http://www.vimeo.com/7786740
for everyone who has wondered what the whole story has been, and for everyone who was a part of it....and still wondered what the whole story had been.
well, here's the whole story.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Flannery Oconnor: unapologetic, faithful
Barry Moser, Valley of Dry BonesIn an essay titled, "The Fiction Writer and His Country", Flannery Oconnor addresses the concern of literary critics that American novelists do not accurately represent the "joy of life" in a country which is "enjoying an unparalleled prosperity", which is "the strongest nation in the world", and which "has almost produced a classless society."
She responds in such a way that encourages me not only as a Christian, but as a Christian artist, especially in a cultural climate hostile to Christianity, at Florida State and in the United States at large.
Christian artists have the inconvenient responsibility of conveying a need for redemption to an audience convinced of a reality where such redemption is not only an insult, but an unnecessary fairy tale. The belief in the depravity of man and his desperate need for redemption is a make-believe cop-out of living life in the here and now, a crutch for the weak, instead of hope for every soul with the curse and blessing of being confronted with the reality of his soul: needy.
Flannery says:
"Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.
The novelists with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, they you have to make your vision apparent by shock--to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."
Christian artists are often accused of having a view of the world so dark that it is dishonest. Each artist faces this accusation singularly, with no other conscience but his own.
"It may well be asked, however, why so much of our literature is apparently lacking in a sense of spiritual purpose and in the joy of life, and if stories lacking such are actually credible. The only conscience I have to examine in this matter is my own, and when I look at stories I have written I find that they are, for the most part, about people who are poor, who are afflicted in both mind and body, who have little--or at best a distorted--sense of spiritual purpose, and whose actions do not apparently give the reader a great assurance of the joy of life.
Yet how is this? For I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don't think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these time to make transparent in fiction."
She is right about that. This is not a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The Burning and The Blessing
While I was in Uganda, I wrote about the tattoo of the tarot card that I have on my shoulder. If you haven't read that, you should go back and read that first, because this is part II of that story.
* * *
A couple of weeks ago, I got a wild hair and decided to obsessively clean.
This began, innocently enough, with the trunk of art supplies in my closet. But then it started spreading. First to the shelves in my closet, then to my desk, then to my bookshelf and before I knew it, half my stuff was in the hallway and I was rearranging the furniture. The bed was turned this way, the chair was on the bed, dust was flying and I thought......
Hey, this feels pretty good.
The closet was, by far the biggest challenge because that is the place I throw things when I try to forget about them. I unearthed all sorts of memories, crawling out from under things. It was very emotional.
And then I really found a chunk of something.
There were my tarot cards, hiding in a little bread pan, in the corner of the bottom of the trunk, curled up in a ball whispering to each other, "If you don't move, she can't see you."
Well I saw them, and I picked them up and I just looked at them for a minute. The thoughts began to dawn on me. Why do I still have these? Why haven't I destroyed them by now? I destroyed the eight of swords, why haven't I destroyed the rest of them?
Well, I didn't really know so I just set them down on my bedside table and kept cleaning, but now that they were out in the open, their presence was really bothering me. My eye kept being drawn back to the place where they sat, staring at me. I heard God whispering.
"You know, we still haven't talked about this."
The last year and a half has been a stormy affair between God and I. We've fought and we've struggled and fought some more and cried and there have been a few times when I've tried to kill him. It's been hard.
But God is faithful. He's more faithful than I am and he's kept his promises to me, even when I turned my back on him.
Somehow, in all of this Storm, the fact that I had engaged in the consulting of spirits and divination had slipped to the bottom of the closet, unaddressed. I'm not exactly sure how this happened, but as I continued to be drawn back to the cards, sitting on my bedside table, I knew there was a reckoning about to happen. I had been struggling with whether or not the tarot was actually evil, since I thought I had seen a lot of good come from tarot, but as I thought about this, the conversation between God and I surpassed the tarot and became much more serious.
We started talking about baptism.
