blood is the least of it

Posted on September 1, 2010 by linnea

Iganga Town, Uganda

September 1, 2010

“I’m thinking about Columbia.”

My mother’s perfect composure cracked and she whispered fiercely, “why do you always have to go so far away?”

I’d just gotten back from South Africa and my mother mistook my interest in Columbia, for graduate school, with an interest in South America. She was wrong about that particular location but not my inclination. I travel when I can and as such I’ve expanded my concept of family.

Despite america’s definitive step away from the “traditional” nuclear family -  mom dad and two point five kids- my family has hung on. My folks have been married for 40 years. My sister is married with three kids of her own. I seem to be the only outlier to our familiar norm. I’ve chosen to expand our family in a decidedly different way, I get adopted.

There is no paperwork and no one is claiming me on taxes – although I do occasionally get a name change, but I have been successfully (and repeatedly) adopted or absorbed into families all over the world. A running joke, when I tell them they are my favorite mom and dad, they know it means something because I have a history laden with doting moms and protective fathers.

South Africa, New Zealand, Liberia, folks have literally taken me into their homes, fed me, taken care of me when I was sick, and kept me safe and happy before bundling me back home to the blood that birthed me.

And so family for me is this expansive thing. A thing that transcends biology or language. In my village in south Africa, my friend Skware’s mother, who spoke Ndebele to my limited northern sotho, claimed me as her family. When I was absent too long I was chided, when I got old (around 23) and wasn’t married she had solutions (mostly that I marry Skware) and when I was injured, she cried.

It doesn’t take blood to love someone fiercely.

My brother in-law’s father died yesterday. I’m still reeling from the idea that that quirky, funny, friendly man is gone. And while he technically has no familial ties to me beyond marriage, I feel his loss none the less. He is family because he loved and raised Ced. Because he insulted me affectionately the way he did all his family. Because family is more arbitrary than blood.

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much better now

Posted on September 1, 2010 by linnea

September 1, 2010

Iganga Town, Uganda

The issue with long distance sick-ing is two-fold. There is the long distance part. The idea that folks who care about you are worried and can’t do anything. They can’t bring you soup or see you to make sure you aren’t worse than you say (which when far away you might be inclined to do just a little tiny bit to alleviate worry). And of course there is the fear of the health care facilities…at least where I tend to do my long distance sick-ing.

The other issue is the things you tend to suffer from. Silly me, when I got malaria earlier this year, I just assumed everyone knew it is a mosquito borne illness endemic in large swaths of Africa, asia, and latin America.

But not in America. And so folks asked me about how I got it, was I boiling my water, could I treat it?

I realize now I should have done a better explanation, especially if I want to minimize unnecessary panic. The thing is, whereas the flu and colds and allergies, are all commonplace stateside, there are other things that are pretty common place here. And just like no one gets too worked up over the flu going around (in most cases), the same is true (in most cases) with things like malaria.

schistosomiasis, a water borne parasite that lives in your blood, is pretty common here – where lake Victoria and the nile meet. It makes you tired and if left untreated it can do liver damage among other things. But for my part, the tired part seems to be the biggest problem…at least until today…today I started treatment (and will end treatment, it is only one day). Let me just take this time out to say while I had slight malaise before, the treatment knocked me squarely on my behind and put me in the bed asleep in a way the illness didn’t.

Still…comments from friends and family were mostly in the range of, “if you were here(USA) you wouldn’t have that problem” or “you need to come home and treat that.”

While there is truth in the, “if I stayed home…” argument, there is very little in the “come home for treatment. America, the West in general, is a place to treat a lot of things, especially chronic things…but something rare on its shores and unfamiliar to its doctors? I’ll take my chances with treatment from a place where every pharmacist and most average citizens know the treatment (and often the dosage) off the tops of their heads.

this wasn’t the first time I’ve gotten sick far from home. In mozambique it was a head-breaking car accident, in Liberia a little malaria (and apparently schisto since the initial diagnosis came as a result of my check-up upon leaving Liberia), and who knows what Uganda will bring. Still…you can get sick anywhere. No one blames America for my allergies and says I should move to Uganda or brazil because of those…

so I’ll stay put. I’ll be careful and I’ll explain better so the worry is less. It’s ok, really, I’m feeling much better now.

