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.