Something to Call Their Own

Africa is very much a culture of community, more precisely it is a society revolving around the family. What’s yours is also your brothers, including your children, what’s yours is also your nieces and nephews and cousins and second cousins, and if you are a woman, what’s yours is also your husband’s entire family. The communes that are families provide a security that is otherwise lacking here. In the United States we often want big daddy government to help us solve all our problems, from health care to finances to job security to natural disasters to vulnerable children to worker’s rights; in Africa, a continent rife with ineffective and inefficient government, daddy’s big family serves the same purpose. And when problems arise, as they inevitably do, they are handled with a certain African protocol, with an eye towards who or whom in the family should handle any given situation bearing in mind matriarchs and patriarchs and relations between the people involved and in-laws and who lives where and who is married to whom and so on so as to not step on toes, so as not to offend, to avoid appearing as if you are trying to undermine or sabotage another; African families members are dependent on and generous with one another in many ways that puts Americans to shame, but are oftentimes also cautious and untrusting of each other. It is tricky to insert yourself into these familial relationships and graces without an understanding of African culture and the specific dynamics of any given family.

And so now you may have an idea of some of the many challenges I’ve faced in setting up projects on my needy children’s behalf: the contention between family members whispered to me in private meetings around dinner tables and the open clashes between the family and outsiders I’ve involved on the projects and the all the whirling rumors and innuendo. And so now you may also understand how sharing works here and how individual ownership of any given thing from knickknacks and shoes and books to businesses and homes and farms does not have, like most everything else, quite the same meaning as it does in the United States.

And so now you might also see why it is amusing that Richard, my 14-year-old with the chronically infected leg, has taken to locking the toys given to him by my mom, his Jaaja Muzungu, in the flimsy cupboard crammed to the side of the kid’s small sitting room. He of course lets his sisters and little cousin play with them, more than willing to share, but he eyes them closely, watching them for unnecessary roughness or absentminded placement, sweeping up the dump trucks and motorcycles, sticking them into the cupboard after playtime is finished with a big grin, chatting and laughing, his pleasure impossible to mask in finally owning the shiny and unique. For a kid that maybe only had two torn shirts and a pair of pants to his name some months ago, not even having a toothbrush, a book, a hangar, a towel, a bed, a sheet, a pencil, a jacket to call his own, he was understandably a little possessive in a manner unusual to the culture, humorously so.

And it was also amusing last night as the kids bent over a large map I bought them, staring I suspected for the first time at the outline of the world and its wide lands and spacious seas and mazes of borders and networks of rivers, having asked the kids to find Uganda, which they did after a short while then asking them to find America and noticing that my 16-year-old, Agnes’ eyes continued to search over Africa scrutinizing the names of countries and cities in its midst for the letters U.S.A.

“No,” I said laughing, “it’s over here,” pointing across the large laminated page to the far right explaining to her the differences between the continents and oceans, which I knew she understood because I had just read through the neatly-printed notes in her exercise book on the subject. I saw little lights in her head flickering on connecting what she had learned in school with the map. Then as we tried hanging the map on the wall my four-year-old Rachel pointed to the wall opposite where another educational poster hung of the human body and she said, “Mommy, skeleton.”

And I responded surprised and proud, “Yes, Rachel it is a skeleton.”

And she said, “Skeletons’ bad.”

And then I made a face and giggled saying, “No, skeletons aren’t bad, they are good. You wouldn’t be able to move without them.” She didn’t understand exactly what I was meant I am sure, but she knew what a skeleton was and she wouldn’t have known and maybe never would have known if it weren’t for my being there through strange twists of fate and all the tremendous, absolutely critical support I’ve been given from friends, family and especially my parents to help these kids, so many close to me giving to five needy kids they don’t even know on the other side of the world.

