1 Case 1: Mansanga
Asylum, quarrels and grandchildren
Seated in front of a grass-thatched wattle and mud hut, Mansanga removed the skin off fresh beans that she had been soaking in a pot of water for a while. Silver-grey wisps permeated her short hair and a dirty cloth was wrapped around her waist, partly covering a loose stained T-shirt and her bare legs. Her granddaughter, about eight years old, spooned the remains of a yellow maize paste out of a big iron pot, using her free hand to cover her face every time I turned my head towards her during our talk with Mansanga.
Like most times I visited Mansanga, normally together with Amani, she was preparing food. Her grandchildren usually helped her to cook and fulfil her other household chores. For example, they handed Mansanga the maize cobs laid out on a mat to dry, so she could remove the kernels, they brought a jerry can of water that she needed to wash dirty dishes with, or they removed a heavy pot from the fire outside the hut where she cooked. Mansanga found it difficult to carry out such activities, as she had developed a stiffness in her legs as a child. She was thus used to moving slowly on her hands and knees, which was especially challenging in the rainy season when the area around the house was muddy. Her daughter-in-law Rose complained one day that Mansanga’s clothes were constantly covered in dirt.
During our visit, Mansanga asked her grandson to bring her identification papers from inside the hut to answer my question about how long she had been in Kyangwali. Checking a white sheet that showed her own and her grandchildren’s photos, names and ages, she figured out: “I have received [food] three times, that means I have been here for three months”, according to the three dates and signatures that were scribbled on the paper. Mansanga had only recently arrived in Kyangwali, but her son Benjamin had lived in the camp for longer, together with his wife and children. It was only when war broke out again in their home in Eastern Congo that Mansanga and her grandchildren had joined the remaining family in Kyangwali. During that recent upheaval, her daughter had been killed, leaving Mansanga to take care of her grandchildren by herself.
On another visit to Mansanga’s home several months later, we only found her son Benjamin and his wife Rose. Rose was splitting cassava roots with a
Other things had not gone smoothly in Mansanga’s process from asylum seeker to refugee either. Asylum seekers normally received food rations with a ‘temporary asylum seeker attestation’ that was valid for three months, during which time they should acquire refugee status. Throughout my research, refugees from certain regions in Congo were granted refugee status on a prima facie basis, meaning that no individual assessment in the form of an interview was needed to obtain refugee status. But this only counted for people arriving at one of the transit centres at the Ugandan border. However, the Bubukwanga transit centre in the border town Bundibugyo where Mansanga arrived, had been closed at that time due to the low number of refugees, so she had travelled with her two grandchildren to Kyangwali by public transport. This situation created complications for Mansanga’s application, and she was not able to receive food aid for nearly six months.
It was only later that I understood more about the family’s problematic food supply situation during that time. Mansanga was home alone on a Sunday, as her restricted movement hindered her from attending church with her relatives. That day she told us about conflicts in the family, with a lot of bitterness: “The problem is, here at home they fight. And for me, I do not like to stay with people who fight like that. All the time you hear kakakakaka, and even when they give you food you fail to eat it. The fighting is every day, they always fight with that woman [her daughter in law]”. Again, she showed us her refugee attestation card, and said that, thankfully, she had received food rations again a few months ago. Although there were other reasons for family quarrels, Mansanga expressed how much her being off the food log had intensified the already existing tensions: “This woman has said several times that I ate their food, but I did not add anything. The food in the house was already little, and I felt bad, so I would even refuse to eat. At least now, somehow we have enough food”.
2 Case 2: Rafael
Begging, good neighbours and Mother Mary
I learned about Rafael from an aid worker from one of the NGOs in Kyangwali. She told me that they had helped him through a gardening project, as he was an elderly disabled person living on his own. So Amani and I rode our bicycles along the narrow paths that led away from a village primary school, as we had been told how to find him. However, even asking around did not help us much, until we realized that Rafael was known by the name Mapiki, as people referred to the bicycle he used to be seen with.2 We finally found him by his small hut directly beside one of the paths, sitting in front of his open door on a plastic mat. He greeted us with his partly toothless, but bright smile, happy to have visitors, which he thanked Mother Mary for. His wrinkled face and grey hair contrasted with his bright blue hip hop-style hoodie and the glaring yellow plastic rosary around his neck. His knees were drawn up to his chest and he seemed to experience pain when he moved his posture much. His hands and feet were malformed, his knuckles thick and swollen, the toes only short stumps – due to a parasitic skin disease caused by sand fleas, as I later learnt.
