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Annie Turnbull in Uganda
24 Jul 2007 in Uganda
Annie has been working with IMC since January 2005. Originally based in the IMC UK office in London, Annie was responsible for recruiting for international positions within IMC's programs. Following HR site visits to Indonesia and Sri Lanka, she realised her own wish to work in a field position and trained alongside IMC UK's Programme Officer prior to deployment to Uganda as a Program Support Officer.
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Photo by: IMC
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IMC President & CEO Nancy Aossey (left), Annie Turnbull (third from left), and IMC’s Uganda team earlier this year
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My time in Uganda is rapidly drawing to a close. After being here for a year, my contract is finishing in mid-August, and I’ve decided to spend some time at home with friends and family rather than renew it.
I've had an incredible experience here, and much of what I have seen will stay with me for years to come. The Ugandans that I've met in the internally displaced persons and refugee camps have reminded me how much I take for granted. To see people with so little show so much generosity and compassion for others really puts my own petty concerns into perspective. Many come from conflict-affected communities, and have worked hard to get an education, which would qualify them to earn a good salary in the capital city of Kampala or even overseas--and yet they are working in the camps, hoping to be part of the solution. Some have taken in to their already crowded households the orphans of friends or siblings whose lives were claimed by the conflict or HIV/AIDS.
And yet: some of the things I have seen have been disheartening. With more than 20 relief organizations trying to stave off hunger, improve sanitation, and revitalize that have become dependent upon food rations and materials distributed by NGOs. Even as security improves, some people are refusing to leave the camps until they receive a resettlement package, which includes seeds, tools and building materials. It is difficult to think that humanitarian efforts have contributed to creating a generation of Acholis who expect financial or material incentives to motivate them to re-build their own villages and start cultivating their land again.
IMC is currently designing future programs to remedy this. We have to move away from the culture of “supplying” toward encouraging these communities to revert to their traditional ways of earning a living and providing their own food. Our aim is to find individuals and households who are rebuilding their villages and cultivating their land again, and to train them to train their peers to do the same. This program is integral to IMC’s philosophy of capacity-building. It's not an easy or a speedy process, but the most important thing we can provide these communities with at this point is self-reliance.
I was talking about this issue last night with a consultant who is in Uganda working with Oxfam. We were debating the difficulties of the fact that when you're somewhere like northern Uganda, you can be working incredibly hard and giving your absolute best, and still realize that your best can feel inconsequential considering the scale of the problem you're trying to address. My friend the consultant had a good perspective on the situation, however, and one I hope to keep in mind for the future. His theory is that you can’t try to solve the problem in its entirety; rather, he advises taking things on an individual or family or even village level. His suggestion was to focus on local success stories: an emaciated baby who recovers through an IMC feeding program; or a group of villages that used to draw water from a filthy swamp, but now have access to clean water, thanks to a hand pump installed by IMC.
It's been a steep learning curve and a lot of hard work and I'm looking forward to having a break. I also have a sneaking suspicion, though, that after a few weeks of rest I'll be itching to get into the field again!
June 2, 2007
Hi there,
Long time, no type! I managed to smuggle myself home for a vacation which was great. It was really lovely to have a rest and catch up with everyone.
It’s funny how quickly you get back into things once you’re back. When I returned to Kitgum I figured it would be good to hold some team-building exercises for the office and health centre staff as a reminder of how we need to work together and of what we’re all trying to achieve.
Annie briefing the team on a communication exercise whereby one person describes a picture to the person sitting back-to-back with them.
The third person gives feedback on the team.
The third person is the ‘judge’ and gives feedback at the end of the exercise as Harriet (Reproductive Health Officer) is doing in this picture.
Carmen, IMC Uganda’s Psychosocial Co-ordinator, adds on the pressure during the ‘crossing an alligator-infested river’ exercise by removing flotation aides from Jennifer’s (HR Admin Assistant) path!
Patrick (logistics), Samuel (nurse from IMC-supported health centre) and
Moses (Nutrition Officer) are getting the hang of not leaving
any of their flotation aides unattended for the ‘current’ to take away!
The team is working together to ultimately end up in circle facing in or facing out with no twists or tangles. Loklit on the right (the guard for the Kitgum office) looks like he might be twisting a touch too far for comfort!