And then I looked back up at the four older kids all still crowded around the map showing each other different places, eyes glowing, minds buzzing, the whole world opening up to them and it became all the more clear that they had in fact never even seen a world map before, and MIA’s lyrics flashed through my head:

I put people on a map who’ve never seen a map

I showed ‘em something they’ve never seen

And I hope they make it back

And I felt as if I stepped into the song, feeling like I was giving these children tools to make their lives better, but knowing that I could only do so much and they would have to do the rest with what they were given. But I was hopeful, am hopeful that they will proceed wisely since I know how far they have come, watching their tremendous progress, their great strides, their hard work before my eyes, witnessing reminders of what they’ve gained from knowledge in school subjects to life lessons taught at home, learning geography and biology as well as how to take care of what is theirs, toys and maps, family and love.

Rebounding in the Big Sky

Sitting in the back of the taxi van bumping along pot-holed, congested, polluted Jinja Road, beat-up cars and disheveled lorries and sagging taxi vans running past each other and bodas lining the road’s edges, I stared out the window into the grey afternoon, thick equatorial clouds squeezing the dark green hillsides. I had grown accustomed to the route having traveled often between Lugazi and Kampala, I knew all the rest stops, the speed bumps, the markets, the shanties. Watching the world rush by, the world now familiar, but lingering in the back of my mind, soon again to be foreign, I withdrew inwards, daydreaming, listening to my Ipod.

Big sky
I’m gonna hurt you
Big sky
you’ll remember this
Big sky
up above the rain
How can I ever put a stop to it
look you in the face again?

How could I stop? Where did I restart? Why was I feeling so disconnected? No, I knew, I knew: the uncertainty of my projects and the thieves trying to destroy them, the lingering strangeness of my surroundings and the impending shift from it. I was about to reemerge, about to surface from dark, cool waters back into my old comfortable life, entering a strange vortex of the familiar and foreign and what was once one would then, poof, become the other and it would be confusing and maybe a bit upsetting and all the while I was acclimating, readjusting to life as I had known it for decades before I would be thinking how are my projects going? what about the kids? but then how long would I think that 15,000 miles away; I might as well be on another planet as it certainly was a different world. I was drifting, losing sight, feeling worn and muddled.

When I’m breathing
When I’m sleeping
I can’t think of nothing else
All my longin'
All my waitin'
All the things you never felt
All weepin'
All my wailin'
All my standing on the shelf
How am I ever going to get through this
back to myself again?

I stared into the fields, the workers dotted along the hillsides, digging as they did everyday; I watched the vendors along the street side carrying baskets of fruit on their heads, pushing their wares as they did everyday; most here are without much choice as to what they do, performing their daily tasks without mind of the monotony; maybe there was assurance in the routine, maybe they felt grounded in the certainty of their habits.

But where was my center? What was holding me, what was holding all this together? I stared through the grimy taxi window dust and exhaust blowing in my face, looking into the billowing clouds masking the huge blue sky beyond and continued to listen.

Won't you say it isn't so?
Watch me fallin'
See me fallin'
I slipped through
the vortex of the sky
Darkness and light
That’s what’s inside
Darkness and light
It’s what’s inside

And in listening I recalled. I recalled what I already knew; what I had known all along. I just had to remember what I had forgotten…

The sky is limitless; a void of light and dark. Stretching as far as our imaginations, it reflects possibilities existing within all of us; a potential and nature revealed faintly in lives of want, and starkly in crushing need. I anticipated watching it vibrantly within others Here, but within myself….what will I do faced with the novel and unknown?

I wrote the above paragraph last spring, just a few weeks into my African stay, questioning who I would be when confronted with then unknown challenges while spending months on unfamiliar terrain; yes, within all of us is incredible potential for darkness and light falling across the span of our lives filled with endless possibilities in what we experience and encounter, and the one certainty in all the uncertainty is choice: how will you respond? Which will you be? Darkness or light?

The last couple of weeks and their corresponding blog entries have been the dark sequel to my story, the sort of Godfather II to my saga. Weighted and disappointed, bruised and disgusted, I entered the dimmest hours after months of slowly walking away from the light. I felt everyone around me to be suspicious, a society fat with poverty and corruption forces you to be untrusting, and my particular circumstances absolutely required me to be calculating and dubious, but in guarding your interests, in protecting yourself and that which you hold dear, you cannot forget the good, you cannot forget those around you who are honest and faithful and inspiring because then you are no longer a little bit of light, darkness has taken over.

