Enduring Images

I’m starting to get asked by friends that I’ve talked with since getting back, “What’s one thing that really sticks with you from all you’ve seen?” but of course being me, I can’t narrow it down to just one. From Uganda, there are two that I can’t get out of my mind, one disturbing, one hopeful. Which would you like first? (This tells me a lot about you.)

OK, we’ll start with the sad, end with something good.

We were in rural Uganda, having just spent two days at Paraa Lodge, an amazing place overlooking the Nile River (the Nile!!! I kept pinching myself), located in Murchinson Falls National Park, the largest game reserve in Uganda. On the way back to Kampala, we stopped at the Boomu Women’s Group, a small collective that makes and sells crafts, and also has simple accommodation and meals for travelers on their way to the park. The leader of the Boomu group, Edna, was our guide and took us on a tour of the entire village, most of whom are not associated with Boomu, but just live in the area and allowed us to walk through and observe their daily lives -- cooking, doing laundry, washing dishes. (This is where the blacksmith I mentioned in the last post lives.) While these villagers are much better off than those in the slums we visited a few days earlier, the poverty is still wrenching – I have a picture of one of their “toilets” which consisted of a 2-foot hole in the ground with some largish sticks across it to keep you from falling in. Right out in the middle of the field, no walls, and certainly no toilet paper. Never mind flushing.

As we were walking though the huts on the dirt paths, we came across a skinny young girl, about 11 years old, who looked visibly pregnant -- I would have guessed maybe 7 months or so. We were all pretty aghast, having heard about very young girls having babies, but seeing it eye-to-eye was another thing. All sorts of thoughts were running through my mind – who did this to her? Is she married already, so young? Was it rape? I asked some of the other women in our group if they saw her and what they thought; we gossiped for a bit. Finally, I talked to our tour guide, who said she’d asked Edna what the story was. She isn’t pregnant, Edna said. She has worms.

Worms.

Can you imagine living with a belly swollen up like that, knowing what’s inside you, especially when the rest of you is so skinny?

“There isn’t the money to give her medication,” Edna said. De-worming pills cost around 30 cents each. “There are many like that in the village.” By the time our tour had finished, most of us had dug deeply into our pockets, and left Edna with a fund to purchase enough medication for everyone in the village who couldn’t afford the pills. Edna’s eyes were glowing, and her gratitude was genuine. It was clear this was going to happen. She wanted to write us a receipt, and promised to follow up with our tour guide, whose email address she had. Not necessary, we all agreed. We trust you. One woman in our group is a nurse who has worked a lot in poor countries, and she said that in situations like that village, the worms couldn’t really be eradicated, but the goal was just to cut down the numbers in the body and lessen the impact on people’s health.

This still makes my skin crawl just writing about it. The things we get to take for granted living here! This is the image I want to remember the next time I feel like complaining about some miniscule irritant in my own life. We are so very privileged. As Nicholas Kristof says, we won the birth lottery…

Now on to our hopeful story.

Our second full day in Uganda, we stopped at an orphanage that BeadForLife has an association with. Mark, our BeadForLife guide, told us that this orphanage was for parentless street kids who had no place to live, and had been started by a couple of young men who had grown up under the same circumstances. One of those young men, Derrick, met us in front of the gate and told us a bit about the orphanage. It’s called M-LISADA, which stands for Music, Life Skills and Destitution Alleviation. They house about 80 children, and provide a meal and daytime activities, including music lessons, for about another 70. At one point, he opened the gates to let us in, but instead a tidal wave of children came pouring out, screaming with excitement, yelling “Hello! Hello! Welcome!” and hugging each of us tightly before moving on to hug another of us, on and on til we were all grinning like fools and slightly wobbly from so much affection being poured on us. The children then began to choose favorites, and each of us found ourselves “adopted” by at least two or three children, who hung on to our hands and arms and escorted us indoors. “How are you?” said the thin boy who had glued himself to my side, with a thick Ugandan accent. “I am fine. How are you?” I replied. This seems to be the first exchange everyone learns in English, and the kids seem so proud to know that one. “My name is Ivan. What is your name?” Obviously this child had gone to at least some school, as he could communicate in English fairly smoothly, thick accent or no.

