taking off in uganda

I'm throwing it way back today, and it's not even a throwback Thursday or Tuesday or whatever. :-) Here's a bit of video from the archives that has never been shared on this lovely blog. Way back in 2007, I was settling into my seat in the back of the small Cessna, readying for the return to the Ugandan mainland. As I finished buckling in, I realized our Bukasa Island hosts were singing and praying us off, and I managed to capture a tiny clip of their care-in-action.

lenten poem ten

Kisaba village on Bukasa Island, Uganda, 2007.
The folks had carpeted this church with soft, sweet-smelling, freshly-cut
grasses. It was lovely--my first experience with grass carpet indoors.
But I also watched its freshness die, while Bible metaphors
echoed through me. Today's metaphor: James 1:9-11.

Carême 10: Pure of Heart

A pigeon couple

On tiled roof across the way

Happy in the rain.

                                                          

                                                         ----(for they are the Lord's)

("Limitations" from Prayer: 40 Days of Practice by Justin McRoberts & Scott Erickson; The Lent Project - Biola U. Center for Christianity, Culture and the Arts; Psalm 119:33-48; James 1:1-15; Matthew 5:8)

mountains in my blood

Somewhere between Lyon and Albertville, France

17 février 2013

Naked vineyards climb snow-covered slopes. Slopes that are angular and rocky. Not soft and rounded like the mountains I come from. Occasionally, a small, ancient castle—perhaps intact, perhaps in crumbling disrepair after centuries of standing tall—slides into view, as though it’s no big deal to be a castle, still claiming a vantage point that assures no marauders can approach unseen. Roofs of all sizes are pitched steeply, ostensibly to keep the heavy snow from collapsing them, but even pitched roofs can eventually succumb to the heavy, wet whiteness, it seems. Along with and sometimes on top of castles, broken roofs, too, have slid past, each scene in view for only seconds—oh, look! now there’s a tall, narrow waterfall outside my window, gushing melted snow—as the train zips on its merry way.

Albertville, France

Even if my weekend in Albertville (site of the 1992 winter Olympics!) had been terrible—which it wasn’t—the weekend jaunt would still have been worth it for the train ride alone. On my Friday exit from Aix to Albertville, views were mostly muted and monochrome, but beautifully so, hinting at the weather that had brought the previous night’s pillowy snowfall. As I return south today, the sky is clear and bright, making the landscape’s every color seem more fully itself: the white, white snow; the deep brown/black of disrobed trees; a blue, blue sky; the warm stone-brown of still-lived-in old houses; multitudes of shutters flaunting bright greens or light blues, cherry browns or apple reds.

And as I observe families of homes huddled together in the shadow of the rocky heights and wonder how the shadows and the beauty mark the lives inside those homes, my train takes me back to other places where I’ve wondered similar things.

Kalongo, Uganda

Suddenly, I’m back in Uganda, wondering about the people of Kalongo who live in the austere but beautiful shadow of that strange, rock-mountain that towers over their round, thatched roofs. And then I’m in Cape Town, South Africa, where Table Mountain marks life for inquisitive four-year-olds such as my cousin’s daughter and for residents eager to return home to the security of their mountain’s austere but familiar footprint.

Cape Town, South Africa

Next, the snowy Alps and the cultivated slopes transport me to the mountain villages I visited while trekking in India’s stretch of the Himalayas. Especially that particularly heart-claiming village where the people were so very friendly and their terraced farmland, so high up, was the picture of order and hard work and healthy harvest. And from there I am back in the Appalachians that birthed me, back in scenes I was reminded of in India.

Uttarakhand, India

Just as certain qualities of urban centers are a culture all their own no matter what nationality marks them, so it is with communities tucked into mountain crevices. I felt at home in Northern India partly because it reminded me of home in Northeastern Tennessee, where a drive along curvy mountain roads showcases sheds of patchwork tin and sometimes-dilapidated barns with partially-intact roofs, clinging to life a little longer in solidarity with their older cousins in the Alps. 

Upper East Tennessee, USA

things I haven't had to worry about yet

When this kind family offered tea to my fellow trekkers and I last May while we were visiting some of the small villages tucked among India's Himalayan Mountains, I never thought of not accepting their offer.

Last week while collecting interviews for a fun-to-cover article about cultural engagement for BestSemester magazine, I heard from Kara, a Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia, who described a sticky cultural situation I've yet to encounter:

"It's very difficult to know when to conform to another culture and when not to. This battle occurs every day for me! It's not just about major topics and issues, but about the everyday things. For example, here in Mongolia, if you are offered food or beverage it is considered very rude not to accept it and then consume it. But when it's something you know is going to make you sick, must you eat it? What if it's vodka, which is very popular here? I don't really want to encourage excessive drinking, and I definitely don't want it to appear like I condone alcoholism, which is rampant, but if I refuse to take a shot of vodka, I may be offending my hosts. What do I do?"

Tonight I ran across a related tidbit on the blog of a traveler/photographer I don't know (greetings, Mitchell, in case you ever discover this link to your nice site) who is recounting some Romanian adventures:

"I was reminded a little of India, when the locals almost forced their hospitality upon us, only in India the hospitality takes on the form of tea and food, while in Maramures you have to drink their toxic home-made “Tsuika”, a 50 + degree alcoholic beverage, strong enough to burn a whole in your stomach. After drinking five or six shots of it in the first day I decided that in reply to future offers it would be better for me to drink a tiny bit of it, make a face and say that it is too strong for people from my country, which is not far from the truth."

