I've been thinking about teaching.

This is the teaching statement I wrote for my composition theory learning-how-to-teach-composition class:

I believe in myself because someone else believed in me. I feel intellectually empowered because as I grew up, I was taught by educators who valued, respected, and encouraged my individual voice. I was taught that what I thought mattered, and that I was capable of sharing these worthy thoughts with the rest of the world. I am certain that by the time I finished 6^th grade, my teachers had already cemented in me the intellectual self-confidence that I still feel today.

            
Of course, every human being has a unique voice that can contribute something of value to humanity, yet so many students have never been told that what they think is worth sharing. They are – so often these days – taught to listen rather than talk, memorize rather than create, and fit within the lines rather than draw their own. As an educator, my primary goal is to counteract the negative beliefs that the modern, results-driven educational system seems to perpetuate. I will have done my job well if my students come to feel empowered as individuals who have something of worth to bring to the larger human community. Grounding my teaching practices in methods that work to create as egalitarian a classroom as possible helps me to reach that goal.

I recognize that not all students were encouraged to feel empowered as I was from such a young age, and so I seek to create a classroom environment that is inclusive to each student, no matter their background. Inclusion is usually by nature a complex dynamic to orchestrate in a diverse classroom, and most classrooms have some level of diversity, whether physical (race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability) or cultural (ethnicity, socio-economic status, chosen culture). However, my approach is to both honor differences as well as recognize similarities between all of the students in my class. If the class size and the classroom space permit, my students and I arrange the desks in a circle for each class session. If I am not lecturing at the board or walking around checking on group work, I will often join the circle by sitting in (or on the back of) one of the desks. The circle functions in many ways to create the inclusive class dynamic I aim for: the students are physically positioned to interact with each other face-to-face, making engagement much easier; they can easily work in pairs or small groups without having to turn away from other students; and class discussion occurs organically for the same reasons. On a more abstract, perhaps subconscious level, the sort of hidden curriculum that the circle teaches is one of equality. Not only is each student on more of an even plane (there is no longer a real way to “sit at the front” or hide in the back of the classroom) – I am also able to join them on that plane. The circle teaches students that they are all equally valued as participants in the class, and that I value their input as much as I value my own, since I am a part of the circle as well. The board isn’t even the focus of the classroom anymore: the focal point is the center of the circle, which also happens to be the central point of the discussion we generate.

            
This brings up another critical part of my pedagogy: teaching is, as much as possible, a balance between transmitting new knowledge and facilitating engagement with and application of that knowledge. Learning, then, is a balance between absorbing new ideas and putting them into practice with others. Having the focal point of my classroom be the middle of the discussion circle rather than the front of the classroom with all of its traditional teacher’s tools communicates to my students that how they engage with what they’re learning is as important, if not more so, than how thoroughly they memorize the exact details of that knowledge. Active participation in class further emphasizes this value. It doesn’t take very many classes for my students to realize that they are expected to participate in class discussion – if they don’t volunteer to speak, I will call on them to share their thoughts at some point anyway. I sometimes ask students to go around the circle and share what they wrote or discussed with their partner, but the more comfortable they get, the more often they will volunteer to share on their own. To be fair and strengthen the feeling of equality, I am open to participating in discussions where I ask students to share personal information or ideas, so that there is no imbalance whereby I ask for their vulnerability without being willing to be vulnerable myself.

            
Personal sharing often comes out of the practice of freewriting, a staple element of my teaching practices. Writing about personal experience and then getting to share what was written with a group of peers can automatically – in the act of sharing – validate and strengthen the belief that individual voice is important. If a student comes to believe that what they think and write is worth sharing, even in the informal acts of freewriting and class discussion, they will be more likely to have that confidence when they write for other assignments. Freewriting has consistently been one of the most appreciated practices in my classroom. Students comment that freewriting has led to them enjoying the act of writing more, feeling like they can put more personality into what they write, separating the act of criticism from the act of invention, and growing more confident in their ability to write. Separation of the critical from the creative is also, I have found, a valuable benefit of freewriting. So often students begin to judge what they write as soon as they write it, which can quickly stifle their flow of thoughts and sense of voice. Freewriting in essence teaches them to hold off on critical judgment of their own writing until they have enough creative material to work with.

