Saturday, December 19, 2009

Last Minute Gift

Here is the information for this year's Give-A-Goat program. I know we're getting down to the wire and Christmas is only a few days away, but this is a wonderful program that really impacts people's lives. Just an idea for something special this Christmas!


Hunger, sickness, loss: the gift of a goat to a family with any one (or more) of these challenges, leads to milk for a malnourished child. This gift translates directly into protein and calories - a very tangible demonstration of the love of Immanuel: God with us. This year, as a result of your generous gifts last Christmas to BundiNutrition's Matiti Project, 109 goats were distributed to families coping with these very real challenges in sustaining life in Bundibugyo. We are so grateful for your generosity. It is a privilege to be your "hands and feet" on the ground here as we see the smiles on a mother's face as the arrow on the scale creeps higher and higher! This Christmas, if you would like to "Give-a-Goat" to provide milk for a hungry, sick or left behind child, $130 allows us to purchase a high grade dairy goat (due to the number of goats distributed to date, we are now able to purchase their progeny locally here in Bundibugyo), train the family in its care, give them a few tools for constructing a simple shed, and then enable them to take the goat home. $200 will allow us to do the same AND to set aside a portion for supporting the ongoing development of a local high grade dairy goat breed in Bundibugyo – an effort to develop a culturally appropriate and sustainable source of milk to boost the protein and caloric intake more widely, in a district where half of all children are chronically underfed. For the third consecutive year, we are offering African handmade Christmas tree ornaments to the first 100 Give-a-Goat donors (at the donation level of your choice). Please read the following directions carefully, and a very Merry Christmas to you from all of us here in Bundibugyo!

How to "give-a-goat":
1. Go the to Give-a-Goat donation page here,
http://whm.org/project/details?ID=12375 to donate by credit card. This is the simplest and fastest method, and allows our colleague Ginny Barnette in the Sending Center to quickly confirm your donation and address and mail you the ornament.
2. Send a check to WHM Donation Processing Center, P.O. Box 1244, Albert Lea, MN 56007-1244, writing "Goat Fund 12375" on the memo line. Since the processing and return of the information to Ginny could take a couple of weeks, you may want to email her (
GBarnette@whm.org) in order to be sure you receive the ornament before Christmas.
3. If you would like the ornament mailed to a DIFFERENT address than the one on your credit card or check, you must also communicate this to Ginny. A card will be included with each goat describing the program.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

A Son's Sickness, A Father's Story

Sickle Cell Disease is tragically common here. While you may have studied it briefly in high school biology, I'll spare you a discussion of the genetic basis of the disease. Boiled down, it is a genetic disease that leaves the patient with extremely low levels of hemoglobin, so that the heart and lungs have a hard time supplying oxygen to the body. In the U.S. it is a manageable disease. Here it is not. I see hundreds of anemic children with SCD, and I can't think of a single adult with it. You will understand the implications of that.

Aliganyila is my mental image of Sickle Cell Disease. Distended abdomen, stunted growth, big yellow eyes, stick-thin arms and legs, pale palms, malnourished body, frizzy discolored hair. That look, to me it says "sickle cell." He is the embodiment of the disease, as far as I have experienced it. He is also a wonderful boy, playful and amiable, the son of a friend of mine and the nephew of my best Ugandan friend. Jennifer says that his life has been tenuous since he was born. One emergency blood transfusing after another, visits to the hospital or the Myhre's at all hours, rushed trips to the district hospital to get the right blood type, always near the brink, sometimes farther and sometimes nearer, but never comfortably distant from death. A few weeks ago he came to the heath center desperately ill. Heidi told me he had a foot in the grave, and that there was no blood of the correct type anywhere in the entire district. It was supposed to arrive the following morning, but it seemed unlikely that he would survive the night. I went down to the health center to visit him, and it was physically painful for me to see him in the condition he was in. He lay on his side, his breathing rapid and labored, his racing pulse visible in his neck, as his lungs and heart tried desperately to get enough oxygen to his body. For him, just surviving was like running a marathon. Even lifting his head was too monumental and exhausting a task, though he managed to lift his hand a few inches to meet mine as I sat with him. His hemoglobin was just above 2 - for comparison, I would be rushed to the hospital if mine dipped below 8. Just about any child in the States would be dead around 4 or 5. Aliganyila probably hasn't been above 6 in his entire life, with 12 being considered normal. He simply could not get enough oxygen, and he couldn't last long in that state. I don't know if I have ever prayed for anything as fervently as I prayed for Aliganyila's life that day.

Before I continue, I need to mention his family. His father is a friend of mine who lives just down the street - I've eaten meals there and stayed a night or two at their house. He has several children with SCD. About a year and a half ago, before I arrived, one of his sons died of the disease. Then less than three weeks before Aliganyila was admitted at the health center, another son with sickle cell died. A friend told me that he has lost 6 children. And now, with Aliganyila near death, he was facing the prospect of losing three sons in 18 months, and two in less than three weeks. That thought floored me. I can't even wrap my mind around it. I simply have no context that allows me to understand what that would be like. The horror and tragedy of it brought tears to my eyes and a knot to my stomach. I cannot really describe how I felt; horror, anger, pain, doubt, and many other emotions at once. I looked into the father's eyes, full of despair and tears.

Eventually, the blood arrived, and Aliganyila held out long enough to get the transfusion he needed. The next day he was sitting up in bed, and smiled at me as I greeted him. He was alive again. It turns out that at that point, his hemoglobin was still below 4, but his body is so accustomed to the anemia that he was looking pretty good. He received three more transfusions over the next 2 days, but he never got above a hemoglobin of 5, our usual benchmark for discharging a patient. One of the greatest moments of my time here was playing with him one day when I walked into the health center. I held out my fists for him to guess which one I had something in, and he laughed and laughed with embarrassment and chagrin as he guessed wrong 5 times in a row, before finally getting it right and finding the 100 shilling coin in my hand. The smile on his face, the laughter in his eyes, and these coming from a boy who was so nearly dead less than 48 hours before, were some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And days later, he was back up at my house playing with the other boys.

He is still sick. This disease will never leave him, and as I mentioned before, I don't know of anyone with sickle cell who has survived to adulthood. His prognosis is not good. But seeing him return from the edge of death to his normal, smiling, happy self brought joy to my heart. His father is relieved, though still scared. How could he not be? I'm left to grapple with hard truths and conflicting emotions. The juxtaposition of joy and sorrow, sickness and healing. The suffering of a father that is too great for me to fathom. A wonderful little boy whom I love, for whose life I am now always afraid. A good God, a God of wholeness, and a broken, painful world, full of suffering. One thing I know: my face lights up every time I see Aliganyila, a loved one back from the edge of death.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Grasshopper Pizza

It's grasshopper season. They're everywhere - flying, hopping, green snacks. You read that right: snacks. Fried or boiled - apparently boiled gives you "the real taste" - people everywhere are chowing down on grasshoppers by the bag full. It makes sense when you think about it, a plentiful, seasonal, nutritious resource, the eating of which also reduces pests on people's crops. But still, there's something disquieting about watching people eat insects.

At our team pizza dinner, Pat showed up with fried grasshoppers, to complement the pepperoni, bacon, and veggies on the topping table. I had heard tell of grasshopper pizza, but it always seemed closer to legend than reality. But soon I found myself munching on a grasshopper - by itself, at first, to get the full experience - and then eating several more on pieces of pizza, thrown on there among the onions, pesto, and tomatoes.

So, there's the story. Grasshopper pizza. Not as bad as you might think. The exoskeleton feels a little strange in the mouth, but it mostly tasted like anything else that you might fry in oil. That being said, I doubt that Pizza Hut will be adding this to their menu any time soon...

Sunday, November 15, 2009

A memorable evening

Some moments stand out, as they are happening, as memorable experience, ones that are unusual or foreign enough to me to make me realize that I'm living in a place far removed from my previous experience. I often say of thee moments, "this will make a good blog post." Last night was one of these moments.

