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…