Lions and Hippos, Masai! Oh My!

Masai Mara.


The bus lurched to a stop at around 2:30am. Lucky for me, the Mzungu Privilege had landed me a bus upgrade to ‘Royal’ and the front row seat behind the driver. I’d spent the last 6 hours in and out of sleep, listening to Rachel’s and trying not to touch anything. As this was one of two designated potty breaks I decided to venture out into what proved to be a really bad psychedelic trip. The parking lot of this rest stop was infested with the huge passenger buses that litter East Africa; the cheapest companies’ vehicles are painted neon purple or gangsta gold, some even rock a black light interior; their back windshields are tagged with phrases like, “Jesus Saves” or “Cream Team”. I stumbled bleary eyed and sleep deprived out into this reality and stepped in line with fifty other women to wait for the latrine (you think gas station toilets are bad?) There is some cultural defect here that renders lines inconsequential, people literally will just squeeze in front of you, and when you tap them on the shoulder and flash a ‘bitch please’ smile they just nod their head in submission and squeeze in front of the person behind you. I then proceeded to the…cafeteria? The peeling pink linoleum floor was lit by badly chosen orange bulbs that flickered and buzzed with each fist sized flying bug that landed on them. People were frantically stuffing themselves and their children with 20 shilling beef hunks and sausages while the sounds of crying babies and popping oil clung to the sticky walls. This was just the first few hours of my 10-day Kenyan extravaganza! HaHa…uhhhhh.

I spent the next few days in Watamu, a small beach town north of Mombassa that plays host to a strange Italian diaspora. I was able to dive my first day there; a twenty minute boat ride on a crowded little speedster teeming with hairy old Italian men and their young beautiful girlfriends took us to our first dive spot: the Deep Place. Not so deep after all, at 18 meters the slanted reef was home to dozens of live coral, trumpet fish, puffers, lionfish, angelfish, octopi and a 5-foot moray eel named George… I had pleasure of scratching George beneath his gaping dagger-toothed mouth, much like a kitty…the joys and quirks of the marine world. Dive two was a 16-meter reef called Caracas. To be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference between the two dives; in my experience the purpose of doing two dives is to illustrate the variety of sea life…not to emphasize the similarities…alas. In any case it was great to be in that place again, to begin the descent and have all the skills come back like riding a bike. I love the ocean. I was able to play stowaway on a special chartered snorkel trip on day two; the boat crew saw me snorkeling alone just off shore and pulled up. They were smoking a joint and invited me to tag along with them and the British family they were picking up at one of the ritzy all-inclusive resorts…could I say no? We were able to go in to the Watamu Marine Preserve and I spent two hours lazily following parrotfish and looking for shells; the family turned out to be a grown up brother and sister with their partners and parents. They snuck me into the Turtle Bay Resort with them afterwards and I gorged myself on coconut tilapia and ‘chocolate balls’, all washed down with the worst pina colada I’ve ever had. Good ole’ British hospitality.

Watamu.

During my stay in Watamu, I made three or four trips to this unbelievable authentic Gelatoria; hand made gelato, crepes, cappuccinos, juices…it was heaven, it made me second guess my pledge to go on a raw food diet once I get to New Zealand. I spent my last night on the coast in Mombasa at a nice hotel with a king bed, television and a balcony view of the traffic below. Some friends of friends took me out to a club on the outskirts of town where I attempted to get drunk but could really only think raging thoughts of all the gross white men picking up the young Kenyan prostitutes and the stage where black girls in leopard print thongs were workin’ it to the soundtrack of The Lion King…it was all a little too exploitive for me. It highlighted the consequences of a successful tourist industry in a developing country; anything for money money money. See, Uganda doesn’t know all those dirty tricks yet because tourism is still a new industry, I have a sinking feeling I may be in for a rude return to Uganda in a few years.

I took the 10-hour bus ride from Mombassa to Nairobi early Saturday morning and arrived Saturday night with the biggest Nairobi chip on my shoulder, “I know this is Nairobbery. Don’t you take advantage of me! Hey, stop looking at my purse! Oh yeah, is that really how much that chapatti is…you trying to cheat me?!” Everyone probably thought I was crazy, but it didn’t deter me from wearing my passport around my neck even while bunked up in my mzungu hotel for the night.

I left Sunday morning for my obligatory safari adventure.
Myself, Kat, a 25 year old Korean-American from SF trying to find herself, and Jef, our 43 year old chain-smoking Spanish-speaking Kenyan guide, drove the 5 hours through the Great Rift Valley to Masai Mara, one of the most notorious game parks in the world. We had three days of bumping around in our pop-top vanagon through the 2000 sq km reserve, seeking out lions, buffalo, giraffes, elephants, eagles, hippos, crocodiles and every kind of deer-like creature that’s ever roamed the African expanse.

"Geelaughs" -Jef
It was all good fun and if it weren’t for the ever-looming Masai tribesmen trying to cajole us into paying for a traditional dance or a traditional meal or a traditional hike or a traditional cell-phone cover…than it would have been the most relaxed I’ve been for months. On the way back Jef made us stop at the hotel we’d had lunch at on the way to the park, everyone who ate the meat that day (everyone but me) had had heinous diarrhea for days. He wanted to set them straight and demand a refund, telling them, “You know, we all been shitting like this (explosive hand motion). You see? I’m bringin a blanket to the damn toilet, I can’t sleep. Just shit, fuck, just shit.” Jef was a great guide, in the safari business for 17 years, two teenage daughters and a wife who ran off to Canada and hasn’t contacted him for three years; he wants to marry a new Christian and live in the stone house he’s going to build. Go Jef!
I decided to forgo a second night in Nairobi and upon return from Masai Mara I immediately hopped on the overnight bus back to Jinja. That was a terrible decision. Cold, smelly, sticky, crowded, loud and roads that seem to have just been craggy rock plains that were moderately worn down by the heavy traffic, but would still throw you into the seat back in front every 15 seconds if you weren’t properly braced with abdominal muscles engaged. Not to mention crossing the Kenyan-Ugandan border alone, on foot at 3:30 in the morning is probably not so advisable. But, eenyhoo…here I am. Alive, well; once again being overfed and under lockdown… back ‘home’ from my vacation from a vacation.

“I need you to disorganize your bones from this place!”

-Prefect at Lubani SS to disobedient hordes of students


‘The time has come,’ the walrus said.
‘To speak of many things.
Of children dressed in threadbare robes, of chai and tribal kings.
Of Nile ebbs and borehole flows, of cassava and maize.
Of Muslim women’s shrouded souls, of thick twelve hour days.’

Those who know my father know him as a character of many colors. An Irish-(ex)Catholic anchor dressed in tie-dye, ever accompanied by Conyers, Labradors, children and the like. He wears flowers, sausage-finger-stuffed between his Giants cap and his slowly salting bear-hair. A ball player to the death, he gardens obsessively, curses like a sailor and has a metal knee. Woven within the snags and stitches of his being is a turbulent heart, unconditional, uncontainable and unavoidable; his love is like an electric storm. That heart sent two boxes and forty pounds of fun to Uganda…I got to be the messenger.

Don’t think small-scale here. My dad doesn’t send things like pocket encyclopedias or scrabble. A P.E. teacher, it appears he broke into his own office and robbed himself. Soccer, football, baseball (balls, mitt and bat): check. Frisbee, tennis, volleyball: check. Squishies, bouncies, twirlies, stickies, floaties, squares and circles, pinks and blues, the classic and the inconceivable. In addition, he took the liberty of funding a small Bay Area school construction project by single-handedly buying out an elementary school’s “Cheap Foam Shit Craft Fair”; I also received the orange and beaded fruits of that labor.

The last two evenings at sowa ikumi (4 o’clock), tuzana mu (we played at) Kyabirwa Primary School. With a turn out of about one hundred beaming pre-teens (and shady older thuggish characters) each round, I can safely say…well, it’s been quite a trip. Beautiful and carefree, violent and indulgent, chaotic and peaceful, tears, laughter, nausea and vomiting…we accommodate the whole gamut of the human sensory experience over here. As the only playthings (well, playthings designed expressly for the purpose of play) for miles, the distribution of these priceless goods has been a harrowing trial, a testament to the patience and durability I’ve acquired these last few months.


