Uganda is a place of unavoidable reality.

You open your eyes to a blue mosquito net above your head. Light falls in the screened and barred windows along with gregarious rooster fanfare and insistent school bell clanging. Your dreams have woken you up into a new reality: Uganda, a place where the specters of war and development hover, where a pale skin can result in getting cheated or being served a feast – neither of which you actually deserve. An in-between place.

Rolling your yawning mind out of bed, you light the gas stove and put water on for tea before you head to the bathroom. African tea, which is black tea boiled with ginger and milk and a touch of sweetness, is your new favorite way to start the morning. As you decide between a mango and fried eggs or banana with granola from home, you hear wailing from the backyard: Kymbi is awake, and his mother Betty – also the housekeeper, and an incredible woman – tries to quiet her stubborn toddler by cajoling or disciplining, or both. She needs him to eat his porridge before she can head off to catering school, which goes until midday, when she comes home to begin cleaning the house and doing laundry. She and Kymbi and her younger cousin Sharon live in what is commonly called the “boy’s quarters” in the backyard: four small rooms with a toilet and running water, all cement floors and walls.

You choose a banana with some comforting granola and slice and pour into a bowl. A black cat, all meows and green eyes, slips past you into the kitchen when you throw your banana peel into the compost bucket outside, then settles into your lap as soon as you begin to eat. His name is Maxwell Elvis – you have nicknamed him Melvis – and when he realizes that he is not interested in your tea or granola bowl, he curls up on your legs with a satisfied purr. Sometimes you journal or take notes for your internship as you eat, but this morning you decide to read. The books you have read so far this summer have been stupendous, with the sort of wisdom that is powerful because you happened to read it at the right time: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott, and The Way of the Heart by Henri Nouwen. You have just begun The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and you have been entranced since the first sentence. Munching contentedly, your mind takes a deep breath and dives into her language. It surfaces briefly to say good morning to Joe, then Melissa, as they emerge from their bedroom a little sleepy eyed to begin their day with tea and hardboiled eggs or leftovers. They are about your age, recently married, and the directors of the Suubi and EPOH projects here in Jinja. Your schedule is very different from their busy one, but you usually get to connect in the morning and relax a little with them at night, sometimes with TV shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm or Gilmore Girls or the Harry Potter movies.

The banana, granola, and tea disappear as quickly as the time while The Poisonwood Bible paints pictures in your imagination. Before you know it, the morning is passing and you need to start walking to the village. You double-check that all of your essentials are in your bag: Klean Kanteen (why they couldn’t spell the name with c’s, not k’s, you don’t know), Ugandan cell phone, coin purse with 100 shilling coins up to 20,000 shilling notes, digital camera, and your trusty notebook and ballpoint pen. Dressed in a culturally modest skirt and shod in Chacos, you call goodbye to Joe and Melissa and head out the door, across the well-trimmed lawn, past the mango tree with its tire swing and the underwear drying on the line, and through the door in the big blue iron gate that is in the compound wall.

It is partly cloudy today. The impossibly big, flauntingly fluffy white clouds are playing tug-of-war with the sun. It looks like the sun is winning, and the forty minute walk to Danida – one of the villages outside Jinja – will soon be quite warm. You could take a boda boda, but you would rather save the 25 cents it would cost to have a guy on a motorcycle shuttle you around; besides, you like to walk. Except when the boda drivers pester you to get a ride from them, which has just happened. He was driving past you when he slowed down and said, “Yes? We go?” Trying not to be impatient, you shake your head no. There are varying degrees of politeness, ranging from being called madame to getting kissing noises accompanied by “Muzungu, we go!” Your standard response is either shaking your head or simply ignoring them, though the extra attention you get comes in handy when you actually need a ride.

You take a breath, shrug off the intrusion, and continue walking: down Magwa Crescent and past a girls’ school, a particularly eye-catching lime green gate, and more boda drivers, left onto the street that connects to Main Street and also leads to Sun Rise bread factory, left again onto the end of busy Main Street with even more boda drivers and lots of busy people, crossing on a corner of rushing bus, bike, boda, and car traffic, and finally onto dusty Tobacco Road, which leads to the villages of Walukuba, Danida, and Babu. Watching vehicles avoid the myriad of potholes – boda bodas are deft and fluid, matatu vans and trucks slow and cumbersome – you breathe in the yeasty comfort of Tip Top bread factory, on the corner of where you turn once more to properly enter the villages.