Rafael had fled from Congo to Kyangwali 19 years earlier. Although he was already in his older years by then, he used to farm. He planted maize, beans, Irish and sweet potatoes but, after the misery, as he called it, he was no longer able to work. One night, about four years before, he had suddenly developed pain and stiffness in his legs and knees. Since that day he had never again been able to stretch or move his legs, and he became highly dependent on other people’s help. He said he was lucky that some neighbours helped him
When Rafael’s bodily capacities diminished after the incident four years previously, the aid agencies had categorized him as an ‘extremely vulnerable individual’, an EVI. Hence, Rafael was still receiving 100 percent of food rations every month even after 19 years in Kyangwali. At first, the village community social worker collected the food rations for him. Rafael then gave these rations to Mohammed, whose family in turn cooked for him. But things had become problematic: at one point the community social worker had stopped delivering the food rations, and then suddenly vanished one day – unfortunately with Rafael’s attestation papers and food ration card, which meant that he missed out on his food rations for three months. Ever since then, Mohammed had collected the food rations for Rafael. However, despite receiving the rations, Rafael complained: “I receive food for one person. Oh my God, a little oil, which they can only cook with for two days. CSB [a corn and soy blend used to make porridge] only lasts for three days. Then they give me three cups of beans for three days”. Rafael shared his thoughts about why his neighbours helped him out: “They help me because they see that I cannot live without their help. When they give me food and porridge, they say that I can die for other reasons rather than hunger”.
When we returned another day, we again found Rafael in front of his hut, smoking a pipe. We heard that he sat in this spot every day, sometimes begging for money from the people that passed along the small path leading through the village. Often, his neighbour’s children surrounded him, and Rafael explained: “When a Good Samaritan gives me some money, I send a kid to the market to buy some fish or tomatoes for me”. During a conversation with Rafael’s neighbour, Mohammed was eager to emphasize it was he who took care of Rafael, and that other neighbours were “just talking”, implying that they did not actually support Rafael as they claimed. Mohammed had taken on the responsibility after a man who used to look after Rafael had received the opportunity to resettle in a European country. When I asked about the ways he took care of Rafael, Mohammed answered: “He is like my child. I always plan, whether it is medication, whether it is food or clothes. I plan for him like I plan for my children”.
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When one thinks about humanitarian aid, food is one of the first things that come to mind. Food is what people need to survive. As such an essential part of disabled people’s daily lives, it was frequently one of the first things they brought up in our conversations. Food aid was also omnipresent in Kyangwali as, for example, hut doors were created out of oil tin cans with the blue World Food Programme (WFP) logo on, children carried jerry cans that had once served as oil canisters, and white sacks with the red and blue USAID emblem were piled up for sale in small retail shops and in the market.
The cases of Mansanga and Rafael show how food aid becomes integrated into people’s everyday lives through practices of cooking and eating, as well as through sharing, parenting and other forms of care. In this chapter I explore the rationales of food aid for disabled people in Kyangwali, and relate it to their life worlds. I consider people’s concern that “the food is not enough”, as they often complained, and reveal how my interlocutors challenged the logics that guided food distribution. The chapter demonstrates that food is not only essential for people’s survival, as conceptualized by the aid agencies, but also becomes part of people’s sociality when they sell, exchange or contribute food rations within their social networks.
