Ankole Cattle, Semen and the New York Times

Andrew Rice visited Uganda last year to write an article on the extinction of the Ankole Cattle. I'd been waiting with baited breath for the article, and though I usually check the New York Times Magazine site every Sunday, this week it took me until Wednesday to get around to it. And his article, "A Dying Breed," awaited me.

Rice visits cattle farmers all over the country to find that the Ankole cattle, so distinct to Uganda, could be extinct within less than 50 years. They're being cross bread with an American cattle breed called the Holstein. While Holsteins produce much more milk than Ankole, they also require more care and feed and don't really have the genetic protections necessary to survive in Sub-Saharan Africa. But the cows are being cross-bred nonetheless.

According to industry figures, American companies exported 10 million “doses” of cattle semen in 2006.

The result? Less genetic variation, fewer Ankole and a lot more milk. But, as Rice mentions, several Ugandan tribes are lactose intolerant. USAID is spending millions of dollars promoting milk, but problems remain.

The volume of milk produced in Uganda doubled between 1993 and 2003, but in the absence of a surge in demand or improved delivery systems, the product has literally flooded the market.

Refrigeration and transportation are just two impediments to selling so much milk.
It doesn't seem that anyone ever asked if Uganda needs so much milk. And the trade-off for dairy is loss of genetic variation, before we even know what benefits might be hidden underneath those giant horns, as well as creating a national herd that is less-disease resistant and adoptive to the climate.

One big heat wave, it seems, could wipe out the nation's Holsteins. Given the recent spate of floods, no one should be counting on a stable environment. USAID and other organizations may think they're coming to Uganda's rescue with genetically superior cows, but will they be the knight in shinning armor once their cows have perished?

Tracy Emin came to Uganda and went, and I missed it

Tracy Emin, a British contemporary artist, was in Uganda last week. I read about it yesterday in the Independent.

Quote:

'In a place where nobody knows who I am, or what I do, stands my library'

I studied her work during my undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, where I took many an art history course, that in no way shape or form provides me with useful knowledge at this point in my life. Her conceptual work has certainly not infiltrated Uganda, where most people don't even know who Picasso is, let alone an art world star like Emin.

I made about five phone calls yesterday after reading the article, to see if I could track her down, only to find that she'd already left the country. I'm not sure what kind of written piece I would have done should I have found her, but I guess it doesn't matter now.

My art history degree, which I almost put to use for about five seconds, once again proves useless.

I used to be so invested in the ephemera Emin and her kind produced, but now it seems so far away from the pot-holed and poverty-struck place I now inhabit.

I wonder how it felt for Emin to go from a London world where she's a mini-celebrity to a place where the YBAs mean nothing. Maybe it was a relief, or maybe she went around insisting to everyone that she is famous, despite their lack of knowledge about her.

I guess presenting a tousled bed in a museum may be important in the UK and to a world of lecherous academics who worship such detritus, but here, it just doesn't matter.

Nor does my undergraduate degree.

Thankfully, I delayed before pursing a PhD as planned, and every day, I'm glad I'm not in a slide library.

Article: Dreams of Military Service

This article appeared in the Sunday Monitor, sans photos, the benefit of reading here....

Dreams of military service

Glenna Gordon

In the modest compound of Mubende’s Resident District Commissioner, along the Fort Portal Road, the immediate fate of 100 people will be determined. A mix of people in plainclothes and military camouflage sit or lounge around as army officers speak loudly into their mobile phones. The civilians watch them expectantly.

They have gathered here from in the hope of being recruited into the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF). Ms Madrine Namakula, one of the only two women present, sold bananas for a month to earn enough money for transport to Mubende. Like everyone else present, the lure of a steady Shs180,000 monthly salary convinced her to try her luck at army recruitment. Though she has a nursing certificate, she's been waiting for months to hear about her application to join Mubende Hospital.

During that long wait, hanging out at the compound and waiting just two or three days to find out about the UPDF didn't seem like a bad option.
With unemployment burgeoning nationwide, the 3,000 slots UPDF is looking to fill during this round of recruitment have become highly coveted positions.

”Enlisting is more popular than it used to be,” says Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Gureme, the officer in charge during this exercise. “The army image has changed and is better. And army pay is good – as much as a graduate would make on their first job. People like to be associated with the army."

The UPDF, once notorious for allegedly recruiting child soldiers in the north and tacitly condoning tribal favouritism, now appears to offer an alternative for a country with an unemployment rate of just 3.5 percent but an underemployment rate as high as 17-18 percent.

Mr Leonard Kamugasha, 26, has a proper teaching certificate but can only find low paying work at second-rate private schools. “Life was not easy,” he says. “If I join [UPDF] I will get a salary so I can take care of relatives and start forging a life."

