Through some combination of Peace Corps Uganda’s administration ineptitude and potential PC hosts manipulation a lot of sites here get approved that should not be. My first placement in Murchison sounded amazing…on paper. That was until the reality of it all sunk in. I was stuck in the middle of the bush with little to no transportation options to do things like go out and get food or visit a friend for one of our allotted weekends without “breaking policy”. If feeling stranded didn’t stress me enough, there was the issue that I wasn’t wanted. PC and Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) headquarters seem to have discussed the want for volunteers and when said volunteers were granted chucked them to their two biggest game parks. There never seems to have been discussion with the park wardens whether they wanted a volunteer or not or had work for a volunteer, etc… So there I was, with nothing to do and no where to go and without the promise of the big budgets that other organizations like GTZ and USAID bring. Luckily for me, there was another small NGO doing work nearby in the park, I just had to sit tight and wait for their work to re-start. I started helping Soft Power Education with their museum project in the park; a project which promised to promote livelihoods of locals, help prevent poaching and educate both students and visitors…again on paper. Not that Soft Power was failing on any of their projected goals, but that UWA was being impossible to work with. The chief warden who’s a big, fat corruptible creep never could understand why I was working with Soft Power, but never offered any other options for me to look into. The wardens that I should have been working with, tourism and community conservation each had their own set of vices. The former was a loose, manipulative woman and the latter got his “esteemed position” through nepotism and never had the slightest clue where to start. As they say here, “Ey, they are not serious!” So I had nothing to do. My good friend’s advice was to stop caring and “just go to the office and look busy. You can get good at solitaire.” But who leaves everything behind for two years to get good at a computer card game? Eventually I broke down and in a visit to told Peace Corps I couldn’t go back to site. The Country Director was particularly displeased with me even though she had told me six months back that this placement probably wouldn’t work, but that I should go and try. I call six months a fair shot.
So I got thrown rather haphazardly to my second site which was surely a favour being done to a friend through the PC Education Director. I was placed at an “eco-lodge” run by some old Ugandan woman. I still am unclear what makes the place “eco,” I don’t think having grass thatched roofs makes you “green.” At any rate, this woman built this campsite that was clearly popular with overland companies back in its heyday, but fifteen year of no maintenance, bad customer service and worse management, slowly turned almost everyone away. So this was my new “economic development activity”….to work as this woman’s free muzungu manager. I didn’t think that being someone’s free labour fit into the frame of “community development.” The owner tried to play this runaround that she works with a women’s group in the community and maybe getting a volunteer would force them to “be serious”….but then she had to “get ready for the holiday season” and had no time at all to help me. After struggling for weeks on end to try to get the women to meet to talk about a “way forward” without the help of a counterpart or supervisor, my faith in my work began to rapidly fall away. Besides the fact that I am a foreigner, I was also younger than all these women. Although my supervisor believed the best way to deal with them was to “treat them like children,” I firmly disagreed. I believed they had to care themselves. I could not force them to care about savings or a better life and I certainly wasn’t going to be patronizing to try to achieve such ends.
I decided that even if out of the odd chance a devil like Country Director McGrath Thomas would grant a third placement (which by the way is considered an “extreme circumstance”), I didn’t want it. I am an adult and I don’t need a bunch of inept clowns fooling around to decide my future for me. I can make my own decisions and my own mistakes. At least in doing so I can be certain that I know me best and can make the best judgments. So I packed up my house and headed to Kampala to meet with the one Peace Corps staff member that I consider decent and competent, Jolie Dennis. She had the job of handing me my ultimatum, quit or be terminated. The only reason this came as a disappointment was because I wanted to be the one to break the news to them that I was quitting and instead got given the ultimatum before I could get it out.
Having a boyfriend at the time, lots of friends here that I didn’t want to leave, a potential job on the line and a faint glimmer that maybe if I stayed I could still “do something meaningful,” I made the blind leap of faith called a field termination. Here I give up my work visa, my no-fee passport and my flight home in order to stay in country.
With a bit of help from my boyfriend, I shifted my things up to Sipi and settled into helping my boyfriend and his partner with setting up their lodge. I was never paid and knew I wasn’t going to be from the get go. All I asked was that I was fed (sounds pretty dire, huh? And looking back I guess it really was.) I gave them practically everything I owned and did my best to be as helpful as often as possible. I still don’t know if they really know how grateful I am that they took me in; for all the good and all the bad, I couldn’t have made it this far if I hadn’t been allowed to stay.
The unfortunate side effect of all of this “time together” with the boyfriend ended up with us breaking up. I guess it did become a bit much to date, live together and work together…and I still think there were other issues involved but that the lack of space definitely had a defining role in our undoing. The positive side is that we really are trying to be friends. We don’t hate each other which is good, because god knows, some relationships really do properly end up in the shitter.
So now… on to the now!! With the last year being so shit, there should be nowhere to go but up I suppose…. (ok, i’ll try to write more tonite!)
