Welcome to Uganda: Beware of Rebels, Malaria, and Malevolent Livestock

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Yesterday my coworker was attacked by a goat. The offending beast was tethered, clearly to no useful end, in a field we pass through every day on our way to work. It blocked the path; she moved to walk around. It butted; she screamed.

Bruises and welts ensued, as well as a good story she can tell her friends back home in Finland: “What did you do in Uganda?” they’ll ask. The casual reply: “I was attacked by a goat.”

For myself, I feel brutalized by nothing more than heat, pollution, and 2am Shakira blasting from the bars of nearby Kabalagala. By now I’m used to the daily power outages, cockroaches in the bathtub, hideous church music, and near-death encounters with boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis) every time I cross a street. There are also the rebels in the North (cause of many a military escort when I’m in the field) and malaria buzzing through every open window (been there, treated that). It’s all part and parcel of the whole gig; it’s all part of living in Africa.

I’m here in Uganda until December, volunteering for an NGO that “challenges and responds to the causes and consequences of human suffering with a commitment to promote justice and dignity for the disadvantaged.” The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) is a faith-based organization but is non-missionary in its humanitarian efforts—a quality I highly appreciate considering I’m about as Lutheran as the gecko that lives in my living room.

The work itself is both fascinating and frustrating. Having spent the previous eight months (October 05 to March 06) backpacking from Istanbul to Cape Town, I thought I was prepared for anything. I was wrong. The world of aid and development is a strange one indeed, full of contradictions, moral ambiguities, and politics—not to mention the masses of people living in unthinkable conditions, the ones on the receiving end of it all.

In the coming months I’ll write about my work with LWF and visits to the field: displaced person camps in war-ravaged Northern Uganda (a region that earned the “world’s most underreported humanitarian crisis” label a few years back), HIV/AIDS community projects in Southern Uganda, and refugee resettlement programs in South Sudan. I’ll wax poetic about ex-pat life in Kampala and talk of the existential crises I face every time I pass a beggar on the street.

And I’ll try, in some small way, to share the Uganda I’ve come to know: a place of constant music and burning garbage; sudden rain and scorching sun; small acts of charity and large acts of ignorance; sensational landscapes and baffling bureaucracy; people who laugh in the face of poverty and goats that stand their ground.