But acceptance into the UPDF isn't easy either. Applicants have to advance through five qualifying stages to be in the pool considered for enlistment. First, they must bring proper documentation of their Ugandan citizenship (a local council letter, birth certificate or ID card) and academic records (varied depending on the entry level one prefers). Next, potential recruits must pass a basic medical examination.

“Do you have any obvious deformities?" Lieutenant Colonel Gureme asks, stating the purpose of this first round of medical screening. Then, all recruits must run 3.2 kilometres “without fainting”, he adds.
The next phase is a more intensive medical exam including an HIV screening test. Finally, UPDF officers review all documents and rank the recruits, with only the top eventually accepted.

Ms Namakula, the registered nurse, didn't know about the run, called a BFT, or ‘Battle Fitness Test’. She completed the 3.2 kilometres while wearing a tattered yellow skirt with pleats after borrowing a pink pair of sneakers from the only other woman present.

Though she insists that she will not face additional hardship as a woman in the army, she glances down at her skirt and then across the compound towards her sweaty fellow recruits – all men in shorts or pants who have removed their shirts to stay cool.

”I will be given a uniform, so the skirt will not be a problem,” says Namakula. “I'm not afraid of anything,” she adds, including the HIV test.

Mr Dan Wekoye, 24, was more daunted by the prospect. “I assume I am HIV negative,” he says. “Really, [but] yeah, I'm fearing the test,” he adds, mentioning he was last tested two years ago.

”The HIV test is voluntary," says Lieutenant Colonel Gureme. “You can opt out, but then you cannot go onto the next stage.” ‘Voluntary’ might then not be the best word to describe it, the officer admits, but he also argues that the UPDF does not want to put the strains of training on anyone's body if he or she is already suffering the side effects of HIV.
For people desperate for a job, the rigours of recruitment are a low price to pay for the salary they might receive if accepted.

Ms Namakula insists that even the risk associated with active army service isn't enough to deter her: she'd be happy to go to Somalia, where the UPDF is currently deployed under the auspices of the African Union on peace-keeping operations, or more unstable areas of Uganda.
"Whatever I am told to do is what I will do," says Ms Namakula.

Uganda Best of Blogs

This year's Best of Blogs voting drive has begun. All the nominees are listed at The Kampalan.

I'm nominated for the Photography category - thanks guys :-).

Funny Bits of This and That

A list of some recent amusement....

1. The caretaker at my compound, Kamukama, recently had the cutest little kitten trailing him around. I was enchanted. I asked Kamukama if it was a boy or a girl and his reply was, "I have not yet confirmed."

2. A new brand of condoms in on the Ugandan market, according to this New Vision article. They'll come in "assorted fruity flavours and often have the rubber ribbed, twisted or dotted." That's the funny part. The sad part is that the article says that only 9 million condoms are sold per month, and there's definitely more than 9 million sexual acts per month in a country with 28-30 million.

3. The beauty of Ugandan furniture! We went furniture shopping this weekend to replace our wood slats couch with something that is only a slight comfort upgrade. But an upgrade is an upgrade and so we're happy with it. Sort of. After having it in the apartment for less than an hour, David swore he saw a mouse coming out of the cushions. I have yet to see said mouse, but based on what the furniture shop looked like, it's not so surprising that there was one. David saw said "mouse" again last night, and desperately put out traps covered in peanut butter. Alas, this morning, the peanut butter remained uneaten and the mouse loose. David swears he'll stay up all night tonight, to catch the damn "mouse." I'll be sleeping. At my old place in Bukoto, there were so many mice that I couldn't use my closet because it was a cesspool of mouse crap. One mouse? Not so bad. Especially a "mouse."

(These are just some of the couches from the place where we bought ours, and though our new furniture doesn't brag diagonal stripes, it isn't that much better - with a brown and gold cross hatch pattern that looks like it's managed to stay around since the mid 1970s.)

4. A lot of people in Uganda have my phone number. Whenever I go somewhere and meet people, I tend to give them my business card. MONTHS later, when I can't even remember who they are, I'll get a phone call. Today, the LC of Moroto called me. Well, actually, he "flashed" me, which means he just let it ring once so I have a missed call. I didn't know who it was since y phone was stolen a little while back and I thought it might be someone I know whose number I don't have anymore, but low and behold, it was the LC. "Can you assist me with some airtime?" he asked. "I'm sorry, I don't have any airtime," I said, though I was using said nonexistent airtime to call him. "Airtime."

Book Reviews: Bad, Good, Best

GOOD: Telling True Stories, a book on how to write narrative non-fiction, is one of the first books on craft I've read since finishing my master's in journalism. It was refreshing and reinvigorating - I couldn't stop writing down new reporting ideas while I read it.

