Tuesday will be an interesting day. Another day creeps closer to the looming second block exams. More volleys of definitions, signs, symptoms, diagnoses, and numerous other facts will be flung at me from Power Point. My hands will be brought one step closer to being able to feel and heal the bodies I place them on. And Yoweri Museveni, the President of Uganda, will meet with George W. Bush to discuss a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Northern Uganda and the role that the US might play in that.
Wait. What?
It seems like I've been searching for a day like that for years, since I first heard the story of the Lord's Resistance Army. To go from there, to learning more about the children placed in harms way and the millions sequestered into devastation, to actually meeting children like Jacob in Uganda and continuously loosing at cards to him, to saying good-bye to all of my friends like Peter Paul and Abiyo Peter and leaving on a plane with their world so much closer to piece and yet still infinite steps away. Every tangible step since then, the renewed talks, the international pressure, the appointment of a State Department official to the conflict, and now to this meeting, strikes me with hope and fear.
Oddly, the fear comes first. First I remember hope that has bloomed before. That I have stood in front of crowds and told them that their actions would bring forward peace, that we were all a part of history. And also that my friends are more familiar with words and gestures of peace than they are with the actual living of it. And then I'm afraid. I fear that two men will sit in a room, comforted by the cushions beneath them, and talk of lofty things and vague, grand plans. That they will register the hope felt by everyone who understands the pinnacle of this time. That they will even voice their own hopes, and that will be all. Photos will be taken and politics will emerge the only winner available.
Then the smooth hope comes on. I remember the parade of white flags, how Jolly remarked that it was unlike anything she had seen. I remember Gulu blossoming. I remember two thousand people in Portland joined by tens of thousands everywhere. I remember talking with so many people who know that peace is the only option and who told their government so.
Then, I can pause and let the hope in. It's wild to think of what we've all been a part of. And it's far from over. Even after this talk, there will be more talks. Even after deals are signed, there will be reconstruction. Even with this looming before us, we still have to act. For those of you who read this before Tuesday is over, I'll provide a link to email President Bush, and help drive these talks towards the hope that we can all feel.
And then we sit and watch the news and listen for the echoes of all of our voices and our hope ringing out.
Email President Bush:
http://resolveuganda.org/node/416
Monday, October 29, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
A Reversed Recital: Delayed Reflections Part I
What with the numerable occurrences in life recently, I’ve only just realized my silence since settling in to Vallejo. It was not intentional. Life, as I’ve said when describing my return from Africa, has a consumptive manner to it that doesn’t release sometimes. Something about this past weekend between the reunion, the 90’s flashback music on the radio, and countless other events have forced me into reflection on the past several months and realizing that I have written nothing about this American life. So, I’ll offer some formally written (in blog format, not sure how formal that is) promise to try to reflect, write, and respond to life.
I’ll begin with the easiest, something I’ve already written. Even before coming back to the States I knew I was heading up to Portland soon to revisit old friends and my favorite state. I had been invited to speak at the Love Rally there about my experiences in Uganda. This invitation, in fact, formed a good amount of how I forced myself to process the experiences as I was packing up and heading out. The result is this speech, the details of which I very well may discuss later, but for now, here it is, something vaguely similar to what I said in Pioneer Courthouse Square over Fall Break some weeks ago: (sorry it’s kind of long, trust me I tried to deliver it in ten minutes.)
Paving the Road to Heaven
Thank you for that introduction, and thank you all. One thing I learned in Uganda, you can never thank people enough, so for them and for myself, thank you. For stopping and listening, wether you are parked here for the whole day learning, loving, and dancing, or whether you are passing through and were stopped by a story about a child, or a genocide, or a health clinic, or a global crisis, thank you for responding to that impulse, the impetus that tells us the world can be better, that improves our intentions and how we live our lives.
Being back here in the Square reminds me of how powerful that impulse can be. About a year and a half ago, I stood here with two thousand other people who slept overnight in solidarity with the children of Northern Uganda. On the road to and from that night to here, I have been shown remarkable examples of how our best intentions can go dramatic distances to improving the world. There are people who will tell you that isn’t true, that the “road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” They will tell you, citing entrenched histories of violence and death in Africa and elsewhere, that for all the money spent, we have done no good. They will say that donations and efforts do little besides placating Western guilt and advancing vague capitalist causes.
I, of course, disagree with this perspective. I have seen, in myself and others, the power that this simple idea can have. When a story or a picture or a person inspires something in us that is better than ourselves, we are driven with this desire to do good, and our best intentions carry us. I can only tell you from what I’ve seen that when these intentions are carried through honestly and fully, while the results may not be what we imagine when we first start out, they can reap great Good. A Goodness of the capital “G” sort.
The story of my own inspiration is the only way I can think of to explain this. I started out on this road as a college student, some mild experiences in developing countries, mostly in Mexico. After watching Invisible Children for the second time, I began to imagine what real impact I might have in the world. For those of you who are not familiar with it, the documentary Invisible Children depicts a civil war that has raged and destroyed lives in Northern Uganda for over twenty years. The conflict has resulted in tens of thousands of children abducted –forced to become child soldiers and sex slaves, in around 1.8 million people displaced from their homes, and in innumerable secondary effects from a decimated educational system to heightened HIV/AIDS scenario. After watching the film I was griped by the desire to do something anything—my best intentions calling out for justice and repair. I could have dropped a dollar in the cup and called that enough, but luckily I was offered the opportunity to travel the country and raise awareness with Invisible Children. That route led me to numerous high schools, colleges, churches and other places where I was inspired by the profound good will of the youth of this country. The experience culminated in the event I mentioned, with bodies strewn in sleeping bags all over these bricks. And after that I felt good, like I had done something, we had all come together and we accomplished a small step towards peace in Northern Uganda. The opposing sides entered into peace talks shortly afterward and hope loomed heavy for the first time. I could have stopped there.
Just as my money was not enough, the fact that I raised my hand once with over 80,000 other people to cry out “Injustice” did not solve the problem. If I was going to follow through on my intentions fully, I would have to do more. Again, I was graced with an opportunity to travel to Uganda and help create a program called Schools for Schools with Invisible Children aimed at rebuilding the North. I had profound ideas of what I could accomplish after studying International Relations and scoffing at the history of folly that Americans and Europeans have reeked in Africa. But if I was going to provide any real assistance there, I was going to have to learn more. As I sat in meetings with government officials, headmasters, teachers, students, and anyone who would talk to me I learned more about what real needs were and what real solutions could be offered. I saw schools made out of slants of scrap wood that produced quality students while relatively resource-rich schools struggled. I learned about the deeper qualities that were needed for development.
One of the most profound of those was community. Out projects in the Internally Displaced Person’s camps always provided us with inspiration. To describe an IDP camp for the uninitiated, imagine the refugee camps that you have seen on tv and in photos. Now imagine something worse. Because of instability caused by the rebel army, the Ugandan government forced a majority of the people from Northern Uganda into these camps where there was no water, no sanitation, no schools, no farming. Now a great percentage of the population is dependant on foreign aid for medicine, food, education, and other essentials. The rates of death, rape, alcoholism, and other tragedies in these camps are staggering. We try to help how we can but it wasn’t until a fire destroyed hundreds of tightly packed mud huts that I learned about profound help. As these huts where struggling families kept their few possessions were destroyed, a group of our beneficiaries in neighboring camps came together to assist the affected families. These people who themselves had next to nothing, who we provided a small boost of income and hope, and they turned around and offered a large portion of that back to us to rebuild the burnt and destroyed huts and homes. Only after witnessing exchanges like that of real love and community did I come to a more profound understanding of aid these good intentions of mine would ask of me.
But this is a growing, living thing. This spark of initiative that I’m describing in these good intentions continues to grow in me as I meet and discuss with people here and everywhere. And if I can offer you one thing, in my gratitude for the fact that you stopped and listened to me it is the understanding that I have come to. We can pave the road to Heaven with our good intentions, we can create a better world, we can answer that call inside ourselves that says we must do something, anything. But to do so honestly and fully, we have to follow through. It was only by investing myself and learning about the situations and talking with people that I learned how to help even more. If you have heard a story today that inspires you, I ask that you don’t just give money and let your conscience by assuaged. Get involved, the only way to change the world is to allow yourself to first be changed. And I’m not saying we all have to run to Africa. I was lucky, and I am enormously grateful that I could do that. But so much could be done right here. A couple of months ago, Invisible Children held another event and tens of thousands showed up to call for an end to the war in Northern Uganda and an end to the Internally Displaced Persons camps. Since then, the State Department has taken strong steps to assist the peace process, and hope continues to grow in Uganda.
That is what I offer you. Do not just be inspired, be changed. Learn about the people and the cause that inspires you. Then let that change in you shine out into the world in a new song, yours combined with others. That is love, that is the fruit of good intentions, of honest inspiration and wanting to improve the world with the courage to see it through. The call that Ghandi made, to “be the change you want to see in the world,” is your soul’s inspiration, your good intentions calling out, offering the only real hope for change, one that starts and continues with you.
(By the way, if the topic interested you and you want to be truly angered, read Michal Maren's "The Road to Hell")
I’ll begin with the easiest, something I’ve already written. Even before coming back to the States I knew I was heading up to Portland soon to revisit old friends and my favorite state. I had been invited to speak at the Love Rally there about my experiences in Uganda. This invitation, in fact, formed a good amount of how I forced myself to process the experiences as I was packing up and heading out. The result is this speech, the details of which I very well may discuss later, but for now, here it is, something vaguely similar to what I said in Pioneer Courthouse Square over Fall Break some weeks ago: (sorry it’s kind of long, trust me I tried to deliver it in ten minutes.)
Paving the Road to Heaven
Thank you for that introduction, and thank you all. One thing I learned in Uganda, you can never thank people enough, so for them and for myself, thank you. For stopping and listening, wether you are parked here for the whole day learning, loving, and dancing, or whether you are passing through and were stopped by a story about a child, or a genocide, or a health clinic, or a global crisis, thank you for responding to that impulse, the impetus that tells us the world can be better, that improves our intentions and how we live our lives.
Being back here in the Square reminds me of how powerful that impulse can be. About a year and a half ago, I stood here with two thousand other people who slept overnight in solidarity with the children of Northern Uganda. On the road to and from that night to here, I have been shown remarkable examples of how our best intentions can go dramatic distances to improving the world. There are people who will tell you that isn’t true, that the “road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” They will tell you, citing entrenched histories of violence and death in Africa and elsewhere, that for all the money spent, we have done no good. They will say that donations and efforts do little besides placating Western guilt and advancing vague capitalist causes.
I, of course, disagree with this perspective. I have seen, in myself and others, the power that this simple idea can have. When a story or a picture or a person inspires something in us that is better than ourselves, we are driven with this desire to do good, and our best intentions carry us. I can only tell you from what I’ve seen that when these intentions are carried through honestly and fully, while the results may not be what we imagine when we first start out, they can reap great Good. A Goodness of the capital “G” sort.
The story of my own inspiration is the only way I can think of to explain this. I started out on this road as a college student, some mild experiences in developing countries, mostly in Mexico. After watching Invisible Children for the second time, I began to imagine what real impact I might have in the world. For those of you who are not familiar with it, the documentary Invisible Children depicts a civil war that has raged and destroyed lives in Northern Uganda for over twenty years. The conflict has resulted in tens of thousands of children abducted –forced to become child soldiers and sex slaves, in around 1.8 million people displaced from their homes, and in innumerable secondary effects from a decimated educational system to heightened HIV/AIDS scenario. After watching the film I was griped by the desire to do something anything—my best intentions calling out for justice and repair. I could have dropped a dollar in the cup and called that enough, but luckily I was offered the opportunity to travel the country and raise awareness with Invisible Children. That route led me to numerous high schools, colleges, churches and other places where I was inspired by the profound good will of the youth of this country. The experience culminated in the event I mentioned, with bodies strewn in sleeping bags all over these bricks. And after that I felt good, like I had done something, we had all come together and we accomplished a small step towards peace in Northern Uganda. The opposing sides entered into peace talks shortly afterward and hope loomed heavy for the first time. I could have stopped there.
Just as my money was not enough, the fact that I raised my hand once with over 80,000 other people to cry out “Injustice” did not solve the problem. If I was going to follow through on my intentions fully, I would have to do more. Again, I was graced with an opportunity to travel to Uganda and help create a program called Schools for Schools with Invisible Children aimed at rebuilding the North. I had profound ideas of what I could accomplish after studying International Relations and scoffing at the history of folly that Americans and Europeans have reeked in Africa. But if I was going to provide any real assistance there, I was going to have to learn more. As I sat in meetings with government officials, headmasters, teachers, students, and anyone who would talk to me I learned more about what real needs were and what real solutions could be offered. I saw schools made out of slants of scrap wood that produced quality students while relatively resource-rich schools struggled. I learned about the deeper qualities that were needed for development.
One of the most profound of those was community. Out projects in the Internally Displaced Person’s camps always provided us with inspiration. To describe an IDP camp for the uninitiated, imagine the refugee camps that you have seen on tv and in photos. Now imagine something worse. Because of instability caused by the rebel army, the Ugandan government forced a majority of the people from Northern Uganda into these camps where there was no water, no sanitation, no schools, no farming. Now a great percentage of the population is dependant on foreign aid for medicine, food, education, and other essentials. The rates of death, rape, alcoholism, and other tragedies in these camps are staggering. We try to help how we can but it wasn’t until a fire destroyed hundreds of tightly packed mud huts that I learned about profound help. As these huts where struggling families kept their few possessions were destroyed, a group of our beneficiaries in neighboring camps came together to assist the affected families. These people who themselves had next to nothing, who we provided a small boost of income and hope, and they turned around and offered a large portion of that back to us to rebuild the burnt and destroyed huts and homes. Only after witnessing exchanges like that of real love and community did I come to a more profound understanding of aid these good intentions of mine would ask of me.
But this is a growing, living thing. This spark of initiative that I’m describing in these good intentions continues to grow in me as I meet and discuss with people here and everywhere. And if I can offer you one thing, in my gratitude for the fact that you stopped and listened to me it is the understanding that I have come to. We can pave the road to Heaven with our good intentions, we can create a better world, we can answer that call inside ourselves that says we must do something, anything. But to do so honestly and fully, we have to follow through. It was only by investing myself and learning about the situations and talking with people that I learned how to help even more. If you have heard a story today that inspires you, I ask that you don’t just give money and let your conscience by assuaged. Get involved, the only way to change the world is to allow yourself to first be changed. And I’m not saying we all have to run to Africa. I was lucky, and I am enormously grateful that I could do that. But so much could be done right here. A couple of months ago, Invisible Children held another event and tens of thousands showed up to call for an end to the war in Northern Uganda and an end to the Internally Displaced Persons camps. Since then, the State Department has taken strong steps to assist the peace process, and hope continues to grow in Uganda.
That is what I offer you. Do not just be inspired, be changed. Learn about the people and the cause that inspires you. Then let that change in you shine out into the world in a new song, yours combined with others. That is love, that is the fruit of good intentions, of honest inspiration and wanting to improve the world with the courage to see it through. The call that Ghandi made, to “be the change you want to see in the world,” is your soul’s inspiration, your good intentions calling out, offering the only real hope for change, one that starts and continues with you.