When a person is baptized, they renounce evil and all of the spiritual forces that rebel against God and corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. They turn to Jesus Christ and promise to put their whole trust in his grace and love. They promise to obey him.
I made those promises eight years ago when I was baptized in the Methodist church, but a lot has happened since then.
I turned my back on God and not my face, and I went my own way. I counted the commandments of God hopeless, impossible, unrealistic and foolish, instead of counting them as pathways to blessing and peace. I began walking the hard road of rebellion and it led me to a place where I was alone and isolated. I thought that following my desires and my ideals would lead me to an open place of freedom and a renewed, true sense of intimacy with others, but my desires and my ideals betrayed me and left me alone, hollow, cut off from everyone and wondering what had happened.
I was lying in the ruins of my apostasy, tormented and undone.
I had clearly not kept my end of the bargain. Over the years, I had broken my promise to trust, my promise to rely on his grace, to renounce things that would corrupt and destroy me, to turn and accept Christ, to follow and obey Him. But as I look back now I see the ways that God was faithful to his promises, faithful to His grace.
"When Israel was a child, I loved him,
And out of Egypt I called my son.
As I called him, so he went from me;
They sacrificed to Baals,
And burned incense to carved images.
I taught Ephraim to walk,
Taking them by their arms;
But they did not know that I healed them.
I drew them with gentle cords,
With bands of love,
And I was to them as those
Who take the yoke from their neck.
I stooped and fed them…
How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?...
My heart churns within me;
My sympathy is stirred.
I will not execute the fierceness of my anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim.
For I am God and not man,
The holy One in your midst;
And I will not come with terror."
Hosea 11:1-4, 8ac-9
God was faithful. He led people into my life to shine their light in my darkness, he spoke to me as I sat alone, searching desperately for something in a deck of cards. He spoke to me in whispers as I sat crying on my back porch because I didn't like the person I was becoming. Even though I had forgotten my promise, he hadn't forgotten his and he wasn't giving up on me.
In all those times when I showed my unfaithfulness to my promise, Jesus was falling to his knees in the front yard, head in his hands, begging that the cup of suffering would pass me by.
But it didn't pass me by. I drank the bitter cup to its dregs and threw up in the street.
"Your ways and your doings have
Procured these things for you.
This is your wickedness,
Because it is bitter,
Because it reaches to your heart."
Jeremiah 4:18
I always thought the tarot was pretty innocent. I always made it clear that I wasn't practicing divination, that I wasn't a fortune teller, that what I was doing wasn't evil---but no matter what I said, or what I told myself to make myself feel better, that didn't change the fact that the tarot was evil, and what I was doing was consulting evil.
I didn't just decide one day that the occult sounded better than Jesus. It was a slow rot. It started with my own apostasy, and somewhere along the way, I found something that celebrated that, and that thing led me deeper into darkness.
So when God began to drop hints a couple of weeks ago that we had some things to talk about, it had less to do with tarot cards and more to do with apostasy.
I had rejected the God I had promised to trust and it had grieved us both, only I hadn't felt that until now.
So when it came time to repent, I wasn't just admitting I was maybe wrong about a few things. I wasn't groveling before an angry God. I was grieving before a gracious one.
"O Lord, are not your eyes on the truth?
You have stricken them,
But they have not grieved;
You have consumed them,
But they have refused to receive correction.
They have made their faces harder than rock;
They have refused to return."
Jeremiah 5:3
My face softened by the tears of my mourning, I turn around to face the Lord, only to find that he has been in hot pursuit since the chase first began.
"If you will return, O Israel,
Says the Lord,
'Return to me;
And if you will put your detestable objects out of my sight,
Then you shall not be moved.'
And if you shall swear,
'The Lord lives,' in truth, in judgement
And in righteousness;
The nations shall bless themselves in him,
And in him they shall glory."
