Downs and Ups

I have not felt like blogging this time around. As Aimee has written, this trip is very different from our first. We have come back into a network of relationships and responsibilities, both old and new. We’ve come back with the understanding that we very likely will not be back this way for quite some time, and we are trying to utilize each moment for the work we’ve come to do. One of the first things we discovered when we arrived in Gulu was that the two brothers who we’ve been sponsoring in school since February are in very different situations. Fred, the younger boy, is in his first year of secondary school in a private, Catholic school. His campus is secluded and very green. There are only 130 boys there and they have (old) computers, functional science labs and, most importantly, a feeling of normalcy. Stephen, his older brother, is twenty years old. He dropped out of secondary school seven years ago when his Aunt could no longer afford the school fees. When we met Stephen, he was driving a matatu and trying to support Fred and his Aunt. He had a terrible stutter and he seemed, in many ways, traumatized. I think that for Stephen, just the pride of being in school and wearing a uniform has contributed to a major shift in his personality. His stutter is considerably less pronounced, he is smiling a lot, and he talks positively about his future. Unfortunately, the school that Charity for Peace placed him in is in ruins. It honestly looks like a burned out squatter flat. The school consists of a single administration building pushed back from a dirt road atop a small hill on the outskirts of town. If no one were in front of the building, you would honestly think it was abandoned. There is graffiti all over the face of the building and the windows are almost completely broken out. Next to this building is the boys dorm. When we went in, the smell was enough to knock a person down. Trash and dirt is piled in every corner of the living quarters. When the power is on, there is a single lightbulb on the ceiling to illuminate the room. All of the boys sleep on thin, foam mattresses on the floor. It is quite a sight. Fifty or sixty boys to a room, crammed together like sardines. Stephen had few clothes and just a thin sheet to keep warm. Despite the fact that he had been in school for six months, they had failed to provide him with the uniform that was supposed to be included in his fees. The weather now ranges from very hot in the midday to quite cool in the evenings and throughout the night. Stephen was complaining that he was quite cold. He also told us that he had yet to be shown his report card so he had no idea how he was progressing in his studies. When I went to speak to the headmaster, a man who seemed to be in his late twenties or so, he didn’t have a very good explanation for the uniform or the report card, but both miraculously appeared within a day or two. On the day that I came by to pick up a copy of the report card, the headmaster asked if I worked for an NGO. When I said no, he said he was sorry to hear it because he was going to ask me if there were any job openings in my company. Text books are only for those who can afford the 20,000 shilling cost per book, so hardly anyone has books. That’s not just at Stephen’s school. I have only seen one or two children in any of the schools I’ve been to who have even a single book. Fred, even though he was in a “good” school, had no mosquito netting on his bed. He had only two shirts, a pair of pants, and a pair of shorts that substituted as underwear… So sponsoring a child, we’ve discovered, requires a lot more than just writing a check and sending it to some charity. There has to be some follow-up. Now we are in the process of getting Stephen into a better school where we can be somewhat sure that he is not freezing on a cement floor each night. If we hadn’t come back, Stephen may have finished his schooling in this place and he would never have mentioned anything to us because, to him, it was a better situation than he had been in…

On a completely unrelated note, I was feeling quite homesick this week. I had been getting quite a bit accomplished last week. I was plowing through a lot of reading for N.Y.U. that I had fallen behind on during the year. I was preparing some abstracts for papers and conference proposals. And I had started working with the prisoners and Gulu prison on a theater piece. Things were moving along wonderfully, but then I came down with some terrible infection. I don’t know if it was viral or bacterial or what. A lot of the locals are convinced that it was malaria. Whatever it was, it threw me for a loop! I was truly down and out for about five days. High fever, vomiting, night sweats, headache, intense joint pain, the whole nine yards. Aimee was amazing. Despite all the intense weight she was carrying on her shoulders from her days at the hospital, she really nursed me back to health. I was so out of it, I wasn’t really aware of what was going on for her. Nevertheless, she was transporting back and forth to Gulu Independent hospital to get checked, to get medication, and then sitting with me at home until she was sure I was comfortable. So after a tough, long weekend, I am feeling much, much better. But ever since I got sick, my spirits have been really low. Actually, I’m feeling a bit like myself today. We’ll see if I can maintain through the day because for the last few days, I’ve been pretty low. Dreaming of the Atlantic Ocean, Brooklyn pizza, and Brian Lehrer (my favorite NPR host in New York). Missing my niece and nephew and my brothers and my parents and my cat (!) and feeling sorry for myself about all of it…

But then I woke up this morning and the sunrise was absolutely stunning. The air was clean and fresh and I felt a bit lighter. As I walked down the red-clay roads, I tried to see the scene with fresh eyes again. I tried to remind myself that it was pretty incredible that I was strolling down this road in Central Africa. It is incredible. Aimee and I don’t know when we’ll be back here. It may be many, many years. It may be never. I know I’ll have pizza again. And I’ll swim in the ocean in a few short weeks. But when will I see this African sunrise? And when will I live with a group of singing, dancing, drumming nuns? When will I be offered a steaming bowl of white ants again as an after-dinner treat? When will I have the chance to enter a Ugandan prison and do a bilingual theater workshop with 100 inmates? It may be a while. So I’m telling myself to stop bitching and start rediscovering these landscapes. When we left in January, we said that it had been a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Well, now it’s been twice-in-a-lifetime and I don’t want to take it for granted. I still look forward to coming home in a few weeks. I really do miss everyone, and I can’t wait to get a slice and some chocolate ice cream. But it will keep. For now, we are here and I want to soak it in because I don’t know if I’ll pass this way again.

More to come…