(By the way, if the topic interested you and you want to be truly angered, read Michal Maren's "The Road to Hell")
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Answering the Shofar's Call
I never quite understood how the choice of an Observant Jewish-based institution would affect my life when I headed out to medical school. At first, I didn't even notice that Touro University in Vallejo, California was even Jewish. As it was explained to me, the whole thing dates back to early Jewish immigrants who have been participating in philanthropy for a considerable part of our country's history. Their latest efforts have been to bring health education to the West Coast. The first and most constant thing mentioned during orientation was the food. I realized quickly I would have to get used to BBQ's without cheeseburgers--an awkward thought. The fact that we observe all Jewish holidays including Shabbat (half-day every Friday) certainly adds a positive spin on everything.
Luckily, the differences do go more than superficial and calender-based as well. During orientation, the school's Rabbi came forward and gave a quick lesson out of the Talmud, which spoke of the benefits and necessities of community. Moments like that will hopefully continue throughout my education here. Already I am learning more, as we were inducted to our clinical lives in the White Coat ceremony through the blasting of a Shofar, a Jewish horn. At the ceremony, we received one of the most pronounced symbols of our new profession, medicine. The use of the instrument intended to loan some of its awe-inspiring blasts (the same sound that fell the walls of Jericho) and of introspection and release (through its sounding at Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur). All of these meanings blasted towards us as we attempted to understand the depth of what we began. A four year task, which really just begins our journey, of intense learning and preparing to serve community and sacrifice ourselves.
I sat in my auditorium chair, looking up at our imported prints of Chagall's stained glass windows, and took in the perspective of at least the coming year. I've closed myself off to traveling now for a while. Locked into a home, building relationships as much as I can in my free time, I cannot even imagine what might happen. I know much of the time will be consumed by books, studying, discussing, practicing, worrying, and all of the food-and-sleep withdrawls that accompany these things. It's worth it. It's something I've been working towards for a while. I'm sure I can manage it, but I'm also sure it will be tough.
I also cannot promise much inspiration in these digital pages. Without travel to inspire, and with books and lectures pushing me down, I hope I can still manage enough inspiration to collect somethings worth communicating, but I will even miss writing about my adventures of the last years. Hope those who have read along have enjoyed the excursion. We'll see where it takes us now.
To see me in all my doctorly getups, go to www.lifetouchevents.com
Enter the password "Touro"
Click on "Touro White Coat"
Then select the last page and scroll near the bottom. You'll find a group picture and my own. Sorry I'm too cheap to have my own camera, but I hope that gives everyone an idea. Thank you all.
Luckily, the differences do go more than superficial and calender-based as well. During orientation, the school's Rabbi came forward and gave a quick lesson out of the Talmud, which spoke of the benefits and necessities of community. Moments like that will hopefully continue throughout my education here. Already I am learning more, as we were inducted to our clinical lives in the White Coat ceremony through the blasting of a Shofar, a Jewish horn. At the ceremony, we received one of the most pronounced symbols of our new profession, medicine. The use of the instrument intended to loan some of its awe-inspiring blasts (the same sound that fell the walls of Jericho) and of introspection and release (through its sounding at Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur). All of these meanings blasted towards us as we attempted to understand the depth of what we began. A four year task, which really just begins our journey, of intense learning and preparing to serve community and sacrifice ourselves.
I sat in my auditorium chair, looking up at our imported prints of Chagall's stained glass windows, and took in the perspective of at least the coming year. I've closed myself off to traveling now for a while. Locked into a home, building relationships as much as I can in my free time, I cannot even imagine what might happen. I know much of the time will be consumed by books, studying, discussing, practicing, worrying, and all of the food-and-sleep withdrawls that accompany these things. It's worth it. It's something I've been working towards for a while. I'm sure I can manage it, but I'm also sure it will be tough.
I also cannot promise much inspiration in these digital pages. Without travel to inspire, and with books and lectures pushing me down, I hope I can still manage enough inspiration to collect somethings worth communicating, but I will even miss writing about my adventures of the last years. Hope those who have read along have enjoyed the excursion. We'll see where it takes us now.
To see me in all my doctorly getups, go to www.lifetouchevents.com
Enter the password "Touro"
Click on "Touro White Coat"
Then select the last page and scroll near the bottom. You'll find a group picture and my own. Sorry I'm too cheap to have my own camera, but I hope that gives everyone an idea. Thank you all.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Over Continental Breakfasts
The terminals and the baggage claims have vanished, but the traveling has yet to cease. A few days more and I’ll actually have settled into home. For the past week, while in some respects I’ve had the easy luxury of returning to the leisure of the unemployed and spending the whole day playing with my nephew, I’ve been missing some of that real ease that begins with quiet. Even now as I push a few moments into my schedule, I’m a little lost at how to sort through the memories that sometimes run at me blindly while staring out the windows of moving cars.
The changes and revelations that I’ve seen over the past week have come in fits and flashes. While eating, pushing in the same favorite foods, the ones automatically ordered without even barely consulting the menu, I catch—usually somewhere in the middle of the meal—the idea that I really haven’t had this taste in quite some time. I try to recall all the sitting and wishing for that taste that have flooded me over the year.
It is mostly at these moments that I notice how the past year somehow seems like a bump of a skipped record. Life has continued so steadily, as it should, as it couldn’t have been expected to otherwise do. And not in the great leaps and bounds of the imagination. It is not the great advances that I oddly find myself looking for every time I return to my former homes. Old buildings should be ravaged or removed, new efforts stretching up skyward. Mostly, life plods on. Even advancement takes the same pace it always has—eating up the occasional empty field and replacing it with the pre-formed boxes and signs of an America ready for consumption. And its easy to find myself slipping into the groove I left a year ago, filling the time and space with movies and fast food, coffee and cold beer.
I’m still waiting for the chances to feel the differences more than I do now. They are there, impossible to confuse. When I look into a sky that I once might have thought was glorious and now I find the texture flat, when on the long car rides I fail to see huts disappearing beneath the green growth on the side of the road, when I’m going to bed and my friends are waking up facing a day I can’t help them with and experiencing things I’ll only know about if somehow we can both struggle against the tide of life and find the time to write each other.
Nothing seems as shocking, and also ghastly familiar, as the excesses. Walking through the nicer outdoor malls of San Diego, where people are quite as plentiful as in the camps back there, except that here their lack of covered skin is carefully placed and far from accidental or the result of natural feeding or tattered clothing. Something about the gatherings, especially in food courts and clothing stores unsettles. There was one mall, this one in Phoenix, with a constant vigil of three flame-topped pillars, each tall and blasting enough fire to cook decent meals. The worst, to me, wasn’t the waste or the fuel that spilled out burnt into the air as heat and pollution. The unease, I think, in retrospect, comes from the knowledge that in this world somebody always pays for the excess, that is isn’t just bits and pieces of flashery to amuse the citizens, but it always gets divided and placed on the bill and we pay it unheeding.
The comfort can set it off as well. After switching around with nights on couches and floors and sleeping in cars, I was lying in bed last night, a non-descript hotel room with their standard huge beds and slightly heavy blankets, including the one everyone knows they never clean. I kept thinking about how huge the bed seemed, especially when compared to my rocking bunk bed that swayed whenever Adam or I dared to roll over in our sleep. The luxury seemed fitting and not too indulgent: to spread out and feel the mattress underneath every inch of any direction I might sprawl out to. And I thought how odd it was to have this now, until I remembered that I actually had much more comfortable beds, like the soft mattress and blankets in Masindi when we went to visit Peter’s family, or in Zanzibar, or wherever, and Masindi’s night cost five dollars.
The whole experience amazes me in other ways as well. One night, I was invited to a gathering of friends at my grandmother’s house. A few of her acquaintances from church had their weekly meeting and they wanted me to come and share. Here was the entire thing that I was wrestling with condensed. How do you turn the experience into a speech or some slideshow presentation. It was easy when I set my laptop to display the many-foldered photos at the pizza shop and I sat around enjoying dinner with my friends and family, randomly telling stories whenever they surfaced in my head and the monitor at the same time. This was more like the days I stood in front of audiences, theaters and classrooms and tried to leave them with something about Uganda to dwell on that would hopefully grow someday into action. I was surprised when it felt warm and comforting to talk about everything again in this way. Even with people who didn’t know the exact circumstances, these men and women had lived through quite a bit themselves and drew from childhoods on farms and lives in wars and other struggles. They saw the folly of the world for what it was.
The perspectives of my grandmother and her friends grounded me for a while. They saw fear in the world, and hope in the youth and all of these things that I tried to bring out in them and myself. They enjoyed the pictures and the media and opening their eyes and telling stories that placed the events in their own considerable perspectives. I tried to see through their conversations and my still unformed thoughts to an idea of the world. It must be something more than people and places, but it is hard to see from hotel lobbies.
The changes and revelations that I’ve seen over the past week have come in fits and flashes. While eating, pushing in the same favorite foods, the ones automatically ordered without even barely consulting the menu, I catch—usually somewhere in the middle of the meal—the idea that I really haven’t had this taste in quite some time. I try to recall all the sitting and wishing for that taste that have flooded me over the year.
It is mostly at these moments that I notice how the past year somehow seems like a bump of a skipped record. Life has continued so steadily, as it should, as it couldn’t have been expected to otherwise do. And not in the great leaps and bounds of the imagination. It is not the great advances that I oddly find myself looking for every time I return to my former homes. Old buildings should be ravaged or removed, new efforts stretching up skyward. Mostly, life plods on. Even advancement takes the same pace it always has—eating up the occasional empty field and replacing it with the pre-formed boxes and signs of an America ready for consumption. And its easy to find myself slipping into the groove I left a year ago, filling the time and space with movies and fast food, coffee and cold beer.
I’m still waiting for the chances to feel the differences more than I do now. They are there, impossible to confuse. When I look into a sky that I once might have thought was glorious and now I find the texture flat, when on the long car rides I fail to see huts disappearing beneath the green growth on the side of the road, when I’m going to bed and my friends are waking up facing a day I can’t help them with and experiencing things I’ll only know about if somehow we can both struggle against the tide of life and find the time to write each other.
Nothing seems as shocking, and also ghastly familiar, as the excesses. Walking through the nicer outdoor malls of San Diego, where people are quite as plentiful as in the camps back there, except that here their lack of covered skin is carefully placed and far from accidental or the result of natural feeding or tattered clothing. Something about the gatherings, especially in food courts and clothing stores unsettles. There was one mall, this one in Phoenix, with a constant vigil of three flame-topped pillars, each tall and blasting enough fire to cook decent meals. The worst, to me, wasn’t the waste or the fuel that spilled out burnt into the air as heat and pollution. The unease, I think, in retrospect, comes from the knowledge that in this world somebody always pays for the excess, that is isn’t just bits and pieces of flashery to amuse the citizens, but it always gets divided and placed on the bill and we pay it unheeding.
The comfort can set it off as well. After switching around with nights on couches and floors and sleeping in cars, I was lying in bed last night, a non-descript hotel room with their standard huge beds and slightly heavy blankets, including the one everyone knows they never clean. I kept thinking about how huge the bed seemed, especially when compared to my rocking bunk bed that swayed whenever Adam or I dared to roll over in our sleep. The luxury seemed fitting and not too indulgent: to spread out and feel the mattress underneath every inch of any direction I might sprawl out to. And I thought how odd it was to have this now, until I remembered that I actually had much more comfortable beds, like the soft mattress and blankets in Masindi when we went to visit Peter’s family, or in Zanzibar, or wherever, and Masindi’s night cost five dollars.
The whole experience amazes me in other ways as well. One night, I was invited to a gathering of friends at my grandmother’s house. A few of her acquaintances from church had their weekly meeting and they wanted me to come and share. Here was the entire thing that I was wrestling with condensed. How do you turn the experience into a speech or some slideshow presentation. It was easy when I set my laptop to display the many-foldered photos at the pizza shop and I sat around enjoying dinner with my friends and family, randomly telling stories whenever they surfaced in my head and the monitor at the same time. This was more like the days I stood in front of audiences, theaters and classrooms and tried to leave them with something about Uganda to dwell on that would hopefully grow someday into action. I was surprised when it felt warm and comforting to talk about everything again in this way. Even with people who didn’t know the exact circumstances, these men and women had lived through quite a bit themselves and drew from childhoods on farms and lives in wars and other struggles. They saw the folly of the world for what it was.
The perspectives of my grandmother and her friends grounded me for a while. They saw fear in the world, and hope in the youth and all of these things that I tried to bring out in them and myself. They enjoyed the pictures and the media and opening their eyes and telling stories that placed the events in their own considerable perspectives. I tried to see through their conversations and my still unformed thoughts to an idea of the world. It must be something more than people and places, but it is hard to see from hotel lobbies.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Flying Westward
I tried to take my time. The whole trip was set up with the goal of not only visiting some fancy locales, visiting some old friends, but also just to breath in time. Even the flights themselves promised me some relaxation. Sitting in Gulu I fantasized about sitting in the comfortable seats, slightly reclined as my small television screen played movies I hadn’t seen or maybe even heard of, kindly men and women passed by me at regular intervals dropping food and drinks in my laptop tray table, and I slept as much as I could watching land and sea and clouds carpet the world below me as swinging past and behind me. As I still sat in Gulu, trying to imagine the best way to return, a trip laden with layovers seemed like the best way to slow to a gradual progression what must surely shock. Of course, I didn’t exactly plan on the itinerary I received. Four days of travel spanning four continents (technically). But without any idea of what could be better, I set off on the plane last Friday.
Before that moment, of handing over passports for one last exit stamp and loading of bags in the hopes that fragiles wouldn’t be ruined, there were a series of good-byes. Perhaps over the next weeks, I’d like to detail a little bit more about the last month in Gulu, some retrospect covering the times that I couldn’t elaborate on while I was still there. It was hard enough to digest the experience while it was happening and even with the distance of days, I still have difficulty assessing everything. I’ll talk someday of the celebrations and the stories, the tearful good-byes, the longing looks for the last time around, wondering what was happened, what has been accomplished, how will I or the people I’ve met be remembered.
I made it down to Entebbe airport with Adam, each of us trying to get in our last thoughts about life and work and everything. I’m sure we could have talked more about deeper things and less about the same struggles of our lives and the same easy jokes we always through out, but there is something nice about enjoying the comfort of a friend’s conversation for the last time. It’s difficult to imagine if I will ever see these people again. One of the largest questions I was asked as I was leaving was, “When are you coming back?” I don’t know. I’m heading off to five years of school during which I hope to do some small amount of traveling and after which I would love to return to the developing world and begin work anew. But where will I go? Can I return to this place where I’ve built up relationships, see what has occurred in my absence, pick up some things again? Should I head off to some new adventure, take the lessons I’ve learned and try to apply them in new surroundings, spreading the influence around? The whole decision is too far away for me to make any real attempt at a decision.
On a side note, it is remarkable that this question continuously arises. The Acholi peoples’ contacts with Westerners have been so full of people coming for a period of their lives and then leaving. The times where these people actually return are not extensive. I’ve always feared that this is one of the reasons for how when the children run to greet me the roadside, they scream, “Muno Bye!” instead of a more welcoming salutation. They are used to seeing me leave. Perhaps we have made some changes in this. In our organization, it is common for people to return. Bobby, Laren, and Jason have all come back numerous times. Katie has come and gone with great regularity. Many of us have taken vacations to the States and returned. When I talked with people and they saw that I wasn’t making the return trip or at least didn’t know when I would do it, there was this additional level of shock. Some of my friends pleaded with their eyes and sometimes half laughing voices for this to be another joke of mine, that surely I would return. It broke me a little each time to say no, that I had responsibilities at home that I had to return to, investments that would keep me away. Regardless of how much I would love to continue to be involved in their lives, mine pulled me away.
