mkwano gwange (my beloved friend)

Sometimes, I get nervous to take pictures in the village because I am afraid of upsetting a Muslim.  Followers of Islam believe, and I think there is a morsel of truth in this, that taking someone’s picture is taking away part of their soul.   I do always ask permission, yet I am terrified of accidentally snapping a Muslim in the background, and causing that person distress.

Furthermore, and more generally, taking pictures feels like a heavy responsibility.  I want to honor the people I photograph, and never, ever take their consent for granted.

I loved this little boy as soon as I saw him.  On a dusty, gray day the bright yellow of his shorts, the electric blue of the chair, and the bicycle wheel spinning round and round next to him immediately drew my eye.  He seemed completely unflappable to me.  His gaze was steady and unafraid.  In this, he seemed almost like an old man, as if he had seen all sorts of goings on under the sun, and as if nothing I could do or say would surprise him.

worms and spiders and lizards, oh my

I live in a comparatively posh area of Kampala, on top of a sprawling, gorgeous hill.  Here, the air is much cleaner than air down in the valleys, where every car belches black smog and burning trash piles emit sinister smoke.  [Cows feed on trash here, which is why meat tastes like garbage]

On my hilltop, I breathe easy.  I can run.  Mornings come, bright and beautiful.  From my apartment, I see the thick smog-blanket below, and I am deeply thankful for clean air and for physical safety.  (Simultaneously, I’m devastated for the thousands who sleep, wake, walk and play in that brutal dust and heat).

No question that I’m very fortunate in that I live in such a beautiful place.  However, a small series of unfortunate, yet funny, hygiene-related issues occurred yesterday where I live.

Yesterday afternoon, K (my roommate) and I decided to make tahini sauce and roasted cauliflower.  It was a bright, lazy Sunday afternoon.  The windows were open.  The sun shone through, and sort of stuck to everything like butterscotch.  Cauliflower simmered on the stove.  Bon Iver crooned.

“This is a gorgeous day,” K remarked.

“It really is,” I said, thinking about how much I need these periods of rest, how necessary Sabbath has become to me.

“Oh,” K said suddenly.  “ AR [a woman who used to live in our apartment] mentioned we need to clean our water filter regularly.”

Now we did not know this.  I guess we’d assumed that the filter cleaned the water …. seeing as that is the point of a water filter and all.  We popped open the top.  Lo and behold, here were little mounds of mold and a nice maggot colony lifting their white bellies sunward.  They squirmed in the lukewarm shallows, enjoying the pleasant afternoon.

“Gaaaah,” I said.

“Ecch,” Kirsten said.

We have been drinking this water for two months.

I think we responded rather well, given the circumstances.  We poured the water out — and well, I couldn’t help but notice that it ran chocolate brown and left a moldy residue.  Even then, we did not panic.  We took deep breaths.  We paced the kitchen a little.  “Calm,” K said.  “I feel calm.  Yes, this is good.”

That’s when I noticed a hideous spider crawling in her blonde hair.  K, I said.  Do not freak out.  Stay where you are.  I want you to stand very still.  I am going to remove a spider from your head.

I flicked the spider, and he crawled away.  At which point, K shrieked.

We gathered ourselves together once more.  We even managed some shaky laughs, and went back to preparing our lunch.  We listened to the strains of worship music coming up the hill (the hill where we live is home to many clubs and churches, which means techno music or hymns are always playing).

A few seconds later, my phone rang.  K shrieked again, this time louder and longer.

“What?  Oh my gosh, what?”

“Ah … the noise startled me.”

We were certainly on edge.

Five minutes later, after preparing our cauliflower and tahini, K remarked that there is lizard poo festooning our walls.

I looked around.  Indeed there was.  Why, there was lizard poo as far as the eye could see.

“You know,” I said.  “I am just going to decide not to see this lizard poo.  I don’t see it.  I don’t see it, I don’t see it.”

