Big Sky Uganda

A Case for Charity

2011-08-08T17:53:00.000-07:00

It’s now been a little over two years since Ester and I rescued kids. Rachel was just three at the time. Now she is six. Sylvia had never been to school. I still easily recall the look of frustration and embarrassment on her little face when the teacher asked her to count to ten during her admissions test and nothing came out of her mouth. Now she is in P2 (second grade). Beatrice and Richard didn’t know the alphabet two years ago. Now they are half-way through primary school. Agnes could barely speak English back then. I ran into her on the street a couple weeks after her mother passed and she mumbled something to me. I heard mother...dead. Now Aggie speaks English almost fluently and is in secondary school.

The kids are growing up so fast. Ester sent me this picture of them last week; it made me happy, proud, and sad. I try to forget how much I miss them.

I keep in contact with Ester and the children regularly, and I am as proud of Ester as I am of the children. This project has been successful mostly because of Ester’s constant and hard work. She has managed to look after the five orphans and her own child, Peanut, and keep the Snack Shop up and running all on her own. It is very difficult to establish sustainable projects in developing countries and the credit now really belongs to her.

Ester has been managing the shop well enough to make enough of a profit to cover her and the children’s everyday living expenses, like food, clothes, transportation, basic medical, etc. It is not enough to cover their rent and school fees though, so I send money back to her quarterly for these expenses, which are relatively expensive.

Whenever I call about money or to see how they are doing, I hear the children laughing in the background. It brings me such joy to hear their health and happiness. Everyone is doing well except poor Richard.

The infection is Richard’s leg has recently worsened, the ooze and pain returning. Ester sent me this picture last week and I wanted to cry.

Ester has taken Richard to one of the best hospitals in the country for treatment upon my request. They said he needs another surgery and will meet with the surgeon this Saturday, August 13. I suspect he will go into surgery a few days later. Ester’s friend, Moses, whom I’ve met, will accompany her since he has medical background and can hopefully provide assistance. I have also asked Ester to give the doctor my email as I would like to stay on top of his treatment firsthand.

I remain hopeful that this surgery will be the final treatment for the boy, but unfortunately it is impossible to say. A friend recent saw the photograph and asked if it were better if the leg were amputated.

Forget what you know about sidewalks, ramps or ADA compliance. Imagine a place where you walk only on hard, undulating red dirt, or through thick, gunky red mud that sometimes swallows your feet to the ankles. Imagine that same place with clinics and hospitals that only hint at modern medicine, there certainly are no wheelchairs or prosthetics.

If you are disabled in Uganda, you literally pull yourself over the dirt to get around. If you are able-bodied in Uganda, you may have a few opportunities to earn a living. If you are disabled, you have none.

An amputation is out of the question.

We really need your donations to help cover the cost of Richard’s treatment. As always, there is no overhead for this project and all money is sent directly back to Ester and the children. All costs are also scrutinized closely.

Also, I am happy to say that donations of $100 or more are now tax deductible!

The Kiwanis Foundation of Tierrasanta (the community in San Diego I call home) has agreed to accept, manage and distribute funds for this project. Everything else, including the operations and fundraising, will remain entirely my responsibility.

I am very excited about this development. It came about rather flawlessly and I believe the charity's financial mangement will help make the children’s futures more secure.

I only wish there were something similarly simple that could be done to make Richard’s health also assured.

A Work Of Art

2010-12-17T16:38:00.000-08:00

Time and space in another world - a world so modern, fast and shiny - have caught me up again and sent me flying forward. I have been swept out of this spring and summer's sulking limbo, readjusting to life in the US. In the autumn I got a job; then I got a phone; and then I got so much more: car tune-ups, dry-cleaning, monthly bills, gym sessions, new works clothes, rush hours, happy hours, a medical plan, a dental plan and a 401k (okay, come the new year). I am here again, finally. But as something new, something more complete. I have far greater perspective - as if the lens that once perceived the world has been adjusted into place, having always been askance.

Today I attended a memorial service for my former mentor, an extraordinary man swiftly and heartbreakingly taken by pancreatic cancer. At the service I saw many former colleges among the hundreds paying their respects to a great, but humble man who undoubtedly impacted thier lives as positively as he did mine.

Thus is the time for reflection.

I speak with Ester and my African children as often as I can still, still looking out for their well-being despite the obstacles between us: their lingering in undeveloped, inefficient Africa and me moving at the speed of light some 13,000 miles away. Might as well be another planet, I tell people. Ester is still managing the snack shop, although it's not doing as well as I would like, but more importantly, the kids are happy and grateful. I can hear them shrieking and laughing in the background whenever I call, and see in my mind their bouncing off the bunk beds, running barefoot on the concrete floor, Rachel and Peanut ganging up on Richard in play fight while Sylvia smiles watching, B2 reads and Agnes cooks on the charcoal stove.

I have been told by Ester and the the hospital that was treating Richard that his health has improved, but he is still not quite well. The hospital has said they could do no more for him, so I ensured that he was taken to another reputable orthopedic surgeon in Kampala. After checking him, the new doctor says that Richard just needs some medication to dry up the leg and special bandaging, a treatment course that should just take a few weeks. So we will find out shortly if he will finally be healed, but I reamain cautiously optimistic, this is Africa, I tell myself and others.

So they - the kids and Ester - are there, and I am here, and God only knows when our lives will collide in person again, and God only knows if things will work out with the project as I envisioned, and God only knows if I will ever become accustomed to straddling the vast divide between our two staggeringly different worlds. But like most significant things in life, there is no clear end; new situations and new people and new emotions surface and fall with the passage of time; we collect; we throw away; we rearrange; we hold onto what is most dear and continue like an artist molding our own works of art.

Reality Checks

2010-06-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

I am slipping back more and more into the life I once knew, knowing I will never quite be the same again, but I have once more grown accustomed to traffic and paved roads; the selection of a hundred cereals and dozens of cooking oils at the store; news, music, advertisements, cell phones, laptops, televisions and pdas a constant affront to my senses. I am getting a little impatient again, and a touch ungrateful. Expectations are swelling, so is my sense of me: I want to do this; I don't want to do that. The aura of duty and service dwindling. When will I get a job? When will I get money?

I spoke with Emma this morning. She is my Ugandan cousin, my Aunt Vinnie's daughter whom I stayed with often in Kampala, sometimes running around together in the capital going to muzungu bars and waking up the next morning with headache thinking, man I'm old.

There was a boy that stayed with their family, one of their cousins. He often parked himself on the couch next to the T.V. in the large sitting room, watching Ugandan music videos, dubbed telenovella or maybe a pirated DVD rented from the shop around the corner. The boy rarely spoke, sitting with his jaw always ajar, his eyes dully watching the world around him. He didn't like going to school, preferring television and video games. Emma told me he stayed with them because he was good friends with Derrico, their youngest sibling, and because he would attend classes for his kind Aunt Vinnie.

And then one morning I awoke at their house some months ago to find all the younger kids gone to school, but Joseph still sitting in front of the TV.

"You should go to school, Joseph. Just cause Aunt Vinnie isn't here today doesn't mean you shouldn't be in class," I yelled to him from the kitchen. He didn't even look at me, still watching the T.V. with his mouth agape. What a weird boy.

Emma sort of laughed behind me going in and out the kitchen to make food on the charcoal stove outside.

"He doesn't like to go because he' sick," she said softly so he couldn't hear. "He says there's no point because he is going to die."

"What?" I asked, although I needed to further explanation.

"He's got HIV."

She told me the boy was very sick and actually older than Derrico, although he looked two or three years his junior. After that I watched him more, noticing the sick child smiled around his cousin, I think the only time I saw him smile, laughing while thoughtful and ebullient Derrico played video games. I saw Joseph and Derrico together all the time the first several months I visited Vinnie's, but then around the holidays or maybe it was after the beginning of the year, Joseph was noticeably absent from their sitting room, the seat next to the T.V. empty.

"He's sick," Emma responded when I asked about the boy. "He went back to stay with his father. Mommy couldn't take care of him all the time."

And I never saw him again.

And then this morning, thousands of miles and moments away, I got an email from Emma. She'd been busy with exams, she hadn't heard from my kids. Oh, and our cousin Joseph had passed away about three weeks ago.

I called her immediately.

"He kept getting better then falling sick again," she said.

"Was he taking his medicine?"

"Yes. Mommy was taking care of him. But one day he just closed his eyes," she explained plainly as a red-tailed hawk flew overhead casting me in its shadow, while I sat by my parent's pool that rests on a hill overlooking swaying eucalyptus trees in a chaparral canyon, cars on well-paved roads below us going to work, dropping children off at schools, the things I was growing accustomed to slamming into the things I could easily forget.

"Derrico cried," she added of her little brother. Ugandan men and boys never cry, she didn't have to tell me. I hung up the phone feeling shameful.

I don't have any pictures of Joseph, but I wish I did. Here are some pictures of Aunt Vinnie and Derrico in their backyard the morning of a solar eclipse.

Blissful Convergence: The Fourth-Graders

2010-06-04T14:21:00.000-07:00

The fourth grade class was the next I presented to the day I went to my sister’s elementary school. Paired with Beatrice, the children had sent dozens of heartfelt correspondence to my 10 year old. Here are a few of my favorites from the second set of letters (the first set can be found here):

Dear Beatrice,
Happy Valentine’s Day! It has been a long time since writing a letter. Valentine’s Day is something we celebrate of love and kisses. I wanted to write/say how are you doing? Oh, and what are 20,000 shilips [shillings]. By the way how is Uganda? Beatrice you are a fun person to write to. I hope you study. Again, Happy Valentine’s Day.
Your Friend,
Emily Peralta

Dear Beatrice,
My name is Joseph. I would like to ask you questions about you. What is your favorite food? What is your favorite sport? What do you do with your family? How many brothers and sisters do you have? I have two brothers. One has twelve the other one has three. The little one bothers me too much. The big one always plays. I am a terrific student.
Sincerely,
Joseph Castro

Dear Beatrice,
How are you? I am fine. Today was rainy here. Was it good in Uganda? I think we will be good friends. Is your country grassy or sandy? I want to know about you and your country. I am an only child. Are you too? I like to go outside. Do you? What are some of your traditions? What is the name of the language you speak? What remedies are there in Uganda? Are the flowers pretty? Do you think we will be friends? What do you like?
I hope you write back.
Sincerely,
Anthony

Dear Beatrice,
Hi how are you Beatrice? I’m fine. I am so happy writing to you. I was wondering of a song you told me about. I think it is bread in butter. I have two questions for you. What is your favorite food? Also, if you like animals. I love animals. I was wondering if you could send me a picture of the animals in Africa. I hope you write back.
Your Friend,
Jasmine

I began the presentation by giving each of the children Beatrice’s replies. They stared wide-eyed at the papers, leaning over each other comparing answers. Then I played the video on everyday Ugandan life, and like in the second grade class, the children discussed their impressions afterwards, little voices telling me they noticed Ugandan children had to fetch water, didn’t have desks in school, played with trash because they had no toys and ate food they grew in the gardens. I made it a point to explain during the slide show when a picture appeared of children leaning to the ground cleaning a school hall with rags that there were no janitors at Ugandan schools. I heard a room full of gasps...especially from the teachers. How would you like to go out and clean the halls now? The teachers gruffed to their children.

