Editor’s note: This is the seventh installment from a series by Stephanie Bowen, the Communications Manager for International Medical Corps who is traveling in Uganda. You can see a map of her trip here.

I went to Kibera today. Home to anywhere between 750,000 to 1 million people, Kibera is the largest slum in Africa and one of the largest slums in the world. I have seen photographs and heard stories from colleagues, but still found myself a bit surprised at the level of poverty. I grew up just across the Mexican border, near the town of Tijuana, and thought it would be similar. But the sheer size of Kibera is stunning. You can see tin-roofed shacks as far as the eye can see. You see occasional latrines and water spigots here and there, but other than that, there is no sanitation infrastructure. I learned the term “flying toilet” today, which is essentially human waste in a plastic bag. They are everywhere.

It struck me that there were kids in school uniforms and men dressed in suits or nice slacks and shirts amongst the filth. There are all kinds of businesses – restaurants, pharmacies, vegetable stands and mobile phone shops. These are all housed in flimsy structures, most with tin roofs that have rusted.

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Editor’s note: This is the sixth installment from a series by Stephanie Bowen, the Communications Manager for International Medical Corps who is traveling in Uganda.

My time in Kitgum was very rewarding. I went around with the staff to different program sites throughout the Kitgum area. There were great distances between the programs, mostly over very bumpy roads. At one point I felt I might get sick from all the bouncing around. But it was all worth it.

The internally displaced persons (IDP) camps are set up a little differently than the settlements I saw in the south. The housing is better, and it feels more like a village. A lot of people have actually started moving back to their villages, which is highly encouraged. There are still challenges though because it means rebuilding your home and starting your life over, mostly without the necessary resources (a means to make a living, building materials, etc). I met two widows who had moved back to their village a year ago. One of them remained in the camp while the other built their house - all by herself. It took her four months to complete, but now they are both living there with their children (the widows were co-wives with the same husband).

I was surprised to see that some of the villages people were moving back to were very close to the IDP camps. I assumed people had traveled long distances to escape the Lords Resistance Army. Many did of course, but those who lived close to the city of Kitgum were relocated to the camps as a means of having safety in numbers as well as to make the job of securing the area more manageable.

The first thing I saw was a water, sanitation and hygiene project that we completed on one of the villages. International Medical Corps put together a comprehensive campaign to educate people on the importance of having clean water and practicing safe hygiene. The ideal home will have a rubbish pit to burn trash, a latrine, a shower with a drain, a dish drying rack and at least one hand washing station. We toured a “model home” and it was quite impressive. The tippy tap – where you wash your hands – has a plastic bottle of water with a little spout, a soap container and a container for ash. If soap is unavailable we encourage people to use ash to clean their hands as it contains lime which has a disinfectant. After our tour we walked around the village and everywhere I looked there were dish drying racks and tippy taps. This project is complete, but we are hoping to get the funds to replicate it in other villages as proper hygiene is a key factor in staying healthy.

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I have been traveling throughout Uganda with Dr. Jojo. As I get a first look at our programs he is looking for ways to make them stronger. I will be sitting down with him tomorrow Friday, July 31st to answer your questions. Due to the time difference, I will need your questions by 9pm PST on Thursday. Please post questions in the comments section below, or email them to media@imcworldwide.org

Dr. Jojo Cangao is International Medical Corps‘ medical director in Uganda, where we are providing health care, training, nutrition services, HIV/AIDS treatment and awareness programs, as well as programs aimed at combating sexual and gender-based violence. Dr. Jojo, as he is affectionately called, previously served with International Medical Corps in Darfur, Kenya, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka.

The northern part of Uganda is beginning to emerge from 20 years of war that decimated its health infrastructure and forced large swaths of the population to live in government-enforced camps. With the government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army working toward a peace agreement that has seen security in the area improve, these displaced populations are beginning to return to their home villages. But they face poor access to farmlands, limited income, and dried up water sources.

Meantime in the southern part of Uganda, camps are swelling with refugees who have fled from nearby countries, including Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In some cases, the camps are seeing as many as 1,000 new refugees each month, mostly from DRC. Many refugees come to the settlements having survived rape and domestic violence, and face it again once they arrive.
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Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment from a series by Stephanie Bowen, the Communications Manager for International Medical Corps who is traveling in Uganda.

Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Mbarra, Uganda – After a morning of meetings with camp officials and our NGO partners, I went to meet with a group of men who are part of an education campaign International Medical Corps is running for combating sexual and gender-based violence. These men had once beaten their wives or raped women and girls. Now they are working with us to educate other men and women in their villages about the problem. One way we’re doing this is through dramatic reenactments.

They performed a drama about a young girl whose father had a drinking and gambling problem and married her off at a young age to one of his drinking buddies as payment for the debt. He regularly sold the family’s food from the farm to sustain his alcohol and gambling habit and was often violent with his wife and daughters. The drama then showed International Medical Corps community educators coming to the village and teaching about the dangers of drinking, gambling and violence. At this point the daughter was pregnant and back at home because her husband beat her severely. Through a gradual process of education, the father stopped drinking and eventually became a community educator himself. It was a very colorful performance, as the large group of actors, made up of men and women, opened with a traditional dance to a rhythmic drum beat.

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Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment from a series by Stephanie Bowen, the Communications Manager for International Medical Corps who is traveling in Uganda.

Here are photos from our time in Kampala:

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Editor’s note: his is the third installment from a series by Stephanie Bowen, the Communications Manager for International Medical Corps who is traveling in Uganda.

Today was quite full. Georgina, Genevieve, Brooke and me were picked up at the hotel at 10a.m.

We piled all of our bags into the car and went to the office where we met with the staff. Jojo gave us a security briefing and then we went over the week ahead. Between the time I talked to Dr. Jojo on Friday, he had already reached out to the field to see if any women might be willing to tell us their stories and they had several people lined up for us to meet. I made it very clear that there was no pressure to talk to us and emphasized my desire to protect the privacy of our patients. But there are always women who do want to talk, who want to let people know what has happened to them, no matter how brutal, so they can raise awareness and help bring things like sexual and gender based violence to an end.

We hit the road for a 5 hour drive to Mbarara in the Southwest, where we would stay the night.

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Editor’s note: his is the second installment from a series by Stephanie Bowen, the Communications Manager for International Medical Corps who is traveling in Uganda.

For those of you who do not know, my first week in Uganda will be spent with a remarkable young woman named Georgina Miranda who started a campaign called “Climb Take Action.” Her mission is to  climb the highest summit on each continent with hopes of raising $50 per meter to benefit International Medical Corps, a total of $2.2 million. She climbed her third summit - Kilimanjaro – this week and she will be joining me as we visit our IMC programs in the Southwest where we are focusing on HIV and gender based violence. We will be joined by two other Kili climbers who also raised money for International Medical Corps. After our trip to the Southwest,  I will head to Northern Uganda where I will see programs that range from HIV to nutrition. It is also the site where we implemented our American Express Members Project grant, so I will be collecting information that we can report back. My third week will be spent in Nairobi where I will see our programs in the Kibera, the largest slum in Africa. I will also be reaching out to journalists, hoping to get some media coverage of the issues that we are working to help tackle at the IMC.

Editor’s note: This is the first installment from a series by Stephanie Bowen, the Communications Manager for International Medical Corps who is traveling in Uganda.

July 18, 2009

Today was my first full day in Kampala. I woke up a bit groggy and it took me a little while to just get going, but it was worth it because I feel totally caught up on my sleep. Thankfully the shower was warm this morning – last night it wasn’t. That after 48 hours of travel, in the same clothes!

Moses, one of the International Medical Corps drivers, was going to pick me up and take me to a few hotels that I wanted to see for a donor trip we are planning in October. When he called to ask if he could come an hour later, I decided to take a cab as the hotels I was interested in were in the same area and I could just walk to them all - after all it was his day off and he has a one month old baby!

Moses is a young, hard working Ugandan who takes pride in his work, his family and his country. In addition to working for International Medical Corps he has a cab company, which keeps him busy off hours. Right now his wife is staying home with their three children, but he would like to be able to buy her a salon so she can have her own business. He carries photos of their children on his cell phone and showed them to me on our ride from the airport. They are pretty darn adorable. He does not want anymore children because he wants to be able to support his family and have a good life. He explained the whole cycle of lack of education and poverty in Uganda that we see throughout the developing world. Moses reinforces that lesson I always learn when traveling: We all have similar dreams and goals.

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