Food aid to Ugandan refugee settlements in Kyangwali was provided by the WFP, but stored in big warehouses in the different camps and distributed through a partner NGO. As Uganda’s government allocated land to refugees for cultivation as part of their self-reliance strategy, the WFP gradually scaled back their relief operation by reducing the amount, and eventually phasing out their food rations for people who were able to make use of the land and
The category of the ‘extremely vulnerable individual’ was just one of many used to allocate food rations in Kyangwali. Based on the latest assessment mission for food security in 2014, the UNHCR, the WFP and the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) had developed their current ‘food ration schedule’ for Kyangwali by categorizing refugees into the following further groups. The categories ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘new arrivals’ designated people who had lived in the refugee settlement for less than three years, the category ‘new case load’ denoted people who had arrived within the last four to five years, and the category ‘old case load’ stood for people who were registered more than five years ago. People from the ‘new case load’ and the ‘old case load’ were entitled to 60 percent and 50 percent of the food rations, respectively (GoU 2014).
As the provider of food aid, the WFP calculated the rations according to the daily calories needed to sustain human life. The recommended minimum was 2,100 calories per day, and this is what a refugee on a 100 percent food ration in Uganda received (The Sphere Project 2011, 185). These required calories were provided in the form of maize, beans, CSB (a corn-soy blend to make porridge), vegetable oil and salt (GoU 2014). In the monthly food distribution of October 2015, the UNHCR and the WFP introduced the option of choosing between food aid and an equivalent of this support in cash in Kyangwali. This was part of a new approach that the aid agencies had been gradually implementing since 2014 in the various refugee settlements in Uganda and worldwide. The shift towards food assistance provided in the form of cash aimed to empower refugees by allowing them to choose what they wanted to eat themselves, and had so far been considered extremely successful (e.g. WFP 2015).
Given this basic information, in this chapter I will first outline the rationales that underlied food aid for people with disabilities and reveal their vagueness, as a result of different historical trajectories of the concept of vulnerability in various institutions. By looking closely at everyday concerns and practices around food, I will then expose how disabled people were critically excluded from participating equally within Uganda’s overall refugee policy, since food aid only ensured survival, and did not enable people to become self-reliant. In a third step I will show that, despite this shortcoming of food assistance for disabled people, food aid was important for enabling people to create and maintain social relations. Thus, the higher food ration received by disabled people
3 Vague Rationales of Food Aid for Disabled People
The basic rationale behind food aid in Kyangwali must be understood in relation to Uganda’s self-reliance strategy. In a policy context where people were expected to become self-sufficient through agriculture, those who were unable to do so were entitled to special food support, as outlined above. Behind this rationale is a Western ideal of equality that aims to level the playing field (Ingstad and Whyte 1995, 7–8). “People are thought to be in need,” Stone argues, “when they do not have whatever it is that most people in the society obtain through their work” (1986, 20). This kind of logic is also ingrained in Uganda’s categories for food aid. Under the current self-reliance strategy based in agriculture, the provision of food aimed to level the playing field for people who were not able to farm their fields.
However, the UNHCR and the WFP did not perceive disabled people to necessarily have special food needs. The eligibility criteria for people with disabilities stated that: “A person qualifies for food assistance, if he/she is unable to access food due to the direct consequence of his/her disability and doesn’t have family and/or external support”.3 This description was attached to two different criteria that counted for any person potentially being categorized as EVI. The first one stated that, if a single head of a household was considered unable to access food, all their children aged 18 or under qualified for the so called ‘food-basket’, meaning they all would receive 100 percent of food rations.4 The second additional criterion stated that someone was only entitled to special food aid when he or she did not have any household members older than 18 who were seen as able-bodied and economically productive.5 With this, vulnerability, or rather inability, as the criteria explicitly state, was socially defined. If disabled people had support from an able-bodied spouse or a grown-up child, they were seen as being able to access food, and thus excluded from special food aid.
The people I talked to in Kyangwali often did not themselves know why – or due to which criteria – someone was categorized as EVI or not. Often they
During the time of my research the WFP struggled to move away from the EVI category to EVH, standing for ‘extremely vulnerable households’, as they were in fact distributing food to households, not individuals. In Kyangwali and beyond, however, the documentation about selection criteria for food aid still used the name ‘EVI’, and this was also the term which aid workers in Kyangwali used all along. These respective foci on the individual or household led to much confusion in applying the categories and in interactions between the various organizations. This can be attributed to different conceptualizations of vulnerability and a vague definitional authority over the inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Well, when we look at the WFP, the list that we generate after verification is actually regarding the EVIs who are in need of food support. But there are also EVIs who are in need of medical support, educational support or
shelter support. So there are also the general UNHCR criteria that target specific different angles and different aspects of our interventions.