I then passed around jewelry from Uganda, explaining that some of the beads were made of paper, which women painstakingly rolled, dyed and varnished. I showed them the wallet made of bark and the earrings made of reed. We talked about the clothes Ugandans wore. I explained they either draped themselves in traditional African cloth with vivid patterns, or more commonly, put on Western shirts and pants. I glanced around at nicely dressed children behind wide white desks.

“What do you do with your clothes when you don’t want them anymore?” I asked.

“We give them to charity.”

“Right. And do you know what happens to many of the clothes you donate to charity?” The kids looked at me expressionlessly. “They get sent to Africa.” I paused letting it sink in. “And guess what? Africans have to buy them – usually at open markets where the clothes are piled on the ground. They don’t pay much, maybe 25 or 50 cents for a shirt, but for them sometimes that’s a lot of money. You might even see a T-shirt from this elementary school in Africa.” I pointed to a girl in a bright pink and sunshine flowered shirt. “Someday you may get tired of that nice shirt or too big for it, and you’ll give it to charity and a girl in Africa might end up wearing it.” The kids all looked down at their clothes.

I couldn’t speak for long; my presentation was limited to about fifteen minutes, but I knew how it would end.

“Jasmine. Which one of you is Jasmine?” A round faced girl in the corner giggled and raised her hand. “Beatrice told you in her first letter she wanted to sing you a song called Bread and Butter. Do you remember?” Her brown mane flopped up and down. I turned to the rest of the class to explain. “The song is about friendship, how friends go together like bread and butter. Beatrice liked having Jasmine and all of you as friends and wanted to show it.” I turned back to Jasmine. “Before I left Uganda, I recorded Beatrice singing the song so you and the rest of the class could hear it.”

A hushed anticipation swept across the little crowd. Then Beatrice’s sweet voice filled the room.

Blissful Convergence

2010-05-26T21:30:00.000-07:00

“The kids are going to freak out when they meet you,” my sister said to me as we passed through the gates of the elementary school around the corner from USC. “They’ve been asking about you for weeks,” she added smiling.

I looked out the window mimicking her expression, eyeing the impressive compound located in one of LA’s tougher neighborhoods, pit bulls yelping across the street, weeds usurping gardens and pavement cracks. I was excited to meet the children. I felt I already knew them from my sister’s descriptions and from their letters - they had been pen pals with my African kids for the last several months.

I had read each of the little Angelinos’ amusing letters, which were filled with insightful questions (Do you walk? Do you know about camouflaging? ) and served as portals into their young minds (I like math because when you get older you have to make sure when you buy something you have to give them the right amount or your going to have less money in your bank account). But most of all, it was touching to see how the children, mine and my sister’s, connected with each other from opposites sides of the globe. One American wrote to my ten year old Beatrice: I’m sorry about your mom. My dad passed away too and then my grandma and grandpa in the same year.

I was to give four presentations that day, one to each class that wrote my children. The first class was paired with Sylvia, my eight year old. Melanie knocked on the door just after the first bell rang and a boy struggled to push open the heavy door, first seeing my sister then me. My sister and I bear a strong resemblance; he had to have known. His tiny mouth dropped and his wide eyes glowed.

“Wooow,” he gushed, his back pressed against the door in disbelief as we walked past and the rest of the second graders turned around; soft squeals filled the room.

“Class. Ms. Crane is here with a guest,” the teacher said introducing us, but apparently we needed no introduction. They knew my sister from the talks she gave on Sylvia and me. They sat mesmerized through my sister’s presentations as well as mine, which included a slide show on life in Uganda followed by Sylvia’s answers to their most recent round of questions to her.

“Mariana. Which one of you is Mariana?” I asked the group of doe-eyed intent faces staring back at me. A little girl raised her hand. “Mariana, you asked Sylvia, ‘How do you feel on Christmas?’ Sylvia said she feels ‘burungi,’ that means good in Luganda. She also says that she likes swimming on Christmas.” Mariana’s eyes grew to saucers and her mouth spread to an exaggerated grin. (I grinned too, but remained silent about little Sylvia likely not ever swimming as her village was not immediate to a body of water.)

“Adriana. Who is Adriana?” Another girl’s arm shop up. “Okay Adriana. You asked Sylvia, ‘Do you have libraries? Do you go on field trips?’ Sylvia said, ‘No, we don’t have a library, but Maama Muzungu bought some books for us to read’.” I then explained that Sylvia didn’t know what field trips were because she has never been on one before.

I continued to go through the list of questions and answers, the children listening, interest sketched across their small faces. Then I asked for Rebeca.

“Rebeca. You asked Sylvia what her voice sounded like. She said she didn’t know, but I recorded her so you can see her and hear her voice for yourself.”

Rebeca couldn’t even smile; her face relaxed into suspended disbelief. I reached over for my laptop, pressing play for the queued video.

“Here, Rebeca. This is for you and the rest of the class.”

The God of Small Things

2010-05-21T06:41:00.000-07:00

Since I've been back many people have asked me all kinds of questions about everyday life in Africa. How do they wash clothes? What are the schools like? What are the hospitals like? Do they have cars? How do they cook? What are their homes like?

Below is a slide show illustrating the details of everyday life in Africa. Hopefully it will answer some questions you may have about typical African living conditions as well as explain how the smaller aspects of life influence African culture and behavior. Enjoy!

Out of Africa

2010-05-11T13:48:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to believe I returned from Uganda six weeks ago. At times a part of me still feels afar, strolling along red dusty roads, staring through screens of verdant matoke leaves; it is clear not all of me is here, my mind a bit unfocused and hazy, meandering and distant like a wandering stream in a hidden meadow. And yet the piece of me far away is fading, the memories and emotions of Africa losing their shape, the edges softening, the colors not so vivid; the details of my exotic rhythms losing themselves in the folds of my modernizing mind. People here will occasionally ask me about my time there and I eagerly recount beautiful moments, but I am beginning to feel slightly disassociated from those events as if I speak of another – maybe a character from book or film.

Maybe that was Karen Blixen. Maybe it wasn’t me in East Africa living among Africans, working with them side-by-side on a farm and setting off on adventures deep into the bush gapping at grazing wildlife, in step with men in colorful garb clutching iron spears and ancient traditions. Maybe that was a memoir of someone else attending to the locals’ ailments, navigating social schisms, skeptical of assumptions and convention; another silhouette against the expressive African sky.

As I straddle two worlds in my fuzzy head, I watched yesterday for the first time Out of Africa, feeling at once nostalgic and comforted, understood and vaguely envious. I am not sure why I never saw the movie until now, the genre one I particularly like, the character a certain source of inspiration, and like many, I am an ardent admirer of Ms. Streep; but, strangely, I missed viewing the Best Picture award winner until after living in Africa. Watching the romantic epic unfold before me against the paradisiacal plains of East Africa, I recalled my time riding through those sweeping vistas and long grasslands dotted with acacia trees, the excitement in spotting my first lions (they weren’t hunting me, but, more preferably, mating), and I again felt my feet sinking into the soft, springtime earth of the magical land of the Masai: the Mara.

The scenery, motifs, sentiment and characters of the film were recognizable and enchanting; I was captivated by the passion between woman and man, and woman and land. But the film reminded me most of the fascinating people, indigenous and transplants, I met: the gorgeous Africans living refreshingly in the moment, welcoming me with wide smiles and arms, their curiosity of me and I of them, remembering how those ties strengthen over time while I watched the woman in the movie tirelessly work to secure land for her tribes people, reminded of African youth and their delight in my novelties while I watched the local children in the film burst into giggles as the cuckoo emerged from the clock; and I also recalled all the backpackers and overlanders and aid workers taking up residence in Africa, disillusioned by Western notions on how life should be lived and what you should do and where you should go and with whom, meeting again in my mind the menagerie of expats and dreamers following their ideals, their passions, their morals, their hearts.

And amidst all this familiarity, all these people and ideas I came to understand this past year, the movie made me realize something else I learned during my time on the restful continent, a knowledge I acquired without fully appreciating it until watching the theme explored in film: the idea of ownership; that objects and people, knickknacks and relationships, land and souls, absolutely anything and exactly everything, cannot be possessed, that, in fact, nothing can be owned beyond that which creates and comprises you as an individual in ways meaningful and unique – our spirits, attitudes and memories.

And so now I try to remember more fondly all the people and adventures, good and bad, I came to know through my African life, and, just as importantly, I am trying to see more clearly that which I seek to experience next, that which I desire to call my own.

Old Shoes

2010-05-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

The sneakers were gently worn, not tattered and soiled like the embarrassment my running shoes inevitably become after months of jogging dusty trails, but they could not be described as new. Vaguely soiled, the blue hue muted, they had begun to lose their new shoe form, the stiffness softening appearing to mold to a certain pair of feet. My mother had probably worn them for a few weeks walking the paved hills of our neighborhood, her feet spinning round and round in them at the local Y. I recalled the sneakers very clearly, seeing them again in my mind when they became the unexpected topic of conversation an evening last week.

I was standing squeezed next to a cocktail table at the Natural History Museum in San Diego surrounded by docents and whalers, former teachers and biologist, my mother and dozens of other volunteers being thanked for their service with chicken fajitas and red table wine.

