mbale

the journey to mbale was quite an experience. buses in uganda are interesting places, and trips on them are far from comfortable but full of surprises. the conductors pack in as many people as possible, with little regard for the number of seats available. despite the fact that the trip is many hours long, people cram into the aisles and stand, teetering back and forth into the rows of seated passengers at every swerve. you make some new friends as strangers squish you two-to-a-seat, and you jostle and jerk and wind up nearly in each other's laps.

air conditioning does not exist in this country, and i doubt if you could find it without great difficulty in all of east africa. so in the unbearable heat, everyone sweats like mad, and the bus stinks like no other. sometimes the windows can be pried open, letting in a slightly-less-hot jet of air, and bringing with it a mist of red dust. by an hour into the trip, it has coated everything. you run your fingers down your arm and it leaves a trail; you lick your lips and taste a gritty, salty film. the roads are more potholes and ditches than roads, and paving is a strange and unusual luxury, so, particularly in the back, you go flying off your seat some six inches every few minutes. however, i discovered, if you can anticipate the bump and take a little leap just before it hits, you can catch yourself don’t crash down quite so hard on the landing.

at the stops, street vendors swarm the bus, and passengers lean out the windows to examine their wares: roasted cassava, chapattis, fried dough, big and little bananas, boiled brown eggs, sesame balls, sizzling skewers of mysterious meat, homemade passion fruit juice in sketchy used bottles. in addition to food, they sell all manner of random things—sponges, “miracle” creams, false hair, strange pills, toys, bibles, fabric. people toss out a few hundred shillings and the vendors catch the coins and pass up the goods through the windows. they send children up onto the bus—the smaller they are, the easier it is for them to weave in and out of the standing passengers with their little baskets of goods.

the strangest thing sold, in my opinion, is live chickens. they bind the feet of the chickens with cord, and take a fistful of feet in each hand as they approach the bus and swing their clucking wares at the windows to display them. people pass out some ten thousand shillings and grab the chickens, pulling them through window and shoving them under the seats for storage. i think i have finally found out why transporting live chickens is so common, despite the obvious inconveniences: pretty much no one has a refrigerator here, and even if they did, the rarity of a day without a power outage makes the storage of spoilable food a challenge. so it’s most efficient to keep the bird alive as long as possible—it stays fresher that way. (we walked into a restaurant once and asked “is there food?” as you must do here, because the answer is usually “no.” the waitress replied, “yes, and we’re making some,” as another person came in and passed a flapping chicken over the counter)

it seems remarkable to me that we were able to nearly cross the whole country in a day. on a good road, the trip would have taken some 4 hours. however, with the old bus and the stops and delays, and most especially the bad roads, our total trip time clocked in at 12 hours. i wonder what effect better infrastructure would have on uganda’s development—i think that it’s one of the cheapest, easiest, and most effective ways to improve the situation here. with good roads, i think regional disparities would reduce substantially: economic gradients would start to dissolve as goods from all over the country would become available in all markets. (though this would be bad news for the people who make money off buying goods from rural farmers at low prices and taking them into the city, where they can’t grow food, and jacking up the price) there are huge cultural and linguistic differences between people of different regions of the country (at nearly every stop on the bus ride, we heard people speaking a different language outside the windows.) some of the strong differences and cultural rifts have led to resentment over the years. but i think that with the simple improvement of infrastructure, communication would vastly increase, people would be able to travel more, interact with people of different cultures and regions, and this might promote more understanding and cooperation.

also, some people in rural areas and regions far from the outer regions feel politically marginalized. the perception of political marginalization was one of the main reasons for the war in the north, and although this was obviously not caused solely because of lack of physical access to the central government, i think that didn’t help the situation any. but if there were more communication, and more access for the rural people and those in marginal regions to the seat of government, if central government officials could more frequently and easily travel to different regions, the people might feel that the government wasn’t so removed from their lives and their problems. This might improve their situations, as the government might be better able to address these problems, and further would resolve some of the political issues facing the country.

anyway, finally about an hour from our destination, the bus simply stopped and made us get out. despite our protests that we had paid for tickets for the entire journey, they said they would go no further. so, grumbling, we had to get a taxi to take us the rest of the way.
it was lovely to see the others for easter. several of our classmates were researching in that eastern region, and others had come from other parts of the country to convene in mbale for a bit of a reunion. eastern uganda is absolutely gorgeous, full of lush mountains and waterfalls. we went hiking and swimming in mountain pools and spent a good bit of time just admiring the breathtaking views.



but the highlight of the visit was our trip to visit abayudaya, a little jewish community where one of our classmates was researching. such a community seems extremely unlikely in a country as fervently christian as uganda. nevertheless, there it is. we went there for passover services. despite the fact that many of us were not jewish, for some reason it seemed like a good thing to do. it was tricky to get there from town, however. we spent a good while trying to bargain down the boda-bodas and taxi cars. but they all wanted to charge us far more than our meager research stipends could manage. finally, we saw a cattle car—and looked at each other.

