An influential trip abroad

Deirdre Newman

When Kelsey Long was considering her options for study abroad after

the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, her family encouraged her to go to the

country she had chosen -- Uganda.

“My mom was like, ‘go, hide out, you’ll be fine,”’ Long said.

So Long, 21, who will be a senior at Boston College in the fall,

embarked on a three-month stint in Uganda and immersed herself in the

country.

Long, who grew up in Newport Beach, said the opportunity enabled her

to focus on development studies, which is part of her major, and learn

about the Ugandan culture.

“I learned that there are so many cultural influences on health and

health care,” Long said. “Now I would probably get mad at someone that

says that nutrition and malnutrition are completely because of lack of

food.”

Long said she chose to study in Africa because she wanted a continent

that was not as accessible to Americans as Europe. She picked Uganda

because of the program’s focus on development studies and because it is

an English-speaking country since it was a former British colony. She

also gravitated toward Africabecause she had spent time in Zimbabwe when

she was 17.

Upon arriving in Uganda on Jan. 31, Long said she was immediately

overwhelmed by the country’s potent smell.

“It was like a compost heap -- dark and warm but with a burning

tinge,” Long said. “There’s humidity, heat and lots of vegetation. . . .

It’s hard to recreate. Maybe if you were in the South [United States] on

the hottest morning at dawn and you stuck your head in the dirt and

burned something nearby.”

Long was placed with a host family in the village of Nabutiti, a

suburb of the capital, Kampala. Her family included mother Ereth, sisters

Racheal and Gertrude and brother Ivan. Two of the other siblings were

away in boarding school and their father worked in a different part of

the country and only came into the village on the weekends.

Because her host family was under the impression that Americans did

not share bedrooms, they cleared out the biggest bedroom in the house for

her while the rest of the family was packed into one room. Long quickly

dispelled that misconception, she said.

“I made one of the sisters move in with me,” Long said.

She also grew accustomed to differences between the U.S. and Uganda

like using pit latrines, with the occasional cockroaches creeping around,

and using a cup full of water to wash her hair.

As part of the program, she took classes in Swahili -- one of Uganda’s

languages, although not the one primarily spoken in her village -- tooka

development studies seminar and participated in a field studies seminar.

The field studies seminar focused on how to involve communities in

sustainable development, including a three-day study in a rural village

where Long and the other American students explored preliminary

sustainable development techniques. When they considered giving the

village a token of their appreciation, it took 12 hours of debate to

figure out what, if anything, to give, Long said.

“Even when you’re helping, nothing is easy,” Long said. “You have to

think of so many ins and outs. That’s why you can’t do anything without

the community.”

Long also performed an internship at the nutrition unit of a hospital

in Kampala, focusing on maternal and child health care.

While most of her time in Uganda was incident-free, Long said there

was an unsettling event that sent chills down her spine. Two thieves were

burned to death by a village mob in an act of vigilante justice.

Long said she wasn’t as surprised that it happened as she was by the

reaction of her family.

“The most shocking part was talking with my sisters and hearing in

their own words what was going on just 150 yards from our house,” Long

wrote in an e-mail the day after the incident. “They were excited and

couldn’t help but elaborate on details and just somehow look happy. I

couldn’t explain it.”

Despite the cultural differences, Long said she was impressed with her

family’s attempts to go out of their way to make her feel comfortable.

Alternatively, she said she also tried to absorb as much of their customs

as possible.

“I think they felt that I liked their lifestyle and when I ate

something Ugandan, they felt really good because they knew where I was

coming from,” Long said. “Their estimation of Americans rose.”

Long said she was sad to bid her family goodbye when she returned home

and is sometimes frustrated by how difficult it is to keep in touch with

them since they aren’t as computer literate as Americans.

The experience of seeing nongovernmental organizations working on

health care issues in Uganda -- including an American organization that

funds an AIDS orphan hospice focusing on rest, nutrition, arts and

theater -- inspired Long to consider starting her own organization

someday.

“I would love to do something like that -- a holistic approach,” she

said.