Week 1
After leaving my home Saturday afternoon, and traveling for 38 hours, I finally reached Jinja on Monday night. I’ve been wanting to call this my pilgrimage since I found out I received this research fellowship through the Buffett Institute at Northwestern. Not because of the strenuous initial journey to get here, but because of the immediate and unforeseen implications this trip will have on my life and life trajectory.
I’ll be constructing and helping to implement a waste management system for the Bugembe Town Council, which has 33,000 residents, solely recommended by my own research. At 18 and while pursuing degrees in Journalism and Sociology, I’ll have grown men, with business and engineering degrees, gawking at my words and backing my decisions– I understand how backwards and ridiculous this is. I had planned to stay away from the pseudo eco-tourism that a lot of us college students partake in during the summer, and still hope to, but I now see how hard that is when working with universities and other institutions.
Kakira
I’m staying in Kakira a small town in the Bugembe Town Council, which is right outside of the much bigger Jinja Town. Kakira is an entirely gated town as it lies on the land of Kakira Sugar Works factory, a multi million dollar company that follows all the bureaucratic rules of any transcontinental entity, no matter its location (bordering one of the poorest slums in Uganda). I feel like economic inequality follows me everywhere I go and has become so apparent in my life and my awareness after my first year at NU, but I know it’s not following me. It’s just everywhere and in every capitalistic state. However, from my short observations, it doesn’t seem to affect daily life as much as it does in the US. This could be because it’s not as drastic as in the US– here you’re either poor or really poor (in terms of global wealth), and the way of life seems much more purposeful. You have your role, and you do it. That is up to your interpretation in comparison to life in the US.
Being Black
I’ll never stop being Black, so it’ll never stop being an issue. I’ve come to the realization (at this point in my life) that it is honestly hard being Black anywhere on this planet. In the US, you are backtracked and stopped in your tracks by the institutional racism that hasn’t been capped or even truly combatted since this country’s creation. And from what I’ve been told, in European and Asian countries, you’re seen as an exhibit in a museum– met with stares and awkward touching. In Africa, at least in my experience as a lighter-skinned Black person, you’re met with looks of confusion. My Chinese colleague has been met with smiles and ecstatic greetings, while I’ve often been ignored, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all, but telling nonetheless. A lot of people think I’m Muslim and East-Asian, definitely a new one, but I can’t blame them. Our country has failed to teach the atrocities and true history of slavery, so how can I expect Africans to believe that I’m supposedly one of them. The only difference is– I have generations of my family’s colonizer’s blood flowing through my body. Coincidentally, as I’ve been here I began reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and have had to combat his early Back to Africa beliefs. America isn’t ours, but Africa really isn’t either. Especially in a contemporary sense, after my week here, I’ve seen how impossible an African-American integration into Africa would be. The roots of our cultures may be similar, but not enough to bridge the intense culturally and psychologically gaps that separate us.
But to end this on a good note, my host family is amazing and they have two little children that I love. That is all, see you next week and Brazil is winning the World Cup.
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