Within the UNHCR’s operations worldwide, the EVI category was used in a broader way than only concerning food support. When they categorized someone as ‘extremely vulnerable’, it meant that they gave that person priority in every possible regard.
The concept of vulnerability had arisen from different historical trajectories in various institutions. While all aid interventions in refugee camps rely on principles of vulnerability, some institutions used the concept at the population level, others at the household, or the individual level, given the aims and roles of each institution (see e.g. Heijmans 2001). Vulnerability as a category was initially used to assign priority food aid in contexts of humanitarian emergencies, and it just referred to nutritional status (Davis 1996; Jaspars and Shoham 1999). The UNHCR initially developed as an institution that offered legal protection for European refugees after the Second World War, and only began categorizing people according to their basic needs and vulnerability when the institution expanded globally in the 1990s (Glasman 2015, 15). When it incorporated the concept of vulnerability into its approach, the UNHCR borrowed from other UN organizations (such as the WFP, WHO and UNICEF), but especially relied on organizations that prioritized aid recipients’ personal medical needs (such as ICRC, Save the Children, Oxfam and MSF) (Glasman 2015, 15–16). Their concept of vulnerability was thus predominantly about individual bodies and risks.
In the WFP, vulnerability was generally understood in terms of nutritional risks. Within their ‘Vulnerability Analysis Mapping’ (VAM) process, vulnerability was interpreted as food insecurity and rather an assessment of households or even whole populations. It not only covered food availability, access and use by vulnerable populations, but included food markets, regional commodity flows and population trends (O’Connor et al. 2017, 8). Thus, while vulnerability was in one sense narrowed down to mean simply access to food, it was in another sense broadened out in comparison to the UNHCR’s historically-evolved approach, which focused more on the individual person. Therefore, I argue, the varying and vague categories in place in Kyangwali stemmed from historically differing uses and adaptations of the concept of vulnerability within the WFP and the UNHCR.
Next, I turn my attention to an alternative perspective of how food aid should be conceptualized, by considering how my interlocutors understood their own vulnerability within Kyangwali’s refugee policy context.
It was a colourful happening. As well as the famous kitenge dresses and headscarves bearing flamboyant designs, many of the women at the refugee settlement’s food distribution point were protecting themselves from the blazing sun with fanciful umbrellas. The glare from white sacks of beans and maize emblazoned with the WFP logo was almost blinding, as they were unloaded from the lorries and stacked up on a huge tarpaulin on the ground. People coming to collect their monthly allowance lined up, carrying all sorts of differently-coloured plastic basins, buckets, jugs and mugs to transport their food rations in. Through a loudspeaker, an aid worker announced that this month’s food allowance contained the full portion of maize meal, soy, beans and cooking oil, but he also brought the not so happy news that there was no salt available this time. Indignant murmurs swept through the crowd but soon gave way to relaxed chattering and friendly greetings again.
From afar, I was able to spy Odongo. With his small paralyzed legs crossed, he sat on one of the distributed sacks in a group of people that were about to divide their respective shares of the food rations. As well as a woman with a limping leg, the group included elderly people and children. I was told that they were a group of EVIs. When I sat in the circle of Odongo’s group, as they divided the food aid into their individual rations, I was not surprised to see them quickly buy and sell amongst themselves and with others. As I had observed in other situations, food distribution points became a big market place, though no one called out to advertise their merchandise. Trading food aid was prohibited, and people were constantly reminded of that by announcements over the loudspeakers, and the instruction ‘NOT TO BE SOLD OR EXCHANGED’, which was printed in large letters on the huge cans of vegetable oil.
