In this interview, we hear from John Alam. John is working as a Peace Corps Education volunteer in Uganda. What John shares gives us a better understanding of the work volunteers do. We learn about the challenges, rewards, and personal growth that happens from volunteering in a new place. John talks about living in a different country, working with local people, and dealing with surprise situations. Join us as we learn about John’s journey and see how volunteering with Peace Corps can change lives.
Table of Contents
- Volunteer Experience and Motivation
- Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
- Surprises and Challenges
- Advice and Support
- Practical Tips and Language Learning
- Social Identity during Service
- Impact of Media and Final Thoughts
Volunteer Experience and Motivation
1. Tell us more about serving as an Education volunteer in Uganda
Thank you for the opportunity to share my story. I feel very fulfilled in my service and sincerely welcome these questions.
I am a volunteer in the Education Sector, but my experience is unique. I have taught in a classroom only about 6 times and I am approaching COS in the next 4 months. I have built and cataloged a massive library here in Northern Uganda, and I manage it with the aim of perfecting a sustainable library management system for when I leave.
Every morning, I lift weights, feed my cat, and sort books onto the shelves until the pupils are freed up to enter the library during lunch. This is game time. In a single hour of the day, It is total chaos. Most of my workday is spent preparing for and recovering from that hour, 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday.
2. What motivated you to join the Peace Corps and choose Uganda?
I did not choose Uganda. I am a military veteran and, in spirit of that, I wanted to be placed where Peace Corps felt my work experience was most applicable. I was working at a nonprofit in Portland Oregon, and the labor force was union busted. In a fit of admittedly angry impulse, I applied for the Peace Corps that night. As the acceptance emails came in, I was resolute.
Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
3. Tell us more about your home situation
I am very close with my host family. I have shared a very chemical bond with them from the beginning of the homestay period. They would do anything to keep me happy and safe. It is a very deep connection.
However, I do live alone. I am living about 60 kilometers south of the South Sudanese border in a quite rural area. I live in teacher’s housing provided to me right on the school compound, about 100 yards away from the library we built. The sound of kids laughing and playing is literally constant, as there were 2150 students at my school as of last year, with a high percentage of them boarding at the school. The school facilitates primary 1 through 7 students and has a nursery school attached to it.
I carry my water from about 200 yards in two 25-liter jerry cans maybe two times a day, and I have generally reliable electricity. The ethnic group I live among is the Acholi people who speak a language in the Nilotic language group. We eat a lot of beans and “posho,” which combine into a complete protein to recover from my weightlifting. There is a pretty big body-building and boxing microculture here, and I have fallen in love with it. Within a 100-yard radius, I can get farm-to-table tomatoes, onions, rice, and eggplant. I also pick up freshly butchered beef and chicken every week. I have never been healthier.
4. Any memorable experiences or interactions you’ve had?
As I am approaching COS in a few months, I am not sure I can single out just one memorable experience. I will always remember the look on the first student’s face upon being the first to enter the completed library. I have always been in awe of how much the children and youth love books here. It kind of deters me from raising a child in the United States – the drive to learn may be there, but this deep love for it isn’t. Kids here are devastated when I say it is time to close the library for the day.
Surprises and Challenges
5. What has surprised you most about challenges in Uganda?
To be honest, I had so few challenges, and it is entirely due to the behavioral norms of the people here. This region has endured a great deal of conflict, and the Acholi folks tell me that it is the reasoning behind the care-free, gentle welcome inherent to the experience of newcomers. People here are straight forward but kind. They are dedicated to each other as community members above all else.
In fact, I think if anything surprised me, it was seeing how a developing community treats neighbors who live with severe and persistent mental illness. Before the Peace Corps, I worked in behavioral health. My past career and ambition are in trauma care for those living on the streets, enduring addiction and SPMI, or fleeing conflict. I have seen people treated terribly despite those circumstances and believe it is a symptom of Western cultural and economic norms.
