June 2010
11 posts
“I hope if all people in this community adopt into this [bee keeping], they will...”
– Samuel— expert bee keeper
Feeling of Hope
As our days in Gulu come to a close and we reflect on all the things we’ve seen, the conversations we’ve had, and the people we’ve met, we keep coming back to a common theme: Ugandans have a deep understanding of their own problems and a solid grasp on what needs to be done to fix them. There are obviously many challenges, funding being the biggest, and much that needs to be done, but the...
Highlights of our day at Paraa National Park:
Singing along to 90’s American music all along the way, off-roading to find a lion!, asking our wildlife guide “What’s the gun for?” and hearing him say “To guide you” with no further explanation, watching a hungry elephant knock down a tree, seeing a giraffe pee for a ridiculous amount of time, and eating as much as possible at the fixed-[over] priced lunch buffet. What a day.
Us and some...
All-American BBQ, Ugandan Style
We’re planning an all-American BBQ for the GWED-G staff and all the friends we have made here in Gulu for tonight. Wish us luck as we try our best to morph Ugandan local foods into something that resembles a BBQ.
No ground beef so we’re planning to aggressively chop, no mayonnaise so we’ll make a nice cabbage and carrot salad and call it “coleslaw,” definitely no cheese so hamburgers it is, corn...
Priorities
Before we left, the GROW team approached Columbia global health professor Alastair Ager for some research advice that would help us develop our projects. Being already familiar with Gulu and public health initiatives, he suggested an exercise we could conduct in a short time and without extensive research experience. The result was the prioritization activity that we did with members of Loyobo...
Looking forward
Exciting days here at GWED-G. Maya left this morning, but the rest of the team remains for another week and in these final days we’ve begun developing projects for next year in conjunction with Pamela and the rest of the team. After conducting some interviews within the community, we identified HIV prevention and treatment as a recurring issue for Northern Ugandans. In the past our projects...
Goats!
We’re sorry that it’s taken a while to get this post up. Since last Saturday, we’ve been busy visiting the seven families who were beneficiaries of the goat-raising income generation project we funded this year. We’ve now visited all of the families; we’ve seen a baby goat named “Hope” and seven pregnant females. We’ve witnessed an epic chicken capture and received two chickens as gifts of...
Street talk
GROW team: “What’s your name?”
Ugandan child: “I’m fine.”
~
After we do something stupid like spill water on ourselves:
Ugandan: “I’m sorry.”
~
Ugandan in any and every situation: “Nnn. Nnnnnnnn.”
~
GROW team: “Do you want ____?”
Ugandan: “Yes please. No.” (that means “no,” btw)
~
...
“Obama is from our village!”
– UGANDAN villager, Obama relative?
…GROWing
May 2010
6 posts
“I am doing their job, I’m just speaking a different language.”
– Pamela, director of GWED-G, speaking of the national governments neglect of northern Uganda and the necessity of NGOs to intervene.
A renewed people
Rebuilding northern Uganda is not as easy as demolishing IDP camps and allowing the Acholi people to return to their ancestral homeland. Bosco, the program director of GWED-G, put it best when he said that after twenty years of dormancy, the land, along with the infrastructure of Uganda, has “returned to zero”. Wells are lost within the underbrush, trees have reclaimed once cleared farmland,...
“They brought some man and told five of us to step on the man until he died. ...”
– Okema Fred, abducted in 1994 when he was 14. Now part of the GWED-G IOM program.
Finding our focus
We’ve spent the past few days in the communities that GWED-G serves, speaking with politicians, local policemen and women, and most importantly the Ugandans who have remained voiceless for so long. The first day in the field we interviewed former child soldiers who were abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army during Uganda’s twenty-year civil war (http://www.resolveuganda.org/situation). These...
Who we are
I’m Liza (pronounced Leeza in Uganda.) I’m a sophomore at Columbia, studying biology, and I’m the president of GlobeMed at Columbia. I packed too little underwear but too much bagged tuna. I thought I could go to the bathroom anywhere, but the “toilet” in Pamela’s house is testing me. I can’t wait to meet the beneficiaries and bring their stories back to Columbia.
I’m Patel Vir...
We're Here!
And so it begins… our month in Gulu, Uganda (northern Uganda) with Gulu Women’s Economic Development and Globalization (GWED-G) and its founder and director, Pamela Angwech:
Globemed at Columbia feels incredibly lucky to be able to call GWED-G our partner organization. GWED-G is an NGO that strives to strengthen the capacity of grassroots communities in Northern Uganda to become self-reliant...
April 2010
3 posts
“Great things are done by a series of smaller things brought together.”
– van Gogh
Our mission
Our organization is partnered with the non-profit GWEDG based out of Gulu, Uganda. GWEDG was founded in 2004 with the mission to empower women and excluded communities in the Gulu and Amuru Districts of Uganda, by strengthening their capacity to be self-reliant agents of social change, peace, and development. GWEDG’s primary initiatives include the promotion of human rights and prevention...