An AIDS education performance troupe danced at the Hospice, where two Yale interns will volunteer.

Upon her return to the Yale campus in the fall of 2006, Emanuel met with staff at Yale Undergraduate Career Services (UCS) to share her idea. This dialogue led to the formation of Bulldogs in Uganda, a summer program that will send eight Yale students to the Ugandan capital for two-month internships in an array of fields. Emanuel coordinated the internship positions herself, deliberately selecting work environments that would allow Yale students immersion in the Ugandan culture. She began organizing the program in September, and by the February application deadline, ninetyseven Yale students had applied for eight internship offerings in journalism, health, government, and music. The interns will connect with Ugandan professionals, learn about the realities of daily life for locals in Kampala, and provide the framework for a continued partnership between Yale and Uganda.

Balikoowa Centurio, a Ugandan musician determined to record traditional music before it disappears, believes the interns will contribute to his project. “Ugandans will be proud of having [Yale students] working together with me,” he told The Yale Globalist. “I feel we are brothers and sisters who should share knowledge, ideas, experience [with] each other without fear.”

Bulldogs in Uganda is the latest of the many International Bulldogs programs that UCS offers undergraduates. The first Bulldogs program was instituted in 2003 with British Bulldogs, which places students in London-based internships, and was shortly followed by Bulldogs in Beijing in 2005. This summer, UCS will also offer Bulldogs programs in Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, and now Uganda. Philip Jones, director of UCS, focused on introducing the three Africa-based programs this year. According to Jones, the purpose of the Uganda program is “to give Yale students the experience of living and, more importantly, working abroad. If we mean anything when we talk about a global economy, we need to get students to go abroad and experience that.”

What distinguishes Bulldogs in Uganda from other Bulldogs programs, though, is the story of its inception. Working closely with Jones and UCS, Emanuel coordinated many of the logistics for Bulldogs in Uganda herself, making it the first studentdesigned International Bulldogs program. “I could have done this independently, but one of the reasons I wanted to work with Yale is so that [the program] becomes institutionalized and continues even if I’m not able to go every year,” she told the Globalist.

Emanuel, an Ethics, Politics, and Economics major, took a year off after her junior year to pursue research for her senior thesis at Hospice Africa Uganda, a medical facility in Kampala. She wanted to assess the “feasibility of pilot programs in day care and caregiver training and certification.”Emanuel worked with translators to conduct interviews with family caregivers of terminally ill cancer and AIDS patients.

While in Uganda, Emanuel constantly wrote in her journal, filling its pages with impressions and sketches of her surroundings. “I was in places where you notice the small things because they are different from your basic assumptions,” she said. Emanuel admits that the journals she has kept since her return to the United States mostly contain “to do lists.” She is eager to return to the self-reflection and exploration the Ugandan lifestyle allows her. “Where I live, there are a lot of resources and time is of the essence,” she explained. “For the Ugandans, resources are the limiting factor, and time is what you can use plenty of.”

Back at Yale, Emanuel is seated at a picnic table in a residential college courtyard with a zip-up sweatshirt and sneakers. She seems content in her comfort zone, but it is when she talks about Uganda that her eyes light up. Looking at Emanuel perched on the college picnic table, it is hard to imagine her boarding a plane with a suitcase stuffed with medical supplies or walking the streets of Kampala with a long skirt stained red from the dry ground.