My material on Karamoja is going up, slowly slowly, so I thought I would put the first two pieces here. More is following, and I’m still hoping to get more done before I post a bunch of pictures and general reflections next week.

Ngeleca Maddalina – “I don’t remember the last time there was meat to eat”

KARAMOJA, The Ik are one of several ethnic communities in Uganda’s northeastern region of Karamoja, near the border with Kenya.

Culturally and linguistically distinct from the rest of Uganda, Karamoja has often been marginalised and lacks the kind of services and infrastructure found in the rest of the country. While most ethnic groups in Uganda are Bantu, the Karamojong are Nilotic – they are taller than most Bantu people, speak a dissimilar language, and still dress in traditional clothes. (More…)

Namoe Aisha: “I’m ready for the medicine, me myself, I’m ready for it”

MATANY, Namoe Aisha, an HIV-positive widow with four children, is currently undergoing treatment for tuberculosis at the Matany Hospital in Moroto district, a remote region of Karamoja in northeastern Uganda. She told IRIN/PlusNews about the difficulties she has encountered since being diagnosed with the virus two years ago.

“When I was still young I went to Soroti [a district in eastern Uganda] for school, and there I married a Musoga [ethnic group in eastern Uganda] man. We had four children. Two years ago he became very ill and he died.

“I was also sick and I went to test and found that I have HIV. My co-wife [her husband's other wife] was also sick with AIDS and she died soon after our husband. She had refused to be admitted to hospital even though she was coughing with blood. (More…)

Because of their small numbers – around 5,000, most people guess – the Ik are marginalized even within Karamoja. As the tribe has shrunk, most of their cattle has been stolen by neighboring Kenyan tribe the Turkana who live directly across a mountain range that serves as a border. The Ik have abandoned traditional cattle-keeping ways and turned to agriculture. However, their lack of agricultural experience as well as last year’s floods, followed by this year’s droughts, means that most people don’t have enough food to feed their families. The increasing price of food worldwide also means that, even in this remote region, food purchased from neighboring tribes has also gone up in price.

The long awaited book club arrives.

The onus is on me to pick the location, I guess, and I was thinking Iguana, but that’s so not central. So I have to fall back on the default Mateo’s. We can discuss a different place for next time….

I’m guessing there will be a blogger or two there, since the only way this has been discussed is via blog, so maybe we can also talk about meeting during a different part of the month next time, not so close to BHH. (I’ll miss it, again, next month. Is the media establishment at large conspiring to make me constantly go up country on assignment during BHH?)

27th Comrade – this is on the day of the month dedicated to you. I think this means you should come.

I’ve just returned from Karamoja, an impoverished region in the north-east of Uganda, bordering Kenya and Sudan. The people who live there are culturally dissimilar from the rest of Uganda, and partially as a result of this, marginalized politically and economically, with almost no existing infrastructure or opportunities for people who call the arid region home. They are traditional cattle-herders, with the modern twist of abundant AK-47s that make raids on neighboring tribes deadly.

Last fall, there was a flood. This spring, there’s been a drought. Things are much worse than they were when I visited last year. Or maybe I know better to recognize how bad things are.

Sometimes, I feel like at least once every few weeks, I come home and say, “That was the worst/poorest/saddest place I’ve ever been.” But only one place can truly take the superlative.

I hope that I don’t see anywhere worse/sadder/poorer anytime soon, because this was pretty bad/sad/poor. It will take me awhile to decompress from watching a famine unfold and children die. It will take me awhile to sort through all of the material I’ve gathered and try and form a coherent narrative.

In the meantime, here are some photos I took of a few little boys from the Ik tribe. They were so cute, laughing and smiling and running around and being kids. The distended belly is a tell-tale sign of malnutrition, but more subtly, the orange tinge at the hair line is indicative of Kwashiorkor.

Three…
Two…

One!

Just wanted to plug an event taking place this weekend…

La Fontaine, Kisementi, Saturday, 24 May

Nagenda

This one-night-only event will act as a fund raising event to help Nagenda International Academy of Art and Design (www.nagenda.org) open its doors in September 2008. Our featured artist is Kizito Maria Kasule, Makerere University Professor and Founding Director of NIAAD.

NIAAD will be the first of its kind in East Africa! Slated for official opening in September 2008, NIAAD will be a self-sustaining institution where local and international artists will hone their creative and entrepreneurial skills. Located on the edge of Lake Victoria, NIAAD will provide a lush backdrop for students, instructors and volunteers to gather at a top-notch facility. Artists will be inspired to promote local arts and crafts techniques; learn cutting edge design technology and encourage one another through a network of alumnae and international artists. NIAAD is a fully registered community-based organization within Ssisa sub-county Wakiso District in Central Uganda.

NIAAD’s mission is to establish a continuous and self-sustaining center where mediums of artistic expression will be learned and appreciated. Their objectives include:

1) to establish a local and international arts training center for people of Uganda and beyond;

2) to preserve, promote and utilize indigenous art and craft skills through training and research, fostering a sense of community pride and shared history;

3) to create employment in the arts by training school dropouts, orphans and other disadvantaged people;

4) to provide art training in a high-caliber academy setting to students whose primary and secondary schools cannot employ art teachers;

5) to provide and equip ordinary people with art and designing entrepreneurship skills which they can use to market their art and craft products.

NIAAD will not open its doors without the help of art lovers like you! Please join us for this special event and schedule your tour of the NIAAD center with us!

I’m off to Karamoja for the week. Will report back soon.

Many people have criticized a new program in Tanzania that gives people economic rewards when they test negatively for STIs (sexually transmitted infections). Congo Girl calls this “derogatory.”