Whilst dividing the mixture of corn and soy blend (CSB), Odongo and a young boy laughingly complained about how small the rations were. When they noticed my interest in the topic they went on to make jokes about having to count every single bean for a meal, claiming that, as refugees, they were not supposed to eat much. This was not an unusual situation to encounter in my fieldwork. During food distributions, strangers often turned towards me and complained by placing their hands on their bellies, articulating that “the food is not enough”. Also, in personal conversations many disabled people and their families or carers stated that the food rations they received were too small. While some of my interlocutors referred to the kilograms of maize or beans they received, they often expressed the amount of food in cups and communicated it in the form of rhetorical questions: “See, four cups of beans and 12 kilograms of maize, can you eat it for a full month?” or “One cup of oil, can you, if they gave it to you, eat it for a whole month? It is not possible”. People with
Initially, I considered some of these statements that the food rations only lasted for few days to be wild exaggerations. I was well aware that my perceived role as a potential helper or advocate in my task as a researcher might shape people’s complaints about the amount of food rations towards me (see Schuler 2018). Ugandan aid workers never missed an opportunity to remind me that white people like myself were associated with decision-making power and money. Assuming that disabled people were just lying to me to make a point, the aid workers emphasized that food rations contained sufficient calories to sustain human life.
When the ever-prevalent complaints that the food was not enough did not reduce or vanish after I spent considerably more time with disabled people and their families, I realized that they implied more than simply being a question either of the amount of the food or of my skin colour. Anthropologists have shown in other displacement contexts that the sufficient, but ‘wrong’ food can become an indicator of what is absent. They use expressions like “tastes of necessity” (Trapp 2016) or “foods of sorrow” (Dunn 2014) to describe food aid that does not match people’s eating cultures or preferences, so is not capable of sustaining social connections, normalcy and dignity (see also Oka 2014). This certainly played a crucial role in how my interlocutors perceived and valued the food aid provided by the WFP. Yet, focusing on disability, there seemed to be more at stake. When I started to become increasingly interested in the ways in which disabled people understood the food as not being enough, I learnt not only about the entanglement of food aid with people’s socialities, but also about how people challenged the current logics of distributing food aid.
You cannot eat beans and posho every day, and they [the aid agencies] do not give us charcoal, they do not give us salt. And they do not give us
money to go and grind the maize. I have a small business that helps me, so I can at times get things like meat, sugar or fish. You cannot eat these beans every day and it cannot take you through the month. It is impossible, it can even cause sickness in your body.
The expression that “the food is not enough” also points to the fact that what was being provided was not thought to be the right food: the maize was whole, so had to be ground before it was edible, and my interlocutors wanted more diversity in their diet. Mansanga’s and Rafael’s examples demonstrate the ways in which food aid was exchanged or supplemented by other goods, which people considered to be more tasty. Mansanga’s daughter-in-law usually sold maize in order to buy cassava flour, which they preferred for making posho, and Rafael sent his neighbour’s children to the market to buy fish or tomatoes if he managed to receive some money from one of the people who constantly passed his hut.
When I talked to a WFP consultant about the problem that the food provided often did not meet people’s eating preferences, she eagerly agreed that food support should be adapted to fit what people really wanted. Yet, she also explained that this was simply not possible for the organization to fulfil within its funds and remit. Due to budgetary constraints, refugees were expected to adapt to the most economical provisions, the most nutritional and caloric food available for the lowest price on the world market (Trapp 2016, 414). This sometimes became explicit when the sacks of soy, for example, carried the inscription, ‘Supplied by the USA’. The people I interacted with knew that they ate rice that came from Brazil, for instance, but also sometimes from Uganda or Rwanda. Governments were by far the largest group of donors to the WFP, contributing either in the form of cash or in-kind donations (WFP 2016b). When such donations were in cash, a WFP representative informed me, the organization prioritized buying food locally and tried to adapt to people’s ordinary eating habits. Yet any kind of donation counted as significant, so food donations were being transported from different parts of the world to the refugee settlement, when people in Kyangwali actually often produced a surplus which they sold very cheaply in the local market (Omata and Kaplan 2013).6
However, sometimes the aid workers accused people of “play[ing] with their nutrition” if they sold food rations, as they were specifically calculated according to a person’s caloric and nutritional needs. One of the aid workers said: “I cannot really understand, if it [the food ration] is enough or not. To me, it should be for the individual to know: if it is for a month, they should use it accordingly”. Aid workers doubted the capacity of many refugees to use their food rations responsibly. This was seen as particularly problematic when cash was introduced. Although the service providers generally approved of the fact that cash distribution enabled people to choose the food they preferred, many aid workers expressed certain concerns.
