"Work"

I think it's probably time to let everyone know about the "work" that I've been doing here. And about the work that I've been doing here.

I'm calling it "work" because, so far, it's been a little hard to come by, and work -- actually doing things where I feel useful and busy -- has been a lot less common than "work" -- where I do useless and frustrating things like going out into the community with my counterpart when she asks me to present some information on some topic like reproductive health or early childhood development which she will then translate, which then ends up meaning that I talk for a couple minutes, stop to let her translate, and she talks for twenty or thirty minutes about I have no idea what.

But, in the last couple weeks, I've started to have slightly more work and slightly less "work".

A while ago, I wrote about how I was going to be doing some work with another community-based organization (CBO) in the district. They had some people who were acting as home-based counselors for people living with HIV/AIDS (or PLWHA, as the acronym goes here), but who'd never actually been trained on what it meant to act as a home-based counselor for PLWHA. So I was going to train them, using only my bare hands, the little bit of knowledge that I have, and a lot of notes from a lot of different books and manuals. I was excited. It was going to be work, not "work", and it was going to keep me busy for a while, and, also, had the potential to turn into a lot of other things -- HIV support groups that I could meet with to talk about income-generating activities (IGAs) or village savings and loans associations (VSLAs) or planting a simple garden to grow some food that is more nutritious than cassava. Work! Exciting!

And then I got back from IST in January, all ready to start doing some work. I called Okello Moses, the director of the CBO when I got back, and we set up a time to have a meeting to discuss the training. We met one day when he came to meet me at the office of the organization I'm placed with (Vision Teso Rural Development Organization, or Vision TERDUO, because acronyms, or VT, if you want an acronym inside another acronym), and then we went to the office of his CBO. There I met with him and a couple of the guys who were acting as the counselors. We talked about what they were doing now, what they felt like they needed training on, and what they felt like the needs of PLWHA in the community were. Moses said they were going to mobilize resources (NGO-speak for getting money) for the training and then we could set a date and get going. So it all went really well, and I was, again, excited.

About a week later, I still hadn't heard from Moses, so I gave him a call: Moses, how are you, blah blah blah, let's set a date for the training, let's do this thing. Yes, ok, he said, but there's been a problem. And he asked if anyone at my organization had talked to me. They hadn't. I asked why. And then Moses went on to tell me that after we had met that first time, my supervisor (at VT, not the Peace Corps) and the executive director of our organization had called Moses into the ED's office, and proceeded basically to verbally harass him, asking him what he thought he was doing working with me, why he thought he could just come in here and work with me, and on and on, to the point where they were, Moses told me, threatening him and his organization if he continued to try to work with me. And so, Moses said, thanks for the offer, but no thanks.

Needless to say, 1: my organization had not mentioned this to me, despite the fact that I had told everyone that I would be doing this training, despite the fact that I had told everyone that I was working on material for this training since that meeting, despite the fact that my counterpart and supervisor were both at Peace Corps trainings where the topic of secondary projects -- projects that PCVs do outside of their organization, projects that PCVs do with other organizations or community groups in the area, projects that PCVs are strongly encouraged, almost required to do -- was brought up more than once or twice, and 2: I was pissed. It was early afternoon when I called Moses, and I was at the office, and I hung up the phone, thought, Expletive, expletive, expletive, picked up my things, went home so that I wouldn't tell my supervisor and counterpart and the ED what I really wanted to tell them, and called another PCV friend to rant.

Because not only had my organization ruined what was, really, the only work I had so far lined up, and taken away an opportunity for PLWHA in the community to (hopefully) improve their quality of life, but they also hadn't, themselves, given me any work to do; they had only given me "work."

So the next week, I sat down with my supervisor and counterpart and we talked about secondary projects. I said, PCVs are placed with an organization, but they don't belong to that organization, blah blah blah, our responsibility is ultimately with the community we're placed in and the Peace Corps, blah blah blah, secondary projects, blah blah blah. They said, ok. And I said, I'm going to do a training with another CBO. And they said, ok.

