To hell with good intentions: a theological point

To help out some friends I'm responding to journal entries written by their students on different topics concerning youth engagement in a globalized world. My first response was related to a talk given by Ivan Illich to an American volunteer organization. You can download the text of that talk below. I wanted to share my response with you because it summarizes some important things I've been learning lately.

tohellwithgoodintentions.pdf

My Response:

I don't know if you've ever worked or lived in a less developed country, but as you might know, these are ideas that plague thoughtful expatriates who live and work among the international poor. They are ideas that Invisible Children has wrestled with since its inception, and that agencies as established as the UN have yet to answer satisfactorily. In that context, I'd like to share with you what I'm learning. I hope you'll find in it some little benefit.

First, Illich was addressing an audience of youth, which you reflect in your journal, but rest assured that his criticisms apply equally to expats of all ages. Often times adults are worse. They tend to have more plans and systems that they want to implement in poor communities, which means less listening to locals, and they tend to have more funding, which means locals are less likely to speak up in the first place. Youth or adults, outsiders can be damaging.

One lesson that I learned in Uganda that will guide me for many years is: A Ugandan will do more good for Uganda than I ever can. The reasons are obvious. She understands her community more deeply than I will because she was born into it, grew into its roles and conventions, knows its troubles and hopes from a thousand evening conversations. She absorbed it like language. I, on the other hand, struggle to peel back its layers; I search for its heart. Sometimes I'm more successful than others, but always I have to interrupt in order to understand. She just knows.

However, I am one who has benefited greatly from the type of volunteerism that Illich condemns. I first entered the developing world in Nepal, and have since volunteered in Ukraine, Romania, and India, and have worked in Uganda. My time in Nepal changed my life for the better, and I would even say that I did some good while I was there. In fact, I went back two years later to continue that work.

I have seen the dark side of volunteerism as well. When I first moved to Uganda I watched hundreds of westerners flow through the little town of Gulu. Many developed emotional relationships with locals, giving them things and promising more, only to fly away, never to be heard from again. The children of Gulu, and many adults, habitually ask white people for money and candy and food. When interacting with them I could tell that I was not considered human. In their eyes I was a pallid sack of cash. This is only one of the negative effects I saw. There were others.

So what then shall we do? I don't have an easy answer, but I know this: The best way for me to positively influence a place is to support its visionaries. In Nepal that visionary was Mahabir. We were invited by him, took our instructions from him, worked closely with him. He was from the area in which we worked, had refined his own vision for the place and had been working for decades to accomplish it. Our contribution was only a checkbox on his master plan. He could have done without us and he went on after us. He maximized our contribution and mitigated our damage.

In Uganda that visionary is Jolly. She is an Acholi woman and the leader of Invisible Children's work in Uganda. It's her vision and advice and instruction that we rely on. We've spent hours with her trying to minimize any negative influence we would have on the community. And it seems to be working. We are held up by community leaders as an example among international organizations in Uganda. And it's because of her.

It's not easy to find a visionary to support, and supporting her doesn't always mean volunteering in country. But then, volunteering shouldn't be our goal - only doing good. So if it turns out that we can do more good by staying home, then we should. But if she invites us and gives us work to do, then perhaps it is good to go.

Also consider this: if it's true that a Ugandan will do more good for Uganda than I will, then doesn't it hold that it will take Americans to help America? I think there is great value in finding where we can contribute in our own country. Real life-and-death needs exist here as everywhere else. In our place of leadership in the world it's important to maintain a balance of focus.

Visionaries

I've had a number of conversations in the last few days about how Americans should best work in Uganda - whether independently or through an organization or through churches; whether as leaders or supporting leaders; whether through grassroots empowerment or policy consultation. All of these are options.

My view on these things is evolving. Right now it can be codified in a single sentence: Find the local visionaries and support them.

The most successful projects that I've seen westerners carry out in various developing countries are those that are done at the request and under the instruction of a local man or woman who has a personal and positive vision for his or her community. They know what is needed, they know how best to get things done, and they will continue the work far after you and I go home to the American suburbs.