“And this is the daughter who just got back from Africa,” my mother said introducing me to her co-volunteers, a way of distinguishing me from my sisters – my social awkwardness seemingly not distinctive enough. The women were receptive and apparently interested in my journey and began asking about Uganda. What did the people eat? How did they cook? Where did they get their water? What do their homes look like? I explained the life that I had come to know, the daily rhythms that had become comfortable and routine. It would take hours to cook a meal of beans and posho or maize and potatoes, you fetch your own water (although I had plumbing), most villagers live in mud homes, the people in town usually dwell in blocks of simple brick construction.

“And is it strange to be back?” They asked.

Yes, it is. And then my mind began to drift.

As we stood around the cocktail table, my mom telling them about her trip to visit me, I thought of all the things they didn’t have - they, my Ugandan family and friends - their homes sparse and uncluttered, their lives devoid of material worth, that world far away and fading in my mind; and I considered all the things we have – we, my family and friends here in America - all the things bombarding us to be bought, all the things cluttering our homes and minds, that world sharpening back into focus before my eyes; and I remembered how happy I was and how happy they were not owning very much, unencumbered with possessions, living without incessant indulgence, without insatiable consumption, without the sickness of constant coveting that seeps insidiously, often unperceivably, into every pore.

And then my mom began telling the women about giving my Ugandan sister, Ester, a Clinique make-up bag, a free gift my mother received having bought magenta lipstick or grey eyeliner or the like, and how Ester’s whole face lit up when she received it and how she proudly carried the bright pink plastic container with her everywhere thereafter as a privileged American would a Prada handbag, and as my mom told the volunteers this I recalled the night she gave the bag to Ester, my mom saying to me, rather surprised, that if she knew Ester would like the bag so much she would have brought more, and I envisioned I am sure the same thing as my mother just then: a whole cabinet stuffed with similar toiletry bags collected over the years from department store make-up counters, all sitting under the sink perfectly unused.

And that’s when my mom told the women about the sneakers, those faded cobalt-stripped Nike sneakers, one of several pairs resting on the shelves in our laundry room. I knew my mom gave the sneakers to Beatrice, but I was not with them at the time, not knowing exactly what happened until the evening at the museum; or, maybe I did know and had forgotten; I had forgotten because it was unmemorable, an expected exchange, a normal response at the time, at a time when I was accustomed to living without and seeing others live the same.

Sipping wine from plastic cups, an intact dinosaur skeleton erect on the far side of the long, airy room, a gift shop just next to us with jewelry and pictures and sculptures (one abstract piece of soft black stone strangely similar to my African carving of a family standing in a circle holding hands, their arms turning indefinitely in unison), we stood around the cocktail table enjoying the day’s final light golden and dramatic falling through enormous windows; my mom said to the women:

“I gave one of the girls, Beatrice, my old sneakers. I gave them to her the night I was leaving because I didn’t really need them and I knew she would like them. I brought her into the bedroom so the other kids wouldn’t see and said, ‘Here, Beatrice. I want you to have these.’ She took the sneakers and then dropped to her knees. She grabbed my hand and began kissing it, saying over and over again, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you,' while tears streamed down her face.”

Old Shoes

Thank You and Looking Back

2010-04-26T08:13:00.000-07:00

Another thank you from the kids to their friends helping them in America.

Below is the first video of the children showing the conditions we found them in and how their lives changed rapidly under our care. You can also go back and follow the story of their progress by clicking the "My Kids" label to the right, or clicking here.

The Metamorphosis

2010-04-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

No, I am not dead. Although, I am quite sure I am not the same. I am dead in a way. Maybe I am slumbering in a cocoon a part of me having passed in a sense and I am preparing to be reborn. That sounds right. I am in pupa metamorphosing and will emerge imminently as something new, possibly entirely unrecognizable. I am hoping a butterfly. But it could be a monstrous vermin.

I have in fact arrived back in the States. Strange at first it seemed the acclimation process escaping me, maybe it a wives tale passed down through wild back-packer legend and imagination. How is it adjusting? People would ask seeing me for the first time to which I would inevitably respond it wasn’t a problem and boy was it nice to be clean and have consistent electricity and hot running water and, oh yes, it's also wonderful to be with old friends and family, fury and not. And maybe because I soon thereafter contracted what appears to be shingles and because soon thereafter my family and I flew from Cali to the Chi and rural Indiana for a reunion, maybe because of these reasons - sickness and constant change - I have been feeling a little not like myself, suffering from all sorts of time and space and cultural adjustments, from deficient civilization to Californication to White Sox Nation to Survivalist abomination, now I am just craving hibernation.

I don’t want to see a movie, I don’t want to visit the mall, I don’t want to drive my car, I don’t want to go too far. My world was so small for so long. Me waking in the morning to a quick wash from a basin of cold water, throwing on a shirt, one of a handful of choices, putting on some pants, one of maybe three choices, and walking a short distance to town and helping at the snack shop and looking after the kids and walking through town some more as all the townspeople spied me knowing where the muzungu was at every moment and all the while I had little to no idea what was happening on the outside, Michael Jackson’s death filtering down to me and every village in the world, and I heard about a health care package and Lady Gaga, but besides this and incessant reporting on the English Premier League (a Ugandan fixation) I didn’t have the first clue. And having been a news junkie up until about a year ago, and now again blessed (or is it cursed?) with constant awareness from an impolite 24-hour news cycle on television, internet, radio, and podcasts, I find myself not really wanting to pay attention, the world still something other, something outside my cocoon, spinning far too fast like an out of control toy top, making me dizzy and anxious and so I prefer to look away.

And I look away and ahead wondering when I will be ready to face things as I once did: jobs and news channels, malls and movies. And when, especially, will I be able to deal with choice? So many butters in the market and pastas and breads, and ice creams and juices, and dressings and jams, and chocolates and cheese, and Asian sauces and Mexican chilies, and gourmet mushrooms and packaged spinach, I almost can’t believe it, my grocery store exactly the same as it was a year ago, me very well remembering its contents and their locations, but it all a bit overwhelming after frequenting Ugandan shops with usually one choice of offerings, necessities like cooking oil, rice and beans.

And so I sit in my cocoon wondering, but not really worrying (as I am quite Africanized and Africans it can be said generally don’t waste their time worrying), wondering when the world won’t feel like it's spinning so madly and I will be ready for reentry, emerging maybe as a fluttering butterfly, or possibly a scuttering beetle; I am still not quite sure, but I have had much practice and learned quite well this past year how to wait patiently.

Five Angels Inspiration

2010-04-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

As they inspired its inception and are its beneficiaries, the Snack Shop I established in Lugazi, in all its deep-fried divinity, in all its caloric splendor, has been rechristened the “Five Angels Snack Shop” in honor of my five African children – I also had to rename it as a way to secure ownership and disentangle myself from some people who didn’t have the best of intentions. Deciding upon the name was as simple as the process to officially rename it; African life can be blissfully easy at times: no legal hoops to jump, no rebranding prices to pay, no registration or red-tape to maneuver; I just had to change the names on signs.

And so some days back an artist hung from a ladder in our tiny shop as the cooks rolled dough, fried pastries, sautéed vegetables, as the townspeople, our customers, our regulars, lined up on our steps outside the counter and display case eyeing the samosas, donuts, pancakes and chapatti. I smiled amidst the chaos, sandwiched between the ladder and my busy cooks and our line of customers. At least things now are working; at least I will leave with a sense of accomplishment, a sense of service; peace of mind.

I have enjoyed these last few weeks paying my dues, putting in my time at the shop; watching the new business slowly settle into place, problems ironing themselves out with no small amount of work on my part and Ester’s and her half-brother’s, Ivan; us trying out different business models: making chapatti from another location to cut energy costs, purchasing ingredients in bulk from market in Kampala, increasing the prices of some products. And with all the trials and errors and weeks and months of uncertainty, the sacrifices and toil have paid off: for the month of March we will have finally made a significant profit – one which indicates that the few thousand dollars I invested in start-up costs for the shop (with my kind donors’ money) for items including a gas cooker, deep fryer, refrigerator, furniture, etc., will pay for itself in a little more than a year’s time. (And this is where I sigh deeply with relief, deflating like a worn beach ball.)

Now that I feel more secure I can look back and say that I’ve enjoyed the process of getting the business off the ground, watching its progress, sure and shaky at times; I can say I’ve taken pleasure in the rough moments as well as the little shiny ones: me working alongside Ester and the cooks, rolling dough for chapatti, my garments sprinkled with flour, greeting customers, Hi muzunugu! the townspeople say as they watch me amused by my attempts at preparing African food and me watching their eyes light up as they grasp their favorite snacks wrapped in paper wet with hot oil.

This welcoming, the town’s warm reception to the shop has been a pleasant surprise, a sincere source of pride and happiness for me: not only are the children being helped through the business, but otherwise out-of-work women are employed and the town is appreciatively benefiting from delicious products and quality services. In fact, one of our biggest problems in the opening months was meeting demand, especially with our beloved chapattis: unique and sticky, thick and buttery.

And so the little shop hums in the town centre, churning out oily creations and sugary delights; its location and goods well known by the townspeople. I mentioned the shop’s stature to Ester the other day, people know where it is? Everyone knows where it is?

She nodded, smiling broadly, proud to work there, proud to supervise, proud to reap its benefits, “Yes, everyone knows where it is. Everyone knows the snack shop.”

Amenah, one of our cooks, and her daughter Samiya

Florence, another cook, frying pancakes

Me and Samiya - another picture of the baby just because she is so damn cute

Richard rolling the dough for pancakes

Ester and the kids hanging at the Shop

Impressions Sugary Sublime

2010-03-29T22:06:00.000-07:00

Here are some recent images from around the sugar company in Lugazi.

A woman walking at dusk along a sugar company road

Fighting peacocks - the birds are brought from India and roam the plantation property

Flowering gardens are common along the central grounds

Factory at sunset

Negatives as Positives

2010-03-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in the shop one evening a few weeks ago when the normally quiet and unruffled Ester suddenly widened her eyes and told me she just remembered she needed to tell me something.

“Last night little Sylvia told me that the father used to inject them in the village.”

“What?” I said my eyes widening as big as hers.

She repeated herself. Then my head began spinning.