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there is no personal in space

Posted on August 31, 2010 by linnea

Iganga Town, Uganda

August 31, 2010

There are some americanism, my inner mzungo so to speak, that I would presume are rigid and inflexible. I’d be wrong but I sometimes argue with myself that it is true. Personal space is one of those things. From my history I know that I can work through the concept of space; the idea that it is personal- seemingly a mzungo/lakugwa concept.

In south Africa I acclimated myself to women patting my breast when greeting me or gesturing in my general direction. It would rest there absently as we went through our greeting, “how did you wake up?” “I woke up” (a very literal sotho greeting) and onto the part of the conversation about how my parents were and their children. In anticipation of my mzungo/lakugwa family’s visit I took my mother and sister aside to explain and demonstrate. My sister cleared her throat after it had been a few minutes, I’d moved on to another topic, and my hand still rested lightly on her left breast.

And when I stood in lines at the post office or a bank, I quickly learned that line means a throng of people vying for the next teller to process their money or to sell them stamps. And so I squished my breasts against backs or wedged my foot unceremoniously into an almost nonexistent gap, lest there be confusion about my place in line.

I know how to forego the personal in my space.

Still I had wedged that part of myself somewhere deep and forgotten. Until…until I realized that South Africa was just practice. Here people don’t even pretend to get in line. It isn’t a subtle inching forward or even a competition culminating in a mad dash to the front. Instead, people casually walk past an otherwise orderly line and place their receipt for stamping, groceries for buying, or money for paying on the counter in front of a person who has been waiting in line for ages.

Recovering my south African instincts, the other day I ignored woman who circumvented the long cue I’d just stood in and placed her withdrawal slip under the teller’s window. I casually removed her form and replaced it with mine smiling all the while at the teller and simultaneously giving the woman the side-eye (a difficult feat in unison).

I’m not all the way there, today I forgot to physically press myself against the back of the woman at the immigration line which allowed a man to slip in-between us and put his papers down. The line was short and I was tired. I let it pass. The conversion isn’t complete. When I approach the bank manager’s desk and see that someone is sitting there I instinctively hang back, my mzungo in full gear. He generally gestures toward the inevitably empty chair opposite the person already at his desk, and shakes his head.

“why do you stand over there when there is a chair right here?” he makes a point to tease me repeatedly because he doesn’t understand that in America you just don’t crowd a person when they are talking money.

I’m sure in a month I won’t even realize I’ve adapted again. Won’t realize that I no longer allow air or light between me and the body in front of me in any given line or allow for the privacy of the monetary transactions of strangers. Hell…I’m halfway there already. Right now I still hear my inner mzungo urging me to reacquaint space with personal. But that voice is getting fainter. Hell, I might forget I’m a mzungo at all if the kids would stop screaming it at my every time I pass by.

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best of intentions

Posted on August 29, 2010 by linnea
August 29, 2010
Iganga Town, Uganda

Finding the balance is treacherous. Somewhere between apathy-inducing sympathy and hypocritical heartlessness I have to believe lays the way to help people help themselves.

I have no delusions of grandeur. No belief that I have solutions to old and complex problems that a whole country and generations of people failed to think of on their own. So my public health work that is the job I undertake in various countries (including the USA) is not one I take with conceit or the expectation of changing the world right now.

Still, I find it difficult at times to navigate through the confusing waters of what I should do, what my expectations for others should be. So it is with the orphan support program I’m responsible for in my current job. I do not know what it is to live, parentless and income-less, in rural Uganda. I don’t know the nuances of finding food and shelter when the people who would generally be responsible for such things are unable to.