Despite their claims that food money was often spent, for example, on alcohol, I observed that people behaved very responsibly in how they used food aid or cash donations. A disabled mother of five weighed up the potential consequences for her children’s nutrition when considering whether to choose food or cash donations: “I imagined getting the money because it is more for the vulnerable. But the flour for porridge … when the children go to school they
Many of the people I talked to switched to cash donations over time, arguing that this not only allowed them to choose which food to buy, but also meant they could use a small amount for other requirements. People categorized as EVI received 36,000 Ugandan shillings8 per month, people categorized as ‘new case load’ were given 28,000 Ugandan shillings,9 and those included in the ‘old case load’ got 15,000 Ugandan shillings.10 It is important to note, however, that not every person with a disability had the same opportunities to access shops and markets, in regard to their mobility or a social network they could draw on. The option of receiving cash turned out to be especially handy for disabled people who ventured into business, because this enabled them to invest in their business, or even start one, at times when there was enough food in the house from their fields.
The option of cash also brings up questions about who has the freedom of choice within households. Cooking was clearly a woman’s domain in Kyangwali. None of the men I knew cooked for themselves. Their meals were prepared either by their wives, their children, or neighbours. As cash distribution was only introduced over halfway through my research period and, as most of my interlocutors only switched to that at a later point, I was not able to observe many consequences in this regard. Nevertheless, some accounts pointed towards a certain direction. When I asked their opinion of cash support, some of the women thought that it was a money issue, which would be the men’s domain to decide. Many of the married disabled women I knew handled money as well as their husbands, or also engaged in business activities. Yet it is possible that cash implementation might have a gendered impact.
Another way that people perceived the food rations as not being enough was explicitly expressed by Mohammed when he said: “But that maize cannot be enough, not even for a child’s school fees”. Another of my disabled interlocutors similarly explained: “All my children receive the food rations. But because the children study, we need to pay like 15,000 Ugandan shillings11 at school. When you remove that money, you are left with little food”. It was a widespread expectation that food aid should provide for people’s needs beyond nutrition. However, this anticipation clashed with the reality that the food rations were definitely not enough to fill a person’s stomach and provide for their other needs.
When my interlocutors argued that “the food is not enough”, they were referring to the fact that, through the food aid allocation, they were not treated in an equal way to non-disabled refugees. The food support that disabled people categorized as EVIs received was not actually in any way equivalent to what an able-bodied person could acquire through farming. While a big part of Kyangwali’s population still received at least a percentage of the initial food rations, their agricultural activities enabled them to sell part of their produce in order to cover other needs such as soap, airtime for topping up mobile phone services, clothes, school fees and medicine. Disabled parents and their spouses often feared that their children would have to drop out of school in order to cultivate land, since they were unable to do it themselves. They felt it was unfair that the aid organizations did not provide them with more food, or at least support them with their children’s school fees and study materials. While farmers could acquire necessities other than food as soon as they produced some surplus through farming, the food aid people with disabilities received targeted just their nutritional survival, so did not meet such other needs. It was in this sense that the categorization system did not fulfil its rationale of creating equality among supposedly autonomous individuals.