I'm thinking Mitchell's suggestion of a way out of this particular cultural engagement predicament sounds pretty good, so I've decided it's something worth adding to my bag of traveler's tricks in case I'm offered something stronger than tea the next time I'm on the trail somewhere in the world.

So far I haven't encountered any real food fiascoes in my travels. Thankfully. Of course, there were those small fish I ate in the village of Kisaba on Bukasa Island in Africa's Lake Victoria (I blogged about that here), but fish are not bugs. Or vodka. In that same town, though, I had the only experience I can recall of deciding not to eat something, even if not eating it could be considered impolite. It had more to do with exhaustion and dim candles, though, than with what was on my plate:

Sometime around 11 pm or midnight the night we stayed in Kisaba, we were finally led to our hosts' home/shop for supper. We wound through the dark fishing village on the edge of the lake and eventually passed through a covered storage room/kitchen area and entered a dark room of their home. I think it was the same room they used as a little shop during the day. It was lit only by a small light that, as I recall, was some sort of small oil lamp kind of thing. Whatever it was it emitted the amount of light of a small candle. Hence, when they brought our food, it was nearly impossible to see what was on our plates.

I was really tired at that point in the day and not so hungry anymore. And it was the chicken, of all things, that forced me to the brink of impoliteness. I decided I couldn't eat it because I just couldn't see it well enough to pick around the bones and such, and it was probably a pretty skinny chicken, so one had to do a lot of picking. So, I ate some of the other things on the plate and hoped it would be too dark for my hosts to tell what I hadn't eaten. I never noticed any dirty looks and everyone was still nice to me, so I guess no offense was taken.

And that is pretty much my most exciting food story thus far. (You were on the edge of your seat, weren't you?) Well, other than the secretly stealthy, invisible spices in the food at our Indian hotel, the food they kindly tried so hard to Americanize for our group. But that's another story for another day, maybe. And now that I think about it, there was that other dimly-lit meal that I ate in Maissade, Haiti, but other than the dimly-lit part and not being able to participate in the dinner table conversation because my Creole language skills are non-existent, that meal was really tasty.

So, anyway, the real moral of this blog story is that sneaky, hot spices and chicken-in-the-dark are a far cry from tsuika. And I'm glad some other travelers have gone before me and called back warnings about the more tipsy variety of hospitality I might someday encounter.
*Top photo: India, photo courtesy of Leigh Greer.
*Bottom photo: view out the door of a church in Kisaba, Uganda.

rockin' it country style in sudan

I've been moving photos from one computer to another tonight and came upon this bit of video. It made me chuckle, for the pleasant memory it holds, so I decided it's time to share it with you. There are so many stories yet untold from my Africa travels, and I'm still hoping to give those stories life here over time. This is a start.

I met Kennedy during a quick overnight trip to southern Sudan from my base-for-the-month in Uganda. I've been curious about and captivated by Sudan for a long time, so I was really glad things came together for me to get at least this brief bit of time there. Kennedy is the Ugandan aid worker who hosted us in this very remote town. As we flew in, it was clear this was one of the more remote places I'd yet been during my Africa sojourn. The terrain was parched and filled only by scrubby growth. No other spots of concentrated life were visible from the air, outside of the town we were visiting.

Kennedy was great and had such a fun sense of humor. We spent a good bit of time being driven by him between aid sites in the SUV that's so necessary for driving in such places. There'd been some rain recently, leaving behind some very muddy, deep water spots on the dirt road. Kennedy had to do some fancy driving to get us through them. After he'd successfully gotten unstuck in some spot or other, I called up to him from my perch in the back of the vehicle: "You're having fun, aren't you?" He grinned in response.

So in all this driving around, I barely noticed the music lilting from the vehicle's speakers. Someone else commented on it first. I didn't notice it because it just seemed so normal to hear Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and more singing to me. I'd just assumed it was the radio playing all this time. I didn't stop to realize that it was unlikely that there was a country music station broadcasting in remote southern Sudan.

Turns out that Kennedy is a huge country music fan. He was pumping his tapes of country music through the speakers. Kennedy offered me an unexpected bit of home in the middle of this hardscrabble locale. It was fun to tell him about my Nashville home and the country music stars who used to come through my Starbucks line. I was supposed to come back to Nashville and tell them all about the big fan they have in Sudan. :-)

uganda photos

There are obviously many, many photos from Africa that I haven't gotten to share here. I'm slowly, slowly working to make more of them available online. To start, click here to access an album of Uganda photos. Enjoy!

tilapia is the coolest word of all

(For photos to accompany this post click here or scroll down to the January 8 entry.)

Two weeks ago tonight I enjoyed one of the perks of my job. My writing-assignment-of-the-week was a profile story for Nashville Arts Magazine on a couple of Nashville’s restaurant owners. Mid-afternoon I met them at one of their restaurants and got to know them a little as we chatted and I wrote down their answers to my questions. Very pleasant people.

As we ended our interview time, they invited me to come back to that restaurant, the one in Sylvan Park, and to their other one in, the one in East Nashville, and enjoy a dinner on them, noting that experiencing their restaurants would be helpful for writing the profile story on the owners. Very wise people.

