ALLIES Honors Fallen Tufts Alumnus and Begins Long-Term Relationship in Uganda

By LT Anne Gibbon

Assistant Director, Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, US Naval Academy and trip leader 

Representatives from three ALLIES chapters, USNA, Tufts, and West Point, traveled to Uganda from July 23 – August 9, 2010 to conduct field research on the state of post-conflict reconstruction following the civil war against a rebel army, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), that ended in 2006.   Students included Ben Ross and Emily Paine from Tufts, Cadet Matt Ropelewski from West Point, and Midshipman Mark Carrion from the Naval Academy. 

The trip was inspired by the memory and legacy of Ben Sklaver, a Tufts and Fletcher alumnus, who was a Captain in the US Army when he was killed in Afghanistan.  On his first deployment though, Sklaver served under the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa with the mission of mentoring Ugandan military units.  There, he witnessed the high rates of child mortality and other diseases caused by dirty drinking water and sought to address it.  While working at the Centers for Disease Control in 2007, Sklaver founded the ClearWater Initiative, which this ALLIES trip went to work with in Uganda as a tribute to his work at Tufts and in the military.

On the ground, the group met with the country director of USAID, David Eckerson, the CJTF-HOA representative to the US mission in Uganda, CDR Schoenbucher, USN, and the Army CA team lead, Captain Nate Heller, USA.  Students took the initiative in setting up meetings with local directors of international NGO's and major civilian organizations, including ICRC, WHO, and the UN, as well as local NGO's including THETA and ClearWater Initiative. 

In addition to office meetings, the ALLIES group worked with a Ugandan pastor linked to the NGO Invisible Children, and spent time in the village of Pakea in the civil war affected region of the north.  The village is slowly being rebuilt after community members fled the rebel attacks, living in IDP camps for nine years. 

While this is just one village in the maze of jungle outside the few major cities in the north of the country, the implications for its stable growth and an understanding of it as the model for the fragile growth in the north can be understood through the lens of Human Security.

While camping in the village of Pakea, the students joined community members in building the first primary school, and planting fruit and pine trees along the two ruts that would someday become the major road into the village. Almost unbelievably, they were the first white people to visit the village, however that statistic was rendered meaningless when the community gathered for a celebration.  The elders invited the students to speak to the gathered residents through an interpreter, but it was the actions taken by the students - traveling across the world to meet a person rather than read a textbook about a conflict, sharing a rare meal of meat, and finally dancing and singing with men, women, and children from the community - not the words that communicated the message of friendship and global community.

Based on this pilot trip, ALLIES plans to return to Uganda and Pakea in 2011

Human nature lends itself to constant conflict, that drive is only matched by societies striving for peace - one that shelters economic growth and an ever-increasing standard of living.  The threat to that peace is not a specific person, group, or nation-state that can be targeted and controlled.  The enemy is the narrative.  Brian Fishman, who studies terrorism at the New America Foundation, said the choice of historic enemies as addressees for the recent parcel bombs bound for Chicago was a sort of inside joke that reflects the Qaeda ideologists' view of history.  “The jihadis draw a straight line from the Prophet Muhammad through the Crusades, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Iraq, to the present day.  The narrative is that non-Muslims are always on the attack, always trying to take Muslim lands.  The jihadis like the narrative because it justifies violence, since they claim that they're only defending Islam.” 

America and her allies lack an equally compelling counter-narrative.  Admittedly, it is a much greater challenge – it must encapsulate the non-extremist elements of Islam and Christianity, a multitude of cultures, races, and socio-economic states, as well as both military and civilian organizations.  The common factor is a mutual desire for human security.

It is this commonality that the 2011 ALLIES Uganda trip will begin to address from an undergraduate perspective.  US civilian and military students will travel to Africa to spend a month with Ugandan civilian and military students.  They will first establish a community among themselves, working alongside each other, sharing their stories.  The best place to start a community is in tents in a remote village, where the pit latrine is considered a luxury – not the five star hotel in downtown Kampala. 

The village of Pakea has agreed to host the approximately 25 students and five to seven faculty and officers.  Following the first two weeks of work in the village, the group will move to guesthouses in Kampala where they will spend two weeks in classrooms at the Uganda Martyrs University.  The university's master's program on the ethics of human development is located in downtown Kampala, affording both convenient facilities and relevant academic stimulation for the remainder of the class.  During those two weeks, the students will study the recent history of post-conflict reconstruction and the roles that civilian and military organizations played, as well as the current slate of issues in central and east Africa: conflict minerals, mass rape, the Sudanese referendum, and mass refugee movement out of Somalia.

