After three months, this is why I'm here - A personal manifesto

After three months, this is why I'm here - 

A personal manifesto

A break in Kampala.  I love Kampala.  After an excruciating 14 hour drive, I made it.  It’s been over three months since I’ve arrived in Uganda and I'm trying to write about what this time has meant to me, how I’ve changed and how I will move forward. 

I watched a documentary last night about James Baldwin (great internet in Kampala!) and one particular quote of his struck me deeply.

'I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do, what you will find, or what you find will do to you.'

Oh James.  Yes, James.  It’s not just about what you will find on the journey but what the journey will do to you.

Sunday, I had the privilege of meeting a phenomenal woman.  As much as I tried to remain the ‘professional researcher’ I am supposed to be, it was a serious challenge to hold back tears hearing her story.  I am constantly uneasy trying to balance my role as a researcher with that of an individual, a woman, who has deep care and concern for her ‘subjects’, ‘interlocutors’, ‘participants’ or whatever you want to call them.  Some feminist ethnographers go further stating the in order for the researcher to truly break down power barriers, the researcher must fully accept the subjects to become full collaborators.  This, too, makes me uneasy, not least because I am a control freak.

But as I sat uneasily balancing my role – knowing that I will at least ever so slightly cringe when I listen to the recorded interview later, I stand firm and confident in how Stacey describes the role of the feminist ethnographer:

The researcher herself is the primary medium, the ‘instrument’ of research, this method draws on those resources of empathy, connection, and concern that many feminists consider to be women’s special strengths (Stacey, 1988, p.22).

How else could I have reacted other than with tears in my eyes as this talented, ambitious, courageous, successful, and determined woman told me her life story?

How would you react to such a personal and eloquent account of loss, sadness, abandonment, and tragedy? 

How would you respond to hearing the harrowing story of a woman sitting in front of you – a woman featured in national newspapers for her business expertise, her professional success, a woman admired by so many – when she tells her story?  

How she was orphaned at three years, abandoned a world away from her childhood home before high school, brewed beer in an attempt to go to school, audaciously went to the high school of her dreams and asked for admission, made her way to university only to sleep in a secret place for three years because she had no money for accommodation at university, found a way to network to help pay university fees in the highest offices of the most prestigious university in East Africa?  And then, just when you think life has finally worked out – you know her current life – the life of a successful business woman, a happily married woman, a loving mother – you find out that an horrific car accident paralyzed her only a decade earlier and she had to learn how to walk, talk, and care for herself all over again.  How would you react to that?

At one point during the interview, when she herself teared up, she noticed me holding back tears in my eyes and said as a glimmer of love brightened up her face, ‘Don’t cry.  I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.  I am alive.’

Even with the tragedy I have experienced in my own life, it feels minute compared the obstacles she has had to drag off the road to her success.

The truth is, she is an exceptional human being by anyone’s standards.  I sat in this interview trying to find the ‘right’ way to respond as a researcher.  But I am not just a researcher.  I am a feminist, an ethnographer, and a woman who cares deeply about my research,  I have a belief and fire inside me, whether naïve or just plain empowering, that what I am doing WILL MAKE A POSITIVE DIFFERENCE in others’ lives.

This lovely woman, even with all her obstacles, is a rarity, an exception to the rule of what happens to girls like her, not just here in Uganda, but all over the world. 

I met girls in my own country, particularly strong in my memory are my Bronx girls who had big dreams, failing schools, and little to no resources to bring those dreams to fruition. 

I am still broken hearted over a young woman I interviewed in Kenya who had so much potential, with the highest marks in the region, but with one mistake, one mistake that boys and girls alike make all over the world, a mistake that doesn’t ruin a life in many parts of the Western world, resulted in her losing everything.  I found her sleeping on the dirt floor of her grandmother’s shack in a Nairobi slum.  She slept on the dirt floor with her newborn baby boy so close to a kerosene lamp that for weeks I couldn’t sleep worrying that in this tiny shack in which she had to sleep diagonally, she might spill the lamp and accidentally burn down the place, end her life and the lives of her family members in their sleep.  Whilst there are many honourable men in the world, those who are not simply walk away, no harm to their potential, their ability to go to school.  But for her, all her studying, hard work, highest marks, meant nothing.  She is a slum girl who hopes to make a living braiding hair.  The girl who dreamed of traveling the world with Kenyan Airlines is now begging for food in a slum.

The incredible Ugandan woman sitting across from me at lunch is an anomaly, an exception to the rule.  But what happens to the rest of the girls?  What happens to girls when they spent literal blood, sweat, and tears to get an education?  What happens when the sponsors walk away, the funding dries up after primary or lower secondary or upper secondary?  What happens to the girls?  What happens to he girls who were taught to dream big in school but then realise that the door that has been opened to them has now slammed in their faces? 

This is why I do this research. Because their potential is wasted if we cannot bring them to the point where they can stand on their own and make use of their education and skills. While I care more about these young women’s well-being, it’s also bad financial investment if they cannot thrive.  An investment that might make the Westerner feel good for giving, but doesn’t follow through enough to change someone’s life for the better.

Had I not had a financially able and loving family, had I not been born with all the privileges that I have, those who know me know that I just may have become a drug addict, a dropout, a loss of talent to the world.  But I didn’t.  And I’d like to think that I’ve spent my adult life sharing my talents and gifts with the world and hope the world is better because of my being in it as a functioning adult and not a drop out depressed, drug addict.

I have never believed more in myself and my research than at that Sunday afternoon lunch.

I normally do not share information about my research in such detail on this blog but today I make an exception for the exceptional woman.  I make that exception because she herself is sharing her life story with the world with an upcoming memoir published and to be released later this year.  She has given me permission to share.

At the end of the preface of her book, she writes, ‘You don’t need to be opulent and rich to make a difference, you just need to care.’

It is in caring about individuals, about my research that makes me believe that I can make a difference.  And Baldwin was right.  It is because I care that I am finding out what this journey is doing to me.