Scott Will and I returned home from the Myhres to find our house broken into yet again (at least the fourth time in the last 6 weeks). This seemingly thoughtful thief never trashes the house nor takes electronics - my computer was out in the open - rather he just takes money and usually locks the door behind him. This time, since we've changed and added some locks, we are struggling to figure out how he got in. This time he found my money. It's frustrating and maddening. My emotions were a combination of anger at being robbed, frustration at not having put an end to these thefts, fear that I'll discover the thief is someone I know and trust, and indignation at being treated this way when I'm trying to do good things here. The latter is the hardest part: the feeling of being unwanted, treated poorly or as a source of money by people who I am trying to relate to, to love, to serve. I believe that part of that pain and indignation is legitimate, but part of it stems from an inflated notion of my own importance and a self-righteous sense of what I deserve. I am often frustrated by the sense of entitlement that I feel from some people here, especially those who have known missionaries for a long time, but experiences such as these reveal to me my own sense of entitlement, a revelation that is poignant and painful in its accuracy.

With these emotions swirling in my head, I went to bed. Or rather, I tried to. I climbed under my mosquito net with a book but stopped when I saw something small in the middle of my bed. As I picked it up, I realized that it was a small cluster of what appeared to be insect eggs of some sort. Insects laying eggs on my sheets is simply revolting. I threw them out and started to change my sheets, now frustrated, upset, and disgusted. That was when things really got good. As I started to change my sheets, a large mouse or small rat darted out of my mattress, along the frame of my bed, and into the far corner of the room. Holes chewed in my mattress, mosquito net, and sheets, chunks of foam littering the floor, dried grass brought in from outside. This meant war. One too many things had frustrated me that night, and I focused that anger on this insolent and unfortunate rodent. I called Scott Will, we stuffed a towel under the door to prevent his escape, and started chasing him around my room, sticks in hand crashing wildly on the floor, both of us ready for bed, in our underwear, at midnight in rural Uganda. We laughed at the absurdity of the situation; it was the only appropriate response. It was then that this moment struck me as emblematic, and we both commented that this was a blog post. After several minutes of running, swinging sticks, stomping, and generally tearing my room apart, man triumphed over beast.

So many things went wrong that it brought some levity to the situation. At least life isn't boring.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Aerial Pictures


Here are some aerial shots that I said I would try to get. Above is Nyahuka town.


Aerial shot of the mission, with the biggest building being the community center. My house is just barely out of the picture in the top right corner.


The blue roofs are Christ School, and that's the football pitch where the boys train and play.


The small, straight, light green strip near the center is Bundibugyo airfield, seen through a gap in the clouds.

A weekend in the rift valley

At the risk of representing my life as one spectacular trip after another, here’s an update about my weekend excursion into the great East African Rift Valley. I was accompanying Scott, who was on a trip to see Luke and Caleb at boarding school, and it was a chance for me to see a different part of this continent. We boarded a 4-seater Cessna here in Bundibugyo and flew out on the one-year anniversary of my arrival in Uganda. The next day we flew to Nairobi and hopped in a taxi for the hour and a half drive out to RVA. I was totally unprepared for what it would be like. We climbed higher and higher, reaching over 8,000 ft on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the rift valley, where the view of the plain several thousand feet below stretched as far as I could see, rudely broken by Mt. Longonot towering up into the sky from the middle of the massive valley. The sun breaking through infrequent gaps in the clouds created a beautiful speckled pattern across the plain as far as I could see. We began the descent down the side of the escarpment, and reached Kijabe, home of RVA and a remarkable mission hospital, about half way down, still perched around 7,000 ft with a stunning view of the rift valley. Despite the amazing views and spectacular landscape, perhaps the most amazing part of it was this: the temperature was cool. The air was crisp and clear, with a strong, cool breeze. The cold blue of the sky was unlike any I’ve seen in Uganda, and I commented to Scott that it felt a bit like September in New England – and that came from me, who spent 4 cold autumns in northern Massachusetts. The next morning was cold and rainy. I again commented that it felt like fall in New England. At a high altitude, even in the cool weather I burned badly in the sun after being outside all day Saturday, but this wasn’t the hot humid burn that I get in Bundibugyo; it was a cold, dry, chapped burn, reminiscent of the feeling I get after a day spent skiing. In spite of the discomfort, I thoroughly enjoyed being outside in the cool weather, as it is something I haven’t experienced much in the last year.

I met some fascinating people while I was there, including an American doctor who has been working there for 30 years, and a British doctor who calls his soccer referee’s license the only qualification that means anything to him.

After spending the weekend at RVA, watching the boys play soccer, checking out the hospital, and attending a wonderful cook-out, we got in a cab back to the airport. You might think that this would be a less interesting part of the trip, but you would be wrong. Nairobi is a dicey place at night. First we realized that the driver had alcohol on his breath. Then a policeman, after seeing white people in the car, attempted to stop us in traffic, likely to try to get some money out of the situation. The driver, probably both trying to avoid being extorted and to avoid trouble for drinking and driving, ignored the officer and tried to drive away on the shoulder. I looked behind us, and could only see two things: the policeman’s flashlight bouncing as he ran after us, and the barrel of his gun illuminated by the flashlight’s beam. After the officer slammed his hand down on the trunk of the car, the driver sped away on the shoulder. Next we saw a large pool of blood on the road. It wasn’t hard to imagine how that happened, as people were constantly running across the busy, unlit road. At the airport, the power went out as we were waiting to check in. That’s right, a major international airport, one of the main arrival and departure points on the continent, was without electricity, except for some emergency lights. With computer check in shut down, we waited as each passenger was checked in by hand, with hand-written boarding passes (incidentally, the woman checking us in didn’t have her own pen, asked to borrow one from me, and then asked to keep it, to which I said yes, if only because I didn’t feel like arguing).

The following morning we boarded a Cessna again for the flight back out to Bundibugyo, my first time making this flight. Right after takeoff I discovered a frog around my feet – welcome to the tropics – and briefly considered dropping him into Lake Victoria below us before I thought better of opening the window. Flying in these small planes is amazing, amid spires of cloud hundreds of feet high, one feels much more a part of the sky than when cloistered in a commercial jet that tears through the air at immense speed. Instead of taking us around the Rwenzoris, the pilot opted to go straight over the mountains, climbing thousands of feet as we drew closer. I’ll admit to being a little nervous as he tried to keep the plane under some heavy clouds and over the mountains, a task which gave him rather little elevation to work with. We moved through a lower pass, and I could look up at mountains on either side of us and see individual leaves on the trees below, and we then dove steeply down the other side, almost sliding down the back of the mountains as the pilot searched for a hole in the lower cloud cover to drop through. When he found it, we were almost right over the border and could see the airstrip, Nyahuka, the Christ School football pitch, and various towns in Uganda and Congo from thousands of feet. It was striking to see how close together so many things are, contrasted with how long it takes to move from one to another. Towns that are a 1 hour walk or 15 drive apart appear to be almost touching, with the poor, winding roads making travel between them difficult. Even towns on the other side of the border look to be only a stones throw away (ok, a pretty long stones throw). We swooped low over Nyahuka for Scott to get some pictures - again a bit too low for my comfort, probably only 300 feet - before dropping onto the grass airstrip. These pilots amaze me. The neighborhood kids were abuzz with excitement over the low-flying plane, and one commented that he thought I must have been the one flying it, since it came down so low. It appears that these kids understand, and attribute to me, the recklessness of youth. (I’ll work on getting some of those pictures from Scott. The aerial view is pretty cool).

Sometimes I feel like I’m always writing about my latest trip, the latest amazing place I’ve gone. For one thing, they’re the easiest to write about. But it is true that I’ve seen some amazing things in the past year. So it made me think: life here isn’t easy. There’s the stress of living in a foreign culture, many, many fewer conveniences, the separation from friends and family, the suffering that is constantly before my eyes. But there really are many benefits as well, including the opportunities to see some spectacular parts of the world that I never would see if I didn’t live here.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Pictures

A few pictures from my parents visit. Here, Gloria is having a wonderful time helping my mom dress up. These kids are fascinated with white-people hair - it's just so different than anything they have ever seen or felt.

My mom and I at the top of Murchison Falls during out travels. Any picture of me with my mom is exciting.

The first and only male lion I've seen here, and it was only about 50 feet away from the vehicle. Powerful and beautiful don't begin to describe it. Probably a once-in-a-lifetime sighting.

