Shame & Notoriety: Stopping Police Rape of Sex Workers in Uganda

On Wednesday, July 13, I had the below article published on Gender Across Borders, the leading gender issues blog.  Here is a link to the article.  Here is the article’s text:

Last February, I sat across from 50 Ugandan prostitutes who sought my legal advice.  They wanted me to get the police to stop raping them.

I was the legal consultant at Platform for Labour Action (PLA), a Ugandan non-governmental organization that provides marginalized workers with free legal services.  The prostitutes had formed an association called the Lady Mermaids Bureau, which partnered with organizations like PLA to help the women receive medical, psychological, social, and legal support.

Within two months of our first meeting, the prostitutes had developed and applied a strategy that prevented police assaults.I was introduced to the prostitutes in a small parking lot in a Kampala slum.  There, the women confided in me and two other PLA lawyers that police typically raped them two times a week.  Sometimes the police dragged them into an alley and raped them there; other times, the attacks occurred after forcing the women into the back of patrol cars.  If the women resisted, the police stole their money, beat them, and threatened imprisonment.

Contemplating how to help these women, PLA’s director and I decided that pursuing criminal prosecutions was a fool’s errand: the police officers would protect each other and do everything necessary to stymie any criminal investigation.  Filing a complaint with the police department or suing the government was also unsatisfactory.  While either approach might provide victims some small monetary relief, neither would deter future wrongdoing because they would shift the focus away from the individual bad actors and onto an amorphous governmental entity.  We needed another strategy.

I had an idea.  What if we removed government from the picture entirely?  What if we ignored the abuse of power element and legally analyzed the problem as a typical rape case (putting aside that no such thing exists)?  Because rape is both a crime and a tort – a civil wrong – the woman would be able to sue the man in civil court for monetary damages.  We could represent the prostitutes in civil lawsuits against each policeman and publicize the details of every case.

First, the prostitutes needed to gather information about their attackers.  After performing a security review to determine how best to protect the plaintiffs, we would file our first lawsuit.

Some Ugandans I spoke with were skeptical about the idea.  They told me that the Ugandan public following the case in the press likely would not sympathize with the prostitutes.  Many Ugandans assume that sexual attacks by police officers are part and parcel of a prostitute’s work:  selling your body for money on the street meant that you were asking to be raped by the police.  Though that perspective sadly contained a hefty dose of truth, it was also myopic in one fundamental way:  it undervalued the extent to which the policemen themselves would be shamed merely for having had sex with a prostitute, and the repercussions of that shame among the officer’s friends and family.  That embarrassment, and the financial strain of a lawsuit, might just be enough to stop them.

We decided to put the plan into action.  I asked the prostitutes whether the police officers wore their uniforms when they assaulted the women.  The police almost always did, it turned out.  The patrol cars were also almost always nearby while an attack occurred.

After explaining our strategy, I asked the women to memorize officers’ badge and patrol car numbers, names, and appearances.  As a test case, we then would sue the policeman who had raped the most women.  His name would be in the papers, and his face on television.  He would have to endure a long, humiliating public lawsuit.  He would personally feel the consequences of his actions.  Other police officers watching would think twice before raping again.  Winning the lawsuit would be irrelevant; the mere fact of filing and publicizing it would do the trick.  It would deter future egregious conduct.

Six weeks later, the sex workers came to PLA and told us that our advice had worked wondrously:  not a single prostitute from the Lady Mermaids Bureau had been raped, beaten, or arrested by the police since we had spoken with them in that parking lot.

I was dumbstruck.  What advice?  All I had asked was for them to memorize information.  Instead, armed with that simple instruction, the women went on the attack.  They told  approaching policemen, “I have memorized your badge number and name.  If you touch me, my lawyers at Platform for Labour Action will come after you.”  That was enough to frighten the would-be rapist into leaving the women alone.

Though not exactly what we had counseled, the outcome was more successful than I could have imagined.  The women took my words and applied them in a way that made sense to them, based on their intimate knowledge of the street.  They were able to look at their problem from a new perspective, and then help themselves.

