Monthly Archive: September 2017

Last week we received a visit from the “Double Delphine”: Delphine Pinault, the CARE Uganda Country Director, and Delphine Mugisha, the program manager who developed my position, and their small entourage. It looks like we will we need to move to a bigger office, but larger available buildings are hard to come by in Arua. Delphine M. asked me to mentor the initiative managers here to help in their writing.

For my entire career, except my first three years out of law school, I either practiced solo, or as a partner in a partnership with a few employees. Probably eight people were in my largest law firm.

Meital at swearing in

Working in the Peace Corps meant I would a supervisor (called a “champion”), for the first time in 30 years. As readers know, this was Meital. In the beginning, it was a bit difficult, because I felt she was a little too “mothering” but eventually we became rather collegial, and now I love her like a sister. She complemented my writing, and gave me the confidence to apply for my current position. Meital was supposed to be the champion for the five 3rd year extension volunteers. However, last week it was announced she was leaving the Peace Corps at the end of October, for undisclosed new opportunities. She has been on leave, so I don’t know more yet. I wish only the best for her.

Of course there were a few other people above Meital in Kampala, and the whole Peace Corps agency from it’s D.C. headquarters across more than 60 countries. But generally volunteers get a lot of autonomy in our scattered isolated locations. In Bugiri, Adams was my “Supervisor”, but he was very much like one of my small business clients. ATEFO was a small NGO hanging in there, scrambling to attract donors for projects. I was never shy about giving Adams my two cents, or rather 2 shillings, about running his little enterprise, and he respected my work experience.

Today, the Peace Corps is humming very quietly in the background, as I now have become a very tiny cog in a big machine called CARE International. Wikipedia states “For the fiscal year 2016, CARE reported a budget of more than 574 million Euros ($688 million US) and a staff of 9,175 (94% of them local citizens of the country where they work)”. I don’t know if the CARE employees in the north with me exceed 50 yet, but they are increasing every week. The home office in Kampala seems more involved too.

As small as my role is, I have important responsibilities and deadlines, and there is more pressure to perform. I am taking some things off my hard working team leader Carly’s plate. She has been a patient “boss”, and I enjoy her. I have met my soon-to-be new boss Julius, who visited while he waited for visa approval. When he returns next week from his home in Kenya, there will be a small overlap with Carly before she heads back to Melbourne for a well-deserved break. I hope Julius and I will get along well.

I can’t say there is much “fat” in this office. Everyone works hard, including every Saturday. The senior staff has to go to so many meetings, both in the office and at the settlements, and yet I can understand the necessity of them. This sprawling refugee crisis is complex with lots of moving parts.
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I was a lawyer for 16 years before obtaining my first P.C. Many of you remember Dictaphones, and word processors? My lawyer friends reading this blog will recall legal research in law libraries, piling up open law reporters to photocopy cases, then cutting and taping cited opinions into hand-written briefs in legal pads to give to a word processor tech. My last two years in the villages were strictly low tech. I taught financial literacy using lessons printed on grain sacks or on white sheets of paper taped to a wall or a tree.

Today at CARE, all of the initiative managers have to use laptops (unlike ATEFO staff), and the entire CARE organization uses Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud, which is new to me. I struggle to figure out elements of Excel, PowerPoint and Word software. Back in the day I would delegate: “Fix this, so it looks this way”. Now I really need to learn how to do more, but fortunately the younger staff are quite patient to respond to my requests for guidance. I always joke with Ugandans, “My brain is not as ‘spongey’ as before.” I mean it more for learning local language, but it applies to learning software and its tricks.

I have not been able to get out as much for interviews and story writing. Story writing is a different discipline than legal writing. I had hoped my blog experience would be helpful, but….. my Peace Corps colleague Ruwani in the Kampala office, edited one of my stories. She did such a good job, I was sincerely humbled! I need to step it up!

The road from my home to town lies next to a dormant golf course. It is said the caretaker died, and that was that. Cattle is herded now.

I have lots of little hills and gullies around me. A common sight throughout Uganda, washing boda bodas in a creek.

Just up from the boda guys, ladies were digging sand. I asked what they were doing with it, and the lady pointed to a sand pile twenty feet away and said “We will sell it!”