And giraffes. Murchison Falls National Park is the only place in Uganda you can see them, and we saw them in abundance.

I'll try to post some more of these but my internet is about to shut down, so time forces me to be short.

Earthquakes

I awoke to a loud rumbling and my bed shaking. My house creaked and groaned, while everything on my shelves hummed and rattled. In a barely conscious state, I realized that I was experiencing what seemed to be a sizable earthquake. It occurred to me that it might be safer to be outside, but before I could rouse myself enough to decide what to do the 'quake had passed. Seconds later I heard rumbling again, heralding the first of several aftershocks that rattled my house. My neighbors told me that they were terrified and ran outside at 3:30 AM. This afternoon we learned that it was a 5.0 earthquake centered not far south of here. Living in the Albertine rift valley, the same fault line that created the majestic Rwenzori mountains just to the east of me makes earthquakes a reasonably common experience. There have been several recently, most of which I haven't even felt, but this one seems to have been the biggest in quite a while.

While I don't think any buildings here were damaged (and I have no information about towns closer to the epicenter), it certainly causes me concern as Bundibugyo district is rapidly developing and larger buildings seem sure to be built in the near future. In a place where most houses are made of mud, you can imagine the damage that a serious earthquake could do. But the even more dangerous buildings would be larger ones that are cheaply built. There hasn't been a serious earthquake here since 1993, so it's certainly not an everyday occurrence, but as electricity comes into the district, with plans to pave the road, it is clear that this place is changing, and larger buildings, combined with little no regulation of building codes - if they even exist - may be a dangerous development. One only has to look at the recent earthquake in Indonesia to see the damage that such an event can inflict on a developing country with countless poorly constructed buildings.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Sickness and Friendship

About half of the team is sick at the moment, with what seems to be the result of contaminated ice cream (yes, we make homemade ice cream here, thanks to the Myhre's cow). It's something pretty nasty, beyond the standard intestinal bug. Though I'm running a fever - and frequently running out to the choo - I've been extremely lucky in a couple of ways. First, this is only the second time I've been sick in almost a year, despite living in a place with different, and more numerous, germs. Second, both times I've gotten sick have been right after someone has come to stay in my house. Scott Will arrived last weekend to stay for a few months, so I wasn't alone in my house all night.

This bout of sickness provided me with a truly remarkable experience. Yesterday evening, as I was curled up on my couch, feverish, aching, and weak, my little neighbor Charity stuck his head in my door. Upon seeing my condition, he walked in and just sat next to me, sometimes silent, sometimes patting me on the shoulder, sometimes telling me how sorry he was. As I got colder, he brought me blankets. As night fell, he lit candles in the room and closed the shutters, to protect me from "moving air." He made sure I was taking medicine and even advised me on what ones I needed - "two red and one tylenol." Soon Gonja, Charity's brother, joined us, and he brought me water and cleaned in my kitchen. They brought my clothes in off the line. And they just sat next to me, caring for me in my sickness.

The care and tenderness they showed me was heartwarming. Because of our respective ages and vastly differing access to resources, there is usually substantial inequality in our relationships - they come to me for help a lot more than I go to them, as there is simply more that I can do for them. That, unfortunately, is just how it works, and this dynamic is a difficult part of relationships here. But this illness gave them the chance to care for me, and their concern and warmth brought tears to my eyes.

I thanked them over and over for what seemed to me to be going so far out of their way for me, but they assured me that helping me in my sickness was not a burden, but rather was truly what they wanted to do.

I don't want to look at everything through the rose-colored glasses of one positive experience. These kids aren't perfect. Last week my iPod disappeared after they had been in my house, and reappeared a few days later, more scratched than when it left and missing its case, after I expressed my anger at it being taken. While I can't be certain, there is little doubt that one of them took it. Those types of experiences are also a part of my life here, and these relationships are not always easy. Nothing is as straightforward as a few blog posts might make it seem to be. But seeing the way they cared for me last night made up for a world - or at least a few days - of frustrations. They treated me like one of their own.

Monday, September 28, 2009

A friend I miss



Meet Mujuni. He is one of my favorite people in the world. A boy of about 4 or 5 years, he has trouble forming words, he has chronically infected and pus-filled ears, a distended belly, and a tiny butt which improbably holds up a ragged pair of shorts. When he has shorts. He sometimes wears a dirty cardigan, sometimes a ratty t-shirt, and sometimes no pants. His infected ears and general state of dirty-ness give him a smell all his own - I can tell when he is at my door just by the smell, and I can tell whenever someone else has been holding him.

When he first showed up at my neighbor's house months ago, he was terrified of white people and would often sneak up behind me to touch my leg, only to flee in terror, arms and legs flailing wildly, when I would turn around. But slowly he warmed up, and by the summer he was a regular fixture in my house, running around like he owned the place, dancing to music, playing with Doug, Tim, and I, and exclaiming "ngeee!" at just about everything. As I would appraoch my house, he would see me from a distance, raise both arms over his head, wave, and run with beaming smile and awkward stride into my arms.

But his story is sad. His parents were very young and unmarried when he was born, getting him off to a bad start. His mother eventually married another man who didn't want to raise another man's child (this is a very common scenario), and his father was either unable or unwilling to raise him. And so he found himself staying with his mother's relatives, who happen to be my neighbors. Sometimes I would find him standing alone in the yard, crying softly. As I would take him in my arms to comfort him, some other friends said to me, "Mujuni is want his mom."

When I returned from my travels in August, after dropping my family at the airport and then going to Kenya, I was excited to see him again. However, upon arrival I was told that he had gone to live with his father's family, about an hour and a half walk away. I was truly saddened to hear the news - I guess, until that point, I hadn't realized how much joy Mujuni brought to my life. But I miss him terribly. His constant presences was sometimes a nuisance, but I love him. So, not long after getting back, Sarah, Ashley and I made the trek out to visit him one day. He was quiet and shy, barely making a sound the whole time we were there. It was sad to see, after he had livened up so much in the preceeding months. For his sake, I hope that he regains the vitality he had found in his time here. Selfishly, I wish he would come back and stay here again so that I could see him, but I realize that it is probably best for him to be with his immediate family. Gonja sometimes tells me that he'll be back soon, which makes me excited at the prospect of being with him again, yet saddened that he has such a volatile family situation.

He is a wonderful, sad, adorable, sickly, loving, happy little boy. And his story is one that is repeated over and over here, where unstable family situations make life volatile and difficult for children.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Instability




A recent experience with my neighbors has me thinking about illness, marital problems, and the destabilizing effect that these things have on children. I’ll preface this by saying that I realize these are issues all over the world, but they have become more obvious to me here, and I think that some things about this place can make them more acute.

I write frequently about my neighbors Saulo and Majili, and their children, my good friends Gonja, Charity, Gloria, and Nighty. Well, when I returned from my travels last month, Gonja told me that his mom was very sick and admitted at a private health clinic. I went with him to visit her, took a few gifts, and a few days later she returned, seemingly coming out the other side of a serious case of malaria. But not long after that she was gone again, and this time I was told that she was at her family home, about an hour and a half walk away, to recover and receive more treatment. I began to worry as the days wore on. The kids were really struggling without their mom around, both from a lack of someone to cook for them and the absence of her caring presence. I began cooking for them regularly and helping them buy food. With school not in session, they practically lived in my house, having no real reason to be at home during the day. I was quickly exasperated at their constant presence, especially as I was attempting to work on med school applications, but I tried to keep in mind that they were especially needy at the time, and that it was a wonderful chance for me to show them love.

About a week ago, when I returned to my house, I saw the kids walking with packed bags. It turns out that Gloria and Nighty have gone to stay with their mom, while Gonja and Charity were going to stay around for school. But soon, they began making a daily commute from here to their mom’s house – they got their bikes in reasonable working order and rode out there every evening, and back here for school every morning. But now I haven’t seen them in several days, so I don’t think they’ve been in school this week.

Yesterday, when I was walking by a large group of women at the health center, I heard my name and instantly recognized Majili’s voice. She was there to see Scott, apparently having some lingering health problems. I was so glad to see her, and hopeful that she would be returning soon so that her life and that of her family could return to normal. However, it soon became clear that this wasn’t just about sickness. Apparently, the reason she is staying at her family home has more to do with her complaints about the home that her husband has provided her and the ways in which he cares for her. Leaving the family alone, or taking the kids with her, seems to be her form of protest.

