If you’re looking for a good read, I suggest checking out the ‘Poverty Matters’ blog on The Guardian site.
The blog highlights Uganda’s efforts to increase educational support, particularly through universal primary education.
Last month, Invisible Children Uganda (ICU) officially turned five.
As a way to celebrate, we threw a party…Ugandan style.
(photos by Molly Milroy)
In our humble opinion the Ugandan Advocates of the Mountain Best… we mean Mountain West Roadie team will return from tour with the most street cred. You may ask how we could make such a bold statement. Well, they have survived the 100-degree, desert heat of Arizona and are well on their way to championing over the harsh winters of Colorado and Utah.
Why would Comfort and Scovia forfeit the comfortable and familiar weather of Uganda for the extreme conditions of the Mountain West region? To them, the answer is simple. Comfort expresses, daily, her amazement that there are people willing – even excited- to live out of a van, in order to give a voice to those who are invisible in northern Uganda. Roadies put their lives on hold for 5 months, to advocate for people they have never met. What gets Comfort through the below freezing Colorado temperatures? The knowledge that she is putting a face to the thousands of stories that aren’t being told from her home.
Scovia has taken a semester off university to bring Gulu High School to the Mountain West. She says, she will gladly brave the Rocky Mountain snow if that’s what it takes to help rise up future leaders of Uganda and rebuild the school she has the privilege of representing. She is SO happy to meet, face to face, the Schools for Schools clubs that have helped rebuild Gulu High school. She always says, “It’s because of people like you, that I am able to be who I am today!”
Don’t misunderstand. It’s not all sacrifices. We’ve enjoyed the hot thunderstorms of Phoenix and the first snow-fall of Aspen. Oh! The places you will go as a roadie!
Hailey Mitsui
Team Mountain West
A month ago when our Mission Director Adam Finck was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, doing some ground research on how best to combat the LRA’s invisible movement, he came across David Axe, a reporter for Wired Magazine. David took a keen interest in the fact that we were using simple technology to make a huge impact in the safety of lives in northern Congo. Check it. - Jedidiah.
From Wired Magazine UK:
by David Axe.
A loud knocking on the door of the parish house was the only warning of the rebel attack. It was Sept. 17, 2008 in Duru, a farming town of 6,000 people in the remote northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area plagued by rebellions. People from outlying farms had seen a band of rebels on the road leading into town. A Duru resident named Roger Kayadunga had raced to the parish house to warn Father Ferruccio Gobbi and the other priests. “They’re coming,” Kayadunga said. “Lots of them.”
But there was no time to flee. The rebels arrived on the parish house steps before Gobbi could even put on his shoes. The rebels ransacked the house, taking all the food and electronics, then set it on fire. They briefly marched Gobbi around Duru before releasing him, bruised and terrified. Others were less lucky. Hundreds of Duru residents were kidnapped in several days of attacks. Hundreds more died.
It’s a tragedy that has repeated itself across northeastern Congo for years: farmers see the rebels coming but there’s no time to warn the rest of the community. Today the UN, an American nonprofit group and the Congolese Catholic church are determined to give vulnerable towns and villages enough warning to escape rebel assaults. Their plan: to reinforce and modify an existing Very High Frequency radio network maintained by rural parishes, transforming it into an early-warning system capable of quickly disseminating information on rebel movements.
The early-warning network promises to save hundreds or even thousands of lives, and at low cost: just $140,000 for new equipment. It’s a striking example of applying basic technology to mitigate strictly human problems in a harsh and remote environment. It’s frontier tech. And for the hundreds of thousands of people it will benefit, the radio network is a “home-run,” according to Adam Finck, a key organiser.
Lonely radio
DR Congo is the size of Western Europe and contains half of Africa’s tropical forest. For all its size, the country has just 300 miles of paved roads and no more than 40 functioning airstrips. To call Congo inaccessible is an understatement. In the northeast, towns like Duru might be 50 miles apart and connected only by muddy footpaths. It should go without saying that cellular service and broadcast television do not reliably reach them. As isolated as islands, Congolese towns rely on radio for their tenuous communications links to each other and the outside world.
For reasons a scholar of medieval history might best comprehend, the Congolese church operates many of the most powerful radios, especially in the northeast. Twice a day on most days, once on Sundays, a church operator in each of 13 villages spread across a swath of jungle several hundred miles wide, radios into Dungu, the regional hub, with a news update. Dungu calls back with the aggregated news from all 14 locations.