Sometimes in Uganda, denial is the best way to go.  This tactic works well with lizard poo, but not so well with cockroaches.  Big and fat, fast and mean, cockroaches  demand instantaneous reactions.  K and I are both now quite good at killing them.  We smash them dead on a daily basis, using our sandals as clubs.  Sometimes, we chase them around the apartment, dousing them with Doom until they quiver, shudder, curl up and die.   [The Doom fumes are probably slowly killing us as we sleep as well].

K and I have even started a little graveyard outside.  We deposit carcasses into the shrubbery.  We hope this nice visual will deter other maggot and cockroach perpetrators from infringing upon our lands rights.

The lizards can stay, I think — they are kind of cute.  Now if only we could potty train them?

brinner in cyberspace with wesley

This morning, I transcended space and time to have breakfast with Wes. Wes is a friend from college.  We used to do theater together and also spin donuts in snowy parking lots.  Additionally, we share a love for ludicrous rap lyrics.

For Wes, breakfast took place at 7:45 p.m. in Seattle.  For me, breakfast was at 6:45 a.m. in Uganda.

We made the necessary arrangements a few days ago.  “This will be brinner,” Wes said.  “Dinner for me, breakfast for you.”

“Ha!  I like it.”  Then, “What should we eat?  The same things?”

“Of course” he said.

We settled on scrambled eggs, mango, and coffee.  “I can put flowers on the table,” I said.

To which Wes responded, “You can have a flower.  I will have  a man tree.”

The picture below is grainy and gray, and completely fails to do justice to the breakfast.   The picture doesn’t show the delicious food  — pale, creamy yellow mango (which was just a lee-tle crunchy) or the steaming coffee.  Furthermore, the Skype camera distorted Wes’ face.  Sometimes, as we chatted, he was suddenly missing his nose.  By turns, he became a shadow.  But the shadow’s movements were Wes’ movements, and the voice was unmistakably Wes’.  And best of all, he could still make me laugh, even from across the ocean.  Yay.

I tell you what, this “Information Superhighway” stuff is just unreal.  Connecting like this is very helpful when you long for old, familiar friends.  Maybe some day (oh, happy day!) technology will advance so far that you will be able to email me breakfast pastries as attachments.  Imagine!  And perhaps — who knows — you could even email yourself to me.

So I say, in the midst of a rain storm rocking the office and a sudden bout of missing people, yay for technology!  Yay for old friends and the instant comfort even the general impression of their faces can bring.

krennington: a love story

In Colorado hot springs last year.

This weekend, I’ve thought a lot about my dear friend Erin K, affectionately known to many as “Special K.” Except now I think I’m going to have to call her “Special B,” since she just married Ned B.

I first met Erin my freshman year of college.  We lived on the west wing of the third floor of Fischer Dorm.

She threw discus, I did theater and choir.  She was from New York and spoke quite loudly.  I hailed from Canada and spoke quietly.  Despite our differences, or maybe because of them, we connected.

Erin had precariously stacked her modular, ugly, college-issued bunkbeds into this sort of dorm room‘cave.’  The whole contraption looked like a giant game of Jenga.  I loved it; it made me feel like a kid again.  We would hunker down in the fort and watch What Not to Wear, sometimes talking to her suite-mates through the shared bathroom.

“How’s Bio?”

“It sucks, it’s a beast.  I was up till three last night.”

“So I hear.”

[sound of toilet flushing]

We made kettle corn all the time because it was cheap and delicious.  We brewed raspberry and crème de menthe flavored hot chocolate from a gargantuan Sam’s club stash.

E and I did not have to talk; we could be quiet together.

We lived on the curved inside of a U-shaped dorm.  The West side was for women, the East, for men.  Whose bright idea this fishbowl dorm was, I don’t know.  Sometimes we would catch glimpses of very sincere, lovelorn boys strumming guitars, and looking longingly into the women’s rooms. We laughed at them. I should clarify that we didn’t escape implication ourselves.   Our own awkwardness, our own fecklessness, were frequent topics of conversation.  As we struggled through love and life, we wiped out often.  We skinned our knees.  But at least we could talk about it, wonder at it.