A credible threat of legal action halted rogue policemen from sexually assaulting a small group of Ugandan women.  I often wonder whether this strategy could be replicated elsewhere, using a three-pronged approach:  (i) threats of lawsuits, (ii) backed up by actual filings of lawsuits when necessary, (iii) in conjunction with aggressive press campaigns.

Although we were successful with the Lady Mermaids Bureau, this approach might not work elsewhere because each location has its own political, cultural, social, and legal peculiarities.  I think we first need to address these and other questions:

1. Is this approach sustainable or will policemen eventually “become wise” to these tactics?
2. Must a country have a free press for this strategy to work?  How free?
3. Perhaps most important, how do we protect the women who will be carrying out the strategy?

An Unexpected Phone Call Following Investigation Into 14-Year-Old Boy's Murder

When I received a call one morning from a number I did not recognize, I assumed it was a wrong number. But, as it turned out, the man on the other end was looking for me. He said he had gotten my phone number from David Abitekaniza, a police officer I had been hoping to interview regarding the brutal murder of a 14 year-old boy. I had been trying to meet with Abitekaniza for weeks, so I got excited.

Weeks earlier, a lawyer from my organization and I led a team investigating Innocent Kirungi’s murder. You can read about the case here, here, here, and, for those of you who read Luganda, here. As you can see, it has gotten some press. My organization, with a few others that protect children’s rights, held a press conference about the boy’s murder and what we were doing about it. Here are the press release we drafted, the executive summary of a report we are completing, and the complaint we filed against the people responsible. (I’ve also posted some pictures from the press conference.)

In case you don’t have time to read the linked documents, here’s a summary of the gruesome facts: Innocent Kirungi, 14, was brought to a temporary remand home (similar to a juvenile detention facility) to be watched over for 5 days before he was to be transfered to a more permanent remand home for rehabilitation. The only crimes he had committed were petty thefts. Over the course of the next five days, he was forced to perform hard labor, beaten unconscious, buried alive, then taken out of the ground — alive — and beaten to death. The kicker is that the person who had hired his (and the other remand home boys’) services was a police officer, one David Abitekaniza.

So, as you can imagine, when I got that early morning call from a stranger telling me that he had gotten my number from Abitekaniza, I was excited but also a little concerned. You see, I hadn’t been looking for Abitekaniza to find out how his investigation into the murder was going; I was looking for Abitekaniza so I could investigate him about the murder. The man on the phone told me that Abitekaniza had refused to speak to me because I was from a human rights organization. But then, he said, "I am Abitekaniza's friend. He will talk to you now. Where are you? I will come get you and bring you to him."

When I heard those words, I began to wonder...Had Abitekaniza sent this guy after me, to lure me away, take me to some empty field, and slice me to pieces with a machete? I quickly forgot about Innocent, the poor murder victim, and started thinking about myself and my family and friends. Had I finally crossed the line? Had I been so naive all this time? I am living in Africa, I thought, in Uganda, in a country where I have watched a police officer beat a young man in the middle of the central police station; where cops rape poor, weak, defenseless women; where powerful leaders are trying to kill every gay man, woman, and child. And now my fight against these injustices was coming to bite me in the ass. My family and friends were right. I was being too provocative over here. I had crossed one too many powerful people. I was finished. I was scared.

But I was not stupid. I told the man that I would call him back. When I got to my office, I spoke with my organization's legal officer and executive director. They told me the obvious: speaking to this man could be crucial to our investigation, so we needed to find out as much as we could from him. We decided to have him come to our offices. There was no way he would harm any of us there.

I called the man and asked him how he could take me to Abitekaniza if Abitekaniza lives in Masindi, 3 hours outside of Kampala. He said that Abitekaniza was on a security detail here in Kampala and that he could bring me there. I told the mysterious man that I would not go anywhere with him until we sat down and spoke. I gave him directions to my office and told him to come by immediately. He said he would.

Two hours later, a tall, harmless looking, poorly dressed man entered our offices. He, another attorney from my organization, and I went into our conference room to talk. I asked him who he was and why he so badly wanted to take me to Abitekaniza. Three minutes later, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The man was a witch doctor.