The news is too old to be useful for security purposes, explains Ian Rowe, a member of a UN security agency that also maintains a regional base in Dungu equipped with VHF radios. “When an attacks happens, two three days later you might get a report.” It occurred to the agency that there was potential to combined efforts with the church. By expanding the church network and speeding up its reporting, together the two groups might transform the network into an early-warning system “so communities can call for help when under attack,” Rowe says. The plea for help could be passed on to the 17,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in Congo or the Congolese army. Meanwhile, villagers in harm’s way would have time to flee.
All it would take is around a dozen new radios and some training for the operators, both costing comparatively little. The problem was, neither the church nor the UN agency had any money at all to spend on the project. Luckily, earlier this year an American nonprofit organisation, specialising in issues related to Congo’s rebels, had fallen into some money and was looking for ways to spend it. Invisible Children, based in California, signed on in July. With their money, the UN’s expertise and the church’s basic infrastructure, work on the early-warning system got underway.
“What’s up with the shoes?”
Invisible Children sent Finck to the eastern city of Goma to buy the first of the new radios. He asked around for his preferred model, an Italian Codan, and was directed to what appeared to be a shoe store. “What’s up with the shoes?” Finck recalls asking the proprietor. The man explained that the imported Codans were so heavy, it added practically nothing to his shipping costs to also pile on Italian shoes and belts for a side business.
Traveling on UN aeroplanes and helicopters in mid-September, Finck linked up with the UN security agency and headed into the forest to the village of Limai, identified as the best site for the first new radio. The church in Limai provided a technician named Masta, actually an off-duty airplane mechanic, to help with the installation. “It’s cake to install these things,” Finck says. All that’s required is a small space for the shoe-box-size radio, a solar panel to power it and an antenna setup. In Limai, the team opted to string the antenna between two trees and hold it up in the middle using a bamboo pole. After just three hours of work, the first new radio was ready. The operator began reporting the same day.
Before leaving Congo, Finck identified one more site for a new radio. For that and the other 10 new sites, the church would handle installation and the UN would oversee training to speed up the operators’ reporting. The second site Finck picked was Duru, the town that had been attacked in September 2008 and its parish burned. It took two years and some clever thinking, but Duru residents would finally have the means to get a few steps ahead of their attackers.
The radio project is slated for completion by the end of this year. (note: the first small phase of this project is hopefully to be completed by the end of this year, but there is a long road ahead to complete the true project, and bring communication and safety to the region – JJ)
And a youth said, “Speak to us of Friendship.” Your friend is your needs answered. He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving. And he is your board and your fireside. For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace. When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the “nay” in your own mind, nor do you withhold the “ay.” And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart; For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed. When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain. And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit. For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught. And let your best be for your friend. If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also. For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill? Seek him always with hours to live. For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness. And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
- Khalil Gibran
United Nations Base Attacked in DR Congo
Fifty armed men descended upon a UN peacekeeping base in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, saturday. Declaring their intention to attack, the men, armed with automatic and locally fabricated weapons, opened fire upon the base after repeatedly being warned against attacking the base. The peacekeeping troops, who sustained no casualties, returned fire and killed 8 combatants who appeared to be members of a local Mai Mai militia group.
Uganda Prepares for Presidential Elections
The politicking is intensifying in Uganda as presidential nominations were announced this week, pitting eight candidates against incumbent Yoweri Museveni. Museveni, who has held the post since 1986, altered the country’s constitution in 2005 abolishing presidential term limits, allowing him to run for his third term in 2006 and now his fourth in 2011. Many fear that the February 18th polling date will bring about a wave of electoral violence as Museveni’s shaky relationship opposition leaders and the press may spark civil unrest between political factions.
From The 99 Percent:
by Jocelyn K. Glei
Have you ever fallen into a black hole of comparison shopping? You’re looking for a new digital camera, for instance. You head over to Cnet.com and read some reviews of various cameras, watch the video demos, identify the model you want. Then perhaps you employ Google’s shopping search to price out the options and find the best deal. All of the sudden, it’s four hours later. You’ve found the perfect camera, but your purchasing triumph is tainted by a creeping feeling of, well, disgust. Couldn’t that time have been used better?
I was thinking recently about what my biggest distractions were – the things keeping me from pushing my creative projects forward. As I scanned through my daily activities, I found that the most insidious distraction was, in fact, things. More specifically, the wanting, hunting, and getting of things – whether they be tangible (a new computer) or intangible (information).
