That's what chemicals can do - Uganda

Some Thoughts on Justice and Reconciliation in Uganda

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 02:01:38 -0400

I promised I'd write about justice and reconciliation, so here's the first bit.

Many foreign NGO and aid workers in Gulu are focused on the role of justice and reconciliation in restoring peace in Uganda. As near as I can tell, justice simply means some sort of punishment and reconciliation means making sure the victims are happy or otherwise psychologically satisfied enough for the peace to last.

I have several problems with the debate as it stands. First is that nearly everybody has decided that any position that leads to punishment (e.g. prison sentences) is retributive. The word "retributive justice" gets thrown around a whole lot. Basically retributive justice is an approach to justice where you treat crimes and moral offensives as if they create a moral debt that need to be repaid. These depts are repaid by punishing people or filling some other obligations. In fact, the word "ought", which indicates moral duty, is an arcane past tense of "to owe", which highlights the "paying your debt" theme of retributivists. Another way of putting it is that retributivists think people should be punished simply because they've committed a wrong and independent of how that punishment will effect anything else.

There's some theoretical merit to retributivism, but most liberals have abandoned it. This is partially because retributivism makes the most sense if you believe in an identifiable, objective, and final moral law that exists independently of societies. Traditionally, this means you're a creationist of sorts. I guess you could also be an evolutionary retributivist (if certain moral intuitions evolved to be universal) but I don't see that as being a particularly fruitful project.

At any rate, the most common alternative to retributivism is utilitarianism of one form or another. Utilitarians punish people only insofar as it is believed to be good for society as a whole. They tend to support things like rehabilitation and alternate therapies if they are more effective than punishment. For example, a utilitarian might advocate voluntary chemical castration for rapists whereas a retributivist would demand imprisonment even if imprisonment somehow increased the overall amount of rape in the world.

I don't think this distinction is entirely semantic in the Gulu context. One of the things that bugs me about people who confuse all justice with retributive justice is that many people seem to be under the impression that the LRA leaders are just bad people and that they deserve to be harmed because they're such jerks. Many Ugandans express feelings that LRA leaders should be mutilated, castrated, raped, and so forth.

This reminds me of what US Supreme Court Chief Justice Stone said about the Nuremberg Trials (where they tried the Nazis). He said (pulling the language of the quote from wikipedia)

[Chief US prosecutor] Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,....I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.

So the approach being taken in Uganda is similarly a high-grade lynching party. Except in this case, there is more wheeling and dealing about who gets lynched and who gets to walk. And all of this shadiness is in aid of "reconciliation", which means we don't want to piss too many people off.

I say tough. No offense to the victims of this or any other conflict, but they don't get to dictate what happens to the offenders. If you let victims decide punishments, you get an arbitrary system where it's much better to commit crimes toward the forgiving than the surly. But surely justice should be independent of how blood-thirsty or exhausted the victims are.

Uganda provides a chance for the International Criminal Count (ICC) to gain some teeth. This is important for the same reason Stone opposed the Nuremberg trial. War crime punishments can only be taken seriously if there's a credible independent international institution that decides on the appropriate punishments. Undermining the ICC because it's perceived as a slowing force in the negotiations -- or because it wants to punish too many or too few people -- is shameful for the foreign NGO crowd.

So both the focus on retribution and reconciliation seem to be much too based in mob justice for my taste. But perhaps this is a natural result of believing that non-arbitrary justice is too "western" and shouldn't be imposed on Africa. I find that argument as persuasive as saying that not having to bribe government officials is an American colonialist value. Some things are objectively better than others. A non-arbitrary judicial system is better than mob rule.

Back to the First World (Hurray Infrastructure!)

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:20:58 -0400

I'm currently eating delicious foods at Heathrow in England. I'm quite excited about seeing my friends soon. I'm also excited about the existence of a proper infrastructure: high quality running water, ubiquitous Internet, proper roads, properly maintained vehicles, enforced safety regulations, decent sanitation, a culture of acceptable customer service, etc.

The lack of infrastructure in Uganda (and especially in Gulu) is quite sad. For all the talk there is about development, there's very little talk about boring things like paving roads. It's relatively clear that simply paving the road from Kampala to Gulu would drastically decrease the cost of traveling and shipping goods. Raising income is one way of increasing prosperity, but so is decreasing prices (a point that I think many including me miss when we criticize ultra-cheap stores in the US). It would also decrease the wear on vehicles, allowing them to be kept in service longer and probably saving money in the long run. That's not to mention reducing the average cost of vehicles if it's no longer the case that the only usable car-sized vehicle is a Toyota Land Cruiser. But for whatever reason, it's not cool to talk about development in terms of infrastructure anymore. And one thing I've noticed about mzungus in Gulu it's that the hipness of your project matters a great deal.