So I called Moses back: Moses, how are you, blah blah blah, I've talked to the people here, and I'm sorry for what happened, but, in reality, I'm a Peace Corps volunteer, and not a Vision TERUDO volunteer, and I'm supposed to work in the community, not just in the organization, blah blah blah, so let's set that date, let's do this thing. And Moses said, again, Thanks, but no thanks.

And that was that. No more work. Back to it only being "work".

So then, a week or two ago, after numerous other organization-related frustrations, and wondering if it was, in the long run, going to work out with VT or if I'd have to try and change organizations, wondering who else VT had told not to work with me and wondering how that was making me look in the community, and talking about the whole situation with my program coordinator at the Peace Corps office, I sat down, again, with my counterpart and supervisor to talk about work versus "work".

I said, I feel like I haven't been given any real work, blah blah blah, the project that the health program is working on is totally covered and doesn't need my help, blah blah blah, I want responsibility, and work, and things that I can be in charge of on my own, and I think what I'm going to do is make a couple project designs, things that I can be in charge of and responsible for, that can still be done under the auspices of VT since you don't want me out of your site ever, not even for a minute, and then we can go over them together and see where we can go from there. They said, ok. (They also said that when they first found out they'd be getting a PCV, they thought that their PCV, AKA me, would be writing grant proposals and mobilizing resources, which, like I said, means getting money, to which I said, Yeah, no. But that could be an entirely different rant than this one, and I'm kinda on a roll here.)

Then my supervisor said, Aren't you doing that training with that other CBO? And I said, Ha.. ha.. yeah, about that.. That's.. um.. not going to be happening, because now he's.. um.. refusing to work with me, because.. well.. someone here told him that he wasn't allowed to. And I stopped there and looked at them, and they didn't look at me, and they didn't react at all. So I guess that's that.

And, so, here we are.

All in all, despite all that, I feel pretty good about where things are right now, and where they could, if VT doesn't try to take everything over and destroy it all, go from here. I'm working on a couple project designs -- the same training for HIV counselors, so that I can get them the information even if their CBO doesn't want to work directly with me; and a peer educator program for a secondary school in town, where a select group of students will be trained to basically be available for questions and issues the other students in the school have, about HIV or social issues or pregnancy or peer pressure or whatever, and also lead some sessions on all that stuff at all-school assemblies, and all that good stuff; and the one project that I most want to do, which I'm not ready to share with my organization yet, until I can be sure that they're going to let me do things how I want to do things, which is a soccer league for boys, probably ten to fifteen years old, who aren't in school, where the league will run, over the course of ten to twelve weeks, in a tournament style, while also incorporating life-skills sessions.

And so I've given these work-plans, or project designs, to my counterpart and supervisor to review, and we should be able to meet at the end of the week, or the beginning of next week to discuss details and hopefully get started.

So I feel good.

Other than that, on the work side of the "work"-work divide, I've started an after-school Life-Skills Club at a secondary school in town. And, so far, it's been awesome.

The school, called Light College, is not a college, is small, about 120 students total, spread across four grades, Senior 1 through Senior 4 -- basically like high school in the States, S1 being Freshmen. It's one building, rough, unfinished brick walls and a tin roof, one classroom for each grade, students dressed in blue pants or skirts and white button-down shirts cramming into desks that are one wooden slab for sitting on attached to another wooden slab for writing on, the teachers dictating lessons with the use of cracking blackboards that never really seem to get clean and caning students with a long wooden switch when the students -- actually I don't know why; there's no reason for that.

There are about 35 students in the club, some from each grade, and I love them. Silent at first, they had trouble understanding my English either because of the accent or because I was talking to fast and were simply not used to participating in class or being asked to ask questions or speak out or do anything besides copy notes from the board, now they're energetic, charismatic, funny, engaged, intelligent, and eager to learn. This is the first term of the school year (though it's ending this week), so I'm looking forward to meeting with the kids in the club once a week, each term after this.