Soon the children were pried off of us, and we were given a tour of the facility, along with the personal and very moving story of the orphanage’s founder, Bosco, who had grown up without a father, only to have his mother leave for a trip to purchase supplies when he was 11, and never return. Suddenly this young boy found himself in charge of his two younger siblings, with no place to live and no way for them to feed themselves. As they moved from porch to porch to sleep for the night, Bosco learned to forage through the slums’ huge garbage dumps to find food, and eventually started hiring himself out carrying water for people for a few shillings. School for any of them was completely out of the question, but he used to stand behind the fence of a private school, watching as the children practiced their music lessons for the marching band. “Please, could I learn how to play, too?” he would ask the music teacher. “No, of course not. You’re just a dirty street kid. We can’t have your sort mixing with our children! Get out of here!” But the boy persisted, standing at the fence every day, and through sheer luck, finally encountered someone who was willing to help his dream come true.

Fast forward through years of just the right person showing up and being willing to help at just the right time, and you now have the present situation, a donated house of about 1200 square feet, where 80 children and 7 volunteer staff members live. The boys’ bedroom consists of about a dozen triple-level bunk beds crammed together, and they have made a firm rule: no more than two boys to a mattress. They are sad to not be able to offer a room to the other 70 children that show up each day for activities and a meal, but there is not a square inch in the home that’s not utilized to its full capacity. There simply is no more space for even one more bed. But what they have saved space for is their linchpin music program. One room is reserved for the lessons, another for storage of the many donated instruments and uniforms for their brass band. They hire their band out to various functions to earn money, and the kids are surprisingly good at what they do. They showed us a video they’d recently recorded of the band marching through the local neighborhood, spearheading a community event to clean the neighborhood of its street litter (with no scheduled garbage pickup in Uganda this problem is very pervasive).

As we moved through the tour, we headed outside, where all the children were waiting for us. They first sang one song in Swahili, then broke into The Star-Spangled banner, the tune being carried by a lone trumpet, while the kids, knowing the melody but not the words, sang along with “la-la-LA, La La LAAAA…” We all joined in, supplying the words, tears streaming down many of our faces (including mine). After, my buddy came back up to me again and grabbed my hand. “Hi,” he said. “Do you remember my name?” “Yes, of course, you’re Ivan!” I said. Those of you who know me well are aware that this feat was a minor miracle, as my ability to retain peoples’ names ranks at about the level of a topiary plant.

He beamed at me. Clearly these kids do not get much individualized attention, and he was going to make the most of it. We chatted for awhile about what instrument he played in the band (trombone) and what he wanted to be when he grew up (an engineer). Then our group moved on again for the rest of the tour. We eventually got to the kitchen, a very small room with a tiny sink and a mismatched collection of plasticware drying on the counter. “You feed everyone out of here?” someone asked. “Yes,” Bosco replied. “But where do you keep your food?” “Well, in this closet here,” he pointed to room with a half-empty sack of flour. “But we’re out of food right now…we haven’t eaten yet today, we have no money.” This was stated matter-of-factly, no guile, no trying to twist our heartstrings. More embarrassment on his part than anything else.

150 of these wonderful kids in their care, and they’ve run out of food? I felt like the air had been knocked out of me. We had been warned by Mark before arriving that this organization was run hand-to-mouth, on a shoestring budget, but I wasn’t prepared for what that meant in reality. By the time the tour ended, we had quietly collected donations from everyone, and handed them $700 US, enough to keep them afloat and pay all expenses for about two weeks – and hopefully buy lunch. Where the next chunk of funds was going to come from after that was up in the air, but they had managed to survive in this manner for over 10 years, and they are determined to stay open one way or another.

Part of the presentation involved their plans for the future, and their hope of doing some marketing to let others know of their existence. They now have their own web page (www.m-lisada.org) and are part of an organization called PYE -- Partnerships for Youth Empowerment (www.pyeglobal.org/4partnerships.html), which also has other partner organizations right here in the Pacific Northwest. If you search M-LISADA on Google, you’ll also find YouTube videos of the band in action.

The young men who run this organization – all volunteers and in their 20s – were so inspiring in their commitment to these kids and this project, that I can only hope that somehow the $25,000 that would pay all their bills and feed all 150 kids for a year somehow materializes so that each day is not such a crap shoot for their existence, and they would have time instead to focus on making themselves independently sustainable, their goal. Their energy and dedication, and the hope they hold out for the possibility of better lives for these forgotten and stigmatized children makes me believe it will happen.

Yes, they can.