It would be so simple to write a check. To dole out cash with little expectation from a student to help…because, how can they help? What do they have to contribute?

Only they do have resources. Not cash reserves or rich friends, but every culture, every person, has something to draw from that enables them to survive. And I can’t help but think that pretending those resources aren’t important or don’t exist, that people – even students – are helpless as they navigate through life, is counter-productive. It instead leads to a culture of entitlement simply because…a culture of apathy to its own progress and success.

I lived in rural South Africa from 1999-2001, not long after the elections. South Africa, with Mandela at the helm, was the world’s darling. Aid money coursed through the economy, often unchecked and seemingly with little oversight. As a result, when I approached the communities I lived and worked with, I was once met literally with, “what will you bring us?” there was no discussion of collaboration or mutual contributions. And when I told one of my schools (requesting computers despite the lack of electricity in the community…and for that matter potable water) that I had brought myself, the principal told me that he “would hate to have to report me to my boss for not doing my job.”

And so now I find myself flirting with the other side – or at least feeling as if I am. An attitude and expectation that students be held accountable for, be participants, in their own educations. Passing grades, contributions to the other materials that are necessary in schooling.

My colleague gently reminds me that many of these kids are alone in the world save for their siblings. Some are scrimping to help their sisters and brothers, are caretakers in a way that I can’t begin to imagine. And I am chastened. Humbled. Who am I to require anything more than their survival?

Only this program…any program…won’t be here forever…won’t help forever. Children grow up and sponsors fall away. Recessions linger and donations shrink. People must figure out a way to survive – to dare to thrive – in spite of the harrowing circumstances that are unfair but still their circumstances.

Sometimes it feels like I’m dancing with the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” crowd; that wonderfully ignorant notion that people have that somehow they managed to get where they are purely by their own volition, their own determination and brilliance. Never mind their station in life, their social capital, their family history, a break, a fluke, an accident.

I am not so delusional. I know that where I am is squarely on the shoulders of a community of people that actually spans the globe and has been everything from steadfast contributor to flashes of influence.

But I also know that my organization is now part of these students’ community of influence. Contributing fees and support to an education that might otherwise be beyond reach. But community alone – like a person alone – can’t be everything. And so while I don’t want to pretend that the obstacles I’ve overcome in my life’s journey remotely reflect what these kids are forced to, they still have to overcome. They have to study and diversify their resources, think creatively for solutions, because it has to be done and no one can do it for them…even with a program designed to help and the best of intentions.

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thunderstorm lullaby

Posted on August 29, 2010 by linnea

It has been raining for hours, a symphony on a tin roof lulling to the patter of flowing tears. I should be sleeping. This is my favorite lullaby. The night wrapping me in a moist embrace and singing sweetly to me. But I find myself stingy with this unquiet. The electricity flashed away by a streak of lightening breaking the night into temporary day, the glow of my laptop growing faint, and I find myself not willing to relinquish this rare part of my life now, my days, where no one needs me and no one can reach me if they did.

My Saturday evaporated into a cloud of students from our orphan support program and a nap of sheer exhaustion. The kids dubbed me mom and my colleague dad. But even without all the students present, 22 children is a lot to handle all at once.

And maybe if it had simply been their 22 pairs of eyes needing…needing school fees and books and belief that this isn’t all we can give, maybe fatigue would not have held me hostage and stolen most of my daylight.

But Thursday…beyond the sanitation push that had me wielding a hoe to help dig trash pits and nails to assemble tippy taps…there was a child so tiny and frail, skin hanging from the bones. So malnourished I could see it from across the yard. No need to know the age because no age should look like that.

Only age does matter.

Ten months.

Ten months. And when I held her in my hands, she was weightless, her sounds – tiny like her frail body – barely loud enough from my arms to reach my ears but shouting at me just the same.

And what can do at this point? so much damage is already done. This week we’ll take her and her mother to the nutrition ward. But it isn’t a matter of simple malnutrition; the other children are happy and healthy. She is sick. Appropriate care so long in coming, she is probably dying as well.

