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

we like to think home is where the heart is...

but right about now my heart is sleeping soundly in an extra-long twin bed in davis...
I'm going to have to make exceptions for that friendly phrase... home is what you make it to be?

what do you make of this...
I'm thinking right near that line between can't-breathe-excitement and fucking-terrifying oughta do.

got this email a few days back:

Host Family Information
For: Shannon Harney
Dates and Program: Sept 15, (Uganda)
Location: Jinja

Dear Shannon,

I am pleased to inform you that you have been placed with the Mpangi family in Bujagali, Jinja for your family home stay. Below you will find important information about your host family.

Host Family: Mpango
Contact Information:
Main Contact: Silaji Mpango

Host Family Members:

Mother, Rose

Daughter: Edith, 9 yrs

Daughter: Sylvia, 22 yrs

Son: Silaji Mpango, 24 yrs (works at Soft Power Education and will walk with you to work in the morning)

Accommodations:

Your family is located in Bujagali, about a 10 minutes walk from Soft Power Health and only 10 minutes from Bujagali Falls, one of Jinja’s main tourist sites.

Your house is quite rural, located in a very scenic village. It is a small, modest house with only 2 bedrooms and a small sitting room. There is no electricity and water is from a borehole (though your family knows that you must be supplied with bottled water). Your kitchen, latrines and bathing facilities are all located outside. There is a small front yard and a small backyard. There are several children around the village and many chickens and goats.

As you will be walking to work everyday, we recommend that you bring (or buy here) a pair of boots or shoes that you do not mind getting muddy. There are no paved roads and the red clay earth will stain.