Uganda

I wanted to simply post pictures but they didn’t seem right to me without a little commentary too—composed on jetlag after 22+ hours of flying so...apologies in advance and feel very free to ignore the words and just skim the pictures : )

This is Richard, the community outreach worker with whom I tag-teamed. Sleeping was the only time we weren’t together (he liked to tell me, “I know all your moods.”) Our job was to motorbike around Wakiso, Mityana, and Mpigi Districts, where we mobilized communities for HIV testings, arranged the testings and counseling, taught about reproductive/sexual health in schools, and conducted focus groups to increase men’s involvement in family planning and HIV care. I learned upon arrival that I am the first volunteer that the tiiiiny, indigenous organization has ever had haha, so that meant they let me run with all my ideas on revising their current projects and even starting new ones (my boda bodas! more on them below). I also helped with writing (revising grant proposals and producing communication materials)...working on paper instead of computer because we had no electricity. It was all exactly the experience I wanted—living and eating and sleeping with a local family, not even seeing another American let alone having to work with one, getting out into the more rural communities and talking to the people there, and, best of all, training for ongoing work with the organization...we agreed that I will continue helping them in my free time (ha) here in New York; I left with a growing list of assignments for this side of the ocean, but of course I’m counting down the minutes to when I can go back : )

Boda boda (motorbike) boys transported us around the communities. Most times I rode sandwiched between the boda boy and Richard. Midway through the week Richard began sharing all his crash stories with me (“See how I can’t straighten this arm all the way? The boda actually died in that crash...”)

I like the badasses...

Heading out with my favorite boda boy

Rats, my cool motorbike face crumpled at the sight of Richard speeding past with a funny grin...anyway I was already giddy because of my crush on this boda boda. See how aloof he is? You’ll see he’s the exact same in the group photos below. He NEVER changed his face expression; he was always just that unfazed...drives me crazy

The bodas’ mobility and comparatively good income (and let’s be honest, motorbikes are hot) put them at particular risk of HIV. Richard was very supportive when I asked if I could take them on as my special project. They blew me away—very intelligent and receptive and determined and engaged. And I got free rides thereafter : ) When I asked which challenges they’re facing, they told me, “Well we’re just so big, the condoms always break” ahhahaha

Whenever the kids see a white person, they wave and say, “Mzungu, mzungu! Hi mzungu!” (“whitey”), jumping up and down and calling all their friends to come see too. And Uganda has a lot of children. If I stopped in one place for a few minutes, I’d soon be surrounded by a group of them touching my skin, brushing and styling my hair, playing with my clothes, holding my hand against their heads, and wanting to play games. One little girl took my hand and with determination rubbed every last speck of dirt from it. A high little voice yelling, “Mzungu!” started each morning and ended each day. I never really got over the way they kneel to greet older people respectfully. A group of boarding school kids here...

One day I was walking around the community to let people know about an HIV testing, answer their questions, and ask store owners if we could post signs on their doors. I forgot my glue bottle at one store and had just turned around to retrieve it when I saw a little boy, probably three years old, walking toward me with the yellow bottle in hand. He dropped to his knees and handed the bottle up, too shy to look at me. When I gave him 500 shillings, he immediately did a second knee-drop, this time in fast-motion and still never looking at me, and then he stood and, in his nervous excitement, tripped as he turned to hurry away. I think I actually HEARD my heart breaking that time, ha

After our first HIV testing. I gave candy (something I hate doing) to a throng of 50 kids that had crowded around me. The older ones kept pushing the hands of the youngest out of the way. I wanted to give something to one little girl who hadn’t had any, but she couldn’t manage to get her hand above a million others and I couldn’t reach through to place it in hers; I kept saying, “No, this one is for her!” Finally she opened her mouth wide and I hand-fed it like a worm to a hatchling, and everyone laughed at the trick. It was this little girl in red...

Somehow it didn’t seem strange to see four year-olds caring for infants, until I got back home and saw how four year-olds are treated here. Anyway when the candy ran out, the kids remained crowded around, watching as if they expected me to explode into a mound of chocolate at any instant. When I sat, every last one of them immediately sat. Not one talked or took his eyes from me. I had them form a giant circle in the middle of the football field and began improvising games for the next several hours—everything from “Down by the banks of the hanky panky” to follow-the-leader. We danced calypso, did gymnastics, and played leapfrog. Duck-duck-goose was a disaster. (These kids ranged in age from 2 to 12 and most didn’t speak English.)