It helps me realize that in focusing just on "news," I'm missing so many other stories that are stories worth telling.

A must for anyone interested in writing craft.



BAD: The Hot Zone's author Kevin Sites apparently never read any books or craft, or at least wrote his own book that seems like he never did. He does the opposite of everything they advise in the aforementioned book, flying in and out of "Hot Zones" without ever bothering to find a story besides the one that makes the headlines. The worst part is that his reporting isn't even as good as wire-writing. And the most annoying thing about his work is that every time he quotes a local from wherever he's working, he changes their name. Not a problem in an of itself, but he does this:

"Anne," (not her real name) says....

And proceeds to put the name in quotation marks EVERY TIME HE USES IT. And he uses the parenthetical EVERY TIME as well.

But worse is that he never delves below the surface of any story. He's in and out without a single revelation. He makes me regret buying the book and carrying it all the way to Uganda.


BEST: Emma's War is a brilliant book about the white lady who marries Riek Machar in the early '90s. It's a meditation of the role of foreigners in Africa, and how as things get worse, their dinner parties get smaller and smaller. The books is also about the history of Sudan, and a bit of biography on Emma herself, who surely reminds me of other people I've known who have come to Africa in search of something that goes without description and can't be found in the developing world.

At one point someone asks Emma why she would leave London to live with poor people in Southern Sudan, and she doesn't really have an answer, or at least not a good answer. But how many foreigners living here would? For the questions it poses, the answers it offers, the history it teaches, this book was definitely worth the read. (And, you can buy it at Aristoc.)

At the border: Kenyan refugees in Uganda

Where did she get a doll head on the border of Uganda and Kenya? Fleeing people don't usually bring much with them, but I guess this little girl didn't want to let go.



After the World Food Program supplied rations, this little boy walks off with a pot of cooking oil.



In the midst of refugees everywhere, this little boy just needs to put his head down on the table and rest.



Children are some of the people most affected by the conflict and subsequent resettlement, but the ones with no contribution to the violence. Here, they look so innocent and beyond the ethnic violence.


The oldest man at the site, he fled Kenya with his children and his grandchildren.



It's hard to tell just how many people are staying in each room until you see all the shoes lined up outside.


This woman survived the church burning at Eldoret. See Frank's feature on her story here.




Small Kenyan children underneath a map of Uganda, drawn on the wall of St. Jude's Primary School in Malaba. I wondered how much they knew about maps, borders, and politics.




Staying inside a crowded school room with all of the desks stacked up against the wall, these Kenyan refugees trying and find a haven in Uganda.



Looking shocked, perhaps angry, or perhaps just confused by all the cameras that invaded Malaba that day.



A community meeting between elders and youth over how food should be distributed at the small settlement.



Not much to do at a refugee settlement besides drink porridge and wait for the violence in their home country to recede.

Working in the field

As much as some adults squirm away from the camera, kids flock to them. "NTV??" this young boy kept asking my friend Frank, who wasn't even filming, but was making the boy very happy. He loved the attention of one journalist taking his picture while another filmed.


But nothing compares to what happens when you bring out the computers. A gaggle of kids gathers. As Justin said, "It's like magic to them." He set up his satellite phone to transmit his story to London. The big clunking device emits radiation while it works, so he had shoo away children and adults passing by his signal.

Another journalist, a bit older, was with us, and amazed at the in-the-field technology. The days of mimeographs and telegrams are long gone...

You are lost!

I've been out of Uganda for about a month, and upon returning, many people have said to me, "You are lost!" It's a common phrase here, uttered when you haven't seen someone in some time.

But the irony of it is that perhaps I was lost. In New York, where I used to know how to get from any one place to another at all times, the familiarity of geography was lost.

The day before I left Uganda, my phone was stolen at Fat Boyz, all of my contacts lost. It wasn't that big of a deal, phone theft is pretty common, but I realized it was almost a year to the day since I was seriously robbed of camera, computer, passport, etc. Losing my phone had more of a sting than it should have - I felt angry about all of the other things I'd lost along the way. But I also realized how much I'd changed in the past year, all that I haven't lost.

I'm looking forward to getting back to work - I'm heading to the Kenyan border this afternoon - so expect more posts regularly from now on.

I guess after all I wasn't lost.

Links

Plot to kill the Queen during Chogm?? Foiled by the brilliant minds in Uganda's government.

Plastic surgery for victims mutilated by the LRA.

NYT had a piece practically weeping over people canceling their $30,000 safaris to Kenya, but this piece on BBC actually considers the impact the decline in tourism will have on Kenyans.

Were Kenyans paid to create chaos?

Alex B. Hill's insight into the violence in Kenya, including more of a historical reading than I've seen elsewhere.