I have to pinch myself as I look around me while sitting here thinking what to write about as my first contribution to the blog. We've been here 3 months now, and the place looks like it is a home, which of course it is, but every little article kind of has it's own story. So, since I've thought of this Uganda adventure as a kind of extended camping trip since we've gotten here, let's take a little day hike and figure out where we are.
As I look out the back window the neighbor kids are playing and the 2 year old boy is balling about something as usual. They're Margaret's (Marcy's supervisor- the head of the nursing school) grandkids who she inherited when her daughter died of who knows what late last year. Apparently, the kid's mom was not well-liked by her husband, the father of 1 of the kids, and she was poisoned, but the results of the autopsy have never been made public so people just kind of believe what they want to. Relationships are hard to figure out. Around us, we have neighbors whose husbands are wherever, working, while mom is at home working and raising the kids. The dad/husband probably has at least one other wife somewhere else, and you see him once in a while here in the neighborhood. There might also be a cousin, niece or nephew or one of the village girls, or all the above living with you, going to school, thinking about going to school or just staying with you and being a babysitter or house girl. People come and go. I'm being asked all the time, especially when out front doing my laundry, where the house girl is and why am I doing my own laundry. I explain we don't need one, we're with the U.S. Peace Corps and we're tough...haha.
As I look out the front door I see the deserted house belonging to the hospital where the people living there moved out last week to bigger and better things in Lira. The dad lost his job here, for reasons nobody knows, but there is a lot of speculation. They were a mixed family with kids from 2 of the guys wives, not sure he had any more, and the sister of 1 of the wives as the house girl, even though she is too old to be a house girl. Anyway, the kids and I became friends from the start and now they're gone. I'll miss “Public”, the 7 year old, rambunctious boy who came over often just to sit and chat, as well as “Joker”, his 13 year old brother who has sickle cell anemia and not the energy to keep up with his buddies so he just kinds of hangs out most of the day and complains of being bored. I could count on one of them being on the porch within 5 minutes of coming home, hanging out for 15-20 minutes then kind of wandering off if there was no food to share or they saw more exciting things to do. It's funny the nicknames they get hung with and they don't know where they come from. Not all the kids have nicknames, but the ones who do, go by the nickname and their friends will not know their real name. Naming here is also interesting, reflecting what is going on in the family when the kid is born. My co-worker, Christine, for instance, is named Mokeonzia Christine. The name means good-bad, followed by her Christian name. Something good-bad was going on at her birth and she got stuck with that handle. Some of them must be embarrassing, like the girl who gets the Lugbar name meaning she was a great disappointment to her father who wanted a boy, or the child who is born into the family that doesn't have a pot to piss in. (Really)
As I look around me here in the dining room we have maps of Uganda and East Africa on the walls marked with the places we eventually want to go. Right now, we can't do much out of our immediate town but that will change in about a week when we've reached some magic number of weeks at site that Peace Corps has written into it's policies. Then we can travel after filling out about a dozen forms submitted at least a month in advance, etc. It's not that bad, but in reality most volunteers don't conform to the rules and many just go and take the chance of not getting caught. This works for just leaving town or site without doing the paperwork for a weekend at another volunteers site, as well as the adventurous volunteer who will go on vacation without using any vacation days. I won't go into details. I also see some Lugbara language charts on the wall, and 2 sheets of paper with about 60 verbs we're supposed to memorize by next week. We both passed our Peace Corps language proficiency test, although I still can't fathom how Marcy and 2 of the others in our class did....she'll acknowledge this! It was somewhat of a big deal because if you didn't pass you have to go to your site, get a tutor, study for 3 months and take the proficiency test again, and again and again until you're “proficient” in someone's eyes. P.C. makes a big deal about language which is a good thing, but in our case the teaching was horrible and I think they wanted to just get rid of us up to the west Nile region, learn from their mistakes and do a better job next time. This region was closed for many years due to conflicts and war. The teachers, 10 of them who are 6 months ahead of us, are the first P.C. Group to be back in the region for a couple decades. The connection with language training? Since Lugbara had not been needed, since this is the only region in Uganda that speaks it, there were no teachers on staff. The ones they got were not seasoned teachers and were not familiar with the many dialects so they taught what they wanted when they were around. Out of our 12 weeks training in Wakiso, I think we had maybe 4 where both our teachers were there. The main teacher dropped out for 5 weeks for one thing after another back home here in the Arua area, and the other one was almost totally ineffective and would rather be drinking beer and enjoy being away from home! I think the training staff felt sorry for the bunch of us and cut a lot of slack to get us through. Marcy and I have been getting a tutor for a couple hours a week, at P.C. expense, a primary school teacher, and are trying to get a little more conversant. It's a difficult language, not so much in terms of the number of verbs and nouns that need to be memorized, but the sentence structure is so much different, and the individual words may mean up to 9 or 10 different things based on intonation and context. So we'll keep at it for awhile. Finally, on the walls I see pictures of family and friends and the thoughtful holiday greeting cards that many of you back home took the time to remember us with...thanks!