And so I left, on these and other circumstances that still swim about in my memory, I boarded the plane. All of my dreaming about the comforts are air travel were realized on the first few trips. Good beer, pleantiful food (as long as you continue to ask for it), and comfortable seats. I enjoyed the silence and the room for reading, the ability to look out the window and watch my home fly away beneath me. I ran through my insane itinerary (Entebbe→Nairobi→Dubai (7 hours)→Amsterdam (22 hours)→Detroit→New York City (26 hours)→Detroit (again)→San Diego. Four days of travel, I had spread it out to delay the onset of jet lag, to meet up with friends in distant cities, and to attempt to enjoy the return voyage. It worked like a charm.
In Dubai, I got to remember what fast wireless internet was all about. With simple clicks I managed to check emails, download, at amazing speeds that I had forgotten was possible. When sleep finally started to push towards me around 3 in the morning, I found myself wandering the halls with numerous others in the same vain, many spread out on the floors under blankets they had stolen from their arriving flights. Luckily, I had done the same, and I found a comfortable spot and tried to push out the noise, lights, and brilliance of the duty free shops below me. The sheer extravagance of those stores had been hard to walk through. The selections and the prices and the throngs still striving to purchase at a time that could not yet even be called morning through me back into the consumptive world I had left behind. It was nice to close my eyes.
I had been to Amsterdam numerous times before (once even detailed in these passages) and always enjoyed the city. There was something even more enjoyable after the hassles of Kampala to sit at a café and have a cup of well-made coffee, to read just outside of a brasserie while sipping a dark ale, to push through the crowds at the only museum I braved and realize how my tastes in art might have changed. I now looked more towards Van Gogh’s pastorals as the source of genius. The lines spilled out from the fields and the colors of the sky that melded seamlessly with the trees and bounced in reds and greens and yellows that couldn’t help but remind me of Africa.
By the time I got to New York, I was anxious to see some friends that I have been missing for years. I met Meghan at the airport whom I hadn’t seen since UCSD and later in the city ran into Lance and ran over the years its been since we both went to Horizon and lived in that condo in La Jolla. Following an instinct that I should have acted on long ago, I pared the two and watched as they became great friends. Lance still finding his way in the city after a couple of years and Meghan just moving there, we all had an amazing time. Coffee in the village. The view from the Empire State Building as the sea buildings beneath me seemed to almost wash in the waves of people and vehicles and wind. The rooftop seating with live music barely making it from the bar below. We had set out for a quick trip—it wouldn’t be right to miss Manhattan at night. Somewhere around four in the morning we realized that we had probably done enough right by the place and turned in for some sleep only to try to push more into the day in the morning. I don’t think I could have done more in 24 hours, but the goal was far from whirlwind tourism, enjoying the city, taking it in with my friends was the real goal. I embraced all of that and all the while reeled from imaging how my Ugandan friends would have embraced the scene. How would Peter Paul have drunk in the heights of the buildings, and Peter Abiyo with the streets and the cars. Tony with the music and the crowds. The mixtures of love and awe and fear that would have pored out from my friends found some small expression in my own perceptions. Nothing significant, but at least a nod to the effect they’ve had in my life.
And then the doldrums. After New York was civil commuting. Layovers, crowded delays in airports, bad expensive food, no movies, worse than babies are the teenagers and barely older kids and their prattle. Soon enough, with the energy for the trip draining me, I landed in San Diego. Straight from the airport to burritos, carne asada fries, a nice beer, a friend’s house in which I’ve spent countless relaxing nights, and sleep. The morning held views of the ocean, the great Park, a breakfast burrito (technically a “Lunch Burrito”—the horribly misnamed conglomeration of eggs, cheese, bacon, hash browns, and beans.) I had reached the shores I had known for so long.
Before that moment, of handing over passports for one last exit stamp and loading of bags in the hopes that fragiles wouldn’t be ruined, there were a series of good-byes. Perhaps over the next weeks, I’d like to detail a little bit more about the last month in Gulu, some retrospect covering the times that I couldn’t elaborate on while I was still there. It was hard enough to digest the experience while it was happening and even with the distance of days, I still have difficulty assessing everything. I’ll talk someday of the celebrations and the stories, the tearful good-byes, the longing looks for the last time around, wondering what was happened, what has been accomplished, how will I or the people I’ve met be remembered.
I made it down to Entebbe airport with Adam, each of us trying to get in our last thoughts about life and work and everything. I’m sure we could have talked more about deeper things and less about the same struggles of our lives and the same easy jokes we always through out, but there is something nice about enjoying the comfort of a friend’s conversation for the last time. It’s difficult to imagine if I will ever see these people again. One of the largest questions I was asked as I was leaving was, “When are you coming back?” I don’t know. I’m heading off to five years of school during which I hope to do some small amount of traveling and after which I would love to return to the developing world and begin work anew. But where will I go? Can I return to this place where I’ve built up relationships, see what has occurred in my absence, pick up some things again? Should I head off to some new adventure, take the lessons I’ve learned and try to apply them in new surroundings, spreading the influence around? The whole decision is too far away for me to make any real attempt at a decision.
On a side note, it is remarkable that this question continuously arises. The Acholi peoples’ contacts with Westerners have been so full of people coming for a period of their lives and then leaving. The times where these people actually return are not extensive. I’ve always feared that this is one of the reasons for how when the children run to greet me the roadside, they scream, “Muno Bye!” instead of a more welcoming salutation. They are used to seeing me leave. Perhaps we have made some changes in this. In our organization, it is common for people to return. Bobby, Laren, and Jason have all come back numerous times. Katie has come and gone with great regularity. Many of us have taken vacations to the States and returned. When I talked with people and they saw that I wasn’t making the return trip or at least didn’t know when I would do it, there was this additional level of shock. Some of my friends pleaded with their eyes and sometimes half laughing voices for this to be another joke of mine, that surely I would return. It broke me a little each time to say no, that I had responsibilities at home that I had to return to, investments that would keep me away. Regardless of how much I would love to continue to be involved in their lives, mine pulled me away.
And so I left, on these and other circumstances that still swim about in my memory, I boarded the plane. All of my dreaming about the comforts are air travel were realized on the first few trips. Good beer, pleantiful food (as long as you continue to ask for it), and comfortable seats. I enjoyed the silence and the room for reading, the ability to look out the window and watch my home fly away beneath me. I ran through my insane itinerary (Entebbe→Nairobi→Dubai (7 hours)→Amsterdam (22 hours)→Detroit→New York City (26 hours)→Detroit (again)→San Diego. Four days of travel, I had spread it out to delay the onset of jet lag, to meet up with friends in distant cities, and to attempt to enjoy the return voyage. It worked like a charm.
In Dubai, I got to remember what fast wireless internet was all about. With simple clicks I managed to check emails, download, at amazing speeds that I had forgotten was possible. When sleep finally started to push towards me around 3 in the morning, I found myself wandering the halls with numerous others in the same vain, many spread out on the floors under blankets they had stolen from their arriving flights. Luckily, I had done the same, and I found a comfortable spot and tried to push out the noise, lights, and brilliance of the duty free shops below me. The sheer extravagance of those stores had been hard to walk through. The selections and the prices and the throngs still striving to purchase at a time that could not yet even be called morning through me back into the consumptive world I had left behind. It was nice to close my eyes.
I had been to Amsterdam numerous times before (once even detailed in these passages) and always enjoyed the city. There was something even more enjoyable after the hassles of Kampala to sit at a café and have a cup of well-made coffee, to read just outside of a brasserie while sipping a dark ale, to push through the crowds at the only museum I braved and realize how my tastes in art might have changed. I now looked more towards Van Gogh’s pastorals as the source of genius. The lines spilled out from the fields and the colors of the sky that melded seamlessly with the trees and bounced in reds and greens and yellows that couldn’t help but remind me of Africa.
By the time I got to New York, I was anxious to see some friends that I have been missing for years. I met Meghan at the airport whom I hadn’t seen since UCSD and later in the city ran into Lance and ran over the years its been since we both went to Horizon and lived in that condo in La Jolla. Following an instinct that I should have acted on long ago, I pared the two and watched as they became great friends. Lance still finding his way in the city after a couple of years and Meghan just moving there, we all had an amazing time. Coffee in the village. The view from the Empire State Building as the sea buildings beneath me seemed to almost wash in the waves of people and vehicles and wind. The rooftop seating with live music barely making it from the bar below. We had set out for a quick trip—it wouldn’t be right to miss Manhattan at night. Somewhere around four in the morning we realized that we had probably done enough right by the place and turned in for some sleep only to try to push more into the day in the morning. I don’t think I could have done more in 24 hours, but the goal was far from whirlwind tourism, enjoying the city, taking it in with my friends was the real goal. I embraced all of that and all the while reeled from imaging how my Ugandan friends would have embraced the scene. How would Peter Paul have drunk in the heights of the buildings, and Peter Abiyo with the streets and the cars. Tony with the music and the crowds. The mixtures of love and awe and fear that would have pored out from my friends found some small expression in my own perceptions. Nothing significant, but at least a nod to the effect they’ve had in my life.
And then the doldrums. After New York was civil commuting. Layovers, crowded delays in airports, bad expensive food, no movies, worse than babies are the teenagers and barely older kids and their prattle. Soon enough, with the energy for the trip draining me, I landed in San Diego. Straight from the airport to burritos, carne asada fries, a nice beer, a friend’s house in which I’ve spent countless relaxing nights, and sleep. The morning held views of the ocean, the great Park, a breakfast burrito (technically a “Lunch Burrito”—the horribly misnamed conglomeration of eggs, cheese, bacon, hash browns, and beans.) I had reached the shores I had known for so long.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Searching for Home
(As a prelude, I seem to have included the wrong link in the last blog. Please check out Rubanga? at http://jamestravels.com/rubanga/issue_1.pdf.)
Driving away from Gulu the other day, I kept rotating my thoughts. Sometimes I would stare at a tree, a camp, a hut, a group of children playing, the Nile, all of these things that I see, and try to fix it permanently as some image I would see at every moment when I close my eyes. Sometimes I would try to joke around and talk with Peter Abiyo trying to confirm and explore the already considerable impression that he has made on me. Other moments were spent scanning back over the past year--images, ideas and actions all sprawling out and coming at me at random times. And of course, sometimes I just stared. Like when I looked at the clouds and marveled at the incomparable majesty that is an African sky at its highest. Echoes of people danced about in my ears and I attempted to understand how I would not see them and how they meant to me as I sorted through the words they gave me when I left about how I had affected them.
I've been preparing to leave almost ever since I got to Uganda. That's what you're supposed to do. If your work is temporary, you know that you must leave and in your space, ideally, you must leave a world better for your having been there and not suffering for your having left. This doesn't mean that you don't let the place affect you in real lasting ways , and it still fills my heart and it still makes me long, already, to return. Even as I sit in Kampala, not even on the plane, not even at the airport yet. My work here has been such that I have made it the focus of my time. I have built relationships and experiences alongside it, and considered both of those integral parts of my work, but I have been running since the word "go." As such, I kept the pace until "stop" could be also be heard.
I don't know that I've been able to prepare myself adequately for leaving Uganda. I even have some work to do today (I fly out at three) And it's hard to break the habit of that and let my mind attempt to digest everything. There are uncountable things I'd love to say to everyone I meet, but my head has not yet fully formed the words. I hope that everything comes out in the sentiments of what I do manage to say, and in my actions louder than anything. When I look at my friends and prepare to say goodbye, there eyes seem to shine that it does.
I'm going to try to still spill out a few stories here, things that I have neglected to tell. And I can't guess at what will happen on the way home. I can hardly even think of home adequately. I'll be there soon, or wherever it is that I call home when people ask where it is. It's a difficult location to imagine--one place holding the anchor to my life. I can't really say where home is, if I'm going there, or how I might be ready to see it again. I've left it and I'm going there. Even San Diego is in many ways simply a place where home used to be. I'll see, and try to tell, what it looks like when I find it.
Driving away from Gulu the other day, I kept rotating my thoughts. Sometimes I would stare at a tree, a camp, a hut, a group of children playing, the Nile, all of these things that I see, and try to fix it permanently as some image I would see at every moment when I close my eyes. Sometimes I would try to joke around and talk with Peter Abiyo trying to confirm and explore the already considerable impression that he has made on me. Other moments were spent scanning back over the past year--images, ideas and actions all sprawling out and coming at me at random times. And of course, sometimes I just stared. Like when I looked at the clouds and marveled at the incomparable majesty that is an African sky at its highest. Echoes of people danced about in my ears and I attempted to understand how I would not see them and how they meant to me as I sorted through the words they gave me when I left about how I had affected them.
I've been preparing to leave almost ever since I got to Uganda. That's what you're supposed to do. If your work is temporary, you know that you must leave and in your space, ideally, you must leave a world better for your having been there and not suffering for your having left. This doesn't mean that you don't let the place affect you in real lasting ways , and it still fills my heart and it still makes me long, already, to return. Even as I sit in Kampala, not even on the plane, not even at the airport yet. My work here has been such that I have made it the focus of my time. I have built relationships and experiences alongside it, and considered both of those integral parts of my work, but I have been running since the word "go." As such, I kept the pace until "stop" could be also be heard.
I don't know that I've been able to prepare myself adequately for leaving Uganda. I even have some work to do today (I fly out at three) And it's hard to break the habit of that and let my mind attempt to digest everything. There are uncountable things I'd love to say to everyone I meet, but my head has not yet fully formed the words. I hope that everything comes out in the sentiments of what I do manage to say, and in my actions louder than anything. When I look at my friends and prepare to say goodbye, there eyes seem to shine that it does.
I'm going to try to still spill out a few stories here, things that I have neglected to tell. And I can't guess at what will happen on the way home. I can hardly even think of home adequately. I'll be there soon, or wherever it is that I call home when people ask where it is. It's a difficult location to imagine--one place holding the anchor to my life. I can't really say where home is, if I'm going there, or how I might be ready to see it again. I've left it and I'm going there. Even San Diego is in many ways simply a place where home used to be. I'll see, and try to tell, what it looks like when I find it.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Ask a Good Question
Not long ago a few friends of mine decided to ask everyone they knew in Northern Uganda and associated with our works here a simple question, "Does Rubanga mean 'God' or 'a Hunchback'?" To which they received not very many answers but a lot of awkward stares. Since that failure, they rephrased the question as a request, for people to submit whatever they wanted to a first-run attempt at a literary journal. Figuring on a slight retreat from just constantly considering money and contracts, I tried to fold some small part of the beauty and frustration (and even the beauty of that) into a small piece. Given more time, I would have polished it more, but as it is, I tried for a small reflection of Uganda in terms of my own exeriences and those of my closer friends. If you want some additional reading, feel free to look through the first issue. If you are fully inspired, there is a call for participation at the end.
http://jamestravels.com/rubanga/issue_1.pdf
http://jamestravels.com/rubanga/issue_1.pdf
Sunday, July 01, 2007
Learning to Love French
Looking back it was one of the most fulfilling trips I’ve taken. Looking forward, I can sympathize with all of those who looked at us slanted and questioned. “Why the Congo? What do you hope to do or see there that might be worth the trip, and—of course—the ever-hyped danger?” Of course, these same questions rang considerably when I was first considering the move to Uganda. Then, I had a solid answer, a plan that—even if my eventual tasks here turned out to be completely different—at least I had something secure that I could offer as a reason for the trip. But at the beginning of this last excursion, I lacked anything so definite.