I decided it was a good week to take them up on their offer, even if it was going to take up more of my time and even if sure-to-be-scrumptious meals are better enjoyed with dinner companions than alone. My cupboards were fairly bare, and my meal-creating energy almost completely depleted. Taken together, this created a good moment for a job perk. A good meal is surely nearly as great as health insurance, right?

So Monday night I enjoyed a drive through East Nashville streets that always make me want to own a little front-porched house on a side-walked, tree-lined street with neighbors to wave at and nearby coffeehouses to haunt. And a neighborhood café that serves delicious fare would be nice too.

I ended up choosing an entrée from the list of specials for the night. The tilapia dish attracted my attention, and when the bartender recommended it, I was sold. Choosing tilapia dishes is one of the residual results of my world being opened up by my Africa travels. Tilapia. I learned I liked it. And guacamole and avocados too. These foods have been added to my list of choice foods, courtesy of Africa.

I was not disappointed. The tilapia special was scrumptious indeed, as were the cheesy grits served with it. (I always thought I didn’t like grits either! And I kind of enjoyed not liking them and being a rebel southerner. Hmmm, is there any other kind of southerner?) This tilapia was much tastier than the last tilapia order that Africa prompted me to choose and that I tried to write about on this lovely blog.

On that occasion, ‘twas the night before Christmas and I did some thing I had never done before. I ordered fish at a restaurant. My parents, my sister and brother-in-law, my nephew and I ate supper at Applebees before they closed early for Christmas Eve. I perused the menu and saw the parmesan tilapia. It made me think of Africa. Just 23 days or so removed from that continent, I was happy to take my mouth and mind back there and to have an excuse to do something I’d never done before. Actions in the service of sentimentality can be nice.

Tilapia makes me think especially of my couple days on islands in the Ugandan waters of East Africa’s vast Lake Victoria. Fishing is one of the major industries of the people who live there. And I was told that they were catching mostly tilapia and Nile perch. I don’t know what either of those fish look like, so I couldn’t check out the veracity of my informants, but I’ve decided to trust them.

I had fish quite often while in Africa. I don’t especially dislike fish, but I usually don’t choose it when there are other options. Like chicken options. And I definitely don’t like picking out those spindly fish bones. But since I usually was eating whatever was offered me during my travels, I ate fish and learned that I like it. And I particularly learned that I like tilapia, at least tilapia recently pulled from the lake. I also learned how to spell tilapia, which is a good thing to know because it’s such a cool looking word.

My novice palatte still can’t distinguish well between different kinds of fish, but now I feel like I have a fledgling relationship with one specific member of the general fish category. It’s a pretty one-sided relationship, but a relationship nonetheless. So I must now take advantage of any opportunity to deepen that relationship. So Applebees tilapia it was. It arrived with accompanying rice pilaf and veggies and earned points for choosing good friends. It had nice texture, looked good and was thankfully boneless, but when its parmesan blanket was scraped back, well, it was pretty one-dimensional. Boring. Bland.

And I have to confess that part of me was a little bit glad that looks were deceiving. Because actually, the blackened, salt-preserved fish that appeared to take hours of preparation around a wood fire was tastier than that fancy, boneless Christmas Eve version. The island tilapia was served sans head but with fins to accompany its sliverly fish bones. Fins aren’t exactly appetizing-looking, but memory says that the fire-cooked fish tasted much better and had much more character than the nice American restaurant version, which made me proud of my island hostesses. And made me feel connected to them again. Which made me wonder if my Applebee’s tilapia had been caught by one of the island fishermen I met. Which made me feel connected to them too.

And so I think it’s now a done deal that tilapia will always take me back to Africa and to kind and smiling hosts who labored over my meals and reminded me that we’re all alike on the inside no matter our outer trappings. Those are memories that make me smile and feel warm inside, whether the tilapia proves to be tasty or not.

tilapia is a cool word

A post and accompanying captions will be forthcoming. Blogger's being a bit obstinate, and beyond that I pushed the magically mysterious combination of keys that made my blood, sweat and tears (to be a bit melodramatic)-consuming post go "poof" and refuse to be found. Which makes the tears want to be more real than dramatic.

pray for the folks in bundibugyo

Please join me in praying for the World Harvest Mission team in the Bundibugyo district of western Uganda. I spent a brief two days with them in early October (here's my post from that visit). Last night I received a message from one of my friends from that visit. Amy has returned to the US since I was there, but she's stayed in close touch with what's going on there.

You may have heard news, as I did, that there had been an outbreak of the Ebola virus in Uganda. In the midst of my travels and minimal internet access, I never had a chance to check further into that report. However, Amy's message brought that report slamming into my very recently re-acquired American life.

Bundibugyo is the location of the outbreak. The World Harvest Mission's team leaders in Bundibugyo, Drs. Scott and Jennifer Myhre, as well as a short term staff person and physician assistant, Scott Will, are working in the thick of the outbreak. The district has few doctors and the Myhres serve as doctors supplementing the staffing of the government medical providers. Scott Will had worked in Bundibugyo previously. When we flew to Bundi for our information-gathering visit, he was with us, fresh from his flight from the States and excited to be returning for another short term stint in Bundi.

