DOCUMENTING STRUGGLES OLD AND NEW
Ashley Moradipour (BFA/TV Broadcast Journalism '14) films a village micro-loan meeting in northern Uganda.
From the modern city of Kampala, to the small town of Kitgum, to a tiny Batwa village near the Congo border, students were surprised and touched by the struggles of the people of Uganda in Professor Jeff Swimmer’s class, Destination: Africa. Every year since 2009, students have traveled Malina Fagan (BFA/Film Prod. ‘14) on location to a different country to document the work in southern Uganda. of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Africa. The students broke into groups to film three separate documentaries. The first group worked with Grassroots Reconciliation, an organization in Kitgum that partners victims and victimizers of the Ugandan Civil War so that they can talk and begin to heal each other’s emotional scars. The second documented the lives of Batwa tribe members who have been displaced from their lands in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest when the government turned it into a national park and animal sanctuary. The third worked with the organization Youth on Rock in Kampala to document their experience fighting Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill which, if passed, would criminalize homo-sexuality in the country.
“I was surprised by the energy these people had,” says Nathan Skeene (BFA/Film Prod. ’14), who worked on the Kampala documentary. “I had this mental image of a miserable people forced to live in abject poverty because of their sexual identity. That part was there, but it was exciting to see them thriving in a strong community that they had built together. They even have a performance group, called the Rock Angels. We didn’t get to see a full performance, but they did demonstrations for us and it was just surprising that they still had the desire to put together this performance after all they’d been through. It took me off guard.” Destination: Africa is an interdisciplinary, three-course series that involves students from Dodge College, Wilkinson College and the School of Law. The program is possible thanks to a generous $1 million donation from an anonymous donor for the purpose of profiling NGOs in the developing world. Although the program’s first trip was to Cambodia in 2008, in 2009 the program was refocused on the work of NGOs throughout the African continent.
Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.
PAUL THEROUX, GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR
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Students follow a family displaced from their ancestral lands by the Ugandan government in the 1990s.