The Life-Skills Program is used by PCVs worldwide, and the PC has a great manual with lessons and topics, warm-ups and games to play. Life-skills are basically, how should I put this, skills that you use in life. Some of the skills you use in life, anyway. Minus basic karate skills or speed-boat driving skills, the life-skills we're working on are along the lines of self-esteem building, communication skills, responding to peer pressure, assertiveness vs aggressiveness vs passiveness, decision-making skills, along with more informational sessions on things like the facts and myths of HIV/AIDS, and sessions that open debates and new lines of thought on issues like gender roles.

So the first week of the Life-Skills Club was a little rough. I think the students had a really hard time understanding me, we weren't doing the most exciting things -- we just reviewed the basics; set up some club rules like being respectful, giving me the Time-Out signal (hands in a T-shape) when they can't understand me, and so on; voted on peer educators, six students that would help me out by leading small groups and helping to lead sessions as well as being available for questions from other students; and intoduced the Question Box, where they could drop questions, written down, that they didn't feel comfortable asking in front of the whole group -- and so it wasn't the most fun forty minutes any of us had spent.

The next week, worried that they'd be worried that every week would be like the first one, I decided not to do anything relating to learning or sitting in their desks where they'd been sitting all day, so we just played games. We did creative thinking games, we jumped around, we made an African version of Simon Says. They all laughed, tried to think and approach things with different perspectives (something they're never asked to do in school), jumped, had a lot of fun, and I did too. And they talked more and started to open up more and, I think, realized that it wasn't just going to be me lecturing at them every week, because I don't want to do that either.

The week after that, they split into small groups, led by my awesome peer educators, to prepare role plays that they'd perform the following week. They were to make a short drama about a risk situation that young people might typically face, where the characters in the drama engaged in the risk behavior because they were missing some of those important life-skills. I didn't give them examples of risk situations or behaviors, because I wanted them to have to be creative and didn't want each group to end up doing the same thing, and, when they performed the role plays the next week, they were creative, they didn't all do the same thing, they had assigned roles, memorized lines, brought their own props, and practiced during the week.

We had fifteen year-old girls getting pregnant, people getting HIV after having unprotected sex, everyone seemed to be stealing school fees from their parents and skipping school to go drink instead, someone got run over by a car for some reason, someone brought a flat-brimmed, fitted baseball cap with the hologram sticker on it that was worn by the "bad" boys in the dramas. But each role play was funny and insightful and creative, and the kids were really excited to do them. And I was excited about it too.

The best part, so far, is that they've started asking questions too, and they seem like they've started to feel like they can use me as a resource for those questions. And their questions have been direct, topical, frank, and bold. One boy asked, in a country where you can be stoned to death for being rumored to be gay, "These Europeans who are practicing homosexuality -- is that a good thing or a bad thing?" And so I told him what I thought and that it was a really good question, because it was. And then he followed it up with, "So if I'm infected [with HIV] and I take this boy as my sexual partner, will he also get the disease?" And so I explained the four fluids that transmit HIV and how they can transmit the virus between two men too, not just between a man and a woman, and I told him that it was a really good question, because it was. And someone else told me that they have a friend, a boy, who has a girlfriend who is pressuring him into having sex with her though he doesn't want to, he's still in school, he wants to finish, but he does love her (apparently, in the way that 15 year-old kids can love each other), and her family is rich and his is poor, so she's buying him things and keeps pressuring him, and so my student told his friend that he would ask me what my advice was on what he should say to her to get her to stop pressuring him. And so I told him what I thought and that it was a really good question, because it was, and I told them all that I'd always be available for more. (And I will be, I want to be that resource, because they will have more questions -- the Question Box, before it was stolen by some little kids who climbed in through the windows over one weekend, was full of questions, which will, hopefully, be put into the new Question Box, which will, hopefully, not be stolen.)

And so, when I'd gone to the last couple meetings feeling a little unenthusiastic, a little tired, or a little distracted, within a couple minutes of being there I was happy, energized by their enthusiasm, and I'd forgotten about the things that were distracting me before.

I felt useful, like I was doing even the smallest bit of something good, and I was happy to be doing that work, the kind with no quotation marks around it.

Like 2Pac Says

Ch-ch-changes.