So if you really want to change things in a far off country, first you need to find its visionaries.

It's okay to depend on friends

In my current field of work - nonprofits, NGOs, aid, development - there is a lot of talk about 'dependency.' The idea is that if one person helps a second person for some length of time, the second person will become dependent on the first person's help, and won't be able to fend for himself (gender bias unintended - another big NGO concern).

Here in Uganda I often hear that we should not give 'handouts' to 'locals' because 'locals' will become 'dependent' on 'handouts.' The prevailing wisdom says that my every interaction with a Ugandan will effect the 'stereotype' of the 'white man' giving 'handouts' to 'locals.'

But what about when 'locals' become friends? What happens when we're no longer 'white man' and 'local,' but just together, talking, relaxing? And what happens when my friend has a need he is too poor to meet and I have more money than I need to spend?

Then, my friends, I am happy to build dependency. Because then it's not the 'white man' that my friend depends on. It's his community, of which I am a part. And after all, that's what we all crave: A community that we can depend upon. Sometimes that means family, sometimes friends, sometimes religion, sometimes clubs and teams and gangs and book clubs.

So here's to dependency. I hope that someday you all find yourselves wonderfully dependent.

Live in the place where you live

Wherever you live, if you are not a part of a trusting community of people you don't really live there. You live in your own little world.

This is something that I've learned here in Uganda, where wealth differentials, culture disparities, and language barriers make trust a hard thing to build. But if I don't trust people here and invest in them and let them invest in me, then I'm not really here. I'm just passing through this place, like a breeze: inconsequential, quickly forgotten.

The same goes in America. You exist where you build trusting community. That's why, in a culture where most people don't talk to their neighbors, people's worlds have shrunken to their immediate families, their houses, perhaps their offices.

If we are going to make our communities better, we have to start by really living in them, building relationships based on trust, developing understanding. The larger you want the impact to be the more barriers you'll have to trust across - socioeconomic, geographic, ethinic.

But you might want to start with your next door neighbor.

Where the soul breathes

Lake Bunyoni, Uganda. Where I soaked for the last five days - in sun, water, and peace. The island on the left, if you're wondering; that's the one I stayed on.


My friends (from back to front) Gilbert, Kevin and I paddling a dugout canoe across the lake. These round-hulled beasts are near impossible to steer and will cause no end of laughter or frustration, depending on the amount of sleep you got the night before.


Taken while rowing aforementioned beastly canoes. As you can see, the efforts are worthwhile.


Me. Rope swing. Bushara Island.


My good friend Kevin doing some sort of aerial maneuver off the swimming dock on our island.


Backflip. Same dock.


Sunrise. In the foreground is the roof of our room - a "geodome" according to Byoona Amagara. In the middle, a dugout canoe makes the morning commute.


Sunset.

Taking off the rosy glasses

The Ugandan government has lately been rather bubbly about the resettlement of IDPs in the north. The media followed suit, republishing figures and statistics that were all a little mysterious to those of us here among the displaced people. I found myself asking, "Are they going to the same camps that I am?" Turns out they weren't, as this article from Uganda's 'Daily Monitor' explains. It's a very informative read.

The report from the Refugee Law Project that the article cites claims that only about 10% of IDPs in the Acholi subregion have begun returning home. This number, which seems accurate in my experience, reflects the continuing sense of insecurity among residents of northern Uganda. They still live in fear of a return to war. It's happened before. Twice.

And the negotiating parties in Juba who have responsibility for establishing peace in the long embattled region still seem to think it's okay to risk progress for the sake of exchanging witty barbs at each others' expense, as this current controversy over the LRA's request for $2 million has shown.

We are not out of the woods yet, my friends. Not with the ICC still looming like an immutable cloud over the proceedings and Joseph Kony still firmly entrenched in a remote region of the already remote Democratic Republic of Congo. Instead of my predictions I'll give my hopes: The US sends a high-level envoy to observe the talks and finds them progressing, but sees the road block that is ICC warrants waiting to halt progress not far away. The US works together with other international stake holders to convince the ICC to suspend the warrants for a period of time in order to allow the government of Uganda and the LRA to engage in local peace processes that will fulfill the ICC's conditions for justice. Thereafter the warrants are dropped and peace settles like a deep breath over northern Uganda. My friends move out of the camps and know freedom, some for the first time.

