Chimp Tracking in Uganda

Posted by Mark D. Jordahl on April 24, 2012
Posted in: Destinations, Tourism, Wildlife Conservation. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a Comment

Most people in Uganda think Kibale National Park is the only place to go for a good chimp tracking experience. I heartily disagree. I have always been a big fan of Kaniyo-Pabidi forest near Murchison Falls National Park. Not only is the chimp tracking excellent, but it is easy to combine with a safari in Murchison – by far the best park in Uganda by my reckoning.

I took this shot on my most recent trip up there last week. It’s the last thing I remember from the hike:

p1100454 Chimp Tracking in Uganda

Go Chimps!

Mark D. Jordahl – Kampala

What Would Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Think of The Expat Life?

Posted by Mark D. Jordahl on April 4, 2012
Posted in: Human Rights, Musings, Personal Observations. Tagged: , , , , , . 1 comment
300px Martin Luther King 1964 leaning on a lectern1 What Would Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Think of The Expat Life?

Martin Luther King leaning on a lectern. Deutsch: 1964: Martin Luther King Português: Martin Luther King (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On this day 44 years ago, April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed.

It is interesting reflecting on this sitting here in Uganda where sometimes it is hard to tell he ever lived.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the unfairness of the ex-pat life. There are times it feels like the old south – you go to an expat party and the only black faces you see are those of the servants. We live in nice houses and drive our own cars, spending as much to fill the tank once as we pay our maids for a month of work. We are able to come and go freely between Uganda and our home countries, whereas a Ugandan can spend a lifetime trying to get a visa to enter the United States.

Organizations here even have “local” and “expat” pay rates. I heard from one American woman that she flew back to the US to sign her contract because she would get paid more. A Ugandan wouldn’t have that option. And the benefits packages are often staggering – shipping containers to bring all your possessions from home, flights home for visits for the whole family, private school education for your kids (I must admit, as someone who hasn’t ever had a paying job here in Uganda I am sometimes a little jealous of some of these perks! But then I think about all of the benefits I do have.).

We are given extra – and undeserved – status based on the color of our skin (see my post The Expat/Ugandan Dynamic), and can walk into nearly any venue without being questioned. I have often thought it would be interesting to be a white con-artist here just to see what you could get away with.

I believe all of this undermines the goals of international development, an important one of which is local empowerment. One thing Uganda needs is jobs and business development. Bright, young people with an entrepreneurial spirit that will drive the economy forward. Instead, what they see is that the way to get rich is to work at an international NGO. In the United States, college kids who want to make money go into business. Here, they go into any field that will get them a job at USAID. This leads to thousands of “briefcase NGOs” whose only goal is to come up with a good mission statement and get money without ever delivering any services.

What would Dr. King think if he spent time in the expat world of Kampala (or the capital city of any other nation in the world that has a large foreign-aid industrial complex)? I hope that he would feel there is some good, important work being done with good intentions, but what I see when I imagine the encounter is a look of bewilderment and a tear of discouragement running down his cheek.

Mark D. Jordahl – Kampala

What Would Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Think of The Expat Life?

Back in Uganda

Posted by Mark D. Jordahl on March 30, 2012
Posted in: Personal Observations. Leave a Comment

Well, the whole family made the journey back to Uganda safely, and we’ll be here for the next 6 weeks. Japhy, coming here for his first visit at 7 months was a trooper, and Nile, 5, is an old hat at international travel and was un-phased as usual.

We left here nearly a year ago, and it feels like it was yesterday. The warm, familiar smiles, old friends, soft air, the “dogs of Muyenga” barking all night long, that welcome taste of matooke and g-nut sauce. At the same time we are once again confronted with daily reminders of how hard people here work just to make ends meet, and all the odds that are stacked against them doing so. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that the world is a fair place.

Our lives always feel so split between our attachment to this place and our attachment to family and friends back in the United States. Where is “home?” If only it wasn’t so difficult and expensive to travel back and forth, we’d have the selfish good-fortune of not needing to choose.

Ugandan Blogger on Kony 2012

Posted by Mark D. Jordahl on March 8, 2012
Posted in: Foreign Aid, Human Rights, Northern Uganda, Regional, Uncategorized, Video. Tagged: , , , . Leave a Comment

Here is a video created by Rosebell Kagumire, a respected journalist and blogger in Uganda, with her thoughts on the Kony 2012 video:

Please pass this on, as it is important – AND DIFFICULT – to get the voices of Africans into debates about Africa.