            
The circle and the freewrite, in many ways, have come to embody my classroom pedagogy. Through the circle, regular freewriting, student-chosen topics, in-class time spent on invention and drafting, and a down-to-earth, approachable teaching persona, I hope to encourage students to feel empowered as individuals and engaged as a community. The awareness I seek to pass on to them is the same awareness I learned growing up: their voices are worth being heard, and there are people who will listen. Only with that awareness, I believe, will students have the confidence to truly speak in the first place.

The strange pull of what you truly love.

            The ocean is calling, its salty fog whispers twining around my wrists, my ankle, my mind. I could stay here in the redwoods, these towering elders that watch over me while I sleep; but the fog tendrils tug and I imagine I can hear the waves breathing in and out on the shore. I grab my helmet and a scarf for the wind chill, my bike lock key and cell phone, a couple of dollars for the bus back and my swim suit.

            Downhill. Calves tight over my pedals, I lean into each curve and only brake as much as I need to. Pretending I’m on a racehorse, or a motorcycle, or maybe I’m flying – I whoop with the joy and the redwood mist gently soaks up the echo as I speed closer and closer to the coast. I am birthed out of the forest onto a panorama that steals the breath of locals and tourists alike when it’s stripped of its blanket of marine layer precipitation: Monterey Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Today, the marine layer coats my cheek like a wet exhale, and I grin anyway, cherishing my experience of this place when the fair-weather visitors deem it too gray and gloomy to blow their money on.

            Still downhill, yet more cautiously as I pedal alongside traffic and cross busy intersections, avoiding potholes and pedestrians, the elders replaced with oaks and invasive eucalyptus. Over the railroad tracks, past one of the natural food stores and a couple of taquerias, and I’m there. The Pacific Ocean as manifested by Monterey Bay lies open-armed in front of me, the fog so dense that there’s no way to even guess the city of Monterey bustles directly across the bay. Kelp and sea grass cover the beach I look down on from a coastal cliff. The surfers are dancing the waves just a cove or two over, and an older man watching his dog romp in the sand is the only other person near the water.

            I trot down the stairs and kick off my sandals to be greeted by cold, grainy sand under my feet. Shivering without from the chill and within from anticipation, I strip down to my suit. No matter how many times I find myself here, I can never rush into the water I long for without pausing. Feet firmly planted, arms at my sides or raised to the sky: a moment of thanks, of gratitude, that the ocean is always ready to catch me in expansive arms, that all I have to do is take the plunge and I will be held by a presence as deep as the night sky and no less comforting in its magnitude.

            I breathe once more, fog above me and water before me, grin once more, and run into the waves.

Let yourself be silently drawn

by the strange pull

of what you truly love.

It will not lead you astray.

- Rumi

A short tableau of summers past.

The smell of sunscreen mixed with citronella: perpetual summer. Sitting on the guard stand, the idyllic teenage summer job - get a tan and get paid! Friends and annoying little kids abound, whistles and straw hats, and if you forget your water bottle I'll hand you a red plastic cup with a healthy dose of shame. Snarf lunch on a twenty-minute break, or if you're lucky an off-duty guard will run to Safeway for sandwiches or sushi.

So much encapsulated above the blue chlorine water and below the blue hot sky.

Pulling tarps as the sun rises, quiet in the early morning. Old ladies wait to do an exercise routine recorded over a tape of Kenny Rogers songs. Trees and birds watch the cycle of the day go by as parkas are peeled off, the old ladies leave, and chipmunk chatterers of children arrive to jump or be dragged into the pool for a half hour of heaven or hell.

Pulling tarps as the sun sets, tired sunned-out skin, lithe happy bodies, high school idealistic chatter: "What's everyone doing tonight?" The never-ending search for thrills on vacation in a small hometown.

The Holdfast

I live in a home in the redwoods.

Mushrooms blossom after each rain.

But today is not a mushroom day.

The ocean is calling, its salty fog whispers twining around my wrists, my ankle, my mind.

Ahh. Heartbeat of my soul, the breathing of waves in and out.

Sometimes things die.

Sometimes we help them die.

We think it’s just a straw.