“will you take us to abayudaya?” we asked the driver.
“yes”
“for 2,000 shillings each?”
“yes”



and it was done. we clambered onto the back of the cattle car and held tight to the side rails as the truck jostled off and out of town. we laughed at the ridiculousness of it all, the stares we got, a bunch of muzungus in the bed of a giant truck, at how we stumbled at every turn, at the wind that threatened to make my skirt fly up, at the general strangeness of it all.

the service was nice. but i must admit, it seemed so bizarre to be there, in a little synagogue tucked away in the mountains near the kenyan border, listening to a group of ugandans switching from their native tongue to read out hebrew prayers and sing “baruch atoh adonai.” i sang along, nostalgic for home and hillel. a little ugandan girl with cute braids and a sweet smile came up shake each of our hands and squeaked “shabbat shalom!”

"With the bittersweet taste of goodbye... I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be."

Che Guevara,
The Motorcycle Diaries

i feel like i am... in another world.

i can't believe that this is my life now. i am in school, actually--this is my semester, strange as it seems. classes ended two weeks ago, and i am now in the northern town of gulu conducting research. it is a small, quaint town, and i like it very much, though it is very... rustic, i suppose you might say. six other students and i are now staying in a small hostel, surrounded by round, thatched-roof mud huts. the bleating of goats and shouting of vendors from the marketplace nearby form a constant chorus to our lives here. the buildings are all little and low, and you can walk anywhere in town. it is a calm, quiet little place, quite welcome after two months in the craziness that is kampala, and has the feel of a southern small town in the US. you can scarcely tell that it was until quite recently the heart of a civil war zone.

the research is practically falling into my lap. i have heard gulu called "ngo city," and the name is quite apt. on the 2 km. walk to my main organization, GUSCO (gulu support the children organization), i pass a good two dozen ngos that are all doing similar work, all happy to provide me with interviews and site visits and documents to help with my thesis. the topic, by the way, is "formal and non-formal approaches to the education of formerly abducted persons in northern uganda" (a bit of a mouthful, but i'm basically studying education-focused ngos for former child soldiers and the ways they transition into formal government schooling).

i picked a focus on education partly because i felt that it was one of the least touchy subtopics in the general field of uganda's "post"conflict development. not like researching human rights abuses in the war, psychosocial issues and trauma, SGBV in the war, etc. i really wanted to avoid coming here and asking people "what happened to you in the war?" (as many people do). rather, i wanted to ask "how are you working to rebuild your lives and move forward?"

despite trying to pick a less-touchy topic, this is one of the hardest things i have ever done. i come home from my research and cry--at what i have seen and heard. these children have suffered so much, have been forced to endure such unimaginable things. GUSCO's vocational training school teaches mainly escaped child soldiers and escaped child mothers--girls who were abducted by the LRA, raped for years, and impregnated by rebel leaders. the girls come every morning to their tailoring classes, carrying the children of their captors strapped to their backs in cloth slings. most of the girls are not yet seventeen. some students have watched their families murdered, some have been forced to kill innocent civilians or even their own relatives, some have spent ten years or more in rebel captivity, some still do not know where their kidnapped brothers and sisters are, or even if they are still alive.

teaching children who are former child soldiers is rather like... teaching children who are not former child soldiers. i am working now as a teacher's assistant in a 5th grade english class at the laroo school for war-affected children. and i was rather surprised to realize that it’s pretty much the same as teaching the kids in guadalajara and bangalore—they have the same questions in class, act pretty much the same, have trouble with the same things and laugh at the same things. i must admit that at first i was quite nervous about it. i was walking on eggshells, thinking “with all these kids have been through, i don’t know how i’m ever going to be able to teach them. i mean, they might have watched their parents being murdered—i damn well better not risk making them feel bad about something as petty as grammar by saying they’ve spelled the plural form of ‘leaf’ wrong.” on my first day, i know i oughtn’t have, but i kept thinking “has he killed anyone? has she been raped? how did he get those deep scars on his face and how did she lose her leg?”

but now as i walk along the paths of the boarding school, my mind is full of other thoughts. “[] really seems to be struggling with that grammar point—i wonder how i can explain it to her differently. maybe if i use more examples? maybe she can come in at lunch tomorrow and we can do some more exercises. but [] is very quick at this—he’ll get bored if we keep going at this pace. maybe i can find another exercise for him to do while we review yesterday’s lesson.”

