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…