My research here is going well. I don't think I've ever felt this relaxingly productive in my college career. I have very low-key, manageable days, talking to farmer groups and UN organizations. It’s hard to sleep in past seven because my classmates are obsessed with jogging, and I usually have a couple of hours in the morning before I go into the field. Living here is like living in weird NGO world. The seven of us in Gulu each have six weeks to complete our individual research projects, and we all live together and come home at night to make dinner (read: guacamole) together and talk about our various interviews of the day. Whenever anyone hits a road block, they just get out the NGO guide and start calling numbers. I’ve gotten used to spotting the same logoed Land Cruisers passing me on the road as I walk to appointments. When I think about it, I don’t know of any other circumstance under which I can imagine the past six weeks taking place. Everyone in town has come to know us in our regular spots, the tailor, the café with the most reliable outlets, the pineapple seller, the Human Rights Focus resource center where we use the internet, the Indian grocery store where we buy yogurt. In the evenings my classmates and I run into each other buying chapati and avocadoes in the market.

It’s going to be hard to go back to the real world after this utopian Research World. What do we do? Nothing, really. When people ask us how our work can help people in Gulu, we feebly respond, “uhh, well, I hope that by just talking to organizations and getting the information out there…uhh…we’ll raise awareness of the problems.” We talk to NGO staff with ambiguous titles such as “liaison for peace-building affairs” and “livelihoods project coordinator.” If I hadn’t already exhausted myself trying to figure out how everything really works, my bullshit meter would be on constant alert. But, for all the tricky conundrums of development, the one thing that can assuage my growing personal sense of uselessness is, at least they’re all Ugandan.

The office of the Norwegian Refugee Council has not one Norwegian in sight. The Gulu branch of the World Food Programme is completely Ugandan-run. Action Against Hunger, Catholic Relief Services, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization: all Ugandans. I was supposed to meet with someone from USAID named Hayden Aaronson, a suspiciously muzungu name, but he called in sick and I met with his Ugandan coworker instead. I don’t know why I had this image of white people running through the hallways of their organizations in developing countries, but thus far I have been underwhelmed by the muzungu presence here. It’s not exactly neocolonialism, though some of the donor conditions (ahem, USAID) may point in the other direction. Maybe things used to be different, but it’s pretty hard to make the case in Gulu that white people run the show.

I don’t know what this means for me, a white girl who wants to come to “help out” while simultaneously avoiding all the negative associations between her race and international aid.

The only thing I can take away from this is that white people shouldn’t look at development as anything more than an ordinary job. If I happen to be academically interested in agriculture in Africa, why shouldn’t I be able to have a career reflecting that? But I think I know just enough at this point to assume that’s ultimately benefiting me more than any African. That’s how most careers work, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it certainly doesn’t justify a holier-than-thou notion that what you’re doing is an unselfish act of charity.

I’m just happy to be here.