I knew we were neighbors, that these simultaneous and largely unlinked, though at times similar, conflicts raged beyond and sometimes across the borders of the two countries. I knew people suffered and longed and some people strove for peace. I knew a bit of the history, but nothing extensive. And I knew it seemed alright to go. This last art troubled me because I know how I have spoken and how I feel about people who travel to Gulu to see, first-hand, the suffering of the Internally Displaced Persons Camps. As if somehow the tragedy wouldn’t be real unless they stood as witness to it. People travel and let the tears brim up in their eyes and the wringing hands clench tight before returning down south. And partly, they are right. There is something about visiting the place and knowing the people that makes the reality of Gulu live. But I always question what they do, what they offer, and how they present themselves—ever wary of those loathsome words that have been regularly lobbed at our organization—conflict tourism.
We had the idea of going as investigators, not for any special purpose other than trying to gain a wider understanding of the area we lived in, having read too many books about how Africa is both more than and less then the political boundaries of formerly imperial borders and hoping to learn what linked and what differentiated. None of this was for formal research, and possibly we could have dove into JSTOR and other locations for similar information, but the vividness of experience called stronger than academic publications. And, to be perfectly honest, the slight amounts of danger, of walking into a country most people don’t go to for fear of rebels—numerous Congolese factions, the Interahamwe, other Rwandese groups—and other travesties. Anyway, we had a contact. Our friend Julia had been about a month before with a Congolese friend of hers from Kampala. I called him, and he happened to be in Goma at the time so I asked if I could join him. “Perfect.” So we left.
The two o’clock bus from Kampala to Kigali, Rwanda bursts through small towns, over darkened potholes and through the pre-dawn fog of the increasingly vegetation-filled countryside of southern Uganda with enough speed to rock us occasionally out of sleep for fear and to get us to the bus park by ten in the morning, plenty of time to push on to the border. The officials as we first entered the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the Goma crossing were friendly as people normally are when we are first friendly with them. We laughed about American tourists, very large passport stamps, and numerous other things (not so much about the $50 it cost to cross over) and met Petna’s friends. I had called Petna at the border, introduced myself again as Julia’s friend and he excitedly sent some people down to pick us up.
During the whole trip we struggled with language. In the Congo, they speak French and Kiswahili. I’ve learned about as much Kiswahili as I can from a song that runs through greetings. “Mambo, Jambo Sana, Habari Gani… Hakuna Mutata.” And as for French, honestly, I’ve never cared for the language. Too visceral, almost venereal, too many letters that aren’t actually pronounced and odd comas and hyphens thrown in for no reasons I can discern. Then there was the friend who offered to teach me but instead ridiculed my poor pronunciations at every step. But there are kids, and when beautiful kids speak, and wonderful people speak, I can listen and almost love it. And when our well-armed guard speaks (more to come) I can struggle to understand. I can imagine living in a place like this and learning more than I could hope for, more than when English and ease is such a simple recourse. I’d be forced to do what everyone we met did, struggle forward with a language they don’t quite grasp. But we met somewhere and still exchanged stories and laughed a bunch, right from the beginning when we met Petna’s friends.
The took us to Petna’s offices, a decent sized compound out of which he runs a film and television production studio, a music group, and other initiatives through which he tries to create Goma as a cultural center for the Congo. Having little to no idea what he did or who he was before we got there, we were amazed to meet musicians, cinematographers, and all kinds of folks as we entered the place, everyone friendly and promising a great time over the next week. They almost ushered us to a local hotel, until we ran into two of their mzungu friends who subsequently offered a spot at their guest house. They warned us as we drove over there, “It’s not what we expected when we came here, we live rather well.” Knowing how I am pampered in Gulu with a nice compound, a great cook, and other niceties, we tried to assuage them, “No, we understand.” But we didn’t. They work for HEAL-Africa, an organization that runs a hospital in Goma and numerous community programs in the surrounding areas.
The director is a former Member of Parliament and current orthopedic surgeon who runs the hospital and the organization and allows many of those involved to stay at a magnificent house he acquired right on the shores of Lake Kivu. While doing amazing work in the peripheral areas with local leadership, they seek out special cases for his orthopedic skills as well as for a group that works on the incredibly high rate of vaginal fistulas in the area (due a record setting number of unskilled deliveries in the rural areas and Goma’s tragic claim as the world leader in violent gang rape.) They opened their home to us, began explaining their programs, allowed us to jump off the rock outcrop of the garden into the lake, and fed us well. We took a small side trip up north about 80 kilometers (more than 100 km and it begins to get too dangerous due to the rebel groups, even the place we went is often off limits) with a group that was setting up a new operation to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV. (We also made a small trip to a dairy farm in the mountains that easily resemble Europe where we got what is easily the best cheese I’ve had in over a year.)
Tired, making it home and then swimming, we rejoined with Petna to celebrate the world premier of a film he made about the lives and thoughts of the children in the area, tying it in artistically to the hopes of the continent with the coming of the South African World Cup. After each film we saw, we enjoyed a spread of beers (not those small Ugandan beers, but serious, 720mL bottles) cheese, sausages, nuts, anything we could think of, and asked the various directors questions about their works in between rounds of applause. The evening offered us a homegrown film festival intimately celebrated and lovingly shared.
The next day was a big one for us, we had set up to climb to the top of ________, an active volcano. I thought I’d be ready, but the two years I’d taken off from backpacking apparently weakened my legs, which were about ready to quit when we finally reached the top. Everything seemed fine, though, as the sunset and the lake of fire and lava erupted below us in ever-changing patterns of continuous explosions. I could try to explain how the lava stands as one of the most amazing natural spectacles I’ve seen, but the words are dainty compared to the quite literal center of the Earth exploding below us. So, we sat and sometimes joked, but regularly watched in silence, then slept through our tired muscles easily and thoroughly.
The morning was cold and we rushed to get down the mountain without letting gravity push us too hard all of the time. Regularly we failed at that and everyone ended up with scrapes and torn clothing. (Each step made Adam and myself question the validity of making the entire trip in Chacos.) Half the decent lay in the path of a lava flow created by an eruption in 2002, making every step a struggle to keep your ankles intact on the rolling and crumbling igneous rocks. We pushed ahead and only slightly noticed as our ranger guide (adequately equipped with an AK-47) kept intently staring off to the right. Remember our conversation the other day about any dangerous animals in the area. “Non, non, les personne dangerouise.”) [I have no idea how to spell in French.] We became a little worried. Asking him what it was, we finally got the reply “Les Bandit,” and instructions to move quickly down the mountain. We started moving quickly then even quicker after a shot fired behind us. I tried to remember what I had learned, that a single shot is a warning shot, that people with AK-47s don’t tend to take single, well-aimed shots at their targets, and that the situation wasn’t as bad as it might seem, but that was difficult. So we ran down the hill. We kept running until advised and allowed to stop, rested, then continued down the hill until we found someone coming up. We explained to her in English and she translated a little French for us so we understood that two men with black barrettes and uniforms but no guns(?) were crossing up above. Probably Rwandan militia trying to make it home. The Congolese Army was called to scout the area and our photographer/translator friend who wanted to go up the hill waited until they were finished. We were close enough, so felt it best to go home.
That night was filled with lively retellings of the story to our mzungu friends, to Petna, the whole crew, through drinking and dancing and wishing we weren’t so tired and aching and that we didn’t have to leave the next day. I said I’d try to come back. And I will try. I don’t know. We here it all the time in Gulu, but I loved the place. Their was music, amazing food, amazing people, all of these aspects of African life that I loved. I wanted to stay and learn from the solid organization. I can see myself returning on a rotation in 3rd/4th year, or maybe once I start my MPH studies. I’m not sure, it’s hard to promise these things, but I want to.
The whole trip didn’t offer us much rest, the main cause for the vacation, so we took an extra couple of days at Lake Bunyoni on Bunyo-Amagara Island. The place is seriously the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in Uganda. Perfect lakes and islands, wonderful food and people, a rope swing to dive into the clear actually safe waters, canoes to paddle around in, everything that promises a great vacation. It took a couple of days, but we finally felt rested, completely rejuvenated, and hopefully ready.
I had about a month left. Since that time (about three weeks) I’ve encountered numerous struggles as I attempt to prepare to leave. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be ready or if my tasks will ever near completion, but more and more it looks like things will be fine. I trust in this as I try to trust that all the complications with money and school will work out, as I try to trust on every trip I take, leaving that silly book behind and knowing that I’ll meet great people and that things work out. If I can try to make something bigger out of it, that this is how God works, but I don’t feel like I have the distance from the occasions for that sort of philosophizing. I’m not yet good enough to fold it in like I should have learned from Garrison Keillor, but now I’ll spit out my quick experiences and ideas. For now, what I can offer is just trust, and more hope. But it seems to work.
Pictures to come, hopefully.
(NB – While writing this, I attempted to relax outside in the shade and chose a spot next to the Kampala Golf Course, watching the players. The afternoon was pleasant as I enjoyed a sandwich and tried to put my thoughts together. However, after a little while, two men—introduced as Inspector William and Moses—came up to me and said I was frightening the golfers. I had selected a spot just on the edge of the course to stay out of people’s way but apparently, that was too obtrusive. At first, I thought of just apologizing and leaving, but instead I just asked if there was somewhere else I could sit. After a long talk and pleasantries, the two men offered me a bit of shade at the end of one green. This advised spot actually lay considerably further into the course than my first choice, but it seemed nice enough so I sat down and finished my sandwich.)
I knew we were neighbors, that these simultaneous and largely unlinked, though at times similar, conflicts raged beyond and sometimes across the borders of the two countries. I knew people suffered and longed and some people strove for peace. I knew a bit of the history, but nothing extensive. And I knew it seemed alright to go. This last art troubled me because I know how I have spoken and how I feel about people who travel to Gulu to see, first-hand, the suffering of the Internally Displaced Persons Camps. As if somehow the tragedy wouldn’t be real unless they stood as witness to it. People travel and let the tears brim up in their eyes and the wringing hands clench tight before returning down south. And partly, they are right. There is something about visiting the place and knowing the people that makes the reality of Gulu live. But I always question what they do, what they offer, and how they present themselves—ever wary of those loathsome words that have been regularly lobbed at our organization—conflict tourism.
We had the idea of going as investigators, not for any special purpose other than trying to gain a wider understanding of the area we lived in, having read too many books about how Africa is both more than and less then the political boundaries of formerly imperial borders and hoping to learn what linked and what differentiated. None of this was for formal research, and possibly we could have dove into JSTOR and other locations for similar information, but the vividness of experience called stronger than academic publications. And, to be perfectly honest, the slight amounts of danger, of walking into a country most people don’t go to for fear of rebels—numerous Congolese factions, the Interahamwe, other Rwandese groups—and other travesties. Anyway, we had a contact. Our friend Julia had been about a month before with a Congolese friend of hers from Kampala. I called him, and he happened to be in Goma at the time so I asked if I could join him. “Perfect.” So we left.
The two o’clock bus from Kampala to Kigali, Rwanda bursts through small towns, over darkened potholes and through the pre-dawn fog of the increasingly vegetation-filled countryside of southern Uganda with enough speed to rock us occasionally out of sleep for fear and to get us to the bus park by ten in the morning, plenty of time to push on to the border. The officials as we first entered the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the Goma crossing were friendly as people normally are when we are first friendly with them. We laughed about American tourists, very large passport stamps, and numerous other things (not so much about the $50 it cost to cross over) and met Petna’s friends. I had called Petna at the border, introduced myself again as Julia’s friend and he excitedly sent some people down to pick us up.
During the whole trip we struggled with language. In the Congo, they speak French and Kiswahili. I’ve learned about as much Kiswahili as I can from a song that runs through greetings. “Mambo, Jambo Sana, Habari Gani… Hakuna Mutata.” And as for French, honestly, I’ve never cared for the language. Too visceral, almost venereal, too many letters that aren’t actually pronounced and odd comas and hyphens thrown in for no reasons I can discern. Then there was the friend who offered to teach me but instead ridiculed my poor pronunciations at every step. But there are kids, and when beautiful kids speak, and wonderful people speak, I can listen and almost love it. And when our well-armed guard speaks (more to come) I can struggle to understand. I can imagine living in a place like this and learning more than I could hope for, more than when English and ease is such a simple recourse. I’d be forced to do what everyone we met did, struggle forward with a language they don’t quite grasp. But we met somewhere and still exchanged stories and laughed a bunch, right from the beginning when we met Petna’s friends.
The took us to Petna’s offices, a decent sized compound out of which he runs a film and television production studio, a music group, and other initiatives through which he tries to create Goma as a cultural center for the Congo. Having little to no idea what he did or who he was before we got there, we were amazed to meet musicians, cinematographers, and all kinds of folks as we entered the place, everyone friendly and promising a great time over the next week. They almost ushered us to a local hotel, until we ran into two of their mzungu friends who subsequently offered a spot at their guest house. They warned us as we drove over there, “It’s not what we expected when we came here, we live rather well.” Knowing how I am pampered in Gulu with a nice compound, a great cook, and other niceties, we tried to assuage them, “No, we understand.” But we didn’t. They work for HEAL-Africa, an organization that runs a hospital in Goma and numerous community programs in the surrounding areas.
The director is a former Member of Parliament and current orthopedic surgeon who runs the hospital and the organization and allows many of those involved to stay at a magnificent house he acquired right on the shores of Lake Kivu. While doing amazing work in the peripheral areas with local leadership, they seek out special cases for his orthopedic skills as well as for a group that works on the incredibly high rate of vaginal fistulas in the area (due a record setting number of unskilled deliveries in the rural areas and Goma’s tragic claim as the world leader in violent gang rape.) They opened their home to us, began explaining their programs, allowed us to jump off the rock outcrop of the garden into the lake, and fed us well. We took a small side trip up north about 80 kilometers (more than 100 km and it begins to get too dangerous due to the rebel groups, even the place we went is often off limits) with a group that was setting up a new operation to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV. (We also made a small trip to a dairy farm in the mountains that easily resemble Europe where we got what is easily the best cheese I’ve had in over a year.)
Tired, making it home and then swimming, we rejoined with Petna to celebrate the world premier of a film he made about the lives and thoughts of the children in the area, tying it in artistically to the hopes of the continent with the coming of the South African World Cup. After each film we saw, we enjoyed a spread of beers (not those small Ugandan beers, but serious, 720mL bottles) cheese, sausages, nuts, anything we could think of, and asked the various directors questions about their works in between rounds of applause. The evening offered us a homegrown film festival intimately celebrated and lovingly shared.
The next day was a big one for us, we had set up to climb to the top of ________, an active volcano. I thought I’d be ready, but the two years I’d taken off from backpacking apparently weakened my legs, which were about ready to quit when we finally reached the top. Everything seemed fine, though, as the sunset and the lake of fire and lava erupted below us in ever-changing patterns of continuous explosions. I could try to explain how the lava stands as one of the most amazing natural spectacles I’ve seen, but the words are dainty compared to the quite literal center of the Earth exploding below us. So, we sat and sometimes joked, but regularly watched in silence, then slept through our tired muscles easily and thoroughly.