What to do but schedule appointments for for the coming week. finish the day.

I readied for the ride home, waiting on a stretch of narrow dirt road. Distracting myself, I bent over to watch as the tips of my fingers trailed lightly over slender leaves triggered the closing of the touch-me-nots woven into the blanket of other greenery. The Ugandans stared curiously and laughed and the strangeness of the foreigners.

The group of children that had trailed us from house to house as we asked if people had trash pits, a place to wash their hands, latrines, increased and their chorus of “mzungo” grew in volume as well.

And like their voices, my week followed me home, urged me to lie still for just a moment, enticed me to sleep mid-day leaving me sleepless in the midst of my thunderstorm lullaby.

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mapping home

Posted on August 25, 2010 by linnea

August 24, 2010

Iganga Town, Uganda

If I were to map my town, take stock of people and places…really look and not simply let it pass me as I stroll, it would be full of sounds and color and scents. Even on a two dimensional piece of paper it would spring to life because life tends to demand that.

My street, Mzungo Way I’ll call it, where the children sing the moniker they have bestowed. “mzungo hello. Mzungo goodbye. Mzungooooo mzungooooo,” trailing behind me as I take a left. Walking for a little way I stumble upon Goats’ Intersection where 20 plus goats of all colors and sizes gather and dance the spectrum from lethargy to spastic. A little ways past them, a few steps really, and I reach Duck Crossing where a brood? A gaggle? Of ducks and fuzzy yellow ducklings, waddle aimlessly or swim in their sometimes murky puddle sometimes parched indentation of a tire.

After turning right at Blind Bikers’ and Gawkers intersection (a sometimes perilous endeavor given the bicycles that careen around that corner from behind a brick wall with no announcement except the occasional shrill tinkle of a rusting bell and the staring – er – gawking people that distract me as I pass) I make a left at the Jack Fruit junction, the spiny fruit hanging heavy and languorously from the trunk of the tree for which I’ve dubbed that street and I find myself on Stench Street.

Here the refuse from neighboring households and, I assume the church that has commandeered a huge section on the right of that busy dirt road. It is safe to assume that a clinic or the hospital also do at least occasional dumping there as needles have been spotted among the matoke* peelings, the debris of chewed sugar cane, and anything else a house has deemed unnecessary. Adults and children alike scavenge through the piles of decomposing debris and are either immune to or practiced at avoiding the stench that rises like steam from a pot of rice.

At the end of Stench Street there is, what I presume to be a bar of some sort – I only see men there playing some kind of game I can’t quite see, the occasional call in my direction to ask who I am or where I’m going. Across from that bar is Freedom Park, a patch of green grass crisscrossed by countless footsteps into a brown-striped quilt dotted with trees. People nap in the shade, muslims step away from the bustle of town to take a moment to pray when the mosque’s call reaches out to believers, and men gather at the corner to talk. The discussion wafts by me in snatches of lusoga caught on the breeze. The air heavy with traditional drumming and the speaker destroying bass of local music as crowds gather for political rallies, I imagine they are debating the coming elections in the way men on corners all over the world tend to.

And just like that I’m in town. Bank Row, Market Street (in the most literal sense), I don’t know their actual names…the actual names are random and unhelpful. Instead I find myself concentrating on landmarks, some – like the roundabout on the Kampala Highway – obvious to everyone; others, like Salvation Army Way (host to a row of women selling used clothing) that are just for me, small things to help guide my way through the unknown.

*matoke: savory bananas used to make one of the staple foods

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colonial me

Posted on August 21, 2010 by linnea

August 21, 2010

Iganga Town, Uganda

I haven’t mastered this pseudo post-colonial era in africa. In truth, this is my first true interaction with the way things probably were. I have a high fence with broken bottles glittering in the sunlight to deter unwanted visitors. And if that fence fails I have an armed guard circling the premises.

