This Story's Pages: November 2009

Hello Friends,

In a world where so many cannot meet their basic needs, we have a tendency of dismissing feelings. What’s a bit of loneliness compared to an empty stomach, or a bit of sadness to a lack of shelter? While it is true that basic needs are essential for survival and have a strong effect on how we feel, these past few weeks I have been awoken to the power of feelings.

Feelings are like the guy who shines shoes near by our home in Kampala. I see him every morning, arranging shoes on a mat, taking out his supplies, preparing for a day of work. I think he makes me smile every day, but I never notice until the days he is not there and some happy feeling I had not recognized is missing. Rarely do I wake up and think ‘I am so thankful I did not wake up sad!’ Until I wake up sad and miss those happy mornings when I wake up from a nice dream and feel deep in my heart a sense of purpose.

A few months ago each of the community organizations we work with through Bantwana Initiative trained a group of community volunteers on psychosocial support. It is a fancy term for mobilizing community members to support each other in social, emotional, and spiritual ways. This month I had the opportunity to visit some of these volunteers and observe their sessions with families caring for orphans and other vulnerable children. Usually when we visit partners, we focus on the tangible results, how the maize is doing, how many goats have been sold, are children going to school, etc. This time, the volunteers focused on how families are feeling.

Someone asked me once during graduate school what keeps me up in the long nights of studying. I would have liked to have answered curiosity or passion, and perhaps those are there, but often it is pure fear of failure that kept me going. I’ve come to see fear as a source of motivation. This week I realized, I was never really afraid of anything, perhaps highly concerned, but fear has taken a new meaning for me, and it is paralyzing.

A colleague and I are squatting under a tree to observe a session. A woman in a bright pink dress is leaning against the mud wall of her house and looking at the sky. A small child is resting between her legs. The volunteer is asking about how things have been going with her. ‘Have you been taking your ARVs?’ (treatment for people affected with HIV). ‘Yes, I take them at night or I feel dizzy, but people say the supply is finished. Next month they might charge us for the treatment.’ The conversation continues and the volunteer tries to encourage the woman to keep up with her maize production as soon it will be harvest time.

‘Do you know where to sell your maize mandam?’

‘If I am here, I will sell. I know where. Until then, I buy my children an egg each day, when I am not here, they will remember that.’
Fear – immense and powerful fear – not just of death but of those who stay behind. A fear that is lived each day when looking into children’s eyes, or caring for the maize plants, or going to the clinic, not knowing if today is the day the drugs will not be there.

In another household we find a pair of elderly grandparents caring for their granddaughter who has a severe disability. The mother had died and the father, their son, has taken off and refuses to care for the child. The grandparents show us the maize field they planted with support from the program. At an age when they should be cared for, these two kinds souls are working the fields for their granddaughter. For this visit we go inside, since the girl is paralyzed and is too heavy for the grandparents to carry outside. We enter a dark mud-walled house that is covered with colorful drawings and newspapers. The girl is 13 but is so stunted she does not look a day over 6 years. Her head is swollen due to water around the brain, a condition that has paralyzed her completely. I am thinking of the son of these kind people; a man who leaves his own daughter behind for greener pastures, and the love of his parents tested. Parents are supposed to love their children unconditionally, do they still when children neglect their own children? I am lost in thoughts when the grandmother starts crying. A colleague translates for me.

‘We took her to the referral hospital with help from some people in the community. At first we were happy to see other children in her condition. We felt like at least she is not the only one. We even saw some kids who were getting better. But when the doctor saw us he said we came too late. There is nothing he can do. We came too late, too late, maybe if we came earlier.’

Guilt, it eats away at this woman’s soul, feasting on her sadness, adding hardships to her hard days. We comfort her that it is clear they had done the best they can. We spend some time with the young girl introducing ourselves and she smiles back. We all leave feeling guilty, that we, too, came too late.

The backdrop to these experiences is beautiful scenery. We walk along green mountain and valleys, sometimes picking guavas off trees, and I feel like I am inside an encyclopedia of where food comes from. I always ask, ‘what is this one, or that one,’ pointing at anything green. It is hard to explain that we do not see how things grow when you buy everything in a supermarket. I wish we got to see more often all the lives that are touched by what we consume… perhaps it would make us more caring as consumer, more careful and also more generous. At times the scenery seems misaligned with the hardships we find, like someone forgot to change the set between shows, but mostly, I am thankful for this beauty, the rest it provides for the heart. I am thankful that courageous people live in such beauty.