Jeremiah 4:1-2
In my grief over the separation I had caused, and in the joy of God's grace and forgiveness and mercy, I knew that I had to put the cards away. I had to put the rebellion and the broken promises and the cards away once and for all and I had to renew my vow to the Lord.
Father John and Ashley and their littlest Wallace, all together with Sonya Cronin witnessed the burning of my tarot cards and the renewal of my baptismal vows on October 26, 2009 at St Peter's Anglican Church.
We celebrated God's grace and piled the cards in a little flower pot that the Wallaces had brought. We doused them with lighter fluid and as they burned, Ashley and Sonya presented me for the renewal of my baptismal vows. They promised to help me grow into the full stature of Christ by their prayers and witness, with God's help. I renounced again the spiritual forces of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. I renounced all sinful desires that draw me from the love of God. I turned to Jesus Christ to accept and put my whole trust in His grace and love. I promised to follow and obey Him.
It all happened at once, the burning and the blessing. As Father John stood in front of me, he anointed me with oil used at ordinations and baptisms. He made the sign of the cross with his hand on my forehead and reminded me again of God's faithfulness when he said,
"You were sealed at your baptism as Christ's own forever."
He anointed my hands and my mouth and my ears with oil and showed me how God was setting me apart to do His work with my hands, a new work to lead me into blessing, and not into bitter darkness.
I felt Ashley's hand on the tattoo on my left shoulder and Sonya's on my right shoulder. They surrounded me in a triangle, and I felt so surrounded by God's love and devotion to me, thankful for his grace in putting people like Ashley and Sonya and John in my life to show me His love. I could hear the baby talking a little bit and the fire popping behind Father John. Sometimes if he shifted, I could watch the cards burning and it all just felt so good in the autumn air, I could feel some things were dying. Just like the leaves falling away, there were parts of me that fell away then, and the promise of new life was more real than it ever had been.
As it was all happening there, out in the open, in the garden at the church, I saw what small and flimsy things, made of only paper, the cards really were and I was sobered by that reality. I thought,
Hey, this whole time, they were only paper.
But it wasn't just paper that led me into bitter darkness. And it's not just the paper in my Bible that leads me into the presence of the God of the universe. A Bible will burn just as easily as a pack of cards will, but there are things going on in the world other than just what we can see with our eyes.
"Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.
Then He who sat on the throne said,
"Behold, I make all things new."
Revelation 21:3-5
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
yeah. this is all gonna turn out alright.
This came to me in a dream.
Righteousness, the cake I'm baking alongside all Christians over time and space. As I follow the recipe of scripture, mixing four parts purity, one part weeping, ten parts mercy, one part repentance, I get the feeling that others have measured this combination before.
And as I begin to watch the batter swirling into a sweet conclusion in the buttered pan, I think.....
yeah. this is all gonna turn out alright.
As I slide my pan into the hot oven, and the wave of heat fogs my glasses I think---maybe I'll survive this after all.
Maybe the warmth and the fire will set me free and when Jesus peeks over the oven door twenty five minutes from now he'll celebrate and say:
"And I will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.....Behold. I make all things new."
Revelation 21:4-5
Being a Christian is like making a cake----except halfway through, you hand the spoon to Jesus and finally admit that you are the cake. Surprised by this fact, you totally lose all composure and then you're both standing in the kitchen and the spoon is on the floor, your head is on Jesus' shoulder and you're crying and he says....
yeah. this is all gonna turn out alright.
"Assemble yourselves and come, Gather together from all sides to my sacrificial meal which I am sacrificing for you, A great sacrificial meal on the mountains of Israel, That you may eat flesh and drink blood."
Ezekiel 39:17
Righteousness, the cake I'm baking alongside all Christians over time and space. As I follow the recipe of scripture, mixing four parts purity, one part weeping, ten parts mercy, one part repentance, I get the feeling that others have measured this combination before.
And as I begin to watch the batter swirling into a sweet conclusion in the buttered pan, I think.....
yeah. this is all gonna turn out alright.