Where many would avoid eye contact with people in need in the West, the Acholi people embrace them. The community comes together to build shelter and provide food where there is abundance. If a mentally ill person is at the school I am living in, they are free to roam and even enter classrooms as long as they are not disruptive.
I will never forget seeing a “houseless” person dancing in a crowd of very young students on the school compound as the teaching staff clapped and laughed with the music. My instincts were of concern, all those months ago, but I get it now. When I asked community members about this first experience, they said “He was my teacher when I was in primary school. He has always been in the community, and he is too far gone to come back to the way he was, so what else would we do? If he is hungry, we feed him. He has a house that we built for him in the village. He is a part of us.”
6. What challenges did you face while working on Education projects?
The library construction and catalog are my life’s greatest accomplishments. I laid bricks and mixed cement. I woodworked to build the shelving. I cataloged 8409 books in 349 titles by 12 categories (publishing year, grade, subject, etc.) and serialized them by hand with a sharpie to coordinate their belonging by shelf, row, and series.
Word to the wise NGO – if you want to donate books, make sure they have a place to put them or they will rot away with termites and rain. The books salvaged were 8409, but we had twice that number when I conducted my needs assessment. Everything unfit to be shelved and cataloged was given away to the students for free, first come first serve. It was a mess. As of today, this is the second free-standing library out of every school in the district.
7. Could you share some of the secondary projects you have been involved?
The library has been my entire life, but we have planted about 500 trees on the school’s compound, and we distributed a few hundred mosquito nets to pregnant or lactating mothers in the community. I have also loved facilitating my Grass Roots Soccer and Journey’s Plus classes with the kids. GRS and JP are evidence-based curricula that teach youth about HIV, among other important topics. GRS is very popular, as it involves a soccer ball in really fun activities that are analogies to concepts like HIV.
Advice and Support
8. What advice would you give to someone considering serving as an Education volunteer in Uganda?
I would say dedicate a lot of time to the needs assessment when you arrive at site. Come up with 15 questions that are designed to reveal needs. My first go-to question in needs assessments is “In your wildest dreams, what would you add to the school?” These are teachers, and they are so very busy. They likely have a big family waiting for them at home, on top of everything else.
Be the extra pair of hands, the extra wristwatch, and the extra mind that they wish they had. The problems to be solved, and maybe even the solutions have already been thought of – you just need to ask the right questions in the right way and carry out the required tasks in the time that you have, but they likely don’t.
I love teaching, but these people are experts in their work. If teaching was all I did, I would probably just scramble up their end-of-year test scores (we are second from the best in the district!). Many schools you may find yourself in here are understaffed and, if so, maybe teaching is where you are needed most, but don’t settle in where you are not needed. Focus on impact. Maybe they need a new latrine. Maybe they need a nutrition program. If grants were still available, I would have turned my school’s available 8.6 acres into a student-managed food program.
9. How has the Peace Corps training helped you during your service?
I don’t think you can train someone perfectly for this experience, and I think that this is something that should be expressed early on. I also think that there should be an HCN (host-country national) who is a graduated cultural anthropologist involved in training or at least designing the training for volunteers. There are a lot of nuances in integration that are otherwise stumbled upon by the volunteer in service without a more academic understanding of the community and language. Things like perception of time, constructs of gender and race, boundary setting, and faith are covered, yes, but the trainings should delve into the “why” of it a lot more.
I also think VRG is a waking nightmare, and there is nothing anyone can do about that, but it would help if we knew how understanding it helps us in the long run of a career in international development. Program management, grant management, and M&E are all things we will have to be comfortable with long after Peace Corps if we pursue careers in humanitarian aid or development.
Practical Tips and Language Learning
10. Anything that you packed or didn’t pack that you’d like to tell future Uganda volunteers?
This is a spectacular question with innumerable answers.