According to this witch doctor, Abitekaniza’s family had hired another witch doctor in Masindi to protect Abitekaniza, to prevent the police from arresting him for Innocent’s murder. It appears to have worked since he wasn’t, and to this day hasn’t been, arrested. But when my colleagues and I showed up in Masindi to snoop around and I started calling Abitekaniza to try to meet with him, he got scared. So, his family got in touch with a higher-level witch doctor in Kampala to try to get me off his scent. That higher-level witch doctor was the person sitting in my office telling me this incredulous story.

Part of me thought this was all a joke; I asked the man right to his face whether he actually believed in witchcraft (dumb question, I know, but I just couldn’t believe this whole thing). He naturally confirmed that he did, and startlingly enough he’s not the only one. According to the premier independent newspaper in Uganda, 6 million Ugandans, or about 20% of the population, believe in these doctors’ special powers.

It turned out that Abitekaniza’s family had not been able to afford this particular witch doctor’s fee and so he was hoping to play the double agent game. He promised either to bring me to Abitekaniza so that I could interrogate the police officer or to get us whatever information, documents, photographs we wanted from Abitekaniza — all, naturally, in exchange for a fee. He was a scam artist, just like any self-professed sorcerer I might come across in the U.S.

We refused to pay the doctor but were able to learn some more important information from him about the case, so the meeting was helpful, and I was grateful for the call, despite being afraid for a little while.

For all I know, everything he said was a lie, and he actually was there to put some sort of spell on me. But spells are one thing I do not fear. Especially not from that witch doctor. He just didn't seem all that powerful.

A Salute to Bob Dylan

In the spirit of Bob Dylan, I've written some lyrics about the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and Bahati, using the same meter as Dylan's "Only A Pawn In Their Game." Just as Dylan saw the white man who shot Medgar Evers as a pawn in the Southern white politician's game, I see MP David Bahati as a pawn in the religious right's game.

Feel free to sing my lyrics to Dylan's melody. His lyrics. Dylan singing them.

My lyrics:

A member from the back of the room swore the end to all gays
He was about to begin a crusade
He promised to throw them in jail
Even those who wouldn't tell
Who else was gay
Well he'd make them pay
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game

A group of Americans preaches to this African man
You can become Uganda's president one day
It's a sure fire way to climb with no skills they say
With his parliament voice
Used in the course
Of the religious right's plan
To rid gays from the land
But Bahati'll still stand
Behind all their hands
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game

Ssempa and Amiza they both know to yell with such force
They've got so much passion in their voice
But Bahati can't speak, he just giggles to the world like a fool
Cause it ain't his rule
To be so cruel
He just wants to win
Even if through sin
So he will aid their hate
And watch Amiza state
Devilic is lezbian
Perhaps it's him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game

From a small village he came, he was a nobody
But they picked him to lead the hate parade
And they taught him to speak to the press
And to always suggest
That gay recruiters
With their sneaky lures
Convert straights to gays
All over the place
Bahati makes space
For these lies to be embraced
Maybe he is to blame
For being their pawn in this game

The day the first homo is locked up for being himself
Foreign funds will start flowing from this land
And organizations will shut, leaving folks in a rut
HIV in every hut
But Bahati won't care
Cause he'll have got a bigger share
Of people voting his name
So to him it's all the same
The man who's the pawn in their gay-me

The Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009

"You need to understand what really goes on in 'their' bedrooms. Let me show you," Pastor Martin Ssempa announced as he turned on a projector and showed a picture he "had found on the internet" of two men engaged in mutual masturbation.

This occurred at a meeting I recently attended that the Uganda Human Rights Commission hosted to understand people's views regarding the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009. (The Commission is an independent government body tasked with informing parliament about the human rights implications of proposed laws.) For those of you who don’t know, Member of Parliament ("MP") David Bahati has proposed this bill to punish many acts and omissions related to homosexuality, including performing homosexual acts, promoting homosexuality, and failing to report homosexuality. Probably even saying the word "homosexual" without a menacing tone will be grounds for punishment under this law, if enacted. Specifically, any homosexual act is punishable by life imprisonment, not “up to” life imprisonment; the punishment is simply "life imprisonment." Promoting homosexuality, which could mean anything, can land you in jail for a minimum of 5 years while not reporting that someone else is gay carries a penalty of 3 years imprisonment. The bill also levies hefty fines on those who promote or fail to report homosexuality ($50,000 USD for promoting, up to $6,000 USD for failing to report).