Moving to the sitting room, where we don't sit very often, I see the Lugbar stick furniture and the refinished sofa as well as a bunch of clay jars, floor mats, baskets and our bikes. The stick furniture is cheap and functional. There must be a village out there in the bush somewhere where a bunch of fundis' (craftsmen) turn this stuff out night and day. We've bought our share and will give them away when we are done with them. Waiting on one last piece of furniture, a shoe rack, which Maroni the fundi promised would be done and delivered by today. He was waiting for the caning material which apparently comes from the Congo and then somebody in his family died and he has been out of touch since then, about 2 weeks. So, this has been going on since the boda accident Marcy had after talking with him about building these. Today's the day, we'll see if he comes through. The sofa, on the other hand, is good hardwood, teak I think, that was sitting outside on a neighbor's porch when Marcy spied it out. We needed something to put in the room so she asked the owner and they said take it away, but give it back when done. I refinished it and an old school desk that was here as our furnishings and gave them to Marcy for Christmas. She found some upholstry foam and some material and did the cushions and now we have a respectably furnished sitting room that will compete with the Brits who seem to all have a larger allowance from their funding sources for furnishing their homes than we do. The bikes have been a God-send since they allow us to get around in a reasonable amount of time to where we need to go. You take your life in your hands every time you go out, especially near the town center because there is no traffic control and the town is nearly overtaken with boda-bodas' (little motorcycles, like dirt bikes size) with drivers that are all convinced they have to be somewhere 10 minutes ago and they all own the road. It really is mayhem and we've both seen our share of accidents and Marcy has been subject to being struck while trying to get across a busy intersection on her bike, but that story has been told in a previous blog. I get my exercise daily with about a 5 km ride to my work compound every morning and back at night. When we first got this place Marcy had something in mind for decoration and it has turned out to be a display area for weaved floor mats and hand woven baskets. I think we could be an outlet for the stuff, but the place looks good ! Actually, when she is done eating her tuna fish salad (which the good folks back home lovingly sent) we're going out to look at this Sudanese mat that I've just got to see. It'll be in the house somewhere come sundown.
Down the hall, first door to the right is the visitors bedroom equipped with 2 beds with mosquito netting and mattresses for our guests. The beds are also the stick furniture, made by the missing Maroni, and are very strong and a little bit attractive in a simple sort of way. One for Kate and one for Conor when they visit next December! The beds are open for anybody, before or after the kids, who would care to be a little adventurous and find their way over the ocean to pay us a visit. Knowing now what I didn't know before coming over here, would I visit Uganda? I think so. I don't think that Uganda is a destination, but definitely worth the trip because we're here. We have yet to get out and do any serious exploring, mainly because of P.C. rules, but we will do that as time goes by. There are a couple Ugandan national parks, the city of Jinja and Lake Bunyonyi way down in the southwest corner, that are on the list, and we need to get to Zanzibar, off the cost of Tanzania, and a couple other out of country places. We will have a good travel itinerary for visitors, promise!
Across the guest bedroom is the bathroom, it even has a tub in which you can take your basic bucket bath or a kind of shower with the solar shower unit we borrowed from a family that went back to the states for a sabatical- he is a language consultant, previously with Wyclif, the established Christian ministry that translates scripture into the world's different languages. Not sure what he does now, to be honest, Southern Baptist Missions maybe, but they are a very nice family and we've made friends with them. We have had the good fortune of meeting many interesting folks here, primarily through a women's Bible study group that Marcy joined shortly after we arrived in Arua. We've also gotten to be friends with families from Great Britain, Denmark and Germany, people who are here in one way or another with Christian ministries or NGOs'. I've also joined a men's group that meets once a month, but have only had one get together so far. Guess we're not as serious as the women, but men usually aren't are they? There's a lot of Africa experience in this group of people, with one couple being on the continent for over 30 years. I guess they like it better here than at home which to me, at this time, is a little mysterious. I think what happens is that you can get caught up in whatever it is you do and before you know it, a long period of time has gone by. The 30 year couple are both dedicated to what they do- him as an agronomist trying to work with people in different countries to increase food security, that is, trying to ensure there is always something to eat despite the changing climate patterns, pests, conflicts, etc. and her as a nurse in community health, working with tribes in the deep bush. One interesting story he told us is when she was captured by a terrorist group in the 1990s' and held for the better part of a year before getting set free. She won't talk about it. Another couple we know are from Germany, working at an FM Christian radio station. They've been here a couple years, love what they do and are not sure what they will do when their contract ends. So that's the bathroom, except for the nagging question of what exactly are the nature of the different creatures that exist in the hollow cavity under the bathtub.
