure myself? I have no idea; these very obvious observations never cross my mind until I wake the next morning and laugh at the strange dimension of what passes during the night.

Nothing is getting wet – unlike home, the wind falls when it starts to rain so that the water drops vertically as arrows. I suppose its better to close the windows regardless; I open the mosquito screens which shutter the inside of the windows in order to tilt the slats of glass, gingerly, the way you might if a dangerous wild animal lurked outside. I gasp at the first burst of lightening but then start to notice the peculiar, murky purple light of the storm, and the glow in the sky from the lighted city under the rain. It is dream-like and almost beautiful, a subterranean twilight of a colour that doesn't exist in daylight. Lightening keeps flashing but not in forks; it simply lights up the sky for a moment as if explosions are taking place in the clouds, sometimes the whole sky, sometimes in small puffs which pick out a fluffy white cloud in the midst of the featureless gloom. I run back to bed, somewhat awed.

After half an hour of the deluge, the rain gradually softens and trickles off. The lightening grows very faint and although thunder continues to gently roll across the night for some time, it is only a lullaby to wash me back to sleep. The whole show is over within an hour, and the light from the window is no longer underwater twilight but the blue light of dawn. I feel soothed.

The same pattern took place twice during the working day at the office, and again the morning after that. By the time it came to Thursday night, when I was woken by rustling curtains and heavy rain, instead of straining every nerve to watch for the first coming flash with the frightened twitch of a rabbit, I just hoisted my blanket higher and turned over and went to sleep.

Capable of making a rational decision to sleep through a storm? I feel as if one of the great milestones of becoming an adult have been passed.

A Brief Means of Introduction

I arrived in Kampala, Uganda just over a week ago. About three weeks' ago I had very little idea that this was going to happen. There were lots of people who I didn't get to speak to before I left, and there are lots of people who have no idea what I'm doing here (I've been getting some very shocked reactions on Facebook). So here goes as a brief means of explanation – those of you who've already heard this tale of delay, denial and confusion can skip down a few paragraphs...

In September last year I began a 12-month contract with an international human rights organisation in Dublin called Front Line (FL). Front Line works on and with human rights defenders; people around the world who work in various capacities to improve the rights of others, and who face risk as a result of speaking out or challenging vested interests. Not all defenders are the civil and political activists so beloved of student unions and celebrity endorsements, and not all of them are people who work for human rights organisations. Defenders are journalists, lawyers, trade unionists, teachers, academics, writers, doctors, community activists and village leaders – many of them don't even know themselves that they are human rights defenders. You'll hear me banging on about defenders quite a bit here – once you become aware of the concept you begin to see the defenders all around, behind every newspaper headline, within every volunteer and within every community initiative.

The arrangement was that I would spend a total of 6 months in Front Line's Dublin office, but would also be seconded abroad on an internship. This was originally intended to take place in Geneva. Front Line had previously been sending interns to the office of the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, essentially a special expert on the topic appointed by the UN, which operates with the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR), with a staff of three (“the Mandate”). As two specialised agencies working in this field, the Mandate and Front Line have a relatively close working relationship.

For reasons I won't go into, plans changed and things were delayed. It was nothing personal, just bad luck that it happened to take place around the time I was supposed to leave. Fast forward three months and I was still in Dublin waiting to see what would happen. This actually worked out pretty well for me. Work was good; I was involved with an international conference hosted by Front Line - the Dublin Platform - which was an amazing experience, and went to Geneva for a week to attend the Human Rights Council and assist the Mandate during one of their busiest weeks. I stayed with a succession of kind friends who gave me various welcoming homes, treated every week like it would be my last, and saw Dublin for what it really is: a social city which needs to be discovered with a bit of time, effort and a few good friends.

Margaret Sekaggya herself (the SR) is in fact based in Kampala, Uganda, her native city. As Special Rapporteurs are working experts in their field, most if not all of them have many commitments and full-time positions, whether as lawyers, academics or otherwise, and they travel so frequently that its usually not feasible to have them based full time in Geneva. To cut a long story short, Front Line have seconded me to assist the SR in her office in Kampala. Given that a few months had already been lost, we didn't waste any time about it. I had my vaccinations, booked my flights and left within two weeks.

So here I am. I am now Research Assistant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders (try getting that mouthful out after a few drinks), and will be here for three months, until the start of July. Although I'm working with Margaret in her capacity as SR, I'm hosted in the office of the NGO which she runs in a leafy suburb of Kampala; the Human Rights Centre Uganda. The Centre also works on human rights defenders, although solely in a Ugandan context.

I had in fact toyed with the idea of blogging once or twice before, but never had a good enough excuse to indulge myself in inflicting my unsolicited views on the rest of the world. Now that I'm away and without the kind of implanted internet access I'm addicted to, it seems like the easiest way to stay in touch. Before I left the amount of people who also inquired and actively encouraged me to start writing was both encouraging and exciting. It seems like some of you might actually read these aforementioned inflicted views! And if not – well then they'll stay safely out of your way here in cyberspace.

I'll also use the opportunity to thank everyone for the alternatively well-wishing, encouraging, kind, helpful, shocked and confused emails and messages I've been getting lately from people near and far, especially from those folks I haven't talked to in a while – its always touching to see you're still making the effort to take an interest in my wanderings. I haven't had time to write back to everyone but take it that I was delighted to hear from you, and will try and drop you a line soon.

That's it, introduction completed! Find below a few things I've written since I arrived. Some are a bit long, but what can an over-excited new blogger do...