Uganda, interestingly, is a country where people of the same sex often walk down the street holding hands, where people of the same sex grab and rub each others' hands mid-conversation to add a physical dimension to the discussion. These are normal Ugandan idiosyncrasies, and nobody thinks of them as sexual. But that might change. If this law passes, people might start reporting to the police that they saw one man rubbing another's hand in the middle of a conversation. Let the witch hunt begin...

From what I can gather, this bill is pure politics. Most Ugandans are scared of homosexuality; they think it is weird and gross and a sin and must (and somehow can) be stopped. Most Ugandans also wholeheartedly believe that “the homosexuals” are recruiting straight people to perform homosexual acts. You hear countless stories here of people being offered money to engage in gay sex. The promoters of the bill claim to have verifiable statistics; they even brought a man to the meeting who had been raped by his male school teacher when he was a kid but has now been “cured” and is straight. He described how he engaged in these gay acts with his headmaster and only later learned that gay acts were wrong and became straight. No, he wasn’t gay; he was raped by a sick pedophile, but to this man, and to Pastor Martin Ssempa who brought this man to speak, the crime was not pedophilia; it was homosexuality.

The one nice thing about the "cured" man’s speech was that he was against the automatic life sentence and the death penalty in the bill (the punishment is death for having gay sex with someone under the age of 14, engaging in gay sex with your child, giving someone HIV during gay sex, having gay sex with someone who has a disability, or being a repeat offender) because then people like him would have ended up in jail without the chance at reform. Another “former homosexual” echoed those comments, angry that the bill did not contain a provision encouraging reformation of gays. “You don’t heal someone by harming them,” he said. "For example, you are not curing someone’s headache by smashing his head with a hammer. Loving, caring, and respecting individual rights is the only way to cure people.” Better than nothing, I guess.

When challenged at the meeting about the so-called “mass recruitment” of homosexuals, Pastor Martin Ssempa, the godfather of this bill, simply restated this odd idea without providing any of the objective statistics he claimed to have and moved on to his graphic pictures. He went into his tirade about what “goes on in ‘their’ bedrooms,” showing us four different images that he found on the internet of two men engaged in sexual acts: one of mutual masturbation (as I mentioned earlier), one of anal licking (“anal licking, anal licking, anal licking” – he seemed to really like that phrase), one of a man putting a plastic object in another’s butt (“the more pain, the more pleasure for them”), and one of fisting. His best line was, “where do we draw the line, when the fist is halfway inside the other man’s anus or all the way in?” I am not making this up.

Many other MPs and community leaders also spoke out against homosexuality and in favor of the bill. Other than Ssempa's, MP Isha Otto Amiza's comments stand out most in my mind. MP Amiza began his angry rant by noting that he would “try to control the level of emotions in me.” He certainly doesn’t get an A for effort. He “was surprised to hear Obama, an American president, with African blood, to say he was opposed to the bill.” He then pounded his fist on the table and explained to the crowd, “homosexuality is inhuman, unnatural, devilic, goes against the principles of humanity and nature. It is devilic. It should be fought relentlessly by god-fearing persons, by Christians. I would go an extra mile and ask the Muslims in Uganda to impose a Sharia on homosexuality.” I’m not sure he used the term “sharia” exactly right. Also, is "devilic" a word?

There were some bright spots, some courageous men and women who stood up and spoke out against the bill. Some maintained it was a human rights issue; others said homosexuality was a vice or disgusted them but imprisoning people for being gay (or performing gay acts) and for not reporting on people they “suspect” are gay is a harsh, cruel, and pointless law.