The sun is now triumphantly beginning to melt your skin, but you barely notice the natural perspiration that once mortified you. Women in skirts and tee shirts, or in the traditional silken, big-sleeved gomesi invented by the British, smile shyly and greet you as you pass each other. Men greet you as well, though the “How are you?” is often accompanied by what feels like a smug leer. The houses, if you can call them that, are cement blocks with corrugated tin roofs and two or three families, each family living in a space smaller than the size of your living room. From around the corner of one of these red-dusty rectangles comes the now familiar singsong cry of “Muzungu! Muzungu! How are you?” A small gang of ragamuffin children in tattered clothes appears, some boldly approaching you to briefly grasp your hand, others balking and waving from a distance. The bolder ones follow you for a few moments, while the wavers are satisfied with yelling, “Muzungu, by-ee!” before scampering back to their mothers.

Since Danida is the farthest village from town, you pass by many of the homes of Suubi women and their families on your way through Walukuba. First is Janet on your right, who makes delicious groundnut sauce (like peanut butter). The next row houses a very pregnant Annette with her solemn-eyed young boy, and a garden away from her is Christine, whose exuberant girls danced and played hand games with you during your last visit while little Andrew looked on. A chorus of “Muzungu, by-ee!” is flung at you from the yellow-uniformed kids at the Elim Church nursery school, beyond which lies the small community of Babu. There, Agnes lives with her youngest, Stephen, who always offers to carry my bag for me. Near her is Getu, a sprightly older woman who supports six children by herself and whose energy and humor reminds you of a young-at-heart grandmother. They are close friends with Grace and Bosco Jennifer, who is a shy twenty-one-year-old mother of three, as well as Joyce and Esther, sisters who are sure to serve hardboiled eggs when you drop by to visit. Edith also lives in Babu, next to Elim Church, and is quiet in public but quite friendly in her home.

You continue past a secondary school on your left and a large field of maize, sugarcane, cassava (a potato-like root), and sweet potato on your right, bringing ecstatic grins to children’s faces just by waving at them. After the field are more rows of houses, newer and a little nicer and some even with electricity. Suubi women live there as well, Betty and Caroline and Prisca and Emily and Josephine and another Christine, but today your destination is in Danida. You follow the red dirt road as relative wealth merges into more fields, which run into the determined homes of some of the starkest faces of poverty in the area.

Here, some of the buildings are distinguishable from the road only because their surfaces are vertical and smoother; they are made from the same murram dirt as the roads and are the same terracotta-rust hue. You run one more gauntlet of boda drivers at the first of the rusty earth homes, next to a tree with tires hanging from it where men fix their bikes. 

The calm, gorgeous blue water of Lake Victoria mingles with the sky in the distance – Danida has the best view of the lake in the villages – but you lower your gaze from the horizon, and the view is distinctly less picturesque. Gone are the front lawns and whitewashed walls of the nicer parts of Walukuba; the red murram dirt so common in Uganda stretches from the front door across the street to the front door opposite, and exposed brick walls show no attempt at whiteness. Children in dirty almost-rags or nothing at all greet you with smiles or wary stares, before continuing to play with sticks and homemade Chinese jump ropes. Besides the boda drivers, there are few men in sight. Most of them go into Jinja Town or even to Kampala for jobs during the day. Women are everywhere, though: bent double sweeping their dirt front yard or scrubbing clothes in plastic washbasins, taking care of their children, tending to their charcoal-cooked meals, or buying small necessities from one of the tiny roadside shacks that are as much a part of the landscape as murram. 

You are just passing one of these ramshackle kiosks when you hear a smile at your shoulder and turn to find Jasnida greeting you. She looks “smart,” as people here say when someone is well dressed, in a moss green satin fitted shirt and long skirt, her hair pulled back in small plaits that end in curls. You say hello and exchange the routine greetings of “How are you?” “How is your place?” and “How is your day?” as you hold hands on the way to her house. You had arranged to spend time with her today, so it is a little startling when she drops you off outside of Joyce’s house instead. The two women are neighbors and good friends, and it makes sense when you realize that Jasnida seems to have a few chores to do at the moment. So, you settle into a small wooden chair across from Joyce’s welcoming, dimpled face.

