Wellbeing – a few Ugandan glimpses from the past week of research

 It’s been a week of wellbeing – mainly talking about it through the interviews I conducted, and thinking about it as I typed up the transcripts and wrote down my reflections on each interview. But also putting it into practice through carving out a bit of time to spend at the jigsaw table in a particular coffee shop in Gulu (yes, I love doing jigsaws, so that is definitely a wellbeing activity), as well as making sure I got out for a run or walk each morning.

The research I am doing, and that has brought me to Gulu this time round, is related to an exploration of how women, with a lived experience of trauma caused by conflict, make sense of wellbeing. So much of the narrative around wellbeing comes from the global north, and is therefore dominated by voices from institutions and organisations who represent that sector. My research is a push back against that. It is seeking to ask women from the global south, women who are not from well-established backgrounds, but women who are refugees, or internally displaced. Women who are from cultures where ordinarily they aren’t allowed to speak for themselves about many issues. My research is therefore a small attempt to bring the voices of the non-dominant and marginalised to the centre, and to give them the opportunity to share their perspectives and reflections.

The interviews this past week weren’t with the refugees or the internally displaced groups – those interviews are phase 2, in January / February next year. The interviews this time were with female staff members of I Live Again Uganda, through whom I am gaining access to the phase 2 interviewees. ILA is a CRED partner, and they deliver trauma counselling and other support to the refugee and IDP communities that I will be drawing my participants from. So, this time the interviews were about exploring with the ILA women their thoughts and reflections on wellbeing.

I’m still processing the findings – I’ve not even started on the coding, and thematic analysis – but, in no particular order, here are a few reflections on wellbeing as per the 6 Ugandan ladies I interviewed:

•        Wellbeing, when talked about by national bodies in the context of Uganda eg in school, on public service broadcasts, tends to focus on physical and financial wellbeing. According to those narratives, it’s all about being physically well, and financially secure – if you have all that you’ll be fine.  In those narratives, there is not really any mention of the mental wellbeing aspect, and yet for all those I interviewed, the key thing for them was giving attention to the mind, and the health of the mind.

•        The physical and the financial are important, but the mental, spiritual and emotional wellbeing also need to be attended to. If you don’t have wellbeing in all areas, you don’t have wellbeing

•        Organisations that go in and deliver support to people in post-trauma situations tend to focus on the physical wellbeing, but don’t always give attention to the mental wellbeing.  The healing of the nation has been slowed post-conflict due to the lack of attention to mental wellbeing

•         Wellbeing cannot be confined to the individual. If the community does not have wellbeing, then the individual cannot have total wellbeing.      But equally, the wellbeing of the community is made up of the wellbeing of its members. So if one of the members does not have wellbeing, then the community does not have total wellbeing.

•        Wellbeing is affected by culture, and in particular the wellbeing of women is affected by the cultural norms and expectations placed on them regarding the responsibilities that they have to bear, and how much they, or are not, able to represent themselves, their views and their wishes.

•        Wellbeing is such a broad term that when I asked each of the interviewees to translate it into their mother tongue of Acholi, they each gave me a different translation. So I now have 6 Acholi translations to work with!

Many would say that there is nothing ground-breaking or revolutionary here. And I’d be inclined to agree. Other papers will be able to be found that make each of these points. But the majority of those papers didn’t ask women with lived experience of trauma who come from the global south. It’s good to finally be giving a small group of those people the chance to take centre-stage and speak out, and I’m looking forward to seeing what more appears as the research progresses.