(Also, how awesome would it be to run fibre optic cable to Gulu??? But that's another issue.)

(Also, why the heck is there virtually NO solar power???)

Anyway.

From now on, very few of these blog posts will be focused on convincing my family that I'm alive. They'll start to focus on various thoughts about the mind and how it works and why. So if you're not interested in that, you may wish to filter out all the non-personal entries.

There are several Gulu-related blog posts I hope to make, however. They include (1) my thoughts on this whole retributive justice versus restorative justice thingy, and (2) my analysis of blogger optimality and inefficiency (in the sense that a network of bloggers is optimal or inefficient, not that any specific blogger is).

Coming Home Soon

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 01:40:01 -0400

I'll be heading back to the states on the 20th of this month. Everyone who needs a copy of my itinerary should have one from before. I am looking forward to coming home for many reasons, but I also wish I could have done more here in Uganda. There were several projects (about 4 or 5) that I wasn't able to complete largely because of bureaucratic issues at one place or another. But I suppose that's to be expected to some extent.

My friends Rebekah and Carrie and Halle are visiting Gulu from Kampala. It's always good to see them, although Rebekah and Carrie are typically tied up with a student group they're leading. I'm going to miss a lot of my friends here when I'm gone, and so many of them are not going to be around Connecticut any time soon. It makes me sad that I may never see them again. But I guess that's what the Internet is for.

My current plan is to fly into New York and take a train down to Baltimore for a couple of days. Then I'll drive my car up to New Haven. My dad says he has a bike he can give me, so I'm excited about being able to bike around town when I get back to school.

I have a lot of blog posts in my mind about more substantive things, but I think I'll save that for when I have more time to write.

Global Voices Online

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 01:21:13 -0400

A friend of mine in Kampala pointed me to a blog aggregator called Global Voices Online. I think it's extremely well done and the blogs it has seem to be very interesting.

Strangely, though, the page is something of a beast to download. Each post on the front page has its own image file. There's also a big image for the logo and one at the bottom for each sponsor. Finally, the navigation relies on javascript with image files for icons.

This is a really odd design for a site that's supposed to be accessible throughout the developing world, and even more so since its job is to deliver simple text. A far better design would be to strictly use HTML for all the text (including replacing the logo) and CSS for all the design. Most of my blog is done that way, thanks to Serendipity, which is the software that runs it. I think it looks perfectly nice and it's much less of a beast.

The Global Voices Digest does a better job of being lightweight, but it's not very pretty.

General Update

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 03:22:14 -0400

Things in Gulu continue to go well. It seems to me that the longer I spend here the fewer interesting things I have to blog about. I know that's not objectively true...I'm just becoming accustomed to the lifestyle here.

Rebecca and I are continuing to work on several projects, but some of them require a little secrecy while we're here so I can't blog about quite yet. I am very excited about them though, and it makes me feel like I want to come back after spending another semester at school. I'd have to work that out with Yale, but I think it should be possible if I get all of my non-research requirements out of the way.

I've started to use my miox purifier just about every day. Instead of buying bottled water I fill up two Nalgenes with tap water and add the purifing mixture to them. They taste fine and I haven't had a problem so far. As a result, I have much more water than I would ordinarily have, and I feel less bad about it when I use it for things other than drinking (e.g. when I brush my teeth with it).

I almost have unlimited Internet on my phone. I signed a contract with MTN (the cell company I use here) for unlimited GPRS Internet. It takes 48 hours to process and the papers probably didn't go in until Thursday. By Monday everything should have gone through. Once that happens I'll be able to upload pictures and things. As it stands, I can view web pages and be on IM, but sending things is simply too expensive.

This weekend we're thinking about hanging out by the pool. And by "the pool" I mean the one pool that exists in Gulu. I haven't been there yet, but I hear it's not bad. I look forward to being able to swim.

Packing List

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 03:16:43 -0400

I thought a lot about packing before I came to Uganda, and I read some peoples' packing lists. They helped me out a lot, so I thought I'd post mine.

Gadgets

Gadgets are vitally important in traveling. I'm mostly happy with what I brought. There are a few things that I would have changed if I could (such as my laptop) and some that really have worked out well.

