A Q&A interview with William Holbrook '99, M.A. '06 about his work with underprivileged youth in Uganda.
By Tammy Griffin-Kumpey MSPC '06
What are you are doing in Uganda?
A: I am volunteering for an NGO called The Kids League, which uses sport as a means to mobilize local areas to learn about issues of health, education and character development. The Kids League runs programs in seven of the northern districts, which are primarily conflict areas and internationally displaced people camps. I'm developing a community-based program for Uganda's capital city of Kampala.
Currently, there are over 200,000 children between the ages of 10 and 14 years old in Kampala, but there are only a handful of after-school programs available to them. Through my previous work experience and educational training through Clark's Community Development and Planning (CDP) graduate program, I believe that sports can be used as a positive tool for the social development of both youth and their communities.
It's my hope that we at The Kids League can use our strong reputation in the field of youth sport to bring together the communities of Kampala to provide positive after-school opportunities for the city's youth. Over the course of the next eight months, I will be leading the research and design of a new sports-based character-education program for one of the five districts in Kampala.
Q: How has the experience been for you so far?
A: As this is my first time living abroad for an extended period, I have found it bewildering, exciting, enlightening and a little frustrating. I've enjoyed the challenge of adopting and adapting to local cultures, while at the same time, tried to convey my own sense of personality to the people I am working with. I appreciate the opportunity to be away from home and to really begin apply the concepts I learned in the CDP program at Clark.
I feel like a majority of my experience has been very stereotypical, mainly in learning how to adjust to a whole new culture-like learning to accept potholes the size of flowerbeds, roads too small to accommodate the traffic they experience, people staring at me because I am White, and adjusting to life with power every other day. But what stands out the most for me is how tiring living here can be. Everyday life is a constant bombardment to your senses, as there are new sights, new smells, new languages to learn; and it's emotional when you recognize that you are the minority in another country.
Every day, I absorb something new and that becomes both physically and mentally draining; so by 10 p.m. I'm ready for bed (which is out of the ordinary for me, as for the past two years I was taking classes and studying in the morning, working full-time from 1-9 p.m. at the Boys & Girls Club of Worcester, and then coming home and studying again until midnight.) Politics, the free-market economy and underground economy-there is a correlation between how people don't really have control over their economy, just as they do not really have control over the government. For example, the matatus, which most people rely on for public transportation, are controlled and owned by the Ministers of Parliament. The members of government do not want to invest in a public transportation system because they are the ones making the profit off the matatu service. So people are forced to pay a faire that economically benefits a person that they elected to look after their best interests. It is incredibly unbalanced in the levels of accountability and power, from my own U.S.-based ideal of democracy.
And is it really a free-market economy when close to one half of the national budget comes from overseas funding? So does the government control where the money is invested? Or is that dictated through aid requirements? Therefore, how much economic, and therefore political, freedom do the people have?
So people are forced to work in the "underground economy" of selling goods and services independently. While the underground economy in the states is mainly associated with illegal activities like selling stolen goods or drugs in the inner cities, here it is not. The underground economy includes everyone from the second-hand clothes salesman to the families that sell samosas and chapatis on the street. And while the underground economy is probably just as strong as the national economy, it is much more financially unstable as the government may step in to shut it down.
The impact of the technology boom of the later 90s and early 2000s is very noticeable here. Within Kampala there are as many internet cafés as there are restaurants. Yet there are only three traffic lights that work in the city. It's a place where everyone has a cell-phone and e-mail address, yet diseases like polio and malaria still effect thousands of people.
Q: What are the core issues/concerns of the population you are serving and what challenges have you faced in developing after-school programs in Kampala?
A: In my narrow and limited knowledge of international aid and the issues that attract foreign aid, it seems that inner city or slum youth are not high on the priority least for funding organizations. So even though the youth who live in the urban areas may actually live in worse physical conditions than those in IDP/refugee camps, they do not receive the same level of attention and/or funding.
A cultural issue, which makes my work difficult, is that after-school programming is not a priority in Uganda like it is in the United States. Therefore it's not as simple as starting an after-school youth program; we must first work with local people to demonstrate the need for positive activities for their youth. This is a challenge because we are facing the cultural belief that weekdays are meant for work, either academic or monetary, and house-based work, which means parents are skeptical of letting their children do something that is not family-based.
Finally, there is a lack of general health and physical infrastructure, the effects of "chronic poverty" as experts call it, which is necessary for youth to grow up and become healthy, contributing members of society. These issues range from the cost of attending "free" public school, to a lack of clean drinking and bathing water, to the low levels of proper pediatric medicine, to having schools that can properly house the number of students, to paying the teachers a salary that correlates to the amount of work they do.
Q: How is your involvement making a difference?
A: During my time here in Uganda, I actually have no expectation of making any truly noticeable difference. As cynical as it may sound, the process of starting and opening a new program that will run properly, be funded properly, and be properly supported by the community will occupy the majority of my time here. I hope that we are able to successfully start a youth program here-it will be important to have the means and resources to provide positive activities for the youth that live in the city especially as the IDP/refugee camps are dissembled and the potential for huge population immigration into Kampala grows. So I hope to make a difference by making the organizational structure sounder and more prepared for serving the needs of an underserved population.
To read more about Holbrook's experience in Uganda, visit his blog at www.dwafrica.blog.com
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Clarknews Winter 2007
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Will Holbrook in Uganda
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