If a million of us think that, a million straws settle in the belly of the ocean.

One day, we might be thirsty

and find nothing to suck up our straws.

The part of kelp that anchors it to the ocean floor is called a holdfast.

Let us hold fast to the earth. If we forget our holdfasts,

we might drift in an ocean of straws

forever.

The ocean makes me feel expansive, infinite, philosophical.

Stinging nettle patches, up the road from the ocean, make me feel hungry!

Stinging nettle is one of the most nutritious plants native to North America.

Full of minerals and vitamins, its stinging barbs release

neurotoxins that act like

Icy-Hot

on stiff muscles and arthritic joints.

It’s also very tasty!

(Like spinach on steroids.)

Blanch, boil, or dry the leaves.

Make nettle tea, which can also be used as a conditioning hair rinse.

Blanched leaves blended with

olive oil

pine nuts

garlic

and parmesan

make an incredible, wild-harvested pesto!

“Hope means to keep on living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.”

- Henri M. Nouwen

Keep humming, keep harvesting, keep running to hug the ocean.

Her arms are open. The redwoods keep breathing.

The earth waits to embrace you.

The smiles linger in my mind, the sweetness lingers on my tongue.

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.

Wise words echo from Tamarack Lake at sunrise.

"Above all, stay grounded. Remember that there is earth for your roots and sun for your leaves. All you have to do is reach down, stretch up, and breathe deeply."

The middle of the wilderness is such a simple place from which to feel certain. The struggle, I find, is to bring the certainty of those wild places into my tick-tock clock-based paycheck routine. To reach up out of everydayness into the visions of something more.

Reach down, into where you come from. Stretch up, to where you know you can be. And breathe deeply, knowing that to breathe is enough.

Taking my own wisdom to heart as I inch towards the river of writing that I long to jump in. Applications to science writing programs in the midst of work is a little like someone asking you, "What is the meaning of your life?" every ten minutes. A practice in groundedness, to be sure.

Having a heart, no matter where you are, at once takes courage and no effort at all.

"Ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, the path is of no use." ~ Carlos Castaneda

My path has a heart, even if it doesn't have a clear destination at this point in time. I find myself devouring stories of pursuing one's passions despite everything, and clinging to the words of the wise in the hope that they might apply to me.

"To find our calling is to find the intersection between our own deep gladness and the world's deep hunger."

~ Frederick Buechner

I find deep gladness in words, but could writing really be what the world hungers for? I run back and forth along the trajectory of a writer, searching for that place where it meets the world's deep hunger, poverty, despair, injustice.

"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you avert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you."

~ Annie Dillard

Perhaps I am searching in vain for that place where writing mingles with social and environmental justice, personal and environmental wellbeing, to the extent that I want it to. Because it is up to me. I can read nature philosophy and sustainable op-eds all my life long and admire how they manage to blend science and literature. Or I can bravely step out into the stream myself; take a deep breath, and share my story.

My thesis is finished, but Suubi will always be in my life, if only in my heart.

Here is the link to the culmination of my time in Uganda and three months spent thinking, researching, and writing back in California. By no means is it perfect or all-encompassing, but I gave it my all.

My senior thesis in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

I've got the fire back in my belly; only now, it burns on charcoal from Uganda.

It has been exactly one month and three days since I left Uganda. That was the first time I can remember not being excited to get on an airplane; in fact, I was downright jealous of the fresh crowd of people who arrived at the airport just as I was about to leave. And though my take-off went smoothly, in many ways I feel like I crash-landed back into my homeland. I am just now beginning to feel like the discombobulation that possessed my life since I came back is gone. Here is a conversation my friend Jocelyn - who is studying abroad in Senegal right now - and I had that helps to illustrate what this transition has been like. She sent me a message on Facebook in response to my last post:

Heather, this is an absolutely beautiful that strikes a chord in me on so many levels. I hope you don't mind if I ask everybody reading my blog to please come and see this entry; it speaks volumes to what I hope to communicate little by little through my own entries.

How are you coming along in your project of learning to love America in all its imperfectness? What you say about breaking illusions as being the real process of learning is absolutely true.

