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.