As I slide my pan into the hot oven, and the wave of heat fogs my glasses I think---maybe I'll survive this after all.
Maybe the warmth and the fire will set me free and when Jesus peeks over the oven door twenty five minutes from now he'll celebrate and say:
"And I will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.....Behold. I make all things new."
Revelation 21:4-5
Being a Christian is like making a cake----except halfway through, you hand the spoon to Jesus and finally admit that you are the cake. Surprised by this fact, you totally lose all composure and then you're both standing in the kitchen and the spoon is on the floor, your head is on Jesus' shoulder and you're crying and he says....
yeah. this is all gonna turn out alright.
"Assemble yourselves and come, Gather together from all sides to my sacrificial meal which I am sacrificing for you, A great sacrificial meal on the mountains of Israel, That you may eat flesh and drink blood."
Ezekiel 39:17
Monday, September 14, 2009
For whoever may or may not be still reading!
So, be there readers or not, I feel compelled to write again.
So much is changing. Uganda isn't gone. There are plans in the works to return next summer.
June 30.
Lisa and I are going to lead a group of women to visit the mothers at Kagando. After I just sort of landed in a heap in Tallahassee in July, it seemed like I would never see Uganda again, that my life was just going to spiral on into the future, bored, meaningless, vacuous.
But God doesn't just leave his people hanging that way. Things are beginning to take shape on the horizon. I've just made a two year commitment to Stephen Ministry at St Peters, so I guess I'll be hanging around for another year after I graduate, which is just fine with me. Midwifery school is still on the radar, but I'm not so anxious about going immediately. God's timing is perfect.
This is a widwifery school located in the Phillipines that I have been considering:
http://www.midwifeschool.org/Home.htm
The Stephen ministry website:
http://www.stephenministries.org/stephenministry/default.cfm/928
So much is changing. Uganda isn't gone. There are plans in the works to return next summer.
June 30.
Lisa and I are going to lead a group of women to visit the mothers at Kagando. After I just sort of landed in a heap in Tallahassee in July, it seemed like I would never see Uganda again, that my life was just going to spiral on into the future, bored, meaningless, vacuous.
But God doesn't just leave his people hanging that way. Things are beginning to take shape on the horizon. I've just made a two year commitment to Stephen Ministry at St Peters, so I guess I'll be hanging around for another year after I graduate, which is just fine with me. Midwifery school is still on the radar, but I'm not so anxious about going immediately. God's timing is perfect.
This is a widwifery school located in the Phillipines that I have been considering:
http://www.midwifeschool.org/Home.htm
The Stephen ministry website:
http://www.stephenministries.org/stephenministry/default.cfm/928
Thursday, August 27, 2009
echoes
so i don't really know why i'm writing here right now. I'm not in uganda......I'm definitely not in uganda. I'm in strozier library. Which is a much sadder place. I just miss writing. I haven't really written a thing since I got back. I haven't really processed much of this stuff since I got back. There are no categories here for talking or thinking about Uganda.
man I miss it so much I cry sometimes. I miss it so much. I miss it so much. I have now been here a little longer than I was in Uganda after the group left and that is so sad to me.
I wanna get out of here. out of this country. off of this continent. away from this cell phone.
no one is probably out there to hear this shout, as it tumbles down the canyon wall into the abyss,
and all that comes back from that beautiful shout is a fading, withering echo.
and then it's gone.
that's what happened to Uganda. It came back like a withering echo.....and now it's gone.
man I miss it so much I cry sometimes. I miss it so much. I miss it so much. I have now been here a little longer than I was in Uganda after the group left and that is so sad to me.
I wanna get out of here. out of this country. off of this continent. away from this cell phone.
no one is probably out there to hear this shout, as it tumbles down the canyon wall into the abyss,
and all that comes back from that beautiful shout is a fading, withering echo.
and then it's gone.
that's what happened to Uganda. It came back like a withering echo.....and now it's gone.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Home
Well, as some of you may know, I am home.
