Displace Me Koro, Night 1

So, this wasn't a planned part of the 3-part series, but I just had to tell you...

“Oh! You overslept this morning,” I hear as the African sun bludgeons my squinting eyes. I look at my watch; it’s 7:00am my first morning in the camp. I’ve been asleep for less than four hours. Martin is laughing with his wife outside of their small room-home. “You overslept seriously!” he laughs. To him I said, “Yeah, I guess I did.” To you, I’ll tell the real story.

After Martin showed me the bed, the small mattress on the ground that I would be sharing with him, he went to bathe. As I lay against the concrete wall, trying to claim for my body as thin a swathe of mattress as possible, I thought to myself, “I have to become friends with this wall. I have to love the wall.”

While Martin was out I fell asleep. I woke up and it was pitch black, Martin was snoring in my face, mosquitoes were dive-bombing my ear, and there was a rattling sound in the corner of the small room. I had seen a rat earlier. I tried to adjust my position on the small strip of mattress but there was only one that was comfortable. Unfortunately a comfortable position remains comfortable for only so long.

As I listened to the rat digging through Martin’s possessions and Martin’s snoring and felt my limited positional options I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping much more that night. “Luckily,” I thought, “I’ve already slept for a while.” I guessed it was 4am. I pressed the button on my watch and stared into the blue light: 10:40pm. Approximately 30 minutes after I had dozed off. This was not good.

The rest of the night is dizzy blackness filled with unsuccessful twists and turns in search of comfort, set to a chorus of snores and hungry mosquitoes, and punctuated by the clamor of rats in metal bowls. Twice the rats ran over my legs. By 1:00am they had moved to a position about six inches away from my feet, where they commenced chewing and clawing their way through some piece of Martin’s meager belongings. If you’ve never tried to sleep with rats hungrily chewing just inches from your feet, I’ll assure you now, it’s difficult.

I kept checking my watch, hoping that I had dozed, that time had passed. It hadn’t. 11:30, 1:00, 1:45, 2:40, 3:20… And then I woke. 7:00am. Martin laughing. I was not amused.

Sunrise: A Preview

Sunrise on my first morning in Koro-Abili IDP camp. Stories and photos forthcoming.

Joyce's Story, continued

There was a little girl named Joyce who lived on the beautiful African savanna. The savanna is like a field, only it goes on forever in every direction, with a sky the size and depth of a hundred oceans above it. Most eyes can't take in a scene as big as the savanna and its sky, but Joyce's can. They are big, brown eyes that might be as deep as one hundred oceans and one.

Long ago I told one of Joyce's stories , a sad, sad story that will shape many of her stories to come. But today I heard another story, older than the first and just as tragic. It too will write pages in her life, and shorten its book.

The land of Uganda is situated just over the rim of your world and a little to the right. When you come to Africa, look for the biggest lake and stop just a hair to the north of it; that's Uganda. It's a small country full of busy people with the darkest skin and brightest smiles. Walking around the streets of southern Uganda reminds me of recess - everyone is out talking to each other, some playing games, some making fun, many laughing, one crying.

But mention the north to these southerners and their eyes grow distant, their smiles fade, and they look away. They are frightened and ashamed. In fact, although Uganda has been a country for over 40 years, many southerners don't consider the north part of their nation.

Joyce lives in the north.

Since long before Joyce was born war has darkened the lives of people living in northern Uganda. Roughshod rebels have roamed the land, carrying guns in their arms and a swirling confusion of darkened dreams in their hearts. The dreams come from a place that, if you close your eyes, looks like a crumbling cliff that tumbles down below the light and ends in a pool that is really a mirage, but swallows you just the same.

Many believe, as Joyce might someday come to think, that if southern Uganda had cared about the north these rebels would have been stopped before they could do much harm. But they weren't stopped, as Joyce's life shouts in its small, devastating, living testimony.

You see, it's not only rebels and their guns that kill people in northern Uganda, there is also a plague, and the frightened people of the north have been forced to live in such a way that the plague spreads like bateria on a doorhandle.

In the story of Joyce's that I last told, you heard that she was burned badly over much of her body, and that her mother was killed at the same time by the guns of rebels. But bullets or no, the war had already claimed Joyce's mother. She had the dread plague of HIV that hides hideously in the camps of the north.

Weeks ago Joyce began to cough in her hut on the wide savanna. It got worse and worse, and soon it was unavoidable that she must be taken to a hospital. She was tested and was found to have tuberculosis, a terrible lung infection that, untreated, would lead to death. But the doctors fears were not assuaged by the prescription of antibiotics. They know that tuberculosis is a friend of a plague, sneaking in the doors of bodies that the plague has left open, so she was tested for HIV as well.

She is positive.

She is positive.

She is the butt of every distasteful joke this land can muster, the depository for the misery of a 20-year war. And she sits, eyes so wide and deep, holding it all within her frail body in the hospital in Gulu, and she breathes.

By God's careful manipulation a movie star and a journalist were with Joyce when she was tested, and they have vowed to spend their money to extend the boundaries of her shrunken life. Someday, I hope, she will be strong enough to present herself to the world as evidence of its own misdeeds, and her deep eyes and easy breaths evidence that it need not be that way.

Rainshower

Usually when thunder echoes in the narrowing distance and the first tentatively falling scouts open up the sky for a coming torrent, people who are outside go inside. Yesterday I stayed out.

I was four days into a continuing plumbing drought, and had just finished my second evening of rather intense sporting activity and, although I couldn’t smell myself, I could see the grimaces of my friends. And I grimaced back. So as the thunder neared my friends and I looked into dripping sky with childish anticipation.

The storm came slowly. The drops grew but not much; they drew closer together but not much. It was no shower. But as I wondered if I should give up and go inside I noticed four pipes peeking out from patio roof. They gathered all the water falling on the overhang, divvied it up rather evenly and emptied it in four even streams onto the ground. And after a few minutes the streams weren’t brownish red anymore. They were perfect.

I ran inside for my shampoo and conditioner, Kevin got the Old Spice Red Zone body wash, and three of us took a pipe apiece. The steady trickle was just enough, until the wind picked up. Then the flow was broken and scattered, hardly enough to rinse conditioner from hair like mine.

So I climbed onto the banister surrounding the patio, held onto one of the slick pillars and stuck my head right up to the pipe. Soon I was clean. And cleanliness – in water-deprived, hot, dusty Gulu – is next to miraculousness.