At another house we sit under a tree with chickens running around. An old woman is discussing intensely with one of the volunteers. To her right, on a straw chair, sits a young woman with a disability who cannot talk and has difficult moving her arms. A small child stands next to her staring to the side. When my colleague turns to translate for me, I ask her not to. I already know, I was briefed before we got there, and hearing it again is too painful. The young woman was raped and no one knew about it until she showed signs of being pregnant. Now, the old grandmother is tired. She is old and she already spent her life caring for a child with a disability, and now, she does not want to take care of another child. Discussions continue intensely and I listen to bits of the translation – keep the child, give him to the father’s family, demand payment, involve local leaders. I phase in and out. I just look at that child. I heard once that to grow into healthy adults children need at least one person who thinks they are number one. Will this child have that? We try to interact with the young boy, but after 2 years of emotional neglect he is non-responsive. ‘The pathways responding to affection in the brain are not developed,’ explains a colleague of mine. Children who do not know how to respond to love. We advise about next steps – ‘best interest of the child’ and ‘local leader involvement’ and other terms – when we leave that house I actually cry, silently and without attracting attention; we’re supposed to be ‘strong’ in this line of work. I thank my parents for teaching me from a young age how to accept love.

I do this for 5 days and I feel exhausted, yet our volunteers face these issues all the time. I wonder how they manage, and in later visits, I understand they persevere because they can see they are making an impact.

‘I was afraid to get tested,’ tell us a woman in a dark green dress, ‘but my friend here, this one, he helped me. He encouraged me and even took me to the place and stayed with me to get my results. Now I am on treatment and I am ok. I am not afraid anymore.’

Another woman runs out of her house to meet us at the road and gives me a huge warm hug. ‘These people, these friends of mine,’ she points at the volunteers, ‘they found me dying at my house, but I did not know why. I did not want to know why. They took me for testing and now I receive treatment. They even come with food sometimes.’

Tense relationships between grandparents who want their retirement and children who want their childhood have been mended as volunteers counsel families to share the work. Malnourished kids who could not walk a few months ago are playing happily as families were advised about kitchen gardens and healthy food for children. Community members have come together to construct shelters for families whose roofs had fallen in on them, literally! People have found motivation to participate in organic agriculture and animal husbandry as volunteers remind them that each hard day in the sun will result in school fees, medical treatment, and new clothes. Children facing stigma because their clothes are worn out or their parents have died of AIDS have someone who cares, who comes once a week to give them strength to ‘ignore those silly kids and focus on how smart you are.’ Volunteers come with nothing but notebook and a smile and they leave behind so much hope and companionship.

Hope is the magic ingredient – the energy that keeps people going even in the toughest of circumstances because tomorrow could be better. Love, or friendship, provides the ability to endure because together we are so much stronger. Next time I do a program budget I’ll make sure to include tons of hope and loads of love along side seeds, goats, and piglets.

I have also gotten to visit partners in Eastern Uganda, another beautiful part of Uganda, and to visit Sipi Falls, which was great.

Back in Kampala, cherishing the feelings of enjoying a new place, Pierre and I continue to settle in. The kids on the street have learned out names. I am Imba and Pierre is Pia or Mpira (which he likes because it means football). After a week in Western Uganda, I was greeted to hugs and before I even got home, Carol, my favorite little kid, announced to the whole street, ‘Imba, Imba, Pia is not home now, but come. Madina, Madina, Imba is back.’ Walking around our neighborhood, we also found where everyone dumps their garbage, in a huge pit down the hill from our house, and discovered that it is a prime bird watching place. There are the giant Uganda storks, which are not the nice kind in kids books, but dinosaur looking giant birds that are always filthy. Then among the garbage, sparkling clean and beautiful, as if immune to the chaos, are Uganda crested cranes, a majestic bird with a yellow crown. This time of year is also grasshopper season, which is a delicacy to eat. On our street people have set a giant trap which consists of really bright lights, iron sheets leading into buckets. At night, it looks like someone left the sun turned on, with millions of grasshopper swarming around, and kids and birds competing with each other to catch the spoils.

Hope you are feeling well.

Thanks for being in my life

Inbal
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