Kelly Austin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lehigh. She is in Bududa, Uganda this summer with a group of students pursuing her research in community health. You can see her previous posts here.

One of the key research projects I am working on here is looking at the hidden costs of coffee cultivation in Bududa. In this remote region, coffee is the only product that links Bududa to the international market. So far, I’ve interviewed over 20 coffee farmers, traders, and community leaders. For all but 2 of the interviews, I used Dezz’s assistance to translate and help co-conduct the interview. Sometimes, we walk out into the community and meet the farmers at their coffee garden. They are always very proud to show me their plants. Other times, Dezz organizes the interviews so that the participants come to the Zaale house to be interviewed. This has been the case with all the women I have interviewed, because if I had met them on their property, their husbands would have overseen the interview and I suspect I would have not gotten honest answers.

The gender inequalities with coffee are glaring. One of the key questions I ask is if they think that coffee growing benefits men and women equally in the community. All of the male growers I have interviewed contend that coffee benefits themselves and their wife (or wives) equally. They say they share all the money they get from selling the coffee with their wife or wives, and they use the money together to do things like pay for school fees for the kids, or buy clothes and other needed household items. However, when I asked the women and two community leaders this question, they give me a very different response. The women say that it is them who plant the coffee, maintain and prune the plants, bring

water from the river to coffee gardens that are high in the hills, spend hours and hours harvesting the coffee, and carry the dried coffee beans to the trader; then the men send them home with the empty containers. They never touch the money received from selling the coffee, or even know how much money is made. Many of them contend that their husbands use the money for drinking, feasting, and even to have sex with other women. They are left with nothing – but a backache, or worse. During one interview, one women pointed to her face, displaying a significant scar from below her eye across her cheek. She says, “This is what my husband did to me when I quarreled with him about the money from coffee.”

Continue reading Researching the Impacts of Coffee in Bududa →

Kelly Austin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lehigh. She is in Bududa, Uganda this summer with a group of students pursuing her research in community health. You can read her previous post here. 

Overall, things have been going well the past few days. Power has returned! Yay! Hopefully it will last several days without interruption. On Saturday morning, Mark & I took the students to go see one of the favorite weekend activities in Bududa – bullfighting! Bullfighting is not like we think of it in the US, with a red-clothed matador beckoning a bull, but rather, large bulls fighting each other until one of them runs off, concedes, or is badly injured. It is essentially chaos, with hundreds of people (mostly men and children) on a large pitch (soccer field) running around, yelling, following whichever bulls are in action. The crowd scatters for their lives whenever a bull gets tired of fighting or concedes a contest, taking out whoever is in his way. Luckily, we saw no human injuries, and Peter and Dezz Zaale kept our Mzungu group safe at the top of an embankment behind some very thorny bushes. At one point, the bullfighting settled a bit, so they brought out a female bull to rile the fighting male bulls up. Boy did that work!

The tone changed that afternoon when several of the Zaale grandchildren and members of our Lehigh team started to fall ill with fever and vomiting. I spent most of Saturday afternoon dolling out ibuprofen and Cipro (medication for bacterial infection), taking temperatures, and making my students ramen noodles. In total, 3 of 6 the Lehigh students were ill. They all started to improve slightly on Sunday, but 2 of them continued to have fevers at night. This is a common sign of malaria. I contacted my good friend, Dr. James Wafula, and he agreed that I should take all of those with fever to his clinic (which is one the other side of the Bududa loop) on Monday morning for malaria testing.

Continue reading Malaria Outbreak Strikes the Compound! →

Kelly Austin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lehigh. She is in Bududa, Uganda this summer with a group of students pursuing her research in community health. You can read her first post here. 

So let’s talk infrastructure. We stay with a local family, the Zaales. David Zaale is around 70 years old and has lived in Bududa his entire life (except for when he was forced to temporality relocate to Kenya for several months during the Amin era). David and Elizabeth Zaale have several children, the eldest is in her 40s, and the youngest, Dezz Zaale is in his 20s.

The Zaale compound is extremely nice and well-developed compared to the other homes in Bududa, which tend to be made of mud and dung (both inside and out). While we benefit from having brick walls, cement floors, and some paved “sidewalks” that connect the guest rooms, other conditions are a bit more rugged. There is no running water, and the electricity is very spotty. We use pit latrines and take “bucket baths”, where we use water that is harvested from the river to douse ourselves clean (or clean-ish). As I wrote in the last post, the roads are very bad here, you are either fighting dust or mud, and it takes about 1 hour to go ~12 miles. We most often walk to where we need to be.

We are lucky enough to have 3 house ladies (or silent soldiers, as I like to call them) who work all day long, fetching us water, cleaning the rooms and latrines, cooking our food, washing our clothes in the river, washing dishes, etc. Of course, many members of the Zaale family chip in on these tasks, including Elizabeth herself. As I often notice here, the women work so hard all day long. Tirelessly hand plowing in the gardens, collecting fire wood, picking stones from uncooked rice, and tending their children.

Since we arrived in Bududa, we have had electricity about half of the time. We are in a bad stretch right now, having been without electricity for about 4 days. Of course, this makes working and doing research a bit challenging. Fortunately, Papa David Zaale has a generator (one of the only ones in the village) that he turns on for us for about 3-4 hours per evening so we can charge our computers, audio recorders, and phones. However, if we all plug in at once, it overloads the generator. So, it is a bit of a shuffle and negotiation of whose devices get priority in charging, based on what tasks each of us need to do the following day.

Another challenge to work here can be the noise. With so many people around the compound, including extended family members, young grandchildren, and infants of the house ladies’, the level of crying, playing, singing, and talking can be a bit intense sometimes. And Ugandans love music. The students and I sometimes sneak into the garden to find a quiet spot to do our interviews (when they are not at a health center or a community members’ house), and we’re trying to institute a couple of “quiet” hours from 3-5 in the afternoons to do the transcribing. Transcribing involves typing out word for word everything that was said in the interview from the audio recording. Transcribing typically takes about 3-4 times longer than the actual interview itself. While this task is arduous and time consuming, it is an absolutely necessary step of the qualitative research process.

Dezz Zaale is one of our key translators and community liaisons. Papa Zaale has amazing connections to many administrators and health workers in the district, as he was an educator in Bududa for over 50 years and Elizabeth has served in local political positions. Each year, Papa uses his connections to help us expedite the process of getting clearance from the District Health Officer to do research in the health facilities. Though, this still usually takes hours of sitting and waiting for an appointment or chance to talk to the DHO and get her rubber stamp of approval. Dezz does the hard work on the ground of securing community members, interview times and locations for us, as well as helping us to refine our interview guides before each interview to ask questions in culturally appropriate ways or ways that will make sense to the local population. Without the help and support of the Zaale family, my research would not be possible. I am deeply appreciative of all they have done to support my work and provide meaningful experiences for the students.