Isn't it wonderful to know that we are all just like anybody else? And yet, so unique individually and culturally? The layers of difference and commonality are endless, enmeshed, and ever-shifting. Beauty incarnate.

Love,
Jocelyn

thank you so much for letting me know what you think, jocelyn! you are welcome to share this post with anyone...a huge part of why i write is to help communicate what i learn about the world to people who maybe haven't had the chance to learn the same thing. i'm glad you like it. :)

i have had a really tough time learning to be back here and love america. it's been a little over a month, and i'm just now feeling like i'm on my feet again. (it didn't help that i only gave myself a week before school started.) i think that being out of this culture and country for three months has made it nearly impossible to ignore all of the things i didn't like about america in the first place. where before, i could put up with aspects of this culture that annoyed me, now i feel like they are glaring and unavoidable. things that i thought used to satisfy me don't anymore.

although that all sounds super doom-and-gloom, it's like a painful but good pruning. from this i'm learning what can truly satisfy me and make my life as fulfilling as it was this summer. i can have a fulfilling life here; it just means seeking out truly edifying habits and places, rather than numbing out on what my culture tells me is fun.

yes, one of the most humbling lessons and joyful truths is how absolutely human everyone is. it shatters any ideas that superiority or greater wisdom lies in one culture or another. when i find myself wanting to look down my nose at people who seem to be absorbed in materialism, i remember that many ugandans are just as proud and anxious to have and acquire possessions. once my lens of judgment has cracked and fallen away, i can truly appreciate the individual and simultaneously universal beauty in each person i meet, and it humbles me.

My last sunrise in Uganda threw amber-gold watercolor onto the clouds I love.

My friend Caitlin asked me to tell her the biggest thing I am taking away from my time here in Uganda. An inordinate number of souvenirs aside, there is a lot I am bringing back in my perspectives, my desires, and even my eating habits. I have grown immensely more comfortable with the person I am and confident that that person can not only survive, but even make a positive impact in the world. I have gained an unlikely tolerance for eating large amounts of food and drinking multiple sodas in one day. (I hope that I don’t suffer from cravings for carbonated, caffeinated sugar-water when I get back. I wouldn’t be surprised if I did.) I’ve gotten used to thinking in terms of acres, dry and wet seasons, tribal politics, and selling charcoal to pay for school fees.

But Caitlin asked for the biggest thing, the single greatest impact this small, beautiful country has had on me. It is a realization that came to me within my first two weeks here, yet it has continually shifted shapes and reasserted itself in unexpected ways. The simplest manifestation is this: people are people are people. The most obvious symptoms are the ones I recognized first. People here, like people in America, like (probably) most people on Earth, need food, want to care for their children, like to have nice clothes, and either are proud of the house they own or worry about paying rent. Oh, and they like to be happy. I think the difference here might be that most Ugandans don’t seem to depend on external circumstances to make them happy as much as Americans do. They don’t feel entitled to the material goods that are supposed to “give” them happiness; they may be discontent with their standard of living, but they decide to be happy with what they have. Women decorate the half of their one room house that is partitioned off as their living room as proudly as if it were a Victorian-age parlor. Children amuse themselves to no end by transforming junk into toys; some string and an old iron become a boat to tug around, and a bicycle tire rolling along the dusty ground is fun in and of itself.

On the other side of the coin, many Ugandans are by no means content with their lifestyle, as they will bluntly tell you; expecting you, as the almighty and rich mzungu, to enable them to become as materially blessed as you are. I will never be sure whether strangers I met wanted to talk to me because I’m white, because I’m a girl, because they think I have money, or because they were just being friendly. To a lesser extent, it has been hard not to be suspicious of the true motives of friends I have made here. If I were black, or if they knew I was poor, would they be as interested in me? There is no way to separate the quality of my experience here from the color of my skin.