They wanted to take a few (not bad!)

My greatest achievement was arranging (with the help of a primary school teacher-turned-translator) a slightly modified game of “Rooster on the roof.” It was my favorite game that we always played at gymnastics camp. At the risk of nobody caring, I’ll explain: Everyone has a partner. There are about five different “commands” that you learn, each with a zany name. “Rooster on the roof” means that the first partner drops to the ground on all fours, and the second partner balances on all fours on top of the first partner’s back. “Lover’s leap” is when one partner jumps into the arms of the other. You get the idea. I began explaining the game when I realized that the names of these positions would mean absolutely nothing to the school teacher (let alone the kids), so I simplified it to two positions: bridge (stand facing your partner and clasp hands above your heads) and tunnel (one partner puts his hands on the ground and rump in the air, making a teepee shape, and the other partner lies on his belly underneath). Judging from the teacher’s pronunciation of the commands (“bodge” and “turl”), my modifications didn’t simplify the game very much, but we pulled it off and it made me so damn happy, ha. Obviously by hour three of game time I was reeeeeally stretching for ideas, so I could’ve kissed the older kid who finally suggested we play football.

Football fields doubled as pastures for grazing cattle. The first time that the boys had me try to kick a goal in a shoot-off, my ball smacked this cow squarely in the stomach. It didn’t even flinch—must happen often

I am the student here. The kids are teaching me to say body parts in Luganda

I am making the stupid face at my Ugandan brother, Andrew! Our house had no running water or indoor bathroom, so every night I took a bucket bath outside in the yard, beneath the stars and listening to the late-night music from the disco down the street, taking care not to tip my single candle leaned up against a board. I had a bucket of boiling water, to which I poured cold water from a jerry-can until the temperature was right. (Only problem was the air got pretty chilly – temperature drops at night and even the daytime isn’t as warm as New York summer.) After the first few nights of leaving my bath with soapy hair, I got pretty good at it. But I never got the hang of the broken knob on the door to re-enter the house, so night after night I found myself standing outside in my towel, calling, “Hey I think I locked myself out for the eighty-second time!” Then I would hear Andrew’s voice yell, “Melon? [he couldn’t pronounce my name] Wait!! I am coming to assist!” hahaha as if galloping on horseback to rescue me from a dragon. Aside from that ritual, Andrew and I shared some evening heart-to-hearts about Catholicism, cultural differences (“What I love about Americans is that they are all so positive about success and they never need to stop and think, they just make decisions and are certain,” he told me, haha), and money. An immensely pragmatic boy - kind of obsessed with money. He asked, “If you had billions of dollars, what would you do?” Thinking it was an “if you had any magic power”-type question, I gave a moronic imaginative answer and he goes, “Oh, I would invest it in a bank.”

Where I took my starlit bucket baths

Water source nearest our house

My family kept tons of chickens in the backyard. Very common to see women in the marketplace cradling an infant in one arm and dangling by both wings a chicken (dead or alive) in the other
chickens

My Ugandan "mommy"! She and I talked by candlelight every night. Whenever Richard dropped me at the house at the day's end, he would say, “Your mommy and daddy are home, you are safe”

Note the mosquito net. Mommy insisted on getting my bedroom (with me in it) from all possible angles. It’s actually my Ugandan sisters’ room but, like so many other young people in the country, they’re away at boarding school

I didn’t get any night pictures but - I couldn’t believe the activity on the streets at night! 10 p.m. is very early and up until 2 a.m. all the roadsides are bustling with campfires, vendors selling chapatis (tortillas made of egg) and roasted maize, motorbikes, people visiting, children in school uniforms, etc. And everyone wakes up at sunrise too. Having no alarm clock, I woke every morning before sunrise to the sounds of the Arabs singing their prayers, the roosters crowing, and bath water splashing on the stones outside. And having no mirror, I just rolled out of bed, brushed my teeth, and was ready to go : )

Visiting my extended family! : )))))))))))) I was so happy. Had lunch with the national staff

