"Tumaini": Swahili for "hope"

I was a freshman. With the Gordon chapter of Amnesty International we showed "The Invisible Children," a documentary made by 3 guys who graduated college and went to Africa to "find something." What they found was a civil war that had been ravaging Northern Uganda for over 20 years. Now a senior, I am in Uganda, and visited the Invisible Children Bracelet Campaign office. It was surreal; standing outside a gate with the oh-so-familiar 'Invisible Children' lettering scrawled in white on black. We knocked, and entered to receive a tour of the offices, meet workers, all displaced from Gulu, and understand the organization more fully. It was encouraging. After my freshman year, critiques of the amount of advertising, and the quality of advertising, done by Invisible Children have sprung- a lot of money is spent. On the ground, the organization seems as sustainable and simplicity minded as possible though. And the ways that the Bracelet Campaign is not sustainable, are being addressed. The office we went to is completely Ugandan staffed. The workers we talked to are happy- thankful for a job with benefits. "Because of this, my sister and brother can attend to school." The walls are bare; the money goes to people, not decorations.
Two days later I visited another organization called TAPP: Tumaini AIDS Prevention Program. And it was even more exciting. TAPP is not only completely Ugandan staffed, but began out of a Ugandan man's acknowledgment of need, and desire for change. "Be the change to want to see in the world" and all that (Gandhi). TAPP's aim is to provide opportunities for women and children infected with HIV/AIDS, to reclaim identity and community. So often those infected are ostracized, sick, and unable to provide for themselves (or their children). There is jewelry making- providing income, as well as collaboration among the women who work together. There is a program for elderly women, raising funds to build 2 room homes, so that they have one room to live in and one to rent for income. There are children's programs- a school, sponsorship opportunities, etc. I walked with Patrick, the school's headmaster, for 15 minutes as I left the center to catch a matatu back to Mukono. He also leads MDD (music, dance, and drama), and allowed me to inquire about the effectiveness and sustainability of theatre here. He went to undergrad for "Community Theatre," and spoke highly of its potential. I asked if he thought me coming back here and getting involved in community theatre (specifically focused on social change) was attainable. He answered a hearty "yes." For those 15 minutes alone, the day's visit was worth it.

My time volunteering with LiA also continues to highlight my weeks. Walking through the Acholi Quarter in Banda, the IDP camp that most of the interviews are conducted in, is an intriguing combination of light and heavy. It lightens me in the good of the work, and weighs in its dank reality. Invisible Children, TAPP, and LiA- each pushes me to wonder how where I'll end up long-term and what I'll be doing. And how the heck will acting play in? I think of Franny and Zooey once again: "Somewhere along the line...you not only had a hankering to be an actor or actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to- be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier?"

Bathday.

That fetal-position-inducing bacteria in my intestines put me out of commission for several days, but I’ve been able to sit up for most of the daylight hours of this week, and finished the medicine last night. The bacteria also laid off substantially for my Sunday birthday, and I celebrated much more than I thought I would be able to. I went to sleep on Saturday night, resigned to a quiet passing of the next day. In an attempt to avoid the Ugandan tradition of regularly drenching the “bath-day” boy or girl, few people knew of its coming. Soon after I entered my final dreams as a 20 year old, I was awoken up by a group of fellow USP students singing though, who blindfolded me and led me outside in my pajamas, circled me around, and ended in the nearest kitchen. There were candles lit and an entire yogurt parfait bar. A surprise party for my Ugandan birthday! And I didn’t get drenched!

The next morning, Aimee, Sarah, and I headed into Kampala to go out to breakfast and finish shopping for friends and family. We caught the matatu (public taxi in the form of a 15 passenger van) per usual. Not until the matatu was venturing down Jinja Rd. did we realize there were also chickens aboard- 80 in total, shoved under seats and between feet, squawking and flapping occasionally. It was hilarious. One laid an egg. Even more hilarious was when they and their owner were dropped off just outside Kampala, and they were loaded onto two boda-bodas (public transport in the form of a motorcycle): attempt to imagine 40 live chickens tied by their feet in pairs, draped over the handle bars of a motorcycle. Amazing.

The day was good- we laughed at the public transportation system and our own glee over the anomaly of pancakes and coffee for breakfast. I finally bought gifts for the men in my life (Dad, brother, brother-in-law…). A definite birthday highlight was arriving back on campus in time to receive a phone call from the entirety of Fitchville Baptist Church, complete with a group crooning of “Happy Birthday.” Sick and a birthday made the Atlantic Ocean seem very big last week, but in a matter of a phone call I suddenly felt loved enough to suffice the distance.

