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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.