Erin lived with a sort of all-or-nothing approach, devil-may-care attitude, that I really envied.  Sometimes, she would literally roll out of bed with her hair messy and poofy like a lion’s mane, wearing sweat pants.  “I don’t even care this morning,” she would say, and really mean it.  Off to class she went.

Other times, she would put on a leather jacket and mascara and look amazing.  I liked that about her.  All or nothing.  She said what she meant, meant what she said, and did what she wanted to do with her time.  She put her money down, so to speak.

Erin’s way of life—“yes meaning yes,” “no meaning no,”—carried over into her  social interactions.  At a place like Wheaton, it’s all too easy to spread yourself thin and say yes to every passing acquaintance who wants to have a ‘SAGA date’ in the cafeteria.  As a hopeless people-pleaser, I said yes far more often than I should have.  Consequently, I was forced to scurry around, burdened and overwhelmed.   Erin, by contrast, would yawn and say, “There are like five people here that I care about.  You are one of them.”  [Or, in the case of one poor gentleman who could not take a hint: "you aren't one of them"]    Her loyalty reminded me then, and reminds me now, of Ruth saying “Where you go, I will go, and your people will be my people.”

In a sea of perfect, buttoned-up Christian girls, I could always count on Erin to speak her mind.  Sometimes, I would look around campus and think that the people we were all beautiful violins shut up in cases.  Everyone lived so timidly.  We were so afraid of expressing anything other than ‘niceness.’  Erin stepped out and played real music.  She walked with sass.  I loved that.  I loved her loud truthfulness, I loved her spice, and perhaps, to some extent, lived vicariously through her daringness.

We decided to live together.  She was a great roommate.  When I got sick – as evidenced by my sickly pallor in this picture – Erin would care for me in a way few self-absorbed college students could.  She brought me armloads of juice, magazines, and princess balloons.  Sometimes, she would say, “Gross, this room smells like sick people,” but she cared.

This is me just after I had thrown up.  E and K brought me this amazing balloon (read the caption closely … they edited it).

We ate a lot of Snyder’s honey mustard pretzels.  We listened to Michael W. Smith as we sketched out maps of the Holy Land for Old Testament.  Lying prone on the floor, Erin would swear at her Bible map.   Juxtaposed with Michael’s soaring violins in the background and conversations about prayer drifting through the open window, her well-placed curse words always amused me.

Our senior year, Erin graduated a semester early.  She left to work at a house for addicted and convicted teenagers in California.  Lots of college’s details elude me today, but I remember this particular goodbye in vivid detail.  Me, Kara (her maid of honor) and Erin went to Caribou coffee for a last hot chocolate.  The wind was deathly cold and characteristically vicious that day.  It sliced our cheeks like knives.  We had to tread carefully on the treacherous Chicago ice.  A  gray sky hung above us like spun wool.  The metra train rattled by, those green windows gleaming a little through the cold.

Erin came back out to see opening night of Hamlet!

Erin wore a light blue North Face.  We all cried a little.  The years had been startlingly good to us.  “We’ll see each other soon,” we promised, and then we pulled away in Kara’s car, leaving Erin at the curb of O’Hare airport.  And she was gone.  And just like that, our college years together were over.

Erin knew her new job would prove challenging, but she wasn’t quite prepared for what met her when she arrived in San Jose.  Mismanagement and disorganization abounded at the girls’ home.   Erin received no support from the administration.  The girls she lived with were volatile and unpredictable.  Wounded tigers.  Their pain, violence and constant drama never ceased and Erin had no respite from any of it.  Without the help of two other co-counselors (they’d quit), Erin had no time off to recuperate or recharge.

On the positive side, Erin did get to learn new, juicy phrases, like “hella tweaker” and “why you gotta waste my flava.”  She drove around a van of teenage girls listening to, “This is why I’m hot” blaring from the speakers.  At  AA meetings, she had to watch her girls vigilantly.  They kept trying to instigate trysts with male participants.

Like most dramatic experiences, Erin’s stint in the rehab center  made for good stories later.  Yet of course the prospect of a good story provides little comfort in the moment.   San Jose was rough, and Erin was slowly unwinding in it.  When I talked to Erin on the phone — she tried to whisper, but she doesn’t really have an ‘inside voice’ – I could tell she was very, very tired.