I am sitting in the office in my parents house. I am showered. I am clean. My clothes have been washed. I found a small stowaway bug in my luggage.
The trip is almost complete. Now there's just the part where I tell everyone all about it a thousand times. I can't wait. There is so much to say.
I will say this, I am going to slowly reimmerse myself into life, so if you don't get a phone call as soon as you'd hoped, be of good cheer my friend. Things take time.
It's strange being back here, where everything is clean and everything is available and easy. Suddenly I'm reflecting on the time I spent in Uganda as a past tense thing, and it's sort of uncomfortable. I feel as if I've abandoned Uganda for a hot shower and a bowl of cereal.
I'm going back. I don't know when, but I am.
I was trying to explain kampala to my parents last night. My mouth moved 100 miles a minute and I stumbled over my words and spouted them out desperately. There are no words.
And yet I am using so many words.
Here is an excerpt from my journal the day we flew out of Entebbe.
I was writing the story of how I came to buy a small book:
The story really starts, if we're going to be quite honest about it, at the dawn of time, but for the sake of brevity, I'll start with just this afternoon.
Lisa and I were picked up from the Namirembe girl's hostel at 5:06 pm by a man named Steven. Lisa has been my travleing companion in Uganda now for two months. She's blond, she's beautiful, witty. She's one of those "scrapbooking" types. Steven is a medical lab technician, Ugandan, who runs a small clinic in Entebbe. He has a very thick accent and a low rumbling pattern of grunting, which makes it difficult to navigate a conversation.
The Namirembe girl's hostel is home to a number of Ugandan girls, school age, who stay in bunks at the hostel while they get an education in or near kampala. They must be very dedicated, because around the time the rooster begins to crow in the morning (4am), we hear them clamouring into the study room. Ugandans are morning people. They're also tea-taking-types. At eleven, everything stops, and everybody takes tea. They hide little electronic kettles in closets and office cabinets, waiting for tea time, and then---out come the cups and the water and the milk and the conversation.
The hostel is run by a man named Patrick, tall, lanky, with skin like an aging plum,very separate and yellowish teeth, spectacles and graying, wiry hair. He is kind, he is warm, he speaks slowly. The first night we came back to Kampala from the hospital, I saw him walking around in wide, slow strides, searching for a girl from room 31. A few minutes later when i was in the showers, I heard him shuffle in in his silk robe and slippers and his warm, fatherly voice echoed in the concrete washrooms--
"Heh-DOH?"
I answer and he immediately knows I am not the one from my accent--distinctly American and curt, not melodic or slow, like Ugandans. He mutters worriedly to the security guard outside the washroom.
"Dih guhl eehn druum 31 aast fahr pen-killehrs uhnd naw I aave tem uhnd I con-you to such fahr hah...."
And I feel more at home as I picture him in his bathrobe finding the girl with the headache or the pain and caring for her like a father---here, family connections are about love, adoption and tenderness, not biology.
So Steven picks us up at five, before the sun goes down because it's dangerous enough to drive in Kampala at all, let alone at night. There are a thousand motorcycle taxis called boda bodas and they strain through the traffic in the overcrowded and dusty streets like sand through fingers, sliding around and through wherever they can, not wherever is safe.
We pass the mosque, huge and shining, the most beautiful thing in the city, heavily gated and manicured. A shining monument, a dream among the orange tinted streets and buildings, the trash littered trenches and war torn doorways. The city looks like a place destroyed, abandoned, dying---and yet the Africans are here, they have no where else to go. This is their city, their home, their hope. I feel conspicuosly white as I tumble down the streets on the back of the boda--and my heart hurts as I realize more and more, in the faces of the taxi drivers and street vendors, that I am a visitor in their world, that I may never understand life here, that I may never get in step with the pulse of this plot of humanity because I am of the privledged white race. I am perceived of as elite, easyand powerful.