A university professor challenged Ssempa's use of homosexual internet pornography, noting without emotion that Ssempa easily could have found the exact same pictures where the actors were a heterosexual couple. The most eloquent of that group, however, was a retired army major. He simply said, “what is this bill about? Anal sex? If so, well heterosexual couples have a lot of anal sex too; why aren’t we banning them from doing it? Is it about procreation, about the continuation of the African community, the African family, as many of you have claimed? Well, then we must prohibit people from becoming priests and nuns because they too are not procreating, they are not continuing the African family.” I liked this guy. He was smart.

When it was Bahati’s turn to speak (the sponsor of the bill and the man whose name here is more associated with the bill than anyone else), the room fell silent. But Bahati just laughed. He kind of giggled about the bill and about the consequences. He seemed to think it was all a joke. He had no passion about the bill, the way Ssempa and Amiza did. He simply seemed to love the limelight. This is why I believe, as Bob Dylan would say, that Bahati is only a pawn in Ssempa and the religious right’s game. Elections are in early 2011. Bahati is getting an unbelievable amount of publicity out of this bill, which is resonating with the average Ugandan. Most Ugandans have no idea what the bill says; they just think it is against homosexuality, and so they are in favor of the bill. Politically, Bahati is benefitting immensely, but he doesn’t seem to have any real, gut-felt conviction about it, the way others did. I really think for him it is politics; for the others, it is religion and hate.

Voice of America, the U.S. government's official media service, speculated that the religious right in America are the real drafters of this bill. Yesterday, the New York Times confirmed it. In Uganda, however, it is Pastor Martin Ssempa, the man I keep coming back to and the man who set up a “task force to respond to the bully pulpit of Gordon Brown and Obama,” who is the real force behind the bill. He even defended the bill and compared it to American laws in a letter to Obama and Brown that he handed out at the meeting (on his website, Ssempa posted the letter he sent to Rick Warren, which is similar, but not identical to the one he addressed to Obama).

After displaying his pornographic pictures, Ssempa told the crowd at the meeting that although people describe the separation of church and state as a hallmark of modern government, it is not modern; it is Western. And Africa is not the West; in Africa, “you cannot separate God from the law” because “for the African, homosexuality is unacceptable. It violates all four types of laws.” The Law of Nature (“it is only natural for a man and woman to be together”), the Law of Culture and Ancestors (“this did not exist in the past in Uganda”), the Law of Our Faith – Muslim or Christian (Avner comment: umm...those also didn’t exist in the past in Uganda), and the Law of the Land (“the penal code"). “You cannot say all sins are equal. You can sin but possibly only break some of the 4 types of laws, not all 4. Homosexuality violates all 4. Get educated.” Ssempa then said that he had heard that aid money from the West would dry up if the bill passes. But he didn’t care: “We would rather die in dignity and honor” than fail to pass this bill. “Africa,” you see, “is leading the way from darkness into renaissance.”

A few moments later, the chairman took the microphone and said that “the temperature in the room was getting too high,” and so the meeting would end 3 hours early. It’s a shame because I would have enjoyed hearing some more from Ssempa and his clan. I was enjoying his crusade away from the “darkness” of “anal licking” and “fisting” and “the more pain the more pleasure” and into the “renaissance” of mandatory reporting, bans on free speech and free association, and life imprisonment for consensual sexual acts.

Kampala Central Police Station

Yesterday I watched a police officer beat a man with a cane. Viciously. In the middle of the Kampala central police station.

We were there to meet with a client who had been arrested on a bogus charge and to try to get him out on a police bond. Uganda has a fascinating bail/bond law that I don’t think exists in the United States. In the U.S., if you are arrested, you (are supposed to) get a bail hearing very quickly. At the hearing, the judge determines whether you can get out on bail (by paying a certain amount of money) or if you can go free on your own recognizance. Uganda is different, and strangely a little bit better. Here, you can get a police bond. If you get two people to come to the station and vouch for you before your bail hearing occurs, which typically (I think that should read “sometimes”) is within 48 hours of arrest, the police must release you under a police bond. You don’t have to pay anything. But you need to report to the police station on a specified date; by then the police should have completed investigating the crime and will decide what to do with you. You want to get out on a police bond because otherwise you’ll have your bail review hearing, and anything can happen. If you don’t have a lawyer and the court can’t find you one, the judge almost invariably will just “remand” you. Even with a lawyer, you very well might be "remanded." Being “remanded” is a very bad thing. It means you are sent to prison. Getting you out of prison is tough. Very tough. So, you want to get out on a police bond at all costs. That's why we were there—to get our client out on a police bond.