I finished reading two books this week. The first was about the Iteso, "my" tribe here, appropriately called The Iteso, written by a British guy in the early 1950s (not the most objective viewpoint ever, but surprisingly not super racist) before Uganda gained independence, chronicling the changes that had happened in the fifty years of British occupation (or, well, he calls it British administration; I call it British occupation, the limey bastards). The second was called Beyond the Sky and the Earth, written by a girl, basically a Canadian version of a Peace Corps volunteer (aw, Canada -- adorable), posted for three years as a teacher in Bhutan in the late 1980s.

Both of these ended up being reminders that things change, most things change, and drastically, but some things don't change, and some things never will.

In The Iteso, it had pictures, old black-and-white photographs taken in the late 1940s, early 1950s, of typical life in Teso -- cattle herding, goat herding, sifting through millet, drinking ajon through long straws. And all of these pictures could have been taken by me, yesterday, then converted into black-and-white on my computer. The cows looked the same, with the same young man herding them with the same long papyrus cane, the mud huts looked the same, the bicycles looked the same as the bicycle I bought last week, the same men were sitting around the same pot of ajon in the same wooden folding chairs drinking out of the same straws wearing the same checkered, plaid, or solid-colored button-down shirts with the same haircuts and the same woman pouring more fermented millet into the pot. The only difference was that the men in the pictures were wearing shorts (a novel idea, considering it gets up to around eleventy-billion degrees here), while, these days, if you wear shorts, you're a primary school boy. And today, that cowherd would have a cell phone and would herd the cows across a road, dodging taxis and motorbikes, and sometimes you drink ajon out of a jerrycan instead of a clay pot and talk about the latest developments in world news seen on Al-Jazeera or CNN World. Things change, things don't.

And in Beyond the Sky and the Earth, it was funny -- interesting funny, sometimes ha-ha funny -- reading the observations of a pseudo-PCV posted thousands of miles from here, twenty-plus years ago, and seeing how many of those observations can be applied directly, without translation from Asia to Africa, the '80s to the '10s (?), Sarchhop to Ateso, to my life here in Ngora. Like feeling out of place, a foreigner, and feeling right at home, judging tourists; embracing and struggling with cultural differences -- embracing the pace of life, the "simplicity", struggling with the drunk man groping the teenage girl, the skewed gender gap, the canings in school; learning the language; despairing and not despairing, or understanding, the Westernization; trying to get students to talk -- and both me and the author of the book writing TALK on the board in class, getting laughs from the students who then fell back into silence; thinking about going home, not wanting to go home, not yet, and then wanting to go home, right now; and being miserable and as happy as you've ever been. And though I don't have to wait nine months for a package, only two (!), and letters aren't my only correspondence home, and Uganda is not Bhutan and Bhutan is not Uganda, it's still kinda the same. Things change, things don't.

2Pac says so, anyway.

And, so, from Beyond the Sky and the Earth:

I say that lives in the villages might be hard and short, but the people seem genuinely content with what they have, and this is a function of their faith, which recognizes that desire for material wealth and personal gain leads to suffering. Dini says that they are content with what they have because what they have is all they know. How deep do you think those values go? she asks. Their lifestyle is not a matter of choice but a function of the environment. If they could have cars and refrigerators and VCRs, they would. Let the global market in here with all its shiny offerings, she says, and see how fast everything changes.

And:

I am aware of two possible versions: I can see either the postcard (Lost World Series, Rural Landscape No. 5), or I can see a family bent over the earth in aching, backbreaking labor, the ghosts of two children dead from some easily preventable disease, and not enough money for all the surviving children to buy the shoes and uniforms required for school. It is too easy to romanticize. The landscape cannot answer back, cannot say, no you are wrong, life here is different but if you add everything up, it is not any better. You can love this landscape because your life does not depend on it. It is merely a scenic backdrop for the other life you will always be able to return to, a life in which you will not be a farmer scraping a life out of difficult terrain.

Things change, things don't. And it's not bad or good -- no, that's not true, it's bad and good, but mostly it just is.