At least in theory. In truth the guards are often blaring music from a radio they aren’t supposed to have but we have allowed, sleeping curled up on the side of the house (or on a mat on the front porch for the less concerned), chatting with friends, or shirtlessly sunning themselves. And I’m irritated.

My first instinct when I showed up at the office/house was to make friends with our guard. Assuming we had a few that rotated in on a regular basis. They don’t. instead every 12 hours a veritable stranger walks in with a huge gun dangling nonchalantly from his/her shoulder.

The gig must be mind numbingly boring. We aren’t in any real danger from anything except theft (which is how we ended up with a guard in the first place). During the day we have visitors but the guard is truly only forced to move if a car honks to be let in.

At any rate, my first instinct went by the wayside when I realized I couldn’t keep up with all the changing faces and the way our interactions shifted. it was further forgotten when one of the guards asked me if I wanted to play cards…harmless, I know, except it doesn’t feel that way. I’m at work, and frankly, so is he.

The problem I’m having is reconciling what is a professional working relationship- employer/employee, against a colonial history that claimed the same thing.

Why can’t we be friends…at least friendly?

Only it gets twisted into history and power and expectation.

The other day one of the guards gave me money and asked me to buy her some menstrual pads. Woman to woman I had no issue. But that same day she asked one of our students to buy her a drink. Then she asked me if she could run out to get tea. And today she was stretched out sleeping on a mat on the front porch. Aussie, my colleague and roommate, found another guard with his short open to his navel, rubbing his belly and my first weeks here I woke up to a blaring radio at roughly 6am every day.

Then there is the food. It is Ugandan custom to feed people who work for you, be it special hire taxis, bodas you ask to wait for you, or security. So we give lunch and dinner each day. At first the staff gave out a full container of salt and oil, only it would come back empty each day, so those provisions were rationed. Same with sugar. Most recently it is the batteries that power the radio (we supply those as well and someone walked off with them – which explains the relative quiet of the last few days).

It all seems to have spiraled out of control and it makes me uncomfortable.

Aussie was telling me how much she loves jinja (about an hour from iganga at the mouth of the nile), the palatial homes – currently in disrepair but their former grandeur still evident all these years later- that line the canopied streets. And I cringe a little at the thought. At the policies and protocols that built those houses and who they built them for.

Maybe this has nothing to do with my fears of being a colonial presence constantly trying to make Uganda something it isn’t and didn’t ask to be. Maybe this would be uncomfortable no matter where I was, after all I have never had occasion to have security anywhere else. In south Africa I had the same short wire fence as my neighbors, Liberia didn’t even grant that (which was unfortunate give we lived behind a school and the kids were obnoxious on a good day). In oakland my dad thought I needed protection but I managed fine without it and so I really have no point of comparison.

All I have is this nagging desire to have a mutually respectful working relationship on all fronts. Maybe I’ll figure out a way to do that without cultural differences and history getting in the way.

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kittens and lambs

Posted on August 17, 2010 by linnea

It was the sound of distress. High pitched, I couldn’t quite figure out what it was or where it was coming from. Two young men looked back to where they’d just passed and, seeing nothing, continued.

I stopped and peered in the pile of refuse perpetually piled on the side of that busy dirt road -children and adults alike, seemingly immune to the stench of decomposition aided by intermittent downpours and heat.

Finally, my eyes trailing greenery to the cinnamon brown road, I spotted a kitten splayed out and helpless. It couldn’t have been more than a few days old. Probably newly dropped or abandoned, its cries hadn’t yet diminished to the feeble sound I would expect. The cries of newborn lambs succumbed to after days of neglect from new mothers.

I was living in South Africa the first time I heard those almost human cries in the unquiet of a village night. I bundled myself against eh cold, opened the kraal door and found the bleating little body, limp and scared. I carried it into the kitchen, searing for something warm against the cold air blasting though every rack in the door, roof and windows. I warmed milk, tried to feed. But in the morning it was dead.