Now is the time to make this happen. Work with Resolve, Enough, UgandaCAN and Invisible Children to get this ball rolling before it's too late.

Day in the Life: Lunchtime in Gulu

There's a little restaurant where I like to eat in Gulu. The food is good, and cheap. Barely a dollar for lunch and it comes fast. And it's never crowded. That's why I go there.

And the windows are mirrored on the outside. All along the side of the building a line of gold-tinted mirrors. And lunch time for me is also lunchtime for the kids.

Hundreds of children in all colors of washed, faded uniforms - blues and pinks and yellows - flood the streets and wander into them and dance around each other and laugh. And they stop at the mirrored windows.

They make faces and point at each other. They laugh and yell. And they can't see me, for once they can't and aren't pointing at me, the white man. But they're still laughing in the windows.

That's also why I go there.

Displace Me Koro, Day 3

I'm sitting in the Brussels airport, reflecting foggily back upon Koro and Uganda, waiting for a connecting flight to JFK, then San Diego. My laptop bears the rust red markings of Ugandan soil nested in scratches from hard use. My shoes also hold the red soil, and the nose pieces of my glasses.

The morning of our third and final day at Koro was far better than the previous morning. I had been too tired to worry about rats and mosquitoes that second night and had slept deeply to the rhythm of Martin's snoring. This morning being Sunday there would be no digging. I woke with the family and immediately knew something was planned. Martin was delaying in the room and looking outside anxiously. There's always something planned.

Within 30 minutes several more bracelet makers arrived in Martin's little home and sat in the small wooden chairs. Martin's wife Susan brought in tea and began preparing it - three heaping tablespoons of sugar to each small cup. She stirred thoroughly. With tea she brought deep fried mundazi. Sugar and oil - everyone's favorite beginning to a day. After downing the sweet crystal dregs of the tea, Martin brought out his surprise - soda and cookies. I was given a Marinda Fruity, an ostensibly fruit flavored soda that tastes consistently like carbonated sugar syrup. And Martin, with a wide grin, handed me a small package of cookies, which I immediately offered around the room for fear of having to finish them myself.

Once my blood glucose was sufficiently elevated, like a jet elevates, we walked through the camp to David's place. His family immediately ushered me into his hut where I was served, wait for it, sweet tea and mundazi. We left for church directly afterwards, my hands shaking around my Bible.

The short Anglican service was held in an elementary school across the street, in one of the dim, worn classrooms with a scarred chalkboard hanging behind the priest. It culminated in an offering, the men competing against the women to see who would give the most. Pauline, David's wife, handed me, Tiffany and Kerri each a 100 shilling coin to deposit in the waiting baskets. In this moment she had more than us, and she wouldn't let us miss the opportunity to give.

After church we had planned to visit Abole, a resettlement camp about 2 miles from Koro. Resettlement camps are small areas where people from the larger IDP camps can move to be closer to their homes. The government and some NGOs have encouraged people in the large camps to find these smaller sites and move there, though in practice it hasn't been as simple as it sounds. These resettlement sites aren't served by the World Food Program, which IDPs rely heavily on, and often times they don't have clean water or provisions for sanitation. And when stats count people who have 'resettled' they often include these people who have simply moved to a smaller camp.

David had requisitioned about 7 bicycles for our ride to Abole. I rode on the back of one of them, with one of the bracelet makers peddling. As we traversed the dirt road to Abole David pointed out large swathes of land on each side of the road - this one belongs to Jimmy, that one to Issac, etc. In all he pointed out the farms of eight bracelet makers, neglected farms with falling homes.

This is where they should live. On they way back from Abole I borrowed one of the bikes and raced with them back over the rough roads, past their bright green land, past their weed filled farms, past their crumbling homes, and finally back into the crowded, impoverished camp. They smiled and laughed the whole way, enjoying the fact that a white man can ride a bike, just like them.