In remembering this, in considering all this while staring out the taxi van, pollution and dirt whirling from passing trucks obscuring the peaceful emerald green horizon, I recalled a conversation that I am sure never to forget. A young American woman and I were speaking some months back about the extraordinarily unscrupulous things people will do here in the land of the have-nots: stealing from family members, leveraging disabled children, using charity for personal enrichment, etc. Then the hippyish teenager donning African jewelry and a long flowing dress, dirty feet and unkept hair whimsically said, “I love them even though I can’t trust them.” I watched her dance across the room after she said it, staring hard at her, I am sure my face furrowed in confusion, unable to decide if it was one of the stupidest or most profound things I had ever heard.

But in the months that I’ve been here I’ve come to realize it doesn’t much matter which you think the statement is, naive or compassionate, sophomoric or philosophical, childish or selfless, it is just true: here you learn to love people even if you can’t trust them, here you learn to love the darkness as well as the light; in a word you learn forgiveness.

Through the Looking -Glass

After living with Africans for nearly a year I was beginning to feel trapped in a wonderland; a wonderland of surreal characters speaking another language, some there to genuinely help me, others to genuinely hurt me, but all completely, utterly ununderstandable, their words at time falling on my ears like jibberish. I had to get away for a few days. I was finally, just absolutely having it – having it with Africans and their bizzare ways. I needed to step outside the looking-glass, outside the closing in absurdity that was Africa, outside my projects and their web of problems and regroup, refocus, re-energize; gain a brighter, bigger , more beautiful perspective. I felt myself growing hard, weighted, cynical; I felt trapped on the other side of a looking-glass.

The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings."

So I spent a few days at The Red Chili Hideaway – a compound just outside of Kampala frequented by ex-pats, back-backers and aid workers galore. I found solace in speaking with a menagerie of interesting travelers and volunteers from all over the globe: a young British lawyer working death penalty cases in Malawi who revealed the horrors the prisoners and people awaiting trial endure: 180 people packed into a cell maybe 30 by 15 feet, sleeping at night sitting up with their legs on the shoulders of the people next to them, a whistle being blown every few hours so they can all turn at the same time and rest in a different position on the concrete, dying in prison en mass because they only receive one meal of beans and maize meal a day and medical treatment days too late, all the while waiting five, six, ten years for trial; or the South African woman working outside Gulu in the north of Uganda on a rehabilitation project for former child soldiers/child mothers and her work in getting the community to learn a marketable skill, her teaching them bead-making so that they might earn their own living after receiving hand-outs from aid agencies for nearly a quarter a century, many not ever learning how to provide for themselves; then there was the crazy young British man driving his car by himself from England down to Cape Town, having received 15 flat tires through a rugged expanse of Northern Africa alone, and then of course the equally crazy couple of energetic South Africans on a similar journey, riding their bikes from England to Cape Town, and, of course, the even crazier American doing the same north to south journey on his bike, but alone, but the most insane of all I didn’t actually meet, I only heard of him as a bit of a backpacker’s legend: a single man of an unknown origin, paddling, yes, paddling his canoe or kayak through the war-torn, collapsed-government Congo.

Their stories were fascinating, invigorating, inspiring and soothing; swapping tales and thoughts with the aid workers was particularly therapeutic:

Yes, you just need to get away sometimes; it’s the only way to cope. Yes, you grow a bit hard, not entirely befriending the people around you. Yes, everyone is always trying to get something from you. Yes, it’s hard going back home; nobody else quite understands what you’ve been through. Yes, development books can’t really teach you about how to run sustainable projects. No. No. I don’t know what I am doing in a few weeks when my project is over either. I’ll figure it out when I get home. I don’t know what kind of life I want anymore.

And so it was. A gated compound filled with Western food, a miniature swimming pool, dorms, tents, flushing toilets, beat-up vehicles, and, most importantly, people who spoke the same language, who had the same dreams, fears, passions, challenges, hopes, worries, aspiration, uncertainties, highs and lows; a walled-in sanctuary, a brief encounter with serenity and understanding. But. Then. Back to the ridiculous and the duplicitous looming outside…

“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?”
But answer came there none—
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.