At the school below I received my Ugandan name, Naomi (the closest thing to “Melanie,” which nobody could pronounce). I went by Naomi for most of the trip. At the end, my mommy told me I should give their housecat a name—so I gave it Naomi. (I had to explain to Andrew that in the U.S., “pussy” doesn’t mean cat : x)

Like watching a train crash in slow motion...me teaching the menstrual cycle and answering questions about “the birds and the bees” to a room of 100 girls whose grasp of American English is nebulous at best. I was convinced they hated me for sure. Then at the end, when I handed some materials to the newly elected leader of the youth club, Regina Nakamate, she said suddenly, in the breathiest birdsong of a voice, “Will you come back to see us? I shall be missing you.” Ah! My heart broke right there. It happened at every school; the kids were soooo sweet and so receptive, without even a trace of the "get lost" attitude I know US teens would have.
Richard asked me to draw the female reproductive organs on the chalkboard, and I made him do it instead...because I could think only of that Wonder Years episode when the gym teacher draws it and everyone mistakes it for a cow’s head haha oh gosh, I had to bite my tongue not to say something to Richard about a cow’s head...

At the end of the boys’ lesson, Richard encouraged them to ask me any questions they wanted. This conversation was one of a million with children that went, “How old are you?” “I’m 25.” “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Nope.” “It’s not possible. You are lying.” Twist that knife a little deeper, buddy!

These kids were sweet. One boy said to me, “Excuse me, madam, [everyone calls you ‘madam’] I have a question for you. I am a musician, but my music is lacking something. What can I do?” These girls told me all about jackfruit and chewing on sugarcane. All the students wanted to know whether the US or Uganda is better; I always answered there are things about Uganda that I like better than the US and things about the US that I prefer to Uganda, but it depends on the person and overall one isn’t better than the other. (And I always told them that they know more about the US than students in the US know about Uganda, which made them laugh and cheer)

This was my favorite school, oh my gosh I loved it. The school has a special deal with the organization, whereby they waive school fees for children whose families (if they even have families) can’t afford to pay.

I had just taken malaria medicine on an empty stomach and dismounted from a particularly bouncy boda ride when we arrived – not feeling so hot. Then this kid Alex, the boy sitting next to me in the classroom pictures, walked into the room, and I got the craziest lump in my throat. His face absolutely lit up when he said, by way of hello, “You are MOST welcome!” It had this “gee whiz!” tone. Not sure how to say this without sounding dramatic and cheesy but – all of a sudden I had to turn my face away because two tears actually came out of nowhere down my cheeks. It was so weird. Ugh, I just think that kid is pure magic. He told me he wants to be a pilot when he finishes school, and I told him about Halloween and the blue whale hanging from the ceiling of the Natural History Museum; he asked how big it is and what it eats. I’ve got to write him a letter.

The St. Catherine's Girls Club

Check out this little hotty. He told me squirrels are his favorite animal because “they’re just so funny”

After class, the kids rushed me to the lunch line for posho—a white slab made of corn-soya I think, kind of like cream of wheat—which is scooped from a giant vat and served for every meal, along with beans

Then the girls rushed me to their dorm, where we sat on the edge of their bunkbeds to eat. Clothes were hanging to dry from the ceilings and all the girls were squealing and jumping down from their beds and talking to me all at once. My host dug through a bucket of dirty dishes to retrieve me a fork. Not wanting to eat her lunch, I had only a mouthful and she said, “That’s all your taking?! Have you ever had cookies?” I said yes, and she jumped up, opened her trunk, pulled out a plastic baggy of two hard cookies (a special treat saved from home), and found another dirty dish to serve me one whole cookie. I broke off a small piece and said, “It’s very good; I don’t want to take your cookie from you though!” She laughed and slapped me on the knee. When we took these pictures, every time the camera flashed, one girl would SQUEAL with excitement and clap her hands and all the other dozens of girls in the dorm would laugh and laugh... Best girls ever.

I liked this little poster hanging in one of the schools... “dancing, crying, digging” – for sure the first three activities that always come to my mind

Didn’t take long for Richard to make fun of me for my excited reactions to all the animals. He soon began referring to all the billions of goats, cattle, etc. as “your friend.”

