Rafting the Nile

Rafting the Nile river is one of the coolest things I've ever done in my whole life. Holy crap, that was amazing.

A trip taken weeks ago

Pictures! I suppose I've been promising them for long enough...

Please note the format change.* This batch of pictures has been put on another blog. If you subscribe to my RSS feed, I suggest you go there to subscribe to that feed, as well. And please let me know whether you like this format, find it easier to use, or if this is a crummy idea.
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Excerpts from my journal and remarks about the pictures.

[On Saturday] we went biking with Emily to the clinic where she works, Goli-goli. The sky was blue[, incredibly azure and studded with large, friendly clouds], the dirt road was orange, and the fields were solid green.... I got into a race with a boda-boda [driver]. He had a passenger and still beat me. -pp. 49-50


She seemed to appear from the very darkness itself, a being magically unfolded from the shadows of the house.... With blurred vision she came into the room with only the vaguest sense of who we were, but she immediately recognized Ron. [...] She went to him and gave him an excited embrace.... After greeting him, she turned her frail form to us, first reaching around Denise, then engulfing me in her arachnid grip. A full 18" shorter than me, she still reached one arm over my shoulder. In that embrace I could feel a worn but still able strength and sense the physical power behind her loose skin. -pp. 29-30

Three of Mze's sons. Mze literally means "Sir;" it's an honorific attributed to his status as the oldest living male born into the clan. He looks frail, standing in the doorway with his canes, but he's as strong as an ox.


Sipi falls spills from the mile-high plateau on the north-east face of Mt. Elgon in southeastern Uganda.


North of Sipi Mt. Elgon flattens down rapidly to the great plains of Kapchorwa, then the deserts of Moroto and Kotido in Karamoja. The Karamojong (the people of this area) have a fearsome reputation across the country. It's a wild place, Uganda's eastern frontier, where cattle raids still claim dozens of lives every year and most men tote around AK47s. But from here, it's just peaceful, green grazing land.


Nestled up against the base of Mt. Elgon, Mbale is a sleepy, dusty town near the Kenyan border. With the broad-shouldered mountain in the background, Mbale's covered walkways and broad streets seem overshadowed. The town is dominated by a single hill, crowned with a roundabout and a clock tower. A typical street in Mbale. (We ate at an Indian restaurant in the last building on the left, at the top of the street.)

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*This blog is text-only. I admit that it's proving a chore to try to link pictures in, but it's the only way to keep the page manageable for low-bandwidth connections.

Just Now, On the Phone with Jeffrey Sachs

Yesterday, I got an email from an old friend who works at SIRIUS Satellite Radio, asking if I'd throw in an opinion on Jeffrey Sachs' pilot show, The Power of One, for the station.

I've been a fan of Sachs' since I read his book, The End of Poverty, about a year ago. I think his advocacy of the Millenium Development Goals and his drive to wipe out the most extreme forms of poverty are fantastic and necessary ideas.

On the show, I asked if Sachs could "separate so-called 'good' aid from 'bad aid'? How do you [Sachs] respond to criticisms of people like [the Ugandan journalist] Andrew Mwenda, who argue that any form of international aid damages African socities?"1

Sachs responded rather forcefully that aid to rural Africa is a good and necessary thing. There's no reason to hold off on malaria medications and mosquito nets that will help rural Africans, certainly, and the more ARVs we can distribute in sub-Saharan Africa, the better. And I agree.

But perhaps where we don't see eye-to-eye on this issue is the question of delivery mechanisms. I can't agree that aid is unquestionably good in all situations. Certainly, aid programs can be hijacked, misused, or poorly designed, and thus exacerbate political, ethnic, social, or economic distinctions in societies. Sachs' guest seemed to do a wonderful job of bypassing some of these issues by directly targeting a single, easily accessible village in Senegal for a direct injection of material aid. I think that method certainly has its advantages. But that approach has limited applications.

Certainly, large scale projects, like promoting HIV/AIDS education here in sub-Saharan Africa, or the delivery of the millions of mosquito nets that will be needed in the next few years, or even debt forgiveness requires far more resources than can be mustered by school children in New York City. The largest and most complicated development attempts have to be channeled through organizations and governments on the ground in the Third World. And it is in those situations that aid tends to distort African societies by focusing politicians on their relationships with donor countries and NGOs, allowing them to make trade-offs in the names of their constituents. It's the largest programs that breed the most obvious corruption.

