Interview trip to Pader District

Happy Fourth of July, everyone! I hope you all are having a wonderful celebration. My celebration this year will not have nearly the excitement of last year's patriotic song session on DC public transport and fireworks at the Jefferson Memorial. Largely because this year's celebration will be non-existent. But I am thinking fondly of my July 4th memories today and wishing you all an excellent and safe independence day.

Today's blog post is going to be about another project I am working on. Taylor, one of the students who is in Uganda this summer with the BYU study abroad program here (who is, therefore also working on the crowdsourcing/ scorecarding projects since the first is an AidData project and the second a BYU project), is undertaking an independent research project that aims to assess the unique effects of sexual violence on social structures in Uganda, as compared to other forms of trauma. Her hypothesis is that sexual violence has a uniquely stigmatizing effect, and is thus more detrimental to social cohesion than other forms of trauma experienced during the civil war.

However, Taylor is based in Kampala with the rest of the program, so she enlisted my help with conducting interviews up in Northern Uganda, since that is where the civil war took place.

I suppose it is about time I give you some background on the civil war that took place in Northern Uganda for nearly two decades. I'm sorry if this is information that many of you already know. But, just in case...

A brief overview:

The civil war in Northern Uganda began in 1986, when current President Yoweri Museveni

seized power from a government dominated by northern Ugandans, predominantly

those from the Acholi ethnic group. Soon there after, Joseph Kony began to form the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Joseph Kony blends Christian fundamentalism, African animism and elements of Islam in his ‘spiritual’ leadership and political crusade against the government. His army has a political agenda to overthrow the government and spark the “moral regeneration” of the Acholi people, creating a utopian society in Uganda

Despite their anti-government agenda, the main victims of LRA aggression was the Acholi people themselves. The LRA terrorized the population by killing, looting villages, burning homes, and abducting villagers, namely adolescents who become child soldiers or child brides for the LRA.

In the Acholi area of Northern Uganda (Acholiland) approximately one-third of all males and one-sixth of females between the ages of 14-30 were abducted for at least two weeks.

In 2005, the civil war in northern Uganda was termed the ‘world’s largest neglected

humanitarian emergency’ by the UN’s Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. After two decades of fighting, a truce was signed in August2006 between the LRA and Ugandan government, ending the civil war in the North. Kony and many of the LRA officers have since fled into the DRC.

It is estimated that over the duration of the conflict, 66,000 youth were abducted by the LRA and nearly two million people in the region were affected by the conflict through displacement and exposure to attacks by the rebel group.

Now back to the post...

The women that Taylor's study seeks to reach are those who were survivors of sexual violence either as the abducted women who served as child brides in the LRA or who were attacked during an LRA raid of their village.

Heavy stuff.

So right after the NGO conference on Monday, Taylor and I set out with NUMAT (Northern Uganda Malaria, AIDS, and Tuberculosis Program) to neighboring Pader district to conduct interviews.

The experience was very interesting, and we both learned a whole heck of a lot about field research, though most of it goes in the what not to do column. For example, do not forget to bring a pad of ink so that women who cannot write can sign consent forms.

One of the main challenges we faced was with randomization. For a study like this, you ideally would want to have a random sample of women in Northern Uganda participate in interviews. However, walking up to random women in the street and asking "have you been raped?" likely would not go over so well. So instead, we have been working with various organizations with SGBV programs (Sexual Gender Based Violence) to find subjects to interview. Of course, specifically targeting women who organizations know to be survivors of sexual violence is the exact opposite of random.

Another challenge is the effect of the translator on the interviews. Since none of the women we interviewed speak English, we would conduct our interviews with a translator, who would ask the interview questions, and then turn the answer given into the code that corresponds with one of our survey options.

There are two problems with this. 1) It is HIGHLY subjective how the translator turns the response into a code. For example, if the response choices are a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, it is entirely subject to the whim of the translator where a response falls on the scale. (Quick side note: the inability of Ugandans to stick to the options on a survey or form really makes me realized what a standardized test/ form completing culture we have in the US. The idea of just speeding through questions and selecting one of a multiple choice set of answers is completely foreign to Ugandan culture. This is why a survey that would take me 20 some minutes to complete takes our Ugandan subjects roughly and hour and change to complete. )

Anywho

The second problem with this is that I am totally shut out of what the interviewee is saying. I sometimes just felt like I was mindlessly ticking boxes as these women were relaying these incredibly intense stories. That was a bit frustrating, as it makes it more difficult to really connect with the subject. However, I got to do some interviews yesterday where the translator translated everything the interviewee said, which was a much more interesting and intense experience.

Aside from many lessons about the perils of field research, the thing I have really taken away from this experience is a profound respect for the resilience of the Ugandan people and a deep sense of the injustices of being a woman in Ugandan society.

I'll talk more about these subjects in another post, since I feel like I've been typing forever. However, I'll just end with one example from my Pader trip of what I mean. One of the sections of the survey assesses the level of trauma experienced by each subject. It asks whether the subject has experienced 27 different traumatic incidents, ranging from being displaced from your home, to rape, to witnessing the murder of a family member. One of the women we interviewed answered yes to 20 out of the 27 incidents. Not only does she have to figure out a way to live again, but she has to figure out how to support her 6 children, along with the 4 nieces/ nephews she has taken in all on her own on an income of less than a dollar a day.

All this and she manages to smile and offer to share her G-Nuts with me. Truly amazing.

Love,

Alena