Just as we were preparing to leave the camp, Martin invited us to his home. I told him that we didn't have time to stay there, and he said we wouldn't stay, but he wanted us to say goodbye to his family. I knew he was lying and I told him. He assured me he was not. I knew that he was still lying.

But we walked there nonetheless and found his wife Susan with a freshly prepared chicken and some rice. A last, desperate meal. We laughed as I nicknamed Martin The Deceiver, and his wife The Delayer. As we neared the end of the chicken, all of us late for something in town and ready to leave, Martin handed me some part of the chicken, specially reserved for the guest of honor. At first he said it was the gullet, but it didn't look like a gullet, and one of the other Ugandans said that it was near the liver. I tried to politely decline, and when that didn't work I tried to rudely decline. Still they insisted. I split it with the girls, after much coaxing.

It's so strange to me that he would lie in order to be hospitable, and that he would force people to eat what they don't want in order to show respect.

When we finished I offered to take a photo of Martin and his family. They posed in front of a heavy metal gate, painted green, guarding the building they live in. A gate that is afforded them by the money from my bracelet program. A gate that they need because that money makes them richer than everyone else in the camp. It's a gate that protects them from their neighbors, blocks their friends from view, gives them a sense of security and prestige. It's the same gate that lines our border with Mexico, that confines our news programs, that relegates stories about the poor to page 10 or midnight infomercials. It's a gate in the mind and the heart. It's the same gate I walked through when I first entered Koro two days before.


Martin and his family have no choice but to walk out of it every day and experience the world around them as it is. We have that choice. We can stay inside, guarded in our little compound, or we can choose any one of 100 ways out. The choice is always yours.

We began walking back to Gulu town under a torn sunset. Like my thoughts at the time it was disorderly, improvised, bright, fading.

Northern Uganda Food Situation

Things have looked up for the displaced residents of northern Uganda recently. The European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office made a generous donation that, together with other other recent contributions, will allow the Word Food Program to increase the amount of food distributed to IDPs in June. The increase will bring food distribution up to 60% of the daily caloric needs of the camp residents, which together with coming harvests should reduce malnutrition in the camps.

The World Food Program is still waiting on almost half of the $134 million that it will take to feed IDPs for all of 2007.

Thanks UgandaCAN

Displace Me Koro, Day 1

On the weekend of April 28, 2007, two friends and I stayed in Koro-Abili IDP camp in northern Uganda, where a group of residents who benefit from Invisible Children’s Bracelet Campaign welcomed us. This is my response.

It was in the ironies that we lived for three days at Koro IDP camp. Each step and turn found us overlooking new vistas of the paradoxes of displacement in northern Uganda, of the upended lives of its residents. And it is of the ironies that I write.

The first irony is apparent in any description of the displacement. The government, ostensibly in order to protect the population of peasant farmers, forced them from their farms into displacement camps and did not provide food, water, latrines, waste removal, healthcare, or any other basic service that governments are typically responsible for. The people being protected began to die at rates that shame words like “emergency.” The population was not pruned, it was uprooted and left to compost. The people were killed for their own safety.

Further into the ironies, the rebels from which the people were being protected were from the same peasant farming communities, and were supposedly fighting the government that now had their families trapped. And further still, their methods of liberating their people involved kidnapping them and committing heinous crimes against them, even as their government enemies did the same.

It was to one of these camps that my American friends Tiffany, Kerri and I walked last Friday morning. My backpack held only my camera, an extra memory card, a notebook, a pen, and enough money to buy clean water. My pockets were similarly empty – only a cell phone and my knife, which I use primarily to open bottles. The sun was already high when we set out and gave us a good burn before we reached Koro. When we were nearly there my phone rang. The people there expected us, and my friends Lanyero Benna and Opiro Martin came on a bicycle to escort us the rest of the way.


The families that hosted us are beneficiaries of Invisible Children’s Bracelet Campaign, which means that they are among the few in the camps who are making a living wage. Their position at the top of Koro’s socioeconomic pyramid, and my position as their boss, promised a strange dynamic, especially since I asked them to teach us how to live as the destitute displaced. “Bring nothing, completely,” they had told us.