So not only do the children suffer from their mother’s sickness, they are caught in the middle of marital conflict. It has affected their nutrition, their education, and undoubtedly their emotional health. None of them have been around for several days, and my house has been eerily quiet. That has been good for med school applications (which are tantalizingly close to being finished), but I’ve missed them a lot. I hope that stability returns to my neighbors lives sometime soon.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Why does it always have to be snakes?

Snakes have been a big part of my experience in the last few weeks (I’ll try to blog about something else soon, but it’s an.... exciting part of life here). After several snake encounters early on, I hadn’t seen many in recent months. Then, about a month ago, on the day that I received a package from a good friend that included, among other things, a note hoping that “creepy, crawly creatures” were staying out of my house, I was called into my house by one of the kids, telling me that Tim had seen a snake inside. It was apparently hiding underneath my kitchen cabinets, a small black snake – I was picturing one like I had almost stepped on months ago. So Tim, Charity, and I stood around, waiting for him to come out, machetes and sticks in hand. A neighbor came by, and I decided to show him how the snake couldn’t be inside the cabinet, since there’s no way to get from underneath to inside. I crouched down and opened up the cabinet to show him, only to be startled by a hiss right near my face. I looked up, and there on the top shelf of the cabinet, about a foot from my face, was a small cobra, head up, hood open. I sprung backwards, heart racing – I probably could have bench-pressed a truck, I had so much adrenaline pumping. With help from my neighbor Bihwa, we quickly had him out on the floor where he was an easy target. This is, of course, instantly blog-worthy material, but you will understand my reluctance to post anything about it, as it occurred only a few days before my family’s visit. Luckily, there were no snake incidents during their visit.

Even this story had an endearing moment. Being the naturalist that I am, before we threw the body away I wanted to have a look at it, especially to examine the fangs – it’s not everyday one has a chance to look at a cobra (for which I am glad, to be sure). So I grabbed two knives to use as probes, and went outside to see the dead snake. When little Charity saw me a horrified look came over his face and he shouted, shrill with terror, “Nathany! You are eat?!?! You are eat?!?!” as he saw me approaching the snake with silverware in hand. It was adorable. I did decide to hold on to the snake, however, and I took it to biology class the next day to dissect with Caleb, Jack, and Julia. I bet that not many students can say that they have dissected a cobra.

Just a couple days ago, Gonja spotted a snake in my rafters, which we quickly dispatched of. I don’t think this one was poisonous. While I’ve always liked snakes, the fact that so many here are dangerous has changed the calculations in my mind. I figured I was getting pretty good at this.

So, when Sarah told me the other day hat she had just seen a snake in the rocks by her back door, I thought it was no problem. Just to be safe, I called over a couple of Ugandan men, and grabbed a machete and several sticks and went over to her house. I was a little nervous digging through this rock pile with my bare hands, but we soon found the snake. That was when I realized that I really wasn’t quite as prepared for this as I had thought. There in the rocks was a 5-foot cobra, none too pleased that we were turning his home upside down. I can’t really describe the vehemence with which these two men attacked this snake. The man versus snake battle has a primordial quality here – it is reminiscent of the biblical struggle. They are mortal enemies; people will throw more energy into killing snakes than just about anything else I’ve seen, and there is an obvious glee when people have come out on top of this life and death struggle. They live to fight another day. So, sticks came smashing down on these rocks, splintering into dozens of pieces. Sparks flew off of my machete as it clanged down around the snake. I quickly realized that the greatest danger to myself was no longer the snake, but rather getting in the way of these men who were bent on destroying it.

They made short work of it, but it was a big, black reminder of how precarious life can be. As I thought about the delight people take in killing snakes, it occurred to me that people in the US don’t like snakes either, but it’s different here. Here, if it gets away, it could easily end up in someone’s house that night, which is a dangerous situation with people many sleeping on the floor. There are enough dangerous snakes in Bundibugyo that I think people probably see killing a snake as possibly saving their child’s life. And in many cases, it probably is. I’m lucky enough to sleep in a permanent house, in an elevated bed with a mosquito net. But it was another reminder of the many ways in which people’s lives here are often perched on the edge of a precipice, where any number of small misfortunes or common struggles can push them over the edge. The Babwisi have, in general, little margin for the unexpected.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Home

At long last, I'm back in Bundibugyo, and in most ways it feels like coming home. After an incredible trip with my parents, we said a tearful goodbye at the airport - it was easier this time, but still not easy. Then came a wonderful week in Kenya with Sarah, Ashley, and Heidi, as school breaks are the time that people take a break from the district. So it was an amazing month for travel, but it feels good to be back here. While there are a lot of things I miss about Kenya and Kampala already, I sometimes get the feeling that one can travel too much, and it's good to be back where neighbors know me, even if they don't give me a moment's peace. So, in a frustrating and often foreign way, this place is home, a place I'm glad to come back to, a place that feels right. It's hard to explain how this works in a place where I'm an outsider and that can be stressful to a degree that makes college look like an afternoon nap, but it's true. It has to do with the beaming smiles on Gonja and Charity's faces when we pulled into the mission, and the friends who came from all around to welcome me back. It has to do with the sound of the birds in the morning and the sound of rain on my roof. It has to do with Pat cooking dinner for us when we arrived. It's good to be back.

A couple of re-entry highlights. In one of their most endearing moves yet, several neigborhood children used a slasher (picture a razor-sharp, double-edged golf club used to cut grass) to carve my name into the grass in big letters in my yard. The night we arrived, when I went out to use my cho before going to bed, I found a poisonous snake at the bottom of the door. This was a more difficult "welcome back" moment - sometimes I feel like Bundibugyo delights in slapping me in the face. If he had been actually inside the cho, I would have been seriously disturbed. I returned to find my neighbor Majili, Gonja and Charity's mother, in the hospital, very sick with malaria, and multiple friends have had relatives die while I was gone. It is a sudden and forceful reminder of the realities of life faced by people here, struggles that are far less real to me than to them. I've been away from them as I've been out of the district, but it's as though I've been hiding for a short time, and now that I've come out of hiding they hit me even stronger.

So I'm back, blessed by my family's visit, saddened by their departure, feeling rested from a wonderful week of vacation in Kenya, stressed by shopping in Kampala, glad to be in Bundibugyo, and confronted again with the challenges and heartbreak of life here.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Family

I’ve been notably silent this summer, for which I apologize. It’s been a hectic month, with interns to host, medical school to apply to, and visits to plan, all while continuing my normal work on the team. Just about every time I’ve thought that I should write a post, I’ve thought that it’s probably a better idea to work on medical school applications. I’m now finished with the primary application, but have already received secondary applications to work on. No rest for the weary, I suppose.

But the main purpose of this post is to say that I am incredibly blessed to have my parents and brother visiting me. They arrived about a week ago and have been experiencing life here and just spending time with me and with the team. I still can barely believe that they’re here – it’s a fusion of disparate worlds that hardly feels real. I feel like I exist in two separate worlds, one here, and one in the States, and the two have previously had precious little connection. But now I find myself struggling to believe that I’m walking down the road into Nyahuka with my mom; not only does it barely seem real, it almost doesn’t seem possible. Their visit has been a huge blessing to me. I’ve been anticipating it all summer and it’s truly beautiful to sit around with family in evenings, just talking, drinking port, and enjoying each others' company, something I hadn’t been able to do for nine months. My parents also have my house in a state of cleanliness that it probably hasn’t seen in that same time period.

It’s wonderful to have family see the things that I see and meet people that I know. Their presence here is an amazing gift to me, though it makes me miss my sister even more. This weekend we head out of the district for some travel – a time to see new and wonderful things, to explore new places, to rest in a way that one can never rest in Bundibugyo, and to spend time together. It will be a striking contrast, especially for my family, going from the rugged, sad, hectic, painful, beautiful, and poor landscape of Bundibugyo to a more pristine, natural, secluded beauty of Murchison Falls National Park (with quiet crater lakes and the dirty, chaotic commotion of Kampala thrown in along the way).