And this is where Mwenda certainly has a point, although I don't agree with him that no aid is better than any aid. Instead, how do we handle aid so that we avoid giving people fish rather than teaching them to use fishing poles? How can we direct the flow of aid so that it doesn't eddy into the pockets of bureaucrats, but flows to the appropriate institutions? This issue is overlooked far too often in developed countries, but it's a fact of life here. (For instance, the rumors in Kampala are that a large government cache of ARVs were allowed to expire, simply because the money required to distribute them across the country was siphoned into the private accounts of various, unnamed officials.)

Where Mwenda and other critics of the international donor community are leading us, I think, is not really to a "no-aid" system, but to a "smart-aid" system, where the distorting political, economic, and social effects of aid are openly discussed and mitigated wherever possible. This can be done the way Sachs' guest did: target a small, discernible problem -- a well-cover for a village, a bore-hole, malaria medicine for 12 months, plowing equipment for an over-farmed area. Sachs himself argues in his book that changing the structure of aid to emphasize local demand for programs and then putting local aid organizations in charge helps to alleviate these problems. And that's probably true.

But not all aid projects can be pursued at such a small scale. Educational programs, especially, benefit in concrete ways from expanded mandates and expanded budgets. But those same enhancements often inflate or exacerbate structural, social, or political schisms related to, or in the worst cases actually caused by, those programs. Donors and donor nations need to be transparent in assessing the potential for misuse of donor funds, reinforcing hierarchical or autocratic tendencies inherent in these programs, and the exploitation of the poor or politically isolated that can occur in such situations.

Donors need to start walking the line of necessity, of only doing as much "good" as is absolutely required, then allowing indigenous actors to take the lead. Help people learn to fight their own battles.

Programs should to be tailored to fit the exact needs of their target group. Trimming the fat on aid programs will help reduce the amount of corruption associated with donations by assuring that the program's primary goals are met first. Grandiose, complicated schemes to reduce poverty or alleviate inequalities across broad areas are noble, but ultimately too unwieldy for even developed nations to pursue adequately and cleanly. Stick to the basics, whenever possible.

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I want to thank SIRIUS Satellite Radio for allowing me to talk to Jeffrey Sachs by calling me, thus insulating me from crippling airtime charges on my Uganda mobile.
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Edited at 11:00am EST. Added note thanking SIRIUS and link to Sirius's website. Also added name of Jeff Sachs' show.
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1. My apologies to you, Andrew; I think I'm overstating your position here, slightly.

Weekly Recap

Posting again so soon may spoil you, but I'm running that risk.

It's been a slow week here in Kampala. On Monday, we cranked into the week with the strongest of intentions and a positive outlook on scanning those 200,000 files. We did scan over 400 discreet images in the last week, a number that I'm currently comfortable with. Plus, on Friday I went in and pre-screened several issues of our current journal; those should be faster to scan tomorrow morning.

We had dinner with a delightful Kiwi and his wife (Finnish, likewise delightful) and their German friend (also delightful) who had wonderful things to tell us about Ugandan agriculture and the creeping Chinese presence here. China has big money invested in Sudan (especially southern Sudan, where most of the oil is), and they've only just started taking an interest in Uganda. Some people, myself included, think this might mean an oil pipeline through Juba, down to Gulu and then on to Mombasa. There are other likely routes, but an increased Chinese presence here speaks to stronger ties economically. Our Kiwi friend told us that their main short-term interest will be food, which is cheaper to produce here. And there's rumors that the Chinese are behind the massive lays of fiber-optic cable here in the city. No one knows whether it's just Chinese money, or there's some other reason behind their involvement. I, for one, see no purpose in burying millions of dollars of dark fiber here, but others might.*

*Whew* By mid-week, we were run down and more than a little tired.

But things went ary on Thursday. We had guests come to see our work, check out our process and gawk at the cool stuff we have access to. But after they left, so did we, felled by something unpleasant and intestinal. After a nap, Ron and I took Denise out for a nice Italian meal nearby.

Friday was bad. I made Denise stay at home, but I only stayed in the office for about an one-and-a-half hours. By the time I made it home, I was in the mood for a nice long shower, a toilet, and some groundnuts.

Yesterday was better, though. I did some laundry, played around all day, and we ate at one of the local pork joints for dinner. Splendid!

And today, I read a whole book.