Into my mind flooded all the stupid things the father had done out of ignorance and poverty and possible madness. And into my mind also wandered the public service announcement I saw with Ester some months back on TV: a doctor cautioning a family against using the same needle when administering medication to different family members.

“Can you imagine one family using the same needle?” Ester had said laughing.

Yeah, now I could.

“I am guessing that the father reused the needles?” I asked Ester.

“Yeah, I asked the kids and they said he kept the same ones in the house.” I looked at her in disbelief.

“Did he use them on himself too?”

“That is what Sylvia said.”

I dropped my head into my hands. The father was HIV positive.

We had the two youngest tested for HIV the first day we took them in several months ago suspicious that they might be infected as the mother had recently passed from the disease and the little ones were so sick. Richard had also been tested in the summer prior to his surgery; all were negative.

“Okay. Tonight ask the kids the last time the father injected them. Be sure to ask them if he did it when they visited during Christmas. We need to rule out the possibility of him doing it since we took them last June.”

Ester nodded. She understood the importance of the time frame: HIV will sometimes not show up on tests until six months after becoming infected. Ester questioned the kids and to our relief they said the dad hadn’t injected them recently. Now it was time to test them.

So a couple of Saturdays ago as the three youngest, Rachel, Sylvia and Beatrice, played on the patio outside the Snack Shop in late morning sun, excited as usual to be at a shop they knew was established for them, their photos decorating the walls for all in town to see, Mama Ester finished a few tasks at the business before they departed for the hospital; the kids not knowing where they were going and what was about to happen.

“I’ll meet you here when you get back,” I said to her, anxious to get the results.

A couple hours later they returned, Ester climbing the shop’s steps with an even face, the girls in tow, the two youngest looking as if they recently shed tears.

“They are okay?” I asked uneasily. She nodded smiling.

“Good,” I sighed handing the little ones some pancakes for their troubles.

Meanwhile, Richard was having small procedure at the end of the week; the doctor was to remove a piece of bone for biopsy.

“Ask them for another HIV test while they are doing the procedure,” I told Ester.

A week later Richard and Ester returned from the hospital. Ester said the procedure went well, but the boy was in pain. I frowned; ineffective pain meds were all African hospitals could offer.

“Did they get the HIV results?” I asked her.

“Yes. He is negative.”

“Good,” I said deflating with relief.

Now it was time for Aggie’s test. I was concerned about my oldest since we recently had to chase off some boyfriends and previous to us taking her in, she had been chased off by her father to be married to an older man. It was becoming too difficult to coordinate taking her to the hospital without removing her from school, which she attended until the evenings Monday through Friday and half the day Saturday.

“We need to get Aggie tested now. We can’t keep putting this off. Let’s just take her to the lab here in town,” I finally said to Ester a few evenings ago. Soon thereafter Aggie showed up to the Snack Shop on her way home from school, darkness spreading against the sky.

“Aggie. Before you go home, you come with me,” I said to her. She followed me to the lab, sat down, and yelled and squirmed as the technician stuck the needle into the crook of her arm. I tried asking her about the recent running competitions at school to distract her. She had proudly announced to me when she saw me at the shop that she was selected to run on behalf of the school in a meet taking place in Mbale – a district about a four hour’s drive away.

“You got to go because you were the fastest?” I had asked excitedly. She smiled bashfully and nodded.

“Very good, Aggie!” I was very proud of her, never mind the fact that she was a sixteen year-old running against eleven year-olds.

But as the needle hung from her arm for several long moments she couldn’t remember why she was so excited about running for her school and getting to ride on a bus for probably the second time in her life, the first just a few months ago when she went to Entebbe as part of a class trip to see the zoo and airport, and I tried to forget for those long moments as the needle pulled her blood, watching red flood into the tube, why we were there in that eight by eight foot lab with the stinking latrines in the courtyard just outside, and I tried to forget for the thirty minutes thereafter, waiting dully for the test results, just as I had tried to forget all those previous weeks, this belittling my assurance, reproaching my peace of mind, and I didn’t realize how anxious I was until the little woman in the lab handed me the results and I looked down at the handwritten notes and ran outside, bounding across the center of town for some 50 yards, splashing through the soggy red soil, running up the crumbling shop steps, shoving the paper in Ester’s face, her brow furrowing as she read it aloud, “Agnes. Female. 16 years. Bloo-“

“No! Read the bottom!”

“HIV Negative!” She says her face spread in a huge smile.

“Yes! HIV Negative! They are all negative!” I practically yelled.

“Yes! That is so good! So good.”

Kids playing at Shop before HIV tests - and yes, B2 is wearing a Black to the Future T-shirt! ;)

School Daze

2010-03-13T03:41:00.000-08:00

It has been scorching hot here these last two days, coinciding with this week's "fielding" activities at the local school whereby the schoolchildren forgo their regular classroom learning and participate in track and field events. Some of you have been curious as to what the classes and schools look like, so below are some pictures. You can see more of them at my flickr page.

Jumping rope during break time

School yard and latrines

There are signs painted and erected all over the schools here reminding the children how to behave. Some are actually quite amusing, others are sobering reminders of the unique challenges the children here face.

Kids hanging out in classroom doorway - there are usually several classrooms in one concrete block.

Kids don't have their own chairs and desks - they are usually crammed together on benches.

Race time!

All Things Both Great and Small (A Rime of Lessons Learned)

2010-03-08T04:57:00.000-08:00

Anytime you do something for the first time there are bound to be mistakes made substantial and insignificant that make the first few steps of your new venture wobbly. You sort of stumble along initially with no small amount of adrenaline and energy surging you through your fresh undertaking with the anticipation that in a few months time your endeavor won’t take so much focus, that the bumps will smooth over with the knowledge you acquired through first-hand experience. New jobs, parenthood, traveling abroad, living in a new city, new co-workers, new circles of friends – they all take some getting used to and inevitably you will learn from them and unavoidably at times you will learn the hard way. Okay, now imagine all the things listed above sort of happening at once in a place so different you can’t believe you are still on the same planet.

Well, as my year in Uganda winds to a close in just a few short weeks, I am already starting to look back, kind of looking ahead preparing to look back, mentally accustoming myself to the huge shift that is about to take place, going from a place where I am constantly dirty and constantly different, am the focus of constant attention and the target of constant questions, I will become reacquainted with what was formerly familiar: cleanliness and anonymity, and a host of other things precious, most importantly family, friends, Western food, high speed internet, oh and of course wine.

Below are some of the lessons I’ve learned both great and small. For those of you thinking of moving abroad, especially to establish or manage a sustainable project, hopefully this post will make you all the wiser.

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

1) Managing Tropical Diseases
If you start to feel under the weather, strange headache, stiff joints, unusually tired, diarrhea, go get a malaria test, but go to a good hospital preferably in Kampala rather than a local clinic or lab because the latter will almost always say you have malaria even if you don’t. For example, maybe the local lab will say, yes, you have malaria then treat you for it, but after you complete the treatment you still feel bad so then you go to the better hospital in the nation’s capital and they tell you, no, you don’t have malaria, you have another parasite, a thread worm, but you have to be careful because you can have something else and malaria, in fact many times you will have both since the two will work hand-in-hand weakening your immune system, and, of course, you can get malaria despite being on prophylactics. I've lost count, but I believe I’ve had positive malaria results somewhere around eight times now, two times I was so sick I ended up in the hospital and during my second hospitalization I had the pleasure of also having of H. pylori, an ulcer-causing bacteria, in addition to the severe malaria flare-up, so, really it’s actually advisable to also get full blood work and a stool sample along with the malaria test whenever you are starting to feel bad just to be sure.

"And now the storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

2) Managing Your Pocketbook
Get to know the costs of goods and services. Do all the purchases for your projects for some time yourself so that people you later leave in charge will have a more difficult time ripping you off. Ask people you know before you buy anything or take a boda or taxi anywhere how much they think the item or fare should cost because generally speaking when Ugandans see a muzungu they assume money magically grows from your hand and will attempt to overcharge you, sometimes in ways nothing short of ridiculous. At first this habit of fleecing might not annoy you so much and maybe you will take the stance that yes, I do have a lot more money than them relatively speaking, so it is somewhat fair, but then after you’ve been living with Ugandans for some time, sleeping under their roof, taking their food, laughing with them, commiserating with them, celebrating with them, mourning with them, forgetting oftentimes you are in fact a muzungu (maybe you’ll even catch a reflection of a fair arm in the rear view mirror of a car and think, what is a muzungu doing in here ? and then realize the reflection is of you) and so you feel like you are also a Ugandan in so many ways including that you like them do not have a job and have very little money and so the constant attempts to cheat you become offensive and tiresome and instead of thinking that such unofficial racially-based pricing policies are okay, you begin to think, but does Starbucks charge Bill Gates $10,000 for a latte just because he can afford it?

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.

3) Managing Men
When strange men, including boda drivers, taxi drivers, or any of the scores of men just standing around or taking drink at the small bars in town want to talk to you, ignore them or politely, but quickly respond to their greetings while continuing to move. The first weeks I was here I would try and talk to everyone, but I quickly realized that 1) I would never get anywhere if I talked to everyone that wanted to speak with me because it is just too time-consuming, and 2) generally the strange men can be categorized as respectful, but not as good conversationalist and they will employ rather unoriginal tactics to accomplish their two objectives: sleeping with you and parting you with your money, and while they have been entirely unsuccessful with me in both attempts, their aims become exceedingly clear and boring after a short while.

And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo!

4) Managing Sustainable Projects
I had heard it was difficult, extremely so, to establish successful sustainable project in Africa – I had many, many tell this before, but they wouldn’t really say why. Well, here is the why.

When setting up sustainable projects, and I would imagine through the entire course of administering them, operate with extreme skepticism of all people involved regardless of how sincere they are, how much they may sweet talk you, particularly if those assisting you with the project administration and management are not direct beneficiaries; in fact, assume these people are always looking to take something on the side for themselves in addition to whatever you agree with them openly. And never, under any circumstances have one person or a group of people who know each other be responsible for everything, including finances, reporting, oversight, management, etc. There must, must, MUST be layers of accountability and no one point of contact. To be sincere, charities here regardless of the size and level of funding are viewed as gold mines. Working for a charity in Africa is like working for a blue chip company in the West – they are well-paying, highly-coveted jobs. Why? Well, because charitable organizations, unlike everything else here in Africa, receive a continuous stream of revenue by wealthy outsiders who have a vested interest in seeing that their projects continue. In other words, Africans know that in most cases the money will keep coming generally no matter what happens. It is exactly the opposite of charities in the West where the low-paying work is done out of compassion, so BE CAREFUL!