When we arrived we sat down to make some bracelets with these friends, and were immediately served Cokes in glass bottles. “Do all camp residents get this treatment?” I asked accusingly. “Yes, you drink,” they lied. So we drank the warm soda, grateful for the sugar and caffeine.

Making bracelets is difficult, and soon into it I became aware of what would be one of the blindingly clear themes of our stay – our weakness and their strength. After tying only one of the two knots that make the bracelet, and tying it badly, my fingers were cramped and shaking. The bracelet makers tie over twenty knots per day, and they do it smiling, hardly watching their quick hands. After a round of laughter at my attempt, my fledgling bracelet was grabbed by a nearby man who quickly untied my knot and replaced it with two of his own, both far superior to mine.

As I watched I began shifting my weight. We sat on papyrus mats on the ground. The mats are hard, and for someone used to sitting in chairs, sitting on the floor for any length of time can be difficult. My Ugandan friends sat comfortably, joking with each other and tying bracelets.

Soon our hosts invited us into one of the thousands of mud huts at the camp and laid before us a meal of favorite local foods. Calo, a sticky bread made from millet, with a spinachesque green called boo (pronounced bow) scrambled with eggs. We tore pieces from the calo and used it to scoop the boo into our mouths. It is delicious. When I first came to Uganda I avoided calo. It is bland, sticky and often grainy. But now, a little over a year in, I prefer it.

After lunch it was time to fetch water, however in Acholi culture only women go to the wells. I walked with Tiffany and Kerri to the borehole, but instead of a plastic jug for water I brought my camera. The jugs, or jerry cans, hold 20 liters of water, which weighs in at about 50 pounds. Most women in the camps can carry two at a time, one on their head and one in their hands. Tiffany and Kerri were given one 10-liter jug each. It would prove to be enough.

The nearest well is about a quarter of a mile away, outside of the congested living area of the camp. As we walked through the camp we found children playing, women braiding each other’s hair, an old woman cooking, men sitting under a shade tree drinking.

After pumping the water from deep within the earth the girls hefted the jugs to their heads, where they had placed colorful rolled cloths to cushion and balance them. As we began to walk back they learned to balance the jugs, using their hands to make sure the water didn’t fall. Their necks were flexed, their postures stiff and responsive, their steps tentative. Behind them walked Harriet, an Acholi friend. She carried one of the large jerry cans on her head and walked as if down a city street for coffee.

When we returned our Ugandan hosts prepared for us to bathe. This meant pouring well water into a basin and placing it into a bathing “room.” The bathing rooms have no roof and four walls, some of which are made from papyrus, some wood, but the bracelet makers have a concrete bathing room that I built for them last summer, the nicest one I’ve seen. Some of the rooms’ walls only come to the shoulders, the bracelet makers’ to the top of my head.

Bathing in the camp was the experience that was perhaps most different from what I knew. The bathing rooms are not secluded. They are scattered at random in the dense camp. They are surrounded at all times but huts and people. Even in the relatively private bathing room of the bracelet makers the lack of privacy was startling. Voices would pass by closely, the tops of heads bobbing in and out of view. The nearest home was so close I could almost touch the thatched roof. But the camp residents don’t mind about it. And once I became used to it, bathing under the sun, in a drizzle, in the wind, under the stars, was very refreshing.

The bathing room was also unique in its solitude. Other than the latrines, whose smell is loud enough to sully the quiet, the bathing rooms are the only place in the camps where you are alone. Otherwise there is not enough space. People are everywhere.


After bathing the girls went into the nearest cooking hut, where the thatch ceiling is stained black, to begin preparing dinner. They picked greens from stems and ground sesame into a paste.

As a man I was free to spend my time in leisure. I sat with them, then with the bracelet makers, then began to understand the boredom of a displaced life, the utter lack of opportunity. There is nowhere to go, nothing to do. There is no money for books or a hobby. There are only the voices of the same people and the sigh of time as it passes.