Teaching how to pump the balls.

I spent last night wrapping the craft fair goods, a few finger boards, hackey sacs, bracelets, purses and one plastic giraffe, pony, lion, dinosaur (an animal family not taught in Ugandan schools, they think it’s a chameleon), tiger and elephant. I secured the gifts between pages of the outdated Daily Monitor and New Vision news bulletins and tied them off with green clothesline. Scrolled across the front were the names of the kids in my compound, the creatures who have taken me in regardless of how my skin sits and whose hearts I’ve taken to like sunsets on the African horizon. Becca, Laticia, Joel, Paulo, Emma, Sharif, Magda, Ronald, Nomatovu, Julie, Hanifah, Ashrof, Zaki, Milly, Aliza and of course, my one and only, my Jamali.

I tiptoed out through the front door around dawn, carefully dislodging the nails that keep the door closed. Unloading my backpack stuffed with newsprint colored treasures, I arranged them at the base of a jackfruit tree, Christmas tree…jackfruit tree…whatever. It made me feel like how my dad must feel every time he and my mom did stuff like this for Tyler and I. Ceaselessly surprising us, a bicycle hanging precariously half-way out our chimney (Santa couldn’t fit it down), a geodesic explosion ball secured secretly above our sleeping heads, scavenger hunts, rhymes, half eaten Christmas cookies at the fireplace…them always playing dumb till the end. It feels great.



Word spreads fast in the village, by mid-morning the crowd around the gifts was in full force, curiously observing, sounding out names, holding the gifts to the sun and trying to get a closer look at their innards. I told them, ‘No, I don’t know where they came from, but we can open them at sowa musanvu…one o’clock.’ I spent the morning packing, consolidating, trashing, donating. A few curious kids peered through my window, the same way they had the day I’d arrived. Unpacking and packing both lend themselves nicely to kids looking to look at my things. A gave one boy some post-its, a handful of zip ties to Casseva, a neighbor girl.

Meanwhile, outside, tension was mounting. This one doesn’t have a package with his name, Becca has two gifts, where was the football, why Zaki and not me? It was disappointing, a little heart wrenching, but most of the whiners I’d never seen before so the guilt factor was kept to a minimum. At one I headed outside. I asked Becca to play Santa and distribute the gifts. I knew something was off-kilter the second I started walking towards our make-shift Christmas tree… I just bit my lips, pressed my palms together, “I’m not crying in front of them, I wont.” Half the gifts were gone, stolen; whisked away in broad daylight and stifling heat. Most of the girls received their purses and pencils, but the boys’ pot had been raided. Jamali started to cry and took off towards the plantains. I walked inside slowly, couldn’t bring myself to take any photographs of this, couldn’t bring myself to struggle through my peanut-brittle Lusoga and attempt to communicate the injustice that had been done. Fingers were pointed, names were insinuated; I pulled down my curtain and cried. I should add also that this follows a series of dishonest events surrounding these packages. The day they arrived, my host family stole some of the balls from my room while I was out, I caught my host mother attempting to smuggle the purses away in her pockets, kids were putting the tennis balls in their trousers, rolling balls into bushes to come claim later…As everyone at home continuously reminds me, ‘You can’t blame them.” I guess not.

I caught up with Jamali later. He was wiping snot on his shirtsleeve and b-lining it to Casseva’s place, he knew it was her. We reached her compound. She was frying potatoes in a mud hut and her two younger siblings were peeling cassava inwards, knife blades facing towards their toddler soft bellies. I lost a little a bit, ‘Was it you? Did you steal them? Where are they?’ She almost cried, looked down, ‘Ah-ah, no.’ She looked towards Jamali like he could help her, he just stared towards her with his dark charcoal eyes. She ruffled through the cooking things in the corner of the hut and guiltily removed something. She held out her small coffee colored hand and revealed the six yellow zip ties I’d handed her earlier. ‘Bambi,’ she said, ‘Sorry.’ My very rare motherly instinct lurched, what am I?
I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to go, so I got gone. And now I’m here. Sitting by the Nile. Thinking cloudy thoughts of a flight in 16 hours.

Being here, you’re constantly faced with the dichotomy of the third world. Her endless generosity and overwhelming expectations for heightened reciprocation. Her poverty and riches. Her dismissal of the haves and her distaste towards being a have-not. The innocence of Uganda’s children will always be shrouded by their upheaval into adulthood; its babies raising babies around here and it makes me weary. At times it’s battered me down into apathy, at times it’s lifted my soul to a state of unconditional compassion and nurturing; both are feelings that circulate in me now.
I don’t feel capable of sizing up this experience. Of tacking it with numbers and calculated conclusions. Uganda is messy beautiful, a bit like me sometimes. There is a purity here, a silent undercurrent of love and resilience that penetrates the dishonest business, the corrupt authorities and the poor education, that drills through the rubbish lined avenues and reverberates in the bellies and mouths of these children.
All I have right now is that I am unspeakably grateful for this experience. I am unspeakably hopeful about Uganda’s future.

Thanks and love to those who have given me so much support; those who have kept away tears and brought on fits of familiar laughter, I am forever indebted.

Gettin' Gone

The green expanse back dropped by the cement-feathered sky made me cry today. Or at least I think it did. It could have been the wind, the dust maybe, or perhaps it’s that I’m leaving soon. The latter is a thought I’ve failed to give much attention. Being here has demanded so much of me I haven’t had a lot of time to dwell on not being here. But ‘not being here’ it comes.
It’s coming like winter in California. A sneaky sort of occasion marked by slowly bared sycamores and the end of pomegranates. By a homogenization of domes dinners (you begin to notice when every night is ‘butternut squash and potato soup night’) and by the charcoaling of the western sky from the four pm flight of the crows. It’s slow and quiet, terribly tragic and hopelessly romantic all at once. I guess leaving Uganda feels something like this, if it has to feel like something, this’ll do.

My story has laid itself out in a way that makes me feel simultaneously like I’ve been here for bloodlines and like I’ve just arrived. One of the clichéd ironies of moving to a new place is that just as one’s getting settled, just as I’m feeling home and comfortable and ready to throw my cares to the wind and explore…its time to go. Time to board a plane and eat mini pretzels and force myself not to think of what I’ve left. The landscape that could stop hearts, my village made of sticks, bricks and mud and containing nothing but molten gold open arms and smiles beaming equatorial sunshine, and the kids…these damn kids. When I leave, who’s gonna take on the role of 100 children screaming, “Shanoni! Shanoni! How are yoo? I em fyne. Byee! Byee!” everyday on my walk to and from the clinic…who?


I’m not gonna worry myself over it too bad yet. After all I still have 17 days and 3 hours left on the continent. That’s a fair piece of time to enjoy, to listen, to learn, to love. And …I can always comfort myself in knowing I only have 30 more months of university before I can come back.

Green Gentleness

It was the air that got me first, like a cool Californian inhale. The stuff you breathe near Half Moon Bay or Sebastapool, at San Gregorio and Pescadero; something earthy and damp, crisp and healthy. Within minutes of waking, of bringing forth the energy of the surroundings into my eyes, ears, nose, mouth and lungs, I was out of bed. Moving silently on foot over the mossy trails that edge themselves round the circumference of the island. The edge of my jeans were dewdrop drenched by the time I made it to the top of the nearest hill. I attempted to shade the early morning sun from both above and below as it plummeted from the clouds and at the same time reflected off the still water; I finally surrendered to just throwing my head back, eyes closed and letting my face enjoy the warmth. I stood silent and flat footed in a field of knee-high pink and yellow grasses, young corn stalks, and pockets of vibrant wildflowers that looked as though they’d slipped carelessly from an artist’s easel. This was Lake Bunyoni, this was a place that nursed my bones back white and my blood blood-red.