The morning was cold and we rushed to get down the mountain without letting gravity push us too hard all of the time. Regularly we failed at that and everyone ended up with scrapes and torn clothing. (Each step made Adam and myself question the validity of making the entire trip in Chacos.) Half the decent lay in the path of a lava flow created by an eruption in 2002, making every step a struggle to keep your ankles intact on the rolling and crumbling igneous rocks. We pushed ahead and only slightly noticed as our ranger guide (adequately equipped with an AK-47) kept intently staring off to the right. Remember our conversation the other day about any dangerous animals in the area. “Non, non, les personne dangerouise.”) [I have no idea how to spell in French.] We became a little worried. Asking him what it was, we finally got the reply “Les Bandit,” and instructions to move quickly down the mountain. We started moving quickly then even quicker after a shot fired behind us. I tried to remember what I had learned, that a single shot is a warning shot, that people with AK-47s don’t tend to take single, well-aimed shots at their targets, and that the situation wasn’t as bad as it might seem, but that was difficult. So we ran down the hill. We kept running until advised and allowed to stop, rested, then continued down the hill until we found someone coming up. We explained to her in English and she translated a little French for us so we understood that two men with black barrettes and uniforms but no guns(?) were crossing up above. Probably Rwandan militia trying to make it home. The Congolese Army was called to scout the area and our photographer/translator friend who wanted to go up the hill waited until they were finished. We were close enough, so felt it best to go home.
That night was filled with lively retellings of the story to our mzungu friends, to Petna, the whole crew, through drinking and dancing and wishing we weren’t so tired and aching and that we didn’t have to leave the next day. I said I’d try to come back. And I will try. I don’t know. We here it all the time in Gulu, but I loved the place. Their was music, amazing food, amazing people, all of these aspects of African life that I loved. I wanted to stay and learn from the solid organization. I can see myself returning on a rotation in 3rd/4th year, or maybe once I start my MPH studies. I’m not sure, it’s hard to promise these things, but I want to.
The whole trip didn’t offer us much rest, the main cause for the vacation, so we took an extra couple of days at Lake Bunyoni on Bunyo-Amagara Island. The place is seriously the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in Uganda. Perfect lakes and islands, wonderful food and people, a rope swing to dive into the clear actually safe waters, canoes to paddle around in, everything that promises a great vacation. It took a couple of days, but we finally felt rested, completely rejuvenated, and hopefully ready.
I had about a month left. Since that time (about three weeks) I’ve encountered numerous struggles as I attempt to prepare to leave. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be ready or if my tasks will ever near completion, but more and more it looks like things will be fine. I trust in this as I try to trust that all the complications with money and school will work out, as I try to trust on every trip I take, leaving that silly book behind and knowing that I’ll meet great people and that things work out. If I can try to make something bigger out of it, that this is how God works, but I don’t feel like I have the distance from the occasions for that sort of philosophizing. I’m not yet good enough to fold it in like I should have learned from Garrison Keillor, but now I’ll spit out my quick experiences and ideas. For now, what I can offer is just trust, and more hope. But it seems to work.
Pictures to come, hopefully.
(NB – While writing this, I attempted to relax outside in the shade and chose a spot next to the Kampala Golf Course, watching the players. The afternoon was pleasant as I enjoyed a sandwich and tried to put my thoughts together. However, after a little while, two men—introduced as Inspector William and Moses—came up to me and said I was frightening the golfers. I had selected a spot just on the edge of the course to stay out of people’s way but apparently, that was too obtrusive. At first, I thought of just apologizing and leaving, but instead I just asked if there was somewhere else I could sit. After a long talk and pleasantries, the two men offered me a bit of shade at the end of one green. This advised spot actually lay considerably further into the course than my first choice, but it seemed nice enough so I sat down and finished my sandwich.)
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Qualifications
It makes sense that a disproportionate amount of my time might be dedicated to work. It is, to address things in the most factual way, the reason why I am in Uganda. For many reasons, mostly to do with concerns of my own personal sanity, I like to suppose that I have this entire existence external to work that makes my life complete in a gestalt sense. And while there are things like traveling, friends, some small numbers of external events like the Gulu marathon or the Champions League finals, there is mostly, in my life, from just after working until around eight for dinner and even after that on occasions, little in my head except for work. I’ve tried a fair job of keeping my ramblings here only distantly related to the doldrums of my office life, omitting whole passages of my life consumed with the struggles for proper furniture, fair contracts, and accurate assessments. I suppose recent events, however, allow for a celebratory overview of my more corporate life.
(Be warned, a good part of what follows may sound like organizational propaganda or possibly even bragging. It just feels that since I seldom discuss what I’ve been up to, this could be a good forum to unleash all of this.)
This last week, the fundraising campaign for Schools for Schools completed. Over five hundred schools in the US (and one in Uganda) where gathered into ten clusters, each supporting one specific Northern Ugandan school. As we have issued in press releases and radio programs all over (and one full-page spread in the Daily Monitor to arrive later this next week) the sum total of their efforts for the last semester comes to 1.3 million US dollars. (This translates, impressively to around 2.1 billion Ugandan schilling.) The fact that this staggering figure has been raised by high school and college students, through bake sales and car washes, rock concerts, sporting events, hundreds of creative events and merchandise sales, raises numerous prideful considerations of the youth and their dedication to a cause.
As impressive as their efforts have been, the focus of my attentions is now drawn to how in the next two months, I have to finalize my efforts to plan the spending of this amount. For the past months, I have been talking with contractors, engineers, development specialists, teachers, headmasters, and anyone I could trying to come up with the best method for distributing the cash. With Sarah, the program coordinator spearheading these efforts, and my staff of Frederick—a indomitable engineer—and Peter Paul—my tireless procurement specialist—we have tried to create an outline. Long discussions with each of the participating schools have created a list of their priorities that we will follow and as many efforts as we can make to involve the schools, the students, the staff, teachers, and everyone in every possible aspect of the process.
Just the other day, we divided the schools into phases and selected the first projects to tackle (pending final approval from the schools, but seeing as it’s their list we are working from, that should not be difficult to obtain.) I’ve discussed the projects with a man who is introducing us to a compressed brick technology that will decrease the costs of all of our projects. In addition to the reduced cost, the compressed bricks remove the use of clay-burnt bricks which require firing and destroy vast acreages of forest in Uganda every year. And everything is going forward. In not much more time, we’ll have plans and bills of quantities and contracts for new classroom blocks, laboratories, libraries, and those are just the major construction projects.
At the same time, we have completed work on our pilot program. The ground floor of the girls’ dormitory at Gulu High School is finished and the people pouring through the site heap praises upon it. The 96 girls slotted to move into the building which is so vastly superior to not only their current housing but also to the huts of the Internally Displaced People’s camps where their family lives are over eager to bring in their small supplies. However, in great news, we are delaying their move in because we are securing most of the funding for the second story (“first floor” if you count by Uganda/British standards) from an external source. In similar news, we are awaiting final reports from another external agency that has accepted a proposal to provide all the costs for drilling the needed boreholes in our schools to provide adequate amounts of clean water to the students.
And that only begins to touch on the grant proposal I’m working on submitting to USAID. There is no way of knowing how they will react to it, but we have given hopeful indications. Combining the environmentally friendly brick making technology with efforts to move back schools that have been displaced by the war, we are hoping to engage a seriously large amount from the US government. The distressing situation occurred where a number of schools (three of the ones we have chosen included) have been forced to move from their original locations to city centers in flight from the violence. One school, Awere Secondary School, is celebrating its silver anniversary next year and has spent around twenty of those twenty-five years removed from its home. We are inching towards the possibility of moving them back. (For those not familiar with some aspects of development theory, this move not only accomplishes that great feat but also provides the drastically needed social service of education without which there is little incentive for the people to move away from the IDP camps and back to their homes.) We are currently working on combining those efforts with deals worked out with the Ugandan business community to further decrease the costs of constructing the buildings without which their will be no schools. I have already secured an offer from Tororo Cement for discounts and that combined with in-kind donations from Sadolin Paints.
Of course, there is more than construction as well. One program for an exchange of ideas between American and Ugandan teachers will begin next month. We are working on developing curriculum and psychosocial training for the staff. Soon we will have compiled the lists of books, supplies, and laboratory equipment that we will be providing. We have been in contact with technology experts who have designed low-power using computers that can do everything required by secondary schools including providing internet. We are conducting power assessments that will evaluate the benefits of solar power versus diesel-powered generators.
I have just started many of these projects. Before I leave, less than half of them will have even begun. As much as I would love to see the raising of the buildings, classes be conducted, students move in, books fill shelves, all of these things, my task was to begin. From the outlines we’ve sent off detailing the requirements for my replacement, that person should be able to do even more. Free from the constraints of starting everything, they should be able to develop the program, create new initiatives. It will be hard to let go of it all, hard to think about it expanding and being realized once I’m gone. But it will be great, assuming competent hands take over, to think about everything unfolding even while I sit in a classroom, to think about how schools moving home, education improving, and in some distinct levels, the quality of hope increasing.
(Be warned, a good part of what follows may sound like organizational propaganda or possibly even bragging. It just feels that since I seldom discuss what I’ve been up to, this could be a good forum to unleash all of this.)
This last week, the fundraising campaign for Schools for Schools completed. Over five hundred schools in the US (and one in Uganda) where gathered into ten clusters, each supporting one specific Northern Ugandan school. As we have issued in press releases and radio programs all over (and one full-page spread in the Daily Monitor to arrive later this next week) the sum total of their efforts for the last semester comes to 1.3 million US dollars. (This translates, impressively to around 2.1 billion Ugandan schilling.) The fact that this staggering figure has been raised by high school and college students, through bake sales and car washes, rock concerts, sporting events, hundreds of creative events and merchandise sales, raises numerous prideful considerations of the youth and their dedication to a cause.
As impressive as their efforts have been, the focus of my attentions is now drawn to how in the next two months, I have to finalize my efforts to plan the spending of this amount. For the past months, I have been talking with contractors, engineers, development specialists, teachers, headmasters, and anyone I could trying to come up with the best method for distributing the cash. With Sarah, the program coordinator spearheading these efforts, and my staff of Frederick—a indomitable engineer—and Peter Paul—my tireless procurement specialist—we have tried to create an outline. Long discussions with each of the participating schools have created a list of their priorities that we will follow and as many efforts as we can make to involve the schools, the students, the staff, teachers, and everyone in every possible aspect of the process.
Just the other day, we divided the schools into phases and selected the first projects to tackle (pending final approval from the schools, but seeing as it’s their list we are working from, that should not be difficult to obtain.) I’ve discussed the projects with a man who is introducing us to a compressed brick technology that will decrease the costs of all of our projects. In addition to the reduced cost, the compressed bricks remove the use of clay-burnt bricks which require firing and destroy vast acreages of forest in Uganda every year. And everything is going forward. In not much more time, we’ll have plans and bills of quantities and contracts for new classroom blocks, laboratories, libraries, and those are just the major construction projects.
At the same time, we have completed work on our pilot program. The ground floor of the girls’ dormitory at Gulu High School is finished and the people pouring through the site heap praises upon it. The 96 girls slotted to move into the building which is so vastly superior to not only their current housing but also to the huts of the Internally Displaced People’s camps where their family lives are over eager to bring in their small supplies. However, in great news, we are delaying their move in because we are securing most of the funding for the second story (“first floor” if you count by Uganda/British standards) from an external source. In similar news, we are awaiting final reports from another external agency that has accepted a proposal to provide all the costs for drilling the needed boreholes in our schools to provide adequate amounts of clean water to the students.
And that only begins to touch on the grant proposal I’m working on submitting to USAID. There is no way of knowing how they will react to it, but we have given hopeful indications. Combining the environmentally friendly brick making technology with efforts to move back schools that have been displaced by the war, we are hoping to engage a seriously large amount from the US government. The distressing situation occurred where a number of schools (three of the ones we have chosen included) have been forced to move from their original locations to city centers in flight from the violence. One school, Awere Secondary School, is celebrating its silver anniversary next year and has spent around twenty of those twenty-five years removed from its home. We are inching towards the possibility of moving them back. (For those not familiar with some aspects of development theory, this move not only accomplishes that great feat but also provides the drastically needed social service of education without which there is little incentive for the people to move away from the IDP camps and back to their homes.) We are currently working on combining those efforts with deals worked out with the Ugandan business community to further decrease the costs of constructing the buildings without which their will be no schools. I have already secured an offer from Tororo Cement for discounts and that combined with in-kind donations from Sadolin Paints.
Of course, there is more than construction as well. One program for an exchange of ideas between American and Ugandan teachers will begin next month. We are working on developing curriculum and psychosocial training for the staff. Soon we will have compiled the lists of books, supplies, and laboratory equipment that we will be providing. We have been in contact with technology experts who have designed low-power using computers that can do everything required by secondary schools including providing internet. We are conducting power assessments that will evaluate the benefits of solar power versus diesel-powered generators.
I have just started many of these projects. Before I leave, less than half of them will have even begun. As much as I would love to see the raising of the buildings, classes be conducted, students move in, books fill shelves, all of these things, my task was to begin. From the outlines we’ve sent off detailing the requirements for my replacement, that person should be able to do even more. Free from the constraints of starting everything, they should be able to develop the program, create new initiatives. It will be hard to let go of it all, hard to think about it expanding and being realized once I’m gone. But it will be great, assuming competent hands take over, to think about everything unfolding even while I sit in a classroom, to think about how schools moving home, education improving, and in some distinct levels, the quality of hope increasing.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The Island of Alone
The largest lake locked by land lies in Africa, or at least so purported one member of our boat. Alone, a French man I met some months ago at Backpackers Hostel in Kampala, quickly mentioned how it wasn’t the largest and how he thought it might be in Russia, or at least that one is the deepest. A Canadian girl then mentioned how it was, instead, Lake Superior between the US and Canada. The whole thing stood as little more than the recognition of the limitations of travelers, the sad and persistent need for the guidebook with all those little facts that attribute significances to locations. It could be enough, to sit in a boat with gentle waves lapping against it, feeling funny because the wet spray in the air lacked the salt that I was accustomed to—all this without the trivia debate, but these are the things we think about. I’m not sure how we learned this, if it was in the guidebooks, in National Geographic, on the Discovery Channel, but we come to places through facts, monuments, sites, and scenes. I am no different, except only if that I just wrote it down.
Alone scoffed for a short while about how Americans (the more holistic “Americans” which actually manage to include Canadians) felt the need to assert their superiority even in the size of their lakes before mentioning again that he was pretty sure it was in Russia. He tried to let the matter drop and return to his usual ambivalence to disputes between countries by explaining the reason why dropped out of school. Apparently in France they teach their students that there are five continents instead of the more English-accepted count of seven. At around fifteen, when Alone realized this discrepancy, he wondered how formal education could differ in such vast a category as that and deduced that the whole system was worthless.
