Stories from the Field: September

A South Sudanese refugee, Muzee, with rope meticulously woven from food ration bags

Dear all,

As always, I hope this finds you well! September was a very rich month of fieldwork for us. Many touching stories, beautiful weather, laughter, and taking things a bit slower.

One September bonus has been the arrival of pumpkins to the Point J marketplace. The Point J market is very seasonal-- pretty much the opposite of an American grocery store. Some produce, like cabbage and tomatoes, are available most of the year, while others, such as mangoes and fresh groundnuts, will be abundant for a few weeks and then one day just disappear. Right now orange, hard-fleshed, delicious pumpkins are having their moment.

A refugee family prepares pumpkin and greens for lunch

We wrapped up research with Zone 1 participants on the refugee side last week. I have been deeply touched by all of the participants we have worked with so far, but two stories really stood out and I'd like to share them with you. I'll also share that both participants consent to sharing their stories as follows, and their names have been changed to protect anonymity:

Neima

"Neima" is a South Sudanese refugee in her mid-40s, and running her household of seven as a single mother. After completing our interview with Neima, she led us down the rocky slope away from the settlement boundaries to show us where she collects firewood. As we moved into the bush, she immediately began pointing out a variety of familiar edible and medicinal species, though using names which we never heard before. We learned that, as a child, her family was displaced during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005) to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Her family is ethnically Sudanese Kakwa but, as refugees in DRC, they lived among Congolese Kakwa. So the plant names she picked up are all in Congolese Kakwa.

Neima identified leafy greens in the bush which no other participant has identified, telling us how they were cooked for survival during her childhood displacement. Rather than discounting the greens as valuable only during times of war, as I might have expected, she emphasized how nutritious they are, saying that consuming them is essentially the same as taking medicine given benefits such as lowering blood pressure, and she continues to eat them today. She also taught us about a concoction of multiple plants for treating cough, with leaves boiled together into a tea, including those of Ocimum basilicum and Piliostigma thonningii.

Neima with some of the plants she regularly harvests from the bush to treat cough

Neima took us to some newly-cleared host agricultural land about 2 miles from her home with piles of branches set aside for firewood. As we passed by the home of the host landowners, a female host came out to greet us, running right up to our participant and giving her a hug. The two women smiled and embraced, and then our participant broke into fluent Lugbara (the language spoken by hosts).

As Neima and her host friend chatted away, Alex and I looked at each other with surprise, as most of our refugee participants thus far have little to no knowledge of Lugbara. We later learned that during her teenage years, Neima's family was again displaced as refugees in the northwest tip of Uganda, which is where she learned to speak Lugbara. Neima told us that learning a language is not hard if you make friends with people who speak that language. Her advice: learn a few new words each day, and within a year, you will be fluent. Neima told us that her knowledge of Lugbara and friendship with hosts has helped her gain access to resources such as firewood. She also has become a "bridge" between Kakwa-speaking refugees and Lugbara hosts, helping to negotiate their use of resources such as land and firewood.

Neima (right) and her host friend (left)

I was touched that Neima has made such a strong effort to learn languages in her life, given that she never was able to attend school. School was not available while her family was displaced in DRC. By the time they arrived to northern Uganda, Neima was a teenager and was bullied in the primary school classrooms by young students for being too old, to the extent that she ended up dropping out. The northern Uganda refugee settlement where her family stayed was eventually terrorized in the early 2000s by the Lord's Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony, and her family decided to return to South Sudan. But in 2017, civil strife and violence against civilians in South Sudan again forced her again to return to Uganda with her children-- now her third time living as a refugee.

Muzee

"Muzee" (an honorific term for older men) is a South Sudanese refugee in his late 70s. He lives in Imvepi with the wife of his now-deceased brother. When we first came to meet Muzee, and every time we arrived thereafter, we found him reclining on a wooden chair, picking apart the plastic strands of woven food ration bags, and carefully rewinding them together into ropes for tethering goats or cattle which he sells to neighbors.