I had a lot of time for prayer over the last few days. Not a kneeling, penitent sort of affair; but focused moments for healing and gratitude. I found myself crosslegged on the dock, or standing at the waters edge or crouching atop the highest peak; thinking words of praise and thanks for my surroundings, for this place, her people, for my home, the people I love, the people they love. Wishing for a world brimming with peace and healthy people and compassion; then, realizing this isn’t the reality, settling for a world brimming with conscientious people and the ability to heal and forgive and create peace wherever it can be created. It felt good, who knows, maybe you felt it too.

I have been faced with an internal struggle recently, questioning my role here, or any good-willed foreigner’s role here. There are so many grey areas in aid work, so many ambiguous goals and objectives, so much dust swept under rugs, its suffocating. As someone who has had, BE SUSTAINABLE, engraved in her heart and probably on the back of her head for all she knows, its really difficult to look around everyday and see so much money being dumped into…exactly, who knows?
I try to tackle it slowly. ‘If there was an answer Shannon, do you think it would look like this? Do you think it would smell and taste and feel like this? No, there is not an answer, and this? This is most certainly not the answer.”
Its incredibly overwhelming, all the doubts, all the questions, all the frustration, even the rage… its boiled over into something cloudily condensing in my brain; I’m hoping having time in New Zealand will allow me to process, to sort, spring clean.


This is why being in Lake Bunyoni felt so good. My head felt clear, my skin was clean, I ate banana pancakes. I was and am so grateful for every opportunity I have to see clearly, to gain perspective, to reflect, to be humbled. I wish I could explain the quieting beauty of the place, but I can’t, and of course photographs can’t do it justice. I can be content living in the body it left me with, something strong, stable, free and ready to begin thinking of answers.

LIVE! LIVE! LIVE! FREE! FREE! FREE!

There seemed to be a management problem with keeping cues, perhaps it was just a particularly rowdy day, but I had a certain hunch that the blaspheming prefects threatening to cane the children wasn’t an everyday event. It was the kind of chaos one sees upon the release of a new Harry Potter, or if Brad Pitt was to stroll into a local restaurant… the sticky kind of fist flailing frenzy reserved for once-in-a-lifetime affairs. At first I was impressed, thinking this wide-eyed madness was a testament to my success, but as the novelty wore off, my vocal chords chafed against one another and I found myself threatening violence towards the hordes of teenagers I realized that perhaps I had bit off more than I could chew. It’s a dangerous game offering free services to those who have so little… but I forgave myself. How could I have possible anticipated free HIV testing would result in mass hysteria?
I sit basking in the somewhat lackluster glory of my S.H.A.R.E. program; the project that I’ve spent the last ten weeks developing and executing. It is over, the last child has been pricked, bled and counseled, the last corrupt CDC sponsored lab technician has been paid off…I now have time to be in Uganda, not just to stay here, but to be here.
The teacher training session went off beautifully in an off-green colored room on the second floor of the Cool Breeze Hotel. Questions were asked, interests were sparked, beers were served…Hooray Hoorah!
The next chapter consisted of executing the school sessions. The logistical swamp bucket that presents itself when trying to coordinate three autonomous bodies is thick and it is fierce. After much pleading, rationalizing and exhausted compromises each school finally confirmed a date that worked for both Soft Power Health (i.e. me…that wasn’t too difficult) and AIDS Information Centre Jinja.

tests waiting to be tested.

East Secondary School- November 5th at 10:30 am
The AIC staff arrived one hour late to our meeting place, thus we arrived nearly 2 hours late to our appointment. It didn’t seem to be any skin off the Headmaster’s back as he was lounging under a mango tree eating jackfruit when I arrived in my long-skirted American “I heart efficiency” guise. We lumbered into a concrete classroom with dirt floors and twiddled fingers as the students scuffled in. The presentation went nicely, my favorite moment was when a cocky 18 year old raised his hand to say, “You said that condoms they should be thrown in the pit latrine. But me, I fuck in the bush, so what then?” The AIC HIV counselor was kind enough to take that question for me; I cowered backwards and resisted the urge to kick him in the mouth. We tested 70 students.

Lubani Secondary School- November 8th at 1pm
The AIC staff arrived one hour late to our meeting place, thus we arrived nearly 2 hours late to our appointment. It didn’t seem to be any skin off the teacher’s backs as they were lounging under a grove of pine trees, “We have just released the students for lunch. You wait for some 40 minutes.” So we began the presentation at around 4 pm, at which time I was introduced by one of the younger teachers as his wife. This set the students into such a fit it took canes and cursing of all sorts to quell them. This particular teacher, my husband, has taken to text messaging me late at night to tell me he misses me, that he needs my personality or to ask me “ware you b?” I gave the presentation to just under one thousand students. Outside. Without a microphone. These are times when I thank my theatre career… projection, annunciation…pause, punch and attitude…you got it! We tested 97 students before we ran out of vacutainer needles and the sun went down. This was the most chaotic group of all the students, I sustained several minor injuries that evening as well as coming to the conclusion that I don’t ever, ever want to be a schoolteacher. The electricity at the campus was shifty at best and we realized about thirty minutes before dark that the special hire car we were riding in had no headlights. Henry, the driver, and I had a friendly little chat where all I could think about was that he had a huge problem of misusing the word “generally”, ‘Well, generally, I have no lights. Oh, yes, generally I will go get another car.” This was not the end of the “Henry screwing me up” saga.

Trinity College- November 12th 1pm
By this point I’d like to think I’d worked out most of the hitches. I told the AIC people to arrive four hours before the program began and this time we were only about 20 minutes late. I educated the students in a really beautiful shaded arbor; pine trees, eucalyptus and palm all collected in a strange kind of partnership to provide a cool and calm space in which to talk about viral infections and condoms. We were able to test 100 children and make it home before dark. I felt good, I felt really proud driving home around dusk, the pink sky burning into the sugar cane plantations, the amueze rising as a fingernail in the sky.


St. Stephen’s Secondary School- November 14th 10:30 am
I almost don’t want to talk about it. But this, as much any of the pitfalls and obstacles, was part of my experience, part of the reality of getting things done or not so done here. I received a text message from the HM from St. Stephens at about 10 am the day of the program, something along the lines of, “Please cancel your visit. We are too busy. Thankyou.” Keeping in mind please, that this is after two months of planning, of confirming and reconfirming of sticking to a date and time that he suggested. And so I kindly asked him to reconsider based on the fact that the program had already been paid for, the counselors had been hired etc etc. His response was, “Our position is final and unchangeable. Your program is not as important as our students learning. Thankyou.” The story concludes with me rolling up to the school in a heated fury and laying in on the administrative staff, using my big English words and all.
Over, done with, unfortunate. Thus the lackluster aspect of this whole sha-bang.

But now I have about a month to learn this place. Learn the ebbs and flows of her land and people, the things I’ve been biking past too fast to notice. The weather has been peach, plum, pear perfect lately; cloudy sunshine days, breezy, beautiful. The living here is easy and I’m gonna take an HIV load off and enjoy it while I can. Christmas is coming in fast this year.

"Don’t you see? ...Our city, it is shining.”

It does shine in places too. Samwiel wants me to observe how it shines in the buildings blessed with electricity. The Indian supermarkets, petrol stations, in the Christmas lights strung across the outside of the Mayfair Hotel & Conference Space. But I watch it shine elsewhere. Shone in the worn faces of the shop vendors and tailors, fragmented in caverras of vanilla flavored water, absorbed in the women’s cotton clothes and in the boda boy’s motorbikes, it reflects. The current that propels through this place is one that doesn’t rely upon wiring and circuits; it is passed by word of mouth, through Ugandan handshakes and customary greetings, in local eateries and convenient shops that all sell the same products for the same prices. It smells of the cast iron used by entire bloodlines, deep fried cassava and mandaze, poor sewage systems, people’s sweat. It is complacent and overused, tired and unfair, it is ancient and it is unchangeable. But there are other elements too, sensory components less perceptible to the untrained pallet. Sounds and tastes that cause a double take. What I perceive, the poverty, the impossibility of it all, contrasts starkly with the reality. The perpetually playing children, the mothers gossiping beneath doorjambs and jack fruit trees, the consistently fertile land and gentle weather.