Mob Justice, Boreholes, and (No) Revolutions

These things happened:

Iganga is a highway town on the main road that goes east from Kampala to Mbale. It's hot, dusty, vibrating with passing vehicles. I was there recently, and I was in a second-floor cafe. I walked out, to get some fresh air, to pass a minute or two, to look for other PCVs who were outside somewhere, onto the balcony overlooking the highway where lorries roared past, matatus stopped to let passengers out and started again once they'd packed passengers back in, where construction of a new building going on across the street included a six-man brick-tossing assembly-line where the bricks went from being part of a giant pile through twelve hands to being part of a rising wall, and where general pedestrian traffic milled about, moving back and forth, walking with a purpose or standing about chatting with nothing better to do. And then I noticed, on the opposite side of the street, a stream of people running down the sidewalk to my left, which turned, quickly, into a river of people, and then I heard their voices, angry, shouting, rise on the current up to where I was. I turned to the person standing next to me on the balcony and asked what was going on.

"Somebody has stolen something."

I knew what this meant. I knew what this crowd was coming to see and do. But it still took me a minute to find the man in the middle of the mob. When I found him, though, he was unmistakable. His shirt, ripped open in the front, down to his belly, was stained bright red at the collar and shoulders from the blood that was pouring from his head. He tried to fend off the crowd that advanced towards him menacingly, that had already gotten to him and surrounded him. He covered his head when another man stepped forward and landed punches on his skull and his arms raised for protection. He bounced off the grill of a lorry as he was shoved back against it. And then a man to his left, behind his field of vision, bent down then raised back up with a red clay brick in hand and launched it, from two feet away, like a bowler in cricket, against the thief's head, and he collapsed briefly from the impact, the collision of stone and skull enough to make me wince from a couple hundred feet away, then sprung back up, quicker than expected, quicker than I expected anyway, and then I saw, on the far side of the crowd, from the entrance of a supermarket, a security guard, armed, as they always are, with an old bolt-action rifle, start to push his way through the crowd, and I covered my mouth, but for some reason not my eyes, as I assumed the bolt action rifle was about to be put to use, the thief was about to go from having blood on his shoulders to having blood pouring from a bullet hole in his head, until, somehow, in the commotion caused by the rifle, caused by the gun making its way through the crowd, because it was the gun making its way through the crowd, really, not the security guard, the thief was able to push his way out of the ring of people surrounding him and run, stumbling, bleeding, down the street and around the corner and out of my view and five or six men gave chase but the rifle didn't, the security guard didn't, and I told myself he made it away alive, deservedly so, even though he's a criminal, even though, according to someone else watching from the balcony, this was his third time being caught stealing, and I went back inside and the other PCVs I was with came back inside and I was glad I didn't see him get shot or beaten to death and we all talked about it for a couple minutes, some of them were down there, street-level, while it happened, and then we moved on to better things, better topics, because that happens here, mob justice happens here, and what's the point of dwelling on it?



Right now, middle of March, we're moving from the dry season into the rainy season. It's still hot, at least for me, who's hot when it gets above 80 in Seattle, but it's started to rain a bit at night, clouds have started to gather during the day, the winds have started to blow cool instead of hot and dry (but they're still usually filled with dust). But, maybe a month ago, middle of February, heart of the dry season still, the water in the tap that I have fifteen feet from my door ran out. It ran out one night and, since I didn't notice until it was already almost 9:00, or since I'm lazy, I waited. I didn't bathe the night it ran out. I didn't wash my dishes. I hoped it would come back in the morning. It didn't. I hoped it would come back in the evening when I came home. It didn't. So, dirty dishes piled up in the basin, my entire body filmy with dried sweat covered in fresh sweat, I needed water. And that meant, without the tap, going to the borehole.

It's not that I didn't want to go to the borehole. I was kind of looking forward to it. It'd be a good experience. It was just that there was one thing: jerrycans are heavy. But, whatever. I'm fit. I'm young. I'm healthy. And Ugandan women carry full jerrycans on their heads.

But.

