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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

Through a local NGO livelihood program, Sanyu sustains her family off the sale of sorghum crops. According to UG labor statistics, 46% of women in Uganda engage in subsistence farming, compared to 34% of men. HIV prevalence is twice as high among women than men (Uganda Aids Commission). 2012

Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

Image 6: A portrait of Sanyu, who is living with AIDS and is the sole caretaker of her three children, some of whom are HIV positive.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

Image 5: Nurses care for a premature baby at Iganga General Hospital in Uganda, photographed while on assignment for the Associated Press. The hospital has held clinical trials and training for medical professionals for USAID’s Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP). 2015

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

Images 2-4 were photographed at the Lumino Health Center III’s antiretroviral therapy clinic in Uganda serving people living with HIV/AIDS with USAID support. In 2012, when I was there, the clinic served over 1,200 patients that come from as far away as Tanzania to receive treatment and counseling.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

Captions:

Image 1: USAID sign in Busia in Eastern Uganda. 2012

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

I asked him how this humanitarian disaster was affecting the United State’s reputation in Uganda: “Why do we depend on the US so much? Why didn’t we [Uganda] have a plan? We took foreign aid for granted. This is a time for people to wake up.”

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

that without consistent treatment patients will build up resistance to medicine and more expensive treatments will need to be administered, and potentially new variants of the virus to fight.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

He told me it's only a matter of time before many in need of critical care “deteriorate and die.” Concerns he shared with me are obviously increased transmission of HIV and AIDS,

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

He described the situation as “completely destabilizing… there’s nowhere to run.” With an unknown supply of medicine and shuttered clinics, patients are being told to go to hospitals for services they cannot be provided with.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

despite a February 4 U.S. State Department memo waiver for life-saving services “to prevent imminent mortality among USAID beneficiaries,” which includes all the aforementioned.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

as well as HPV testing for women, tuberculosis and malaria testing and critical data collection. He told me he and 95% of his colleagues were given a stop-work order on 1/24/25, and have not returned to work or since received any communication about the future of their work

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

HIV/AIDS services such as treating and monitoring patients on antiretroviral therapy (ART), HIV positive pregnant and lactating mothers at-risk for transmitting the virus to their baby and those with advanced AIDS

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

Yesterday, I spoke with a Ugandan friend, who will go unnamed to protect his identity. He is in Northern Uganda, building and managing laboratories for The AIDS Support Organisation (TASO) that ensure

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

While there has been a lot of essential reporting on the shut down of USAID, we haven’t really seen the human impact or heard from non-Americans who work with and for USAID.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

Infectious disease knows no borders. Who benefits? Certainly the US’s competitors. Definitely not American farmers, who sell $2 billion annually in rice, wheat, peas and lentils to USAID (source: DTN/Progressive Farmer).

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

I will always question foreign aid and its agenda, but I believe the successes outweigh the failures here.The dismantling of USAID by the Trump Administration is inhumane. The ripple effect for our communities globally is destabilizing, and deadly.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

I've reported on the challenges of foreign development and investment across East Africa, but I have also witnessed firsthand the positive effects that USAID-supported projects have had for maternal and child health, people living with HIV and AIDS, and women’s empowerment.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Feb 12

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Jan 28

Caption: A farm worker holds up a red bandana as a visual marker for other workers across hundreds of acres of sorghum in Plainview, Texas in 2018.
#usa #nationalhumantraffickingawarenessmonth #labor #labortrafficking #H2-A

Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Jan 28

Movement isn't necessary. In fact, most labor trafficking victims are not smuggled through “wide open spaces,” as Trump suggested, or via semi-trucks. They come through ports of entry, many legally on temporary work visas.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Jan 28

Federal law defines labor trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.”

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Jan 28

Another issue is how we talk about it. President Trump, for example, has made multiple statements mixing the words smuggling and trafficking throughout his first presidency to elicit support for a border wall.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Jan 28

A 2016 study by the University of Texas at Austin estimates there are 234,000 adult labor trafficking victims in Texas and traffickers exploit an estimated $600 million annually in illicit fees from their victims.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Jan 28

Analyzing two years of calls to their hotline, Polaris found that 94% of labor trafficking victims worked in the agricultural industry, disproportionately Mexican nationals in the H-2A guest worker program.

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Dana Ullman @danaullman.bsky.social · Jan 28

In 2014, The Urban Institute reported 71% of identified trafficking victims came to the U.S. on legal visas.

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