Soon after, a very very sad and sudden thing transpired.  I remember when I first heard.  I was singing on the worship team at Church of the Resurrection.  As I sang and looked out over the congregation, I noticed that our friend Ashley (a bridesmaid in Erin’s wedding) was leaning out into the aisle looking at me worriedly.  That’s funny, I thought.  She never comes to this church.  Why is she here?

After the service was over, I came down the steps laughing at something someone said.  She was there, waiting, a grim expression spread across her face.  She grabbed my arm.  “Laura.  Laura, Erin’s dad died.”

We flew out to New Jersey to see Erin.  The funeral had just taken place.  We borrowed Ashley’s aunt’s car and drove through the suburbs.  When we arrived at Erin’s quiet cul-de-sac, I remember pressing the doorbell and being struck with leaden helplessness.  What do I say, God, what do I say.  Please tell me what to say.  I have had such a happy life.  I know nothing about death, please help me.

The cul-de-sac stayed quiet.

Erin arrived at the door with a sleepy look on her face, wearing a black velvet track suit.  Lion hair today.  We sat down on her living room couch.  Her jubliant and rosy-cheeked father beamed from photographs on the walls.  His arm was wrapped tightly around his wife.  Ski mountains shone behind him.

Erin proceeded to tell us how she felt. Her heart was cracking open, she said.  Over nine hundred people had come to her Dad’s funeral, he was so loved.  I feel numb in this house full of fruit-baskets and books about grieving, she said.

What had occurred was undoubtedly, searingly awful.  To search for “God’s will,” in this event, as so many well-meaning Christians always try to do, would have constituted a sacrilege.  Erin was wise in that she knew her own smallness.  She knew that anything she understood about God is very tiny in comparison to who He actually is.  So what could she do but wait and be quiet and give her grief to him?

Ashley and I clumsily tried to be supportive that week.  We picked over the fruit baskets.  We watched a lot of tv.  We got pedicures–my first.  The girls laughed at me when I squirmed in that muscle-y, boxy black massage chair.  “Lean back into it, Laura!  Lean back!”

“I can’t!  This chair is alive!  It’s creepy!”

We bought too many cappuccinos and sipped them in the car.

We were quiet.  What do you say, anyway.

Erin moved home permanently to be with her mom and to look for work.  The next year proved difficult, and the months stretched out bleakly.  The job search was tedious.  Erin was always brave on the phone.  Forging friendships proved difficult.

Pain inevitably affects relationships – we all know that if we tell people about our personal sorrow, chances are high they will turn away.  Maybe they’ll stay, be our friends despite it, but who can know?

But then, God blessed Erin with a great job.  Today, Erin heads up a pregnancy and health clinic for young teenage moms.  She is going to school (Fordham) to get her Masters of Social Work. AND she met a great guy.

Enter Ned, stage right.  A bit of a swagger — the nice, endearing kind of swagger.  Boyish grin.

He’s Brazilian, gentle, kind and very funny.  I got to meet him in New York right before I came out here, to Uganda. They picked me up in Ocean Grove, on the beach.  I saw them walking down the pier, and before I knew it was them, I sez to myself I sez, that is couple is in love.  Something about the way they leaned into one another gave them away.

On the car ride home, we bought out the McDonalds drive through.  Ned made her laugh, her loud, genuine, boisterously delightful New York laugh.  I grinned in the back seat.

They got married this weekend in an icy, snowy New York wedding.  Thousands of miles away, on the top of a hill where I live in Uganda, I trod red dirt roads and cleaned our flooded apartment.  I killed cockroaches and deposited their carcasses into the shrubbery.  I made mango crumble.  I studied for the LSAT, and paced our porch.  The sun beat down.  I went to a party to welcome back four biker friends who’d made a trek through East Africa, and successfully avoided angry mobs, dodged steaming piles of elephant dung, watched lightning bolts strike the horizon.  What adventures.  (And I wished myself a man so I could go).

