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Sunday, August 18, 2013
Atop Murchison Falls after hiking from the base of the Nile
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Rhinos 20 meters away!
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Thursday, August 15, 2013
How to plan a service trip
Being in a place is very different from reading about
it.
I know it’s obvious, but despite that, I am finding that it
is also true.
We spent Tuesday working on contacting people and confirming
our itinerary. Why, you might ask, did
we not plan it all in Connecticut? Well, the people we needed to talk to are
all in Uganda, and we really could not find them without networking face to face
in Uganda with people who know the place well. And furthermore, we needed to call them on the
phone. We needed to be here.
At the same time, we were trying to pin down the details of
a short excursion to one of the several wildlife areas in Uganda. Having looked into tours from the US, the cost
was absurdly high, and we were counseled to just wait and figure it out in
Uganda. You have to be here.
Finally, we were
working on a lead from Connecticut in Kisoro, far Southwest on the border of
Rwanda and Congo. From Connecticut,
Uganda looks manageable—it’s about the size of one of those square-ish states
out west like Oregon or Colorado. Or a
few hundred times the size of Rhode Island. Could a person drive halfway across
Oregon in a day? I just drove from
Nashville to Hartford (800+ miles) in one long (miserable) day. It seemed that we could work in Kampala for a
few days, go into the nature park for three days, then south to Kisoro in the
Southwest corner to visit a Young Women’s collective and day care, and then
stop at the Gorilla sanctuary at Bwindi . Yes.
I was proud of that plan. It
seems like we could totally do it.
Well in Uganda, you
can’t. When I mentioned my plan to take
us to Queen Elizabeth Park, then down to Kisoro and Bwindi, “because they are
all so close”, a seasoned ex-pat teacher snorted at me. “They’re not close at all—just get a good map
and see”.
Now of course I
have looked at lots of maps—Queen Elizabeth is on the Western border, just
South—even connecting—is Bwindi impenetrable forest, and then Kisoro, maybe 20
miles Southwest. “Ah,” she said, “but
did you see the roads?”. The roads are
more like the ends of the spokes on a wheel, where the hub was hours away. Kampala to Kisoro takes 12 hours by bus. Close in one way, but there are some
significant things on the way. Also, you can’t drive at night, because the
truckers just park in the middle of the road.
Oh, and the roads look like the surface of Mars, with a recommended
speed just between 20 mph and stop.
Being in a place and
seeing it cannot be substituted for reading about it and looking at maps. You have to be here.
more thoughts about food
Do you enjoy starch?
Ugandans do.
Well, that’s hasty—they eat a lot of starch, I can’t judge
whether they enjoy it.
We had a terrific Ugandan dinner Monday night. The main food is called Matoke, and it is
starchy. Actually it is made from a
local banana much like the plantains you see in Connecticut (which naturally
come from Puerto Rico and Jamaica)
There were some nice stew things with beans and some starchy
vegetables. Then there were several
other root/tuber starchy things. Despite
the starch theme, I do need to add that they were cut into different
shapes.
To be honest, it was all right up my alley. If you have ever had Watkinson’s bean bouillabaisse,
the Ugandan vegetarian dish was very close to that.
You’ve probably heard people at school talking about local
food and sustainable seasonal eating—strawberries in June, apples in October,
Kale in February. In Uganda, almost all
food is local food every day. It’s the
equator, and almost always mild and warm. There is something wonderful that is
fresh, in season and good. Pineapples,
mangoes, passionfruit, bananas. The
other kind of bananas. Papayas,. A different
sort of banana.
In New England, we tried that roughly between 5,000 BC to
about 1950. Blueberries and corn in
July, tomatoes in August: the salad days of summer. Ah, but Connecticut is not on the
equator. So the other 10 months of the
year included leathery smoky dried meat and slowly rotting pumpkins. Later on, after Europeans came, these were
the chowder days, where unfortunate clams mingled with whatever was left
over. I regard these several thousands
of years, comprising all of human history up to the Second World War as a grand
experiment in local eating. A new
experiment, now underway, added elements like cans and refrigerators, banana
boats, and sushi-grade tuna flown in from the Pacific. If I have to participate
in this new experiment, then so be it.