After dinner I was invited to play football (read: soccer) with the local club team. But they we far too good and I in my khakis decided to head back to camp. I met the girls there and with some Acholi friends we strolled around the local elementary school. A short rain fell and we watched local children practice traditional dances. When we returned it was almost dark.

Martin, who had offered to let me sleep in his home, invited the three of us to come and see where he lived. I brought my backpack and we walked to the far end of the camp. After his family’s huts had burned down a couple months ago, Martin began renting a small room in a brick building.

We sat in the low chairs stuffed into the space and Martin’s wife Susan brought in a second dinner. She kneeled before us, poured water over our hands and passed around the utensils. This is the standard practice for a woman at any meal. We thanked her and Martin and ate until we were quite full. Then we returned to the other side of the camp, where the bracelet making center lies.

There they were preparing for a nightly ritual. A radio was produced and chairs set in a rough circle around it. Each night they come together at 9:00 to listen to a summary of the day’s newspapers. In front of our dinners was placed a table, and on that table dinner number three. We politely crammed what little we could stomach into our mouths and I gave clear instructions that “tomorrow, we should not eat so much.”

After the news I followed Martin back to his place. There his wife had prepared warm water for me to bathe, again. It was set inside of the common urinal/bathing area of the building. I’ll spare you the details. Once back in his room Martin pulled aside a curtain that divides most of the one room homes or huts between sitting and sleeping area. Behind it was a mattress, his mattress that he usually shares with his wife, though it’s only made for one.

“You will sleep here,” he said. I was going to protest. Not a chance would I allow my presence to displace his family further. I was going to fight it. He continued: “With me, we will sleep together.” He was beaming. I still wanted to fight. Looking in his eyes I felt that this was a great compliment, a gesture or true trust and friendship. I could not say no. That night I slept on a one-foot strip of mattress between a concrete wall and a 180-pound Acholi man.

And so here we come to our last ironies of day one – a hospitality so generous it is imposing, from a people so poor they are dying.

To be continued.

Sunrise: A Preview

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

Displace Me, Saturday

The peace talks for northern Uganda are set to restart today. Two days later, this Saturday April 28, Invisible Children is hosting the largest ever demonstration of international support to end this war. The event is called Displace Me, and Invisible Children is calling on Americans to show their compassion by spending one night in a mock displacement camp. I am asking you to join them.

Over 90% of the population of northern Uganda has been displaced by this war. What this means in reality is that families who rely completely on seasonal harvests have been removed from their farms, their livelihoods. Children that make it past infanthood are thin, with the bloated bellies of malnourishment and worms. Mothers watch their children battle malaria, meningitis, cholera, and children watch their parents slowly succumb to AIDS. What this means in reality is that a culture is slowly perishing, and that a baby born two weeks ago to my friend Walter, his first child, might never take her first steps.

The only hope of these people is peace. They want to go home but cannot until they are assured that the bullets will not rain on their villages again. On April 28 you have the chance to bring them this peace. Uganda relies heavily on American support and is therefore very sensitive to American political pressure. If the American government wants these peace talks to succeed, they will likely succeed. But various geopolitical interests make our leaders hesitant to apply this pressure. They need our encouragement. Especially at this critical historical moment, when the peace talks offer the best opportunity ever for peace in northern Uganda, we can make a difference.

Our voices matter, especially with elections on the horizon. Let’s use them to give Walter’s baby a chance at life and prosperity. Let’s come together at Displace Me and with one voice lead our leaders to bring peace to northern Uganda.

--

As you commute to mock displacement camps in America, I will be staying in Koro-Abili IDP camp in northern Uganda for three days. I will endeavor to live as much like the displaced residents as their hospitality will allow. When I asked them what I should bring with me they said, “Bring nothing.” While there I will be writing about and photographing my experience to share with you what displacement looks, smells, feels like. I don’t know quite what will come of it, but I hope that you will join me.

World Food Program News

The World Food Program announced yesterday that lack of funding has forced a cut in food rations to those in northern Uganda's IDP camps. The UN food agency said that it had reduced rations to northern Uganda from 60% of the minimum daily energy requirement down to 40% of the 1,200 calorie standard.