Hopefully the exercises helped everyone understand a bit better what we need to do in order to work together more effectively, support each other and to achieve our common goals.
The exercises seemed to go well and everyone got involved which was good. We followed up with a goat-roasting in the evening which was also good fun and a chance for people to relax a bit. After a couple of beers I even managed to get a mini ‘dance off’ going on by shouting out “logistics dance in the middle”….”Agoro health centre in the middle”…”finance in the middle” etc. It was all fun until the tables turned and the next one everyone was calling out was “Field Coordinator in the middle”. If you’ve seen Ugandan people dance (such energy and vigour) you’ll understand why my humble efforts caused great hilarity. I decided after that it was a stupid game and stuck to bobbing along to the music in my chair (like a good British person should…we know our limitations).
Things have been busy in the northern programmes. The grants funding the two major programmes we’re running in Kitgum and Pader finish in June and August respectively so we’re busy writing new proposals and lobbying donor representatives to try and get some money coming in to keep activities going. In our favour is the fact that we’re implementing two very interesting pilot projects at the moment, one of which being Carmen’s psychosocial project, and have ideas for two further innovative projects (in addition to the health and nutrition programmes we’re already running) so there are good signs for the future.
One of the most interesting things we’ve been working on is a pilot project to produce food for seriously malnourished children. Until fairly recently, most feeding programmes have been using enriched powdered milk to treat sick children (when their weight is dangerously low, their bodies can’t tolerate normal solids so they can only take milk drinks until they reach a certain target weight). In recent years, some organisations have started to use a product called Plumpy’nut which is like a thicker, sweeter version of peanut butter. It’s better in that it can be tolerated by malnourished children better than solid food but it doesn’t need to be cooked or mixed with water (which is not always clean/available).
Usually Plumpy’nut has to be imported (at quite a high cost) from the manufacturers in France but our pilot scheme here has had a women’s group producing it in Kitgum using locally grown materials and with technical oversight by the original manufactures to see if we can make the process cheaper and more sustainable.
The women are roasting ground nuts
(smaller versions of peanuts, grown locally) to be used in the Plumpy’nut paste
The women managed to produce one tonne within a couple of weeks so they packaged everything up and are just waiting for the quality assurance testing before we can go ahead and distribute to the children enrolled in our programmes. These are exciting times for them after going through weeks and weeks of preparation and training.
My colleague Zekarias, Nutrition Programme Manager, instructing the group on cleaning the equipment they have to use.
As more and more people are starting to move home with the increased security at the moment, our Water and Sanitation Officer has been busy with contractors installing latrines and locating water sources. It was really great on a trip to Pader last week to see people using the well which IMC have sunk to fill up their jerry cans. In the community of around 2,000 people where the borehole was sunk, there was previously only one other well providing clean water.
IMC’s Water and Sanitation Officer, Dennis, shows the Local Chairman of the community of Ogwang Kamolo in Pader District how to operate the hand pump. The bits of wood around the outside are to stop cattle from getting up to the well.
March 31, 2007
Hi there,
Well the past few weeks have certainly been busy! Since my transfer up to the northern District of Kitgum to coordinate IMC's programmes here and in Pader District (just to the South of Kitgum) I've been trying to get to know all the staff and figure out who does what, support a new Medical Coordinator to take over the running of the Pader Office, work with the District Health Team to organise Child Immunisation Days, write two donor reports, plan activities for the next two months across both districts and try and fit some sleep in now and again!
It's hard work but I'm definitely enjoying the challenge of my first programme management role. After 6 months in Kampala getting to know the programmes, it's great to be up here in such close contact with the field teams and seeing IMC's work being carried out on the ground. I have to admit though, the last few weeks have felt like a lifetime and, now that things are coming together a bit more, I'm looking forward to a short break in Ethiopia over Easter weekend. I've booked myself 4 nights in Addis Ababa and cant wait to be having a little time to myself!
