by Angelica Calabrese:
Over spring break, a group of 13 students will be traveling to rural Uganda to work with a number of community-based organizations that support vulnerable children and orphans.
“But I want to ask you – why do you want to go on this trip?”
The question hung in the air, gathering strength in the silence that followed it. Professor Kaveh Khoshnood, a Yale School of Public Health faculty member who had just spent the past hour discussing with us the challenges facing HIV/AIDS treatment in Uganda, looked around the table at the twelve of us sitting around him. He had high expectations; we could not disappoint.
In the moments that followed, I pondered the question at hand: was I going to “help,” in that abstract and undefinable sense of the word? That wasn’t quite it…maybe it was more like to “give”? But again, that wasn’t quite it – I struggled to discover the nugget of a phrase that could communicate why exactly I wanted to go to Uganda.
But then I realized that I was struggling not because I didn’t know why I wanted to go on the trip, but rather because my desire to participate in this project could not be packaged and delivered in a few concise phrases; I wanted to build relationships, to create sustainable partnerships, to facilitate learning, to bring knowledge and to take away knowledge, and to enable the future of a community – a community that included both the men, women, and children of a rural village in Uganda, and us, twelve Yale students.
The roots of the relationships that this community will stem from have been growing over the course of the past two months, as the twelve of us have worked with each other and with partners in Uganda. . Over the course of the last couple of months, we have been completing an educational curriculum in which we meet once a week to talk about Uganda and the country’s history, HIV/AIDS, public health, and development. In addition, we have met with professors from the School of Public Health, surgeons working in Uganda, the Director the US-based NGO African Hope Network, and others. Together, we have navigated the straits of international development, wrestling with everything from the societal implications of implementing animal husbandry projects to the ethical challenges of editing the stories of Ugandan children, and we will continue to work together through these problems over the course of our time in Uganda.
In Uganda, we will be spending time in the capital city Kampala, in a village in Masaka, and in a village in Sembabule. In the rural villages, we will begin to work on the ground with the organizations that we have been working with over the past two months via email and Skype.
The first organization we will spend time at is Hope for African Children (HAC), an NGO founded by Keneth Stahl, a young graduate of Makerere University. After visiting his grandmother’s rural village and meeting the many children of the village who had been orphaned or left vulnerable by HIV/AIDS, Keneth became determined to develop a sponsorship program that would ensure that these children go to school. The NGO has gradually expanded in its scope, seeking to implement income generation, water sanitation, and de-worming programs in the village, thereby addressing the two major factors that often keep children out of school: lack of funds and poor health. Over the past couple of months, students have been working to develop a new website, new child evaluation forms, water sanitation assessment techniques, and a de-worming educational program for HAC. Other students have been working on putting together a comparative financial analysis to illustrate to donors HAC’s promising future. After HAC, we will move on to the Sembabule region, where we will be working with the Cosma Foundation, a community-based organization that is just getting off the ground. This organization also supports children affected by HIV/AIDS, seeking thereby to strengthen and make resilient their own community. Students have been working with this organization also on website development, as well as animal husbandry and arts and crafts income generation projects that would benefit the children and their families.
As the date of departure approaches, we continue to finalize our projects, as we frantically search for skirts that are below knee length to wear in the village, bug spray, and the smallest travel-size items available. Few know exactly what to expect – we go into this experience with open eyes and open minds, excited to give and receive, learn and teach, and forge relationships with individuals and with communities that will carry us into the future.