Joyce is a down-to-earth young mother of four, one of whom is not in school yet and is currently washing himself sloppily in a plastic tub. Near him is a tarp with charcoal mounded on top and a bucket for measuring. Joyce sells the charcoal for someone and gets to keep some profit for herself. That small amount of money, along with the little she makes reselling produce outside her front door and the weekly income of Suubi money, is all she has to live off of. Her rent just doubled, she tells you, and she’s not sure how she will be able to afford having all of her children in school, especially when they get to the secondary levels. You find out that her husband does have a job, but that when he does get money he likes to spend it drinking with “other women he likes.” Some of her friends have encouraged her to report him to the police and put him in jail, but she is afraid of the repercussions with his family in their home village. She opens the customary bottle of soda for you, and you sip it as the strong woman next to you unravels more of her story: She and her husband moved to Jinja five years ago because of rebel violence in their district of Pader. Three of her siblings were killed by the rebels and two of her sisters widowed, but she has family still farming in Pader and land that is hers to cultivate if she returns. She has no garden of her own in Jinja, and she’s considering returning to Pader with her children because she can make enough money sweating in her fields to put them through school. When you ask her if she would leave her husband here, she nods.

Though you drank your Coke slowly, it is reluctantly empty and your pen has run out of ink after jotting down a few notes about this Acholi who is determined to care for her children despite everything. As her story settles in your mind, leaving echoes of admiration and awe hanging like clouds of dust, you remember with a start that you were supposed to be visiting Jasnida, who is now nowhere to be seen. You ask Joyce if Jasnida is at home and she says yes, do you want to go see her? You nod and when Joyce smiles you wonder if she is secretly relieved because she said she needed to go to the market to buy more produce to sell. It is always hard to tell if Suubi women are ever annoyed at having you disrupt their day with your visit, but you usually decide to believe that their smiles are genuine.

After a goodbye handshake with dimpled Joyce, you walk around her house, past some beautiful, freshly varnished Suubi beads hanging to dry on a clothesline, and up to Jasnida’s front door. She and her teenage brother, Jerry, hasten to welcome me in past her dirt-floored cooking area to her dark sitting room. The only window collects a small amount of sunlight, which filters through the curtain that separates her family’s one bed from the doily-covered couches where she receives guests. In the same breath, she apologizes for the darkness and asks you why you are so quiet. You smile, caught off guard, and begin to scramble for bits of conversation. She soon puts you at ease, for though she speaks softly, Jasnida is eager to talk and curious about your opinion on food, farming, family planning, politics, language, poverty, and money, among other things. What ensues is a pleasant afternoon whiled away in the exchange of different realities over the gulf that hangs between the two of you in shadow-cloaked furniture.

“We are age-mates!” Jasnida exclaims with a smile when you realize that you are both twenty-one. Besides the year you were born, however, there is not much more you have in common. Jasnida was going to school, learning French and English in her village near the Congolese border, when violence forced her to flee to Jinja to live with a relative when she was fifteen. When you were excited about being old enough to vote and buy lottery tickets, she was married and giving birth to her oldest, a stubbornly friendly toddler named Swen. While you are preparing to finish your last year in university, she spends her days in her home, washing, cooking, making beads, and looking forward to the weekend, when her husband comes home from his construction job in Kampala. He doesn’t always bring money, and many Saturdays she takes the meager payment for her necklaces straight to the market, to pay off the credit she accumulated during the week. She fears being told to leave her home because she cannot pay the rent. If she had enough money – if she could pay for rent and food and school fees for her children – she would finish her education and go to nursing school. As it is, the varnished strands of beads gleaming in the muted light represent her children’s health and ability to learn. Without Suubi, she says, they would not survive.

One Mirinda, which tastes like a cross between grape soda and root beer, two muffins, biscuits, and a heaping plate of matoke (a type of banana that is cooked first and is similar in taste to a potato) later, you say farewell and leave. Your stomach is full to bursting, and so is your mind. Stepping back out into the bright Ugandan day, you try to breathe easier but have a hard time shaking off the weight of your affluence in such stark comparison to the Joyce’s and Jasnida’s here. To sit so close to someone in such great need and know that you could change their life for years with the money you spend in a month…Jasnida, who is a devout Christian, says she believes that money was created by the devil. The comparative wealth in your bank account constricts your heart, and you are inclined to agree. What is the truly loving path? To give away all you have to help a few, or to keep your privilege in order to work towards a larger, sweeping change?

The long walk home in cool, slanting late afternoon sunlight; buying fresh produce at the market for practically pennies; being sprinkled in a sudden, refreshing rain shower; eating spaghetti with Joe and Melissa before watching Harry Potter: the routine of taking care of yourself is comforting, though it does little to answer your questions. Your only hope is that somewhere in this great experience of talking, eating, giving, walking, laughing, crying, reading, and writing, you can find a place within yourself to rest. A place where it is okay to be surrounded by your culture and closed in by your pale skin; a place from which there is a small path forward, full of dusty potholes and discouraging hairpin turns but with a glimmer of the blue lake beyond.