I just had the pleasure of meeting an American woman who set up a charity that operates as a support group for AIDS/HIV orphans. A wonderful woman with a big heart decided to try and offer support to children affected by HIV some nine years ago, but for some reason or another, and candidly I think rather foolishly, hadn’t come to visit her programs in person in as long. And over the course of the last nearly decade she has had one person responsible for running her organization, one person responsible for receiving the money and in-kind donations for the kids, one person reporting to her results and finances, etc. and as she sat describing to me the things she has seen during her less than two-week trip, including some weird situation with an interpreter that her one contact insist they use and finding half the boxes of clothes she had shipped to him for the kids still sitting in his home, I just shook my head and told her that this guy she has left in charge of everything is just stealing from her and she needs to slowly take all control away from him, completely reorganize, take inventory, consult an attorney and not send this one guy working for her anything in the meantime, but that she also shouldn’t confront him or act like she is suspicious of him as he will probably bolt and take all of her organization’s possession, including a car, microscope, computer, etc. with him. I didn’t tell her that the little work she did see while here, the orphans’ meeting she attended, one of the meetings that has supposedly been taking place regularly these last nine years could very well have been a shame, the kids not really beneficiaries of her program and this guy could have just told the villagers to bring some kids together for the visiting muzungus to look at and they wouldn’t know any different because of the language barrier. And at the end of my conversation with her I thought, God, I’ve made some mistakes, but at least I figured it out in a month and not nine years!

`God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus! -
Why look'st thou so?' -"With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross."

5) Managing School
When it comes to school for kids under your care there are some things you should keep in mind. First, buy them sturdy black sneakers that Velcro and not the standard patten-leather school shoes because all the wear and tear coupled with the Ugandan red dirt and mud means the non-sneakers fall apart very easily, buckles crumpling apart, soles ripping to shreds, toes poking through holes, and require the constant annoyance of repair and polishing. Second, go talk to the kids’ teachers so that they might give more attention to your children. Your children are just a few in classrooms of scores, at times a hundred kids; one of many little bodies squeezed into hot, airless rooms crowded together on wooden benches, hand-made posters with lessons hung from the concrete walls, all the children looking the same in their school uniforms scribbling in small, flimsy exercise books with broken pencils with just one teacher trying to dictate lessons; if you want your child to have a bit more of an edge in learning, go talk to that teacher.

"The sun now rose upon the right:
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea.

6) Managing Wishes
If you are looking after children who were once destitute and often without basic living requirements, they will find happiness in and be thankful for the smallest things you give them, and although they are never demanding or act entitled, in fact, hardly ever even ask you for anything, they do, nonetheless, enjoy their new lives and its new benefits so much so that maybe at times your four-year old, having spent the afternoon with you in your snack shop, keeps telling you she is hungry despite just being fed an entire plate of food complete with meat, matoke, nakati, rice and beans for lunch, despite also just being given a pancake (a fried sweet made of cassava flour and ripe bananas), despite also just being given a cowpea samosa (a fried pocket filled with cowpeas, which are like big lentils), know that your child is just trying to eat as possible because her previous life didn’t include so much food and delicious food prepared and bought in town at that, her previous diet probably consisting of just boiled cassava and roasted maize from her family’s garden, and as much as you love her you turn to her and smile and tell her, No, Rachel. Your Mommy knows you are not hungry, do you want water instead? And oftentimes she will say, Yes, is water, because she still doesn’t quite grasp English well enough to properly ask for things and because, well, she just likes you giving her something, mostly, attention. Which bring me to one of the most important things I’ve learned here so far….

7) In a Word
There are so many, many children here – products of consistently one of the highest fertility rates in the world, about seven children per woman – it is impossible to step outside here in Uganda and not see so many children and all of them responding in very noticeable ways to your very noticeable muzungu presence. And all those children giggling and screaming and greeting you are at times without shoes and aren’t in school and don’t get all the food and medicine they need and drink dirty water from wells and springs and play in fields of filth with toys of trash – balled up plastic bags and old bicycle tires, smashed water bottles and bent bottle caps. And these dirty, shoeless, undernourished and poorly educated children, believe it or not, despite lives of poverty as we would describe it, are incredibly, inspiringly joyful. In fact, Ugandan children are in my humble opinion generally happier than American kids who are blessed with proper nutrition and regular schooling and modern medicine and modern homes and mattresses and toys and TVs and Segas - children who have everything in some senses, but little to none in others.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Of course extreme circumstances like drought and war and natural disasters and the like withstanding, African children are refreshingly content and beautifully resilient despite their relative lives of need and want and I can only conclude that their happiness is an outcome of their culture of inclusion: African children are a part of expansive African families and clans and tribes giving them a sense of belonging, a sprawling context and substantial support to their lives. And in seeing so many glad, but “poor” children, I have learned what a child really needs to live successfully, more than food, water, clothes, shelter, medicine, or educations. A child really, truly, deeply needs more than any one other thing essentially is love.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone; and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.

Time After Time

2010-03-02T01:24:00.001-08:00

They say you can’t travel thorough time, but I can and do all of the time, actually oftentimes moving forwards and backwards at once, my head spinning with thoughts on what has happened and what is about to occur. I engaged in this type of time warp in my old space, during my time in the fast-paced West where unlike here most people think of all times except the present, spending most of their time lagging in the past and accelerating into the future. And as I am just about to reenter that old space that mixes the former and the following, as I verge on breaking the time-space continuum, I find that I am no longer thinking of only the present here and now, which I have been doing for some time, for these many months; I am preparing as it were to leave this space and return to the future, and I find myself more and more of the time thinking of exactly that, moving back and forth.

Nearly a year has passed since I came to Uganda and nearly 10 months since I first met my beloved five children. It is impossible to really ascertain much less describe how much I have changed during that time, as well as how much the children have developed. I think back to the places we occupied before, me in a comfortable Western life complete with luxury cars and fancy flat screens and high speed internet and paved roads and quality medicine and quality food and quality everything and they in impoverished Third World existences of mud houses and unclean water and field labor and uneducated minds and poor nutrition and poor medical treatment and poor everything , and how our lives crashed into wild convergence this last year and how our lives will swiftly diverge breaking apart again in just a few short weeks, in a time too soon happening.

Thinking back to the children they were when we found them, sometimes I want to laugh. Rachel the first few months we had her took to opening and shutting doors in the Balaza’s home over and again, me realizing later that she engaged in this rather annoying habit because the kids’ home and those they visited in the village didn’t have doors, opening and closing a door was in fact for her an endlessly fascinating form of entertainment. And fast-forwarding to now, likewise the three youngest girls to this day insist on bathing at their jaaja’s (grandparents) because the house has a shower head, which still doesn’t yield hot water, but a shower head nonetheless, which the children stand under squealing and splashing, revealing in the novelty of (sort-of) modern plumbing.

Thinking back to the children they were, sometimes I want to cry. Despite knowing that their lives have altered drastically, the images of those five desperate faces in the village that me, Ester, Aunt Vinnie and Sumete first found last June still haunt my mind, the past lingering into the present pressing ominously against the future. I see those faces again in my memory, in recalling what was, and am reminded of them, and what still is, at times when I turn on the TV, floating before my eyes again in the aftermath of earthquakes and famines, floods and wars, tiny faces that are at once tense and apathetic, shocked and hopeless, ruined from the past, tortured in the present, uncertain of the future; I knew those faces before, didn’t understand them until now, and will commiserate them forever going forward: those are the young faces of trauma.

And in thinking ahead, imagining the lives we will lead, me and my children, sometimes I am excited; for me to be back in the comforts of modern society and the like-minded, to be clean and understood, to be healthy and heard, to eat well and to be anonymous, for that I am anxious; and for them to continue their lives with the comforts that Africa can at the very least offer: regular food, clean water, educations, something that passes for health care and, most importantly, love.

And in thinking ahead, imaging the lives we will lead, me and my children, sometimes I am scared. Will I be able to catch the things that fade and fall through time and space? Will the children be forced back into their dark pasts if not for bright futures? What will remain when dreams and expectations, intentions and understandings are entangled in the circles of backwards and forwards in the gaps of here and there? I think back, I think ahead, my mind racing out of the past and into the future, who I was, who I will be, who they have been, who they will become; I consider, I dream, I hope, I wonder…time after time…

After my pictures fades

And darkness has turned to grey

Watching through windows

You’re wondering if I’m okay

Secrets stolen from deep inside

The drum beats out of time

If you’re lost

You can look

And you will find me

Time after time

If you fall

I will catch you

I’ll be waiting

Time after time

Something to Call Their Own

2010-02-25T06:26:00.002-08:00

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

2010-02-20T07:23:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-15T05:03:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-11T02:33:00.002-08:00

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

2010-02-02T01:56:00.000-08:00

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

De Do Do Do De Da Da Da

2010-01-27T02:52:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-14T07:47:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-07T01:33:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-02T02:29:00.000-08:00

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

It's a Wonderful Life II

2009-12-31T00:08:00.000-08:00

With the year drawing to a close, unceremoniously as it were for me, and despite me not really prone to reflect on the passing year or conjure up resolutions for the new one that will inevitably be forgotten before spring, it would be a bit sophomoric if I didn’t look back on 2009 and acknowledge what an extraordinary year it has been for me personally; what a life-changing and life–affirming set of months it has been learning all the glories and horrors of Africa, and trying my best to be mommy to five needy children.

I would also be remised to not thank each of you have supported me during this year: all of you who have read the blog, all of you who have given generously, all of you who have offered kind words of encouragement. Just yesterday, after receiving another donation from a friend in the States, one of many from some of you whom I haven’t seen in years, some of you whom I don’t know well, some of you in fact who are total strangers, I felt like I was transported into the body of Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life dumbfounded and touched by all of the people coming with assistance for me and my orphans especially during this holiday season.