March 13, 2007
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Girl Power
It's International Women's Day today which is celebrated fairly widely across Africa. All the offices in Uganda have closed for the day and apparently lots of people do actually spend the day visiting their mothers, sisters, etc. Isn't it great that in a country where women in some communities are not allowed to ride bicycles or eat the best parts of a chicken there should be a whole day dedicated to celebrating women and their achievements. Oh, the irony!
Dr. Lynne, IMC's Technical Adviser in Mental Health, has been doing a study on women from Acholiland in Northern Uganda, where we have health and nutrition programs. She's setting up a mental health program to promote early child development, so she was interviewing mothers and midwives to get an idea of traditional child-raising practices.
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While I was in Kitgum, I went with her to the camps to meet with a group of women to hear some Acholi nursery rhymes and children's stories so Lynne could get an idea of how Acholi children learn and what messages are passed on to them. We told a couple of stories ourselves to get the ball rolling (fables like “The Tortoise and the Hare”) , involving the children by giving them finger puppets so they could act out the stories as we spoke. Then we sat back and listened to their stories--bizarre tales which I would have been quite disturbed by had I heard them as a child. In fact, I was disturbed! One story involved a group of children taking out their intestines and dancing around singing a song with a chorus that was something along the lines of, "We're dancing vigorously...but without our intestines"!!
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The most interesting thing is that the tales are full of repetition and then end abruptly and often without a satisfactory and didactic conclusion like the fables I grew up with. Another story involved a group of girls going into the bush to collect berries. On the way home one girl decides to return to collect more berries, calling intermittently to her friends all the while to be sure they're still waiting for her on the path. When she goes back to the path with her berries she finds that they've actually gone, but had left behind piles of poo which had been calling back to her?!? When we asked the women what the moral of the story was, they said, very seriously, that it was to do with making sure you follow directions properly. I remain confused!
February 6, 2007
God's Mercy
Having spent January busily catching up on work after my trip home over Christmas, I now find myself back at field sites in the North of Uganda. Times have changed since my first visit here in July when Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels were still carrying out ambushes on the roads and kidnappings of anyone venturing outside the safety of large settlements. After negotiations for peace started with the Government of Uganda in August 2006 a truce was reached and Ugandans living in the northern districts have been making their first tentative moves out of the over-crowded camps they had moved to for safety and back to their villages of origin.
Unfortunately following their own break over Christmas, the LRA did not return to the negotiating table in January, and, with the cessation of hostilities act expiring at the end of February, fears are rising that an unbreachable impasse has been reached. Widely regarded as the best chance for peace in northern Uganda following 20 years of violent conflict, many were depending upon the success of the talks and fear a return to renewed violence, rape and kidnappings should no agreement be reached.
A majority Christian people with a firm and demonstrative faith, many Ugandans transfer their spiritual beliefs into everyday life. Driving around a town you'll quite often see "In God's Hands Hairdresser" (sounds to me like a disclaimer for when things go wrong..."I'm sorry madam, I know you requested a different style but it's in God's hands, you see?!") or "The Holy Spirit Hotel". So sitting in a bar in Kitgum having a drink with a co-worker, when I asked the name of the bar so I could invite another colleague to come and join us, I was not surprised to learn that it is called "God's Mercy". As I typed the message into my phone I told my colleague to come along and find us; "we're at God's Mercy" I was at first amused and then more sombre when I thought about that statement. For the people of northern Uganda it has never been truer.
December 12, 2006
Taking health assessments and visiting IMC facilities
The grasshoppers are out at the moment and have been everywhere -- clinging on to the front of vehicles, hanging out in the latrines, swarming around any bright lights at night time. Interestingly shallow-fried grasshopper is quite the delicacy here so I have got used to the guys who sell 101 useful items on the side of the road (all those things you surely suddenly decide are must-have purchases while waiting in traffic at a roundabout....like bathroom mirrors, padlocks, belts, mobile phone covers etc) approaching the window with a large tupperware tub full of g-h torsos. They de-wing and de-leg them first, but to me 'once a grashopper, always a grasshopper' so despite many attempts on the part of my Ugandan buddies, there have been no hoppers passing my lips to date.
Read more about the grasshopper season in Uganda.