because in the end, they are just kids. yes, kids who have been through a lot of trauma, but kids nonetheless. and i think what they want most is not to be singled out, pitied or reminded of their past. they just want to go forward, and be treated like the normal children that they are.

if i rode boda-bodas

of course i have never taken a boda-boda. [motorcycle taxi] that would be against the program rules and dangerous. but, if i had taken a boda-boda, i might say that it is one of my favorite ways to travel. it is terrifying at first, and you cling white-knuckled to the seat (or the driver), and shout “mpola, mpola ssebo!” [slow down, sir!] at every turn. but if you just get over your fear and go with it, it is amazing.

the bumps that knock you up off the seat become a chance to fly for an instant. it feels delightfully reckless to clamber onto the back of the motorbike and listen to the engines rev, to feel the jolt of the first dips and sharp turns to weave around the potholes and ditches in the path. by evening, the air has finally lost the sweltering heat of the day and feels cool and dewy whooshing past, whipping at my face and hair. i love to tip my head back and look up at the stars as we zip along, marveling at how clear they are. and when we pass the banana field near st. peter’s church, i turn my head to take in the most incredible view: the whole city is stretched out before me, with the great hills of kampala rising and falling like waves that fade into the night sky. the bahá'í temple on the hill glows softly and all along the hills is a blanket of scattered lights that twinkle like stars. and i think to myself, i can’t believe how lucky i am to be here, riding along and seeing what i’m seeing, because this is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

that is, if i had ever taken a boda-boda, of course.

emmere--food

i am afraid i am growing quite tired of ugandan food. at my homestay, we never have any fruit. or vegetables. or meat. or sweets. or dairy.

in fact, we never have anything except rice & beans and potatoes.

every meal there, every day for two months: rice & beans with potatoes. except breakfast, which consists of tea. i guess most of the world eats like this, and i should feel lucky to have beans with the rice and sufficient quantities of each that i don't go hungry. it's a good experience, i suppose. though boring. and i'm quite thankful i brought a bottle of multivitamins with me on this trip.

i am getting rather bored of ugandan food in general. it is not that i dislike it, per se. it is just that... there is very little variety. and it is approximately 99% carbohydrates, and nearly all of it heavy, starchy, and mushy. a full ugandan meal contains the following: posho (maize mush), matooke (plantain mush), white rice, irish*, sweet potatoes, beans, and maybe some meat chunks. there aren't really a lot of different dishes in the ugandan diet--it's all just as many of the starches as you can afford with beans dumped on top.

[*"irish" this is the term for white potatoes. it is rarely called by its full name, irish potatoes. this can lead to awkward sentences such as "aren't you going to eat some of the irish tonight?"]

in luganda, the word for food, "emmere," only encompasses the starchy staples; other edibles are not considered food, but are called sauces or fruits. there is no general word for "food," in the sense we use it. this carries over into english. i was at a restaurant once, and i asked "may i have beans, greens, and a banana?" the incredulous waiter said, "what, don't you want any food!?" he returned three times before bringing the order, trying to convince me to "eat some food" for lunch. i feel that the atkins diet would not be especially popular here.

on a more serious note, the ugandan diet is not especially high in a lot of vitamins and nutrients, especially for poor ugandans. such nutrients would come from fruits and vegetables and a variety of other foods which are readily available at any market, but far too expensive for much of the population to eat on a regular basis. we visited a children's malnutrition clinic a few weeks ago, which was absolutely heartbreaking--tiny children lying listless and skeletal on their beds, others with bloated bellies or swollen limbs, others severely stunted in size and suffering the irreversible mental impairments caused by childhood malnutrition.

i was surprised to learn that most of the malnutrition cases they treat at the clinic are not due to a complete lack of food, but to a lack of nutritious food. there are many cases, in both children and adults, where the person is not even significantly underweight (and may even be overweight, as many ugandans are), yet is severely malnourished. anyway, at the clinic, after the children were treated for several weeks with UNICEF-donated formula, their mothers were given classes in proper nutrition. as we observed the classes, i was quite sad to note that despite the nurses' best efforts, the problem was unlikely to be resolved. the mothers came in in tattered clothes, sometimes with a half-dozen other children in tow. they nodded along as they were advised to feed their children fish and greens, milk and guavas, though this was obviously completely infeasible considering their economic state.