My work here could absolutely not happen without your help in all its forms and for that I truly am forever grateful. A special debt of gratitude goes out to Rachel Stankowski, Mari Giusti, Woo Jin Shim, Brian Stai and my sister, Melanie for organizing fundraisers that occurred in recent months, and of course to my Ugandan family, the Balazas, and my real family in America, the Cranes, without whose bi-continental support none of this could be possible.

Thank you again for all of your kindness and Happy New Year!

Natalie

It's a Wonderful Life

2009-12-29T08:48:00.000-08:00

My Christmases are usually spent at home nesting, my family and I lounging by the tree, unwrapping dozens of presents, cooking a massive meal, baking plates of cookies. My Christmas in Africa passed quite differently: I moved in taxis and bodas to visit family members, I didn’t open stockings and boxes, I fumbled making a meager dinner, I didn’t touch a single baking sheet.

On Christmas Eve Ester was at the hospital in Buikwe with Richard helping him recover from his surgery performed two days prior, and my girls were in the village with their father, extended family and tribal elders as customary during the holiday season. While visiting the hospital that day I asked Ester if it was alright for me to take her daughter Peanut, whom I was looking after while Ester was in the hospital, to Mukono to have dinner with some buzungus. Ester’s face lit up.

“Yeah, she will really like that,” she said laughing.

“That’s what I thought,” I said envisioning the girl enjoying eating foreign food and being surrounded by the strange, but enchanting buzungus.

As suspected, Peanut did have fun Christmas Eve dinning with the Europeans volunteers; she got a Santa hat from one of the women, practiced her photography skills with another woman’s camera and played soccer with some of the men; she did not like the holiday meal though.

“Peanut. Are you going to eat any of this?” I asked her after everyone else finished eating, eyeing the girl’s plate still piled with lasagna, quiche and pasta. She shook her head. I took the leftovers unable, especially after living in Africa, to let anything go to waste; it was also a welcomed and rare opportunity to taste Western food. “Let me get you more chapatti and kebobs,” I said fetching for her the only two African dishes on the spread.

My namesake and I ate our meal then spent the night at the well maintained property filled with wide bandas and tall trees and floating birds and cackling monkeys resting on a hill overlooking Lake Vic and Kampala – a former children’s home that now serves as housing center for a European charity. We awoke the next drizzling morning and walked through the fog along the hillside toward town; the roads were quieter, the taxi conductors a bit friendlier, but it was generally an ordinary morning; it certainly didn’t feel like Christmas.

At home we found some of my little friends: a group of young girls who visit on occasion, sitting on the floor of our main room quietly watching me amused and intrigued, sometimes I have them do my wash or help me clean the house; they are good friends to have indeed.

“Hi ladies! How are you?” I asked the foursome.

“We are fine.”

“Merry Christmas!” I said entering my bedroom. “I am sorry, but I have to leave now for the hospital. I just came to drop off my things and change.”

Peanut and I then went for town to purchase some gifts and supplies and boarded a taxi for the Buikwe. After jumping along the dirt road for twenty minutes we arrived at the hospital to find Richard drugged up; eyes swimming; face placid. I tried to greet him but he stared at me blankly. I smiled at his confusion, stroking his head.

Soon thereafter the nurse administered more medication through his IV. The boy had to be sedated during his daily dressing since the surgical wound was so deep, penetrating well into the bone, he could not to be conscious while it was flushed and repacked with iodine-soaked gauze.

I accompanied the boy to the dressing room as he fell under, head and eyes rolling back, fear and pain vanishing from his face. I then watched the doctors pour hydrogen peroxide into the large, unsutured hole pink fuzz bubbling and pouring out of his leg like a child’s science experiment; the doctors informed me they had removed a six by two inch section of dead bone during the operation. We had to go very deep.

When Richard was again coherent, gazing at me in recognition, I pulled his gift from my bag.

“Look Richard, I got a car for you,” I said handing him a yellow toy car. He smiled and played with it dully, still weighted by narcotics.

“Mommy! I want a gift!” Peanut exclaimed to me looking at Richard’s present and the remaining gifts in my bag.

“No Peanut. Those dolls are for Rachel and Sylvia. Your Christmas present was going to Mukono and staying the night in a nice place and eating good food and taking pictures with buzungus.” Apparently that wasn’t enough: Peanut started crying. Ester laughed at her daughter’s stubbornness, and eventually another doll was bought.

Peanut crying on Mama Ester because she didn't have a doll

After spending a couple of hours with the Richard and Ester, Peanut and I had to make our way to the village to check on the girls. We boarded a boda and traversed the back roads of Buikwe to the children’s ancestral home. The ride took nearly 30 minutes, but was peaceful and beautiful; we floated over the red mud under the grey, but lightening skies, villagers waiving at us while they prepared their Christmas dinners on charcoal stoves outside, village children frolicking barefoot in their tattered soiled clothes, goats and dogs running through the thick green vegetation blanketing the rolling hillsides. We finally arrived at the children’s plot. The girls ran to me screaming, “Mommy! Mommy!”

I handed them their $0.25 plastic dolls. They threw their hands in the air with elation. Then I noticed Taka was hobbling on one leg.

“What happened here?” I asked grabbing her foot.

Apparently she had caught her foot in a bicycle. The open wound covered nearly half her foot, was partially scabbed over, oozing and Christmas green.

This father is a total and complete idiot. He can’t even look after the children for a couple of days.

We stayed a short time then I told the father I was taking Rachel back because she needed to go to the hospital.

“You take B2 to help you with Rachel,” he suggested. I wasn’t sure why I needed Beatrice to help me look after Rachel, but I wasn’t thrilled about the girls staying with their irresponsible and addicted father, so I didn’t protest. As the four of us climbed on the boda back to town, Sylvia’s face fell, she cried wanting to come with us.

“No, Nabu. You stay here a couple of more days with your family and Agnes,” I reassured her. “Here play with your dolly. Mommy will see you soon.”

The three girls and I returned to Lugazi as dusk fell and the town’s few lights blinked on. I made a face disembarking from the motorbike: I now had two more mouths to feed and the Balazas were in Kampala visiting other family members and I didn’t really know how to cook in an African kitchen; I would just have to give preparing an African Christmas dinner my best shot.

I bought some meat, rice and vegetables and began chopping in my hands with a broken knife, fetching water from the bathroom faucets, picking stones from the low-quality rice, pulling bananas from cupboards for boiling. After a few hours we sat down to eat and I pleasantly surprised the girls and myself with an unburned meal.

B2 eating Christmas dinner

“It is good?” I asked them as they shoved food in their mouths at our undecorated table.

“Yes!” The answered merrily, Rachel sticking her thumb in the air.

“So did you have a good Christmas?”

“Yes!” They exclaimed again. I looked at my children’s happy faces; it was wonderful having them back after their being gone just a couple of days.

“Good. I had a good Christmas too.”

Peanut and Rachel playing with their dolls

Christmas Come Early

2009-12-23T02:31:00.000-08:00

It has been blazing hot here these last three days, the kind of heat I had always associated with Africa, the kind that cracks landscapes, coughs dust, destroys crops, emaciates wildlife, starves villages. Contrary to the song that I haven’t heard since last December, but many of you no doubt have an uncountable number of times recently, it is not beginning to feel anything like Christmas; I am in an oasis of wreathless doors, lightless windows, cookieless kitchens, treeless family rooms, stockingless mantles; no gift lists, no holiday sales, no mall trips, no baking bonanzas, no present exchanges. In fact, I am not planning on giving or receiving any gifts this season besides maybe biscuits and samosas to my Ugandan friends and family, and I was actually very much looking forward to experiencing the holiday simply, sans the extravagance and materialism.

I have been a bit curious how the holiday season would unfold here asking Ugandans about their Christmas plans over the last several days. They casually smile, excited about it as we are in the West, but just as they approach life generally, are without excessive stress and high expectations; it’s an African Christmas.

“What are you doing for Christmas?” I’ll ask.

I don’t know. Mass in the morning then Christmas lunch. I will visit friends.

“What do you have for lunch?”

Meat, Irish [potatoes], rice, chicken.

“You have meat and chicken?”

Yes.

“That is very nice. Do you exchange presents?”

No.

And so are African Christmases: visiting an ancestral village, attending Christmas mass, eating a special meal of freshly slaughtered chicken and produce from their gardens, and maybe wealthier Ugandans exchange some simple gifts; their houses aren’t adorned with mistletoe and wreaths and bows and knickknacks, their airwaves aren’t choked with commercials and songs beckoning them to shopping centers, they don’t worry about spending too much or too little on friends and family, they don’t stuff themselves with chocolates and cookies and cakes and candies. As such, I knew my Ugandan Christmas would be unlike any I’ve experienced before, but, as it has delightfully turned out, will not be without at least one cherished and much appreciated early Christmas gift: Richard has finally had his surgery.

After months of care and commuting between the Lugazi and the hospital in Buikwe on dusty, curving, and probably dangerous dirt roads, consulting with countless surgeons, and him already having one unsuccessful surgery, the boy has finally had the operation that will hopefully end the infection that has for the last two years wreaked havoc on his leg, mobility and self-esteem.

I had gone to the hospital in Buikwe this past Thursday to consult the surgeon and we had tentatively scheduled Richard’s operation for Monday.

“You have the x-ray done today and I will look at it on Monday and let you know if we can do the surgery,” the Slovak doctor told to me as he rushed out the door for a long weekend at Mount Elgon.

“Oh. You mean you might not do it after all?”

“It depends on what the bone looks like. It needs to be strong enough.”

“Oh. Okay. I’ll call you Monday morning.” I was a bit disappointed, but had learned to question all assumptions and expectations here; African life was like driving down a road blanketed in fog unable to see two feet in front of you; you really never know what you are doing, never really know where you are headed, never really know what is going to happen.

I called the surgeon Monday.

“Yes. The bone looks strong enough in the x-ray. We will do the surgery. You bring him tonight to be admitted and we’ll do it tomorrow.”

YES!!!

So Monday afternoon I boarded a taxi to Buikwe hospital with Richard where he had a second x-ray taken and was admitted in preparation for the following day’s surgery then I left the boy behind and Ester came to be with him; remember, you have to have your own nurse with you at African hospitals to clean you, feed you, dress you, care for you; there are African nurses, but despite my being here for nine months and having spent much of that time in hospitals due to personal illness and that of others’, Ugandan nurses’ exact job duties remain elusive to me; I see a lot of mulling around, lounging on chairs, slowly moving through halls.