Sunday, July 12, 2009

I'm often frustrated by the slow pace of things around here, by how long everything seems to take, and by how I can spend a long time doing things and then feel like I accomplished absolutely nothing. Part of this is my distinctly American value on productivity; I feel that time not doing some productive is time wasted; I tend to see myself as valuable to the extent that I am doing something useful. But part of it is also just that everything here is a little more complicated.

Taking care of a vehicle, for instance, is a little harder than in the States. We don't exactly have local garages. In fact, there's not even a particularly competent mechanic inside of a three hour drive. The Zoolander (the mildly affectionate nickname for the vehicle the singles share) has been having electrical problems recently, so that the wipers come on at random times (but not when you want them to) and it can only be started from a roll. We've kept it parked at my house, on the edge of a hill, so that it's easy to roll-start with few people. We decided that it can't really wait much longer and we needed to have it worked on, but this is a pretty difficult proposition. So, in order to have work done on the vehicle, Heidi and I had to drive for more than three hours over the mountains on a dirt road with a broken shock absorber in a vehicle that won't start. We also had to make sure that we never stalled or turned off the vehicle, as we'd have quite the time trying to roll-start it with only the two of us. When we got to Fort Portal, I left a long set of problems and instructions for the mechanic, we grabbed lunch, and hitched a ride with Pat and Pamela, who were driving out to Bundibugyo, where we arrived just in time for the team pizza dinner. So, even just getting the car to a mechanic turns out to be a full day affair, to say nothing of having him work on it and somehow getting it back out here.

Another humorous-but-maddening frustration occured Friday night. It started when I awoke in the middle of the night to the fiercest storm I've ever experienced. I've never been scared of a storm here, but the thundering of the wind-driven rain and hail on my roof made me seriously curious about the durability of my house, and made me think a few times about how close to my house various tall trees were. I could barely even think, as the roar of the rain on my roof filled my head - it was a sound that I could feel. Eventually it faded and I feel asleep again. Tim woke me up again in the dark of early morning, saying something about water on the floor. I got up and walked into the next room, where I found myself standing in a half inch of water that covered about half of my house. So there we were at 3:45AM, our headlamps on, mopping the floor with towels and ringing them out into a bucket. We filled this bucket probably 10 times - there were gallons upon gallons of water. It made me especially glad for two things: first, the fact that Doug and Tim are living with me this summer, so I didn't have to deal with this alone. Second, the fact that I have concrete floors, so that the standing water didn't really matter.

I'm sure that everywhere, things seldom go as smoothly as planned or hoped, but it sure seems like Bundibugyo is special in that regard. One thing is certain - living here has helped expose my performance mentality and the way I define myself by what I can accomplish, as what I can accomplish here is often very little. It's not something I really expected to learn in my time here, and it's a tough lesson.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Clay

Yesterday at the health center, after I’d been talking with the in-charge for a while, he approached me with a curious and perplexed look on his face and something small in his hand. “What is this?” he asked me, as he handed me a bar of yellow clay marked ‘Modeling Clay.’ You know what I’m talking about – the sort of clay that you made sculptures with in elementary school. Heidi and I did our best to explain to him what modeling clay is used for, which was quite difficult. There are no such things as art classes here, and when you try to explain them to someone from this culture, it comes out sounding rather silly. Still, we tried to explain that this is something that is usually used by children to play with and make small men, which is something that should be understood, since I’ve seen kids make things out of the heavy clay soil.

But it really got good when we asked him where this clay came from. Apparently, the last shipment of drugs from the Ministry of Health also included two boxes of modeling clay. Did the shipment contain the TB drugs that we need, since the health center is now out? No. But to compensate for that – modeling clay! The seeming absurdity of it was hilarious. There was no indication of why it was sent or what use the Ministry envisioned for it. I suggested that perhaps they were worried that the in-charge was becoming bored and needed some toys to entertain him. We stood around for a while, just laughing at how ridiculous the situation seemed and brainstorming possible reasons it might have been sent.

I’m just trying to picture the process at the Ministry of Health when someone was deciding what supplies to send to Nyahuka Health Center – “Ok: Antibiotics, ARVs, syringes… do we have any more TB drugs? Hmmm, no TB drugs… what else can we put in there? I’ve got it! Modeling clay! I love modeling clay!” I’m amazed that someone would put that on the list and that a supervisor would then approve it.

Of course, it’s likely that there is some legitimate reason that it was there. Perhaps every health center is receiving modeling clay for some reason about which I haven’t yet heard. Perhaps modeling clay has newfound medicinal properties ;) But I’d rather assume that it is the random and hilarious workings of a national bureaucracy.

Monday, June 29, 2009

What's lifesaving and smells bad?

The rumble of a truck interrupted our post-dinner celebration of Ashley’s birthday. Doug, Tim, Sarah, Jack, Jennifer and I went outside to meet it and the 49 goats that were packed tightly into the back. Remember the give-a-goat program that I mentioned around Christmastime? These goats are paid for by that program and were arriving for the goat distribution happening this week.

We give these goats to women in primarily two categories. First, we try to give goats to HIV-positive women who are weaning their children to reduce the risk of transmission. But weaning is unhealthy for a 6-month old and these kids often have serious nutritional problems, so we hope to supply them with a steady source of quality protein to help them as they lose their most important food source. Second, we find many newborns whose mothers died in childbirth. These kids generally have a very poor prognosis, since whatever they get to replace breast-milk is less nutritious and less hygienic.

So there we were, together with several Ugandans working on the project, at 9PM on Tuesday night, gathered around a truck full of goats. Someone on the truck handed them down where I was waiting to grab this goat around the legs, like giving it a big hug and holding it to my chest. A pretty fun sight, I’m sure. We carried them into the various pens for males and females of different sizes. They ranged from young female goats weighing probably 20 pound to bucks weighing around 70 pounds. It was a funny and smelly job. I changed clothes and washed my arms and face before returning to Ashley’s party, but it couldn’t fully rid myself of the smell of goats until taking a long shower.

The actual goat distribution was on Thursday, and there were probably even funnier images there. First was the mandatory ceremony, involving speeches from team members and politicians, and lunch (the always has to be lunch). After this the goats were given, and each recipient was matched with a specific goat. Since these are exotic dairy goats, we keep track of them and Lammech visits the goat recipients to do veterinary check ups and the like, so good record keeping is essential. I would be handed a tag number, with the job of going into the pen and find that goat. While this process sounds simple enough, you now need to picture me running around in a pen full of goats who are all very upset, trying to grab one and check its tag number. Numerous times I almost slipped and fell in goat dung and urine. After a while my goat wrangling improved, and I was pretty effectively snagging goats by the hind legs as they ran past.

After all the antics, laughter, and annoyances of unloading and then catching the goats, the meaning of it all hit me again as I watched desperate mothers walk away with children on their backs and goat-ropes in their hands.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

A unique applicant?



I had a thought as I was working on my medical school applications the other day. It occurred to me that I just might be the only applicant this year who was sitting outside to try to get a better internet signal, with five small children playing with his hair, crawling in his lap, trying to braid his arm hair, and hanging from his arms. The foreignness of the situation made me chuckle. Think how frustrated I would be if I were being similarly distracted while trying to work on this in the States! But having the kids to play with did help keep me from getting too bored, since most of the time I spend doing anything online is spent waiting for the next page to load. I suppose I should look over each section of the application carefully, to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes while Gloria was covering my eyes or while Mujuni was climbing up my back. It was actually pretty fun.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

A family's fear


My neighbors were terrified last week, when Nightie, their 2 or 3 year old girl so named because she was born at night, went missing one afternoon. Her mother and brothers were running around the area in states approaching hysteria to varying degrees, calling her name and asking everyone if they’d seen her. They feared that she had been abducted; her mother was in tears, running up and down the road looking for her.