Birds' nests

This little guy lived in the future Mityana youth center

A fine place to have your hair styled

No sense of direction

Like little red flowers...

Football stadium in Kampala City. Everybody’s nuts about the English teams (Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool...)

Richard asked me all about gymnastics over lunch one day. He interrupted my stories to say, “Sounds like you were a soldier!” So I told him the secret psychoanalytical reason why I think the issue of child soldiers is the most interesting one to me: The reasons commanders give for abducting children (they are fearless and follow instructions uncomplainingly) are also the reasons why children make good gymnasts. (Of course it’s wrong to compare war and gymnastics as if gymnasts go through even a shred of the terror that soldiers must, but something about growing up in such a conditioned environment resonates with me.) Always encouraging me to dream, Richard said, “You must find a way to bridge your passion for gymnastics with this work!” So I told him about the Wendy Hilliard Foundation and how if I ever had millions of dollars my dream would be to open a gym in Uganda, a country for which gymnastics is singularly ill-suited haha (very expensive equipment, need to be indoors, completely individualistic, etc). It’s obvious why football—community-oriented and requiring only a field and a ball that can be made of wadded reeds—is so popular.
Anyway as a special treat, on my last day, Richard walked me across a massive field in Kampala City to a 1970s-style boxlike building that is the National Council of Sports for Uganda. There we had a meeting with the General Secretary (!) to ask whether there is gymnastics in the country. I wish I had a video of his face: utter confusion at the sound of the word. He furrowed his eyebrows, shook his head, remained silent for a good minute and then said, “Gymnastics? In Uganda? No, there is no gymnastics in Uganda.” At least I got the news from the top! Even better, the General Secretary of the National Council of Sports personally invited me to start a Ugandan gymnastics association! haha. Maybe someday... Until then, I started on a small scale : ) These kids were all naturals!

The little tiny one in the tan shorts absolutely killed me. Any word I said, he would repeat perfectly. When I said, “Let’s do tripods!,” he yelled out, “TRIPODS!!!!” When he executed a near-perfect cartwheel I laughed, “Very good!” and he said back, “VERY GOOD!” What a special kid – I couldn’t stop laughing and even now I get so happy thinking of him : ))))))

Little gymnasts everywhere I went...

Richard's daughters

The details of Richard’s life came to me in small bits (and the details of mine went to him), until the picture rounded out as we talked one morning without power when the rain was coming down so hard on the tin roof that we had to yell to be heard. Another afternoon, as we waited on the porch of a school up in the Mpigi hills for the men’s education club participants to arrive, we ate pitted dates and watched some boys across the street beating bushels of some grass and had a heart-to-heart about love and relationships. Other times Richard gave me long lectures on the history of Ugandan dictators and corruption scandals. These are some of the ways I learned that Richard grew up in a family of 17 children; no surprise that he had to work to pay his own school fees. Richard’s idealistic dedication to the work was among the first things I learned about him. Walking through the communities he would say, “We shall still do what we can, do something, even without the resources. Slowly by slowly, we will get there.” He was always scheming—how we would skip meals in order to put that money someplace where it’s more essential, how it would be better if the money that people spend on taxis could be donated to a pot and divided up among those who most need it. Four years ago, he left his marketing job to work fulltime for the organization, which nevertheless couldn’t afford to pay him. He lived on 300-shilling chapatis and slept in a room of the organization’s office, where he still sleeps today. Now the organization can pay him only a stipend of just under 1000 shillings/day. After having two daughters of his own, Letitia and Immaculate (whose name he pronounces “Immachulate”...he says all “cu” sounds as “ch,” so it’s “dochument,” “partichularly,” etc), he and his wife “went sour” and separated, though the children aren’t yet entirely aware of this. His family pressures him to remarry; it’s not usual for a Ugandan man to be unmarried and also uncommon to have only two children, especially when both are girls. Richard decided, though, to stop where he is and take care of what he has. Family planning hasn’t really caught on; average families have seven children on shoestring incomes. Richard said, “If I have a third, I can’t send that one to school. What kind of love is that? If I remarry and she wants a child, I can’t provide for them and I don’t have much time for them. What kind of love is that?” When I asked what makes him different, he said he saw his mother suffer so much, and she told him, ‘Go to school because you may need to use your head to get land.’ Only 6 and 9 years old, Richard’s daughters already live on their own, attending boarding school away from home. We visited it. Children as young as 5 fetch their own water and wash their own clothes in buckets outside and sleep in dormitory bunk beds with so many others. The morning of the visit, we stopped at a grocery store to buy a small plastic baggy of sweets. Then we pushed our way through the chaotic market toward the taxi park, and Richard suddenly ducked into a hardware store to buy handkerchiefs for his girls. I was thinking, What do you even do with a handkerchief? The clerk gave Richard a stack of scrap linen cloths really, and he took a long while to choose three pink ones from it. He added them to the bag of sweets and kept saying proudly as we pushed back through the taxi park crowd, “They always take my hankies when I visit. They love sweets sooooo much...” The three pink hankies left me pretty quiet.

