Week 2 - Cultural Blog - 09/02/13

Two weeks has now been and gone and we are certainly getting into the way of Ugandan life. This week we having been working very closely with a charity based in Uganda called ‘Tomorrow’s Heroes’. It is run by a girl called Kate who is originally from Northern Ireland. The charity works with local street kids and children from the nearby slum and aims to help give them an education and a home. With this charity, Joanna and I have both taught in the local street kids’ school and helped out on Sunday afternoons at the kids’ club. Through this work we have met many Ugandan adults and children who have all helped us to gain a better understanding of Ugandan life and its culture.

David, one of the street kids at the Sunday Program.

One of the Ugandan Volunteers at the charity offered to bring us around the local slums to see where the boys lived and the homes they came from. When I was previously in Ugandan I had visited two of the slums in Kampala so I felt like I knew what to expect when entering. As anticipated, a drunken man peeing at the side of the slum greeted us to ‘Nakylabye’ slum. The distinctive smell brought back all the memories from the summer and reality set in about what I was going to see again. This time I wasn’t as shocked by the small shacks as homes, holes in the ground for toilets or sewage everywhere. This time I could see beyond the exterior of the slum and see the people there all laughing and chatting. Although to me, a slum is one of the worst places a person could live, to them it was home and you could feel that it was a community in itself. They weren’t just neighbours; they were more like a big family. Howard (1978, p.83) emphasizes the importance of family as she states, ‘Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe or call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.’

One of the houses in the slum.

Men at work in the slum.

We then continued into ‘Kisenyi’ slum. Here I couldn’t appreciate the sense of community as I was too shocked by the amount of children and adults who were drunk or high. Children as young as 3 or 4 were slumped up against walls, eyes rolling in their heads, not having a clue about what was going on around them. If that wasn’t bad enough, we witnessed the children taking the drugs and they even offered them to us. After visiting this slum I couldn’t help but think that these children’s lives are already ruined and their dignity lost. However, ‘Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.’ Bragg (2010, p.76).

Michael, one of the many hungry, drugged boys from the slum.

Getting children off the streets, off drugs and into school is a huge issue for Uganda and has been for many years. Although some significant progress has been made by the work of all the charities in Uganda, it still seems that the slum or street lifestyle is a vicious circle, which may never be broken.  Although Northern Ireland and Uganda may seem worlds apart and that the issues within each country cannot be compared, the difficultly concerned with resolving their issues is exactly the same.

References:

Bragg, R. (2010) All over but the shoutin’, New York, Knopf Doubleday Publishing.

Howard, J. (1978) Families, London, Transaction Publishers.