Laptop: iBook G4. This is Yale's computer and I would really rather not be using it. It's too slow and it has only one mouse button which is really just unacceptable in this day and age. I got around this by buying a wireless mouse. I would strongly prefer to have my thinkpad except that my thinkpad is new and expensive and I didn't want to break it. I swapped OS X out for Kubuntu Linux and that has made some things easier, but their power-pc release is unofficial and therefore somewhat buggy.
iRex iLiad e-ink reader. This is one of the best things I've ever owned. It's for reading e-books. The e-ink display is very crisp (unlike an LCD screen) and has no backlight (again unlike an LCD screen). My understanding is that once a page is displayed it does not use power to continue to display it. So the power consumption is minimal. It also vastly beats the my old Sony Reader because it has a bigger screen, built in wireless, and is a Wacom tablet, which means I can write on it with a tablet pen.
GSM mobile phone. In the US, GSM is the older and worse-performing network. However, it's the network supported by the bulk of the world and if you're going to travel you will need a GSM phone. Most people here buy cheap Nokias when they arrive, and there are certainly many to choose from. I brought my own, a Motorola ROKR E6 that I am very pleased with. Its purpose in life is to be a phone/mp3 player, so it comes bundled with RealPlayer, which actually works very well. It also has all the typical smart phone features you want (imap and pop3 e-mail, GPRS, bluetooth, SD card support). It lacks some of the nicer features, but then again so does the iPhone. On the other hand it's cheaper than the iPhone, has been out for much longer, and has more my style of user interface. When I got to Uganda, I bought a pay-as-you-go card from MTN. After a little work I was able to get GPRS Internet to work on the same card, and Googling things and checking my e-mail ends up being cheaper than making calls. I can also tether it to my computer and use the Internet anywhere there's a cell phone signal. But that's a post in itself.
Camera. I got an new camera, a digital SLR so that I could use telephoto lenses. I love it so far.

Clothing

As far as I know, Uganda has public nudity laws. I keep the police at bay with these items.

2 pairs of ex-officio travel underwear. I'm not sure yet whether this was a good decision. The idea is to wear one pair and wash the other every day. I'm not sure that springing for the more expensive travel underwear has had any effect on my well-being. I could use a third pair because sometimes it's rainy and things don't dry quickly.
two high-tech travel shirts. I'm pretty sure these weren't a great idea. They're all micro-fibre-y and feel kinda weird and gross on my skin. They don't seem to be lighter or dry any faster than my other shirts. Maybe once it gets super-hot I'll notice the difference.
three pairs of shorts. These have been fine. They're all travel shorts, which actually does make a difference because cotton shorts always take forever to dry.
one pair of pants. I like these so far. I've only worn them once, which was yesterday.
sun hat. I haven't worn this yet, and I'm going to look like a total goofball when I do. I'm sure in the hot days, though, it will come in handy.
sandels. I brought a pair of Reef from about a year ago that I like. I tried to get the Reefs with the bottle opener on the bottom of the shoe, but they didn't arrive in time.
running shoes. I usually run an hour every day. I forgot my running shoes however. I did buy new ones yesterday and I'm excited to go running again.
three pairs of socks. I remembered to bring these, but they do me no good without running shoes. I opted for the high-tech lightweight running socks. I'm not sure whether this was worth it or not.
two bandanas. Best purchase ever. These were like $1.99 a piece and are crazy multi-purpose. I bought a blue one and a red one in case I run into either the Bloods or the Crips.
sun glasses. I bought these pretty much on a whim. I got the Bolle five-o aviator style sunglasses and I like them a whole lot. They're very light weight and are great at blocking out harmful sun rays while also giving a good color range. They're also great for keeping dust out of your eyes on long boda rides.