The surgery was to happen on Tuesday. I received a call from Ester at the hospital in that early afternoon as I ran around Lugazi managing the snack shop and trying to sell off the first round of chicks from the Maama Muzungu Poultry Farm in time for Christmas. She sounded typically calm when she greeted me, then:

“They are doing the surgery tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I replied trying not to feel rejected. Patience, patience, patience; patience is virtue.

I waited patiently yesterday for today to arrive. I waited patiently this morning for Ester’s text confirming the operation had begun. I waited patiently for Ester’s call confirming the operation had been completed. I finally called her.

“He’s out now, but like last time needs to be held,” she said to me. My mind flashed back to Richard's summer operation when the boy was only given Ibuprofren for his excruciating pain.

“Okay. I am still waiting for Vegas to help us sell the chicks, but I’ll be there soon,” I said feeling sorry for the boy, but lifted from an incredible sense of relief. I hung up the phone and soon thereafter Margaret, my Ugandan Mummy came to the snack shop.

“Richard has had his surgery!” I exclaimed to her.

“Oh that is very good!” She responded with a huge smile and lightening shoulders; we've all felt the burden of the boy's discomfort.

“Yes, and it was just in time for Christmas!”

“Yes, just in time for Christmas. It is a good Christmas indeed.”

Indeed.

Sense & Sensibility

2009-12-15T01:54:00.000-08:00

Dearest Sensibility,

I beg you not take offense to this open correspondence and its communal nature; however, I have long since been aware that your tendencies, quixotic and impetuous as they are generally regarded, have done you, and therefore I, some ill will during the course of our existence this score and a half.

Whilst we are two distinct spirits forging a single individual, one can only characterize our engagement at times as disagreeable and disharmonious, and one can only describe our self as more often than not divided and perplexed. Owning to no greater interest than that which is ours, I am compelled to expound upon your worth, and it is, to be sincere, all that is charming, glorious, destructive and absurd.

Africans are not unlike us in their duality of disposition and we have had the most unpleasant of interactions with the sort whose gentle countenance disguises vastly divergent temperament and aims. Those nearly most trusted have regretfully proven otherwise and the ensuing disappointment has been a most unwelcomed surprised despite being forewarned of what one has come to expect of Ugandan charity and goodwill.

With this and the welfare of the motherless souls in keeping, I implore you to step with greater trepidation and exercise vigilance of the highest degree, which is to say, that it is imperative that you restrict your influence so as not to exist. Permit me, Sense, to offer full guidance of our shared thoughts, words and deeds, and allow your impassioned whims and gay imprudence to lie dormant for the duration of our stay in a property and populace familiar, nonetheless utterly foreign in speech, dress, tastes, and behavior, not to say anything of work ethic and integrity.

I pray you not take my expression, admittedly direct and abrasive, as a type of defamation or degradation of character; rather, to see that my situation, as it is forever bound to yours, as such, our situation, requires my full inspiration and instruction. Our endurance and that of those entrusted in our care, depends upon our decisions, of which you have proven time and again unfit for seriously making.

So, please, dearest Sensibility, heed this call to lay down your unsuitable arms, and with my complete directive I can assure us an ease of mind and accomplishment of action hitherto unseen, as I am as confident in my abilities as much as I am not in yours.

Yours truly, your most common,

Sense

Quiet Faith

2009-12-10T07:05:00.000-08:00

“We need to help Sharif look after her baby," I said to Ester last week of the M aama Muzungu Poultry Farm caretaker. "She is trying, but I don’t think she quite knows what she is doing.”

Ester nodded. Ester had been a young mother herself; in fact, younger than Sharif when she had Peanut, just a teenager. Maybe Ester made similar youthful motherly mistakes, but I suspected not to the same degree; I knew Ester to be very competent and bright. Ester and I both realized after becoming acquainted with 20 year-old Sharif we would have to guide her through some maternal duties.

Sharif and her baby in front of MMPF

Ester and I had just been to the poultry farm checking on the chicks’ health, taking inventory of feed and monitoring Sharif’s performance; the woman was hard working and serious about her job, she was doing well looking after the chicks and trying to properly care for her baby; but, it seemed, she was facing some challenges with child-rearing.

We spoke with Sharif outside the farm as she held her crying son, the baby sick as usual. My mind wandered during our conversation attempting to recall an instance when upon my asking about the welfare of her child Sharif had replied he was well.

Sharif handed the boy to Ester and entered the wooden structure to tend to the chicks. The boy continued to wail in discomfort. Ester and I inspected him; he still bleed from being circumcised a couple of weeks back. Sharif emerged from the farm.

“You can’t clothe him in jumpers,” Ester instructed her in Luganda tugging on the boy’s trousers. “You need to put him in a shirt and wrap him in cloth.” Sharif nodded. Ester touched the boy’s vaguely discolored face. “He has a rash here too.”

“Yeah, it’s gone away though,” I said to Ester. “She got treatment for that one and the circumcision last week, but his little wee-wee is still not good.” I pouted.

"It will be okay if she doesn’t clothe him like this,” Ester told me as Sharif took off the baby’s pants swaddling him in cloth.

Sharif seemed to understand how to better care for her baby after being instructed; I didn’t see him in pants until the wound had healed; however, two days ago when I again inquired about the baby’s health as Sharif and I mixed the chicks’ feed, she replied “He’s not well. He’s sick. Malaria.”

I squinted. “Are you getting treatment?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“No money.”

“Okay. When we finish here, we go to town for treatment for the baby."

“Thank you auntie,” Sharif replied genuflecting and returned to shoveling hundreds of kilos of maize bran mixed with nutrients.

Sharif and I passed through the dirt and paved roads to town, her with baby in arms. We stopped at the fat, kind woman’s pharmacy, the neyabo who always waives at me eagerly when I pass, the madam who never forgets to ask about my children.

"Mama. How are you?"

"Fine."

“Good. This one has a sick baby,” I said pointing to Sharif. “I am going to first check the blood, but we think it’s malaria. I am leaving now for the hospital with my boy, but please make sure she gets whatever medication she needs. I will pay you tonight.”

"Okay,” the woman replied and led us through her back door to the lab on the other side of the courtyard.

I approached the short woman at the lab.

“Neyabo. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Good. Please give this one a malaria test for the baby. Here is the money.”

I handed the woman one thousand shillings then turned to Sharif.

“Sharif. When you are done here you go back to the pharmacy and get your treatment. I have to go to the hospital in Buikwe now. I can’t wait any longer, but they will help you.”

“Thank you auntie.”

“No problem. Bye.”

I ran off with Richard whose infected leg was emitting a foul odor and was cause for concern. I rushed to the hospital some twenty minutes from Lugazi only to wait an hour for the muzunugu surgeons to emerge from the theatre. The surgeons removed the gauze and looked at Richard’s open wound.

“The leg smelled before, but it is worse now,” the surgeon explained unconcerned. “We will do the surgery on like the 17^th.”

“So this isn’t a problem?”

The surgeon shook his head. “Just be sure to keep him on the Cipro and have the dressing changed every other day.”

“Okay, but you just told me you and the other muzungus are going to Mount Elgon in 10 days. You’ll be gone on the 17th.”

"Oh, yes. That’s true. We’ll do it when we get back.” The surgeons inspected the calendar. “We’ll do it on the 21^st.”

Fantastic! I was relieved that the smell wasn’t as dire as imagined, and that I was a step closer to having Richard’s surgery completed, although I remained cautiously optimistic.

Still celebrating one medical accomplishment, the following morning I inquired about Sharif and the baby with the fat, kind pharmacist.

“No. She didn’t come back this today for the injection.”

“What? You told her to come back though, right?”

The woman nodded. I went for Sharif.

“Hello Sharif. Where have you been?” I asked the girl as she approached the poultry farm after my waiting for some thirty minutes. She replied in Luganda.

The woman on whose property the farm resides explained to me, “her mother called her urgently this morning.”

“Okay, but it’s important the baby gets treatment. When people don’t complete their doses, that’s how they die. You finish here then go right away for the injection.”

Sharif’s eyes were wide. She nodded enthusiastically. She quickly filled the chicks’ drinkers and off she ran.

“That one has too much going on,” said the property owner as we watched Sharif leave. “She has the baby, the mother, the chicks.”

“Yeah,” I agreed thinking how she wasn’t unlike other Africans, mainly other African women, working hard at a job that doesn’t quite make ends meet, attending to her children and parents without spousal support; I agreed thinking how occupied one was looking after five orphans, including a child with a debilitating medical condition, and providing for an African mother and her daughter while running two new businesses and managing six workers in a land rife with cultural differences, exasperating efficiency and inconsistent logic. “But…she’ll be okay,” I shrugged assuredly.

Sharif with her baby and some village kids in front of MMPF

Navigating Africa Surgically

2009-12-05T03:49:00.003-08:00

I have taken to telling people that I will only know Richard has had his second operation when he is wheeled out of the theatre and the surgeon confirms the operation was successfully completed and actually involved penetrating Richard’s tibia. Then and only then will I confidently say “Yes, Richard had his surgery.”

Richard’s first operation was performed this past summer. The days following I accompanied him to the hospital in Buikwe, a rural area near the shores of Lake Victoria, for post-op care. It was then that I learned firsthand of the procedure’s precise nature.

I stood outside the hospital with Richard under the glaring sun, on the red dirt road waiting for a crumbling taxi van to pull up and send us into a cloud of whirling dust. Richard’s attending physician walked by and greeted us. The gentle conversation and my light mood swiftly collapsed when the doctor told me blank-faced that the surgeons “only cut into the boy’s skin.”

I jolted. “What?”

He repeated himself.

“That can’t be. They went into the bone. All the doctors told me that is the only way to effectively treat chronic osteomyelitis.”

“Yes, but it was superficial. They didn’t have the right instrument to cut bone.”

I shut my eyes. My stomach dropped. My head shook. Nobody bothered to inform me that the required surgery as originally planned was not performed due to lack of proper mechanisms until it was casually mentioned to me several days later. Another, only in Africa moment.

The doctor saw my disappointment; I am unsure if he recognized my disgust.

“We will do it in October. Another surgeon will be coming from Europe then.”

“But will you have the right instrument?”