Dad, this picture’s for you: These are seminarians on recess, having a sack race in the middle of a football game hahaha (I love the kid on his face)

Dad, another one for you: the local bar! Inside, men sit on benches in a circle, drinking with loooooong straws from the same tiny pot of local beer on the ground in the center

The office team: Betty (counselor and accountant), Sylvia (intern), Lydia (admin), and Charles (director, and my “daddy”)

Some of the posters hanging in the office

There was also a comic of a girl who meets a nice handsome boy, and as he is walking her home, he slowly turns into a one-eyed green monster haha, wish I had a copy of it

The sign for our organization’s Mityana location

Sylvia! She’s the best ever! I want her to come to New York and hang out

Zigoti was my favorite place, in Mityana District
This picture’s for everyone who likes to make fun of me about meat

And the general store

Young men in Zigoti who aren’t bodas roast maize and bananas here to sell to stopped taxis. These ones were yelling at Richard in Luganda, and I kept hearing “mzungu mzungu,” so I knew they were talking about me. As we walked away, Richard translated: “They said that if they’re going to come to get tested, they need something in return...” (I was the “something”)

The small primary school in Zigoti where we held our first HIV testing

This little girl climbing is named Jolene, like the Dolly Parton song (I taught it to Richard and we sang it to her)

FREE FREE FREE HIV TESTING. Even thumbtacks to hang the posters were a considerable expense for the organization; it was strange to adjust to having no resources

Making the rounds

The road to the Mityana health clinic we visited

A very light load by Uganda standards

Mityana health clinic – quiet in this picture but we also visited on a vaccination day when the lawn was covered with children. I met a little boy with malaria who showed me and told me all about his tablets

In Charles’s words, “Uganda traffic, ninety-percent chaos!” (spoken as we suddenly found ourselves trapped on every side by other vehicles, each poised at slightly different angles in relation to us). At all times you see children in school uniform walking the roadsides, which are riddled with potholes and seem to crumble beneath you. Every quarter-mile, half the road (or the entire thing) suddenly disappears and you’re bumping along rutted red dirt instead.

I couldn’t walk through the taxi park without every other guy grabbing my arms and shoulders and saying, “Hi mzungu, where are you going mzungu? Hi America, how are you America?” I had to put on my game face. All taxis are painted on the door with the phrase “Licensed to carry 14 passengers,” and all don’t leave until there are 21 people (children and chickens not included) crammed inside vehicles that drive with flat tires and others that need to be pushed before the engine kicks in. Extra seats fold up and down over what would otherwise be an aisle. Sitting in the back is cramped but preferable to sitting in the front where you can watch the speedometer hover at 110 mph, every engine light (oil check, engine check, etc) blazing, the 14 year-old driver wrestling with the wheel, and every game of head-on chicken as trucks headed in both directions swerve in competition for the same meager patches of navigable road. I was in a taxi that broke down on the side of the road (the engine belt snapped and we had to de-board in the middle of nowhere and wait for another that could squeeze us inside); a taxi crash (one taxi slammed into the back end of ours, leaving a dent but no injuries; we de-boarded in the midst of the two drivers’ arguments); and a taxi that got lost, which is probably the best story. Trying to dodge traffic, the driver cut off the main road onto a dirt trail that grew narrower and narrower as we bumped along. The taxi began tilting further and further until we were holding on at a 45 degree angle (“everyone lean to the left!”). More and more cows brushed up against the windows. Soon there was no road at all, just grass and swamp and miniature hills that made us thump along so slowly that the cows were beating us. The driver switched off the radio’s cheerful local music. The passengers grew increasingly rowdy, yelling things in Luganda, and the driver yelled back. I was half-sitting on some guy’s lap, and the women beside me held in her lap a black plastic bag with a live chicken poking out its head, watching to see how the driver would get us out of this mess. Eventually he dead-ended at a shack and had to turn around and go all the way back to the main road. While taxis wait to leave the park, vendors poke their heads into the windows and doorway and beg you to buy biscuits, mobile phone airtime, sodas...