September 8, 2006
Taking health assessments and visiting IMC facilities
Hi there,
I've been at field sites in northern Uganda for just over a week now. It's a great opportunity for me to see IMC's field teams in action and to learn to live with all the things the guys up here do without on a regular basis! The temperatures up here are markedly higher than Kampala, as soon as you step out of the plane of doom (still not a fan of 1970s light aircraft) it hits you. The IMC office here is slightly out of the centre of Kitgum town and for some strange reason (apparently because we're up on a hill) there is quite often no running water and all the usual challenges of intermittent electricity supply etc. It's definitely interesting washing from a bucket every morning and filling up the toilet cistern before you can flush it. As ever though I'm motivated by the team here who work with these inconveniences on a daily basis and even now, towards the end of the week, I'm actually quite getting used to it!
Dr. Edison (the Programme Coordinator for Kitgum and Pader districts where we're implementing health and nutrition programmes) and the rest of the team are mostly from Kampala originally but are based here on a permanent basis and have learnt to cope admirably with meeting all the demands of IMC work while struggling with sporadic internet access and the restricted movement due to the insecurity caused by rebel activities in the area (the Lord's Resistance Army have been fighting the government of Uganda for the last 20 years). I felt immensely privileged to be here just as the ceasefire has recently been signed between the government and the LRA. Although most locals are apprehensive about the outcome (a number of attempts to broker peace in the past have failed and resulted in renewed and/or intense rebel attacks) many of those who were in camps for internally displaced people are clearly hopeful that this time things will be resolved and have started to move closer to their original homesteads.
So it is in this context that I headed out with IMC's survey team to assess the health and nutritional status in Orom camp in Kitgum. I was working with Team J (Judith, Amos and Christine), who had been assigned 20 households to survey. This is about the third week of assessments (they had already completed around 15 camps in Pader by the time I came on the scene) so by Orom they were a well oiled machine.
Christine interviews the mother of the household while Judith and Amos take the weight, height and mid-upper arm circumference of the children and of the mother, once Christine has finished with her questions. Despite the heat, we trekked from household to household with the aid of a guide from the camp who was familiar with all the families in the parish we were looking at. It was fascinating for me to see the nuts and bolts of carrying out this kind of assessment having spent many an hour poring over graphs and survey findings from similar nutrition assessments. It really helps to put a perspective on the statistics on a piece of paper.
Later in the week we visited the cholera treatment centre again as there have been 7 new cases in the past couple of days. Everyone had been holding their breath as there hadn't been any new admissions for a while but it looks like the epidemic isn't over quite yet. This week we were hosting a representative from OFDA (the US Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance), which is one of IMC Uganda's major donors along with UNICEF and PRM. We took him along to Padibe IDP camp where IMC has a community-based nutrition programme and we're working hard to rehabilitate the buildings of the health centre (admissions ward, maternity ward etc). A visit to Mucwini IDP camp the next day and a meeting with the Resident District Commissioner (basically the President's representative in Kitgum) seemed to have confirmed in his mind that OFDA funds are being well used. So today it's back to Kampala for the weekend. I'm already looking forward to a long hot shower and then meeting up with friends this evening! Next week I'll be heading out to field sites again but this time to the South West to meet the sexual and gender-based violence team for their monthly meeting and to participate in a workshop to train Community Educators to train others on the issues of domestic violence, exploitation and sexual assault in their communities. More from me soon...
August 21, 2006
Visiting refugee camps and kayaking on the White Nile
Hola!
Well there's plenty to fill you in on but I will try and be a little bit more select this time! The needs assessment in the South Western districts went well but was as hard as I had expected it to be. In the refugee camps where IMC is working, the majority of the settlers have fled conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi. Most families are made up of women and children alone and, in the saddest cases, just children. The most established camp has been there since the late eighties and many of the children we talked to were born and have grown up speaking the local dialect as a first language and only hear of 'home' in stories.