I didn't know much about Ebola prior to today, but today's lesson has explained that it's a virus mostly confined to Africa. Previously, four different strains had been identified. Early indications are that the Bundibugyo strain is a new one. So far it's never been found to be airborne, and it's transferred by contact with body fluids and dead bodies of infected people. Early indications are such common-seeming symptoms as fevers, vomiting, and diarrhea, but the disease progresses to internal and external bleeding. The death rate of those infected is typically very high--50-90%--but so far the numbers in Bundibugyo have been closer to 25%. From what I've read, it sounds like one of the greatest dangers is to people caring for the sick before they know what they're dealing with and know to use extreme measures of protection. The virus resurfaced earlier this year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I think that was more in the western part of DRC. Bundibugyo borders Congo on the east.

All members of the World Harvest Mission team, including the Myhre's kids, have been evacuated to Kampala except for the two Scotts and Jennifer.

One of the greatest costs of this crisis has been the death of Dr. Jonah Kule. We met him while we were in Bundibugyo, though I didn't interview him. The Myhre's described him as their best friend in Uganda. He was working as a medical officer, and the Myhres/WHM helped fund him through medical school. His return to his hometown in remote Bundibugyo to practice medicine was significant, as he could have made much more money practicing medicine elsewhere. The Myhre's described him as a man of great integrity.

Please pray for physical protection for Scott and Jennifer and for Scott Will and the rest of the health care providers. Please pray for the Myhre family as they are separated from each other. Pray for the WHM team as they grieve the losses and live in the intense uncertainty of this time. Please pray for the spread of the virus to be stopped, for the patients who are already ill, for people grieving lost family and friends, that Dr. Jonah's death will somehow bring glory to God's name.

You will find more information on Scott and Jennifer's blog and on Scott Will's blog.

I didn't take many photos in Bundibugyo because I was so busy collecting information, but here are some of the photos Layton took.

the airstrip facing the Rwenzori mountains

the excitement generated by the plane's arrival


one of the buildings of the Nyahuka Health Center, in the town where the WHM team is based. the isolation wards for Ebola patients are at the Bundibugyo town (the district and its main town have the same name) hospital and another hospital.

Drs. Scott and Jennifer Myhre

wanted: imaginative post titles

I'm back in Cape Town after a couple days north of here in Stompneusbaai (Stump Nose Bay) on the western coast. Today I'm finishing up a writing assignment before going to meet the first of my South African cousins. I'll be staying with Jill and her family for the next few days. She's the same generation as me in the family, and I really don't know much about her, so there will be plenty to talk about.

I'm adding some photos to go with the post below. I wasn't at my computer when I added that post, so I couldn't upload the photos.

the girl in purple on Bukasa Island

Alida, Petronecia, Jonathan, Jonathan, Willie where they live behind a Cape Town liquor store

here, have my milk crate

Yesterday I spent the day traipsing around Cape Town with my Cape Town host, Gavin. I’m staying with him and his wife Avril. They’re great, by the way! :-)

I interviewed a neat variety of neat people, all of whom I enjoyed talking with. Perhaps my favorite interviews, though, were with some folks who live on the streets in Cape Town. A man Gavin knows named Brian spends a lot of time building relationships with this group of street folks. I talked with them as part of a story about the Upper Room’s Prayers for Encouragement books. The books are distributed widely, and Brian gives the books to folks in the group I talked with yesterday.

I may have mentioned on here before what an honor it was to be invited inside the small one-room tin home of Joyce in Kenya, and I’m still trying to figure out what language to use to even more adequately explain what I mean when I write such a statement. I’m not trying to do the politically correct thing or the polite thing or the “oh, no, the honor is definitely all mine” thing by saying that it’s an honor to talk with folks like Joyce or Willy and Jonathan from the Cape Town street family.

There is something humbling for me in approaching someone whose life is so very different from mine and, well, whose category in society is lower than the one I’d usually be categorized in. To approach them and feel like they have every reason for not accepting me, for not talking to me. But, instead they let me into their space and their home and offer me their milk crate so that I don’t have to sit on the ground while I talk with them. And somehow whether that person knows it or not their willingness to talk with me is a gift of acceptance, a gift I gladly receive, a gift that humbles and fills me in ways I can’t even understand.

Perhaps it has to do with being trusted by someone who has any number of reasons for not trusting outsiders, with being given the chance by that person connect with them. That gift is somehow more meaningful when it is given by people who’ve struggled and been categorized as untouchable types. It’s meaningful in a similar way anytime a friend lets me into their pain, trusts me with their story. But, when a stranger does the same thing, there’s a different sense of accompanying responsibility.

I felt the same way in Nashville last year when I got to visit the home of a woman living in the housing projects. We met so I could to talk with her about her participation in a community garden. I was so thankful that she would invite me into her home, offer me a seat on her couch and answer my questions.

A different situation in Uganda produced the same feeling in me. As we returned to the airplane from our second day in the Lake Victoria islands, a group of school children met up with us along the path from the boat to the plane. Most of them ran on ahead of us, but one particular girl ended up walking much of the way with Layton and me. This girl probably would have been ridiculed mercilessly by school kids in the US for her appearance. She wasn’t ugly but had features that apt-to-be-cruel appearance-conscious kids would have made fun of.