Now that you understand a bit of the legal background, I can get back to the beating. We sat in the lobby (if it can be called that), waiting for a local criminal defense lawyer / friend of my colleague to meet us and help us navigate the system. Every few minutes, several police officers entered, dragging two or three suspects past the lobby intake area and downstairs to the holding cells. I did not get to see the holding cells, but I hear they are tiny and packed with suspects. I hope to see and describe the holding area one day for you—preferably, not from the inside.

About ten minutes after we arrived, three police officers struggled to drag in a single man. The man was either drunk or high or crazy because he kept falling over as they dragged him through the police station. He was flailing his arms, struggling to break free. But he couldn’t. Not only because three cops were holding him, but also because one of the officers (he was young, younger than 25) pulled out a wooden cane, lifted it over his head, and beat down on the suspect. On his arms and on his legs. They took him around the back, behind the three desks in the lobby where officers sit (I'm not sure what they do), and that young officer beat him some more. Whack. Whack. Whack. Everyone could see it. Most people ignored it or didn’t notice it—perhaps because it wasn’t unusual. I stared. I couldn’t look away. It was gruesome.

The police station is an interesting place. When we arrived, my colleague put her purse and phone down on a table and walked through the metal detector. It beeped. She picked up her bag and phone and continued walking. I did the same. The detector beeped. Every time a person walked through, it beeped. The two guards, armed with rifles didn’t flinch, just sat chatting with each other. I assume (hope?) that it makes a different noise if someone has metal on them. It probably does, but in Kampala, you can never be sure, not even at the central police station. I say this because the police station has no security. You can walk anywhere, up the stairs, down the stairs, in the back, to the side, anywhere in the building, and nobody will stop you. No guards patrol, protecting the station. The only protectors are the two guards at the entrance not monitoring the never-ending beep-o-meter.

After we went through the detector, we sat and waited. I was the only white person in the station, and everyone stared at me. My coworker told me that the only non-black people who come to the police station are Human Rights Watch workers, so everyone just assumed that I was one.

In my first three posts, I refrained from using the terms white and black. But, I’ve begun to accept that refraining misleads my readers; ignoring the real facts on the ground over here only misrepresents the truth. There is black and white here. People distinguish by the color of one’s skin. Not in a nasty way, not in a negative way, but in a highlighting of differences way. And whites receive automatic, unearned respect from most people here. It’s strange; it’s uncomfortable. It's wrong, and it needs to change. But I’ll discuss this in more detail in another blog post. Back to the police station…

After the beating ended, my colleague’s friend arrived and we walked into some sort of records or booking room to find out where we could find the officer investigating the crime with which our client was charged. The room was tiny. A female cop sat behind the desk and owned that place. When our friend tried to explain what we needed, the cop pointed at the sign behind her that said visiting hours of inmates are between 7am and 8am, 1pm and 2pm, and 7pm and 8pm. It was 3pm. If we wanted to wait until 7, we could do that. She was very dismissive, but our friend persisted a bit, said something to her in Luganda, and she eventually opened a composition notebook on her desk. That was the only record of people brought in and arrested at the police station—a composition notebook. I’m sure the station stores the notebooks for the other weeks somewhere, but no central computer system contains all of this information.

She flipped to the date of arrest and we found the name of our client, the charge and the office number of the investigating officer. We climbed several flights of stairs and went to room 64, only to find out that she should have written 54 on the paper. We descended some stairs unaccosted, permitted to go wherever we wanted. We passed by the traffic court (a room filled with police officers deciding what fine to levy on the person arrested for a traffic violation; the person can appeal if she disagrees with the officer’s “judgment”). When we finally arrived in room 54, we spoke to the arresting officer and learned that our client already had been let out on a police bond.