Happy Thanksgiving! CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting) brought the Queen of England to Uganda this week, and also gave us a long weekend with Thursday and Friday as National CHOGM Holidays. We had a big Thanksgiving-ish dinner with the ex-patriots from the area. A Charlie Brown Christmas made up for the lack of stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. Again I talked with love across the Atlantic, and felt a part of things far.

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for: international phone calls; Franny and Zooey (just read it for the 2^nd time this semester); Linus and the meaning of Christmas. I’m thankful for the continent of Africa- all its bigness and my smallness, and how often it reminds me of such. I’m thankful for the Atlantic Ocean, its reminder of distance, and what can cross it.

I hugged back.

A week ago I was sitting on a ferry with Aimee and Sarah, crossing the Equator and Lake Victoria to camp on the Ssese Islands. It docked on Kilangala and we walked down the white sand beach until it ended. Then we kept walking through the bush until we realized that perhaps the beach didn’t start back up again and turned around to set up our tent on the last patch of beach. Looking out at other islands and the sunset, I built a fire- years of camping with Uncle Stevie taught me well. We toasted bread for pb&j sandwiches, followed up by several rounds of marshmallows toasted to varying degrees of perfection. Saturday was our own self-proclaimed debrief time, reading and preparing for the final stretch of this semester. We collected extra wood for our beach fire that night and cuddled up to roast more marshmallows. At a point of quiet stillness, our heads leaned together and I wondered aloud: Since when are we old enough to be off camping by ourselves? In Africa? We are so far from home right now.

Perhaps the sharp reverberating pains that put me in a fetal position on my bed for a day and a half this week were the excuse I needed to curl up and feel young again. I cross the line from 2 decades to two decades and a year old this Sunday. In six months, somehow, I will be a college graduate. Really? Oh gosh, and I’ll be an auntie. In Luganda, the mother’s sisters are also referred to as mother. So, in four months, in the Buganda kingdom of Uganda, I’ll be a mother. Sheesh. More fetal position time.

“Franny now lay sleeping on her left side, facing into the back of the couch and the wall, her chin just grazing one of the several toss pillows all around her. Her mouth was closed, but only just. Her right hand, however, on the coverlet, was not merely closed but shut tight; the fingers were clenched, the thumb tucked in- it was as though, at twenty, she had checked back into the mute, fisty defenses of the nursery” (Franny and Zooey, 123).

Now I sit upright, and the antibiotic for the bacteria that might be hanging out in my intestines sits on my desk. And though I reserve the right to a good fetal position moment whenever necessary, I also embrace the exhausting joys of being here, so far from home and the nursery.

Through an enjoyable string of events (hooray for Aimee and her inclinations), I recently began to volunteer with a community center called Life in Africa (which does microfinance loans, craft sales, and community groups- all sustainable aid and change, organized by and for Ugandans). Once a week I go to either Banda or Ntenda and survey families (LiA members). The center is located in an Acholi IDP* camp and many of the members live in slum-like conditions. On Wednesday I surveyed Zuan Chandini who provides for her sisters five orphaned children. The 5 year old, second to youngest, is HIV positive. Even with the prevalent reality of HIV/AIDS here, the translator I was working with struggled to move to the next question after hearing of an infected toddler.

“Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who indeed knows why there can be comfort in a world of desolation? Now God be thanked that here is a beloved one who can lift up the heart in suffering, that one can play with a child in the face of such misery…Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Who knows what keeps us living and struggling, while all things break about us? Who knows why the warm flesh of a child is such comfort…” (Cry, The Beloved Country, 56-7).

The experiences of the LiA work refuse to sink into my reality. I think asking questions of food intake, future goals, past experiences with child abduction, etc. put my emotions in a distanced state for the sake of sanity. Sitting in a mud room that is home to three adults and three children, with the walls covered in cardboard and newspaper soccer clippings, I attempt to acknowledge the depth of the interaction. Instead I am left with an inarticulate flow of facts. In return for two hours of questions Molly Kyomukama gave me half an ear of roasted corn and a hug. What else could I give her? I hugged her back.

(^ Molly)

*IDP: Internally Displaced Persons

Feelings change from want to must.

I do not recall the earliest point at which I dreamed about a hut in Africa. I ought to find the pictures Russell MacGregor drew of me in a “shack in Africa” from across Mr. Avila’s seventh grade History classroom. I think I still have one tucked in a drawer in Connecticut, drawn in red pen, where stick-figure me holds a playbill and smiles, posing in front of an African hut.

Imagining Russell’s artistry, I laughed nervously and placed my head in my hands as the truck turned off the main dirt road and began the 15 minute drive through the bush to my rural homestay. The driver rolled up the windows to keep snakes from coming in off the branches that hugged against the vehicle. Potbellied children could still be heard yelling, even through the closed windows, anticipating the tears I would soon receive from the two year old twins that became my niece and nephew, frightened at the anomaly of my white skin.