In this nearby gully, there were always kids playing, bathing, or clothes getting washed. I paid 500 shillings to a lady down there who insisted I pay to take this pic when I asked permission.

Momma is cooking at Rhino Camp. There are clusters of huts in a compound, similar to what I was used to in the villages.Refugees are given small plots to grow their own food.

Yay, a Coner Oberst/Monsters of Folk blog title! My son will be proud.

My first CARE assignment took three days. I learned some new skills, but I’m not sure yet, when or how I will utilize them. Nevertheless, it was real interesting, and led to my first visit to a Refugee Settlement. I represented CARE at a training with representatives of 17 other NGOs at a large compound operated by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR will be referenced frequently in the future.)

OpenStreetMap is a crowd-sourced mapping program. Google Maps doesn’t send it’s photo cars into much of the developing world, let alone refugee settlements, and so this is a way to handle it. An example given by our instructor was the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti.  It is best explained from this blog:

Before the earthquake, widely available maps of the country of Haiti had little more than a few highways and roads. The capital city of Port-au-Prince was a shaded outline that suggested a city. The problem was that Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, had been ignored by traditional commercial data providers. Few could afford a GPS, so why build digital maps of roads or buildings?

When the earthquake struck and crisis responders began planning their aid, they were left without a means to identify cities, routes of entry, buildings, parks, or much of anything that would allow them to know how to possibly provide support to the citizens of Haiti.

Immediately volunteers began scouring for available maps and road data. Historic maps, unclassified and released from the CIA, served as the first options for understanding what infrastructure existed.

The result of all this data was that a largely empty and incomplete map gathered thousands of volunteers, developers, and organizers to generate what is currently the most complete map of the country of Haiti. The city of Port-au-Prince has been largely mapped and volunteers are now working on outlying cities and villages. Beyond just marking roads and transit information, there was analysis of damaged buildings, displacement camps, and triage centers.

The map serves more than merely a digital, web based map for viewing the decimated region. The data gathered is free and open to use by anyone….Response organizations and government agencies are using OpenStreetMap for print maps to hand out in the field, and also deploying to mobile GPS units.

And the data will only get better, providing as a resource for the long-term recovery efforts, and rebuilding. Haiti need never again be an empty spot on the map.

Check out this cool 30 second video of the mapping of Haiti within 12 hours of the earthquake.

These maps can be updated remotely from anywhere. We spent our second day of training identifying and marking roads and buildings near Arua. I got my own little square to work on. All but one of my roads were identified as paths (hence the map user would know they can’t drive a car there, perhaps a boda boda) and most of my buildings were probably huts. I also looked at my neighborhood in Denver, and added ATEFO’s identification to the Bugiri map.

On the third day, after downloading two OSM apps onto my smart phone, I went out with three teams to Rhino Camp to do mapping from the ground. We took turns mapping hospitals, schools, and health facilities. After taking a picture, and fixing the GPS point, I interviewed local people to determine, for example, for a school, how many students and instructors, does it have latrines, how many class blocks, who is the owner, is it from an NGO etc. So if someone has mapped it remotely, as a “building”, my data will be added so anyone clicking on the map will now know it is a school, with more information.

Rhino Camp is the fourth largest refugee settlement serviced by CARE in the West Nile, with nearly 80,000 refugees as of June, 2017.  That’s more than a sold out Broncos game! The Politically Correct. term is Refugee Settlement, rather than refugee camp, since these places are less temporary. Yet this settlement is called Rhino Camp because it used to be a rhino camp.
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Below are some photos from Rhino Camp.

The first object I mapped were these water tanks, courtesy of the Danish Refugee Council.

Kids get water from a tap across the road from the tanks I mapped above. These water points are also mapped.

A latrine made from mud for a compound. Note the water container hanging out front to wash hands. A Health PCV would be proud.

Another, very common latrine. I used one like this. It’s only for short calls. No hole was dug. Kind of yucky in there, but there is a board to stand on.

Kids play in a playground provided by Save the Children. There are also football pitches.

I mapped this school. No desks, just benches.

Your standard white savior photo. This was in front of a very well-built permanent school.