And tomorrow, my fantastic girlfriend begins her new job. Yay! So exciting! Congratulations!


And really, pictures are coming.
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*Here's a doozy of a conspiracy theory for you:
1) Google needs to get chummy with the Politburo, looking to stake a claim in the net market in China. Gets burned in the process by privacy advocates.
2) Google now in China, but realizes that the Chinese will finally break the IPv4 Internet.
3) Google/China now invest massively in dark fiber to force widespread use of IPv6 addressing outside the entrenched US/Europe markets.
4) US/Europe get pulled along within a couple of years. Buzz permitting. (Or, alternatively, IPv6 is branded as the 'poor man's internet,' becomes a standard only for developing countries, and never gets admitted into the developed world.)

Second Update Today!

Upping the daily average:

I've been working on the previous post for the last week. Man, was that a pain in the ass. Not only did I have to rewrite large portions of it, but every time I wanted to post it the internet connection seemed to go out here. Then I revised it, and it started all over again.

Also, you'll notice that the last post was heavily annotated. That's something I used to do on my other blog. It required much finagling (I had to edit the blog's source template, which is not fun). But I like being able to do that.

Also, Blogger's tools have been overhauled to complicate the process for me. When I copied local-page tags (they look like this -- < href = " # note1 "> -- the editor insisted on redirecting them to the editing page, not to the home page of the blog. And after I edited each link (there are 18 in the last post) and published, reopening the post for editing put the incorrect links back. Geez, guys. Not clever. Not at all.

Anyway, that's why it took two weeks to post a 700-word article.

Look for some pictures soon (hopefully in the next day or two).

The Project, or How I Came to Uganda

For all of those who still have questions about what exactly we're doing here, let me e'splain something to ju.

Prehistory

Back when I was a lowly, second-semester freshman, I started a research project. Although I did not truly understand the scale of the undertaking, I set off to investigate, categorize, and otherwise describe the myriad qualities and quantities of newspaper coverage of Africa. With the nudging of my overly supportive project director, I slimmed this rather over-blown, make-a-Ph.D.-pee-her-pants project into the tough-but-chewy analysis of one specific place, from one date to another, and from but a single journal. Here are the salients, in convenient, pithy bulleted form:

• Journal: The New York Times
• Dates: 1979-1986
• Country of Interest: Uganda

The project was a good one, and I learned quite a bit about scholarship, most of it about my contemporary abilities and framed in the negative. However, as I say, the project was a good one. The time frame for investigation covered the most recent series of political convulsions in Uganda. In 1979 General Idi Amin was deposed by a coalition of rebels/freedom fighters from the regime of Apollo Milton Obote, the previous president of Uganda; various Ugandans displaced by or disgruntled with the heavy-handed reign of Amin; and thousands of Tanzanian troops. By 1985 Obote's second presidency was over, again at the hands of his generals. Early the next year, Tito Okello Lutwa, deposer of Obote and head of the military government, was ousted by the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M).1 The head of the NRA/M2 was Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, currently the fourth-term incumbent President of Uganda.

My project seemed especially relevant in its contemporary context, as well. It was the spring of 2003, right at the beginning of the debate over the relative merits of print and digital content. The Times was trying to negotiate the waters of being a dual-format medium. As an added bonus, journalism itself was being knocked around a bit. Blogs were popping up like weeds, causing outrage, annoyance, or giggles in the press club. And the Jayson Blair scandal did little for the Gray Lady's street cred. Shortly after the Iraqi invasion that spring, questions began to circulate about the credibility of Times reporting in general. All this formed the background of my research.

It is widely held in academic circles that American media has largely ignored Africa. The sources of this blind spot are so numerous that deducing any single source is much like going at the Gordian knot with tweezers. Rather than speculate about our lack of interest in the continent, I chose instead to examine how the Times engaged readers about events there. Looking through the Times’ indexes, I counted and categorized the coverage of Uganda during the most tumultuous period in its post-Colonial history.

The results were interesting, if only because they raised more questions than I could adequately answer. Coverage was scant, except for instances of armed conflict. Throughout the slow downward spiral of the country (1980-1983), little information was published. Once rebels began a fierce bush war in Luweero, coverage began to pick up again. Worse, the reports either oversimplified the conflict (as both newspapers and bloggers are wont to do) or took sides arbitrarily.

