“My name is Sarah McCans and I was a 2007 research intern at IDRC. I went to Kampala, Uganda, in East Africa to do my field research. Kampala city is divided into five administrative divisions and the Focus Cities project straddles Lubaga and Kawempe.  Within that area there are also several perishes. I conducted three focus groups in three different parishes: Bwaise Parish, Makerere-II Parish, and Kasubi Parish. I chose these parishes because they represented very different environmental conditions and living circumstances.  Kampala is actually located over a series of hills and the valley bottoms are wetlands and marshes and are not very habitable.  Therefore, that land is what is often settled by the most marginalized segments of the population. 

 

So the worst circumstances, environmentally speaking, of the three parishes is experienced in Bwaise Parish. It is located at the valley bottom; draining channels are blocked and so that’s where the most extreme flooding occurs where contamination and sanitation issues are the most visible.  Next is Makerere-II Parish which is slightly uphill, it’s not at the top but it’s at more higher elevation than Bwaise.  And then at the opposite end of the stream we have the focus group from Kasubi Parish which have really no environmental challenges like those facing Bwaise. They are quite high up the hill, there’s no flooding, housing quality is much better, much more secure and stable.

 

So in the three focus groups, each group had to draw pictures of environmental issues, environmental burdens and challenges, around their home environment. So, the house and the yard and the general surroundings. One of the things that became quite apparent during the focus groups was how different the children in each of these parishes experienced the environment burdens. In Kasubi Parish the drawings for the home environment were very everyday, depicting everyday life: handing out the laundry, doing the cooking. 

 

Makerere-II Parish: because it is in close proximity to Bwaise, the children, although they’re not living these circumstances themselves, they are very aware of what’s happening to their neighbours in Bwaise. They go to school together with the children in Bwaise, they’re friends with them. So they were speaking from an observer’s standpoint in their drawings, which was quite an interesting contrast from the drawings and the discussions that took with the children in Bwaise where it was pictures predominantly of flood-waters and ruined property and death and fear.

 

There were a lot of themes that came up again and again in the drawings. And that reflects what these children are experiencing in their daily lives.  In the Bwaise group drawings depicted dirty flood-waters, almost always a house was features prominently in the drawing, with flood-waters up past the door, past the wall. There’s always property floating in the flood-waters: jerry cans, plates and household items, and fish; and the story behind these drawings would be that the possessions had been washed out of the house and been lost in the floods. 

 

Another prominent feature is sanitation. One of the issues in the community is that when the flood-waters come, the latrines, the toilets, get blocked. So, what you do is you unclog them but to do that you release all off the raw sewage into the flood-waters. And the children depicted this in such a graphic and straightforward way, there was no questioning what the issues was and that is evident in a lot of drawings. 

 

One of the themes that came out of the drawings was more unspoken but was very evident in the drawings. I would describe it as the psychological impacts of experiencing the flooding and dealing with these environmental burdens on almost a daily basis.  A lot of the drawings from Bwaise Parish depict death. There is almost always a person, a figure, in the waters who is either dead or drowning. It maybe also written on the drawings that people died or people die.  And when I spoke to adults after these focus groups and I asked them whether or not there had been many incidences of death and they said, no. They really couldn’t think of anything, there was maybe an incident five years ago.  But it just goes to show that it doesn’t have to have happened recently  or to have happened a lot to be something that is probably weighing on these children’s minds. 

 

I have a long-standing interest in children’s environments. Children are not considered to be stake-holders in projects and their opinions are not taken into account even though in a country like Uganda, at  least at the time of the 2002 census, children under the age of 18 made up 56% of the population.  And they are a silent 56% of the population.  And yet they are being affected by these burdens.”