People in the US would flip out to see primary school kids heading home along such highways—no guardrails, no speed limits, no traffic rules, and, just to spice things up, plenty of boda bodas and bicycles rigged to carry a refrigerator’s worth of plantains, pineapple, jerrycans, dead chickens, etc. I saw one boda boda speeding by with a goat over his legs. When the taxis fly past each other, suddenly veering onto the shoulder of the road without so much as wavering velocity, they just slam down on the horn and all the school kids make way. Every time we crossed a road, Richard grabbed my hand—something that drove me absolutely nuts (being taken care of, in general, drives me nuts – “I can manage on my own!” – but that’s another story : )) so I started crossing my arms every time we neared a road, but then he’d just grab my shoulders.
Anyway, here’s the taxi alternative (sometimes they’re piled high on plantains or lumber instead of bags)

Everywhere are little kiosks where you can “top up” your mobile. Richard called this place “the Soweto of Kampala”

Parliament (Richard had friends EVERYWHERE, including here, so he took me inside for a mini tour. He told everyone that I am afraid of Idi Amin.)

Every meal – matooke (hot mashed plantains), rice, sweet potato, and/or beans. Less than $1 per day. After four days I bought a big green pumpkin from the market to take home to my “mommy” and lived on that for the duration. I'm good on carbohydrates for the next decade

Marketplace

midair

The first time I met Ivan, he was sprawled on a couch next to me in the office, quietly watching television and eyeing me shyly. A massive plate of matooke and beans sat on the couch beside him, and like any good kid, he was mashing it around instead of eating. Finally he stuffed some into his mouth until his cheeks were puffed like a hamster’s, and then he turned to me with the most deadpan expression, his cheeks full of food, and it made me burst out laughing, at which point he burst into uncontrollable giggles too. Then Richard wanted me to watch a short Ugandan reproductive health video, which opened with a spunky dance number. As soon as Richard hit play and stepped out of the room, leaving me and Ivan alone, Ivan leapt up from the couch, turned his back toward me, and sprang into a dance of jumping up and down and slapping his ass in midair. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen and I laughed so loud that Richard returned to make sure everything was okay. Ivan and I both put on our game faces; the boy had returned innocently to the couch. As soon as Richard left again, Ivan again jumped up and started to dance. Five minutes into the movie I gave up completely on it and watched Ivan instead. Dancing turned into a one-man sack race with a green plastic bag that Ivan found in a corner. When the bag fell apart around his feet, he made it a skirt, then a cape, then a ferocious alligator that he would creep up to, poke tentatively, and suddenly jump up and run away from, feigning fright with body movements and facial expressions so animated they would make any silent-movie actor jealous. When the bag had been reduced to shreds, Ivan’s new game was to take mouthfuls of water, look at me with puffed cheeks, and then run to the doorway (giggling and dribbling water across the cement floor the whole way) where he could spit it out and laugh completely. Near the end of the movie, Richard returned, and Ivan and I would from time to time look at each other and smile knowingly : )
Ivan’s father, a soldier, is away. His mother works as a counselor and accountant in the office. After that first day, she told me that Ivan kept asking, “When is the mzungu coming back? I want to play with her.” At five years old he’s the coolest little kid I’ve ever met, for sure. He’s sooooo smart, always furrowing his eyebrows and thiiiiinking and thiiiinking and looking around. And he’s sooooo talented, at gymnastics (he always climbs up the side of the office), at acting, at dancing (holy shit)...

Look at that face!

Ivan’s mom...no wonder he’s the coolest!