It expects more funding by June, but until then will be forced to maintain this truncated distribution. Read more here.

The Rains Have Come, the Flames Remain

I'm in the office. It's 6:00pm. Waterfalls drop from the low clouds and from our roof drainage. In minutes the ground is turned to swamp - deep red quicksand. The rainy season announced its victory over dust today.

This morning we drove the dusty road to Atanga IDP camp where some Invisible Children employees had spent almost two weeks last month. Not long after they left a fire chewed through the camp, consuming huts and everything inside them, and two people. Daniel, one of the children that the IC crew had known during their stay, had lost everything. He gave us a tour of the destruction.

We heard that some huts now hold 20 sleepers per night. To my eyes they would be utterly full with six. It's a displacement of the displaced. Huts of which the roof was burnt but the walls remain were given tarps. We entered the tarp topped hut that Daniel now stays in. The air from outside feared that place. Air under the tarp screamed with heat and drowned in moisture. It felt like the sauna in Ukraine, the one in which men commonly lose hair due to the heat. It was unlivable. Almost 6,000 people lost their homes at Atanga and now live in the unlivable.

Consider it pure joy, says James. And I look at the residents of Atanga and can't bring myself to tell them. Not because I don't believe it. In fact I believe it more than ever. I just don't think I could do it in their shoes, and so feel petty and ignorant giving them advice on suffering. They are the experts.

But hope still peeks from corners of the blackened camp. It's a simmer now, a smoking kindling. But I know from watching this land that as huts are rebuilt and families resume the lives that they've learned to live in the camps, hope will boil again. Maybe all we can do is help to turn up the heat.

IDP's have faces to

The term "internally displaced persons" is so formal and dry that we might forget that these persons are people. Individual people with families and hopes, fears and faces. This is one face of an IDP.

Easter Weekend, or Why I Love Travel

The trail was so steep that I could not touch my heels to the ground without falling backwards down the mountain. Loose dirt covered some sections. I had to focus on each step as my legs fatigued, my breathing accelerated, sweat leaked from my forehead and soaked my shirt. I was elated.

I followed my guide Tophil, a sub-20-year-old local I had just met while walking through southwestern Uganda. He was soft spoken and desperate, but too proud and strong to be a beggar. Occasionally as I walked behind him I caught a breath of a strange and perilous odor, like bubble gum but sweeter, and turned like milk turns. I kept a friendly distance and tried to lead the way up his mountain.

This was the first time in months that I had traveled for the sake of travel. When I learned that I would have a long weekend for Easter I knew that I didn’t want to sit by a lake or stand under a waterfall; I wanted to wander. My friend Tom(sky) once told me about a conversation with an old boss of ours, a silly wise Jewish woman. After listening to him tell about his journeys and aspirations she looked at him with obvious sentimentality and said, “You’ve got the wanderlust kid.” This weekend I had the wanderlust.

I showed up at the bus park in Kampala not knowing which direction I wanted to go. Could be east or west to find mountains according to a guidebook I had just skimmed in a local bookstore. I chose west on a whim and settled in for the “six” (read: eight) hour ride to Kabale, which some call the Switzerland of Uganda.

As I rode I consumed pages and pages of Dave Eggers’s What is the What. It’s the fictionalized autobiography of a Sudanese “Lost Boy.” If you have some time and a spare stock of patience, I suggest you read it. The journey of this man from his devastated village through deserts and over rivers and into and out of various refugee camps and finally to Atlanta holds an amazing amount of perspective on this world.

The bus traveled faster than was wise. The tires screamed at the road and pedestrians stared in disbelief, their heads making quick pivots to watch us pass. Then we stopped in the middle of nowhere. Just stopped by the side of the road and waited. Everyone else seemed to know what was going on, or not to care a bit. I asked the man who sat placidly next to me what was happening. “I don’t know,” he stated in a tone that held zero anxiety or curiosity.

