2010 GROW Trips: Columbia goes to Gulu!
by Ankur Asthana on July 13, 2010
By Laura Edison
Since this summer encompasses 13 GROW (GRassroots On-site Work) trips—more than we’ve ever had in the past! —I am going to highlight some of the trips in this series of blogs. This week, I am revisiting the four-week trip that Jo Blount, Justine Hope, Maya Cohen, Vir Patel, and Liza Plafsky took to Gulu, Uganda from May 19 to June 17. GlobeMed at Columbia is partnered with Gulu Women’s Economic Development and Globalization, or GWED-G for short. Their mission is to strengthen the capacity of grassroots communities in Northern Uganda to become self-reliant agents of change for peace and development by providing them with knowledge and skills concerning their health, rights, and development. This summer was the chapter’s first ever GROW trip.
The trip started out with the objective to document GWED-G’s successful entrepreneurship, which is aimed to empower both women and members of the community, and to conduct surveys and home visits to measure the impact of GlobeMed at Columbia’s financial support on the reduction of poverty levels. However, after talking to Oola Kasto, a former abductee to the Lord’s Resistance Army during the 25-year Ugandan civil war, the GROW team decided to redirect the entire focus of their trip. Kasto asked a simple question: why did aid groups with large logos plastered onto the side of their vehicles come to his village, take pictures, raise hopes, and then just leave in plumes of red dust, never to be seen or heard from again? The community wanted action, not pity; the GROW team therefore refocused their efforts on rebuilding infrastructure and recreating stability, rather than documenting trauma. With a renewed focus, they began asking every subsequent interviewee what problems they thought existed within their community. Says Justine Hope of this process, “It was surprising how many smiled or laughed at the question, for the idea that their opinion was to direct our future projects seemed ludicrous to people who had never been asked such questions before.”
The team held several interviews with community members who had been affected by the Ugandan civil war, including former child soldiers and escorts, families who had been forced into IDP camps, and even employees of GWED-G. The team learned about the horrors of the war and the resultant social crisis from evocative first-hand accounts. Based on community responses, the GROW team developed projects for the upcoming year. These projects include income-generating beekeeping and farming programs as well as an HIV prevention, education, and mother-to-child transmission prevention program. Additionally, the goat-lending income-generating project that the Columbia chapter funded during the year was evaluated and assessed for efficacy through interviews with all families involved.
As the GROW team reflects upon all they saw, experienced, and learned, they keep returning to a common theme: “Ugandans have a deep understanding of their own problems and a solid grasp on what needs to be done to fix them.” Perhaps this understanding can best be reflected by Samuel, a Gulu resident who took it upon himself to become a beekeeping expert in order to help those in the community who would be part of the beekeeping income-generating project. His outlook on the future is bright: “I hope if all people in this community adopt into this [bee keeping], they will actually come out of the poverty… We need this kind of project to uplift us, so when we get fully enrolled into this project, I believe the whole world will notice we exist. That is what I hope.”
GlobeMed at Columbia’s blog about the trip is available here: http://bethechange-columbia.tumblr.com/
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