Any hint of abduction is horrifying, especially in light of several things I’ve heard about recently. The boys have told me about some “bad men,” who are often down near the river and will attack and kill anyone they find alone. From descriptions of invisibility, I’ve deduced that they’re talking about evil spirits, which are a pervasive fear here, especially since people placing curses on other people is commonplace. But more concrete and more hideous is the fear of witchdoctors and child sacrifice. I wouldn’t have imagined that ritual sacrifice is something I would encounter, but it’s been much in the news here, especially several months ago. A prominent businessman in Kampala was found to have sacrificed a child as part of a ceremony to protect a building that he was constructing, and the body was buried in the foundation. It’s hard to imagine that level of brutality, and the story brought much needed attention to inhuman practices that no one really wants to think about. In a place where witchdoctors perform child sacrifice, and a place where children run about alone all the time, I can only imagine the fear felt by families when a child can’t be found.

Equally heartbreaking is the belief that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. This leads to countless rapes of young girls - there is currently a 6 year old rape victim on the pediatric ward - with the very real risk of becoming infected with HIV added to the horrendous psychological, emotional, and physical damage that is done. Hearing the story of this girl had effects of both paralyzing me with sorrow and absolutely infuriating me with rage. It’s another horrible, sickening reminder of how broken this world can be.

All these horrors swirled through my mind as I thought about beautiful little Nightie being abducted. Fortunately, none of them came true. They soon found her down in one of the family gardens, near the river, but with a disturbing story of being grabbed by a man and taken there. I still can’t tell how much of that story is from what she communicated and how much comes from the fears of her family; it seems likely to me that she wandered off to the garden and couldn’t find her way back, but who am I to say?

It is believed that, for ritual sacrifice, witchdoctors can’t use children whose bodies have been cut in any way, so I wasn’t surprised when Nightie and her siblings, my friends Gloria, Charity, Gonja, and Afisa, showed up at my door with their ears pierced and pieces of string pulled through the holes. They seemed to think that having a needle stuck through their earlobes was great fun (they even denied that it ever hurt at all), and have since been trying to convince me to let their grandmother pierce my ear. I have declined thus far, and while these adorable kids can make me give in to just about anything, I’m feeling resolute on this matter. As is so often the case, the children around me provided me with an interesting view of culture and life here. There are always new things to think about and wrestle with, sometimes amusing and sometimes sobering, sometimes beautiful and sometimes heinous. How do I respond to these terrors? To the world where they seem to occur with such frequency? I don’t have answers to these questions, but I think that struggling with them is a start.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

An interesting debut

On Sunday I played in my first match for the Nyahuka Hotspurs, the local club soccer team. I was excited to play both because I love the game and because I would be experiencing something new, meeting new people, and getting out in the community in a different way. We drove to the match with the whole team in a big flatbed truck, right out to the border where we reached the primary school where we would be playing.

At the school, there were signs all over the place that were a bit shocking, at least for an American, to see at a primary school. “Say no to gifts for sex.” “Avoid sugar daddies.” And so on.  I’ve seen similar signs on billboards in Kampala, but it’s sobering to remember that those are messages that need to be heard by primary school children in this place. Those are realities faced by children here, dangers they face, and choices they may have to make. It was saddening, but there were a lot of important messages and it’s good that these things aren’t being ignored.

As we warmed up for the match, it was clear that the muzungu player was going to be a main attraction. Kids crowded around me as I warmed up and stretched, some of the braver ones sneaking up behind me to touch my shirt or my cleats. I can just picture these kids running back to their friends shouting, “I touched the muzungu! I dare you to try!” The place we were playing is out there, the sort of place where white people have probably seldom been seen, even with World Harvest having been here for 20 years. Neither of the two players whom I know where there, so I felt pretty alone as I tried to learn teammates names. I started at striker – a rather humorous idea if you’ve ever played soccer with me - and I quickly learned that this was going to be a pretty different game than any I’d played before.

For one thing, the field was spectacularly bumpy and uneven, and when coupled with people who play pretty disorganized ball to begin with, the style of play was pretty frustrating. But that wasn’t the hard part. In the first few minutes, I jumped for a header, and as I went up, an opponent just wound up and kicked me in the back of the legs, his foot never coming within 6 feet of the ball, and sending me sprawling. The referee never batted an eye. Minutes later I got someone’s cleats right in the chest, again with no response from the referee. Soon, it was every minute or so one of their players was making a tackle that would probably get him thrown out of any game in the States or in Europe, none of which were ever called. It culminated when they had a corner kick which led to a scramble in front of goal, with players on the ground, everyone kicking wildly. Their chief violence-doer proceeded to begin stomping on one of our players (in cleats, mind you) and punching him in the head, before some of our players were able to pull him away. The referee’s reaction? To ignore it. I suppose that he did give us a free kick, but he took no action against the offending player. I was pretty stunned and it made me think, do I really want to subject myself to this sort of danger on a regular basis? In college soccer, we all constantly risked injury for the team, but I don’t care about this team enough to do that. Plus, in college I could also know that the ref would protect me to some extent.

As the game went on, I continued getting kicked, sometimes more blatantly than others, and several times my temper flared and I went after the offending player on the next play. My coach and teammates were adamant that I be careful to avoid injury (what does that mean?), I think both because they felt that way about all of their players, but also because they didn’t want to muzungu to get hurt. I still have lumps and bruises all over my legs.

After the game I was talking to some teammates about the violence and they were also upset about it, but the general consensus was that “this is the village.” That’s just how it goes here. What do you expect when you come to the village? That’s one of the things that struck me – even when the events happened, there wasn’t much of a response. It seemed like that sort of behavior was simply to be expected and was relatively accepted. There were a lot of comments like “That is just their way.”

Now, growing up playing club soccer in north Jersey, I’ve seen my fair share of violence at soccer games (often between parents), but those incidents generally ended with red cards and police involvement, so there was a sense that, amid the chaos and violence, there was an overarching order. There was a background of rules, order, control, and safety. But none of that existed on Sunday. There was no one to provide safety or to enforce rules. And the fact that these rules weren’t in place, or weren’t enforced, led to the feeling that the violence wasn’t even considered a bad thing.

I got the feeling that outbursts of anger are a part of the culture and as such they are generally accepted. Jennifer told me that in Lubwisi, you say of an angry person that “anger has taken him,” implying that it is entirely out of the control of said person. How different that is for me as an American – think about how important personal responsibility is in American culture. Of course, nothing is true across the board in any culture, but this is a pretty strong  difference.

As for the important information, we won the game 1-0. I didn’t score, much to the disappointment of the fans, whom I was told were expecting two goals out of me, but I had fun (when I wasn’t getting kicked), and I hope to keep playing with them some, though I’m not sure how much. We drove back to Nyahuka with the truck full of players and fans singing in celebration of the victory. It was a fun experience, and one that provides a small window into culture and human nature, as so many experiences here do.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Under A Mango Tree

Today I felt like a bit more of an African, as I walked for over an hour on small dirt paths and through rivers to visit a friend’s church, arriving dripping sweat and panting in the heat. The service was three hours long (also very African), after which I was served a mountainous portion of rice and proceeded to walk over an hour back in the blazing midday sun, arriving in the middle of the afternoon, once again dripping sweat (that’s pretty much my style these days). I’ve found that I can often operate in specific patterns these days, always going to the same places because they’re the only places to which I have reason to go, so it was really nice to get away from the main road and see a new part of the district. I also had the refreshing feeling of being off of the paths normally trod by white people, so I felt as though I was treated more as an individual and less as a member of a group of outsiders (though still an oddity).

This weekend there has been a nation-wide push for polio and measles vaccinations, as there have been a number of polio cases in northern Uganda, and it was really interesting to see how a vaccination campaign actually looks in a rural place like Bundibugyo. On the way back, we passed a mango tree with several benches and a small table under it, a cooler with vials in it and a sharps disposal box on the table, manned by a nurse from the health center. It was as simple as that – an immunization clinic under a mango tree. Easy to access, on a well-traveled path, and perfectly effective. It reflects a lot of the way that life works here, as mango trees tend to be gathering places in this culture. We also passed church services being conducted under mango trees, a crowd attending to a man with a cobra bite under a mango tree, and countless people relaxing and socializing under mango trees. If you’ve ever seen a mango tree, then you might also have an idea of how much fruit they produce, making them centers of dietary activity as well as cultural activity. Mango trees seem to be places where life can slow down: where people seek refuge from the oppressive sun and rest during the long walks that most people here make every day just to get to market, to their gardens, to their school, to their church, to their family. And yet, they are a place where life happens. They’re where friends talk, where local officials mediate disputes, where traditional medicine is administered, where women sell food, where people sing – where life plays itself out. Sitting in the dirt, in the shelter of a mango tree. There’s a true beauty about it.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

A stroll down the road

Walking on the road here in Nyahuka can be a trying experience, sometimes because of reckless motorcycle drivers but more often because of the steady stream of people calling to me, continually pointing out that I am an outsider. The women on the team suffer much more mistreatment on the road than I do, and I don’t even see the worst of it because it’s toned down when I’m around, but even so it can get pretty frustrating. In light of that, I had a truly beautiful walk down the road yesterday evening, on my way to dinner with a Ugandan friend.