sorry for that depressing interlude. on a happier note, at least it is rather easy to be vegetarian here, though people still find the concept quite strange. when i first told my host mother that i didn't eat meat, she said, "oh, bambi! [sorry for you, what a shame]--were you born that way, or did you catch it recently?" and on our rural homestay last week, when i told them, they said "oh, don't worry, we will take you to the local healer tomorrow--his hut is not far from here. he has so many herbs and traditional remedies, he will surely be able to fix you, and you'll be eating meat in no time!"

in fact, if i needed any more convincing that being vegetarian is the way to go, i would find it by coming here. the ubiquitous butchers here leave nothing to the imagination: they strip animals of their skin and hang them whole from metal hooks over the doors to their stalls. their counters sport piles of intestines, gutted torsos, and huge chunks of raw meat. the red flesh marbleizes with the white fat, and all are splattered with swarms of flies and other bugs. one of the most popular dishes here is goat's meat, and other delicacies include fish heads, cow tongues, and animal intestines.

i also find the transport of meat animals a bit strange. you will sometimes see a dozen live goats, feet bound and bleating, tied to the roof of a van on the highway. live chickens are put in plastic bags, tied tight so they can't flap, with their heads poking out the top. you will sometimes see them under peoples' seats on buses like clucking handbags. in other cases, they are stuffed six at a time into the front baskets of boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis). i once saw a fellow walking down the street holding a handful of dead chickens by the feet.

but on the topic of foods that i actually eat, i am extremely thankful that there is so much indian influence in uganda, as this has led to an abundance of street vendors selling chapatis and samosas. these foods are the staples of my diet when i am not eating with my host family. i actually learned to make chapatis a few weeks ago--it was fun, and not such a hard process as i though it would be. the trickiest bit is the frying. you have to make sure the fire is just hot enough--too cool will leave the chapatis tough and white, and too much will burn them before you can flip them. it is occasionally necessary to pull the pan off and dunk it in water to keep it from getting too hot. you must continuously rotate the chapatis on the pan. this is generally done with your fingers, as is the flipping--but i was lame and afraid of burning, and used a fork. the scariest bit is adding oil to the pan--it was nearing nightfall and rather dark, and i was quite nervous i would spill it and make the flames come roaring up and burn me. but luckily this didn't happen, and i was really pleased with how they turned out. when i get home, i think i will cook them often. in fact, i think i will cook a full ugandan meal when i return, just to remember the interesting culinary experience this trip has been.

close to home

i have been talking more and more with my host brother, morris. (i suppose he is technically my host cousin, but distinctions like that are a bit vague here.) he is 20, like me, and is a quiet and friendly sort. he's been giving me impromptu lessons in the acholi language, as he is from the north, and teaching me to cook ugandan food. last week, when i had to write a report about land use in the area, he spent several hours taking me around the village explaining what crops were grown where.

we were talking the other day as we played with little jojo and eva, when i brought up a rather heavy question. i'd hesitated to ask about it, but really wanted to hear his perspective, so i asked "do you think the war will end soon?" he paused for a long moment and and then launched into a discussion about the potential and drawbacks of a military solution, the likelihood of a successful peace deal, the complexity of the political situation. we'd been debating about it for quite a while when he said quitely:

"you know, i barely escaped being captured by the LRA."

"WHAT!?" i exclaimed, in complete shock.
"yes. i was in primary school--third grade-- at a boarding school in gulu. i am from there, that's where i was born and grew up, and i still have family there. anyway, at that time there was a lot of rebel attacks in gulu, and schools were the primary target--for capturing children to make them into child soldiers. most schools were guarded by UPDF [government] soldiers. but each day, they changed the guard and gave the soldiers a break--to eat, bathe, take a nap. and somehow the LRA learned of when that change was. that was when they attacked.

"the belltower in the chapel started ringing in alarm. we were so scared. there were two dormitories for the boys--one was sturdy, with thick walls bullets couldn't get through. the other was not very secure, with thin walls and a flimsy door. i was in that dormitory.

"there was no time to try to get to the other dormitory. if i had tried to run there, the rebels would have captured me for sure--they had already broken into the campus, were running between the buildings, looking for boys.

"i didn't know what to do, where to go, there was no way to escape. there was nowhere to hide except under the bed. so i crawled under and stayed there, very still and very, very quiet. the rebels broke into the dorm, burst into the bedroom. i saw their boots as they ran past, and held by breath to keep from making any noise.

