An Introduction to Kisoro

Uganda will be our home for the next year. In just a few weeks I will be waking up in the town of Kisoro, in a house across from the district hospital. This will be normal. Until then I am trying to learn what I can about the place – about the town of Kisoro itself and the whole district of Kisoro. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Where is it?

Let’s start with the country of Uganda. It is in East Africa, bordered by Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Sudan and Tanzania. It contains a big portion of Lake Victoria – the biggest lake on the continent and the source of the Nile River.

Kisoro is a town, small by US standards, in the southwest corner of the country. It is only 6 miles from the Democratic Republic of Congo and about 4.5 miles from Rwanda. Kampala, the capital of the country, is about 300 miles to the northeast, a 9 hour car ride, we've been told, over bumpy roads. About 12,900 people live in Kisoro town and over 240,000 live in the villages around Kisoro district. A big part of the Doctors for Global Health program (that we'll be working for) is training Village Health Workers (VHWs) who are from these villages or can travel out to them to provide basic healthcare and recognize when a villager needs care at the district hospital.

Kisoro is just a little ways south of the equator and so the weather stays pretty consistently warm. Being up in the mountains (about 6,000 ft above sea level) will keep us cooler than other parts of the country. According to what I've read, the average annual temperatures never go much above the mid-70s or much below the mid-40s. That sounds just fine to me.

What’s the terrain like?

Mt. Nyamuragira

This part of Uganda is famous for its natural beauty: Steep mountains, thick jungles, sparkling lakes. I hope we'll have lots of time to explore it all.

Kisoro is surrounded by the eight volcanic peaks of the Virunga Mountains. The name comes from ibirunga, the Kinyarwanda word for volcano. One of these peaks, Mount Nyamuragira, erupted as recently as 2012!

Kisoro sits between two national parks (Mgahinga and Bwindi) which together contain the entire world’s population of critically-endangered mountain gorillas. That number is around 800 now and will hopefully continue to grow thanks to conservation efforts. These rare gorillas are a major tourist draw and big reason the parks were created in the first place. Guides have worked for years to slowly and carefully get the giant and reclusive gorillas used to the presence of humans. This has made it possible for outside tourists to safely view them from a distance but it has also made the gorillas bolder around human farms at the edges of the park. Imagine 500 lb. garden pests that can snap a tree with their bare hands!

Mountain Gorilla

Mgahinga and Bwindi are incredibly thick with diverse plant and animal life. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme, Bwindi alone contains 120 species of mammals, 348 species of birds, 1,000 different species of flowering plants, and over 100 species of ferns! All of that in the area of Manhattan and Brooklyn combined (128 sq.mi.). Preserving all of this life has come at the cost of the livelihood of farmers who live near the parks, who now have to farm elsewhere. Those who lived in it (like the Batwa pygmy people) were kicked out and, in most cases, not compensated for their losses.

Lake Mutanda

Lake Bunyonyi is a long, branching body of water with lots of little inlets. It is rumored to get as deep as 2,952 feet – making it the second deepest lake on the entire continent. I've heard that canoeing around the lake and out to its various islands is a pretty popular draw for visitors.

Lake Mutanda will be closer to us: 12 miles north of Kisoro. You can see three of the Virunga peaks from its shores: Muhabura, Sabinyo, and Gahinga. The lake is dotted with islands; those, along with the land around the shore, are teeming with diverse plant and animal life.

Who Lives There?

This is probably the hardest question for me to answer from Boston. We'll be getting to know doctors at the hospital, administrators who work for DGH, Village Health Workers who mostly live around the area and are getting trained to provide healthcare, and the town residents and villagers that make up Kisoro District.

Farming is what most people do for work in rural Uganda, growing enough maize (corn) or potatoes to sell at the market, or -- if weather, pests, or seeds don't cooperate -- just enough to survive on. Sometimes even that is a struggle. 

What we're looking forward to most, even more than exploring the countryside, is meeting people and learning from them. We'll learn new jokes, new songs, new ways of looking at things.

The Perils of Writing about "Africa"

I had tried to fit what follows into an earlier post as an afterthought but realized today that this topic deserves its own spot.

"Africa" is in quotes up there in the title because of how consistently the word gets misused -- casually tossed around like it stands for a single culture, a single country, a single "experience". Frankly, I get a little nervous using the word myself since it's been co-opted by such a wide and seemingly ill-informed group of writers.

We both want to write about our time in Kisoro while not following in this tradition. I've collected some blogs and pieces of writing that address and problematize the concept of our privileged perspective on the African continent.

Here are two posts by women getting real self-reflective and critical about their time abroad.

Sasha Grons -- White Girl Goes to Africa

Pippa Biddle -- The Problem with Little White Girls (and Boys)

Both pieces are well worth reading in their entirety. Here are two short excerpts:

These experiences [in low-resource settings] become more like commodities that we as students from the developed world buy and then cash in as “international experience” when we return home, perhaps to beef up a grad school application or to open doors to new job opportunities. We may leave behind token projects and some little pieces of trivia about our home countries, but what we contribute pales in comparison to what we gain; it’s really all about us in the end.                                                                  -Sasha Grons

I don’t want a little girl in Ghana, or Sri Lanka, or Indonesia to think of me when she wakes up each morning. I don’t want her to thank me for her education or medical care or new clothes. Even if I am providing the funds to get the ball rolling, I want her to think about her teacher, community leader, or mother. I want her to have a hero who she can relate to – who looks like her, is part of her culture, speaks her language, and who she might bump into on the way to school one morning....Sadly, taking part in international aid where you aren’t particularly helpful is not benign. It’s detrimental. It slows down positive growth and perpetuates the “white savior” complex that, for hundreds of years, has haunted both the countries we are trying to ‘save’ and our (more recently) own psyches.                                      -Pippa Biddle

It's a touchy subject, and one that tends to generate a lot of heated chatter in comments sections. Ms. Biddle's post got over 2 millions views and, according to her a lot of mean-spirited responses (probably a lot of encouraging ones too).


These next two sites are really great in a jarring way. "This is Not Africa" is self-described as "Posting all the awkward photos and texts that exoticise Africa." That pretty much sums it up. It's a good touchstone for how "Africa the country" gets popularly discussed and referenced.  "Gurl Goes to Africa" inhabits a similar space, if slightly sillier. It's a pretty delightful and cringe-inducing skewering of privileged tourists saying all the wrong things, like an extended version of the recent Onion article.

This is Not Africa

Gurl Goes to Africa

Binyavanga Wainaina wrote this next piece of satire as a vent against an old Granta "Africa" issue. It's wry and chastising and indispensable, as is the follow-up.

"How to Write about Africa"

"How to Write about Africa II: The Revenge"

This is a lot to keep in mind and, for me at least, it amounts to a lot of pressure when I imagine sitting down to write about what we're going to be seeing beginning in a few weeks. We'll take it one day at a time and always ask ouselves What Would White Gurl Do? And then do the opposite.