Most disabled people’s position of not being able to grow crops also conflicted greatly with the fact that they received the same food support as everyone else among the newly-arrived refugees: “The food they give us is not enough. We get an equal share with people who can go and dig. People with disabilities should get more food than those who can support themselves,”
In theory, disabled people who had just come to the camp were treated slightly differently from other ‘new arrivals’, receiving a different composition of their 2,100 calorie allowance. While able-bodied ‘new arrivals’ received 400 grams of maize grains, 80 grams of beans, 30 grams of vegetable oil and 50 grams of CSB, people in the ‘EVI’ and ‘asylum seeker’ categories received 390 grams of maize meal instead of maize grains, only 70 grams of beans, but an additional 5 grams of salt. This meant that people in the latter categories did not have to invest money to mill their maize or acquire salt on their own. During my field research in 2015 and 2016, however, the EVI category among newly-arrived refugees did not exist, and everyone simply received the 100 percent food ration in its normal constitution. According to the UNHCR and the WFP, EVI assessments to verify the current list and add new refugees should ideally take place twice a year, but this had not been done in Kyangwali since July 2014 due to budgetary constraints and coordination challenges. Hence, people with disabilities who had arrived between 2014 and the end of 2016 received their maize unground. In order to make this food edible, they required money, or had to give a specific amount of their food ration as payment to the local grinding machine operators.
In my conversations with aid workers from different organizations, there was no mention of the problem that disabled people did not have the assets to afford other expenses without practicing agriculture. When I discussed my preliminary research findings with Uganda’s WFP officers, it soon became clear that it simply was not possible to increase the quantity of food rations for ‘vulnerable’ people. They immediately explained that the WFP had to stick to the global standards, which defined food rations as a means for survival.
Thus, despite their disabilities, my interlocutors were not entitled to any additional food allowance. This meant that disabled people were not enabled by this system to participate on an equal basis. The Ugandan refugee policy’s stated objective was self-reliance, but the food aid provided for those categorized as ‘extremely vulnerable’ merely targeted their survival. Understanding how the food was considered not enough from the perspective of disabled people in Kyangwali makes it more imperative to grasp how concerns and complaints about food, which played an essential role for all refugees in Kyangwali,
6 Food Aid as a Contribution
Even though people argued that the food aid was not enough, it was still a very valuable contribution to their lives in several ways. This became clear when I saw what happened when food aid was absent. During the months when the elderly woman Mansanga did not receive any food rations, tensions arouse in the relationship between herself and her daughter-in-law. Rose complained that Mansanga was a burden when she could not contribute to the household’s food. The way that food rations contributed to Mansanga’s acceptance within her family shows how they played a crucial social role. Like Mansanga, several of my other interlocutors were – at least temporarily – not categorized as EVI, due to their household constellation. For most of them this was because they had an able-bodied spouse or grown-up children in their household or, more importantly, on their attestation card.
They had refused to put me down as ‘vulnerable’, because I have a husband who should work and take care of me. They said that it was impossible to give me food. I came to see my name there after how many years?
Seven years! I was really so disturbed. I wondered if my husband would abandon me, because he was the one trying to support us all that time.
By having family support as an exclusion criterion that prevented people from receiving special food aid, the EVI category only recognized certain vulnerabilities, while neglecting or possibly even creating others. Claire felt that being forced to depend on her husband had left her even more vulnerable.
By having to rely on family and community support, disabled people were not only deemed to be dependents. Moreover, their role as providers was neglected. A disabled father worried that: “There comes a time when they remove you [from the food log] and say your children will support you, the adult children. But the problem with the older children is that they are at school and instead it is you who should be helping them”. The criteria for the EVI category overlooked the point that disabled people only perceived themselves as being treated equally when they were enabled to carry out their roles of looking after their children, like anybody else. Also in this sense, for many, “the food was not enough”, as they received the reduced food rations of 60 or 50 percent because they shared a household with an able-bodied spouse or adult children.
These are standard guidelines, but there are situations that may differ. If we look at family support, there might be family members around. However, we have to consider what the situation of the family members is. An old man or woman is for example abandoned by their children, or the daughters have married and are influenced by their husbands, so the support for their father or mother is limited.
At one point I learnt that the aid agencies in Kyangwali had received complaints from the WFP that their number of EVIs was increasing too much. This might – at least partly – have been an outcome of well-meaning aid workers using their autonomy to alleviate the far-reaching shortcomings of the EVI category.