Nobody had informed us. This is Kampala.

My First Outreach Meeting - Some Serious Frustration

It has taken a little over a week for me to become upset. I am now upset. Before arriving in Uganda, I knew that I’d have my work cut out for me. But only yesterday did I realize how important of an issue police corruption is here, how pervasive of a problem it is, and how it seeps into every element of life. We cannot help people unless we figure out a way to address police corruption (or at least, perhaps, to avoid any need for using the police).

I don’t know if this blog comes up in a google search. I don’t know if the government here monitors foreign tourists’ blogs. This might be a dangerous post, and perhaps I should keep all of this to myself. But I’ve always believed that giving people information is the best way to bring about change. Hiding bad information only prolongs the problem. Besides, I'm not important enough for anyone to be snooping, and everybody here talks openly about police corruption, so it isn’t as though I am divulging any secrets.

I went to an outreach meeting yesterday, where we spoke with young community leaders (men and women in their early twenties) who wanted to understand how they could help people in their communities. We taught them basic information about their inherent legal rights, the rights guaranteed to them by the constitution and the laws here. But, one guy in the audience stood up. He was angry. He used the word “confused” to describe his anger. He is a young civic leader, but one with no power. A frustrated leader. (This all took place in English by the way.) The young twenty-something said, “If I wake up in the morning and beat someone, the cops will come and take me away. But, I can be home 1 hour later if I pay the cops 10,000 shillings ($5 USD). What rights are you talking about? Those rights are being abused. I tell my landlord that I get paid on the 5th of the month and so won’t be able to pay rent until then. He tells me ok. When I come home from work on the first, the landlord has thrown all my stuff out because I didn’t pay rent. I tell him we had an agreement. He doesn’t care. I go to the police, but the landlord bribes the police and they beat me up, and I now have nothing. I go to the chairman (the head of the local government, called the local council), but the landlord is the secretary of the local council. The chairman does nothing. Are these rights? Is this right? You told me about the laws, about my rights, but you aren’t answering my question. What can we do?”

I stood up and told him, “What you are saying is that you don’t, you can’t trust the police. You can’t and don’t trust the local government. Is there anyone with power that you do trust? Anyone?” But he had no response. I asked if any of his relatives had friends in the police force, if he had friends with relatives in the police force, anybody he knew, some starting point of trustworthiness. But there was none. He had none.

This entire exchange really bothered me. Others spoke, explained similar problems. It all came down to the same thing.

How can I help develop a legal aid program here if there is no enforcement mechanism, if the enforcement mechanism is the problem itself? Is going to court here meaningless because there is no force behind any rulings? I've got a lot to learn. I know I can’t change Uganda. I’m sure others have tried to address this problem from the inside and out. I don’t know what to do. But, I better figure out something.

My First Child Labor Awareness Meeting

My first work-related assignment in Uganda was attending a child labor awareness meeting in a Kampala slum. We were in the Inkere Zone of the Kabuye Parish of Kampala’s Makindye division. (Kampala is a district, and like all districts in the country, it is split up into divisions, divisions into parishes, and parishes into zones. Hence, I was wrong in my previous posting when I said that the school was located in the Kyengera district of Kampala; it actually was outside of Kampala, in the Ugandan district of Kyengera.) We headed down the slum’s unpaved rocky, potholed dirt roads, which are lined with 2 foot deep ditches that serve as make-shift sewers. In some places, there are grates over the ditches, but in most places, if you aren’t looking you will just fall in. Even areas with grates can be dangerous because the metal rods are not sufficiently close together, so a child easily can get her foot stuck, as can a slender-footed adult.

Behind the ditch-sewer system are shacks, small shacks attached to shacks attached to shacks; these are all shops peddling fruit, eggs, milk, pots and pans, potatoes, you name it. Every shack has a sign in English: “Milk”; “Coca Cola”; “Yogurt.” Every 40 feet or so, a gap between the row of shacks serves as a path (a bumpy path that looks as though it was dug up unevenly with a shovel) to the little homes behind the shacks. We stayed on the “main road” lined with shacks, so I did not get a good glimpse of the houses beyond. Hundreds of people walk down the slum’s unpaved dirt roads at any given time.