While the pilot got the plane ready, I entertained myself and the kids by taking some photos. Then I began saying goodbye to our hosts from the island. During my travels I’ve shaken lots of hands but exchanged far fewer hugs. I’d already shaken hands all around with the school kids, who were from a village on the other end of the island from the one we visited. They weren’t kids we’d met prior to this moment. The goodbyes to the island church team, though, turned into hugs. And, while the other school kids played and ran around the plane, the girl in purple, as she’s been named in my head, stood on the edge of our group watching these goodbyes. Then all of a sudden she turned to me and hugged me too. And that hug was the biggest, humbling, wonderful gift. Whatever her motivations, this unattractive little girl jumped into my world and gave me this wonderful little hug that spoke of trust and of some sort of relationship that had sprung up without any word-based conversation.

If such responses from me to such actions from others were only about being received by someone different from me, then I would expect to feel the same way when life or work takes me into the homes of the very wealthy. But, in general, I don’t feel the same sense of honor or humble gratitude. I can’t say why or whether that’s right or wrong or something inside me or something inside them because I don’t know. Perhaps it just is. But, whatever the reason, the time with folks like the ones I spoke with yesterday feels like a gift to be treasured.

photos that either make me laugh or smile very widely

While in Uganda I stayed with my friends Pam and Simon Wunderli and their kids Joshua and Zara. I had a great time with all of them. Here are some photos from my last night in Kampala. I hadn't taken many photos of Joshua, so I asked him if I could take his picture. He said yes but was very particular about how it should be done.

Picture #1: he wouldn't look at the camera

Picture #2: he would just give a half smile. Then I would have to wait a little while, he told me, for a full-smile picture.

Picture #3: finally! a full smile!

Then I convinced him to let us take a self-portrait together. By then, though, he really just wanted to be the one taking the pictures.

Next he wanted to take funny pictures. Here's his.

Here's mine. Joshua finally got to be the photographer.

Then Pam came out and Joshua wanted to take a picture of us together. Even though he did okay with the funny picture of me, he was having trouble taking a picture of his mom and me. The first photo just got our legs. This second photo was taken while Pam was trying to explain to him that he needed to hold the button down longer. This was the last picture we took because right after this the electricity went out. :-)

About halfway through my stay in Kampala, Zara started visiting me in my bedroom when she woke up in the morning. Fortunately, I had a lot of early mornings around that time, so I was usually up when she arrived, though one morning I did convince her to crawl into bed with me for a little while. This picture was taken at about 6 am one morning. She's sitting on my bed.

This photo is from the day before I left, and I just think it's cute. :-)

Now for something a little different...during our second stop on the visit to the Lake Victoria islands, I had the pleasure of finally eating something I could tell stories about later. We (Sam the Jesus Film guy, Layton the photographer and I) filled our lunch plates from a generous round of good food that was offered to us. Among the offerings were "small fish." We later learned that these fish are caught and then dried in the sun. Then they were cooked somehow for our meal. They arrive on your plate looking just like they do in the picture. Eye and all. Staring up at you. Daring you to eat it. I took the dare and downed one of the fish. I don't really remember anything about the taste. I just decided there was plenty of other food to eat, and I really didn't need any more small fish to help fill me up. Or something like that. The next day one of the pastors took Layton and me on a little tour of the village. Layton took this picture while Unity was explaining the drying process. If you notice, some of the fish are larger than others. Being the observant type, I noticed and tried to ask Unity if they were all the same kind of fish, if these were more mature versions of small fish, or what. Half kidding, I said something to the effect of, "Are these small fish and these are smaller fish?" The reply, "No, they're all small fish," as though it was crazy to ask otherwise.

teaching school

Greetings! I’m in Zimbabwe now, celebrating my last day as a 31-year-old! :-) Thanks for all who prayed for my travels here. Everything went super-smoothly and easily with my entrance to the country. I’m staying in a really nice B&B and am not personally experiencing any real ill effects from the things that are affecting so many of the people in this country right now.

So far I’ve mostly had to focus on finishing my writing work from Uganda, so I haven’t been able to explore this place much yet and haven’t had enough free space left in my head to ask people too many questions yet. Still, people talk and it’s hard to avoid gathering a few impressions even when you’re trying not to. Those will have to wait for another blog post, though.

Instead, I’m going to try uploading some more Uganda photos. These are from the one day I sort of took off after nine straight days of gathering info (hence, the full head). My good friend Mary’s sister happens to be studying this semester in the Uganda Studies Program. The program is run by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. They have a bunch of great semester-long study programs. I was a student in their American Studies Program my last semester of college. They’ve added a bunch of new options since then. USP is hosted by Uganda Christian University, a vibrant-seeming school where students look much more professional than they do at most American colleges and universities.

I met up with Annie, who reminds me lots of her sister and so seemed like an old friend immediately, and chatted for a while before heading out with her and another USP student, Kelly, to their service project at a local primary school. They’d only been there once before to meet the headmaster and get a tour of the school, so they didn’t really know what to expect on this day either.

Well, the headmaster wanted us to use some Child Evangelism Fellowship materials he had and each teach a class. So, after about five minutes or less of glancing through the materials in my hand and choosing to do the lesson on Jesus’ trial, I entered the class of 56 P3 students (probably equivalent to 3rd or 4th grade or so in the US; the education systems are different, and I never completely figured it all out) while Annie and Kelly were introduced to their P1 and P2 classes. After introducing me, the teacher and headmaster left the room, and I was left with the help of the P7 student, Miriam, who was my translator.