Mark D. Jordahl

Invisible Children Controversy

Posted by Mark D. Jordahl on March 8, 2012
Posted in: Articles, Foreign Aid, Human Rights, Northern Uganda, Personal Observations, Politics, Regional. Tagged: , , , , . 10 comments
10870811 ori2 Invisible Children Controversy

Invisible Children (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

OK – after I sent out that last post, I got a lot of questions about whether I have changed my past views on Invisible Children since I chose to promote their video.

I should have been more clear. While I believe they do their work with the best intentions, I am not a fan of Invisible Children, and I would not, personally, send them money.

At the same time, I am a fan of raising awareness about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, and nobody else is doing it as effectively as Invisible Children. This video is worth watching even though they completely mislead people about how easy it will be to catch Kony if only people will watch the video.

I must admit that I am conflicted in my feelings towards them. There are a lot of reasons not to like them:

  • They twist information to boost their fundraising efforts rather than trying to put out current facts and educate people. I remain convinced that they want people to think the war still rages in Uganda because that is the country their fundraising efforts identify with. Even in this most recent video, they refer to Uganda as “relatively safe,” without coming right out and saying that the LRA has not been active in Uganda since 2006.
  • They take sole credit for the advocacy efforts of dozens of people and groups.
  • They simplify the issues in a very mainstream-media sort of way, which can lead to misguided activism.
  • They have never had their finances independently audited, and they have no board of directors. (updated 3/8, apparently they have done audits and have a 4-person board, but have no standing audit committee)
  • Most of all, they have a pretty lousy reputation in Uganda which, to me, is one of the strongest indictments.

And some big guns like the One Campaign (who asked their field staff not to promote Kony 2012 as a representative of One) and the Council of Foreign Relations have either distanced themselves or flat-out shot them down publicly.

Many of the criticisms being leveled against them are bogus. People are crying out about the fact that the top three staffers/founders are each making over $80k. Come on – they are running a $13 million operation, and probably are at it 80 hours per week. That is around average compensation for Executive Directors at organizations with half that budget, and we live in expensive times. If they were working for USAID or the US Embassy in Uganda, they would be making far more, with a benefits package that would blow your mind.

People also complain that they don’t put enough money into programs in Uganda. It is true that they are doing very little on the ground there, but that isn’t actually their main goal. They are a United States lobbying and advocacy group. The problem is, they pretend they are having a huge impact on the ground in Uganda rather than just being honest about it. This is one of the main reasons they aren’t viewed well in Uganda.

They seem to be kids on a joyride who are quite fond of themselves and are very good at what they do, which is media campaigns, not humanitarian work.

And really – is it just me, or is it downright creepy to wear a bracelet with Joseph Kony’s name on it as if he’s your boyfriend?

If Invisible Children would be more honest about what they do and don’t do, if they had a higher financial transparency rating on Charity Navigator, and if they made more of an effort to provide accurate, nuanced information about Africa, I could potentially become a fan since I ultimately support their goal of catching Kony. And really – what am I doing to help? At least they are diving in.

Here are a number of links that dive more deeply into the controversies around IC:

http://siena-anstis.com/2012/03/07/on-invisible-childrens-kony-2012-campaign/
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/should-i-donate-money-to-kony-2012-or-not
http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18890947431/we-got-trouble
http://texasinafrica.blogspot.com/2009/05/what-causes-badvocacy.html
http://innovateafrica.tumblr.com/post/18897981642/you-dont-have-my-vote

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, whether you agree or disagree with me. And feel free to send it on to others so they can add it to the mix of deciding whether or not to become active in the Kony 2012 campaign.

Mark D. Jordahl

Invisible Children Controversy

Kony 2012

Posted by Mark D. Jordahl on March 7, 2012
Posted in: Human Rights, Northern Uganda, Personal Observations, Politics, Regional, Video. Tagged: , , , , , . 3 comments

Invisible Children has come up with another powerful campaign, Kony 2012, and another powerful video that you can view here:

Kony2012.jpg 300x194 Kony 2012

While I am bracing myself for an onslaught of media making it sound like the war is still happening in Uganda, I am thrilled that there will be more awareness of the atrocities committed by the madman, Josephy Kony, and his Lord’s Resistance Army.