"but by this point the UPDF soldiers had heard the bells, had seen that the rebels were attacking the school, and ran back to fight them off. the LRA realized they had to get out fast if they were to escape the government soldiers, and that searching any longer for captives would slow them down too much. so as the UPDF came back onto the campus, the LRA ran away. and i escaped. after that i left school and came south to live here with my aunt in kampala."

after his story, i didn't know what to say. i couldn't say anything, i was in such shock. i just looked at his grave face in the candlelight, trying to process what i had just heard. i thought of the book sitting next to me, an account of a child soldier in sierra leone, of the reports on human rights abuses committed by the LRA sitting on my desk. but for the grace of a few minutes time, the loundess of a bell, the speed of his legs, the luck of his hiding place, the haste of the rebels, that could have been him.

he could have been a child soldier. he could have been forced to commit atrocities. he could have been killed in ways too brutal to even think about. he could have been indoctronated and terrorized and turned into a killer himself. he might still be there, in the forests of congo, forced to attack civilians and wreak havoc in the region. maybe over the years of indoctronation, exposure to and forced participation in such violence he would have come to believe in the rebel cause, and be leading others into battle to capture more children just like him.

and this is morris we are talking about. morris, who loves playing with his little cousins and helping his aunt in the kitchen, who flirts with all the girls in the village, who likes rhianna and break dancing, who laughs good-naturedly when he beats me at cards, who is always ready to lend a hand or offer a kind word, who is one of the most gentle people i have ever met. and he could so easily have been a child soldier.

i am so, so thankful that he wasn't captured, that he escaped that awful fate. but what of the other 66,000 children who were not so lucky?

this horrible, horrible war has gone on for longer than he has even been alive! it has caused such terrible destruction, and throughout, the main victims of the violence have been children. the political motivations seem to have slipped away into a mess of raw violence and revenge. the rebels are brutal, the government is repressive, and the situation is so complex that every step forward towards peace bursts into a hydra of new problems, complications, and fresh violence. i have read about it and studied the situation for years. but this was the first time i had ever come face to face (literally) with the reality of the war. with the force with which it has permeated society, with the people whose lives it has scarred. it affected me very deeply. and i wondered, as i have so many times before:

will this war ever end?

i can't believe i've only been here for a little over a week. i feel like it's been at least a few months. i'm finally starting to feel settled, acclimated, at home here. i don't get too lost wandering the dirt roads of the village and navigating the bus routes anymore, and i haven't been run over by a boda-boda nor eaten by a giant stork yet, so things are looking up.

luganda is starting to make a little bit of sense now. we've moved on from learning random phrases to some grammar structures, which blessedly bear a strong resemblance to spanish--the words themselves are quite different, but the structure of verb conjugations is similar, with first second and third persons, singular and plural, except luganda uses prefixes rather than suffixes to denote the subject. the other day on a bus, the fellow i was sitting next to said something in luganda to his friend, to the effect of "here comes a white girl, she can't understand luganda." and i replied in luganda "good afternoon, sir, how are you today?" the whole bus roared with laughter.

on an entirely unrelated note: i see more guns in one day here than i have in my entire life in the U.S. i suppose it comes from being a country whose history has been pockmarked with coups and rebellions nearly since its inception. but outside every bank, most electronics stores, and even many houses there are uniformed guards holding rifles. i even passed by an elementary school the other day that had an armed guard posted at the gate! i also passed by a UPDF (national army) roadblock checkpoint, and cringed internally, remembering what i'd read about their human rights abuses. i see truckloads of armed men driving past every so often--police, i think, or private security guards. and it's not so uncommon to see someone walking down the street with a huge gun strapped to their back. i think it's interesting that even women are employed in some gun-bearing professions--i have seen quite a few women wearing uniforms of ankle-length khaki dresses with the black strap of a gun slung across their chests.

we had a very interesting lecture yesterday about the war in northern uganda. the speaker basically said that there was no way there could be a peaceful resolution to the conflict as kony has no incentives to come out of the bush and surrender or sign a peace agreement. he said that the solution must be to kill kony or to hope that there will be a rebellion from within the LRA forces that would oust him from power, at which point the rebellion would disintegrate. however, the speaker was very critical of the current military operation, and said that the only way one could be successful is with a beat attack--killing kony with a quick strike right from the start, and not through a prolonged campaign. but this can only be achieved with better intelligence. i'm not sure i totally agree with him, but he made some very interesting points, and it was pretty incredible to talk to someone who actually has personal experience negotiating with the LRA.

i've submitted my first proposal on a possible research topic for my thesis: i want to look at educational resources for former child soldiers and internally displaced children in northern Uganda. i'm starting to look at possible ngos where i might be able to intern and conduct research. it's all very exciting, and starting to come together, though i am a bit sketchy on the specifics of how i will actually go about this project. ah well, i have a few weeks to plan...