So, it was quite an experience, as the lesson in the book was WAY too long to read and have translated the way it was written. I did a lot of summarizing and ad libbing. The first “example” story was about a kid whose sister spilled ink on the carpet but let him take the blame for it. I haven’t seen carpet in two months, so I imagine most of those P3 kids had never seen it. But, we made our way through and had a good time, and the kids asked really good questions at the end. It felt like quite a moment of responsibility to answer “Why did Jesus die on the cross for us?” and “Why did the people want to kill him?” and to make it translatable. As far as I can tell, though, Miriam did a really great job translating, and hopefully the kids learned about Jesus.

After the 45 minute class, Annie, Kelly and I were supposed to take our classes together to the church and do something with them!? We scrounged around in our heads for songs from our youth, especially ones with motions. We got the kids to sing a few of the songs they knew. And still there was lots of time before they were supposed to be dismissed for lunch. So, we dug deeper into our shallow bags of tricks and decided to have Annie be the narrator for the story of Noah’s ark while Kelly and I acted it out. Let’s just say, we’re glad there weren’t any video cameras around. :-)

After we returned to campus in a downpour, I got to sit in on Annie’s African literature class. It was fun and interesting and now I can’t remember the name of the book they were reading. It was Mission to ?? and it was originally written in French. All in all, it was quite a nice day off. It was also neat because the USP students arrived in Uganda about the same time I arrived in Africa, so we’re on about the same schedule in our Africa semester and are absorbing some similar things. It was fun to chat with them.

Here are photos I took of “my class.” To keep the photo session from turning into mass chaos, I asked them to stay in their seats while I took a picture of each section of the class. See if you can find the student who managed to get into all three pictures anyway! :-) (here's a hint: you can see him best in the third photo. there might be more students who did this, but I’ve only found one so far.)

Miriam, translator extraordinaire

Annie and me (notice the water running off the roof behind us!)

Kelly and Annie, Noah's Ark actors extraordinaire

p.s. I think it’s perfectly appropriate to leave birthday greetings in the comments section of a blog. (that’s a shameless hint, in case you didn’t notice! :-) I think I’m relegated to a virtual birthday party this year. :-) )

p.s. #2: Stay tuned for a post entitled “pictures that make me laugh!"

want to see what uganda looks like?

It's so hard to choose just a few photos to share with you. Here's a start, though. These photos chronicle our visit to the islands with Sam with Jesus Film Ministries. We visited two islands in Lake Victoria, but these pictures are just from our stop at the village of Kisigala on Kome Island.

First we landed on Bulago Island where we would catch a boat to Kome Island.

Bulago Island is a tropical island in Lake Victoria that has something of a private resort on it. This isn't what we were expecting to see when we landed!

This is our first glimpse of Kisigala. The church is the larger building on the far right.

We were greeted by very cute, friendly kids!

Layton (the photographer freelancing for MAF) and some of the pastors looking at a map of Uganda at the end of our overnight stay in Kisigala.

These are some of the Kisigala church members outside their home. Harriet (in front with red tinged hair) was my pal during my visit. Her English was good, which made it easier to be pals. :-)

Here's a little self-portrait with some of the women from the church who helped cook for us.

This is where we slept that night!

Sam (in the black shirt) prayed with these pastors before we left Kisigala.

This little girl slept on my lap during the film the night before. I sat in the midst of the kids and had about five or six kids sitting on me or leaning against me throughout the movie.

Here's the boat we took back to the resort island to catch our plane to the next island.

This is our breakfast being cooked. If it took me this much work to make a meal, I'm sad to say I'd probably starve.

in the quiet of the morning

My head and heart are full. And I’ve still got as many weeks to go on this continent as the ones I’ve already lived here. It will, of course, take a long time to wade through the fullness, and it will probably never be fully waded through. There’s always more to be mined from the simplest experience.

When I began planning this trip, as people shared my excitement they fairly regularly came to describe my grand plan for four months in Africa as “a trip of a lifetime.” Not knowing yet what I would encounter here, I usually didn’t correct them then. But now I’m more certain that this is not a trip of a lifetime. It’s a beginning of something that is somehow part of what I’m going to have to do because it’s what I’ve been given to do.

I have no real idea what that means or what that will require of me or what it could possibly look like. And in the deepest part of me, past the part that’s slightly nervous about the unknowns and about the challenge of convincing my community to come along with me into a new chapter of unpredictability and abnormalness, my soul celebrates and rejoices because the reality of a statement like that places me in God’s hands. Fully. Completely. Trustingly. Absolutely.

This morning I’m delaying my encounter with the rest of the world by lingering in the cocoon of my bedroom at Pam and Simon’s. I’ve pulled out a delicious book from my small-ish stack of carefully chosen travel books. I began this one months ago but, with the frenzy of preparation for traveling, didn’t get very far. After heavy blowing rain last night, the day has settled into being that good kind of drizzly, gentle rainy day, the kind that’s good when you’ve been needing some quiet, cozy time inside a cocoon.

Kathleen Norris might be described as a writer’s writer. Mostly I just mean that I love the freedom her writing somehow gives me. She dips deeply into life and then shares her journey with the rest of us. It’s a spiritual journey that doesn’t leave real life. And here are the lines from The Cloister Walk that have prompted me to stop reading for a moment:

“To make the poem of our faith, we must learn not to settle for a false certitude but to embrace ambiguity and mystery.”

…and a few sentences later…

“The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life.”

It’s that ambiguity and mystery that I feel like God’s been teaching me more and more about these past couple years in particular, teaching me to celebrate them, teaching me to embrace them, teaching me how wonderful it is to trust Him enough to exist comfortably in their reality.