I have taken issue with Invisible Children’s perpetuation of the perception that Kony is still active in Uganda and that there are still “night-commuting” children in Gulu. At the same time, I have to give them immense credit and respect for the amount of visibility they have brought to this conflict that now ranges through Central African Republic, Eastern DRC and, by some accounts, South Sudan.

The video makes it seem pretty simple to capture Kony this year, just by keeping the world’s attention on him and keeping the 100 US military advisors in Uganda. I think it will probably be a little more difficult than that, given that the Ugandan army has been trying to defeat the LRA for nearly 3 decades, and the US did participate in a joint operation (Operation Lightning Thunder) in 2008-9 led by the armies of Uganda, South Sudan and DRC without success. The jungles of eastern DRC provide a lot of good hiding places for a small group of 200-or-so rebels, and they have a pattern of dividing up after an attack and re-grouping in a new location, making it even harder to track them down.

That said, I am glad that the United States is finally making a long-term military commitment to stopping such extreme human-rights violations. Also, having the military advisors there means the Ugandan army will have access to top-secret intelligence and military satellite images – things we weren’t likely to just hand over the keys to.

The things Kony forces his child-soldiers to do are beyond horrible, and beyond the comprehension of anyone who hasn’t heard the stories or talked to the children. I have written about some of my own feelings in What If It Was My Son? This is a man that needs to be stopped, and if public awareness around the world is one piece in the puzzle of stopping him, then I hope this video spreads far beyond the 3.5 million views it has had so far.

Mark D. Jordahl

Kony 2012

Slavery Really Wasn’t So Bad, According to the Tea Party

Posted by Mark D. Jordahl on January 24, 2012
Posted in: Articles, Human Rights. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment
300px Cicatrices de flagellation sur un esclave Slavery Really Wasnt So Bad, According to the Tea Party

There should be a global outcry against the Tea Party for this one.

Apparently they want to change American school textbooks to make slavery look like it really wan’t that big a deal in our history. A Huffington Post article quotes a spokesperson:

According to reports, Hal Rounds, the Fayette County attorney and spokesman for the group, said during a recent news conference that there has been “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

Hmmm…”made-up criticism.” Let’s think about that. Did our founders “intrude on the Indians?” Intrude might not be the right word. How about “come crashing in, in a genocidal sort of way?”

And our Founding Fathers DID own slaves. That isn’t “made up,” and that needs to be a part of the conversation. Hal went on to say:

The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” Rounds said, according to The Commercial Appeal.

Yes, they were revolutionaries, and they did bring a new form of governance into the Western world (there is evidence that the US Constitution was significantly influenced by the structure of the Iroquois Confederacy, which existed long before the fledgeling United States). They did bring liberty into the world for some, but let’s keep in mind that abolition movements had been happening in various part of the world for millenia, so it was not a new idea that slavery was wrong. The idea was there, so they could have fast-tracked it a bit more if their own slaves weren’t helping them to stay rich.

To look at History without the “ugly parts” destroys the opportunity to learn from History. The world constantly struggles with threats to human rights. The complex web of issues that both nurtured slavery in the States and led to its downfall can give us insight into modern-day struggles for human rights.

Read more about the issue of slavery in textbooks in Texas.

Mark D. Jordahl

Related articles
Slavery Really Wasnt So Bad, According to the Tea Party

When Elephants and Humans Collide

Posted by Mark D. Jordahl on January 18, 2012
Posted in: Articles, Environment, Tourism, Wildlife Conservation. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment
p1030390 300x224 When Elephants and Humans Collide

Elephant in Murchison Falls NP

Here is a great article I just came across in the Black Star News that highlights the important and complicated issues around human – elephant conflict in Africa. Elephants traditionally ranged over thousands of miles. As population growth in Uganda presses in on their breeding and feeding grounds, conflict is inevitable, which is bad for agriculture and wildlife conservation.

The author sums it up well in this statement:

People are being displaced again, not by marauding humans but this time by elephants. The people lose their crops, livestock, property, and sometimes their lives. The animals, which are already endangered, will likely be killed in retaliation or to prevent future conflicts. And, if solutions to conflicts are not adequate, local support for conservation also declines. In order to be truly effective, prevention of human-wildlife conflicts has to involve the full scope of society: international organizations, governments, NGOs and in particular the communities who bear the brunt of destruction to property.

As I have stated many times on this blog, wildlife conservation in Africa is not straightforward. It is always a balancing act between the needs of people and animals.

Mark D. Jordahl

When Elephants and Humans Collide