“Why?” was a question that a 19-year-old was unable to piece together intelligently. Certainly, the assumption is that American interest in Africa is roughly comparable to that of, say, Brazilian’s interest in Arab camel races. While this is a tragic underestimation of American fascination with and horror of the continent, that seemed to be the attitude of the Times. Since few reporters take up jobs in foreign bureaus, and fewer stay in them for significant lengths of time, the little reporting that occurred was uninformed. And -- an insight at the time, though it would shock nary a five-year-old today -- coverage was largely sensationalist.

There were so many shortcomings in my report. I should have invested some energy in researching the reporters stationed in East Africa during the time, maybe gotten access to their notes and biographies, but I did not. I should have taken the time to carefully review more of the articles themselves, but I did not leave myself time. And I should have compared coverage with other countries and topics, but I did not think of it. It's a project I really need to revisit and update; it showed so much promise, and I was too inexperienced to handle it appropriately. If I can find an electronic copy, I will be sure link to it.

Recent Past

After two years, I decided to revisit the issue of newspapers and African wars. For my undergraduate thesis, I tackled the problem from a different angle, however. Working from a large collection of news articles (not an index) and focusing on the information content, not on tone, this project was more limited in scope, but more rigorous in the approach. Here again, easily digestible bullets!

• Journal: English-language media published in Uganda
• Dates: 2003-2004
• Country of Interest: Northern Uganda

This time, I was looking to understand a crisis that had spun completely out of control twenty years before and continues to boil over at regular intervals. The war in northern Uganda3 has touched several regions in the country, from the West Nile in the northwest, across Acholiland in the central north, to Karamoja in the east, and as far south as Lango and Iteso in the center of the country. The center of the conflict has been the central Northern region, plus the northern part of the Eastern region, as labeled on this map.

The war has been brutal and unpopular. At the height of the conflict, over two million people had been displaced from their homes and were housed under appalling and dehumanizing conditions in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. Although the conflict has raged since 1986, very little is known about it outside academic circles. And information on the war is hard to come by; good information is even rarer. The popular understanding of the war as an insurrection with the aim of establishing an autonomous Acholi state governed by the Ten Commandments is the pernicious myth that clouds any real understanding of the conflict. In fact, Finnstrom demonstrates the ridiculous nature of those claims.4 But in 2006, there were few accessible ways of understanding the conflict, short of digesting reams of Government of Uganda (GoU) and NGO documents or risking life and limb traveling to the north.

Our first attempt to parse the conflict took two parts: 1) try to develop a narrative of the conflict, based on real incidents, statements, and opinions of people actually involved directly in the conflict; and 2) to find a basic sequence of major events that would help inform later studies. These two tasks addressed to fundamental weaknesses in academic studies of the war. First, only a few voices were recognized as contributors to understanding the conflict. The majority of the dialog was controlled by official press sources and a government and military that were made up largely of non-Luo-speaking peoples from the south of Uganda. Second and equally limiting, no comprehensive chronology of the 21-year span of the war exists.

Using the materials collected by my adviser from two English-language newspapers published in Kampala, I aggregated data from individual newspaper reports from January, 2003 to December, 2004.

The results were interesting, if not entirely conclusive. First, according to the government newspaper, over 93% of all civilian casualties during this period were the result of LRA attacks.5 However, it seems unlikely, considering the history of armed conflicts that over 90% of civilian casualties could attributed to just one side or the other, except in those rare cases where certain, inexcusable predilections are prevalent. Second, over the same period, 2.35 civilians were returned for every civilian reported abducted.6 As I discuss, these numbers undermine commonly held assumptions about the tactics of the LRA. Next, engagements between LRA and the Ugandan Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) were regular and frequent. As I wrote at the time, "the regularity of contact between the two sides is impressive and calls into question the common accounts of the LRA as a loosely organized terrorist organization using hit-and-run tactics on mostly civilian targets."7 Challenging the assertion that the conflict is cyclical and follows seasonal patterns that favor guerrilla tactics against civilians, I noted that "the clearest trend across the two year period was a linear increase in total LRA deaths."8 Finally, I found that as the numbers of civilians that were "rescued" by UPDF decreased, the number of LRA fighters that surrendered, defected, or were captured by UPDF increased. I concluded that these results are clouded by the murky definitions of “civilian,” “collaborator,” and “rebel” as they are used in New Vision accounts. Because these categories are never clearly defined, and because the incidents are rarely described in much detail, there is often some confusion about whether a group of returnees were armed rebels who surrendered on a battlefield or recent, unarmed abductees “rescued” by the UPDF. In many cases, the reader can make no realistic distinction. Furthermore, UPDF reports often intentionally interpret proximity to LRA forces as evidence of collaboration. By this logic, being in the UPDF’s kill zone means an individual is a rebel.9