And yet, in the middle of it all, the swimming and screaming African continent, with all its tears and all its mysteries, joys, in all its shrouded beauty--I feel more powerless than I have since I was a child.
We roll past the mosque, toward Entebbe, out of the city and across a brief stretch of country side. Stacks of avocados and mangoes pass by under floating faces, confused and then smiling at our white skin through the window. I feel alone and sad to be leaving Uganda. Strangely, I wish I could stumble through another labored conversation with an African just to get to the part when you both start laughing and smile, shaking hands as an African high pitched, soaring sigh eases the nerves and settles your heart in a feeling of friendship and ease.
I have more to learn from Uganda--the land and the people.
But now we're continuing toward Entebbe, to the airport to begin the journey home, the long transatlantic hop to home, where the comforts of wealth will bother me more than ever.
After a confusing exchange with Steven, the driver, it becomes clear that we are making one last stop. Steven runs a clinic near Entebbe and he wants us to stop, so we can see it. Come see my clinic, he says, you never know what the future will bring. Let us start friendship now, perhaps you come back.
So, we go. And there is one tree with a tire around the bottom and patchy green grass, beige buildings with beds inside, a surprisingly clean and tidy facility, surprisingly empty too. We are led into a small room where a man sits behind a desk, and we are told to sit please. So we sit please and without fail, the man behind the desk produces a visitor's book. Very strange phenomenon in Uganda. Everywhere you go, they have a visitor book and you're expected to sign in and write down your address and your signature and where you're from. I have yet to fully grasp the visitor book concept.
A short visit later, we are on the road again, and we arrive at the airport with five hours to spare. WONDERFUL
We get some instant coffee from the bar in the lobby, which, like many things here, bears the lingering essence of colonial Britain, with its cup and saucer, proper appeal.
We somehow manage to survive the checking in process, with its subtle African, laid back flavor. It takes a while and it's a little uncomfortable when the airline employee is genuinely interested in your stay in Uganda and what you were up to. The no-nonsense, no frills, American approach to service leaves you vulnerable to shock at contact with sincere and warm service here in Uganda. We've lost our sensitivity and gained a whole new vulnerability by our hard appearances and way of life.
After being in the bush for so long, where you will not see a cappuccino for miles, it's shocking coming into the airport terminal, where there are shelves upon shelves of tax-free goods, strategically lit, displayed, available. This is foreign now, as images in my mind of beggars without limbs impose themselves over posters of beautiful woman on all fours, selling fragrances.
THIS is uncomfortable. The comfort is uncomfortable.
We have time to kill, so we wander around the shelves and shelves of fragrances. Some are one hundred dollars, about two weeks pay for a man with a decent job in Uganda. As we smell each one, Lisa accidentally knocks one and we both watch as it falls to the ground and against the white marble. It shatters with a sharp, clean ringing sound---and then silence. For a moment.
I feel the cool perfume on my foot as it is rapidly evaporating and we look at one another, mouths gaping. I peek at the box. On the nose, $100 of tax free accident.
You know what we're both thinking at this point and so does the employee on the other side of the store. So we wait. This is a wonderful strategy for those who have no idea what to expect--which we have been very often since visiting in Uganda. When in doubt, wait to be addressed.
A man comes over and nervously communicates non-verbally, then another comes to sweep up. I notice the perfume has soaked my pant leg and the thought begins to develop that I will smell of this particular fragrance for the entirety of our journey---over 24 hours. After some time, the first man reappears to break the news.
"You pay fifteen dollars."
"Fifty?" we reply in unison.
"nonono fifTEEN."
ohokgreatalrightfinelet'sGO.
Nervously, we quickly make our way up to the counter before we cause any more problems. To soothe the subtle uncomfortable nature of the situation, I grab a small notebook from the rack.
This way, at least it was a customer who broke something and not an anonymous pair of careless American girls who terrorized the fragrance section. After all, we must represent the hoard of good consumers at home on OUR VERY OWN CONTINENT CALLED AMERICA.