In this way, as well as some others, many of my expectations and subconscious idealizations about Africa in general and Uganda in particular have been shattered, leaving the familiar knowledge that people are people. People in Uganda aren’t, as I longingly imagined, poverty-stricken gurus of how to live life happily with few possessions. I held this ideal as the object of my passion, love, and desire before I came here; if the ideal isn’t true, what do I love, what am I compassionate about, what do I desire to learn? The challenge, I have realized, is to allow the picturesque to fall apart, revealing a basic, common, real-as-murram-dirt humanity. The choice is exposed: do I continue to search for the pure, simple, poor yet happy Acholi widow on whom to bestow my love and hopes for the secret of joy? or do I love reality despite its unsatisfying and disillusioning flaws? I have chosen to love. The pain I feel at the idea of leaving this place in twelve hours is all-too-real evidence of this.

The challenge of loving reality in the face of crumbling, imaginary ideals has been both reassuring and disappointing. It means that there is no secret to happiness that cannot be found in my own life, in my own culture, because no such secret lives here in Africa. At the same time, I feel let down and lost because my search for how to live in joy without material possessions has hit a dead end. I can no longer strive for asceticism as the sole standard by which I should find true joy; no such standard exists.

Yet even this disappointment contains its own hope and the seed of a new challenge. If Africa does not hold all the answers, then maybe America has a few of its own. Maybe I can live the life that I long for within my own culture and country, not longing for some ideal environment within which I can easily find true contentment. At the same time, a new obstacle faces me. As some of you might know, I have tended to be overly critical and pessimistic towards the thriving American culture of consumerism. My justification for this was the juxtaposition of my country with that of the mystically simple joy in the face of difficulty I saw in Africa. That joy has indeed proved to be mystical, though a real, imperfect joy still exists here. However, I can no longer judge myself, my friends and family, and my culture against an imaginary standard. Try though I might, I cannot pretend that America fails to be strong against the allure of materialism while Africa succeeds. Like any serious relationship, true love exists when you choose to love the reality, not the ideal. I have learned to love the reality of Uganda. The hope I have found here is to learn to love the reality of America. 

Apwoyo matek, Uganda. Amari bene wubibedo icwinya kareducu. Thank you, Uganda. I love you and you will be in my heart forever.

A raw chicken gizzard has the dark iridescence of a smooth abalone shell.

I see in my mind the long, winding path the bus took two days ago, through the districts of Gulu, Oyam, Apac, Masindi; over the briefly gorgeous Karuma Falls where baboons stroll along the roadside; through Nakasongola, Luwero, and Wakiso to Kampala, and eventually to Jinja. A sloping journey south: the beginning of my solitary exodus from this country. My time here is ever-flowing, bringing me closer to the moment where all of my experiences will be concentrated into everything I am allowed to carry with me on my back and in my mind and heart. An entire culture, the vibrant worlds of Acholiland and Jinja, the friendships I have made and wisdom I have learned, desperately captured in words and pictures and small souvenirs to convince myself that I don’t really have to leave this place; I can take Uganda with me. Is it possible? I will try with all my might.

How did it happen, that I have fallen in love and admiration and interest with this country and find it so hard to think about leaving? Which came first, the welcoming openness of the people here, or my eager openness to learn? Which was it that catalyzed this exchange of ourselves, me in my ignorance and hopeful friendliness, they in their appreciation and bemused patience? It does not matter now. There still and will always be misunderstandings, but through and above and underneath our differences, there is a deep affection blending indiscernibly at times into love.

Gulu was, once again, a profound demonstration of the willingness of Ugandans to accept my blundering attempts to experience and understand their world. I interviewed the agronomist at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization office and the Archbishop of the Gulu Diocese (a prominent local leader) about the challenges facing post-conflict agriculture in the region, and they responded with enthusiasm, though I had nothing to offer them but my sincere interest and curiosity. I showed up to the meeting of a farmers’ group that works with the organization Villages of Hope, whom my Acholi friend Tony helps to run. I hoped to interview them about their experiences with farming, IDP camps, and returning to their lives in their villages, and I ended up with answers, maps of gardens, and offers for me to spend the night and cook food with them. They want me to call the chairperson of the group on his cell phone – by the way, nearly every Ugandan, regardless of economic status, has a cell phone – when I have successfully completed my research and studies. I expressed a desire to have the experience of killing and cooking a chicken and preparing a traditional Ugandan meal; Tony helped me buy a chicken, and a friend of his that I met that day spent her evening teaching me how to do just that. She and her children didn’t even share the meal of chicken, posho, and rice with me, but left me to eat it with Tony and his friend.