Children with heartbreaking stories in Kyaka II refugee camp, Kyangwali
Some of the more tragic stories included those from child-headed families where the eldest is 14/15 and looks after 3 or 4 siblings. In the worst cases these children have witnessed violence at close quarters, some of them have even seen their parents and relatives killed. These families muddle by on the food supplied to them by the World Food Program but, being hungry, growing children with little appreciation of food rationing, they often finish everything by the 2nd week in the month. It was very disturbing to hear such small children talk about their nightmares and flashbacks. Lynne Jones (a child psychiatrist and IMC’s Global Mental Health Advisor) was interviewing groups and some children on their own to get an idea of what their emotional and psychological needs might be. The hope is that we may be able to get funding together to work with these children by helping them earn an income and grow food for themselves and by providing them with counseling and HIV/AIDs testing for those who's parents died of unknown illnesses. We ended some of the sessions with a game which all of the children crowded round for and loved, most of them spend a lot of their time on housework, fetching water or cultivating land and it was incredible to see what fun they had being chased by Lynne and I (we were Nile crocodiles...of course)! When it came time to go we were given an incredible send off. The car was surrounded by about 50 children even until we drove a mile or so down the road!
We stayed in some pretty basic accommodation in the settlements complete with 5cm long biting ants and a latrine that smelt like something had died in it (it probably had...in fact I nearly passed out myself once or twice in there)! When we moved on to the next district we stayed in a hotel in the town centre as the camps were too far away. It was basic by anyone's standards but I don't think I have ever been so relieved to see a flushing toilet and a tap. The meals were also interesting...rather than recipes I think the lady that runs the place has an encyclopedia of carbohydrates. I have never seen portion (solid rice gloop), banana mash, chapatti and rice served together as a main course! I was craving salads by the time we got back to Kampala and was happy to lay off the bananas for a while! But it was great to meet the SGBV team and see them in action with a community group explaining to them what sexual and gender based violence is, talking about domestic violence and the issues of early marriage etc.
They have an incredible enthusiasm and were completely overwhelmed that we had made the effort to visit them. The drama shows, impromptu discussions and door to door visits can't always be easy to instigate but somehow the community forums they have formed now have a real understanding and interest in stopping violence against women.
The weekend after we got back we took a two day Nile canoeing safari....sounds lovely and relaxing doesn't it....they suckered me with that one too! Four sets of rapids later, having been thrown out every time we hit white water and trapped under the boat several times, I decided high-adrenalin sports are just not my thing. Fortunately we spent the night on a fantastic little island in the Nile called Hairy Lemon Island (for no particular reason...I didn't spot any of them while I was there anyway) although I had lost all power of grip in my right hand having spent the day clinging to paddles, ropes, other people's hands etc.
Last week was busy spent putting together a proposal for continuation funding for our HIV/AIDs programme in the South-West. After an intense week of late nights and early starts, it was nice to head off to Entebbe this weekend to see a chimpanzee sanctuary on one of many islands littered across Lake Victoria. The speedboat ride out to Nagamba was probably the most fun part for me but it was cool to see the chimps roaming around, beating each other with sticks and thumping the ground aggressively while "oooh oooh ah ah ah-ing" in our direction. It's amazing what you find entertaining when you stop watching TV for a while...beats Big Brother anyway....in fact scratch that, some of the time I was reminded very much of BB!!
August 7, 2006
First few weeks in Uganda...
Hello!
Hope everyone is well. Thought I should send a little update - can't believe that I will have been here a month by this time next week...it really feels like I've just got here! Am settling into Kampala still and figuring out some cool places to go although I still have a lot to learn...for example I learnt today that the reason it is taking so long for my mail to arrive is that I missed off a critical part of the address (I'm such a spoon).
So...a brief update of what I've been up to recently....the second week here we went to visit field sites which was a real experience! Given my fear of flying, the sight of the 19-seater light aircraft at Entebbe airport was enough to turn me to jelly (I wont even try to describe the substance I was closest to during the actual flight)! After an hour or so we landed at a clay airstrip with fields all around and a little cluster of landrovers and landcruisers at the end waiting to pick us all up. The office, guesthouse and field sites in Kitgum and Pader are a huge contrast to Kampala and I'm lucky that my travel there is in the context of security improving substantially with the current peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan govt....if anyone's interested, the BBC news website has a good background to the conflict. We visited a number of sites - cholera treatment centre, feeding centre etc and without going into too much detail it was a struggle for me to contain my feelings at some point. I think we see these images so often on the TV that the sight of a starving African child becomes almost acceptable and certainly not as shocking as it should be. Standing there looking the mothers in the eye, things feel very different. But it was good for me to see and I'm sure that I will adjust to things with each visit I make. As a Programme Support Officer, it's critical for me to be up there in order to get a real handle on the work we're doing and to make sure that the information we're reporting is accurate and flowing freely. Despite the difficult circumstances, the tenacity, dedication (and, against all odds, sense of humour) of the staff in each centre were a reminder to me that however desperate a situation may seem over here, there are people working hard to make the changes and, without them, the situation could easily be many times worse.
