De Do Do Do De Da Da Da

Don't think me unkind
Words are hard to find
They're only cheques
I've left unsigned
From the banks of chaos in my mind
And when their eloquence escapes me
Their logic ties me up and rapes me

Apologies. I am still too exhausted from a twelve-hour ride over bumpy, dusty African roads from Kisoro, a town tucked between the misty and mountainous southwestern corner of Uganda adjacent to the Rwandese and Congolese borders, to think of anything even remotely clever to say about me and my mom's 10-day safari to four of the biggest game parks in Uganda, Murchison Falls, Kibale Forest, Queen Elizabeth Park and Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. I am also still a bit too overwhelmed by the experience, particularly the gorilla tracking, to acheieve any appropriate level of eloquence, so I am letting my photographs speak for themselves. Below are some of my favorites. You can view all of the pictures here.

De Do Do Do De Da Da Da is all that I can say to you...

Mother And Child Reunion

She crossed continents and seas secretly, a suitcase of gifts in hand

Greeted by the young curiously, another from distant lands

Sweet dolls and shiny trucks swiftly charmed the eager gaggle

One baby, oh it can’t be! even turned and babbled

Skirts and shirts bright and tagged, again more dancing smiles

And it was uttered jah jah burungi! not long after a while

And things till now unseen, oh so many! brought with the fair elder

Coloring books and waxy crayons and puzzles to put together

And private hires with seats clean and music clear, again a novel joy

And a picnic on the lake still and wide, more welcomed than a toy

And can you believe? A boat delivered to the island wrapped in surf!

Seems strange to say, but none had watched water lap the turf

And of course there were stares and laughter and tenderly dipped toes

And then running and jumping and freedom as the water flows

But the long blissful splashing followed an improper investigation

Not till later was it realized, a likely bilharzia infestation

No wonder the island children watched we sighed, but matter it did not

For yes it was achieved that which was so long after sought

And for them and us and another birthday, yes me, I could not pretend

Watching it all, reunited, I recalled the course of a lifetime runs over and over again

See all pix here

Space Oddity

You change here in pieces, in small, at times unperceivable ways. The change is quite fluid, quite peaceful and quite easy… if you are open to it. And if you are willing, one day you can awaken to the realization that you occupy a very different mental space than before did prior to setting out on your odyssey.

As you’ve been plotting and toiling in one space, you’ve also been floating along in another, going in a very different direction; and you may look back at yourself in the most peculiar way. And though your new space may seem far, beyond 100,000 miles, you will feel quite comfortable, in fact, very still, as if your spaceship knows which way to go.

Over the months in the land that was at once new and strange you will have seen roads and hospitals and schools and stores, and you will have listened to music and speeches and radio and conversation, and will have eaten bread and mangos and rice and bananas, in fact many bananas, and everything will resemble what you knew from before, but will look and sound and taste very different today.