When Richard found out that I’m Catholic, he kind of freaked out and arranged a free afternoon so that we could go to Uganda Martyrs Church, where the country’s first Catholics were burned at the stake back in 1800-something. I kind of hate this “pilgrimage” sort of thing. The touching part was not the history or the church but Richard’s enthusiasm. (I have like 92 million other pictures of this place...Richard really wanted to take photos here until, jerk that I am, I let slip, “I think everyday life in Uganda is more interesting.”) At the bottom of a hill below the church is a manmade lake from which three children in bright violet and peacock-blue dresses were drawing jerrycans of water. A small choir was practicing and one woman sat bathing a quiet infant in it. “The water is made cleaner by our Catholic faith,” Richard told me, shortly before we rounded one of the lake’s corners to see a film of brown sludge and litter bobbing on the surface there : x

Richard is the secretary and choirmaster of his church, which was overflowing at Mass on Sunday morning. Communion was a free-for-all; I got confused and didn’t know when I should go up, and missed it, so Richard freaked out about that too and made me go to the priest’s house after Mass to receive Communion specially haha. Because I was essentially shadowing Richard’s life, I also attended two nighttime meetings for the purpose of planning a young couple’s wedding; the church planning committee met in a parking lot in the dark, sang beautiful prayers, and fretted how to raise enough money

Sunday, our day off, happened to be family visiting day at my sisters’ boarding school (there are only three such days per year), so mom piled me into the car along with my brother, three of my cousins (Stella, Julia, and Joann), and twenty pots of hot food that mom and Nakaferu (the maid) spent the morning preparing. Mom’s car is American, bought from her relatives who immigrated to Boston, and it isn’t made for the rutted dirt roads of Uganda. Every few minutes, something on the bottom of the car would clank and scrape the ground, making such an awful noise that the car seemed ready to snap in half. Each time it happened, Mom would exclaim, “Ohh dear!” and Andrew, Joann, and Stella would yell, “Ju-leeeee-ahhhh!”, blaming the extra weight of our teeny tiny, skin-on-bone cousin haha. (Mom would say, “Why little Julia? Why not all of you? And we’d all just yell, “Ju-leee-aaah!” again haha.) Once we arrived at the school, some boys seeking tip money scurried to the car to carry massive boxes of heavy drinks stacked four high atop their heads. We found my sisters, Carol and Doreen, and like so many other families unloaded lunch on a classroom table and began to eat.
From left to right, this is Andrew, mama Elizabeth, Carol, Stella, and little Julia

Joann on the left side of the table, Andrew and Doreen on the right

Pretty much an inside joke with myself, how I didn’t belong...

After the meal, Carol took me by the hand through all the crowds of parents, friends, and teachers, introducing me as her sister with no further explanation.
Caught looking bewildered by all the Luganda conversations...

Here’s an overview of the festivities (one of the most posh schools in Uganda by the way)...