My life (thus far) felt as if it were culminating when I was suddenly ushered to my hut by Toto (Iteso for Mom). This clearing in the midst of African bush- a small compound of huts, a latrine, and several graves, was my home. Toto and Papa, a couple in their seventies, became yet another pair of parents. I was alone in my whiteness, and incredibly welcome in my self. And despite five days of diarrhea on a pit latrine, I crumbled when I rode back along those footpaths. Mercy and Opio had stopped crying at that point- stopped “fearing.” I cradled Mercy in my arms in the moments before leaving. Toto gave me millet flour we had pound and ground together. Ruth, my sister, gave me cookies I watched her fry earlier in the afternoon (they taste like fried shortbread cookies). Papa picked me a dozen oranges from the three trees that centered our compound. The taste of one lingers in my mouth now as I type.

It is difficult for me to summarize this experience. More difficult than any other portion of the semester has been. I arrived feeling as if it was about time I got there, and something inside me wondered what had taken so long. I left feeling, more than ever, the risk of forgetting. I cannot risk forgetting this place where my heart sat down and my arms stopped shaking. Where the lyrics Stevie gave me at the start of this semester inbreathed- “feelings change from want to must.” I must, even though I still do not quite know what.

I missed most of the jokes, but enjoyed the laughter. Most of my family spoke at least broken English, but when jesting, Iteso prevailed. I weeded cassava, dug potatoes and groundnuts, cleaned, roasted, and ground the groundnuts, ground millet, and carried water on my head from the boar hole. We ate everything with our hands, including beef, chicken, mud fish, silver fish, pork, and goat (which lead to the vomitous and diarrhea-ed proof that my stomach is actually having difficulty with digesting meat after two years and it’s not completely mental, as some have accused!). I visited a primary school and left wanting to build my own hut right there, teach at the school, and start a drama program for the girls to promote self-respect. We visited a neighboring compound, home to at least eleven orphan children, two of which are severely disabled. Every night after dinner, which we ate varying between 10 and 11:30 pm, we prayed and sang together. One song included the line “even militia bow before Him.”

I crumbled upon departure. Days later I continued to crumble, though less. And I will continue to pick up these pieces for a long time, but I hope I will not be able to gather them all. I do not want to recover from this. I feel as if I am on the decline to the semester- this rural departure was the beginning of the end, and I embrace that only in the promise that this semester will not end in me.

“Feelings change from want to must, so I push a meaning to it all.”

Glossary of Characters

Consistently present within the compound were:

Toto- Joyce is the mother of eleven children, eight of whom are still alive. The seven graves within our compound belong to her son, daughter-in-law, and five grandchildren than have been lost to “extended illness,” which means HIV/AIDS. Atop the strenuous nature of life for an African woman, she also distributes anti-malarial medicine to children of their village, attempting to lessen the depressing rate of avoidable infant mortality. Papa paid 20 cows and 8 goats in dowry for her.

Papa- Moses is a retired Primary School headmaster of 36 years, still passionate about education. I learned this is full when he took me to a “local” primary school (about a 30 minute walk through the bush), and upon arrival I found out I was about to talk to a group of P7 girls about such. The school we visited has about 1,900 students and 22 teachers. The P1 classroom I was ushered into barely had enough room for me to stand. I peered through the window-less window to watch the 75-100 first graders, in a classroom comparable in size to my 30 student classrooms from elementary school, sing me a song. They sat on the floor, laughing and singing and climbing on top of each other. There are no textbooks.

Tata- Toto’s mother lives in a hut set apart from the rest. As Toto and Papa are in their seventies, I assume she is in her nineties. She is the picturesque, elderly, African woman. When not walking with her 6ft tall stick, she would crawl across the compound to greet me in the morning. She does not speak a syllable of English, but we still managed to have meager conversation. She was most typically seen peeling cassava, hand washing sheets, or slaughtering chickens.

Ruth- Toto and Papa’s “daughter in Christ,” a poor, single mother visiting to help farm, cook, and keep me company. Her husband left with her second daughter about a decade ago and she does not know where they are- she said she would not recognize her daughter. Her elder daughter, Juliet, is in P7 now though and Ruth continues to struggle to pay her school fees. Toto and Papa paid them while I was there as Ruth had no money, and without it Juliet would not continue. The fee was 5000 shillings, about $2.50.

Opio and Mercy- 2 year old twins; son and daughter of Betty, who is a teacher so she is often gone, even staying at the school overnight frequently. Betty was unwilling to allow their father to take a second wife, so he left them. Opio’s name is actually Emmanuel, but he is called the Iteso word for first born twin.

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Lovelove.