The catch-all room at the end of the hall could be another bedroom, but we figured we'd use it for storage. The nursing school, owners of the house, built us a clothes cabinet after we came up last September to look at our future home. Actually they did several other things to the house we asked for and didn't really say no to anything. One important thing they did was to install screens on all the windows. It's unusual to see any structures with screens on the windows and you have to scratch your head and wonder why since malaria is such a problem. Disease is something everybody lives with here. I think Marcy has alluded to that in earlier blogs. I walk my bike through the hospital grounds every day on my way to the road, past all the clinics including the HIV/AIDS clinic, and there are always hundreds of people hanging out, just kind of sitting in the shade having a picnic or napping. Their relative or friend is in the hospital and the people are there to provide direct patient care to the unfortunate soul, including keeping them fed and clean. You'd think that would be nurses responsibilities, but there are so few of them for the number of patients that I think they just do the meds and other more technical tasks. Marcy has been in the different wards and has made it a point to avoid them in the future at all costs. I guess infection control is not the highest priority on the list, besides the fact that P.C. has determined that the clinical part of being a nurse volunteer at a nursing school will have to be from a classroom perspective. At work, it seems like someone in our office is always battling something. Last week, one of the guys had both malaria and typhoid, but still came to work. I think malaria is inevitable if you're here for any amount of time. We're on the prophylactic for our time here, but if you're here for any appreciable amount of time it's not practical or healthy to stay on the malaria med. So, you just take your chances and deal with it as it comes, and hopefully catch it early. Hepatitis is also an issue here, but we've been vaccinated. Besides the extra canister of cooking stove gas and the barbell I borrowed to pump up with, that's about it.
Last room, the master bedroom furnished with a 4-poster bed, deluxe mosquito net and P.C. issued blankets. There's a board about nose height with nails running around the room in-lieu of closets, and a couple of floor mats to wipe your feet on before you jump in. The floors are always dirty, not dirty, dirty, but just always dusty because the windows are always open. We are blessed to have a solid house over our heads here and we both appreciate it very much.
Work-wise, I've not really gotten too deep into any projects, more or less just helping around the office as I can. This organization is a national community of women living with AIDS, one of 40 branches in Uganda, whose members all have AIDS. There are some men members but the women pull the strings and they are an interesting bunch. One of the impressions I have so far is that there is a lot of in-fighting among the group. The leaders have been in their positions of leadership for many years, longer than their constitution allows, but there is apparently no one else who wants to step up into a leadership position. The women are uneducated and illiterate for the most part and the leaders are both school teachers. Don't get me wrong, the women are beautiful people, very humble and kind, but I think that what has happened is that they're in the organization for the goodies. Early on, the 80s' and 90s', there was a very strong national push to eradicate AIDS in Uganda, and at that point the organization was one big family. As time went by, and the international NGOs' proliferated in the country, with a ton of funding for just about any kind of relief effort related to HIV/AIDS, attitudes seem to have changed to where now it's my impression that the women are saying what's in it for me. This can take many forms, from demands to give them an allowance for lunch during their weekly peer group sessions they have in their villages, to “borrowing” the organizations vehicle to get a sick relative to the hospital in Arua to buying them uniforms to wear for when they go out in public for AIDS sensitization rallies. These are the kinds of issues that get discussed when the organization staff is in the villages. They're very poor and needy, maybe it shouldn't suprise me. Anyway, as time goes by, I'm hoping to get a better handle on the group's dynamics and needs that I might be able to help with. I'm especially interested in looking at income generating activities and have some ag related ideas that Marcy and I would like to pursue.
I'm going to end this now because it's been 4 days. Maroni did not show up...suprise, suprise, so I need to track him down. Luckily, I didn't pay him in advance, which by the way, you never, ever do in Africa and probably in other places as well. We are well, some days are better than others, the river we get our household water from is dry and our bellies are full. Life is good. Take care and keep in touch please. God bless each and every one of you. Love ya's,
Tom