Seriously, though,
I am told that one can eat as the Ugandans do in Connecticut—that we can be
sustainable and local. That’s good news,
because given how unsustainable our current diets are, inevitably we will have
to one day.
airplane conversations
On the flight to Entebbe, Kampala, I sat next to a young man from Eritrea named Aday. He was lightly built and athletic looking,
with dark skin, a narrow face and a noble aquiline nose, I would have guessed
he was from neighboring Somalia—his appearance was very similar to two Somali
twins I taught years ago. He was telling
me that he had some passport trouble in Cairo, and had had to live at the
airport terminal for three days. He spoke perfect English with a slight English
accent, but no Arabic, and was upset with the Egyptians who would only speak
Arabic to him, and would not help.
He was headed to
Kampala, which has a large Eritrean community, to help care for a sick
uncle. On the plane, a woman in a white
muslin dress that wrapped up over her head heard him speaking his native
language, and asked if he could complete her immigration form for her. Soon he had several to work on. There were many Eritreans on the plane. As he looked at her passport he said to me,
“She was born in 1935—the things she must have seen!”.
Aday was just coming
of 10 years of military service in Eritrea—mandatory service. He had been an architecture student, but had
been drafted (which he said was ironic—get it?) midway through his
studies. Now that he was free, he hoped
to “see the world”, and resume his education to become an electrical engineer.
I say “free”, but
that’s probably not the right word.
Eritrea’s governments is one of the most oppressive in the world. Its press is regarded as less free that North
Korea’s. And it does things like invent
a 10 year mandatory military service for young men and women. Furthermore, Eritrea has been at war with
Ethiopia for 50 years, on and off. I had
some sense of this, and of Eritrea being an highly oppressive and somewhat
aggressive country, and it occurred to me that this articulate 28 yr old
Eritrean must have been in some active combat.
The things he must have seen!
In my mind, two
questions often occur to me when I think about the impact of war in
Africa. First, how can people who have
seen and perhaps done violent and horrible things seem so gentle and, well,
normal? And, why is it that, after
seeing and perhaps doing violent and horrible things in war, do Americans seem
to suffer PTSD more than Africans?
Emmanuel Jal, for example, was one of the lost boys of Sudan. He was a child soldier. His youth was full of abuse, starvation and
unthinkable cruelty and deprivation.
Yet he seems to have recovered--though he is still haunted by his experiences.
At the same time, many US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan
come home damaged, perhaps permanently incapable of re-integrating into
society.
Naturally, it also
occurs to me that these questions make assumptions that are totally absurd. A hallmark of people that struggle with
integration into society is that you don’t see much of them. If there are Africans with profound PTSD,
these are not the Africans who write books, fly around on airplanes and go on
speaking tours. In the US, too, PTSD
gets a great deal of press because it is a social problem that represents a
cost of war. In a country with a totally
unfree press, would such people ever be discussed?
And yet, Aday and I
agreed that there was something to it.
He told me a horrible story about a friend who used to laugh about an
incident involving an Ethiopian who seemed to refuse to die. This guy walked away from the incident, and
is perfectly normal. Aday’s hypothesis
is that if you live in hard circumstances, surrounded by violence and political
oppression, constantly reminded of the reality and proximity of likely injury
and death, war is not that different from your normal reality. The way you cope with war is the same as how
you cope with life. American soldiers,
he suggested, come from a safer, more plentiful world than Africans. War is a shock to the system. For Africans, the shock is less. If this is true—and I am not saying that it
is—it’s a hypothesis that needs research and study—it explains a lot, and makes
me even sadder, really, if it is true.
I hasten to
reiterate that I don’t think that all US service men and women are damaged by
their experiences, and that I don’t think that no Africans are. My question may well derive from an illusion,
and thus itself be illusory. There’s nothing wrong with asking uninformed
questions, in fact, it’s necessary in order to gain information and find out
what assumptions are lurking in the background.
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