I balanced on the chipping white paint metal of the volunteer house's back porch. Gnawing. Twisting. Jawing on a stick of sugarcane Betty had given me. If everyone had to work this hard to get sweetness in their mouths, obesity would be a flying-pig, laughable myth. Finally I worked a section away from the center, my teeth prying the treasure open and chomping down to release the juice. Mmm. I wouldn't say heaven, but it was close. Watery enough to be refreshing; sweet enough to be, well, sweet. Candy water, just shy of syrup on the tongue.
No wonder all those brown teeth gleam dully out of all those mouths, the school children waving "Hello, mzungu!" as I the white person ride my privilege on the back of a motorcycle taxi. If sugarcane were my after-school snack, cheap as it is, I would set to work chewing it open too. Their bodies stay fit - not enough calories to weigh them down - but their teeth fade from white to yellow ivory before resigning into splotches of rich brown and tan. Even toddlers, even Kymbi who has a leg up on life in Uganda because Betty works for a couple of mzungus, even he is blooming tiny brown blossoms on his two-year-old teeth.
I see these smiles and ache. We high-falutin' Westerners have the audacity to imagine we can "help" these people, by bringing them railroads and English and Jesus and chemicals. We can't even bring them toothbrushes. Or maybe they don't care, and that's my Western fallacy, imposing my paradigm of "teeth-need-to-be-clean-and-people-should-live-to-be-100" on another culture.
The bulk aisle. I stare at the five different brands of packaged raw cane sugar, not to mention all of the other kinds of cane sugar. All those brown tooth smiles, those small hands grasping chunks of sweetness. All these privileged or not-so-privileged, grasping at chunks of sweetness in canes, Cokes, petit fours, you name it. Is sugar the Pandora's box of our bodies? We know not what we wish for. Our ancestors celebrated bitter as embodying life-giving nutrients. But we lean in, sugar bedazzled, and lift the lid.