Skip to main content

From Uganda: Happy 4th of July

Well it seems that great American holiday has come and with little celebration, gone.   As a group we decided that we should try to  celebrate by getting a couple beers, but it seems that didn’t happen. 

Instead,  just Megan, George, and I went out to Matthew’s Bar to get a beer and then called it a night at ten, happy independence day America, I should have found a way to get some fireworks or at least make some out of what was around.   

Even Bob the Brit wished my group a happy independence day.   I’m sure in his history classes our independence as a colony was probably just one of those, “So we had a bunch of colonies, some became independent on their own, others we helped out,  a couple of them became successful, end of story.”

Dagan Trnka, undergraduate, mechanical engineering, UC Davis

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to the UC Davis Blum Center Blog!

Here you will find updates on our organization, and blog posts written by each of our Blum Fellows about their experiences abroad. Make sure to check out our website at blumcenter.ucdavis.edu, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/UCDavisBlumCenter to get regular updates and see our upcoming events.

Visiting the New Roots Farm, By Stella Sappington

At this point in my project I have incorporated my supervisors notes into the first draft of the survey, asked questions regarding his changes, and begun to survey clients. Many of the changes he made were for the purposes of brevity and clarity. He removed the questions I had in place regarding favorite foods and whether the interviewee was the primary shopper, as well as an experimental question about community meals. He also managed to consolidate the multiple questions I had regarding food insecurity that were separated whether they interrogated price, unavailability or distance. I questioned these changes as I was concerned about the knowledge gap between shopper and interviewee that one report mentioned and elucidating rich responses to all aspects of food security. However, I ultimately incorporated each of his changes. At this time I have called 80 numbers intending to administer the survey with only 10 respondents. Their answers are so far similar in nature and offer good gu...

Sky-High Natural Dyes by Jennifer Hoover

In June of 2014, I was bracing myself for my last few days in the Himalayan village I had come to call home. I had spent 3 months there, befriending a few women with whom I worked on various textile projects. As we wrung out the last of our skeins of yarn over a dye bath, Nirmala commented, “You will always remember the time you had only two students.” “No,” I countered, “I will remember the time I had two teachers.” “Three students, three teachers,” we agreed. This, to me, is the power of participatory action research: we are all students, and all teachers; all researchers, and all research subjects. And so I am thrilled to be back for further collaboration, with the support of the Blum Center. I am here in Kullu Valley working with some participants in a women's self-help group (www.whims.in) who produce textile goods as a way of generating some independent income and preserving traditional craft skills. Although the women have started working with the acrylic ...