I'm not a Ugandan woman. And, apparently, I'm not as fit as I think I am. (Although I calculated later, in an attempt to make myself feel better, that a full jerrycan, 20 litres of water, weighs about 44 pounds, and I have two, to carry at the same time, and they're unwieldy, I swear they're heavier than they sound. Oh, and the borehole is an entire kilometre away. I don't know how many miles that is -- because America! -- but when you're carrying 88 pounds of water, it feels like about twelve.)

To get to the borehole, I walked that kilometre through the centre of town, at sunset because otherwise it was just too hot, bright yellow jerrycans in hand, and extra stares passed through town with me, and I walked up to the borehole, big stupid grin on my face, anticipating how silly everyone would think that this was, white guy needing water. I greeted the crowd, maybe forty-strong, as I walked up -- "Yoga kere!" -- and set my jerrycans down at the end of the queue. I was determined not to be the imusugun who walked up to the borehole, skipped the queue, got his water, and walked away.

With my jerrycans in place, end of the queue, I stood and watched the whole process -- people towards the end of the queue, like me, milling about, pacing back and forth, chatting with each other, as they waited for their jerrycans and buckets to inch closer to the flow of water; people taking turns pumping water or making fun of the person pumping water or telling someone else to pump water, the water spurting out in bursts then flowing smoothly, funneled through the inverted, cut-off, top-half of a plastic water bottle into jerrycans, buckets, canteens, plastic bottles; people fighting forward through the crowd to get just a bottle, just really quickly, or just this little bucket, it'll just take a second; the two street kids crouched at the small gutter, trying to scoop up the runoff water that was quickly soaking into the mud; everything, slightly chaotic as it seemed, somehow in order, and there was, in fact, someone in charge -- for maybe ten or fifteen minutes.

So far, so good, on not being that white guy.
Then this exchange happened, when a older man came up to where I was standing slightly outside the main crowd circling the borehole, looking slightly amused at everything.

Him: "Good evening."
Me: "Good evening. How are you?"
Him: "I'm fine. How long have you been here?"
My thought process: Oh, he wants to know how long I've been in Uganda. I get this question all the time.
My answer, somewhat proudly: "I've been here for six months."
His thought process: You, sir, are an idiot.
His answer, somewhat slowly, like he was talking to a child: "I meant... at the borehole..."
Me: "Right."

And then he didn't wait for an actual answer to his question, he just grabbed my jerrycans and waded through the crowd, to the front of the queue, leaving me there, protesting to his back, "Wait-- but-- everyone else is-- I can--" and then I was that white guy.

And being that white guy led to a chain of reactions from the crowd: "We are all in line here!" which led to "But we are assisting this stranger!" which led to "He is not a stranger, he is a friend of ours!" which, the mouth of my first jerrycan now under the spout, led to -- directed at me, don't just stand there -- "You pump your water!" which led to -- directed at me, after my pumping the water wasn't much better than my just standing there -- "More effort is needed!" which led to -- directed at me, from myself in my head -- "My arms are so tired this first jerrycan isn't even full yet how am I going to carry these home I'm so weak this is terrible!" which was understood by the kid standing behind me who took over pumping, much to my relief.

Two jerrycans full -- "Eyalama noi!" -- I picked them up to walk the twelve miles back through town. As I picked them up, a jerrycan in each hand, I thought, These aren't so heavy. I've totally got this. Then I took about seven steps, and I thought, Ohhhhhhh thesearesoheavy Idon'ttotallygotthisnotatall. But, somehow, I made it. I mean, I made it about a quarter of the way home before I ran into Julius, a member of one of the Village Health Teams outside of town, who had his bicycle, and we talked for a couple minutes, and I can't tell you what we said, because I was concentrating all of my mental powers on willing him to put my jerrycans on the rack on his bicycle and take them home for me.

And he did. Probably less because of my mental powers and more because he's just a really nice guy, but still. Thank you, Julius. Eyalama noi.

And then I bathed for the first time in way longer than is appropriate.



These things did not happen:

Rioting.
Unrest.
Mass demonstrations.
Revolutions.
Anything, due to the election results.



And more stories to come sooner rather than later, promise!