Personal relationships always involved some kind of uncertainty, as people could never be sure how significant others were willing or able to react in certain situations. Rafael, for example, could only hope that his neighbours would support him when he had nothing to eat. Whyte and Siu speak about “personal contingencies” to describe this kind of dependency, which bears both potentials and uncertainties (2015, 19). My interlocutors informed me about problematic situations, such as when a certain family member fell sick and was not able to work in the field for a while. The downside of such relationships also became clear when, for example, Rafael did not receive food rations for a while because the village’s community social worker had not done his work honestly.
Given these dependencies, food aid took on a specific importance in people’s lives as being something stable and regular, in contrast to the unpredictable help from significant others and agricultural uncertainties. Whyte and Siu suggest that dependence on institutions seems to be more reliable than interpersonal dependencies (2015, 22).12 Accessing food aid was thus able to provide some stability, and not just for the person who received the food rations. Because it was a comparatively regular and stable form of support, entitlement
7 Conclusion
This chapter has highlighted the mismatch between Uganda’s policy of self-reliance and food aid as a means of survival. The WFP’s provision of food aid did not truly compensate for disabled people’s exclusion from the self-reliance strategy. Hence, my interlocutors felt unjustly treated in this situation and complained that “the food is not enough”. In their view, food aid should also enable them to become self-reliant and to support their families, which is why they questioned the existing logic of food distribution.
The vulnerability criteria that entitled disabled people to special food aid were based on their compromised access to food due to their inability to pursue agriculture and a lack of social support to do so. With this focus on social support, the EVI criteria pushed disabled people to be dependent on their family and community. The criteria not only failed to fulfil their proclaimed purpose of compensating for people’s identified vulnerabilities in terms of inequality and dependence, but even bore the risk of widening the gap between those who were dependent, and those who were able to provide. The recognition through the EVI criteria turned out to be disappointing for my interlocutors in this regard.
Food aid nevertheless became an important part of people’s socialities, when they shared, exchanged and contributed food aid within their social networks. Food aid could help disabled people to create and maintain social connections – an endeavour that was especially relevant in the refugee camp, as the situation in Congo and displacement had often led to ruptures within them. In this way, instead of creating dependency, food aid could make disabled
Posho is the Luganda name (in Swahili ugali) my interlocutors used to describe a staple meal (porridge) made out of maize.
Pikipiki is the Swahili name for a motorcycle (although Rafael used a bicycle).
Document ‘Selection Criteria for WFP, EVIs’, received by email from a UNHCR aid worker, February 12, 2016.
Document ‘Selection Criteria for WFP, EVIs’.
Document ‘Selection Criteria for WFP, EVIs’.
According to a WFP consultant, most of the donations the organization received were in-kind donations, specifically from the US in the form of maize and red sorghum. The WFP’s Standard Project Report 2016 (no earlier publications were available) does not list any in-kind contributions by donors, although it does state that in-kind donations of food commodities in 2016 included fortified maize meal, vegetable oil, grains, pulses, specialized nutritious foods and high energy biscuits (WFP 2016a).
Compared to Congolese refugees who might count themselves lucky that maize was a surplus product in the American food market, the eating customs of South Sudanese refugees clashed rather sharply with the food aid provided. They were used to eating meat and dairy products, in line with the main livelihood of cattle keeping in their home country.
Approximately 9 US dollars.
Approximately 7 US dollars.
Approximately 4 US dollars.
Approximately 4 US dollars.
It needs to be mentioned that humanitarian food aid could also entail some kind of uncertainty. Due to inconsistencies in food provision logistics, the proposed food ration schedule could not always be relied on. It sometimes happened that cooking oil or salt were not delivered, or that, as described before, the maize came in an unground form. People were also often unsure of exactly when the food would be delivered, or if they were facing delays of several days, when, for example, the lorries could not drive along the muddy roads to Kyangwali in the rainy season. Furthermore, cuts in WFP funding due to global or national displacement dynamics repeatedly affected food deliveries to Kyangwali, resulting in food rations being unexpectedly and temporarily reduced to half the usual amount.