The first time I met Alone, he was staying in a tent at the hostel I was at for a while. One of our first conversations was him remarking on how he hated it when people came to each other as citizens of a country first and people second. Apparently, he had been sitting on the couch in the hostel for a few months having the same conversation almost every night. Where are you from? How long have you been here? What are you doing? Few people seemed to listen to the actual responses and just nodded sometimes as if the other person was intensely interesting. After leaving school, he traveled the word for fifteen years, conducting himself in various ways, most of which I still haven’t heard about, but I know that at least he spent some time raising lions. At the time, he was stuck in Uganda, victim to some indigenous disease that kept him from traveling, but he was simultaneously prevented from seeing a doctor by a rather intense fear. Every day I would ask him if he had been to the clinic so he could leave. Every day he would respond, “Not yet, maybe tomorrow.”
By Easter weekend, I found Alone at the other end of the line when I was trying to see about space at a hostel on an island in the middle of Lake Victoria. After greeting me as we got on the boat, he explained that since the time I met him on the couches, after countless nights of similar conversations, he landed a job managing a once-defunct hostel on one of the Sese Islands. The stretch of land he now held was 40 acres, a considerable portion of the island stretching an entire tip of a peninsula jetting off the whole. On the trip, he pointed to a cliff and drew a line between a small set of rocky points. “That’s the equator. We found out one day when one guest had a GPS. A couple of weeks ago [April 1st], we drew a line in the sand about fifty feet from there and had people taking pictures in front of it.”
His section of the island represented a traveler’s paradise to Alone, who had definitely slept in enough hostels to conceive of one. His conceptions included vast plans for bungalows and a tree house with a bar and a pulley system for drinks and a series of pronouncements he wanted to write out and paste all over the place to explain his dreams. He wanted to write it all out when he was eloquent enough so that when every group came through he could convey himself even if the drinks and smoke, which were plentiful, inhibited his expression. In his dreams, the island was a sanctuary free from travelers’ squabbles between nationalities, missing the conflicts of backpackers and volunteers, and trying to accomplish what he could for the locals. (On one specific paper, Alone wanted to explain how he offered a nice house at the edge of his land to the staff, but they elect to stay in a shack because they don’t want to walk so far. He hated the idea that people would criticize him for racism, “It’s not that far, but they prefer the other. It’s not a black thing, it’s what they want.”)
Sitting on the small cliffs, the loft that allowed a view of both sides of the island, or even resting on the gravely beach, I could imagine it. Sometimes, it was infested somewhat with Alex Garland’s visions of a travelers’ utopia and other times with stories and dreams I’ve heard in the dorms of other hostels, but it was nice to imagine a small piece of it being acted out, that Alone had managed to secure for himself the exact thing that so many people have voiced their wishes for in the bunk beds of hostels around the world, “Man, I would create a small place, not like these resorts, but leave it untouched, people would only come if they had heard about it from friends, cheep beds, good food, nice drinks, yeah, and free weed!” After of couple of attempts I stopped trying to think what I would want from it and just enjoyed listening to Alone tell of the hopes he planned out in his head.
Part of the paradise came from the isolation of the place. Others I had talked with booked reservations for the holiday weekend. We happened to call Alone earlier in the day and slept that night with about ten other people. The second night, the only guests were Kevin and myself. Sometimes it was difficult to determine if Alone was hosting us or we were entertaining him in his isolation, but the breaks provided by solitude on the island were welcomed. (Of course, I also imagined the tedium of it, our young host sitting here on nights without guests singing to himself, “Je suis Alone. Tres, tres Alone.”) We had ample time to sit and imagine all the things we could do with time, lives spent appreciating Beauty and Joy, writing and making jokes all the time, without hours dedicated to reports and emails. I also planned the partial incorporation of these dreams; time dedicated to appreciation and reflection, set aside from work, but the fruition of those thoughts remains to be tested.
We were not completely isolated. As we walked through small paths on the island we passed fishermen and farmers that used these dirt throughways every day, I imagined the complexity of the island like a California roadmap, with branches and diversions that we tried to follow when the energy took us. It felt odd walking past the locals as they farmed and fished, struggled for a living, while we sought some sort of sanctuary. But this is the discussion I’ve had with James many times. What if the land next to the Internally Displaced Camps is beautiful? How can you go there and try to appreciate it? How can you strive for peaceful Joy while neighboring suffering? It must look odd to see pleasure-seekers strolling through your workplace.
The fish and farming offered by the island seemed bountiful enough, judging at least by the catches pulled from the waters in front of our small place. The island teemed with life, even wild hippos came by the shores and one crawled up the shore late at night despite the barking of dogs. Vast vegetation filled every inch of the island, which must have provided food and shelter to largest collection of insects I’ve ever seen. Every night we constantly swiped our arms and backs, killing four or five mosquitoes with every pass, putting that brave little tailor to shame. Despite the uncountable bites I suffered, the bugs offered another result—they fed the birds. The island not only sheltered us temporarily but also provided a temporary getaway for a ridiculous array of migratory and resident birds. Every tree filled to capacity with feathers and beaks with obvious hierarchies as eagles claimed the higher perches, several other species claimed the intermediate and kingfishers spread across the grass when they weren’t floating above and diving into the waters. The birds fought and, I would assume, mated with a tenacity that would have easily proved to be sheer delight for even moderate ornithologists. I almost felt guilty at the sheer childish joy that a birdwatcher would feel landing on the island, possibly an old man at the end of a life’s ambition, bearing dark green colors, high powered binoculars, and a notebook where he would make numerous checks and scribbles that day to the amazement and jealousy of his friends back home. And I took the island at a stroll, watching them dart in the air and hide in the bushes, swatting away their abundant food as it buzzed in my ears just as I brushed aside the deep foliage that barred my path. In the less dense bushes, I could watch as hundreds of frogs burst from the trail before my footsteps, spreading out like a living flower even as the dragonflies and other bugs floated beside me, following and accompanying the journey.
The island offered a distinctly pleasant place to pass Easter. It vastly differed from previous years spent with families gathered around tables. Even last year, I took up with an adopted family and was welcomed into a bounty of lamb and love. We had excellent food (Alone is French, after all) and solitude to match wherever our thoughts led. The beauty made it easy to celebrate the gifts of the holiday, the offering of hope amidst struggles—exactly what we were trying to seek in the vacation.
Never was it easier to appreciate the wonder and magnificence of God, with His intense juxtaposition of despair and hope, especially considering the historical context of the weekend, then into the beginning of Saturday morning as a storm rolled in. The day began, auspiciously enough, with Alone hoping that the sun would be out strong enough to lie on the beach but that his saying that would probably lead to a storm. We saw the clouds gathering over Entebbe just around breakfast, piling up heavy and dark while the sky above us still retained some aspect of blue. Soon in encroached, the sky growing and heaving and the dark storm twisting around and rolling towards us. As it approached, the clouds seemed inpatient with their burden the moisture inside them plummeting so quickly that they fell still as a cloud, a white whispering of rain that hung like a beard at the base of the darkness. The storm blew in ferociously casting water and wind over everything for an hour before passing over. The other guests left just after the storm, leaving the rest of the day to us as the sky cleared, the sun shown, and the heat grew enough to call for the coolness of the lake and a quick swim followed by lying about on the deck and thoroughly relaxing.
By the end of the weekend, we tried to tell ourselves we were rested, ready for work again, once more into the fray dear friends. We’ll see how prophetic that is, but every break, every chance to see something of this beautiful country reminds me of something deeper than the simple good I’m trying to do here. There was something selfish and universal that drew me to Africa in the first place, before I noticed the need and before I had some small idea that I might help. That’s something to hold onto as well.
***
Before I could return to Gulu, I had to negotiate Kampala. This can challenge me enough with the traffic, the smog, and the expenses, but as we were leaving this time a new obstacle was placed before us—riots. It seems the government here is set on giving away a significant portion of the remaining rain forests, Mabira Forest, here to a sugar company. Another unknowable natural resource will be sacrificed in the name of Gross Domestic Product. The inspiring portion of this story is that the entire country seems to be rising up in protests, in editorials, in conversations, and even from the pulpit on Easter Sunday. The disheartening part is that this protest is having no effect on policy. This last weekend a number of people staged a protest and delivered a petition to parliament, only to see their peaceful display dissolve into chaos as police shot tear gas and the wild mob attacked Indians because an Indian corporation owns the sugar company. Three Indians were killed in the chaos and the point of the demonstration was lost by the time the news hit reels that night, blood took the place of ecology easily enough. Something has to be done but it’s hard to see what. Mostly it comes down to a vast majority of the world being uninformed about the actions of governments with no accountability. The administration seems content to plow ahead hoping the electorate will forget within the next four years before elections—not a difficult supposition considering the previous actions that have gone ignored. Boycotts and protests seem ineffective and if the international community ignores millions of people starving in camps than it seems difficult to imagine them rallying behind trees. There’s hope somewhere, and that should be a more appropriate focus for especially this weekend, the embodiment of hope in my religion, where hope left us and then returned for good. But it’s difficult to find at times.
Alone scoffed for a short while about how Americans (the more holistic “Americans” which actually manage to include Canadians) felt the need to assert their superiority even in the size of their lakes before mentioning again that he was pretty sure it was in Russia. He tried to let the matter drop and return to his usual ambivalence to disputes between countries by explaining the reason why dropped out of school. Apparently in France they teach their students that there are five continents instead of the more English-accepted count of seven. At around fifteen, when Alone realized this discrepancy, he wondered how formal education could differ in such vast a category as that and deduced that the whole system was worthless.
The first time I met Alone, he was staying in a tent at the hostel I was at for a while. One of our first conversations was him remarking on how he hated it when people came to each other as citizens of a country first and people second. Apparently, he had been sitting on the couch in the hostel for a few months having the same conversation almost every night. Where are you from? How long have you been here? What are you doing? Few people seemed to listen to the actual responses and just nodded sometimes as if the other person was intensely interesting. After leaving school, he traveled the word for fifteen years, conducting himself in various ways, most of which I still haven’t heard about, but I know that at least he spent some time raising lions. At the time, he was stuck in Uganda, victim to some indigenous disease that kept him from traveling, but he was simultaneously prevented from seeing a doctor by a rather intense fear. Every day I would ask him if he had been to the clinic so he could leave. Every day he would respond, “Not yet, maybe tomorrow.”
By Easter weekend, I found Alone at the other end of the line when I was trying to see about space at a hostel on an island in the middle of Lake Victoria. After greeting me as we got on the boat, he explained that since the time I met him on the couches, after countless nights of similar conversations, he landed a job managing a once-defunct hostel on one of the Sese Islands. The stretch of land he now held was 40 acres, a considerable portion of the island stretching an entire tip of a peninsula jetting off the whole. On the trip, he pointed to a cliff and drew a line between a small set of rocky points. “That’s the equator. We found out one day when one guest had a GPS. A couple of weeks ago [April 1st], we drew a line in the sand about fifty feet from there and had people taking pictures in front of it.”
His section of the island represented a traveler’s paradise to Alone, who had definitely slept in enough hostels to conceive of one. His conceptions included vast plans for bungalows and a tree house with a bar and a pulley system for drinks and a series of pronouncements he wanted to write out and paste all over the place to explain his dreams. He wanted to write it all out when he was eloquent enough so that when every group came through he could convey himself even if the drinks and smoke, which were plentiful, inhibited his expression. In his dreams, the island was a sanctuary free from travelers’ squabbles between nationalities, missing the conflicts of backpackers and volunteers, and trying to accomplish what he could for the locals. (On one specific paper, Alone wanted to explain how he offered a nice house at the edge of his land to the staff, but they elect to stay in a shack because they don’t want to walk so far. He hated the idea that people would criticize him for racism, “It’s not that far, but they prefer the other. It’s not a black thing, it’s what they want.”)
Sitting on the small cliffs, the loft that allowed a view of both sides of the island, or even resting on the gravely beach, I could imagine it. Sometimes, it was infested somewhat with Alex Garland’s visions of a travelers’ utopia and other times with stories and dreams I’ve heard in the dorms of other hostels, but it was nice to imagine a small piece of it being acted out, that Alone had managed to secure for himself the exact thing that so many people have voiced their wishes for in the bunk beds of hostels around the world, “Man, I would create a small place, not like these resorts, but leave it untouched, people would only come if they had heard about it from friends, cheep beds, good food, nice drinks, yeah, and free weed!” After of couple of attempts I stopped trying to think what I would want from it and just enjoyed listening to Alone tell of the hopes he planned out in his head.
Part of the paradise came from the isolation of the place. Others I had talked with booked reservations for the holiday weekend. We happened to call Alone earlier in the day and slept that night with about ten other people. The second night, the only guests were Kevin and myself. Sometimes it was difficult to determine if Alone was hosting us or we were entertaining him in his isolation, but the breaks provided by solitude on the island were welcomed. (Of course, I also imagined the tedium of it, our young host sitting here on nights without guests singing to himself, “Je suis Alone. Tres, tres Alone.”) We had ample time to sit and imagine all the things we could do with time, lives spent appreciating Beauty and Joy, writing and making jokes all the time, without hours dedicated to reports and emails. I also planned the partial incorporation of these dreams; time dedicated to appreciation and reflection, set aside from work, but the fruition of those thoughts remains to be tested.
We were not completely isolated. As we walked through small paths on the island we passed fishermen and farmers that used these dirt throughways every day, I imagined the complexity of the island like a California roadmap, with branches and diversions that we tried to follow when the energy took us. It felt odd walking past the locals as they farmed and fished, struggled for a living, while we sought some sort of sanctuary. But this is the discussion I’ve had with James many times. What if the land next to the Internally Displaced Camps is beautiful? How can you go there and try to appreciate it? How can you strive for peaceful Joy while neighboring suffering? It must look odd to see pleasure-seekers strolling through your workplace.
The fish and farming offered by the island seemed bountiful enough, judging at least by the catches pulled from the waters in front of our small place. The island teemed with life, even wild hippos came by the shores and one crawled up the shore late at night despite the barking of dogs. Vast vegetation filled every inch of the island, which must have provided food and shelter to largest collection of insects I’ve ever seen. Every night we constantly swiped our arms and backs, killing four or five mosquitoes with every pass, putting that brave little tailor to shame. Despite the uncountable bites I suffered, the bugs offered another result—they fed the birds. The island not only sheltered us temporarily but also provided a temporary getaway for a ridiculous array of migratory and resident birds. Every tree filled to capacity with feathers and beaks with obvious hierarchies as eagles claimed the higher perches, several other species claimed the intermediate and kingfishers spread across the grass when they weren’t floating above and diving into the waters. The birds fought and, I would assume, mated with a tenacity that would have easily proved to be sheer delight for even moderate ornithologists. I almost felt guilty at the sheer childish joy that a birdwatcher would feel landing on the island, possibly an old man at the end of a life’s ambition, bearing dark green colors, high powered binoculars, and a notebook where he would make numerous checks and scribbles that day to the amazement and jealousy of his friends back home. And I took the island at a stroll, watching them dart in the air and hide in the bushes, swatting away their abundant food as it buzzed in my ears just as I brushed aside the deep foliage that barred my path. In the less dense bushes, I could watch as hundreds of frogs burst from the trail before my footsteps, spreading out like a living flower even as the dragonflies and other bugs floated beside me, following and accompanying the journey.
The island offered a distinctly pleasant place to pass Easter. It vastly differed from previous years spent with families gathered around tables. Even last year, I took up with an adopted family and was welcomed into a bounty of lamb and love. We had excellent food (Alone is French, after all) and solitude to match wherever our thoughts led. The beauty made it easy to celebrate the gifts of the holiday, the offering of hope amidst struggles—exactly what we were trying to seek in the vacation.