The most valuable lesson I took from this research, however, was that statistical history is incredibly satisfying, but horribly labor intensive. It took me six months to quantify just two years of data from one main source, with ancillary information from other newspapers. Extrapolating that rate out across all the relevant materials available on the conflict gives us:

3 months of real-time / 12 months of published material * 10 journals * (72 months of published material [estimated average length of existence] / journal)
= 1/4 * 10 * 72
= 180 months
= 15 years

just to go through the published material by hand.

An electronic copy (PDF) of my thesis is available here.

Certain Current Events

There had to be a better way. And, of course, there is. Let a computer count up all this information for us.

The only problem with that is that none of this information was in a computer anywhere. I had worked from printed newspaper accounts. And I'm not about to go typing in 10,000 pages of material by hand. We have to scan all of that material. And a back-of-the-envelope estimation suggests we might have between 1 and 2 million pages of material to go through. That's a lot of scanning. Complicating the situation is the fact that most of this material was produced in Uganda, distributed only in Uganda, and is archived, not in the US, but only in Uganda.

So, not only do we have to scan all of this material in, we have to do it in Uganda. And that's why we're here. We've found a research group that has been compiling, cataloging, and binding newspapers for archival purposes since the late 1980's. They have much of the material we want. And we have wrangled access to some private collections that may have much of what that group is missing. Some of the newspapers we are scanning have also expressed interest in our work. Other archives might be opening up to us soon.

So now we're scanning defunct newspapers because they will be the hardest to find anywhere else. So far, we have access back to 1987. (We want information going back to 1986, but this represents a good start.)

We still have to do most of the work by hand, though. I am personally excited that we have original broadsheets to scan; we insisted on having a scanner capable of handling a full A3 document. But that means reading each day's newspaper and scanning the relevant material. In four hours last Friday, we scanned 35 discreet documents. That was a first attempt, and I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to store the files once we scanned them. I hope to do significantly more than that in the future. (I still hope to take a few thousand documents back with us in August.)

[Note: According to our daily reports, we’ve scanned over 350 files and generated close to 2 GB of data since last Friday.]

And this is just the beginning. I want to index everything we scan. Then when I'm done with that, I want to start dumping all kinds of data into this database. Pictures, oral histories, interviews, video, legal proceedings, pulp fiction, propaganda materials -- basically anything I can condense to text and translate into English will go in here. And then we'll have something worth looking at.

Our full research proposal is available here.

So that’s why we’re here. If you still have some questions, or suggestions, shoot me an email. (The address is in the right-hand column of this page.)

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1. Tito Okello’s surname courtesy of my access to early newspapers at the Centre for Basic Research.
2. It seems to be a peculiar issue of definition, but East African civil wars and rebel movements tend to draw lines between armed groups and political struggles that are clearly linked in spirit and often in leadership. For example, the military command of the Lord's Resistance Army defines itself strictly as an armed group fighting for the political objectives of the unarmed Lord's Resistance Movement. Because of this, and also to contest the assertion that the LRA is an apolitical group seeking only local autonomy, Sverker Finnstrom suggests using the LRM/A acronym in the current conflict.
3. The Wikipedia articles on the LRM/A and the war are pathetic. For instance, although the article on the LRM/A describes the breakdown in the talks as the result of "Kony...simply trying to buy time." (cit.) The article ignores the fact that the 1994 Bigombe talks were largely successful, and that, until the government's ultimatum, the peace agreement was considered largely concluded. I don’t want to endorse them by linking from the body, but they are there to be found.
4. Finnstrom, Sverker. Living with Bad Surroundings. Uppsala University Press, 2003.
5. Rogers, William K. A Statistical Evaluation of the War in Northern Uganda, 2003-2004. Honors Thesis. University of South Carolina, 2006, p. 23. (USC catalog link)
6. Ibid., "Table 2: Civilian Returnees and Abductions," p. 25.
7. "On average, the two armed groups met 16.5 times in a month. With only six exceptions, the government and the rebels fought between 10 and 20 battles per month." Ibid., p. 30.
8. Ibid., p. 34.
9. Ibid., p. 40.