"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.’