Both the historical and present day examination will use the lens of narrative to understand the success of civilian and military organizations in achieving their goals.  The final project for the students will be to develop their own narrative for human security, as if they were the leaders of the organizations they represent.

Emily Paine: Reflection on ALLIES Uganda

 During the time Ben Ross and I spent in Uganda this past summer, even a short stroll down the hot, clay Lira roads was a voyage through the sea of “Musungu! Musungu!” (the northern Ugandan Lango tribe’s word for “white person”). Somewhere between the stares and the shouts and the laughter was the distinction that we were the white Americans who did not fit in.

I initially reconciled this distinction by recognizing that Ben Sklaver, the man who inspired our trip to Uganda, must have struggled through the same cultural barriers. Ben was the Double Jumbo (dual Tufts University/Fletcher School alumnus)/public health specialist/soldier in the U.S. army, who put his strengths as a soldier and an educated civilian to good use. While on active military duty in the region, Ben worked to improve community access to potable drinking water. Upon returning to the U.S., Ben expanded upon his on-the-ground efforts by founding an organization called ClearWater Initiative. Ben's military mandate and civilian duty were cut short in 2009, when he was killed by a suicide bomber while deployed in Afghanistan. This past summer, sophomores Ben Ross and I were sponsored by the ALLIES program to delve further into his legacy of meaningful development work in Africa.

First, it is worth noting the environment Ben Sklaver had worked in. When Yoweri Museveni’s rise to power by a coup d’êtat in 1986, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) began inflicting large-scale violence on northern Ugandans for twenty years to come. Nearly two million Ugandans had been displaced from their homes throughout the conflict, and Ben worked on water access in internally-displaced persons (IDP) camps.

Since that time, most IDPs have returned to their “homes,” many lacking educational opportunities, access to healthcare, even adequate water and food. This past summer, Ben Ross and I worked with an NGO called ANCC, which is currently contracting a project with ClearWater Initiative, to provide trainings to northern Ugandan villages where new water sources had recently been put in place. These training sessions were based off of a written curriculum including management of the borehole, maintenance among the community, and health practices in extraction of water.

At the outset, I was eager to immerse myself in the world I was being exposed to. The written training curriculum helped me understand the issues that needed to be addressed, and I followed it to as closely as possible. My time off from trainings became time for visiting health centers and interviewing NGOs to learn about their approaches to providing health services. In regards to understanding cultural context, it was important to pursue that as the first step in making change. But what I struggled with was “fitting in” and still using my strengths.

After all, the scope of the problems at hand cannot be underestimated. One of the most common questions I asked villagers was how often they visited the nearest health center for a medical check-up. Laughter was a common reaction once I explained what a check-up would entail. “So, you’re saying that it is normal for people in America go to the doctor when nothing is already wrong? Why would they do that?” The majority of women in Uganda do not even go to a health center or hospital to give birth, even considering the national fertility rate of 6.7. The point here is not just the lack of governmental infrastructure in very basic areas of livelihood, but the idea that abject poverty and all of its implications should just be accepted as life for northern Ugandans.

This grander principal is what the humanitarian network is up against. The necessity of accepting identity and values of Ugandan culture is undoubtable, but Ben Sklaver also called upon the necessity of challenging areas of Ugandan inaccess to basic services. Over time, the Ben Sklaver model started sinking in for me more comprehensively. As a US. outsider, he worked with local Ugandans to learn their knowledge of culture and community structure. As a U.S. soldier, Ben used his training and resources to improve water access. As a U.S. citizen, Ben used his education and advocacy capability to build upon that objective even further.

When it comes to work in development, looking forward without questioning the program seems to make more progress than challenging the current structures in place. When we met with David Eckerson, the Country Director of USAID, he revealed that the annual budget for USAID to Uganda is nearly $275 million, which USAID contracts through grants to NGO implementing partners and U.S. military units on the ground. The problem is that sometimes plans are not followed through on in the most strategic and sustainable way, such as the library that was built and then never filled with books or staff. Their approach is effective insofar as using financial resources and technological know-how as comparative advantages. At the same time, there is room for improvement, and it takes some questioning of the model in order to improve the effectiveness of USAID resources.

In the non-profit industry, there are no competing firms to run each other out of business if the model is not effective.  Ben Sklaver’s legacy is the duty to look for gaps in the government system and current humanitarian, which I got a first-hand glimpse of in Uganda this summer, in order to help communities challenge and reform some of the harsh conditions facing them every day.