All weekend, I felt a lump in my throat– selfishly, probably, because I couldn’t have something I wanted.  I wanted to be able to go home so I could Erin’s bridesmaid, as I’d said I would.  Missing her day hurt a lot.  Days like Erin’s wedding day are irreplaceable.  I missed this day, and it’s not coming back.  I will never be in the pictures.

Comforts I have given up to come to Africa – hot showers, jiffy peanut butter, etc. – have barely registered with me,  because they don’t really matter.   I really don’t care about hot water or peanut butter.   (OK, sometimes I care about peanut butter).  Missing Erin’s wedding, however, is in a different category because Special K is a once-in-a-lifetime friend.  I should be there, I kept thinking as I scarfed down salsa at the party.  I should be there, I thought as I tried to focus on ‘reading comprehension questions.’  I love Erin so much.

Gradually, I think — I hope, maybe — my sadness has changed into thankfulness.  The way God binds up the broken-hearted floors me.  He gave Erin, my beautiful, tender-hearted friend, Ned, a strong man and a super fun companion.  He knew what she needed.  Who would have thought three years ago, in the midst of such numbness and pain, that something so beautiful, strong and splendid as their love would ever come.

So, from Uganda, I guess all I can say is – Congratulations, Hallelujah and THANKS BE TO GOD.

land grabbing’s victims: in pictures

i owe you all a blog entry

Do not let me hear

Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

T. S. Eliot No 2 of 4 Quartets (East Coker)

Oliotya!  (You are how?).

I am sitting coffee shop where I have to dodge drops of water splashing down from the ceiling.  The rain came down like crazy last night.  It choked my heart’s rhythm, it roared so loud– a wild thing.  I sat up straight in bed and told God, “You promised!”—referring to his words about never flooding the earth again.

Weather here is intense, almost vengeful sometimes.  Who knew there was such a sky as the one I see every day?  Wish I could write it down –its wideness, the towering cloud pillars, and the gold calligraphic flourishes.  It seems to me like a living companion in that it comes close and is always changing.  I will remember those clouds dipping down.  I will remember the red communion wafer sun.

I should mention to you that UGANDAN MAIL WORKS.  Rumor was that it didn’t; I’d heard that letters would take eons to arrive and that packages will arrive looted and rifled through.  Well,  the latter might still be true; I haven’t received any packages yet.  I have, however, received some real letters scrawled in familiar handwriting — and when I saw them sitting on my desk at work, I howled with joy.  If you experience the impulse to dash off a letter to me, I’d say, go for it.  You can send me an email requesting my address.

I continue to try to adjust to life in Uganda.  I find work especially enlivening and centering.  The Ugandan staff teach me so much about courage every day.  I think I mentioned on my blog that many of them have quietly done very brave things, simply because God asked them to.  One coworker smuggled hygiene products to the poor during Idi Amin’s reign, risking her life to do so.  For her, the way of obedience was clear.  If I ever suggested she was a hero, she would laugh.  She putters around the office, forgetting her shoes are off, she’s so focused on her work and her clients’ needs.  After many years in social work, she still cries sometimes at her clients’ suffering.  And she tells their stories in a deep, powerful voice: “When I first met C, she was so sick she could not walk.  She had to crawl along the forest floor to meet me.”

My preoccupation this week is a problem analysis section for a “fatty” grant which, if we get it, will help IJM help lots of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the North.  Never did I expect to have to work on such a comprehensive research project, but I am glad for this broadening experience, glad for the challenge.  I spend a lot of time in a coffee shop with BOUTS, or Binders Of Unusual Tonnage, fiddling with words and terms like “ouput,” “food security,” “customary law,” “statutory,” etc etc.

Here’s some background to the grant.  Over the last twenty years, millions of people in the North of Uganda were herded into government internment camps during the conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army.  Now these IDPs are returning home, only to find other people living on their land.  Traditionally, tribes would care for one another and partition land relatively fairly, providing for the vulnerable.  Now that people have grown up away from their clans, social cohesion has broken down and its every person for himself, with no one to protect the widows and orphans most often ousted from their property .  65 percent of all land is now disputed in the North.¹ It’s very, very sad.  I hope IJM can help.  If all goes well, we’ll continue our casework in Mukono County (close to Kampala) and establish a pilot office up north, too, to help individuals who have nowhere to go, no way to eat and who are alienated from their clans as a result of the years spent in the camps.