I cried that day – to the amusement of my host family. “silly lekgowa”, but I learned. The next time I heard the cries I tied the wayward mother to the kraal fence and manually attached her lamb until she got used the idea of feeding.

No longer silly.

As I walked past that screaming kitten I knew there was nothing I could do. Against my instinct, I walked on. The yelps recede and were replaced with the sound of traditional drums. Finally, at the mutatu stand, a mostly filled Jinja-bound mutate greeted me. And as we pulled out of Iganga half an hour later, the kitten and drums were lost on the wind escaping through the slightly ajar mutatu windows.

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out of mabira

Posted on August 15, 2010 by linnea

August 15, 2010

Mabira, Uganda

Tired from the cold night huddled in a bed with three of my colleagues, a disconcerting dream lingering like the early morning dampness under forest cover, we trudged up the muddy incline leading to the road out of Mabira forest.

A truck full of UVP interns and staff slowed to a stop, “iganga iganaga” they called out laughing, impersonating a matatu(minivan taxi). They were already full but the prospect of avoiding the long wait and inevitable mzungo gouging enticed me to squeeze myself in.

The laugher subsided a few miles in, Old Man darting ahead of lumbering trucks and meandering cars. English faded and was replaced by lusoga and laughter while a countdown of music from the entire continent bantered with the wind rushing in from our open windows.

We raced passed people bent over tea plants. The green leaves in bushes low to the ground spreading out like neat tufts of hair. Giving way eventually to sugar cane, lanky stalks crowding each other. Giving way to a cleared cane field burning. The smoke obediently wafting south, rising like volume on a stereo.

Shakira’s “waka waka” catapulted itself out of background status and the whole truck erupted. Hands in the air shaking to the beat, lyrics at the top of lungs catching on the wind and seeming to amplify.

“what language is that?”

“A Cameroonian one. She remade it.”

I didn’t know that. The song ended. Voices offered residual humming.

The forest behind us, the nile, tea, sugar…the weekend just beginning.

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Mabira evening

Posted on August 15, 2010 by linnea

August 14, 2010

Mabira forest, Uganda

The plastic smoldered, drew itself up from clear blue womanly shapes and bright yellow shopping bags to black jewels glistening on ashen logs. The Ugandan interns burned the plastic we’d all collected – the rubbish that has been strewn haphazardly around the party site.

We mzungos* intended to throw it away…where I’m not sure since I still haven’t seen a trash can…but burning wasn’t what we had in mind. Still, it made for a pretty fire. Blue and orange flames between plumes of gray smoke reaching for the clear spot where the canopy of treetops didn’t quite meet.

At this point the night was meandering to an end and the gathering of people who had assembled to say goodbye to my predecessor were nibbling on final bites, voices carrying into final bursts of song, hips wiggling to trailing music.

But it had been moving. People going out of their way to say thank you through song, humor, sentiment, gift. If not intimidating, it was definitely humbling to see the impact- to feel the love- held in trust for her.

Food was central of course. Frederick (of course I named him), the most recent gift from a well commissioning, was skewered on an abundance of sticks and roasted over a makeshift banana tree grill. The pungent sent of goat perfuming the air.

This party was a patchwork of moments. Parts of it made the most familiar pattern. As the night grew cooler and clusters of people drew closer to the warmth of the fire, there were discussions of love and marriage. Of friendship and work. Pieces of the quilt easily recognizable. But there were those moments, because I am a new addition here – foreign and older – where I don’t yet know the cloth, the pattern.

The electricity was out in Mabira leaving the paths to our bandas (sleeping quarters) so dark that the light from my headlamp seemed to uncover only the smattering of rocks in my immediate path. Never mind the muddy water caught in the ruts of cars traveling the same path, stones slick with forest carpet, and mud.

I walked slowly, head careening up from time to time to catch a glimpse of the glittering sky, cocked toward the sound of nocturnal life. The insomniac forest kept vigil while I slept.

*mzungo-foreigner

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