Ghana provided the chance to begin learning how to listen to Africa. Kenya began to take me deeper into the life of this continent. Uganda has somehow felt more profound. As I try to understand my response and what the time here has awakened, the closest I can come is to say that there are stories here that I haven’t gotten to hear yet but want to because I sense that they will teach things about God that all of us need to know. In the midst of the pain and suffering and beauty and hope of the people who live here is a God who is alive and active yet mysterious and unfathomable. He’s sometimes obvious. Sometimes not. And somehow the things that are true here are true everywhere there are human beings alive and interacting with each other, but perhaps some of those things are just displayed more obviously here.

So, we will see what these things come to mean. Wherever the story goes, may God be praised near and far.

some people call it hitting the wall

This week has been incredibly challenging. Arriving exactly at the mid-point of my four months of travels has been a week in which what's expected sure doesn’t seem realistically possible.

To be honest, I struggled today with being angry at the position I've been in this week. That was after I struggled last night with a moment of overwhelmedness and about the same time I was trying to take interview notes as we jounced down the less-than-smooth dirt-rock road. To begin to do real justice to these visits and collect all the information that was requested, I would need to be able to spend at least a week in each place. Instead, I've had roughly 24 hours in each town.

Here are some of the professional challenges encountered so far during this trip and especially this week (for the reading pleasure of all you working writers out there ;-) ):

--Having such little time in a place that interviews have to be as quick as possible, disallowing the chance to really connect with the folks I'm interviewing. That's not my preferred style. I consider myself a writer more than a journalist, someone who's in this for the opportunity to connect with people not just in it to get the quick sound bite and move on. It's about relationships, not just information.
--Having to work around language barriers and be vigilant to discern what people really mean when their English is poor or when someone else is translating for them.
--During the Bundibugyo visit, all of my interviews except for one happened either while we were walking or while we were driving on bumpy roads. Both activities do wonders for note-taking.
--Being unable because of time limitations to tell the whole story that I am beginning to glimpse in a given location and feeling the internal ache that accompanies the act of grazing over the surface of a story.
--Feeling like it's unprofessional to admit that you can't do it all and inhuman not to admit it.
--Accepting that gathering info and writing actually use up a huge amount of energy.
--Working within a tight time frame but being unable to actually control or dictate your schedule during that time frame.

So, that's the rant. Now on to more pleasant things…

Beyond the above-mentioned challenges, it was a delight to visit Bundibugyo. This district of Uganda is located in the Rwenzori mountains. The flight there was absolutely beautiful. We flew over a stretch of hills covered in small farms whose green fields were outlined with the darker green of trees and shrubs and then we came to the stunning mountains. As I understand it, they have a very high elevation, but they have the rounded tops and all-the-way-to-the-top foliage of the Appalachians rather than the severe angles of the Rockies. We flew up and over them and the clouds hugging their tops. On the other side was the lush green of jungle vegetation and the grass airstrip where we were greeted so warmly by folks working for World Harvest Mission.

The visit was great. The World Harvest folks are all Americans. It's been a while since I've been around so many of my own kind. :-) The non-Ugandans I've been around most here are all Europeans. In addition to visiting a couple of the projects World Harvest works on in Bundi, we got to participate in their weekly team Bible study and prayer time and be guests at a birthday party for one of the mk's. It was really nice to be included in all of those activities. I haven’t gotten to do much group Scripture study or prayer time these past couple months.

I ended up staying up late last night talking with Amy, one of my roommates-for-the-night and one of World Harvest's missionaries. She’ll be heading back home to the States in a month or so. It was so great to meet up with one of those people who is an instant friend and enjoy some refreshing conversation late into the night, especially since none of my old friends were on hand to help me out last night. :-)

For some reason (beyond, I think, the aforementioned professional challenges) this visit was more emotional for me than any of the others so far. The emotion was partly in the sense that somehow there are important stories there that should be told, but that I can’t tell this time around. It also hit while we visited two hospitals. At the second hospital we were in the room while the doctor we were accompanying performed four quick ultrasounds to check out four very different patients.

The first patient was a woman maybe in her late 30s suffering from abdominal pain. The doc wasn't able to discover the cause of the pain. He said gynecological care is very bad here—partly because the tools for providing good care are in short supply--so such pains can be very difficult to diagnose.

The second patient was a 36-year-old woman who is HIV-positive and pregnant. She hasn't felt her baby move lately. Happily, the ultrasound showed the baby to be okay still.

Patient #3 is the one that got to me the most. He was a decent-sized 6-year-old boy who came in with a woman I'm assuming was his mother. He looked so scared as he stripped off his shirt and shoes and climbed onto the bed. He never actually cried but was awfully close to it. He had a slightly swollen area in his abdomen that was causing him pain. He winced when the doctor put pressure on that area. The ultrasound showed it to be some sort of abscess that is apparently fairly common here but not in the States. It should be treatable with antibiotics.

After he got off the table and put his shirt and shoes back on, he stood by the door beside his mother. I was on the other side of her sitting on a chair and leaned around to wave and smile at him. I didn’t expect to get much response from him but wanted to comfort him somehow. To my surprise he shyly smiled back. Eventually I reached my hand out and he quickly and smilingly, though still shyly, came forward and shook it. We exchanged some more smiles though I really wanted to reach out and hug him.