Also,
I am sitting in the office in my parents house. I am showered. I am clean. My clothes have been washed. I found a small stowaway bug in my luggage.
The trip is almost complete. Now there's just the part where I tell everyone all about it a thousand times. I can't wait. There is so much to say.
I will say this, I am going to slowly reimmerse myself into life, so if you don't get a phone call as soon as you'd hoped, be of good cheer my friend. Things take time.
It's strange being back here, where everything is clean and everything is available and easy. Suddenly I'm reflecting on the time I spent in Uganda as a past tense thing, and it's sort of uncomfortable. I feel as if I've abandoned Uganda for a hot shower and a bowl of cereal.
I'm going back. I don't know when, but I am.
I was trying to explain kampala to my parents last night. My mouth moved 100 miles a minute and I stumbled over my words and spouted them out desperately. There are no words.
And yet I am using so many words.
Here is an excerpt from my journal the day we flew out of Entebbe.
I was writing the story of how I came to buy a small book:
The story really starts, if we're going to be quite honest about it, at the dawn of time, but for the sake of brevity, I'll start with just this afternoon.
Lisa and I were picked up from the Namirembe girl's hostel at 5:06 pm by a man named Steven. Lisa has been my travleing companion in Uganda now for two months. She's blond, she's beautiful, witty. She's one of those "scrapbooking" types. Steven is a medical lab technician, Ugandan, who runs a small clinic in Entebbe. He has a very thick accent and a low rumbling pattern of grunting, which makes it difficult to navigate a conversation.
The Namirembe girl's hostel is home to a number of Ugandan girls, school age, who stay in bunks at the hostel while they get an education in or near kampala. They must be very dedicated, because around the time the rooster begins to crow in the morning (4am), we hear them clamouring into the study room. Ugandans are morning people. They're also tea-taking-types. At eleven, everything stops, and everybody takes tea. They hide little electronic kettles in closets and office cabinets, waiting for tea time, and then---out come the cups and the water and the milk and the conversation.
The hostel is run by a man named Patrick, tall, lanky, with skin like an aging plum,very separate and yellowish teeth, spectacles and graying, wiry hair. He is kind, he is warm, he speaks slowly. The first night we came back to Kampala from the hospital, I saw him walking around in wide, slow strides, searching for a girl from room 31. A few minutes later when i was in the showers, I heard him shuffle in in his silk robe and slippers and his warm, fatherly voice echoed in the concrete washrooms--
"Heh-DOH?"
I answer and he immediately knows I am not the one from my accent--distinctly American and curt, not melodic or slow, like Ugandans. He mutters worriedly to the security guard outside the washroom.
"Dih guhl eehn druum 31 aast fahr pen-killehrs uhnd naw I aave tem uhnd I con-you to such fahr hah...."
And I feel more at home as I picture him in his bathrobe finding the girl with the headache or the pain and caring for her like a father---here, family connections are about love, adoption and tenderness, not biology.
So Steven picks us up at five, before the sun goes down because it's dangerous enough to drive in Kampala at all, let alone at night. There are a thousand motorcycle taxis called boda bodas and they strain through the traffic in the overcrowded and dusty streets like sand through fingers, sliding around and through wherever they can, not wherever is safe.
We pass the mosque, huge and shining, the most beautiful thing in the city, heavily gated and manicured. A shining monument, a dream among the orange tinted streets and buildings, the trash littered trenches and war torn doorways. The city looks like a place destroyed, abandoned, dying---and yet the Africans are here, they have no where else to go. This is their city, their home, their hope. I feel conspicuosly white as I tumble down the streets on the back of the boda--and my heart hurts as I realize more and more, in the faces of the taxi drivers and street vendors, that I am a visitor in their world, that I may never understand life here, that I may never get in step with the pulse of this plot of humanity because I am of the privledged white race. I am perceived of as elite, easyand powerful.
And yet, in the middle of it all, the swimming and screaming African continent, with all its tears and all its mysteries, joys, in all its shrouded beauty--I feel more powerless than I have since I was a child.