Never was it easier to appreciate the wonder and magnificence of God, with His intense juxtaposition of despair and hope, especially considering the historical context of the weekend, then into the beginning of Saturday morning as a storm rolled in. The day began, auspiciously enough, with Alone hoping that the sun would be out strong enough to lie on the beach but that his saying that would probably lead to a storm. We saw the clouds gathering over Entebbe just around breakfast, piling up heavy and dark while the sky above us still retained some aspect of blue. Soon in encroached, the sky growing and heaving and the dark storm twisting around and rolling towards us. As it approached, the clouds seemed inpatient with their burden the moisture inside them plummeting so quickly that they fell still as a cloud, a white whispering of rain that hung like a beard at the base of the darkness. The storm blew in ferociously casting water and wind over everything for an hour before passing over. The other guests left just after the storm, leaving the rest of the day to us as the sky cleared, the sun shown, and the heat grew enough to call for the coolness of the lake and a quick swim followed by lying about on the deck and thoroughly relaxing.
By the end of the weekend, we tried to tell ourselves we were rested, ready for work again, once more into the fray dear friends. We’ll see how prophetic that is, but every break, every chance to see something of this beautiful country reminds me of something deeper than the simple good I’m trying to do here. There was something selfish and universal that drew me to Africa in the first place, before I noticed the need and before I had some small idea that I might help. That’s something to hold onto as well.
***
Before I could return to Gulu, I had to negotiate Kampala. This can challenge me enough with the traffic, the smog, and the expenses, but as we were leaving this time a new obstacle was placed before us—riots. It seems the government here is set on giving away a significant portion of the remaining rain forests, Mabira Forest, here to a sugar company. Another unknowable natural resource will be sacrificed in the name of Gross Domestic Product. The inspiring portion of this story is that the entire country seems to be rising up in protests, in editorials, in conversations, and even from the pulpit on Easter Sunday. The disheartening part is that this protest is having no effect on policy. This last weekend a number of people staged a protest and delivered a petition to parliament, only to see their peaceful display dissolve into chaos as police shot tear gas and the wild mob attacked Indians because an Indian corporation owns the sugar company. Three Indians were killed in the chaos and the point of the demonstration was lost by the time the news hit reels that night, blood took the place of ecology easily enough. Something has to be done but it’s hard to see what. Mostly it comes down to a vast majority of the world being uninformed about the actions of governments with no accountability. The administration seems content to plow ahead hoping the electorate will forget within the next four years before elections—not a difficult supposition considering the previous actions that have gone ignored. Boycotts and protests seem ineffective and if the international community ignores millions of people starving in camps than it seems difficult to imagine them rallying behind trees. There’s hope somewhere, and that should be a more appropriate focus for especially this weekend, the embodiment of hope in my religion, where hope left us and then returned for good. But it’s difficult to find at times.
Monday, April 09, 2007
All Work and No Play
In addition to the late blog I'm just now posting (see "A Spot of Drought" below) I thought I'd throw on this lighter note as well.
Taking advantage of the amazing technology brought to you by none other than Steve Jobs himself--or more accurately, a sales associate located several thousand rungs on the corporate ladder below Herr Jobs, I thought I would bust out my new MacBook and share some of the pictures I've gathered with people. If you're looking for stunning physical beauty and all of the wonder that Africa can offer, than I can suggest a couple of other webpages because you'll find nothing like it here. Instead, just a couple of shots of me and my friends goofing off, and then one video preview of the short film we're making. So, prepare yourselves for Rent To Own IV and keep hopes in store for actually spiritually uplifting material to come at some foreign date...
I'm trying to upload the video to here, but if that fails, just check out the youtube site, and the showering photo should be in my album. Have fun and Happy Easter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0jAgQGED5c
Taking advantage of the amazing technology brought to you by none other than Steve Jobs himself--or more accurately, a sales associate located several thousand rungs on the corporate ladder below Herr Jobs, I thought I would bust out my new MacBook and share some of the pictures I've gathered with people. If you're looking for stunning physical beauty and all of the wonder that Africa can offer, than I can suggest a couple of other webpages because you'll find nothing like it here. Instead, just a couple of shots of me and my friends goofing off, and then one video preview of the short film we're making. So, prepare yourselves for Rent To Own IV and keep hopes in store for actually spiritually uplifting material to come at some foreign date...
I'm trying to upload the video to here, but if that fails, just check out the youtube site, and the showering photo should be in my album. Have fun and Happy Easter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0jAgQGED5c
A Spot of Drought
(originally written April 1st, 2007 - Gulu, Uganda)
One thing is to break my mind out of the regular system of spring, summer, winter, and fall. One thing out of many, but something that should be easier than the others. Then to replace those things with rainy, dry, rainy, and dry. We're just coming up on another transition here. The relatively wide and flat skies of the dry season that leave the country exposed to the drastic sun and contribute to the vast build up of dust everywhere is being replaced. The dust that gathered on shelves, windows, clothes, in huge dangerous rivers on the sides of the roads where I feared to take my motorcycle in case I lost control in the almost zero traction will still be there, but it will be diminished and will occasionally turn into flowing rivers than sitting pools of mud without warning. The skies are changing now. They're going back to those impossible canvases that greeted and amazed me when I first arrived where the clouds seemed to bend so low and yet reach up stretching to God in layers unimaginable outside of Renaissance paintings or maybe those educational sketches that describe every type of nimbus in one panorama of instruction. The return of that awesome sky offers a distinct pleasure where any time I'm caught up with some form of mendacity in my work, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of something completely beyond me by simply looking up. The world offers an easy reward and distraction.
This reward didn't come easily. Not that I hated the dry season. I did constantly wonder what possessed the insane minds of several guide book writers who warned against travel in any period except the months I lived through and called dry. They seemed to infer that scorching heat, dust that choked like pneumonia and seemed to carry an infectious allergen on every gust of wind, and endless painting of every surface with a dull red was preferable to occasional vast down-pouring that never seemed to last more than a half an hour and refreshed as much as any quick shower. Sure, I wasn't a huge fan of wading through pools and mud to get to work, but there is something remarkable about the storms rushing in and leaving with equal ferocity. I suppose both seasons have their benefits, but I'm glad to see water again.
Maybe it is something about growing up in the desert. I've always been entranced by water. Driving over the smallest river, I feel I have to watch it pass out the window, letting my eyes drink. When I lived by the sea, mostly I couldn't fathom the entirety of the ocean, and could never claim a native's attachment and kinship with it all, but who couldn't love watching it float there in its immensity or watching it consume the sun in a fiery spectacle. I like to think in more poetic moments that the prolonged drought (although don't believe me too much—the dry season over here just means it rains less, we still caught the refreshment of a few wettings on occasion, and this thought carries on to what I had started…) served as part of the reason for simultaneous drought of communication. Sure, there were vastly busy times as I expanded my work into two full time positions, both of which predominately included a need for abilities at bargaining and currency evaluation that I don't naturally posses. The times were also filled with emotional stress of decisions to be made at home, evaluations of life, and the typical Big Questions. And it all was combined in a time frame that precluded much escape for silent evaluation, prayer, or even just contemplation of Life, Beauty, and Joy. But it's more cohesive to join them all into this idea of the dryness, of life perpetuating its surroundings, something similar to globally natural scale of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. And aren't those ideas, even of only partially true, more beautiful if you just accept them as such?
And so, for stories:
Along with a considerable drought that ate up our skies, we also suffered through a local energy crises that darkened our nights, or at least the bulbs and such, and also prevented the national water pumps from supplying our tanks. On one occasion, after about a week of finding methods of hygiene that didn't involve showers and then one ill-advised game of ultimate that left a group of us sweaty and in need of some cleaning, we were blessed with a brief drizzle. Inspired to take full advantage, I followed James and Kevin's lead and stood as those two, Adam, Jesse, and myself enjoyed a slightly more natural shower catching the runoff from the roof. We could toss the whole adventure into cleanliness or at least group bonding, but whatever the explanations, it did offer some interesting pictures that somehow found there way to all the San Diego office desktop backgrounds.
Seeking as much reprieve as possible, we thought that a nice break from the drought and work up North would be a large group retreat to Jinja. This works in part because a place in Jinja offered some teambuilding techniques similar to what I worked with at Outback Adventures at UCSD. Also comes in handy as we all seemed a little dry of sorts and Jinja offered to quench us with the source of the Nile River. Pouring out of Lake Victoria in inspiring amounts, and rushing below cliffs on which perched the dorms and cabins we relaxed in, the River gave us some extra relief and promised to fulfill any desires for water as it tried its best to drown us. After a series of meetings and initiatives, a few of us climbed into rafts and set off down the rapids some have called Grade Five and others just called big enough. For a half day trip, we managed to dump four times, and out guide was sufficiently proud of making us swim down a considerable portion of the river as he laughed down on us from the raft. It was a good time flying through the air, and coupled with moments of just watching the waters fly past or a few of my friends fall from considerable heights, dunking their heads into the water before bungee cords sprung them back up provided for enough additional entertainment. That and we found a Mexican restaurant, so all in all, not a bad time.
Apparently I was quite sated, however, as a few weeks afterward, I took advantage of Kevin's quick trip with a visiting friend and rushed off to Sipi Falls. I felt relieved at finally being able to see a bit of this country besides just the journey between Gulu and Kampala, a few jaunts to Pader, and the one trip to Tanzania. There's something about nature, especially—as I've noted to friends in the precious few personal emails I've sent out—something about looking down at water from a great height. One of the sad things missing from Gulu is honest terrain. It must have been something in our trips with my father, but despite basically growing up in a cityscape (even if it was placed in valley surrounded on all sides) I feel like I've grown more into the temperament of the mountains. I don't want to claim to much wild-man mountain wilderness or anything of the sort, but when I can scramble to the top of something and look down, there is something refreshing about that perspective that can set life in order. I have a friend who I feel gathers a similar emotion from the sea, and I'm sure people hold these things dear. Missing the mountains, I felt the return at the foothills of Mount Elgon and as I watched the waters cascade off one cliff and then another. Of course, this was all accentuated when we tied in and dropped a hundred meters, repelling ten feet from the crashing water to the base, but somehow it was the view from the top that stayed with me.
There are other stories, about people and accomplishments, and hopefully someday I will gather together enough of myself to tell them. Sometime after it all or after a good break, I can even launch into some descriptions of the work here, how it has offered challenges and fulfillment and struggles in so many different ways. Until then, I'm sorry that my correspondence drought has been so severe. I drastically love hearing from everyone and it's hard to not return love in kind. But there can sometimes be something exhausting about staring at a blank screen, like staring at a dry field. But, well, the rain is coming. And after hacking severely at the dry field beside our house for hours, I'm severely glad to feel the rain loosen and nourish the soil. Some foretelling of pride springs up when I think that soon, after our efforts, food might grow there. It was a lot of sweat that broke the ground when it was hard and dry, and blisters that rose, and dirt that caked, and all of these things. Not that the hard work is over, but this softer earth is exciting in its fertility and its newness.
As a side note, I'm sorry that I don't have many pictures to offer. My new computer should be coming soon and then I will try to gather photos from all of my friends to share. I'll try to put up some photos soon, at least the one of all of us getting clean.
One thing is to break my mind out of the regular system of spring, summer, winter, and fall. One thing out of many, but something that should be easier than the others. Then to replace those things with rainy, dry, rainy, and dry. We're just coming up on another transition here. The relatively wide and flat skies of the dry season that leave the country exposed to the drastic sun and contribute to the vast build up of dust everywhere is being replaced. The dust that gathered on shelves, windows, clothes, in huge dangerous rivers on the sides of the roads where I feared to take my motorcycle in case I lost control in the almost zero traction will still be there, but it will be diminished and will occasionally turn into flowing rivers than sitting pools of mud without warning. The skies are changing now. They're going back to those impossible canvases that greeted and amazed me when I first arrived where the clouds seemed to bend so low and yet reach up stretching to God in layers unimaginable outside of Renaissance paintings or maybe those educational sketches that describe every type of nimbus in one panorama of instruction. The return of that awesome sky offers a distinct pleasure where any time I'm caught up with some form of mendacity in my work, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of something completely beyond me by simply looking up. The world offers an easy reward and distraction.
This reward didn't come easily. Not that I hated the dry season. I did constantly wonder what possessed the insane minds of several guide book writers who warned against travel in any period except the months I lived through and called dry. They seemed to infer that scorching heat, dust that choked like pneumonia and seemed to carry an infectious allergen on every gust of wind, and endless painting of every surface with a dull red was preferable to occasional vast down-pouring that never seemed to last more than a half an hour and refreshed as much as any quick shower. Sure, I wasn't a huge fan of wading through pools and mud to get to work, but there is something remarkable about the storms rushing in and leaving with equal ferocity. I suppose both seasons have their benefits, but I'm glad to see water again.
Maybe it is something about growing up in the desert. I've always been entranced by water. Driving over the smallest river, I feel I have to watch it pass out the window, letting my eyes drink. When I lived by the sea, mostly I couldn't fathom the entirety of the ocean, and could never claim a native's attachment and kinship with it all, but who couldn't love watching it float there in its immensity or watching it consume the sun in a fiery spectacle. I like to think in more poetic moments that the prolonged drought (although don't believe me too much—the dry season over here just means it rains less, we still caught the refreshment of a few wettings on occasion, and this thought carries on to what I had started…) served as part of the reason for simultaneous drought of communication. Sure, there were vastly busy times as I expanded my work into two full time positions, both of which predominately included a need for abilities at bargaining and currency evaluation that I don't naturally posses. The times were also filled with emotional stress of decisions to be made at home, evaluations of life, and the typical Big Questions. And it all was combined in a time frame that precluded much escape for silent evaluation, prayer, or even just contemplation of Life, Beauty, and Joy. But it's more cohesive to join them all into this idea of the dryness, of life perpetuating its surroundings, something similar to globally natural scale of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. And aren't those ideas, even of only partially true, more beautiful if you just accept them as such?
And so, for stories:
Along with a considerable drought that ate up our skies, we also suffered through a local energy crises that darkened our nights, or at least the bulbs and such, and also prevented the national water pumps from supplying our tanks. On one occasion, after about a week of finding methods of hygiene that didn't involve showers and then one ill-advised game of ultimate that left a group of us sweaty and in need of some cleaning, we were blessed with a brief drizzle. Inspired to take full advantage, I followed James and Kevin's lead and stood as those two, Adam, Jesse, and myself enjoyed a slightly more natural shower catching the runoff from the roof. We could toss the whole adventure into cleanliness or at least group bonding, but whatever the explanations, it did offer some interesting pictures that somehow found there way to all the San Diego office desktop backgrounds.
Seeking as much reprieve as possible, we thought that a nice break from the drought and work up North would be a large group retreat to Jinja. This works in part because a place in Jinja offered some teambuilding techniques similar to what I worked with at Outback Adventures at UCSD. Also comes in handy as we all seemed a little dry of sorts and Jinja offered to quench us with the source of the Nile River. Pouring out of Lake Victoria in inspiring amounts, and rushing below cliffs on which perched the dorms and cabins we relaxed in, the River gave us some extra relief and promised to fulfill any desires for water as it tried its best to drown us. After a series of meetings and initiatives, a few of us climbed into rafts and set off down the rapids some have called Grade Five and others just called big enough. For a half day trip, we managed to dump four times, and out guide was sufficiently proud of making us swim down a considerable portion of the river as he laughed down on us from the raft. It was a good time flying through the air, and coupled with moments of just watching the waters fly past or a few of my friends fall from considerable heights, dunking their heads into the water before bungee cords sprung them back up provided for enough additional entertainment. That and we found a Mexican restaurant, so all in all, not a bad time.