The following week involved getting down to some serious proposal writing as we need to ensure we have funding to carry on all the good work going on in the north. Amidst all the hard work, I managed to slip out with one of the drivers for a couple of driving lessons (the roads/tracks are so potholed here you need a completely new approach behind the steering wheel)! I don't really plan to ever drive very far as the traffic is horrendous and there's a lot of people wandering around on foot but I do want to be able to drive to the gym (5 mins round the corner from where we live) and the supermarket etc. It's nice being driven sometimes, especially when the traffic is heavy and I can sit there and read, but at times it gets frustrating having to ask someone to take you to the shops or to a restaurant etc...I'm sure you know I'm an independent lass on the whole : ) Anyway, last Monday afternoon I went to go have my picture taken for some passport photos as I'm applying for a Ugandan driving licence.The woman who was taking the photos (in the middle of the shop with about 20 people standing behind her, watching me) got really vexed with me because she couldn't see my ears when she took the picture straight on. She kept moving my head around (a bit more roughly than I would have liked) and tutting and shaking her head at my audience of shoppers.
In the end, still without having explained to me the source of her frustration, she handed me some rolled up bits of paper. In answer to my questioning look she instructed me to put them behind my ears to make them stick out more and told me off saying "your ears - they are too, too small - I can not see them on the photograph". The surrounding crowd also looked suitably displeased with me and then nodded in agreement when she told me off for smiling. Needless to say I skedaddled as fast as I could as soon as I had the pics and was more than amused by the result (basically I have a 'put-on' sad face...I was trying to think unhappy thoughts in order to chase the giggles away but am clearly struggling to keep my composure, all of this with my ears sticking out quite a bit more than they normally would). I'm telling you now, these things only happen to me!
Last weekend was my first foray outside of Kampala. Lynne (IMC's Mental Health Advisor in country for a short needs assessment) and I went to Jinja and stayed in 'banda accommodation' which I learned means 'little wooden shack which you can hardly move in accommodation' but it was fine and only about $11 per night with a fully functioning toilet...I felt truly blessed!
Saturday afternoon we canoed from Lake Victoria down to the source of the White Nile and then on Sunday morning we went quad biking. I was a bit concerned that, while some of the time we were riding alongside the Nile, some of the tracks were through people's villages (hence the children following us). Fortunately our guide explained that the village receive some of the profits from the company and another portion goes to the local school hospital so I suppose they're actually quite pleased to have a bunch of foreigners tearing around their homes looking like the Crazy Frog!
Next week I'm visiting our programmes in the South-western districts. I'll also be accompanying Lynne as she carries out a needs assessment in one of the refugee camps (unlike the north where we're working with Ugandans who've been displaced internally due to conflict, in the south-west we're working with Sudanese, Congolese, Rwanda and Burundian refugees). We're going to be looking at the possibility of setting up a Mental Health programme to address the needs of children orphaned/affected by HIV/AIDs so that will be interesting but, again, I'm expecting that it will be quite hard at the same time. At least these sites are accessible by road (pheeeew) although three hours bumping along potholes might make even reading seem a challenge!
OK so this isn't such a 'little' update but the more I type the more I have to say so I have decided to leave it here lest you are put off from tuning in for the next exciting instalment. Needless to say I'm enjoying myself a lot, working hard, eating lots of fresh fruit and veg (only because 1, we have a cook and therefore my usual diet of microwave dinners is out the window and 2, there are power cuts every other day so freezer food/fresh meat etc doesn't hang around too long before turning to mush) and going to the gym a lot (my body has gone into shock and sometimes I hear voices in my head whispering things like "Pot Noodle" and "pork pie")!
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