Annie says we can’t ever get it. We aren’t capable of understanding the resilience because it will never be our reality. She likened it to leaving the Rwandan Genocide Memorial, the church where over 20,000 people were massacred. Where babies were killed by being thrust into concrete walls. Where men and women Tutsis kneeled frantically praying against plywood pews and violently digging plastic rosaries between thumb and forefinger until the last moment, the final blow. She said when she left, despite the disbelief and the horror, she still felt a blatant disconnect, a barren void that could never be breached because she wasn’t one of them. These weren’t her people. For her, September 11th drew more remorse, anger, sadness. Because we are tribal, communal animals, I wonder how significant it is to our conscious to be a member of the global community. Are we wired to be dedicated to our people, our countrymen, our tribe. Does this prevent us from ever really adapting to another culture? Will I ever be able to challenge these foreign demons as my own battle? Simanyi. I don’t know.


My village is poor, undeniably poor. Children are withdrawn from school because of shortage of funds (the fees are roughly $8 per term), my host sister has two hand-me-down dresses and a math compass to her name, we don’t buy toilet paper here. And yet we are fine, a self sustaining agrarian community, we fear no famine, no flood. Wednesday November 8th I witnessed a new face of Uganda. Soft Power was commissioned to do a special malaria outreach program. We drove the two hours to Kampala to facilitate it. Because of the distance, it was one of the first times SPH had allowed the local social workers to mobilize the community. When we arrived we knew immediately that this had not been done successfully. As we waited for the frantic last minute shepherding of local men and women we observed our scenery.


Nomolago rests awkwardly in the shallow valley between two upper class Kampala suburbs. Its knock-kneed shacks and sun bleached tenement structures rub eachother raw in the twenty kilometer rift that was originally allocated for catching runoff and waste water and providing a barrier between the two high caste communities. The body-stocking tributaries of the community run lengthwise through the valley, obviously over worked and poorly cared for. There is no electricity, no farming, no clean water source and no bathrooms. Immediately upon arrival you are kicked in the face with open sewage, the smell that can only come from a place where the nearest latrines are miles away, cost money to use and close at sundown. Sickly looking ‘Land Ducks’ tread heavily about the place scavenging for food, searching for water, picking at pieces of discarded plastic and old bicycle tires, not unlike the local children. Every child I say had Tinnia Capitus, a fungal infection of the scalp that causes small pocked white scabs to form on top of the head, later leading to open sores and further infections. Ultimately about twenty battered and jaded women showed to our session, they had been told we were giving the mosquito nets for free, when they realized this wasn’t they case they became restless, distressed, pushy and irrational. Me and the other three mzungus were shuffled hastily back into the van and promptly removed from the situation. An Israeli doctor who is volunteering there said that about 15,000 people lived in the slum. All illegally. All without healthcare. All without public schools. These weren’t refugees, they were just the ‘children of poor people’, I can only imagine what that implies about these people’s children.
On the drive back I half-listened to Dane Cook on my ipod. Distressed and unsettled. Dane Cook told jokes about people shitting in closets and ‘Karen the bag of douche’; I thought about the ugly differences between urban and rural poverty and how part of me hated myself for being relieved that I wasn’t the one that worked there, that it wasn’t my mess to manage. But for now, I am okay with that. I am easing in, mpola mpola, into this endeavor. When stakes are so high, I feel content with entering toe first… plunging carries with it too many unknowns and potential emotional breakdowns. Needless to say, I was relieved as we arrived back in Jinja.
‘Don’t you see?’, I asked myself, ‘This city, it is shining.’

We are somehow XTREME!

I caught my reflection in the glass of a notebook store the other day. We have no mirrors in my house so I’ve developed a ‘pretty pretty Peggy Moffit’ complex over the last month or so, eyeing myself in mucky sewage puddles, windows of supermarkets, car doors. The short glimpse set me into a mild self-centered fit; I looked fat. There is no doubt that I’ve put on a few subsisting off an entirely carb and starch diet, but it was discouraging none the less. I asked Samwiel, my new friend and trusted late night boda driver, if he thought I was fat. “Em, no.” he said, “You are somehow…medium.” Brightened my day a bit I suppose. Better medium than fat. Ugandans will also comment on how I’ve “increased” since arriving… also flattering.

It also highlighted one of the many quirks of the Ugandenglish vernacular, the use of ‘somehow’ instead of ‘somewhat’…I think.
I may ask, “Samweil, how was the day?” He replies, “oh, it was somehow ok.”
I think I have mentioned “the what?” before. This is a convenient tool employed to encourage audience participation during a conversation as well as stall your fellow converser so that you may think of what you are meaning to say next.
For example: “To make amagi amafumbe, yes please. First you do what? You go to buy eggs. You move from where? The Ivnamba trading center. Then you put them in the what? The boiling water. That you do what? You eat them… and they are somehow good.”
I’ve found myself parroting these techniques recently in order to communicate more efficiently, because in Rome you do what? As the Romans somehow do.

The Fam. Mama Rose on my right and sister Edith on my left.

We rafted the Nile yesterday. What I really mean is, we rafted the $%&!@*&^% Nile!!! It was a 12 rapid, 6-hour extravaganza; complete with three raft upheavals and subsequent passenger spewage, a guide who kept saying things like, “Oh god! We gonna die!” and “Here comes the shit falls!” and, as far as I’m concerned, my closest encounter yet with death. The run we did consisted of 2 grade II, 2 grade III, 4 grade IV and 4 grade V rapids; I was the only one in my group who’d ever even been in a raft before, needless to say there was a lot of screaming, panic struck faces and lost paddles. It was a really fantastic day though, one of those indirect sunlight days; pleasantly warm with thunderheads always looming just beyond us. I didn’t run into much difficulty or mental chaos throughout the day, until the last rapid. Itanga Falls, its called, “the bad place”, a massive 300-meter froth bowl famous for its “washing machine” maneuvers. We were the only raft out of 5 that decided to go down; of course we didn’t know this until the end because we went first. Two of our group of 7 removed themselves from the boat pre-rapid with a pleasant smile and a “yeah, hell no.” The first wave didn’t topple us, but we got stuck and there was this fleeting moment when I thought, ‘Wow, we didn’t flip, that’s incredible’. Little did I know that within seconds I would be toppled beneath the raft spinning in violent head over feet flips, one after the other after the other, I didn’t know what was up, who was down, if I was alive… my breathe had been knocked out of me upon contact with the wave so having to hold it wasn’t really a concern. I surfaced for a brief moment coughing, only to be sucked back down, it was this second round that ripped off both my shoes and jammed water so far up every orifice I think ill be crying Nile water for a month. When I was finally spat out centuries later a safety kayaker, I like to think of him as my guardian angel boater, pulled up along side of me, shouting at me to swim quickly to the raft so he could find my shoes… find my shoes, in this hell hole? Ok. I choked and spat my way to the raft only to have the guide say, “Hold on, feet up, feet up! Lots of rocks, lots of rocks!”… By this time my head was pounding so hard from all the water pressure in my nose and ears that comprehension and listening skills were rendered moot. Sometime after that and before sun down we made it back to land. It’s all kind of a blur of forced juice boxes and compulsive attempts at popping my ears. Two hours later after spending a crying fit in our dorm room shaking my head to one side, plugging my nose and blowing, tugging on my ear lobe…I had surrendered to the unbearable pulsing pain. My girlfriends came and got me and told me a raft guide knew just the trick. He heated up some olive oil, soaked two cotton balls in it, twirled them up and jammed them into my ears. He motioned for me to leave them there and then disappeared. Slowly but surely the pressure subsided and I was granted the privilege of having a chit chatty night at the bar reliving the rapids and telling the tails of my brush with death with my cohorts… we were Team Extreme. Our shirts are going to say, “TEAM EXTREME: We are somehow extreme.” Oh, and my guardian angel boater found my shoes, both of them…

"But, money is the most important thing"

I beg to differ.
...quoted from my boda driver this afternoon in response to me telling him that having a big house was not the most important thing. sigh.

