Rebecca Haque
Handicap International
Yei, South Sudan
I’m not quite sure how it came to be the 30th of April. As I keep loudly exclaiming at the start of every conversation, “One month!” This time next month, I’ll be in Juba, the capital of South Sudan. This time next month (plus two days) I’ll be starting my internship with Handicap International. This time next month the people and activities that exist so essentially in my present everyday will suddenly be very far away.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that every second thought since leaving Juba last summer has been on my return. I have thus become an expert on the art of summarizing my project:
I’m going to Yei, South Sudan to intern for the NGO Handicap International. I will be doing research on the perceptions of disability, more specifically on how disability is socially constructed. The research will be used to create evidence based projects in health and education sectors that will allow people with disabilities to live with dignity and fully function in South Sudanese society.
People usually do this wide-eyed-thing when I say “South Sudan,” make a little “o” with their mouths by the time I get to “socially constructed,” and a scrunched eyebrow appears at “evidence based.” I don’t blame them—the scope of this project is huge, and in this brief explanation sounds vague and practically impossible. I know I’d be skeptical if I heard something so complex being squeezed into three sentences.
So, over a series of pre-departure posts, I’ll attempt to unpack those sentences, try to do the evolution of the project justice, and have a record of how I conceptualize it before I meet the realities on the ground. Though invoking a human rights discourse, my methodology is devised through anthropological techniques, framed through questions that come from work in Disability Studies and Medical Anthropology. I’ve been lucky to work with Professor Rayna Rapp in the Anthropology Department on my Independent Study about disability in Africa.
I was fortunate to intern with the British Council in South Sudan for the duration of the 2012 summer vacation. It was an experience that was satisfying in the amount of experience that I garnered (which you can read about in more detail here) and the relationships I developed with people I worked with there. And yet it was also deeply confounding to be present when a nation is in its infancy. It is somewhere in between experiencing those two feelings that I decided I want to learn more. The alignment of fates seemed almost comical: Handicap International was looking for a research intern, the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights was asking for applications, and here I was, a hopeful scholar.
South Sudan has gripped me in an academic and intellectual level that has spilled over into a deeply personal experience. And though it is tempting at this point, when departure is so very close, to get all existential on what it means to be leaving New York, I keep myself grounded in practicalities: getting final approval on methodology from the NGO, sending off my passport for a visa before I leave, and trying to find the least expensive storage space in the downtown area.