And you will see glimpses of people who once surrounded you in the old space, maybe you will be reminded on Aljazeera, maybe you’ll watch a woman complain about having to keep her job because otherwise she can’t afford medical insurance, which she needs because she is being treated for an aggressive form of breast cancer and into your mind floats the prayer service you attended last Easter at your Ugandan auntie’s house and how an old sick woman was brought up to the make-shift stage by the outrageous pastor who claimed during his hours-long sermon choked with blood-boiling mendacities (such as his ability to cure people with AIDS) that the holy ghost told him there was a woman with breast cancer in the midst (although your better logic tells you the auntie of the house simply told the man this), and the pastor goes on to say he doesn’t like surgeries and commands the frail woman to not pursue her one treatment option, which is a mastectomy in a land without proper chemotherapy and radiation, and, in fact, the pastor then throws his hands in the air and claims with unabashed arrogance he has cured the old woman too! and everyone in the flimsy lawn chairs begins clapping like a bunch of fools at a circus while you fidget wildly, nearly uncontrollably in your plastic chair hoping the holy ghost also has the mercy to drop the murdering pastor dead right then and there on the stage while everyone is appropriately cheering; and as you relive this memory, at the same time you recall all the hospitals you’ve frequented these many months and how patients are packed into wards (of course never with nurses who properly care for them, or machines that monitor their vitals, or specialist to treat the sickest), and you remember just last week the man lying in the cot at the foot of your boy’s bed and how the man suddenly began flailing violently while his whole family (who appeared from their traditional clothes to be from deep within the village) stood watching not doing much of anything because they presumably didn’t know any better, so you went searching for the nurse and she didn’t seem to understand the word seizure so you shook demonstrating for her and she calmly replies the man was cold and you are like noooo the man wasn’t COLD, so you find the short doctor with the funny round spectacles and he injects something into the man’s IV and as you resume just staring, staring into the huge room in need of paint, full of sick and dying people surrounded by their family members resting on the concrete floor because there are no chairs and no spaces of comfort in these hospitals, the man laying so near seizes again, only this time harder and so you find the doctor again, but soon thereafter you leave, so you aren’t quite sure what happened, but a couple of days later the man in the bed just a few feet from your Ugandan son’s isn’t there anymore, the space empty and you don’t know why or where he has gone and you really don’t want to ask; and maybe just now, at the same moment you are watching the news programming with the complaining woman and remembering the sermon with the deceitful pastor and reliving the hospitals with the scores of dying people, there is an out of work African man (as if that needs to be said) staying in your home with growths squeezing numerous organs in his body and there is really only one hospital in the whole country with the oncological abilities to assist him and he would be lucky to ever be admitted and luckier to ever afford treatment because most others here (in fact millions of others here) are never diagnosed and just die unknown deaths quietly in villages and maybe you think that the woman on the TV wearing the nice clothes and nice jewelry sitting in the nice home shouldn’t be grumbling about how she has to keep her job with good pay and free medical insurance so she can continue to receive the best treatment on the planet while there are millions (in fact billions like stars in the universe) who would never be so lucky as to complain about such a thing, including a person sleeping under the same roof not more than several feet from you.

And that man, like all those now crowding your new space, just accepts things as they are, everything about his and their lives, including his and their deaths. And you become more accepting too, not trying so hard to change everything, and that tolerance affords a certain peace as you continue to float along in your spaceship. Here in the new space life is very real, nothing is figurative; metaphors, like treatments, are luxuries. Here is the space of the literal.

Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do

And while it may seem bizarre and nightmarish to those who haven’t left their capsules, the new space is not without its merits, it’s not always despairing or discouraging or depressing, and you realize it is not because here you are never alone, never isolated, although this may appear contradictory to the inexperienced; in fact, you will awaken to see that you are not, nor ever were floating by yourself. Occupying the new space is a sweeping sense of community and family as vast and novel as the cosmos; one that abhors individualism, in some ways for the worse, but in many for the better, and loneliness and alienation are largely unfamiliar; and therefore everything in the new space has a different sense and worth; and when I speak to people filling the space here, their understandings at many times would be an oddity to you. And for that matter it would be an oddity to the person I was.

Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do

A Thousand Beautiful Things

After visiting Richard in the hospital in Buikwe the afternoon of New Year’s Day, him still recovering from surgery the week prior, I arrived back in Lugazi to fetch some food from the open air market in the town’s centre. While making my way back home to start dinner I practically ran into my friend Sandra.

“Sandra! How are you? I haven’t seen you in so long. How was your Christmas?”

“It was good,” she said smiling.

“How was your New Year’s?”

“Well, right now I am going to visit some patients.” I knew that Sandra often paid hospital visits to people who worked on her community projects who fell ill.

“Who’s sick?”

“Well, I don’t know them. I am going to the children’s ward,” she replied holding out some sweeties.