Apparently I was quite sated, however, as a few weeks afterward, I took advantage of Kevin's quick trip with a visiting friend and rushed off to Sipi Falls. I felt relieved at finally being able to see a bit of this country besides just the journey between Gulu and Kampala, a few jaunts to Pader, and the one trip to Tanzania. There's something about nature, especially—as I've noted to friends in the precious few personal emails I've sent out—something about looking down at water from a great height. One of the sad things missing from Gulu is honest terrain. It must have been something in our trips with my father, but despite basically growing up in a cityscape (even if it was placed in valley surrounded on all sides) I feel like I've grown more into the temperament of the mountains. I don't want to claim to much wild-man mountain wilderness or anything of the sort, but when I can scramble to the top of something and look down, there is something refreshing about that perspective that can set life in order. I have a friend who I feel gathers a similar emotion from the sea, and I'm sure people hold these things dear. Missing the mountains, I felt the return at the foothills of Mount Elgon and as I watched the waters cascade off one cliff and then another. Of course, this was all accentuated when we tied in and dropped a hundred meters, repelling ten feet from the crashing water to the base, but somehow it was the view from the top that stayed with me.
There are other stories, about people and accomplishments, and hopefully someday I will gather together enough of myself to tell them. Sometime after it all or after a good break, I can even launch into some descriptions of the work here, how it has offered challenges and fulfillment and struggles in so many different ways. Until then, I'm sorry that my correspondence drought has been so severe. I drastically love hearing from everyone and it's hard to not return love in kind. But there can sometimes be something exhausting about staring at a blank screen, like staring at a dry field. But, well, the rain is coming. And after hacking severely at the dry field beside our house for hours, I'm severely glad to feel the rain loosen and nourish the soil. Some foretelling of pride springs up when I think that soon, after our efforts, food might grow there. It was a lot of sweat that broke the ground when it was hard and dry, and blisters that rose, and dirt that caked, and all of these things. Not that the hard work is over, but this softer earth is exciting in its fertility and its newness.
As a side note, I'm sorry that I don't have many pictures to offer. My new computer should be coming soon and then I will try to gather photos from all of my friends to share. I'll try to put up some photos soon, at least the one of all of us getting clean.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Happy Holliday
The trip mostly began and almost ended with me sitting in a bus wondering as my knees pushed into the seat in front of how I could sleep and how I managed to be sick at exactly this moment. But don’t let that paint anywhere near a picture that the journey wasn’t amazing beyond belief. The goodness of it all started when I learned I didn’t actually have malaria, just some random infection that we treated with medicine and I hoped would wear off as the bus tore down the road. Somewhere into the 36 hour trip from
Somewhere in the chaos of arriving in Dar at two in the morning and scrambling around for some local money so we could buy anything (somehow Uganda had tricked me out of the idea of traveling with mainly American money, a useful trick traveling anywhere except the country I live in) I left the Lonely Planet in the cab. So, we didn’t really have a plan, except that we wanted to get to
At some point in time there will be pictures attached to this so that everyone can understand the brilliance of this place. Stowntown in
The next day (Christmas Day) we tried to finish organizing and begin the vacation proper. On some points, we were not well informed, and after cruising across the island and pulling up on the east coast just as the sun went down behind us, we found all the guest houses were full, and most of them were so expensive we couldn’t afford them anyway. Somehow, we stumbled, as we often did throughout the trip, on some helpful friends who directed us towards a restaurant. We met our new friend, Aziz, there whose favorite pastime was helping tourists. He set us up in what I’m pretty sure was his room, led us to a Christmas feast filled with fresh caught marlin, vast quantities of fruit and sides and everything delicious while traditional dancers performed in front us and Aziz managed the whole thing for us for half price and basically we ate our full and danced a little bit, then retired for a quick night swim in the ridiculous water, off for “one-one” at a nice local spot with very few mzungus, and then to bed.
Morning showed us how dramatically beautiful the beach could be, with the finest white sand you could ever imagine coating your feet in beautiful powder on the beach and providing squishy, almost gooey cushioning as we walked out into the water, where you could swim at high tide, or walk out almost a mile with water up to barely your knees past seaweed farms and moored boats and other things stretching out to the horizon at low tide. It was amazing to stand several hundred feet off the shore and look back and around, out to the waves crashing on reef in the distance and back to the beach and to the water to either side occasionally dotted with people standing almost out of the water, the bright colors of the local clothing making almost miraculous imaged of women walking on water in the low tide. One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and all of that with warm sun and cool breezes. Just a short distance down the beach from Paje, we found a smaller town of Jambiani almost neglected by the crowds and a great guest house right on the ocean where put up for a while with another new friend, Mumba, who seemed to only know Kevin’s name, but at least he sang it out with the most enthusiasm each time he came close to us.
We spent a couple of days on the beach before heading back to Stonetown for a boat ride, snorkeling through the coral reef with the brilliantly colored fish, up to the island with a hundred giant turtles, more scenic beaches, history spreading everywhere, and beauty beyond understanding. Sadly, thought we had to leave, although it was almost too easy to console ourselves with the idea that we were heading to Arusha. Once more past Kilimanjaro, and the bus ride made me think of a couple of months from now when I will try to organize a force of my friends to attempt the summit.
We were picked up in Arusha by Halidi, our guide, found a great place to sleep and in the mourning set off for Ngorongoro Crater our chef, Booga. Through broken communication, we tried to learn as much as we could about the animals, but more often than not just stood in awe. The combination of the joy of standing with your body perched outside of a Land Rover much like you must have always wanted to do as a child and then coming across patches of wildebeest, flamingoes, water buffalo, gazelles, elephant, lions, hippos, and all sorts of birds and other creatures while you are nestled inside a huge crater that once blew forth from a volcano but now filled with stretches of green and salt water lakes offered just about everything we could ask for in a safari. Once we moved on the Serengeti, I sometimes allowed myself to be lulled into the regularity of everything. Of course, there are hundreds of zebras and wildebeest migrating just to my left and right, of course there are patches of giraffe, and once barely a leopard’s head poking out from the tall grass. I’ve seen this all before in zoos, just never to this extent, all concentrated and free. But that human tendancy, to minimize and rationalize, comes crushing down in some moments, like when we rounded the corner and found a small pride of lions feasting upon the fresh kill of a hippo. This is certainly something the San Diego Zoological Society would not coordinate or even condone. This is reality happening just outside the brief confines of the vehicle, and I traveled through it only, bringing my society and preconceptions with me, not this other way around which I am used to. We are visitors in life and the world, here to observe and hopefully learn a little, but more so just to see and experience joy, to taste and see that God has created something good and shows us that He is somehow Good Himself, better than we could hope.
New Years came in a campsite on the savannah. For some reason, the different camps couldn’t break through social barriers to come together until just before midnight, when, thankfully, the discussion of the correct time brought everyone together. (With some small pride, I can say that it was our party that convinced people to bring their lanterns near ours for at least the simulation of a campfire in the center of our small gathering.) Most people had come somewhat equipped with beer and wine, so we all gathered together, guides and participants, raising bottles, cans, and glasses together and toasting the celebration of newness and life in the middle of one of the prime examples of both that we could hope to find on the planet. Then we went to bed, because everyone wanted to get up early with the sun and with the animals around us to catch them as they caught their breakfast and as the world woke to stretch and show us what it could of how it has lived since the beginning.
Sadly though, every adventure, even if it is just a small subset of a larger adventure seems to come to an end, and while we had probably spent too much money and nowhere near enough time in these wonderful places, we had to set home. Of course, this is
It still seems odd to call
Snapshots
(written December 21st, 2006 in Kampala, Uganda)
Even as I write this, I can't think of the last time I sat down to communicate something that wasn't directly involved with work. Maybe it hasn't been that long. A month or so, something along those lines and I shouldn't worry so much. The absence of my thoughts and recollections for the recent time doesn't necessarily mean that people where questioning the worth of the internet or anything—if it can't bring updates from Uganda, then what good is it. But still, as I haven't written hardly one personal letter in a considerable amount of time, I do feel slightly like I'm abandoning certain friends, people who I wish knew what was going on in my life, if just because when I can't see them and talk to them, then at least if they share second hand in these adventures then it's in some small way like still sharing life with them. After this, I have the daunting task of sending out the entire backlog of emails, but for now, I will attempt this concise abbreviation of the past month. As I can't accurately describe everything, and also as a tribute to the fact that I am finally admitting that my camera is gone, I've decided to try to represent the month in a series of images and brief descriptions. Hope it's fun.
Even as I write this, I can't think of the last time I sat down to communicate something that wasn't directly involved with work. Maybe it hasn't been that long. A month or so, something along those lines and I shouldn't worry so much. The absence of my thoughts and recollections for the recent time doesn't necessarily mean that people where questioning the worth of the internet or anything—if it can't bring updates from Uganda, then what good is it. But still, as I haven't written hardly one personal letter in a considerable amount of time, I do feel slightly like I'm abandoning certain friends, people who I wish knew what was going on in my life, if just because when I can't see them and talk to them, then at least if they share second hand in these adventures then it's in some small way like still sharing life with them. After this, I have the daunting task of sending out the entire backlog of emails, but for now, I will attempt this concise abbreviation of the past month. As I can't accurately describe everything, and also as a tribute to the fact that I am finally admitting that my camera is gone, I've decided to try to represent the month in a series of images and brief descriptions. Hope it's fun.
The First
Thanksgiving in Gulu consisted of a farm-reared turkey given to us by our friend Tony, cranberry sauce and stuffing smuggled in from the States, plenty of sweet potatoes and whatever other approximations to traditional fare that we could make out with local ingredients. I had to work the first half of the day so I didn't get a chance to try my hand at preparing something close to pumpkin pie, but I did swing by the craft store on the way home to pick up several bottles of wine. At the time, the volunteer house held about twenty people, and we all gathered around, blessed my Margie as she visited
Excursion – Finally, a Break
Shortly after Thanksgiving, I moved my weekend to accommodate a trip two new friends were making for
Before we left though, there was a short stay in
After a rollercoaster inspired bus ride, we finally reached
It's difficult to think about this country. I don't want to characterize it by a tragedy. If I lived there, if I called it home, I wouldn't want people automatically associating my home with genocide. At one point, you can't help but think of it as you pass people on the road and wonder what had happened, how it could have passed, and what they are doing now with that history living behind them. We didn't see the genocide memorial, and I had no interest in visiting the school that still held hundreds of bodies piled, dusted in lime, and skulls organized uniformly. It's not that I didn't want to think about it, but I wanted to have more to say about
The hospital was located in a small town down a number of different dirt roads. We got there by bringing along a paper with the name written on it and just pointing. We would get out of one taxi (for those who don't know them, they are small vans designed to pack 14 people, but we did cap out at 23 one time) and point to the paper. The taxi drivers would then indicate a different taxi and we'd climb in, just pointing all the way. After most of the day, we stopped and realized we were there, a nice decorated building with a huge sign baring the symbol of hands joining and the words Partners in Health. Someday years from now, when I have actually finished school, to obtain some small version of the success of Paul Farmer, to have created an institution that not only provides quality care, but to the most needy, and in a way that enables them to continue the provisions to others so that entire regions are revitalized and healthy, to leave in your wake beautiful clinics and hospitals (this one even had a koi pond) and the smiling, vibrant faces of ones malnourished children near death, just to work in a place like that, to provide quality care, seems like a dream. They staff of the hospital took some time out of their obviously hectic schedules to show us around, seeming surprised that we managed to show up, and even outfitted us with bread, cheese, and raisins before we found another taxi and made our way back home.
Work
After this was a long period of typing, talking, and other things. Less interesting than some activities. Let's just leave it at that. But this is part of the reason why nobody has heard much from me.
The Second
As the Christmas season approaches in Gulu, it's drastically different from what I am used to. This much should be obvious, but the forms the differences took surprised me. The first thing was that they have Christmas trees, but they are simply green deciduous bushes that are all over. The most drastic is that Christmas represents a period of high crime. In the weekly security report, the last sentence read something like, "We must remember to be specifically on our guard as we go through this festive period." But we are enjoying it. At the staff Christmas party, we introduced the white elephant gift concept, although calling it Pick and Pass, and watched as our staff struggled vigorously over stealing tea cups and other small niceties from each other, laughing all the way. For us, the actual holiday will be spent somewhere, we're still not sure where, but are considering
Side Out
Just before most of the NGOs broke for the holiday, War Child decided to hold a huge volleyball tournament and BBQ. This was slightly annoying at first, because we wanted to hold a BBQ, but couldn't do so now as it would be copying. But the staff was so excited at the prospect of the tournament that everything was consumed by practicing and preparing. We even had t-shirts made for the team and they debated the actual rules for considerable stretches. In the end, we performed well, but I think War Child had a head start on us. We took fourth place, which actually turned out to be the best, because while first through third received nice trophies, we got a goat, which we will roast in the new year. You can't eat a trophy.
The End of Planning
Months now have been spent in debate, discussion, and hours typing and retyping. When I first started at Schools for Schools we were handed a vision. There were only the first steps made towards making this vision a reality, and many of those I have taken back in the ensuing months. In December, the Roadies for the next Invisible Children National Tour came through Gulu and we were told to have a project for them. This would be the first thing Schools for Schools has actually done. Suddenly we went from talking to doing, I had been negotiating with contractors, suppliers, politicians, business men, guards, and anyone else who knew more about my job than I did (which in various capacities could include most of the population of Gulu) trying to put all those specific pieces of knowledge into one comprehensive plan. Then, one day, it all came together, I had a gathering of workers one side, some fresh-faced mzungu girls on the other, and Jolly standing in front of all of us with a huge sledgehammer, made all the more humorous as she carried both the hammer and her nine months of pregnancy with equal determination. We filmed as she swung the hammer leaving small dents in a laboratory wall and Katie sang out, "Jolly swung the hammer, and the wall came tumbling down." The building should have been condemned but students have been working in the laboratory long after the mortar shells had cracked the wall, the windows had been broken and removed, and termites had all but destroyed the windows and doors. With the swing of the hammer, we began. By lunchtime, the wall was down and reconstruction had begun. By the end of the week, new windows, doors, and cabinets were being installed. In the new year, when the students return, they will find to their surprise, and almost new building. As we move forward, we will install plumbing, central gas, and enough chemicals and science apparatus to allow for the practical knowledge that science demands to avail itself.
Sometimes it's hard to think that you're going anywhere. Especially in
Elsewise
I'm sure I've neglected things, nice moments like finally getting a full fleet of motorcycles and driving around town with freedom and wind blowing past me. The rains in the dry season. The coming and going of various new friends. The joys of parasites. A wonderful night spent coaxing a roaring fire in the middle of a hand-made pottery kiln. More than a couple of truly nice conversations. Seeing a movie, the new Bond, after numerous months, in a theater, with popcorn and everything, although feeling horribly ill and sweating and sleeping throughout. But I suppose there has been enough for now. Life is full, if tiring, frustrating, and confusing at times. But for now, that will do nicely, I suppose.
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