- As a must, buy A History of Modern Uganda by Richard J Reid. If you want to respect and understand the many communities of Uganda, have a deep understanding of their history. Culture and history are intertwined.
- My project could not have been done without my MacBook Air. If you can take care of your things, bring the good stuff. If not, buy insurance and do it anyway. You will not regret it.
- Having Carhart overalls and full grain leather Danner boots for the library construction was amazing, and no terrain can stop me.
- Bring as many power banks, charging cables and chargeable lighting systems as you can find (look into Voltaic, GoalZero and NEBO).
- My favorite thing that I brought was weightlifting equipment you can fill with sand (kettle bells, etc.) and acrobatic rings for body weight exercises.
- 2 terabytes of external memory – your cohort will have movies and music you want to load up on when you reconnect.
- Camera – Sony A6000 with one pancake lens, one all in one lens and extra batteries
- Nintendo Switch
- I cannot stress this enough: Bulk Mac & Cheese Powder. Trust me on this.
11. How has learning the language been?
The language spoken here is called Acholi, and it is of the Nilotic language group. It is a minority language with only about 1.5 million speakers. If you are coming to Uganda, you will likely have to learn one of the languages south of the Nile, most of which are in the Bantu language group. Luckily, this language is so very fun and easy, where the grammar is sort of free form and mostly depends on vowel harmony for you to be understood.
Languages in the Bantu group are much more complicated so learning resources are available, but there are so many languages in Uganda that, if you are placed here, getting ahead in learning one probably won’t help you much. As for those of you who will be placed north of the Nile, good luck finding any resources at all outside of what the Peace Corps provides. I made a dictionary in Excel if anyone is interested!
Social Identity during Service
12. In what ways do you think your social identity has shaped your approach to engagement and service?
I am a mixed man, but I present white. I think being mixed throws people off in a good way. I have a simultaneous understanding of Islam and Christianity and cook food that is not Western, for instance. Overall, my time has been easy as a result of my being a cis, heterosexual man but, as Uganda has a complicated history with immigrants from my father’s South Asian country of origin, I have had to pretend I didn’t hear some things, as it were.
It should be known by those wishing to serve in Uganda that this is a very socially conservative country. Being young or being a woman in this country appears to be, from the stories I have heard as a PSN, a very arduous experience. This is where I think the Peace Corps could use the help of an HCN who has graduated from studied in cultural anthropology. These are cultural nuances that directly regard safety in addition to comfort in service.
Impact of Media and Final Thoughts
13. How do you think your Instagram contributes to your overall mission as a Peace Corps volunteer?
My Instagram has tracked every moment of my experience. I think it contributes greatly to the Peace Corps mission, especially relative to the “three goals.” In a way, I think we have a duty to share our experience publicly, but there are many ways it can be done unethically and ethnocentrically.
We need to make sure that what we share is uplifting these communities above the preconceived notions we often find in the West. We need to focus our documentation of these lifeways and worldviews on the beauty our cultures mutually define. The smiles. The newborn babies. The goals scored. Trees planted. The delicious holiday meals. We must be extremely wary of disseminating a dishonest portrayal of a cultural and ethnic group that folks back home are unlikely to have even heard of.
Make sure that you are asking yourself “Why am I documenting this moment?” and “Why do I want other people to see this image or read this story?” Often, we are initially unconscious of the answers to these questions and this is no one’s fault thanks to cultural relativity and lived differences, but it is a muscle to have a responsibility to train when living abroad especially if you were raised mono-culturally.
14. Any last comments you’d like to pass on to future Uganda volunteers?
Northern Uganda is the world’s best kept secret. Total paradise.
What are you waiting for? Opportunities like this don’t come often. If you have a passion for service and an adventurous spirit like John’s, apply to the Peace Corps today. Expand your horizons, push your limits, and create positive impact as a volunteer. You never know how serving as a Peace Corps volunteer could change your life.
The content of this post does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or Uganda Government.