Tony embodies this welcoming spirit, which is a combination of eagerness to help me experience the ways of life here and deep appreciation that I am interested in doing so, in learning what it is that forms the foundation of each person’s day. The last time I visited Gulu, he introduced me to women in the village of Lurutu, who smilingly showed me how to grind flour, carry water on my head with a cushion of grass, and harvest and peel cassava, a potato-like root. This time, not only did he set up the group interviews with local farmers, but he also brought me to see several farms including his own, where we planted papaya and coffee seedlings. (In doing so, he fulfilled another of my dreams: we rented motorcycles and drove them ourselves, on a dirt road under a deep blue sky, out into the bush to his farm.) He enabled me to visit villages I would have had no access to on my own, and asked for no compensation other than my learning and enjoyment. If this helpfulness is the response I get for showing genuine interest and a simple desire to immerse myself in the culture around me, I am overwhelmed. I only hope that I can do justice to this generosity by telling the stories of these people, my acquaintances and friends, and using the knowledge they have shared with me to somehow help them to rebuild their lives.

The rain comes furtively in the night, drenching the world, then vanishing.

I reached Gulu last night, sustaining no injuries other than a sore rear from the unexpectedly long six hour bus ride, after waiting two hours for the bus to leave Kampala. Then again, you think I would have come to expect the unexpected here. I met up with the couple I am staying with for dinner, then walked back to their compound in the darkness of early evening. For some reason, I feel much safer after dark in Gulu than I do in Jinja. Gulu is supposed to be a broken place, rough around its war torn edges, and Jinja a friendly, settled town open to tourists. I have heard of more violence in Jinja, however, and no one badgers me because I am a mono here - the Acholi equivalent to mzungu. The moon's silver crescent is growing stronger, and here there are not enough streetlights to flood out a wispy Milky Way. A few fireflies blinked like cell phone lights in the grass, bringing to mind glass jars for catching them and the bare feet of summer. A thunderstorm flickered in the distance, though the sky above was clear. Besides the peacefully cool air, none of these are frequent parts of my life. I didn't grow up in a place where I could see the Milky Way, or where fireflies dance, or where thunderstorms shake the air often. Yet I couldn't help giving the sigh of someone who has come home.

I am mzungu.

I am a white person, although if you ask an Acholi, I am kwa, red. 

I have lots of money, which means I am either welcomed as a guest who honors the family I visit with my important time, or I am expected to pay more for everything because I can.

I have skin that inspires awe, excitement, terror, apprehension, distrust, joy, curiosity, and above all, expectations that are often reluctant truths.

My name is called by children with glee and daring, and by men with leers or greedy faces.

"The etymology of the word stems from a contraction of words meaning "one who moves around,"(possibly zunguka, zungusha, mzungukaji-meaning to go round and round) and was coined to describe European traders who traveled through East African countries in the 18th century. The word became synonymous with "white person" because of the traders' complexion."        - Wikipedia

I am a traveler, one who exists impermanently in this place of red dust, sky, and real life in between.

__________

Living up to my name, I am traveling to Gulu tomorrow for the second time. I will be there for a week, and with the more defined purpose of conducting interviews with anyone who will talk to me, provided they farm and live in a village or camp near Gulu. I will be there with the same NGO that drove me to villages a month and a half ago, with an able translator who has become a good friend of mine. As always, your thoughts and prayers for a safe journey will be rewarded with many, many pictures and stories. Afoyo matek! Thank you very much!

In media-hungry America, your life is a broadcast.

Most of the clothes worn here are secondhand. Scrubbed spotless and clean, but still secondhand. Yesterday I did a double-take at a young girl wearing an American Eagle shirt, and t-shirts with corny wisecracks like "Now you've wasted two minutes of your life reading this stupid t-shirt," seem strangely out of place.

Follow these clothes back to their source. Not in the industrial country they were probably manufactured in, but America, where they hung row upon row in a building where shop after shop sells different products to entice the pocketbook. Here is where they really matter, where a little eagle embroidered on a pocket or screen-printed words are looked at critically, a symbol of status and the individual's personality.

Now you have a chance to give your society something different to examine for a change.

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.