My homesickness here doesn’t come in fits as I remember it from childhood. It accompanies me as a slow undercurrent, a subtle sort of white noise I’m disengaged from most of the time. Speaking with Dr. Judith yesterday, a pretty & petite 24-yr-old from southwest Uganda, I encountered a loss for words when posed, “what sorts of differences do you observe between your country and ours?” I struggled with this one. How about, are there any similarities? I think it’s easy to avoid stumbling into a pit of yearning for home when there are so few stimuli to pique my memory of the place. Sometimes there’ll be an onslaught of reminiscence; the dinner party in Rwanda…the salad, the wine, familiar music, that particular incidence was really overwhelming, but we mustn’t dwell, must we?
Bbbuuuuttttt……


I miss my home.
I miss ice cream, my family. I miss good beer, I miss my queen bed with the tableside denim lamp, I miss electricity. I miss good roads, comfortable drives, having a sweetheart, dancing. I miss my favorite kind of ethereal trippy flow music, walking through the property, privacy and my long hair. There. Done.
I had a hot shower this weekend. My first in a month or so, I couldn’t believe how consumed I was by it. I never wanted to leave. Granted it was a rusted metal spigot in the confines of a dark cement room, granted there were cockroaches on the floor and hoards of lake flies… but it was a hot shower, and I felt clean, and warm and sexy and it was great.

This past weekend, the other FSD mzungus and myself fled eastwards towards Sipi Falls for our mid-term retreat. Mid-term…yup, week 6 of 12… that shit trips me out. The place was beautiful, a common theme in this part of the world I’ve found. Rich soulful plateaus freckled with ancient caves that were inhabited by the local tribes worlds ago. The falls itself comes teeming over the edge of one of these cliffs, all white watered and roaring, plundering into a damp valley. Eucalyptus groves, banana plantations, burbling creeks and tributaries flanked by delicate purple-white flowers and kawa plants. Everything: GREEN. Everything: GREEN. We each paid 50,000 Ush to repel down the side of the beast; edging fearful and exhilarated 25 feet to the left of her, at the same time being spat away and seduced towards her violent coursing artery. That was fun, that was really fun.


I'm the little red spot to the left, and that big gushing thing is the waterfall.

Monday night I facilitated my HIV education seminar for the secondary school teachers. I had assumed that we would start at about 7:30, after all, I’d told them to show up at 6:30, its called African Time. When I got to the hotel at 5:30 I’d set out to practice, set up, calm my nerves and my newly arrived bout of nausea…what do you know? All the teachers were there, sitting, waiting patiently. That blew my mind. I was really impressed, impressed by the honoring of their commitment to come, their timeliness, their motivation…it was really inspiring, it made me feel like perhaps I’d gotten this one right, perhaps I’d tapped into something that they really wanted, that they felt could help them make a difference. I’d asked the hotel to provide refreshments on my bill… you know, coffee, tea, sodas… so when I saw all the teachers kickin’ back with cold beers I knew the communication barrier had once again gotten the upper hand. I paid nearly three times more than I’d budgeted for, but the heated post-seminar roundtable discussion on teaching techniques was a lot more fiery thanks to the happy glowing buzz the teachers were feeling. Everything happens for a reason?


I spent that night throwing up (beers were not involved in this I assure you) and wasn’t able to go to work on Tuesday thanks to a number of GI issues. All I wanted was sleep, the temperature in my solar oven house to drop below 90 and my host-mom to please stop offering me fried macaroni… and then down the path to my house comes trotting a whole band of cohorts. My clinic was worried about ‘the sickness’ and so they all decided to abandon their health profession posts for the afternoon and come visit me; needless to say it was the first sick-in-bed day I’ve ever spent surrounded by a doctor, two nurses, a lab tech and a cook…just in case.

Feeling tip-top now though, will go to Kampala (nation’s capital) on Friday and partake in gluttonous carousing theatrics… determined to catch Ugandan premier of “Superbad”…we’re a little behind the times. Its better than Jinja though, our local theatre here is playing Anaconda (circa 1996- feat. J-Lo {before she was J-Lo} and Ice Cube), mmmm mmmm quality film.

saving little pieces of world

Sub-Saharan Africa continues to harbor 64% of the world’s HIV infections and that number is growing 12 times faster than anywhere else on the globe. Uganda’s rural youth are becoming an increasingly high-risk demographic with over 80% of new infections attributed to unsafe sex. At this moment 7% of Uganda’s adult population is living with HIV/AIDS and that percent is on the rise…

This information probably isn’t very surprising, probably didn’t even make you blink. These are the sort of statistics that ooze out of journalists in high rises and news broadcasters backdropped by flat screen images of desolate villages teeming with gaunt children. This is the kind of news we file in our brains with the new Iraqi casualty count and North Korean refugee figures…we’ve heard it all before.
And yet our subconscious apathy… or helplessness or disinterest or confusion towards the matter doesn’t change the should-be-shocking reality that our globe’s poorest nations are being ate bone dry by this pandemic. In India, the Caribbean and Africa the tributaries of this infection are slowly but surely working and winding themselves into every community… flooding entire families, entire villages, and soon entire islands, countries and continents. No, this isn’t the bubonic plague; it isn’t a thief that comes in the night and ravages a populace. But considering HIV/AIDS has been on the forefront of confounded medicine for nearly thirty years and the western nations have been watching their numbers drop for ages now, there is obviously an identifiable disconnect between developing countries and developed countries with regards to this issue (among countless others). I don’t want to ramble on about that, but this is clearly different than not being able to fight corruption or develop industry…and it isn’t necessarily a shortage of money (the U.S., France, UK, Scotland, Canada…etc. all donate billions of dollars to the ‘fight against AIDS’ in SSA) as much as it is a misstep in distribution of funds *surprise surprise*. Musevini, or M7 as he’s known here, basically blew his whole foreign aid wad on one campaign: the ABCD’s- Abstinence. Be Faithful. Condoms. Or Die!! Clever marketing I think. Blech. Anyways, the bottom line is that despite how tired of an issue HIV/AIDS may seem over yonder, its so evident here you can touch it, it looms over homes and children like rain clouds.
A virus is a small infectious organism that needs a living host cell in order to reproduce. The virus often attaches to a specific type of cell, releasing its own RNA or DNA coding information in to the cells decoding machinery. The virus hijacks the host cell’s equipment so that components of the virus are manufactured and reproduced with in the host cell’s machinery and subsequently released into the host where the cycle restarts.
Normally, when a virus enters the body, your immune system (white blood cells) is able to attack and destroy any infected cells. Immunity from viruses can only be achieved by receiving a vaccine. Babies receive vaccines for polio, measles, rubella and other awful difficult to combat viruses. However once contracted, there is no cure for a virus, bits of it will always be lurking somewhere in your system like a drug addict waiting to score.
HIV is a virus (hence the V). It’s a smart virus. A very very smart virus. It has evolved or adapted or come to be by happenstance in such a way that the specific host cell it feeds off of and destroys is the very cell your body needs to combat it…see the problem? The CD4 lymphocytes, or helper T-Lymphocytes are the Godfather’s of your immune system. When something infiltrates your body (a bacterial, fungal or viral infection), it’s their job to call their friends, cousins and other mobster white blood cell cohorts and coordinate the subsequent destruction of said infiltrators. When HIV enters the picture it handicaps that mode of communication, activation and coordination. Everyone starts to panic, doesn’t know where to go, who to kill…Montague vs. Montague, Capulet vs. Capulet…the immune system begins to commit suicide.
Meanwhile the host is chillin. Maybe a fever here, a headache there…nothing a joint and a Simpsons re-run couldn’t quell. If the host isn’t looking for them, it can take years for your CD4 counts to drop low enough to recognize abnormal symptoms…you can see the issue with sexual transmission; if you don’t know your HIV+ you probably don’t think your HIV+ so your pledge that your “clean” to your partner isn’t necessarily a lie as much as a fatal error.
Ultimately, despite the best efforts of ART (antiretroviral therapy- which aims to abolish viral RNA reproduction), your body is no longer able to defend itself. AIDS is categorized by the development of rare infections and cancers: thrush (yeast infection in mouth, vagina or esophagus), pneumonia, tuberculosis or Kaposi’s sarcoma (red/purple raised patches on the skin); though there are many more. 95-100% of HIV infected people will develop AIDS at some point, though it may take more than 10 years.
Last week my supervisor wanted to demonstrate how our HIV test kits in the clinic work. He carelessly grabbed a blood sample from the dozens of test tubes perched on the counter and dropped a blot on a tiny receptor strip. Ten minutes later we went to check it out and it had read positive. The random lab sample, the older women in the hall who’d complained of dizziness was living unknowingly with HIV. We couldn’t inform her I was told, as its illegal to test for HIV without consent. So I sat and stared at the test for a few minutes until the doctor came and threw it in the rubbish bin. I bid the woman a safe journey and refilled my water bottle. Those are things I don’t know what to do with.