“Oh, that is so nice of you! Actually, maybe Peanut and I will go. Let me run home first and drop off these things. Flash me when you are arriving at the hospital.”

Okay.

As Peanut and I walked through the thick muck saturating the ground and splashing onto our clothes, I asked her if she knew why we were going to the hospital. She didn’t know.

“Okay. What do people do on holidays like New Year’s?”

Peanut gave me a strange answer about learning and reading.

“Umm. Not really. Don’t people eat good food on holiday and go to church and go to the villages and see their family and friends?”

“Yes!”

“And what is that? It is fun, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Well imagine if you were in the hospital. The hospital isn’t very fun, right? You are sick and don’t feel well and maybe you are scared because you have to have surgery.”

“Yes.”

“So we want to go say ‘hi’ to these children on New Year’s when everyone else is having fun and they are scared and sick in the hospital.”

“Yes!” Peanuts agreed wholeheartedly swinging my hand in hers.

We arrived at the hospital in Lugazi, which is not more than a third of a mile from our house. Night had blanketed the sky deep indigo and the long narrow blocks of the hospital dorms lit up with lousy florescent lights. I entered the block painted Pediatric Ward on the side.



Sandra was leaning over the railing of one of the beds looking down at a boy lying placidly on his back, his arm wound in white bandages and gauze.



I followed Sandra’s example approaching the rows of bed, most fortunately empty, wishing the children and their mothers and caretakers a Happy New Year. I handed them packets of biscuits and spoke with them briefly. Many told me the cause of their hospital stays.

An unfortunate victim of an all too common occurrence by the notoriously careless drivers, little Masa had been stuck down by a boda on the 21st and would remain in the hospital considerably longer in traction. Her mummy showed me her x-ray: a completely severed bone.



“Oh! You poor thing! Was the bone sticking out when she was hit?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, that’s a compound fracture. Oh! It must have been so painful.” I turned to the little girl. “But you’ll be okay.”

The four year old smiled and said brightly, nearly bubbling, with surprising conviction, “Yes! I will be okay!”

I laughed and patted her. “You are so kanyama!” Then the mother laughed at me, surprised at my knowledge of Luganda.

“Yes, she is very strong.”



I moved to the other beds, mostly filled with babies and toddlers with malaria hooked up to drips, their mothers patiently sitting at their sides. One poor mother had two patients in the hospital, a baby with malaria and a young boy who looked like he had also been hit by a boda. Covering his abdomen was a large open sore, which fortunately appeared to be healing well and the child seemed to be in good spirits, squirming on the bed and laughing while I took his picture.



Other children were also recovering and happy.



But other children were sick and sad.



Still others were scared of buzungus.



Later that evening Peanut sat on the couch of our home while the TV played unwatched in the background. She looked up at me as if she wanted something.

Chi Chi?

“I want to watch videos,” the girl told me.

“You don’t want to watch TV?” I asked surprised. She shook her head. I laughed. “Okay. Come.”

She followed me into my room and I loaded on my computer a collection of Annie Lennox videos, which much to my amusement, the girl loves. She sat in my room memorized with the monitor, singing and dancing as I put away clothes laundered earlier that day.

“You go to the next one. I don’t like this one,” she said as another video queued.

“Noooo Peanut. I am not skipping through this one. This is a very good song. It’s one of my favorites. It’s about gratitude. Do you know that one, gratitude?” Peanut shook her head. “It means thank you. It is being thankful for something.”

Peanut looked at the video skeptically, but with more interest; the soothing notes continued to float through the room.

I thank you for the air to breathe, the heart to beat, the eyes to see again

“You see. She is saying thank you for being able to breathe, to have a beating heart, to be able to see. She is thankful for simple things, for being alive.”

I looked over at Peanut as I stuffed socks into my drawer. She had been standing, but suddenly sat watching intently. She began singing.

The world was meant for you and me to figure out our destiny

To live to die to breathe to see to try to make your life complete….

A Thousand Beautiful Things