There was a light breeze in the dusk air, with smoke rising from dozens of small cooking fires. The loud hustle and bustle of the school-time foot traffic had yielded to quieter movements as people prepared dinner and greeted friends; the yelling voices had mostly turned to casual conversations. There was a calm that I seldom experience on the road, a calm that is different than an American calm, just as chaos here is different from the typically American intensity of life. It was a calm still full of life, but life in relaxation, as the fading light seemed to take with it the gawking and shouting. There was a warm, slow, ease on the road.

An airplane flew due west overhead over head, its trail lit brilliant orange by the setting sun, which also cast a pink glow on the clouds clinging to the mountains in the east. The western sky was a riot of color, the sky above blue, and pink again to the east – a sunset the likes of which I can’t say I’ve ever seen. It was shocking to see a jet airplane in the sky, which made me realize how long it’s been since I’ve been in the States, where jet trails and the rumble of jet engines are simply a part of the environment. I tried to imagine where the plane could be going – mostly likely Nairobi to Kinshasa I though, there’s not much else due west of here, at least not on this side of the Atlantic.

I had a very nice meal with Alex, the man I coach with, and his wife and daughter, which was only briefly interrupted by a minor earthquake. Living right on the central African rift valley, this was the second minor earthquake in about the last month. A fitting end to a peaceful evening.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Alcohol, and self-righteousness

Alcoholism is a big problem here in Bundibugyo. I see it all the time: men stumbling down the road, sometimes even in the middle of the day, carrying the little square plastic bags in which liquor is sold. It’s a problem for a number of reasons. It consumes a lot of money that is usually hard earned and could be used to feed and clothe the family, or to pay school fees. In a place of intense need, it’s hard to see so much money used on alcohol. It’s also bad for domestic relationships, as drunk men may often return home and beat their wives or children. Men also deal with a lot of health problems related to long-term alcohol abuse. This is something we struggle with when employing people – while I am helping them to support their family by giving them work, I may also be further enabling their alcohol problem. It’s hard to know how to address that, since I can’t control how people will use the money they have earned, no matter how much I’d like to.

It’s very easy to decry men for their drunkenness here. It’s easy to judge, to blame them for wasting money that their families desperately need. But then I have a thought – in their place, how different would I be? If my children were always sick, if some of them had died, if I’d lost my wife, if I had to beg, if food was always short, if I couldn’t give my kids a decent education, if I was unable to provide for my family, I think that some way to escape that harsh reality would be extremely attractive. If I were unable to be the competent provider that a man “should” be (for any number reasons, including those out of an individual’s control, such rapid population growth and soaring food prices), if my very identity as a man were compromised, I bet that some way to leave that behind would be hard to resist. Under those circumstances, would I be any different? Would I have better self-control? As you can guess, I can’t be sure of the answer, but I’m thinking it’s probably no.

So, as I struggle with how to think about the chronic drunkenness that is so often a problem here, I have to keep a frightening reality in the front of my mind. That could just as easily be me. In those circumstances, I might spend that money on a way to escape too. That’s a good realization to help me understand others, and a scary realization as I think about myself. So, I still need to struggle against the rampant alcohol abuse here, but I need to try to do so without the self-righteousness that is so hard to escape.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

7 Months

As of tomorrow, I will have been here in Uganda for seven months. That’s pretty hard for me to believe. In many ways, it feels like I’ve just gotten here, especially as I think of all the things that I haven’t done, and yet it feels like it was a different life in which I said goodbye to my family at JFK. I’ve had so many new experiences, so many thoughts, and so many opportunities that it’s almost dizzying to try to think back over the last seven months. And yet, I feel as though I could be doing so much more, making more of the opportunities that I have, experiencing more new things. It’s a difficult tension, and one that can make me feel alternately exciting, lame, courageous, and ashamed. So, I’m taking a more whimsical approach. Here are some little snapshots of my life:

I ride my bike precariously through jostling herds on longhorn cattle on the road. I pasteurize milk at home. I’ve killed probably a dozen rats by stomping on them. I’ve performed several ultrasounds (under Scott's watchful eye). I’ve stared highly endangered 400-pound mountain gorillas in the face. I have had, in sum, probably about 3 days of anything resembling peace and quiet. I am fully convinced that my neighbor Charity is the cutest kid in the entire world. Even after he shattered the truck window with a slingshot. Which he was aiming at his sister. I’ve learned to drive a motorcycle, on bumpy, rutted dirt roads. I regularly remove bats from houses – a somewhat exciting prospect in the land of Ebola and Marburg fever. I’ve watched children die, and I’ve seen them recover from the very brink of death. I tried to perform a lumbar puncture on an infant (sticking a needle into his spine). I almost fought a mob during a soccer game.

Things I like: Geckos on my walls. The smell of jasmine at night. Fresh, cheap avocados. Moonlight I can read by. Playing soccer with my young neighbors. Homemade, brick-oven pizza. Community. The stunning view of the mountains. Falling asleep to rain on my tin roof.

Things I don’t like: Cockroaches. Thieves. Women getting harassed everywhere they go, while I’m left alone. People I’ve never met asking me for money. Dust. Rotten eggs. The incessant calls of “Mujungu!” that follow me everywhere. Manchester United. 110-degree heat.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

weight gain

It's amazing how quickly emotions can change and I can swing from sobriety to giddiness. On Wednesday, only days after the experience which led to my previous blog entry, I went to one of the BBB outpatient nutrition programs, as I do almost every Wednesday. This was the 10th week of the program, meaning that the 17 children who enrolled on the first day had finished their cycle and were getting their last food. At these distributions I usually have a mix of emotions as some kids gain weight and some lose weight, and seldom does anyone show a perfect upward trajectory. Gain some weight one week, lose some the next; sometimes I've wondered if the food we're giving is really doing any good.

So this week, I looked back over the data for the kids who had finished the program. As I posted previously, the primary criteria for enrollment is that the kids are between 70-85% weight-for-height, so I rechecked their weight for length at the end of the 10 weeks. I was thrilled to see that all but one of them was over their target of 85% weight-for-height, even those who showed relatively modest weight gains. Even more exciting, though, was the proportion of them that were over 100% weight-for-height! 100%! That means that these malnourished kids are at a healthy weight, which, seeing them at the start of the program, is a lot more than I could have hope for, or guessed might happen. While I haven't compiled all the numbers, it was around 5 of them who broke the 100% line, and probably another 4 who were close.

I was overjoyed. As I went through the weights with Heidi, I was almost giddy, laughing as I recorded their current weight-for-heights in their medical records books. Seldom have I felt better about the world than when I saw that these children were gaining weight and no longer met malnutrition criteria. When I got home and people asked me how Busaru was, I replied "It was awesome!" (let's just say this was a surprising response). The world looked beautiful. That's the breadth of emotions I can experience in a span of three days, and they are always in tension. The deep feeling that the world is fundamentally wrong, and the giddy rejoicing at the beauty of life. Of course I treasure and strive for the later, but I'm becoming convinced that both are fundamentally true, that both reflect the nature of the world. We live in a place of brokenness and beauty.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Brokenness

I watched a child die today. A baby boy of nine months. I’ve seen children in their last minutes of life, and I’ve seen them minutes after death, but this was different. I watched, my eyes locked on his tiny, sickly frame, as his breathing and his heart stopped. I watched him go from living baby to corpse. Malnourished, anemic, and infected with malaria, he was barely alive when I arrived at the health center; it was simply too late. As Jennifer tried to get an IV in him, I noticed a subtle change in his appearance which I can’t really describe, and I suddenly I couldn’t see his chest moving any more. A cold, tight feeling settled in my stomach as I realized that I was an eyewitness of his transition from life to death.