So. I’m here for 3 months (1 of which is gone with the wind). I’m not going to eliminate AIDS from rural Ugandan communities. But I’d like to think I could take a stab at educating, informing and testing my district, my community; with the hopes and idealistic longing that my efforts will propagate themselves elsewhere in the country. With the money I raised at home, the money that was donated so generously to this project by my dear friends, family and even distant acquaintances; I’ll be implementing a pilot project for Soft Power Health.
The project is called S.H.A.R.E.
Sharing HIV Awareness through Resources and Education (I think it’s a title rule of acronyms that you don’t use the acronym in the full name, but alas). It’s a three part project, whose wheels and wings are already rolling and flapping with the wind at our back…wind being generated by a people who know the situation, know what they need and are willing to work to get it.
I’ve been coordinating with 4 rural secondary schools in the Butugaya and Budondo sub-counties of Jinja District. My goal is to make HIV education, resources, testing and post-test counseling readily available to those who need it most at no cost. Those who need it most in Uganda are the youth (15-24) living in rural areas… so highschools in the bush it was! Here’s a basic breakdown.

Part 1: A teacher’s information and education seminar conducted by Soft Power Health (i.e. me) aiming to educate and train teachers from each of the four selected secondary schools about the HIV virus, transmission, treatment and prevention; as well as equip them with the skills and framework to initiate an HIV based curriculum in their schools. The program will serve as a great opportunity to build the resource capacity of the schools, clear up any HIV/AIDS misconceptions and equip the teachers with the knowledge to be an on-campus HIV education resource for their students.
The free teacher training and education session will be at
6:30 pm on Monday, October 22, 2007
At the Cool Breeze Hotel in Jinja

Part 2: Soft Power Health and the AIDS Information Centre will facilitate an on-campus HIV prevention program at each school. The program features an education and information seminar, followed by free on-site voluntary testing and post-test counseling for teachers, students and the local communities. Soft Power Health will be partnering with the AIDS Information Centre in order to offer the highest quality services. We hope the program will help the students and their communities gain a better understanding of HIV and the risks associated with its contraction and transmission, as well as provide a free testing service to the community in the hopes of stopping the spread of HIV. This program will occur at each school on a day that works for AIC, SPH and the school; we prefer to conduct the program between November 12th and November 30th.

Part 3: The creation of a savings account that will generate funds in order to pay for 2 Soft Power Health staff members to become HIV post-test counselor certified. I had originally intended to pay for and have the trainings completed by the time I leave, but I’ve learned it’s a much more involved and expensive process that Id thought and so ill just be setting the wheels in motion. Once SPH has their own post-test counselors, we wont need to rely on AIC to provide their own staff to carry out the testing and counseling… it’s a way to make SHARE a SPH dominated project so that they can be more self reliant.

So that’s it. The calling I’ve been waiting for. I visited Lubani SS and Trinity College this morning and met with the entire staff of both. I was showered with cups of tea and mandaze (African doughnuts). Everyone I’ve worked with thus far has been so responsive and I’ve been more efficient here than ever at home, despite the stigmas attached to getting things done in the ‘third world’. I was fortunate enough to wander into the AIDS Information Centre in Jinja (the JFK of Ugandan AIDS work) in my first week of work just to ask a few questions. I ended up in the manager’s office, describing my project and having him offer to provide all of the testing equipment for the program. Nearly $6,000 worth of HIV kits, needles, test tubes, gloves, tourniquets etc. So I’m just trekkin along. I’m really enjoying it thus far. I anticipate huge pitfalls, but as the program director of FSD handed over 1.2 million shillings for SHARE this afternoon I was flying pretty damn high. Ill be creating posters, pamphlets and other various text-y things in the next week and then we’ll just hold our breath and jump I guess. Its pretty exciting to find yet another thing that makes my tick though. I always was one to tick.

Gone ta Rwanda

The drive there was majestic. Simply. Purely. Truly. Cruising blissfully through Mother Nature…her valleys and ridges, her peaks, hills, gorges and effortless endless curves. The drive from Jinja to Kigali, Rwanda takes about 10 hours; and as it’s Africa many of that ten hours is spent circumnavigating surprise potholes, goats and toddlers or muscling your vehicle, fists clenched, lungs pursed over the boulders, stumps and other odd solid masses that have been mistaken for smooth concrete by the public works ministry. Upon arrival we were told by the ‘Cavern du Auberge’ that unfortunately a group of 6 mzungu girls traveling from Kampala that very day had been mistaken for our group of 6 mzungu girls traveling from Kampala and thus our reservation had been surrendered mistakenly to the wrong group. Which is all fine and well when you can freely glide across the metropolis that is Kigali asking each friendly Rwandan where might there be alternative lodging… however when their first choice language is Kirwandan, the second Swahili and the third French… I find it a tit bit more difficult. In any case we bunked up across the street at the Dream Inn for a few dollars more, had running water, two double beds, flushing toilets (!!!) and a television that broadcasted CNN world, French golf and low budget Rwandan hip hop videos.
This experience was intermingled with the kick in the mouth reality that there were no ATMs in the entire city and that the following day was Sunday meaning no banks would be open. Four of seven of us were unable to withdraw money the whole trip, keeping reckless spending to a minimum and alcohol consumption violently stunted. Despite my pauper status I was able to score three beautiful Rwandan fabrics and am now on the market for a Ugandan tailor to craft me some style.
An honest ‘sad truth’ about the whole trip was that the food was maybe my favorite part. You must understand however that food takes on a different kind of meaning in your life when you are confined to cabbage, potatoes, matoke, rice and beans for every meal…such is my eating reality in Uganda. We met up with this really fun cute couple from U of O who had just graduated and decided they’d play house for the first time in Rwanda (whatever you’re into I guess)… anyway they were Kigali experts and the first night took us to an UH-mazing Indian restaurant complete with Mango Lassi and every muted color curry you can imagine…heaven. The following evening they hosted my favorite kind of yuppie wine, salad, pasta, bruchetta party; I remenesced about yuppie parties past. I was a little homesick, a little tipsy and sufficiently stuffed as we departed; it made me happy to know that half way across the globe I can still find a few conscious Americans who want to step out of any present catastrophes and bask in wonderful indulgence.
Monday we drove 3 hours east towards the DRC to Volcano National Park, only to be met with a firm “no, I’m sorry, it’s not possible” upon request to a private guided volcano hike…only 1 hike leaves a day, and that is at 7am. Somehow we whined and lied and puppy-eyed our way into the system and before I knew it we were trekking upwards at a pace that me and my “I’ve been sitting on my ass in Africa for a month” thighs were not prepared for. The ascent to the top of the volcano whose name I can’t remember was 3800 meters, and took about 3 hours. About 100 feet from the top, it started raining…sorry, I meant pouring…sorry, I meant hailing. My mantra of “wait till you see the view from the top” was immediately dashed upon summiting. I realized that my only view was of the thick envelop of cotton ball mist and the thick bowling ball raindrops wailing in front of my hooded view. We all kind of half-smiled at each other, choked down some donated glucose biscuits and prepared for the descent. This experience I may add, was perhaps one of the most challenging I’ve encountered and demanded from me supplies of patience, focus, strength and humility that I had never tapped into. Going down took longer that hiking up as each step had to be calculated perfectly keeping in mind hill grade, mud viscosity, leg shaking vibration gradients and how-close-to-tears measurements…all in all a very scientific experience. All I could think about was how I wished I’d brought a helmet and how I had no medical insurance in this country, it was great. We did see two gorillas though (normally a $500 event, seriously); they were hanging placidly in the big huge jungle trees making noises I’ll never be able to replicate despite my tireless efforts.