Muzee twisting plastic fibers into rope

Something about Muzee enchanted both Alex and I from the start-- a certain buoyancy and playfulness, despite having insufficient resources and some serious health challenges. We learned from our interviews with Muzee that he fled South Sudan with his sister-in-law, who has quite a limp and partially blind, while his grown son and daughters stayed back in South Sudan. He shared that he and his sister-in-law struggle intensely with hunger in Imvepi, especially as food rations have declined steeply in recent years. At one point, he used to occasionally receive remittances to his cell phone from a son in South Sudan, but then lost the phone and now has no way of receiving the assistance.

To look for firewood, Muzee took us to the rental land of a friend and member of the same ethnic group. Both the friend and the host owner of the land know about Muzee's challenges and have granted him permission to collect wood on that land. Given his frailty, Muzee could only carry a small bundle of branches weighing about 7 kg.

When we returned to the home, we found his sister-in-law picking sesame seeds from their shells. She explained to us how she will toast the sesame seeds with fresh pumpkin seeds, then mash them into a paste to cook with pumpkin greens and serve with boiled pumpkin. Even the sesame seed pods and stems will be burned and the ash used to make a local salt. No part of the plants goes unused.

Sesame seed husks for making ash salt (left) and mixed pumpkin and sesame seeds (right)

I wanted to find some way to support the elderly couple with acquiring a phone so that they might be able to regain communication with their children in South Sudan. I cannot simply hand out extra gifts or payments to participants outside of the standardized research compensation provided. But then I remembered the rope. I decided to buy some of Muzee's ropes, several of which Alex is now using for tethering his goats, which provided Muzee the small funds needed to purchase a simple phone. The following day, when we went to interview one of Muzee's neighbors, she told us that Muzee was so overjoyed the prior evening that he ran around collecting all of his neighbor's phone numbers before even buying the phone or SIM card, which brough big smiles to our faces.

Muzee (center) with my assistants Robilert (left) and Alex (right)

Host side

With the hosts, we are currently working off of a participant list that lacks any participant phone numbers. So this means a lot of riding around in the bush to look for participants, asking neighbors for directions, then trying to interpret what was meant by instructions such as: "turn left at the big mango tree." One time we had to take a young boy along with us in order to find a participant, interrupting him from making bird-hunting slingshots with his friends.

Our own GPS, guiding us through the back pathways of Amia village

One theme on our host firewood walks has been the use of specific tree species for dental care. Some hosts will dig up pieces of root from Acacia hockii and place it between their molars overnight to "deworm" the teeth. Others use sticks from a species called "Nayia" (yet to be scientifically identified) to scrub the teeth thoroughly each morning when there is not money for buying toothpaste. Robilert taught me how to chomp on the end of the stick to make a brush with the fibers and then scrub each tooth.

Tooth-brushing with Nayia sticks

I also have been impressed by the creative methods hosts use to bring down dried and dead tree branches as firewood. One man used a hanging vine from a tree to tie a hook-shaped piece of wood to a long pole, which he used to pry branches from tree tops. Another climbed far into the canopy of a tree, throwing down branches as Robilert and I tried to dodge out of the way. This is a very different approach to harvesting firewood from that of refugees, many of whom lack access to large trees with lots of dried material, and instead often resort to cutting wet and thorny Acacia stems.

A host creatively devised a hooked pole to draw down dead branches as firewood

A visit from Cathy Watson and team

We were really fortunate this week to have some visitors. Cathy Watson, a Senior Advisor at CIFOR-ICRAF/ World Agroforestry came, along with her driver and a young landscape architect, to sketch out some of the tree-growing models on refugee and host plots around Imvepi and neighboring Rhino Camp. They are interested in demonstrating how trees can be succesfully integrated with other household features such as livestock, gardens, and homes, even on small plots. Cathy is one of the people who initiated CIFOR-ICRAF's agroforestry initiative in Imvepi and Rhino Camp, and I am deeply indebted to Cathy for drawing me to Imvepi as an intern with that program in 2022. It was a real pleasure getting to meet her in person, and fascinating to watch as the landscape architect methodically counted and measured every tree, household feature, and distances in between on paper. She will later digitize the sketches using computer software.

With Cathy Watson (left) and landscape architect Rehema measuring trees and spacing on a refugee plot (right)

I will leave off there for today. Wishing you a beautiful start to October! I look forward to writing again soon.