His mother collapsed on the floor in almost melodic wailing, as women here mourn death, and the crowd that had been forming around the bed continued to grow. I wondered what the other mothers there on the crowded ward with their kids must have felt. But these women are no strangers to suffering. Watching this death, I was struck very powerfully by what a broken world we live in. Everything about it was just wrong – this is not how the world is supposed to be, this is now how lives are supposed to go.

Seeing the horror of death firsthand and being confronted with the brokenness of the world brought to mind something I’d just read.

“Who then are the mourners? ... They are the ones who realize that in God’s realm of peace there is neither death nor tears and who ache whenever they see someone crying tears over death. The mourners are aching visionaries.” ~ Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

That’s the hardest part of it, this feeling that everything about it is wrong. It’s not simply sad, it’s not just terrible; but every fiber groans with the inescapable feeling that, with this boy’s death, the fabric of the world is wrenched further apart. I realize that must sound pretty melodramatic, or sound like it should incapacitate me for days, but neither is the case. The feeling of brokenness is very real and deep, yet I was able to go about the rest of the day’s work (the ease of it is frightening sometimes). The feeling of wrong-ness has not left. I'm guessing it isn’t meant to.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Recovery



The boy in this picture is Kagadisa, a wonderful little guy about whom I've blogged before. I saw him today when he back to the health center to continue his treatment for TB, and as part of his follow-up as a nutrition inpatient. He's also the emaciated boy in the picture from a few posts back. With treatment for his TB and intensive nutrition support as an inpatient, he's gone from a boy who just about dead, to a healthy, smiling, curious, friendly boy. His recovery is a transformation that never ceases to amaze and that I thought was worth sharing, in picture form. His story is the kind that make the stresses and difficulties of working here seem insignificant; the kind that not all children are lucky enough to have; and the kind that make me see the world as sublimly beautiful.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Law and Order

This week one of the mission houses broken into while its occupants were at someone else's house for dinner. The rebar grating over a window was cut, and some money, two flashlights, bagel chips, eggs, flour, sugar, a key, and nail polish were stolen (the bagel chips being probably the biggest loss). The nice thing is that, in general, people here don't have use for a computer, so the laptop was left undistrubed on the table. We talked with a few community members and reported to the police (whose response was... "sorry"). We quickly had a posse of people examining the window, ooh-ing and ahh-ing, very upset that someone would do this. With the Myhres and Pierces away, I became the de facto point man (read: man) for the whole process. The next day, I set about trying to get a new lock (to replace the one to which the key was stolen) and secure the window, and no one felt that there was ever a chance that those responsible would be caught.

But yesterday evening, as I was preparing dinner with a Ugandan friend, I heard a voice at my door shout, with great urgency and seriousness, "Nathan! Come!" I ran to my door, to find a crowd of people leading a boy up to my house with his hands tied. After seeing a group of teenage boys distributing money among themselves, one of my neighbors had run to tell someone, and they apprehended one of them, who in turn confessed to taking part in the break-in. Various members of the crowd were shouting about what we should do with him, and I felt entirely out of my element, as not only could I not understand what we being said, but I also have no idea how these things would be handled in this culture, and how my actions will be viewed by the community. In the end, we decided to delay taking him to the police, first meeting with the parents, registering the case with the village chairman (who wasn't around, of course), and trying to gather the other two boys.

Of course, by the time today rolled around, the two other boys had fled to Congo, putting a significant hole in our plan. It's been a struggle to try to figure out how to handle the situation. I find myself trying to walk the line between ensuring that there are real consequences and showing grace. I don't want to be too harsh, especially because I think that we Americans are already seen that way sometimes, but of course I also want justice, I want these boys to know that their actions are unacceptable, and I want the community to know that this isn't something that people can get away with. Being a newcomer in the culture makes it really hard for me to know how to handle it. It does make me think about how justice should be doled out (both here and in general), and how to gauge what is truly best for the community, the mission, the ones who were robbed, and the boys who took from them. Is it taking a hard line or being lenient? Sometimes I feel like these are a few teenage punks who probably just need to get beat up a few times to learn a lesson. But then I think about the lives they have lived, that we all make mistakes, and I try think about what doesn't just let me get revenge, but what teaches them and might change them. Does treating them as harshly as possible change them? It might. And it might also help deter theft in the community at large. But then again, it could just harden them, and it's possible that being more gentle is what will really impact them. Then I realize that, as a cultural outsider, I probably have no idea what I'm talking about.

Several things made this whole experience classic:
The response of the police. The police will not even leave their headquarters without getting some money out of it.
A 10,000 shilling note was taken from the boy as evidence, and it was said that we needed to present the evidence to the chairman and the police. However, two of the men who actually caught the boy and brought him to me told someone that they felt they should be paid for their services, so a community member who was holding the money (which is, remember, important evidence), has someone make change for him, and gives them 5,000. Today, he presents me with the 5,000 note (which the boy was never in possesion of) as the evidence. I almost burst out laughing when I heard him tell me the story.
The other two boys fled to Congo. I'm picturing an action movie with criminals taking refuge in a volatile country, and an elaborate scheme (undoubtedly involving Jason Bourne) to extradite them across a national border. I don't think it will be nearly that exciting (nor such a kickstart to my career as an action hero), and we'll probably just wait for them to return eventually.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

we've got milk

I’ve written about the BBB outpatient nutrition program for children with moderate acute malnutrition, but those children who have severe acute malnutrition (less than 70% of the weight they should be, given their height, or edema due to protein deficiency) get admitted to the health center for an inpatient nutrition program. Watching these kids recover is like seeing a miracle. Some of them are little more than skeletons when they come in, unable to stand or even lift their heads, and in a few weeks time, they can be smiling, energetic kids again. It’s beautiful. The picture above is of a boy named Kagadisa, who came in looking significantly worse than the picture shows, unable to sit up, barely able to keep his eyes open - on the brink of death. Discharged about a month ago, he's now almost unrecognizable, a relatively healthy looking little boy with a big smile and a swagger in his step. Of course, it doesn’t always work that way, but no where else have I seen such radical changes and recoveries.

This program is run in partnership with UNICEF, who provide the powdered therapeutic milk that we give to these children. A couple of months ago we renewed our contract with UNICEF, and our milk supply began to dwindle. UNICEF seemed to be dragging their feet, never getting us the milk for the program, and we broke into the very last box of it last week. After months delays and expectant waiting, I was starting to think that the milk wasn’t going to come, and we weren’t going to be able to feed these kids. That was a sobering prospect, but it’s a reality in a world of scare resources – I can’t feed everyone I’d like to. There will be people who starve, those who can’t be reached for one reason or another, be it location, corruption, lack of manpower, or lack of finances. This was saddening and infuriating, especially since we had a signed contract for the milk. UNICEF eventually said that they had shipped all of the milk to other parts of Uganda and had none to give us.

When the Myhres were in Kampala this week, Jennifer went to the UNICEF office to plead for the milk. I think she manages to pull off both indignation and emotional supplication simultaneously. Two days ago I heard that the milk was on the way. And this morning, I got a call saying that the truck was at the health center, so I made my way down to help unload and store the 70 boxes of powdered milk – 2100 packets of milk in total. The truly amazing part of the story is that we had only 3 packets remaining for all of the nutrition patients on the ward. As we were unloading, a boy came in with Kwashiorkor (a syndrome resulting very severe malnutrition), and it was great to know that we now had the ability to treat him. Praise God that the food arrived just in time.

A funny side note is that, somewhere in the bowels of the UNICEF system, someone decided that 60 scooping spoons was the appropriate number to accompany 2100 packages of milk. Those aspects of working with big organizations make me laugh, but I guess I shouldn’t complain. So, we’ve been really blessed by this all working out with UNICEF, but it does highlight the tenuous nature of a lot of the work that goes on here, and in much of Africa. Delays, misplaced paperwork, confusion, miscommunication - those things can be very costly, especially to a small organization like ours. Sadly, we’ll never be able to care for everyone we want to or to feed everyone who needs it, but as of today, we’re able to offer good food to a lot of kids teetering on the very edge of life.