As Annie Leonard says in The Story of Stuff, “Our primary identity has become that of being consumers – not mothers, teachers, or farmers, but of consumers. We shop and shop and shop.” We love our stuff. Yet more than the stuff itself, we love the act of finding it – the search, the anticipation.
But why is consumerism – and particularly, an online hunt for the ideal purchase – so addictive?
It turns out that our consumerist impulse stimulates the same part of the brain that fires when we’re on the trail of a great idea. As we go through the trial and error of executing an idea – What if I tried this? Ah! Now what about this? – we’re using those same wanting, hunting, getting instincts but in a nobler pursuit.
Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp calls this highly addictive emotional state “seeking.” In a Slate article on seeking, writer Emily Yoffe sums up his research:
“For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.
The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits ‘promote states of eagerness and directed purpose,’ Panksepp writes. It’s a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused.”
The consumerist search capitalizes on the same “seeking” part of the brain that fuels the creative rush. Of course, while consumerism can serve as an addictive substitute for the stimulation of creative activity, it offers nowhere near the same reward in the long term.
As creatives, we can often rationalize spending time on shopping by telling ourselves that we’re investing our time, energy, and money in a new tool – an item that’s going to catapult our creativity to the next level. Maybe it’s a new computer, maybe it’s a musical instrument, maybe it’s a studio of one’s own. Once you get that new thing, you think, you’ll have a superior means to complete your work.
It’s a false promise, of course. A means of procrastination baked into our consumerist culture. No external thing can prompt creativity, and there’s no substitute for just getting down to doing the work. In fact, it’s been proven that hardship – being deprived of things – stimulates creativity more than being well-off. A recentNewsweek article on America’s declining creativity reported:
“Highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.”
When we have less to work with, we have to be more creative.
Here’s an update from Team PNW:
“Cool safari, eh?
Canada treated team Pacific Northwest magically well. With two weeks to frolic amongst the maple leaves and the filming of Twilight, we were able to go on some incredible adventures of our own! Some people like to go to exotic lands and dense rainforests to see incredible wildlife, but we just drove our beautiful vans right across the northern border.
Our first run in with wildlife was at the Lions Gate Bridge. Here we found ourselves intermixed with a family of raccoons! Don’t be fooled, these masked bandits are more like pigeons or squirrells – they know that humans will feed them french fries…or in our case, cameras? Stuy was able to talk philosophy with one of them, although we found that the raccoon had little to debate upon the meaning of life.
The next exploration into Canadian wildlife was when James and Robert had the chance to go snake catching. Seeing as how the only snakes in Ugandan are poisonous, this opportunity granted them both the privelege of overcoming fears and show the slythering reptiles who is boss! Robert and James are now our fearless friends with nothing holding them back on the road.
Last, but most certainly not least is Meagan’s fateful day of finding the Ladner Community Center. This place is also known as Bunny Central Paradise. We don’t know if the world wanted her to find her own slice of heaven, but the fact that tons of bunnies hop, nibble, and find this place their home is almost too much for our dear roadie’s heart. We really can’t explain her affinity to the cotton tailed bundles of joy, but maybe this video can share a glimpse of her admiration.
The great thing about being on the road is that while trying to end a war, we can also philosophize, conquer fears, and find our pieces of paradise in each day’s travel. All we can say here at Team Pacific Northwest is that our time in Canada has been the cheese to our macaroni, the Edward to our Bella, and most certainly the Celine to our Dion. - Meagan”
Team Pacific Northwest: Meagan, Robert, Taylor, Stuy, Sarah, and James.
Peace, Proscovia and the rest of team Middle America weren't nearly this successful with their pumpkins...
Greetings from Middle America! We’ve been traveling across the Midwest region of the United States, and we’ve had the chance to meet some amazing people from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota. We’re all very excited about our next week of tour as we’ll be making the journey into Canada. While we’ve been busy raising our states-visited count and encouraging people to get involved with Invisible Children, we’ve also found time to celebrate Halloween with some good old-fashioned pumpkin carving! Check out our Gulu Senior Secondary and Schools for Schools pumpkins!
Team Middle America
Jenna, Peace, Bryce, Proscovia, Steve and Megan Dew-Yah
Fionah is touring Southern California right now, advocating to rebuild her alma mater – Sacred Heart Secondary School. Watch this video, get yourself to a screening and help us raise $1 million by December 17th.