The doctor’s face lifted in surprise and contemplation. Apparently he hadn’t thought of that.

“I’ll ask my administrator.”

“Okay. I need to know soon because then I will have to take my boy to another hospital and start the procedure of queuing for another surgery all over again if you can’t get it.”

The doctor nodded and crossed the dusty road.

Calls and visits to Buikwe hospital over the next few weeks were more of the same non-answers. Yes, a surgeon is coming in October. Or. Maybe November. I have requested that we order the instrument.

I was contemplating not waiting till the fall for the elusive Czech surgeon and surgical instruments for fear of another mishap. But this hospital, despite its gaffe, was seemingly more trustworthy than the other option: the government hospital, Mulago.

I was told that one needed to “know somebody” to be effectively treated at Mulago. And the surgeons there didn’t have what the surgeons at Buikwe hospital had, Western medical training and practice. I had a choice: gamble and wait on medical practitioners and instruments to be flown into Buikwe from abroad and have a surgery performed at a low cost or start over and try my luck with the notorious government hospital where the total costs could be considerably more and the quality of care significantly less. I decided to wait it out.

“The surgeon will be here the first week of October,” Richard’s doctor had assured me in September.

“Okay, so I will plan on coming a couple of days after he gets here?”

“Yes.”

I came the agreed-upon day. The surgeon had just arrived, but wasn’t actually at the hospital yet. Come back tomorrow.

I returned the following day and entered the dressing room; shimmering blue eyes and glowing fair hair and skin greeted me. I had long since taken to staring at muzungus like Africans. They look so strange and what are they doing here in Uganda?

The Slovak doctors introduced themselves. The surgeon was of the general variety, but had been to Africa and performed orthopedic surgeries on chronic osteomyelitis patients previously. They unwrapped the bandage and looked at the boy’s oozing leg.

“Yes. I can do the surgery. We will do it Monday.”

“Okay, but the last surgeon didn’t have the correct instrument. Do you know if they’ve gotten it?”

“I think so. I am like 90% sure we will do it Monday.”

Richard and I were at the hospital Monday, but the instrument was not.

“I will see if I can order it,” the doctor told me through his Eastern European accent.

I was deflated, but not surprised. I was coming to understand African life as a menagerie of the exotic, sluggish, insincere and incalculable; it could only be reliably defined as careless and unexpected.

The doctor was going to text me with an update. A week later a message from Dr. Mark blinked on my phone’s screen:

“Hi Nataly. I am sorry, but we still don’t have the instrument and any information when we will have it. When I know more, I will let you know. Maybe on Friday. But it will take some time.”

That week I began mobilizing for Plan B. But then I received a call. It was Richard’s attending African doctor.

“Hi Natalie. Can we meet in Lugazi today? “

“Is this about Richard?”

“Yes. I will tell you.”

I met Richard’s doctor at a hotel in town; the instrument had been ordered and would arrive in a few weeks. They would be able to do the surgery.

I jumped up and down in the hotel’s bar. A few days I received another message from the Dr. Mark:

“Hi Nataly. I’m sorry I haven’t answered, but I still don’t have the instrument. Hopefully your boy will get proper treatment in Kampala.”

What is going on?!?

More calls and another visit to Buikwe confirmed that the instrument was on order to arrive mid-December. The surgeon currently at Buikwe would only be there until year end. Come January, I was told, another European doctor would be coming. But what if he couldn’t do the surgery? What if the instrument arrived late?

I was getting anxious, but the unpredictable nature of Africa could make one perpetually nervous, it could aggravate ulcers developed from a bacterial infection contracted during one’s stay. I was forced to learn to live with the chaos.

Why? Why? Why? Is often the chant from Americans on the other end of my phone, wondering why instruments take so long to arrive, wondering why swabs of infected legs can’t reliably be taken during a surgery, wondering why medications are prescribed incorrectly or expired.

Whatever. I say. This is Africa.

So, as of this moment, as of my last conversation with the doctors at Buikwe earlier this week, yes, the needed instrument is to arrive in less than two weeks time, and yes, Richard’s operation is to take place sometime around the December 18, but as I have taken to telling all who ask, I will only believe the surgery has been successfully completed when Richard is in the recovery room and the surgeon is standing over his leg, showing and telling me the procedure has been performed as prescribed. Then and only then will I know my boy has been properly treated after five months of care and nearly two years of suffering with puss and drainage constantly emitting from an open wound on his right shin. Only then will I say, “Yes, Richard has had his surgery.”

Lugazi Images

2009-12-02T03:55:00.000-08:00

Market at Morning
The vast majority of Ugandans either grow their own food or purchase it at open air markets such as this one in Lugazi.

Hanging on the Stoop
With no TVs, no toys, no electricity, no movie theaters, etc., most Ugandan kids hang out on their stoops in the evenings. The first two pictures are of a nice home; made of concrete and well-painted.

This girl resides in a more typical Ugandan town living arrangement: one or maybe two small rooms for a family, no yard, no plumbing, no power, etc.

Sitting in the yard
These children are fortunate to live in a comfortable house with an actual yard.

Up Another Level

2009-11-24T22:38:00.000-08:00

I was looking over my electronic diary yesterday. I smiled at the August 15 entry:

“Other recent stuff: kids done with school, now on holiday. Got report cards – R and B doing okay, in the 70s, but Agnes not doing well - around 50. Def need tutor.”

Agnes was barely passing P5 this summer despite having taken P6 twice already in the village; despite being a 16 year old squeezed into a class overflowing with 10 and 11 year olds. I was worried about her morale. Would dejection slink in, poisoning her passion for learning? Would sincere appreciation and elation for her second chance at school fade as failure and embarrassment loomed?

How strong was she? How strong is a girl forced out of her home by her parents to marry a man decades her senior? How strong is a girl who has endured suppressive poverty, sleeping in the dirt of a mud house, barely attending school, usually not eating enough, most often going without medical attention? How strong is a girl who cared for her four younger siblings, feeding them, washing them, watching them, guiding them, while tending to her mother as she wasted away and succumbed to AIDS?

Agnes was not unlike other Africans, taking her life in stride, not questioning the unfair and the uncontrollable, doing what had to be done; surviving.

But passing exams and levels were not requisites for life. Could Aggie persevere in the face of obstacles not necessary for her very existence? How strong was she?

During the last holiday in September all of the children, except little Rachel, went to school for private tutoring five days a week. The teachers all remarked on their improvement when they began the school term a few weeks later. The kids continued to receive coaching by their teachers in the form of extra nightly assignments through the fall term. This past week put the months of labor and learning to test: it was exam time.

“Mommy! Mommy! I got a 93 in math!” Aggie told me excitedly a few days ago when I was visiting the kids in their home.

“What? That is fantastic Aggie!”

“And English. 76.”

“Very good, Aggie. Very Good.”

Aggie floated back to the food she was preparing for her younger sisters and brother, happily bending over the charcoal stove the size of a child’s stool, tending to the sauce bubbling in the pot. A bright smile spread across her pretty round face.

A couple of days later I went to visit the kids again at their new place in Nkoko. As per usual, I was greeted enthusiastically; screams, hugs, running, laughter.

“Mommy. I am going to P6,” Aggie said in her stilted, but perking English.

“Very good, Aggie.”

“Mommy! Me P1!” Sylvia exclaimed to me thumping her chest.

“You are going to P1?”

“Yes!”

“Very good, Nabu. You have done very well and you have worked very hard. You couldn’t even count to ten before, but now look at you. You can count. You know your letters. A,B,C, what. You can add and subtract.”

“Mommy. Two plus three is five.”

“Yes, Nabu. Two plus three is five.”

As I spoke to Sylvia, the other children started yelling their new levels to me.

Mommy! Me P3!

Mommy! Me P3!

Mommy! Me Top Class!

“No, Rachel. You are not going to top class. You are going to middle class.”

“Mommy! Middle class!” Rachel shouted smiling, thumping her chest like Sylvia had.

“Yes, middle class.”

I turned to Aggie.

“So your teacher said you passed?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said through an enormous grin.

“She can’t,” Mama Ester later told me. “She can’t know yet. They only know if they passed when they get their report folders on Tuesday.”

I laughed. All of the kids thought they passed, but apparently they couldn’t know for sure yet according to Ester. It didn’t matter though. I had been talking to their teachers. I knew my kids were passing. Tuesday morning would just confirm what I already knew.

Tuesday morning, this morning, offered another bag of surprises. I was at the snack shop putting out another fire: the power had been turned off for nearly 24 hours; no electricity meant food was going bad and little could be cooked on charcoal stoves; it meant we were losing a lot of money.

Get me the contract with our landlord. I need to talk to him again about getting our own meter. He can’t deny us after not paying his electric bill and forcing us to lose this much money.

Cooks. Next time tell me when food is starting to spoil. I can bring it to my refrigerator at home. We threw out too much.

Has the town council paid for yesterday’s delivery?

We already used 8 bags of flour? How?

I was sifting through a lot of chaos with my staff. Ugandans aren’t known for their strong planning skills; the weight was falling on me. I was working hard to get us more efficient, to make us more profitable. Managing through the web of cultural differences was delicate and navigating African contractual obligations was yet another lesson in gratitude: no, there are basically are no real contracts with landlord, you just draft up something small. And yes, they can turn off the power for days.

This isn’t acceptable!

Then. Brightness.

Aggie came to the shop door face glowing.

“Hi Aggie! How are you?” I welcomed her with relief.

“I’m fine.” She was wearing her school uniform. She had a pale pink folder in her hand, which I recognized.

“You got your report folder?”

She nodded happily and made a slight gestured indicating she wanted me to see it.

“Let me see.” I opened the front page with the teacher’s notes on her test scores and his comments on her performance.

“93 in math. 76 in English. 48 in SST. 40 in Science. Very good Aggie.” I searched for the note saying she passed. I didn’t see it. Other notes filled the page: Balance all subjects. Buy one ream of paper. Term starts January 1.

There it was: Promoted to P6.

“Promoted to P6! Very good Aggie!” I hugged her and kissed her forehead. “I am very proud of you!”

Aggie smiled and tuned from me slightly, biting her school sweater folded in her arms. She was bashful; unaccustomed to attention, unfamiliar with praise.

She was shy, but she was strong. And she was moving on.