Dinner conversations

Last night I had dinner at the home of some Ugandan friends, eating with probably about 10-12 family members and friends. Their hospitality was beautiful and I really enjoyed sharing food and an evening with them. When talking to one middle aged man, he introduced me to two of his young children, both of whom seemed thin and looked sickly. He explained that both of them have sickle-cell disease, a condition that we see quite frequently here and that kills many children (having one copy of the sickle-cell gene is good here, since it helps protect you from malaria, but getting two copies of it gives you sickle-cell disease). My heart instantly went out to these kids who have already lived very difficult lives and whose prospects aren't good, and to their family. It occurred to me - what are the chances of having two kids with sickle cell? If both the mom and dad have one copy of the gene, then each kid should have a 1/4 chance of having sickle cell (remember good ol' Gregor Mendel from high school biology?), so I thought it was certainly unlikely to have two kids with the disease. Then I asked him how many children he had, and he responded that he had 10 kids - it suddenly occurred to me that, with 10 children, two of them having sickle-cell is about what you'd expect. I'm not out to rail against big families - they're certainly considered a good thing here, and I'm not judging that - but in a place of great poverty and little access to health care they do often present problems and make each child's life harder. For one thing, there are more mouths to feed, more health care to pay for, and more school fees to pay - I know one guy who is the 10th of 10 children and his father could only put the first 2 through school, so now he's in his twenties and trying to pull together the money to finish high school so that his prospects might look up just a bit. Another problem we see often is that a breastfeeding mother gets pregnant right away again, stopping her breastmilk from coming in and leading to malnutrition and chronic sickness for her child. Oftentimes, a family could provide for 4 children well, but when they have 7 they can't feed any of them adequately. Now, at the same time, I've seen it work the other way. Sometimes, when one or both parents die, and the older siblings will step into that gap and care for their younger siblings, or care for cousins or something like that. This large network of potential support is potentially life-saving and is one of the very valuable aspects of large families and generally communal living, and it seems to me that that is probably one of the reasons behind the great cultural value placed on children. So, as with most swords, this one cuts both ways.

After dinner, we sat around telling riddles by latern light, and I was fascinated to hear African riddles since they tend to come from a very different way of thinking. I couldn't answer any of them, revolving as they did around specific cultural understandings of goats, leopards, rats, and the ways that life functions around here. Similarly, the responses I got to the one riddle I told (we don't tell as many riddles in the States, it seems) revealed how distinctly American it was and the differences in the ways of thinking about things in different cultures. So, my evening ws filled with good cultural interaction which stretched me, as it has the habit of doing, good Ugandan food, and good laughter. And to top it off, they invited me to spend the night with them, so I shared a single mattress in a dark mud house with a friend, in order to get both of us under the mosquito net and because that's how guests usually stay here. Suffice it to say that it wasn't quite the Waldorf.