On our first day there we visited the Rwandan genocide memorial as well as Niyamata, a memorial church. It’s hard to speak about what that was like. How it affected me. How it changed or broadened or shed light on or confused my perspective of Rwandans. The whole event was nothing but devastating, nothing but utterly horrifying. The brutal itching scars of colonialism coming back to haunt a culture years and years after their occupation. It makes me sick. It makes me wonder how a Rwandan could ever look at a mzungu with anything other hatred. I don’t quite feel up to describing the experience right now, but I will and I ought to. But I really encourage people to do some research into the history of the genocide in Rwanda.

We saw zebras on the drive home. They were grazing by the side of the road. So free, so wild…we were able to slide the windows back in our taxi-bus and I could feel the cool equatorial air whip at my face and my chest. My ipod was playing Neil Young I think. It felt good, one of those “I love Africa moments”…

love from a clinic in Kyabirwa

Soft Power Health came to be in the first rainy season of 2006. An American physician, Dr. Jessie Stone laid the bricks of the clinic herself and worked her tiny frame all day for months till the mosquitoes became too ferocious each dusk. Her vision was a world without malaria. A world without one of the most preventable diseases imaginable; a world without the disease that kills more children under 5 in Uganda than anything else…think death counts in the millions. She began chipping away at this by conducting basic community training with the rural villages; talking about malaria, its transmittance and offering absurdly subsidized insecticidal mosquito nets (about a buck n’ a half each). The program was a success and she now finds her cell phone in the states being blown up with the LC’s (local councilmen) of villages wondering when she’s making the rounds in their neck of the bush.
They do good things here; the facilitation of an extensive rural outreach program in which they discuss, educate and train villages about everything from HIV awareness to prenatal care to proper mosquito net hanging. Soft Power Health also manages a full time primary care clinic operating out of Kyabirwa Village (my home sweet home); we treat mostly malaria cases, the occasional malnourished baby, here an infected open sore, there a hypochondriac suffering from “back pain”. The flat fee is 5,000 Ush… about $2.50, this includes your consult with the physician, any lab work rendered necessary and whatever drugs we can prescribe you from our aforementioned closet pharmacy.
As this is the first real job I’ve had, short of ringing in cocktails for The Man, I was slated for obvious hesitations about what life in a 40 hour work week really entailed… but lucky for me and all future employers, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find it isn’t the black hole of energy and pleasure I’d imagined. In fact, on the contrary I enjoy it…ya might even say its turned me into a morning person *gasp*.
I wake up according to my own free will (which is just weird because my own free will says 8am is cool, opposed to like noon) and then hop out of bed. I pull back the colon trap mosquito net that sets me into claustrophobia induced fits a few times each night, maybe pee in the pit latrine (but only if I know I’m not going anywhere with a flushing toilet before 2pm) and then sit myself down to a breakfast that’s been waiting on a tray for me for a few hours…just how I like my eggs really. I then do some questionable guess work as to how my newly short hair looks and eye myself awkwardly in my pocket-sized “mirror” made out of the tin foil-esque material they use when fashioning the looking glasses for porta-potties, hiking bathrooms and prisons. After my fashion biddings have been tended to I jump on my new mountain bike and cruise through a few kilometers of dense jungle village dirt paths to none other than the Soft Power Health Clinic.
And then begins the real work, the real nitty-gritty… but first and foremost, we take tea. As is the way of their colonial predecessor, Ugandans also agree that any time is a good time for tea time…an thus I’m offered piping hot milk tea (boiled milk with sugar) or water tea (boiling water with loose floating tea leaves and sugar) dozens of times over the course of my sub-tropic equatorial afternoons. Oh, and for clarification, when I say with sugar, it isn’t our delicate few teaspoons…its 3-4 heaping tablespoons of it…literally...ya like cavities?

Tomorrow at dawn Ill head south west, slicing through the countryside to the border with Rwanda…which if I’ll goes as planned, I’ll be able to cross. Ill be taking a 10-hour taxi ride with a few of the other interns into the capital city of Kigali. We plan on doing the tourist thing for a day or so, visiting war memorials, genocide museums ect, but I’m also stoked to go to their volcanic national park and ascend to the top of one of the inactive volcanoes…yeah, crater lakes! We’ll return home on Tuesday, which is Ugandan Independence day. This marks the 45th anniversary of Uganda’s independence from Britain. Their 45th anniversary as a ‘democracy’; although they have yet to see their country bask in the glory of the ‘people’s choice’ as their current ‘president’ Musevini has modified the constitution over a dozen times in order to maintain his rule for the past 21 years. Ah well, such are the scars left by colonialism.

Happy Independence Day Uganda…may we live to see the day when the millions of displaced northerners return to their villages, when you no longer coexist as the most resourceful nation on the planet as well as the poorest and most exploited and when HIV and AIDS no longer claims the lives of 10% of your people. Maybe next year…eh?

"Jambo!"

I sit now in a white plastered room in the village of Bujugali. An empty doorframe leads into a smaller closet space; this casket-sized structure serves as Soft Power Health Clinic’s Pharmacy and Dispensary. Two adjacent blood colored file cabinets sit bulging awkwardly with precariously stacked medications in some sections and one lone pill bottle in others; aging masking tape reads ‘syrups’, ‘analgesics’, ‘P2 Agonists’ in order to denote the spaces where the drugs ought to go. I reside in one of three makeshift consultation room; the largest room in the building serves as the laboratory where John Bosco “the boss” and a large gentle man called Livingston sit all day ceaselessly handling blood samples. They look for typhoid, yellow fever, syphilis, and our number seller here in Uganda: Malaria.

It overwhelms me to speak of work right now; I have a project design budding in its early stages. Just germinated. A seedling I’m so eager to watch sprout, I run the risk of leaving it pale and withered as my over attentive torso blocks it’s sun. In any case, I’ll report back soon.
I moved into my host family home last Friday. My room is two meters into the front door, 7 paces to the right, past the living room and right on till morning. Cool worn cement floors and walls adorn the whole structure. The outside has a brick façade, but I know the truth…the village is warm.
I live in an agrarian jungle; a banana plantation right outside our back door, coffee plant volunteers seeding everywhere, each home equipped with its own durable sweet potato field and as I look to the west to watch the sun set from the main road I look past an ocean of sugar cane.


beautiful beautiful kawa...coffee bean
My mother, Rose, is dark and strong, with speckled honeycomb eyes and hands the size and texture of a baseball mit. My older sister, Silvia, is small and waif-like, and yet incredible durable and grounded; she gets stuck in quick sand Christianity too often for me, but her intentions are good. And the last of our humble abode is Edith, she is 10 and has boyish facial features, from what I can tell she has 1 dress, 1 skirt and 1 shirt…all beyond repair. Her status in the family seems to be dangerously close to house servant and she is so soft spoken I’ve all but given up trying to hear her quiet obeys; I found out just this morning that her constant hacking cough is because she has malaria…there is a sever lack of communication in my house.

The 25 or so children that reside on my street alone are priceless. The day I moved in, I had an audience of about 10, just peering curiously into my window for hours…they didn’t want to chat or beg, they just wanted to see my things…things are a rare commodity out here.


My mom had snuck a baseball into my suitcase and that provided them with hours of entertainment…a baseball. Oh, and my poor bear Oliver (many of you know him, some even look on him with detest, but alas…) he spent the day getting thrust high into the air only to plummet to the dust wherein groups of 4 or 5 would pounce upon him and pull violently at his ears and paws until one victor arose with him as a captive. I’m particularly taken with an 8 year old called ‘Jamali’, his English is good and he is as curious about me as I am about him. His family is Muslim and as it is Ramadan, him and his 5 siblings haven’t yet been blessed with gift of the foul chocolate covered protein bars I’ve been distributing desperately to distract and quell the band of ragamuffins. I met Jamali outside my house early this morning and asked if he wanted a walk to school, he said no, he didn’t have school… “Why?”… “No money”. So much for Musevini’s Universal Primary Education Program.