Yet, one of the many purposes of this program would be to give people money so that they don’t have to have sex for money, or engage in other risky sexual behavior associated with economic gain, a fate far more derogatory, in my opinion, that participating in this program.

(The program has other purposes and aims, but here, I’ll mainly be discussing this one.)

So, here’s the thing, sex, in an African context, is NEVER the kind of glamorous-I’m-wiedling-my-all-powerful-feminitiy-to-make-loads-of-money kind of thing. No Eliot Spitzer Number 9 here. More often than not, “risky sexual behavior” isn’t sex work as an employment category but as a means to put a coin in your pocket. The line between a sex worker and someone who has a sugar daddy is practically nonexistent, as is the line between a sex worker and someone who is hungry.

In a western context, the idea of sex work as a woman’s prerogative is controversial, but valid as a hypothesis. In Africa, it is not. The question that needs to be asked here is, why are women having risky sex? And the answer, always (okay, almost always, like 99.9 percent of the time always), is that they need the money.

They need money to buy food. To pay for shelter. To survive.

If they’re only saying yes to risky sex because of extreme poverty, then it is the poverty that is derogatory and the payout that is empowering.

One interesting comment on Congo Girl’s blog is that this will perpetuate economic inequality between postives and negatives. This is a valid point, as is another point by a reader who asks what happens to someone who is raped. These are things that the researchers should consider.

The jury is still out on whether or not this will work. I’ll be curious, along with a lot of other people, to see what happens. One thing that I worry about is the fact that women are paid out every six months: this may not be frequent enough to cover the daily grind. It’s a lot of money, as much as the annual income of most participants, but I fear the long wait in between payouts might cause participants to engage in risky behavior to cover costs in the immediate present.

But this is a concern with the program design, not the program concept. The design will be tweaked over time as the researchers figure out what does and doesn’t work.

The concept, however, is far from derogatory in my opinion. One comment on Congo Girl’s blog says that this program makes her “uncomfortable.”

The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is the thought of women having sex for the cost of a plate of beans and posho. If this program can reduce that kind of occurrence, then the commenter should handle her discomfort while the program participant is eating.

Haven’t been on blogger much this week, and next week, I’ll be upcountry, so expect the paucity of posts to continue (though I will probably do another one today… try to take off the weekend).

But, I promised a book club/book swap, and I intend to keep that promise. I propose:

We will all bring a book, and then swap. We can discuss the possibility of all reading the same text for subsequent meetings. If you’ve already told me you want to attend, then I have you on a list. If you are hearing about this for the first time or suddenly have the desire to part with an Aristoc purchase, feel free to let me know and I’ll add you to the list.

There have been surprisingly few mentions in the Ugandan media of the fact that Yoweri Museveni, the Ugandan President, is currently in Jerusalem. Few mentions in the international media as well, though this is to be expected. Who else is there? George Bush, Paul Kagame, a few other international state heads, and a whole lot of Jews, and some Palestinians who surely have not attended the festivites.

Officially, he’s there for a conference. Unofficially, I’ve heard a whole slew or rumors ranging from things I’m not willing to say on a public space like a blog, to other things I’m not willing to say on a public space like a blog.

Having now spread this tidbit of information, I’ll leave you to speculate about possible meanings.

I look at a lot of different photo essays online. A lot. A few every day, at least, to try and learn from what others are doing and see where I can take my work.

Few make as much of an impact on me as The Hidden Half, a photo essay in Mother Jones magazine. While it doesn’t dazzle with tricky techniques or saturated color, in terms of effect, it does more than any fancier essay could hope for. Don’t get me wrong, the technique is perfect, but if you’re trying to get what I’m talking about, after looking at this essay on Afghan women, look at this essay. Pretty pictures. But that’s all, just pretty.

I’m only posting a few here, because I hope you’ll go look at the whole essay. It’s work your internet cafe time.

October 9, 2004, saw the first free, democratic presidential election in Afghanistan. In the months prior, the Taliban peppered villages and cities with “night letters” warning women not to vote. In June 2004 a bomb exploded on a bus full of female election workers in Jalalabad, killing three. Still, these four women at a Kabul polling station-and 40 percent of women nationwide-asserted their new right. But, as a Womankind report summarized, “paper rights have not equaled rights in practice.”

Why this photo is amazing: technically, it’s great – there’s the division between the three women in blue and the woman in white from the slightly out of focus foreground. But what’s really amazing is the content, the emotion, captured here: the daily grind of these women, trying so hard, how they have to go somewhere in a back corner to just exhale. The photographer’s intimacy with her subjects is unmistakable, and that’s why the photographer could capture such an amazing image.

The waters of Band-i-Amir Lake are thought to cure many ailments, including infertility. If a woman has not conceived soon after marriage, her husband’s family will often travel for days-by car, donkey, camel, or foot-to bring her here. Most Afghans don’t know how to swim, so the woman is tethered around the waist as she enters the lake. The husband follows behind and, as is the custom, pushes her into the frigid water three times.

There is something so moving about this photo – the amazing landscape, the disorientation and confusing imagery (just what are they doing?), but it all comes together to reveal an aspect of women’s lives in Afghanistan that most people know nothing about.

Inside a Kabul home, a heavy curtain is all that separates a prostitute’s work from her family life. Her 15-year-old daughter also sells herself, but not in the house. Too many men going in and out would alert the neighbors, and that could prove fatal.

Here, the photographer is working with limitations: I assume that the woman pictured didn’t want to have her face shown, but the photographer worked around this. She used the curtain, which serves such a necessary role in this woman’s abode, as part of the photo. The photographer has the curtain do all the talking, and that’s what makes this photo amazing.