My Acholi name is Lamaro.

It means "lovely person," and was given to me by a woman in the village of Lurutu in Gulu district. I ground millet and cassava flour with her and watched with a disbelieving ache in my heart as she filled jerrycans with milky water from her kulu, her well. It was a shallow hole in the ground with bugs floating around the edges.

I return to Jinja and hear stories of alcoholism and child beatings. I don't go out alone at night for fear of thieves and try not to get overcharged at the market for my eggplant. The women I visit cannot afford to pay their children's school fees, yet they hurry to serve me heaping portions of the little food they have. 

This love, this "hope that doesn't make sense;" is it here, in this place of poverty and all-too-real thirst for money? I naively expected to come here and be enlightened, to find that the people here were somehow better than I was, that poverty had given them the secret to living a content and happy life with few material possessions. What I have found is that they are human. They, too, have wants and needs and flaws and beautiful strength.

Perhaps I am here not to be enlightened by the absence of flaws, by the idea that owning less means you crave for less. Neither am I here to have my ideology crushed by the obvious existence of these flaws, the same human failures I thought I would leave behind in my luxurious, opulent America. I am beginning to think that I am here to recognize the flaws, struggle with them, and search for the love and hope that I believe still exists in such a reality.