I’m still learning, still absorbing…nowhere near a place called familiar or normal. But this place and these people are good. They are pearls, silk, cinnamon and silver.

calm before the crazy...

Go to people, live with them, love them, learn from them.
Start with what they know, build on what they have, and work with the leaders so when the work is done, people can say- We did this ourselves.
Lao Tzu 700 BC


Bujugali Falls...my new home!

Been five days now. Hard to believe, hard not to believe. This is ‘orientation week’; myself and 7 other Americans (6 from New England, 1 from Portland) are guided like lame livestock through the ins and outs of our current and upcoming Ugandan experiences by our Program Coordinators, Jen (4 redbulls a day, rides a bike around the city at night w/o a light, has a deathwish?,Vancouver) and Berna (goofy, just wants a beer, gasps like she’s run over a toddler every time her phone rings, NE Uganda) and Margaret (regrets this isn’t a Christian organization, drives a low rider white pickup the size of a mini cooper, wears dress suits EVERYDAY, Kampala) our Program Director.

Over the course of the week we’ve been tooling around Jinja and have had and will be having various sessions on:
• Expectations (you’re not gonna change the world)
• Safety & Security (don’t be stupid or you’ll get robbed)
• Culture Shock (you’re rich and white…ummm…better get over it or we can try and get you knock off Zoloft from a local clinic)
• Local Community Orientation (get used to being lost, ripped off and laughed at)
• Health (like diarrhea? Vomiting? Snails that enter your bloodstream through your feet?…well, it don’t matter cuz you’ll have an intimate relationship with all of them in a few weeks!)
• Living with a host family (Everything they do will be weird and everything you do will offend them…but hey…we’re bridging cross-cultural gaps!)
And coming soon to a small sweaty cement room near you:
• Conducting a Needs Assessment (you don’t know shit, go find some out)
• Working with a Host Organization (8am means 11am and when it rains no one will show up to work…it rains daily)


My host organization!!!! Soft Power Health.

Friday we move in with our host families. Start work Monday morning. We’ve been told the first week is supposed to be strictly an observation week, but considering I’ll be in a four room clinic I think people will notice the mzungu in the room biting her nails, not doing jack. By the end of week two we have to have developed our workplan, budget, objectives and agenda for the next twelve weeks…I’m the only one in the group who fundraised before coming so everyone else’s budgets are restricted to $200, which is something, but probably won’t go too far, I’m hoping I’ll have the ability to aim a bit higher with an inflated budget. There’s just so much to do, so much that can’t be done and so many components that must be taken into consideration before I can do anything at all. Tell me how, after 10 days in a community, I’m going to be able to determine what they truly need, tackle how to accomplish that and still make the locals feel important, involved and empowered. But perhaps, 12 weeks from now, there will be small circle of Busoga and one pasty white girl in front of the Soft Power Health Clinic, beaming over the same thought… ‘We did this ourselves’.
I’m into that.


(me being into it)


a boat and a bike in bujugali for eric...everything he could ever need.

Doin Jinja Up Right, Days I and II

There are funny sorts of birds here. Funny sorts of plants too. Lots of phenotypic similarities, but then quirky differences that your brain can’t process properly so you’re left with a bottom-up understanding of the thing itself. The bogandelias (sp?) grow as muffin-shrubs, ganja is free growing all over the place, the chickens and roosters don’t have feathers on their heads, there are these pterodactyl ‘Maribu Storks’ that stand at about a 10 year old’s height with their long backwards legs and a huge pink testicle sac dangling from their gaping beaks and then the turkeys: a vomit inducing cross between peacocks and those penis men from Star Wars (JEST knows what I’m talkin bout).
But the children, oh man, these children are beautiful. The Ugandan skin is dark, real unsweetened baking chocolate dark; the Bugandan people (mostly Bantu I think) don’t have those wide, cheekbone heavy faces…more compact, succinct, focused and proud. The children are much smaller than kids in America, little bodies and little hands and these big weepy eyes…how I’m going to avoid going broke giving them all hundreds of shillings I don’t know. There isn’t a lot of that whole ‘electricity thang’ around here either, so the prospect of being indoors isn’t too enticing for those under 12 or so. The smaller boys and girls dance around in their front yards or in the streets making spazzy embarrassed movements, throwing whatever’s in their hands into the sky, laugh-screaming, “Muzungu, Muzungo!!” as this band of 8 really American Americans (think Sarah H, Sarah I, Shannon H, Shannon C, Annie and Andrew) stroll through the red colored streets.

Today we entered the market for the first time. I was asked yesterday by a very educated, very jaded Ugandan woman if this was my first time in a ‘developing country’…it was a caddy cold kind of comment, one I wanted to shrug off with a “yeah…so.” But this afternoon I realized it isn’t quite as easy of an in as I’d thought. The avenues between the vendors in the market are about a meter wide, just long enough for two small toddlers to clasp their begging fingers from opposite sides. The vendors shoulder up next to each other hiking prices for the Wellingtons and the pineapples, the plantains and the underpants…it isn’t aggressive like Mexican markets, but it’s a different kind of heavy…just so many things I suppose. I’m not sure yet.

We continue to tip toe into Luganda; it’s the predominant dialect spoken in central Africa, in the Buganda kingdom. My organization is in Busoka Kingdom where they speak Lusoka, I’m told they’re similar. It’s not a very sticky language, as in my brain doesn’t seem to want to let it stick. But im not scared to practice in public and the reception is namely positive, so alas, I’ll persevere.

According to our ‘Culture Shock’ session with the FSD coordinators I’m experiencing the Honeymoon stage. As in the euphoric high stage that peaks right before we inevitable plunge into the depths of the inferior/angry/depressed/inadequate/misunderstood/dark phase. As was explained by our PC Jen, ‘you’ll all experience it, just uh, just make a list of all the things you hate about home. That oughta get you movin back up the ladder !’ I wouldn’t say I’m homesick, I just wish home could experience this too; I guess I feel a bit detached…but I am half a continent and an ocean away and its 1000 shillings/minute to call home, so that seems reasonable.
But here's a goat for my mom.

greenman 2007

BURNING MAN 2007 aug 27- sept 3

a good one, first and foremost. As fellow burners/dreamers/cosmic moon people can imagine, its heinously difficult to summarize or even bound these feelings and thoughts and sights and tastes into the whitebred confines of the english dictionary.
for me it was a lot of pinks, rose colored auras, touching eric's kitty sweater made out of woven milk and spider's silk, the luke warm water temperature of center camp, the graham cracker dust I stopped giving a damn about, mouths, eyes, hair, linens, fabrics, sucking candies, our rickety ole' love boat that had carried lovers through trecherous times for centuries, the scrap metal steel worshipers, praying for stephanie, melting into eric's lap in tears or menaical laughter (whichever came first), cold cold apple juice and my boots...OHHHHHHHHH my boots.

these aren't my photographs, they belong to Rob Roy, who we were fortunate enough to crash into a few times out on the playa.
thank you rob roy.



this place was very special to me. a tree house. the love seat window proved to be quite a sanctuary for the goofairy.



you just, you just can't imagine how cool this is. think flip book reality mind fuck extravaganza. simply wild.



the burn. I watched curled beside a lover, that was swell. we both melted a bit I think. the explosion made our bones rattle.
I'm still recovering...singed eyebrows and such.


boys like things like this. unbelievable, these artists, they just must be crazy... I mean...how? what? geez.


E-ROD and I stood right below this. yup, its true.

sending such firm warm embraces to the 'scabies awareness camp'. what an amazing ride eh?
I miss you all so much, please come back here and check on me in the next few months.
you're the reason I'll still be psyched up to move back to davis after a year of exploring. such great hearts.
next year... less grape seed extract and more juice.

loveshan