Toiletries

In the words of DJ Funk, you need soap and water.

toothbrush and toothpaste. Duh.
Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap. I started using this when I was on a quest for animal-free biodegradable soap (most soap is actually pretty bad for the environment it turns out). Dr. Bronner's won my affections because they would sell it to me in bulk, thus allowing me to be conscientious and also spend less money overall on soap. Traveling with it is just great too since you can use it as shampoo and body wash. You can also brush your teeth with it, but I haven't tried. My only regret is that I didn't bring more.
2 toilet rolls. I brought this assuming I would be using latrines mostly. I probably didn't need it, but a friend of mine had no toilet paper and was thankful I had it.
sanitary wipes. These are multi-purpose. So far their purpose has been wiping the disgusting dust off my face and arms after a long boda ride to the camps.
hand sanitizer. Very important. I bought a ton of this before I came. I got a pack of smaller bottles for my day pack and a couple of bigger bottles for my room.
straight razor, strop, brush, and
soap. Again the environment. Straight razors are better shaves and don't require you filling up landfills with 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-blade razor cartridges. They're great for travel because the selection of razor blades here is different and I probably wouldn't be able to find mach-3 blades easily. Also, unless you're staying for about a year, they don't need to be sharpened. I no pack mine into my day pack because they're much better at shaving around wounds should you fall in the dirt and scrape your knee. Not that I have any experience with this.
safety razor. Straight razors require a strop. Sometimes you need to sleep somewhere else for a few days and want to pack light. I brought a Merker razor that I love. It takes double-edged blades like your grand-daddy's razor did. The blades have two sides, which means twice the shaves, and they are entirely made of metal, which makes them easier to recycle. The blades are easy to get here although you have to send away for them in the states.

Safety

I've been accident-prone since I've gotten here. These items help me
not die as quickly.

medical kit. I got a fancy medical kit from Adventure Medical Kits. This was essentially pushed on me by Travel Medicine, where I ordered a much cheaper medical kit that they
were out of. This one cost around $200 and includes a disposable scalpel, duct tape, and stitches among other things. The duct tape has proven very useful. I have not yet used the scalpel or the stitches.
isopropyl alcohol. For cleaning cuts and stuff. Hard to find around these parts. They use iodine instead.
hydrogen peroxide. This is my favorite way to clean wounds because it bubbles white in a very satisfying way. I'm not sure if it's any better or worse than iodine or alcohol. My bottle broke during transit (or maybe when they lost my bags) and spilled all over my stuff. Then I had to clean everything and buy more.
miox water purifier. This was Russ's idea, and the device is very cool. It basically creates some sort of mixed oxidents from saltwater by applying electricity. It purifies a lot of water and is the size of a marker. I
haven't had to use it yet because bottled water is plentiful.
swiss army knife. I bought this in Switzerland a long time ago. I use it just about every day in the states and several times a day here. Very useful for cutting bandages and so forth.
larger knife. The knives in swiss army knives and leathermen (leathermans?) are weak and for wusses. You need a bigger knife if you want to cut things like rope or fruit.
flashlights. I brought several flashlights, some of which were stolen I think. I use my mini-maglite a lot (it turns into a candle, which is extremely useful when the power goes out). I also have a Petzl head lamp and some flashlights that don't require batteries (thanks mom!). I had a big maglite that I loved dearly. It didn't turn into a candle, but you could sure as hell bludgeon a rhino with it if it came to that. Sadly somebody took it.
mosquito net, bug repellent.
You don't want to get yellow fever.

Stuff I Should Have Brought

Travel Radio. My mom very thoughtfully bought me a Grundig world radio when I was first planning to go to Africa about three years ago. It gets the BBC basically anywhere in the world. It's somewhere in a box in New Haven.

Linksys WRT54G Wireless Router. The Linksys WRT54G is a fantastic wireless router that was fairly cheap, very common, and has open-sourced its firmware. This allowed several folks to hack the router to do much cooler things, like repeat wireless signals (for when there is a signal far away that you would like to bring closer), extend its range, work as a wireless card for computers without wireless, and many other things. We have two of these laying around in New Haven, and I very nearly popped one in my bag before I left. It would have been useful in Kampala for stealing wireless or making non-wireless internet wireless. Bubbles O'Leary in Kampala has a router that uses the dd-wrt firmware with the default login and password. This lets you control who can hook up to the router, which comes in handy when too many people are slowing down your Internet. However, I imagine if you do this repeatedly they'll ask you to leave their establishment or at least change the password.

Longish Update

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 11:21:06 -0400

This is my third attempt to write this update. Both times the Internet ate the update. I tried to update a couple of days ago but it just didn't work out.

The Internet here is horribly slow. Right now it's at about 700B/s. My Internet in the states is around 8Mb/s, which is about 1,000,000 B/s. So even when I get to an Intetrnet cafe, it's painful to load even the simplest webpage like Google. So I have come down to Kampala for the weekend to use the Internet.

