My time in Uganda came through an opportunity to volunteer with the organization I currently work for. It was my first real glimpse of their work on the ground—an opportunity to see “under the hood,” so to speak, and to meet both the healthcare workers and the communities whose lives are shaped by this work each day.

This brought me to Nakivale, one of the oldest and largest refugee settlements in Africa. The settlement hosts roughly 120,000 refugees at any given time, primarily from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Somalia, Tanzania, and Rwanda. What makes Nakivale unique is that the Ugandan government allocates plots of land to refugees, allowing for housing and small-scale subsistence farming. The organization I work with provides much of the healthcare services within the settlement, although after USAID was sent through the “wood chipper” and due to broader shifts in humanitarian financing, the programs of my organization have had to dramatically reduce.

During my time in Nakivale, I worked alongside Ugandan health workers, learning the rhythms of the clinics and stepping in where I could across different sites in the settlement. It was a period of learning and listening, more than anything else.

At the end of the trip, I had the chance to travel through southwestern Uganda—to Lake Bunyonyi, Queen Elizabeth National Park, and the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. There, I trekked through dense jungle in search of mountain gorillas, following in the footsteps of the beloved Jane Goodall- guided only by a local tracker and the sound of flies buzzing. It is one of the many times I wished I had carried a better camera. The photographs from these adventures can be found in the Uganda section of ‘See the World’.

The photos below are few as my work lent very little time to documentation.