We roll past the mosque, toward Entebbe, out of the city and across a brief stretch of country side. Stacks of avocados and mangoes pass by under floating faces, confused and then smiling at our white skin through the window. I feel alone and sad to be leaving Uganda. Strangely, I wish I could stumble through another labored conversation with an African just to get to the part when you both start laughing and smile, shaking hands as an African high pitched, soaring sigh eases the nerves and settles your heart in a feeling of friendship and ease.
I have more to learn from Uganda--the land and the people.
But now we're continuing toward Entebbe, to the airport to begin the journey home, the long transatlantic hop to home, where the comforts of wealth will bother me more than ever.
After a confusing exchange with Steven, the driver, it becomes clear that we are making one last stop. Steven runs a clinic near Entebbe and he wants us to stop, so we can see it. Come see my clinic, he says, you never know what the future will bring. Let us start friendship now, perhaps you come back.
So, we go. And there is one tree with a tire around the bottom and patchy green grass, beige buildings with beds inside, a surprisingly clean and tidy facility, surprisingly empty too. We are led into a small room where a man sits behind a desk, and we are told to sit please. So we sit please and without fail, the man behind the desk produces a visitor's book. Very strange phenomenon in Uganda. Everywhere you go, they have a visitor book and you're expected to sign in and write down your address and your signature and where you're from. I have yet to fully grasp the visitor book concept.
A short visit later, we are on the road again, and we arrive at the airport with five hours to spare. WONDERFUL
We get some instant coffee from the bar in the lobby, which, like many things here, bears the lingering essence of colonial Britain, with its cup and saucer, proper appeal.
We somehow manage to survive the checking in process, with its subtle African, laid back flavor. It takes a while and it's a little uncomfortable when the airline employee is genuinely interested in your stay in Uganda and what you were up to. The no-nonsense, no frills, American approach to service leaves you vulnerable to shock at contact with sincere and warm service here in Uganda. We've lost our sensitivity and gained a whole new vulnerability by our hard appearances and way of life.
After being in the bush for so long, where you will not see a cappuccino for miles, it's shocking coming into the airport terminal, where there are shelves upon shelves of tax-free goods, strategically lit, displayed, available. This is foreign now, as images in my mind of beggars without limbs impose themselves over posters of beautiful woman on all fours, selling fragrances.
THIS is uncomfortable. The comfort is uncomfortable.
We have time to kill, so we wander around the shelves and shelves of fragrances. Some are one hundred dollars, about two weeks pay for a man with a decent job in Uganda. As we smell each one, Lisa accidentally knocks one and we both watch as it falls to the ground and against the white marble. It shatters with a sharp, clean ringing sound---and then silence. For a moment.
I feel the cool perfume on my foot as it is rapidly evaporating and we look at one another, mouths gaping. I peek at the box. On the nose, $100 of tax free accident.
You know what we're both thinking at this point and so does the employee on the other side of the store. So we wait. This is a wonderful strategy for those who have no idea what to expect--which we have been very often since visiting in Uganda. When in doubt, wait to be addressed.
A man comes over and nervously communicates non-verbally, then another comes to sweep up. I notice the perfume has soaked my pant leg and the thought begins to develop that I will smell of this particular fragrance for the entirety of our journey---over 24 hours. After some time, the first man reappears to break the news.
"You pay fifteen dollars."
"Fifty?" we reply in unison.
"nonono fifTEEN."
ohokgreatalrightfinelet'sGO.
Nervously, we quickly make our way up to the counter before we cause any more problems. To soothe the subtle uncomfortable nature of the situation, I grab a small notebook from the rack.
This way, at least it was a customer who broke something and not an anonymous pair of careless American girls who terrorized the fragrance section. After all, we must represent the hoard of good consumers at home on OUR VERY OWN CONTINENT CALLED AMERICA.
Also,
next stop: India.
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