For Ugandans, land is survival.  I think this concept is difficult to get across – to Americans, land grabbing doesn’t sound as bad as other injustices.  However, I see the pain and devastation this problem causes whenever I go to the field.  People who’ve been robbed of their land have no education, no food, and they can’t afford medical treatment, not to mention that they don’t belong anywhere.

The children still act as children do — kneeling down in the dust to share maize with me, shoving one another sometimes, laughing so that their tonsils show.  In some ways, they show surprising resilience.  In other ways, you can see their suffering and the waste in them not being able to attend school.

In addition to working on this grant, I’ve also been working on several writing projects, building relationships with media here, working on a small grant to secure wells for some of our clients, taking many, many pictures, writing press releases, and much more.  I’m always busy, and I get to do a lot of things I really enjoy. The Independent, a popular Ugandan weekly publication, included a short article about IJM this month based off a press release I wrote and distributed.

I think one of my favorite things about IJM is the stories — the hopeful stories– I get to communicate.   I see my job as telling the truth, as simply and directly and possible, and spreading hope — which sounds cheesy, perhaps, but seems real and important to me.  Oh hope, unseizable as music, elusive as days passing so quickly.   I couldn’t ask for more meaningful work to do.

sunrise/sunset

swallows and amazons

A few weeks ago, I found a tiny used bookshop up above a tea room here. Friends below were calling me for lunch, but when I saw an old favorite from childhood peeking from the shelves, I had to stop and buy it. This book, yellow spined and dog eared, is Swallows and Amazons, the first in a series about sailing and adventures. I’ve heard tell that some people have learned how to sail just from reading these children’s books. The author describes boats and sailing in such loving detail.

I’ve been enjoying revisiting the first in this series, and this particular passage stuck out to me.

“The island had come to seem one of those places seen from the train that belongs to a life in which we shall never take part. And now, suddenly, it was real. It was to be their island after all.” (17)

As I read this, I probably replaced “the island” with “Africa” in my head. Still can’t believe I’m here.

global shifts/ piecemeal thoughts

Hi my long-lost blog followers,

A revised and expanded version of my previous blog entry, “legal education,” was published here:

http://globalshift.org/2009/11/justice-missio-legal-education-in-rural-uganda/

Check it out!

Oh, I have so much to tell you and not enough words!  My friend A.P. (who used to live here) told me that I should just focus in on specific things.  Like the dirt here, for example.  How it is red and loamy and cakes around your feet, and always leaves strange, rusty parallel lines along my legs.  A steady hand drew them.

Focus in on specifics, AP said.  If you try to tell it all, you’ll get lost and make no sense.

Great advice, AP!  I feel sometimes that I’m drowning in all that is unexpected, sudden and different.  Instead of becoming overwhelmed by the task of painting a big picture, I will work on describing very specific things, which is what writers do anyway: focus in.   I think good writing is as much a hungry, ruthless way of seeing the world as it is fiddling with words.

I will say that so far, Africa makes everything more intense, throws the good and bad into sharper relief.  If you were good at something before, you’ll be better at it here — and your shortcomings become more pronounced, too.  I think my life is widening and expanding.  The highs are firamaents of stars… the lows scrape bottom.

Gotta run — we have a reporter coming to the field today to interview some of our clients.  If you pray, pray she’ll be compelled and write a good article about IJM Uganda.

Laura

 

 

debating

I’ve met someone who fled a certain country and is looking for asylum.  He and many others were imprisoned for being journalists.  I want to interview him and write his story, but I am afraid.  I’m also afraid he will get attached to me if I listen to him.  I’m afraid he’s a psycho and he is lying to me.  And I’m afraid of sitting down with someone who has been tortured.  I feel so guilty — I’ve lived such a clean life.