Soon the bus completed a long three point turn, headed a hundred years back up the road and turned onto a dirt path that was just wide enough to hold us, though not without our windows stripping leaves from the roadside trees. We went far too fast on this road as well, the dust from the white soil flying like chalky jetwash behind us. The villagers whose homes we roared past pointed and laughed and gawked as if a bus had never passed this way. Then we came a skidding halt.

The bus employees, who number surprisingly high on any given bus, jumped out to inspected something in front of the bus. It was a small gulley that a trickle of water had dug across the road. It must have been close to three feet deep and the four across. The local villagers were laughing, their hands spinning in the air to indicate that we were going to have to turn around and leave. The employees got back on the bus and the huge vehicle lurched forward. I grabbed the luggage rack above my head, bracing. But we cleared the ditch smoothly, without even a bump. Looking back I saw the remnant of some logs spanning the gap. I would have hesitated to ride a bike on them.

We were off again, our dust sailing into the air on the mountainside road. Villagers were bewildered. Suddenly we were stopped again. Some words passed through the driver’s window and a local man gestured behind us. When the bus was jammed back into gear the rear tires spun. We were stuck. The entire bus offloaded and the men took their place behind the mechanical beast. We pushed like Samson might have and slowly the back right tire emerged from it’s shallow sandy grave and the bus shot forward. Now it would have to turn around, for the road to Kabale was a narrower track branching behind us.

The driver pulled forward and positioned the bus for an impossible maneuver. He gunned the monster and it lurched, backwards, onto the soft side of the mountain. It looked like it might work. But then it was stuck again. The men once again shouldered the bus’s steel frame and liberated her. The driver quickly reversed his maneuver back onto the road and sped off down the path to find a place to turn, leaving us passengers standing in the silence of rural Uganda.

I looked down the side of the mountain, down a terraced valley that swelled to round mountains on the horizon. The sun was setting through brushstrokes of cloud. I sat on the grassy roadside and smelled the air and watched a local woman watch me sit. We smiled.

The bus roared back and recoiled to a halt. We regained our seats and were moving. Windows had to be closed because branches were now slapping and gripping at the inside of the bus. When the bus encountered oncoming cars both sides would stop and sit facing each other for some seconds before the drivers of the smaller vehicles found the wisdom to creep off the road and let the bus pass.

Finally we found the main road again, seemingly only a mile from where we left it. The sky was almost dark so the curves were surprise forces pushing me against the window, then the man next to me, then the window. I worked to harness my wandering thoughts on the dark bus and realized that my mind has been undisciplined these last months. Working so many hours leaves little time for focused personal thought. My mind, spoiled like a child left to himself, rebelled at my attempt to rally it. I have some work to do.

We stopped in Kabale without an announcement and I barely made it off the bus before it roared off to its next destination. I walked to a little hotel that I had called that morning from the buspark. They had given my room away, though I had booked it only 8 hours before. They pointed across the street to a place whose façade was peeling, lights flickering. I entered. They led me to a room with two beds, a sitting room, a dirty concrete bathroom. It was amazing. I had not had my own room in months. I wrote until I couldn’t see then slept a happy night.

The next day I began walking, following the wanderlust. Down the road to Lake Bunyoni, undisputedly the most beautiful lake in Uganda, but I didn’t intend to get there. On the way I met Tophil, who offered to lead me up the mountainside to his village.

When we finally reached the top a patchwork of terraced mountains rolled across the earth, gently nuzzling the clouds.

My heart inhaled. My mind stopped and looked out the window. I wanted to sleep wrapped in that soil and sprint along the ridge. But since I couldn’t do both I followed Tophil as he pointed out various crops, his elementary school, his church, his home. He taught me how to greet old women passing in their most formal dresses for Easter. They smiled with a girl’s glee and what remained of their teeth.

We passed through the village, greetings and smiles surrounding us like the terraced hillsides and friendly clouds. Soon we reached a dirt road and followed it around the side of the mountain until we could see the lake, indisputably the most beautiful lake in Uganda.

[PS – I won’t be the last that Tophil guides. That night I connected him to the local tourist hostel, who agreed to refer guests to him for “To the Lake” tours. Only 10,000 Shillings “with a boda and a soda.”]

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.