Gulu so far is very good. I was originally planning to stay with my research assistant Rebecca, but decided to get a hotel room instead. Rebecca's place doesn't have running water or a generator. Generators are needed because the power in Gulu goes out quite frequently. She also lives about a restaurant where they frequently slaughter chickens and leave dead chicken bits on her stairs. So that's kind of gross.

The hotel is pretty nice. The staff there are welcoming, and it has many modern niceties, like toilets and showers. Food in Gulu is pretty bad, but the hotel lets us use their kitchen. The other day we made quesadillas with the local tortilla-like bread and they were delicious! There's also a new restaurant that caters to the white NGO crowd and has donuts, vegetable sandwhiches, vegetable pizzas, and proper coffee. I think I'm going to end up eating the vast majority of my meals at this place since it's far and away the best food in Gulu right now.

Gulu town is surrounded by Internally Displaced Persons camps (or IDP camps). These are like refugee camps except that they are refugees from an internal war and therefore don't get international refugee status. The camps consist largely of huts with a few simple building for medical centers and the like. These buildings tend to have been donated by NGOs. There are farm animals running around everywhere and a ton of little kids. The kids get very excited when they see white people, and they run to the side of the road and yell "Muno!! Bye!!" and wave excitedly. "Muno" basically means "white person", and they yell "bye" to mean both "hello" and "goodbye". I'm not sure they know what it means, but they very much enjoy yelling it.

Conditions in the camp are poor, but the people seem happy, and they laugh and joke a lot, which is good. The insides of the huts are actually sometimes pretty nice. The only one I've seen so far had a sofa, an easy chair, a coffee table and a radio, all of which were nicer than typical frat house furniture.

Getting around Uganda is often done by boda-boda which is a motorbike taxi. The boda-boda drivers are everywhere and can be quite harrassing. You can read about them here: wikipedia entry on boda bodas. I try not to take the boda-bodas in Kampala because the streets are densely packed with cars and people and the boda drivers drive like madmen.

A typical day so far goes something like this. I wake up at 8:30 and meet Rebecca for breakfast where we discuss what we need to do that day. Typically we do some computer work (writing etc) for a couple of hours and then head to an IDP camp around 1. We spend the rest of the day in the camp conducting interviews or talking to people. Then we head back and get dinner and then either do more computer work or hang out with other people at a bar. Despite the low quality of the food, the local beer is actually not bad. It's slightly better than something like Natty Bo.

I took some pictures, which you can see here: Uganda photo gallery. I also have a couple of videos, but I have to figure out how to convert them before I post them.

Still no sign of bags

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 08:29:57 -0400

So we called the airport today and they said my bags were coming in on a flight. Then we drover 40 minutes to get them and they told me not only were they not there but that there was no new information about them from yesterday. So, I still have no clothes or toiletries.

On the plus side, I was able to find an ATM and withdraw some Ugandan Schillings. I used these to buy a sim card. The phone number is 0773184736. You can call me internationally if you want. I checked out the phone forwarding service, but it doesn't work outside the US.

Safe in Kampala, bags lost

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:06:06 -0400

So I've safely arrived in Kampala and I'm staying here tonight. My bags are not here with me, however. I think the British Airways people are ultimately to blame. They should be in Uganda by now, but the airport hasn't called so I can't be sure.

I am going to get a sim card that allows me to make calls here. For the parents, that means I will have cheap cell phone access only in Uganda. Russ told me about a free service that lets me forward calls from any number to any other number. I am going to try to forward my 410 number to the new sim card, and I will let you all know if or when that happens. For right now I don't have any Ugandan cash and they don't take debit cards.

Uganda Trip 2007 - Introduction

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:26:18 -0400

Hi everyone! This is going to be the site of my travel blog while I'm in Uganda. It will also contain some things that aren't from my trip. You should ignore those things if you aren't interested in them. The easiest way to ignore them is to use the URL I sent to you, which is

http://blog.greglaun.org/index.php?/categories/5-Uganda

This filters out content not related to Uganda.

Uganda Trip 2007 - Pictures

nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:19:53 -0400

Pictures from the Uganda trip will be available at http://greglaun.org/gallery2 under a to-be-created photo album. You can download all of my pictures in bulk from this album by putting the album in a cart and then checking out. It may be hard to use. If you can't figure it out, ask an Internet-savvy friend or family member. I probably won't be able to troubleshoot things from far away.

I will post especially nice pictures here in this blog, or perhaps post a notice here when I add more pictures to the album.

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nospam@example.com (Greg Laun) — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

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