‘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 I secured the gifts between pages of the outdated Daily Monitor and New Vision news bulletins and tied them off with green clothesline.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.
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