The excitable boy with the meat sticks and white pants in this picture is known as “My Future Husband.” It’s very strange but I spent my last night in Uganda—all of the final taxi ride home, bucket bath, and time in bed waiting to fall asleep—thinking of him, and regretting that I never said anything kind to him. Our first conversation went: “How many children do you have?” “I don’t have any children.” “Are you married?” “No, I’m not married.” “I have decided, I am asking if you will marry me.” “Hahahahahhaha.” He found me ten minutes later and said, “I am still waiting for your answer!” Back in Zigoti the next day, I was standing in a crowd of vendors when I heard someone whisper my name. I turned and it was him, so I gave a little wave. That time he said, “Will you be testing me? If I test negative, will you marry me?” All our subsequent ‘conversations’ were a variation on that theme. My very last day in Uganda, we had the Zigoti testing, and he came. I was talking with a group of school kids when he strutted to the registration table, sat for a minute, and strutted away just as fast. I excused myself from the kids and went over to Sylvia: “That boy who was just here, is he testing?” “He’s very stubborn, that one. He said he’d come back because he needs to work now.” He did come back; he walked up to me and the group of school kids and stopped. We looked at each other, smiled, and said nothing, and that’s when I wish I would’ve said something nice to him—just to ask his name. We looked at each other while he waited outside the counseling room—you know when you’re comfortably staring at someone? I didn’t find out whether his test was positive or negative. My weird feeling wasn’t about him really. He was sort of the lightning rod for a current of complicated feelings that charged throughout the visit. For the first four days of power outages, pit latrines, potholes, bucket baths, tin roofs, secondhand stores hawking clothes and bread, and manic taxi parks, I didn’t equate “different” with “poor.” Then I sort of started to, and it scared me a little. Every cent is counted. There aren’t many jobs. I asked Richard if it were really sustainable to sell plantains in the market when fifty other people are also selling plantains from a mound as big as yours and nobody needs that many. He called it a “preoccupation” rather than an occupation. Hearing about a girl who drops out of school because she can’t buy sanitary pads, seeing what a daily hassle travel is for Richard, and a million other examples made me want to scrap “the mechanisms of assistance” and simply say, “Look I’ll just buy the damn tampons”...until I realized that I was thinking “I’ll just buy” again and again, endlessly, impossibly. So the pendulum in your head starts swinging back toward the thought of glacially slow, long-term solutions—the impossibility of persuading a government to sufficiently increase social spending in a country where massive families are average. It’s another incarnation of the same dilemma as ever—and this trip once again confirmed for me that on the spectrum from “treating war-wounded and sending them, healthy, back out into a war” to “trying to stop a war,” I fall completely on the treating-people side. Anyway I think that to trace problems so far is not for me to do. People do what they can; it’s important just to work toward demonstrating some sensitivity—trying to make people feel recognized—in the everyday interactions. Most of all, to be honest, if I really went to Uganda to “help people,” I would’ve done better to simply send them the money that my plane ticket cost. I think it’s about trying to understand as much as you can about others’ experiences, because that somehow makes you more human, and doing what excites you, but just trying to do it sensitively with regard to the people you encounter along the way. Whenever kids there asked me whether New York is very different, all I could come up with was “more buildings, tall ones, and well-paved roads and sidewalks instead of dust.” Then I got home and thought, “Oh this IS different.” But I think it’s wrongheaded and unfair to compare the two places; then all you end up getting are a string of observations (we ate on less than $1 each day, five year-olds carry around and care for their infant siblings...) that sort of made sense in context and only seem remarkable now that I’m back. So all the cliché unanswerable questions got wrapped up in this boy, like how strange it is that I dropped in for such a short time and am leaving now, and how difficult it is to keep in touch considering language barriers and no email access and the financial burden of stationery or a stamp; and how the meaning behind the three pink hankies slips through your fingers like sand once you’re back in New York where the entire world contradicts the notion that a dollar bill is a precious treasure; and why was I born in the US and others born here?; do I think the US is a better place to live?; if so, is that being condescending? if not, is that being naively optimistic?; if it’s wrong to drop into a country for several weeks and then leave, when the people there can’t do the same, and wrong to be treated as though I’m special just because of a nationality, then is the alternative of staying at home more acceptable? or how do you act? who do I think I am anyway - what help do I have to offer? I’m sure someone in the U.S. could use this boy’s help. All I can really offer in Uganda is the same as what I could offer anywhere—and that’s just trying to be kind and trying to make people feel a little special for the minute that we’re interacting. So that’s an obscure explanation but the best one I can put into words for why I felt so bad for not having said anything nice to the boy. I wish I had a better portrait of him, too. I don’t even know his name. It’s like the feeblest gestures (meticulously shining one’s shoes every morning before stepping into a dirt-pile road) can be the most genuine ones. Things this trip reinforced: I’m still not interested in reproductive/sexual health; I’m interested in war and conflict. And I’m still much more interested in direct medical care than education (not sure I really believe in “awareness-raising” but that’s another story and I’m grateful to the bodas for challenging my disbelief a little).

I have lots of other stories but these ones went along with the pictures.

Richard and my mommy drove me to the airport at the end. They couldn’t pass through security to the Emirates check-in line, but they waited outside with their hands pressed up against a big glass wall, watching me and waving and blowing kisses for forty-five minutes, until we couldn’t see one another anymore.

See ya,
Melanie

written by

Melanie on July 24, 2008 from Kampala, Uganda

from the travel blog: Uganda

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a travel blog by Melanie

Melanie's Uganda Pictures

Kampala, Uganda