Lots of children, all wearing the same plastic sandals, often much too big for their feet, run around or just sit on the ground next to (I assume) their parents who are trying to sell something out of their shop or on the street. Too many kids are forced to work in the Makindye division. The local, independent paper (there also is a government-run paper) reported yesterday that 12,700 children are in the informal work sector in Makindye alone.

As we entered the slum, a large truck blasting music was driving down the “main road.” The passenger was screaming something from the truck’s loudspeakers. My colleague explained that the truck was advertising a concert to be performed by Jose Chameleon, a famous Ugandan musician. A few minutes later, another similar truck drove by, this time telling the locals about a Weasel concert. Weasel is Chameleon’s brother, my colleague told me. “They are brothers, but they don’t talk,” she said. “Chameleon has been around longer. Weasel is better. They hate each other.” Well, now you know about the Chameleon-Weasel brotherly rivalry...

We arrived at our destination, the only bar/club in the slum; it’s about 25 feet long by 40 feet wide. Its width is about the size of 6 or 7 of the little shop-shacks surrounding it on both sides. The walls of the building are a thin, rusting tin. A courtyard greets you as you enter. The women and children (and the few men who attended) sat in the courtyard to listen to the speaker brought by my organization. In some spots, bamboo lines the inside part of the tin walls (not sure why). The speaker stood in front of the audience and presented. Behind the speaker was a small room with a pool table. Two local men – probably in their late teens or early twenties – were playing pool, drinking beers, and smoking cigarettes throughout the three hour presentation. They ignored the sign that said “No Smoking,” not disrespectfully, but simply because, I think, it didn’t actually mean “No Smoking.” I think it was just a piece of artwork the bar had on the wall, like the “Coca Cola” sign or the sign that said “a beer balanced to perfection” or the “Car Parking Behind” sign. There certainly was no parking in the back. The joint also didn’t have a “garden for all parties and leisure times,” despite the sign saying so.

My organization was there to teach the impoverished residents of the slum about Ugandan laws relating to children. Rather than presenting themselves, my colleagues bring in outside, local experts as speakers, which I think is an effective model because the local experts have real authority. The expert that day was a probation and welfare officer who focuses on child issues. He spoke for about two and a half hours and fielded questions from the audience of mostly women. He implored the adults to teach personal information to their kids. He said that kids often don’t know who they are and when they get lost or are abandoned, it becomes very difficult to find their families. By way of example, he called on a little boy and asked him, “What’s your name, boy?” The kid responded, “Boy.” “And your mom’s name?” “Mama.” “Your dad’s name?” “Dada.” “And where do you live?” “At home.” “And your dad, where does he work?” “At the shop.” Everyone laughed, but the probation officer made his point. A worrisome point.

After that, the probation and welfare officer spent about thirty minutes speaking directly to the kids who showed up (they got free muffins for coming; the adults, free sodas). He told them how important it is to go to school, not to be stubborn, and to do their reading. He told them the story that I told the school kids the next day (alluded to in my previous post). He said, “there was a kid who came home from school with poor grades and opened a soda. His father took the soda and poured it on the ground, telling the boy that a soda is a reward for good grades. Trying to incentivize his boy, the father told his son that if he comes home with good grades, he’d buy the boy an entire crate of sodas. The boy, upset, told his dad that he would get good grades, but he’d refuse a crate of sodas. Instead, he’d do so well in school that he’d get a good job one day and buy himself an entire truck full of sodas!”

All the kids in the crowd laughed and a good chunk of them seemed inspired. But nobody matched one boy who didn’t move from his seat and just stared with great focus at the speaker throughout the two and a half hour presentation. While the other boys fidgeted around, poked their friends, and only paid attention from time to time, this one boy didn’t move. He just stared and listened. When we left, I couldn’t get the little boy off my mind. I was sure that he’d learn his name, his parents’ names, where his parents’ work, and his home address. And he’d buy that truck of sodas one day, maybe even an entire warehouse.