But going back through the looking-glass this time I felt more at peace, more in piece, with a clearer perspective like glass perfectly cleaned remembering all of the good and not just the bad around me, and my conversation with my real family waiting patiently in California, just six more weeks and you’ll be home!, as always offered important reminders; you’ve helped so many people already, you have to expect some of these things are going to happen, even major corporations suffer losses.

And, as always, the best reminder was the children. Despite anything else going on, stealing, cheating, lying, backstabbing, rumors, gossip, power-plays, insincerity, lapses in logic, lapses in integrity, I can always, always find solace and happiness in the kids, their laughter, honesty, purity and genuine gratitude are a constant source of strength and joy.

“Sylvia. Put on your new uniform so I can take a picture,” I asked my eight year old yesterday after returning from Red Chili, my little girl who didn’t know a single letter or digit when we took her in last summer and within a period of a few months learned enough to spell simple words and complete basic arithmetic; I was incredibly proud of her as she was of herself. She had been advanced from nursery school to primary school after one three month term and I knew she loved her new, big-girl school’s red and white gingham uniform.

Sylvia ran inside the house to put on the dress then me and her and the rest of the kids played and laughed in the late Sunday sun before I slipped to the children’s village with Aunt Jennifer to check on the land we had cleared and planted on behalf of the kids to ensure their food security when I leave in just a few weeks; happy children, growing food, bright futures… I felt okay despite all the troubles, all the absurdity...

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

part of the land we have cleared to plant crops for the children

The Matrix: In and Out

There are fewer things more difficult in life than finding yourself caught in a set of circumstances that force you to operate in a fashion that goes against your very nature, to find yourself confined in a situation that at once highlights the characteristics that comprise you at your core and also forces you to control or alter those defining qualities; it is a challenge of one’s strength, will, fortitude, resourcefulness and ingenuity.

Say, for example, you have been moving through your life, your entire life thus far, going to school, getting a job, starting a family, retiring, becoming grandparents, and so on, playing out patterns of existence, and then one day, like a shocking jolt, you realize it’s all a ruse and actually nothing was as you had always perceived it: rather than individuals carving unique paths, you were drones following a nefarious plan; you and everyone you knew were not people in cycles, but a cogs in wheels; you were not living a life, but stuck in a matrix.

How do you pull yourself out of the matrix? Could you even have the correct set of tools to guide you? Everything you knew until just now was just wrong. Maybe you would ignore the new found reality, pretend that you didn’t know - that everything was as it had always been? Maybe you would just hope that things would continue as they had, as if they didn’t require some kind of massive, scary change for everything to be right.

For those of you who might have been on this site a few days ago and now see, strange, a missing entry, no, your eyes are not deceiving you, and no, there is not a glitch in the matrix. In fact, I had posted a blog some days ago, but the evil machines are again looking for any opportunity to separate the muzungu from her money and some of those machines are at least partially computer literate and know this website; as such, the post was removed as it is not the time to reveal any information on the matrix that could be used against me.

So what is so difficult here? Everything and nothing. Like the matrix, most people here are not what they seem – you have to look closely, find the patterns and inconsistencies to know the truth. Everything can come crashing down if not played properly, and so I move with caution to ensure the machines will not continue to suck energy from me and my projects, but I have confidence as I have swallowed the little red pill of truth and have learned my true nature and how to control it… and so, yes, I am now for the remainder of my time here in an alternate reality, wholly untrusting.

Songs and Subtext

My January blog entries were titled and inspired by some of my favorite songs, weaving their lyrics and themes into my text as I felt I was at moments living their meanings and tones. So you might have a better understanding of the entries' significance, particularly if you were not already familiar with these pieces of musical and lyrical genius, below are links to the songs on YouTube.

A Thousand Beautiful Things

Space Oddity

Mother and Child Reunion

De Do Do Do De Da Da Da