91Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵ

My internship with Watye Ki Gen was a truly life changing and would not have been possible without the support of the Vanasse Wilbert International Experience Award. I want to thank Ms. Martine Vanasse and Mr. Randall Wilbert for their incredible generosity and support in making this experience happen.

In May 2025, I had the incredible opportunity of travelling to Gulu, Uganda to support the organization Watye Ki Gen. Watye Ki Gen is a community-based organization that supports victims of the northern Uganda war. Watye Ki Gen offers programs that support research, livelihood, and community sensitization. I came to Uganda as a part of my Master of Social Work degree, a milestone I have been working towards for many years.

When I entered the Master of Social Work program at 91Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵ, I was interested in exploring social work on an international level, but I wasn’t sure what this could look like. I have always been interested in exploring, and learning from, different cultures and felt eager to continue this learning through my Master of Social Work degree. Particularly, I was interested in supporting children and families, as I believe this is the foundation from which we all grow. I could have never expected that this degree would lead me to complete an international internship in Africa. To have the opportunity to learn directly from a grassroots organization, supporting some of Gulu, Uganda’s most vulnerable populations, has been so eye-opening. It’s been remarkable to learn from the relational way social work is conducted here, and this will be something I bring into my future practice.

I have supported various projects at Watye Ki Gen, including a participatory project between 91Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵ and Watye Ki Gen, supported Children Born in Captivity (CBC) youth workshops, and followed up on past projects. One particularly interesting experience was when I got to accompany two Watye Ki Gen staff to rural communities, as follow-up to a World Vision project. During the war, many women were abducted from their communities and this project supported female war returnees, who were rejected from their communities due to stigmatization, buy land for themselves to live on and build agriculture initiatives to support themselves. Visiting these women in their homes and hearing what this project and land meant to them solidified my desire to work within international organizations as a future social worker.

Naturally, along with the many highlights, there have been some challenges. Navigating social work in a different cultural context has brought with it a lot of introspection about the way I have practiced social work in the past. One challenge at the start of the internship was around communication. In northern Uganda, the most common language is Luo, at times during youth workshop facilitation I would struggle to differentiate if youth had not understood my question due to language barriers, or if the group was just taking time to think. The silence that accompanied these moments was uncomfortable at times, but it’s something I was able to reflect a lot on. I feel as I moved through my internship I was able to get more comfortable with these silences, which ended up allowing space for a lot of interesting discussion and ideas.

Throughout my time here in Uganda, I have felt the way international support and initiatives can create real world impacts for vulnerable populations. This has been incredibly inspiring, as I have observed the difference these initiatives can have on individual lives. For example, an organizations support can be the difference in a child being able to go to school. This not only impacts the child, but the family and the opportunities that will be available to that child later in life. This experience has shaped my desire to support vulnerable populations on the international scale and provided me with an incredible base in which to build from. I will continue supporting Watye Ki Gen in the future and plan to focus my social work career on supporting populations internationally.

Now that my internship is coming to a close, it’s interesting for me to reflect on how I felt at the beginning of my master’s, unsure of where I fit into this profession. However, now I leave Uganda feeling inspired to contribute to real change on the international level, as I have been able to see what a difference this can make. The funding I received from the Vanasse Wilbert International Experience Internship Award made it possible for me to travel to Uganda and live here while supporting Watye Ki Gen. This experience, and all the learning that came with it, would not have been possible without the generous support of the donors. Thank you so much to Ms. Martine Vanasse and Mr. Randall Wilbert for making this experience possible for me! It’s something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.