The final ultrasound patient was a tiny one-month-old baby boy who’d been vomiting and was referred from an outlying hospital. Upon seeing the patient, Dr. Myhre immediately starting shaking his head, saying that this was not the right test for this baby. He performed the ultrasound anyway, but as he suspected it didn’t show anything. Then while he was feeling around the baby’s abdomen, it peed onto the floor. That, Dr. Myhre explained, actually told a whole lot more than the ultrasound did. “That tells us a lot. The baby’s vomiting breast milk but it’s not dehydrated.”

So, that’s a small snippet from the day. I was closer to tears today than I have been at any other point on this trip so far. I’m not sure why that hospital and those patients hit me so forcefully.

how to use a pit latrine and other stories from the field

I'm here with quick greetings during my 12 hour sleepover back in Kampala. The past three days have been jammed full of good things. It would have been great to stay in each place so much longer, but it was good to get to go to them at all.

Layton and I felt more like "normal journalists" than we like because our tight schedule didn't allow nearly as much time as we had during last week's visit to the islands for sitting and talking with people. Instead we had to focus on getting the info and pictures we needed and had little time for much more than that.

Kalongo and Patongo are villages that became huge IDP (internally displaced persons) camps over the past few years during the height of the LRA's (Lord's Resistance Army) brutal terrorizing of people in northern Uganda. Peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan government commenced last year. The talks aren't completely over, but things are much on the mend for northern Ugandans for the time being.

People who lived out in less congested areas moved into these villages because that's where government soldiers were posted to provide protection. Many of the people who moved were farmers who owned land. When they arrived in the IDP camps, they had no land to farm and it wasn't safe to go out of the camp to the ample farmland anyway because of the roving LRA soldiers. That's why you've heard stories about the lack of food in IDP camps.

These days people are starting to move out of the crowded large camps. Many people haven't moved all the way back to their original villages--where they own land--but have begun to move to new camps/villages part way home. It helps folks to spread out of the tight quarters of the original IDP camps. Things are also calm enough for people to begin farming again. From the air you can see many cultivated fields throughout the area. We learned that people are now growing enough food during the growing season to last them for about 9 months. Before (during the fighting) they were only able to grow 2-3 months worth of food.

Layton and I visited Kalongo Hospital, a Catholic hospital in Kalongo that had to close for a couple years during the worst of the fighting in the area, and GOAL, an Irish? ngo (humanitarian organization) working in Kalongo. Yesterday we headed to Patongo. Fortunately, the road between Kalongo and Patongo that had been closed down by the recent flooding in northern Uganda was passable, though we drove through several yards of knee-deep water outside Patongo. In Patongo, we were hosted by Medair, a Swiss humanitarian org. We went along with them yesterday when they distributed tarps and household supplies to an IDP camp affected by the flooding and today when they distributed school supplies to students at three schools.

It's been terribly interesting to taste life in the international ngo community where people from all sorts of nationalities work together. On our flight from Kampala to Kalongo, there were 9 people on the plane with 5-6 different nationalities represented (British, American, Colombian, Danish, Ugandan and maybe South African). It was also interesting to help distribute notebooks to kids at one of the schools today. The kids lined up and we handed the notebooks and pens and pencils to them as quickly as possible and then they went back to their classrooms. Out of the two groups of students I handed notebooks to, I probably had real human interaction (eye to eye contact and exchanged smiles) with fewer than 10 of them. With the rest, our eyes never met, whether because I was counting out their 5 notebooks or because they were looking away or because their eyes were on the notebooks. It was interesting to see that side of aid work and the sometimes challenge--and impossibility?--there is to really connecting when you're passing out materials to large numbers of people.

On the flight back I was struck again by the beauty of creation. The sky and clouds here are so beautiful. The big wide sky on so many days has offered such a perfect color of blue for providing striking contrast with the white, white clouds that vary in shape, number and type from day to day. And below the land is green and full of varied types of vegetation. The area we were flying over was fairly sparcely populated, but the glimpses of small huts and of larger tin-roofed buildings pointed back to the connection between creation and the people God's given it to. Viewing these things from the small plane we were flying in helped their grandeur show through better than it usually does when you're flying so much higher in jets. Such beauty can't help but elicit a prayer of praise and thanks to God for His creation! (If only I hadn't been so tired, I might have been able to keep my eyes open more and do even more praising. ;-) )

Both last week at the islands and this week in the camps by the second day of the stay I hit my wall of info-gathering and people-interacting energy. By the afternoon/evening of that second day of pretty intensive immersion, I've found my curiosity, my ability to establish a social/emotional connection and my desire to absorb everything possible from the experience overloaded. It's an exhaustion that turns physical. When I'm able I'm trying to give into that exhaustion by pulling out of the experience into my tent or guestroom for even an hour alone. It's so hard to do that, though, when you know your time in a place is limited and want to take in as much as possible before you have to move on to the next place. Today when I arrived back in Kampala, I did have a feeling of wishing I could "take a vacation" by going back home for just a couple days to be surrounded by things that are familiar and require less constant processing. Since that's not possible, I guess I should instead wrap up this post and head to bed in my home-for-the-month. :-)

p.s. In reference to the title, I'm excited that if there were a girl scout badge for good pit latrine usage, which requires the ability to keep yourself and the floor around you clean and dry without grumbling about it, I think I would have finally earned it these past few days. :-)