Ants Marching

Ever seen Tremors? Kevin Bacon, circa 1990? Allow me to refresh: Kevin and some pals are in a deserted desert town, when huge subterranean worms come and try to eat them. Remember how it made you pick your feet off the floor, put cherished belongings on high shelves, or at all costs remain on stepping stones or paved surfaces to avoid touching bare earth, possible sending seismic signals to the giant beasts?!? I never had these side-effects from watching the movies (of course), but from a far more serious and scientifically plausible demon.

It all began on a Friday dusk. I was relaxing in my hammock, doing some reading, being amazed at the complete serenity in which I'd managed to place myself. As the light faded, as it so quickly does at this latitude, I unhooked the carabiners, draped the parachute nylon over my back and retreated for nightfall, supper, and the nightly lighting game I play with the local flying insects.

Barbara (seen here), my girl back home, was leaving for the weekend and I wanted to have her call me before she left, but the cell phone was nowhere to be found. I would try to use the computer, but the power is out and the laptop is about dead. Aha! It must have fallen out while I was in the hammock. With flashlights a group of us look around the backyard, dodging the slumbering cows and the output of their day. No dice. We even try calling it, nothing.

Just as I'm working my way around the side of the house, I feel it. It's never the first one that you feel. He's always halfway up your leg by the time the first bite comes. First on your foot, then immediately anywhere else they might be. Safari ants, small, black, hunters. I jumped, swatted, ran to the house. Off with my sandals and pants, I vigorously rub down my feet, calves and thighs, seeing five or six fall to the floor. I stomp, hard. Turn the pants inside out and shake them out further, two more fall out. It's hard not to panic. They're now in my room. Is every corpse accounted for? Under the bed? My shoes? OK...painful, yet laughable. Step somewhere you shouldn't and you sometimes get ants in your pants.

Dinner is ready and I've talked to Barbara. The one place I didn't look, in the balled up hammock, was right where it was. On the porch we enjoy chicken, beans and rice, and a nice long chat. It's getting late, time to turn in.

My first thought was that I had tracked in more than I originally thought, and the first bite brought back all the anger and fear, feelings I thought I'd put away for the evening. But as Job and Sylvia ran into my room, my heart sank a lot more. From my bathroom were thousands on thousands of safari ants, marching along both adjecent walls. They entered the house just a few yards from where I'd been bitten earlier. We moved to the kitchen and saw what you see in this picture, and again the same thing in Job's bathroom. I started imaginig sleeping in the main house and tediously (and painfully) de-anting all my belongings.

Quickly, Job pulls together a plan. The safari ants hate parafin, and this seems to be our only course. We fill a wash basin with parafin from our lanterns and water to cut it, and sprinkle the stuff around the house. First to block their advance, which was by now threatening stacks of clothes and exits, then to drive them back. Their lines of advance were clear columns, finding them was easy, and a few shakes of the soaked broom to turn them around. Victory seemed within reach when we realized we were out of parafin, and dangerously exposed to counter-attack. Unfortunately, there are few places open at 10pm which sell parafin, but fortunately, it's right beside a pub. Now, I can't say if it was benevolent environmentalism, procrastination, or exhaustion (not plausible), but through our inaction we decided to let the ants make an organized retreat and recover their dead and wounded, while we enjoyed cold drinks.

I should've expected it, but it seems there's a symbiosis, a quid pro quo, between safari ants and humans, for when we returned we found them cleared from the interior of the house, but quite busy carrying termites out of the rafters of our humble home. Again an altruistic streak hit us and we decided to let them finish up. I slept well, but with the mosquito netting tucked into the mattress, and flip flops on my desk (with the flat soles for efficient stomping). In the morning the were gone. An empty trail pointed my attention to the next house down the street, and a girl washing clothes. Just then she slapped her back, calmly scooped up her siblings and gathered the clothes.

Health Center II, Oberabic

I didn't want to be the first ever patient at the new Health Center at Oberabic (trans. 'Five Mosquitoes') in Amuru District. The focus should be on the community that came together to voice their needs, the Diocese for helping organize and mobilize the idea, and MAP Int'l., based in Georgia, for funding constuction. It was a day of celebration, full of music, dancing, soda, visiting foreigners; it was a day for standing up! All I wanted was to lay down...

The back seat of the Toyota LandCruiser is a cramped place, not the second row with doors and leg room, but the cargo area, the very back, with the fold down seats for children, the one you enter through the rear hatch. This, combined with the predictably poor roads, the constant acceleration, braking, pothole dipping, then again accelerating, created some unpleasantly funny tummy feelings. By the time we arrived to the procession, lined with dancers, proud mothers, and soldiers (marching along by coincidence), I was definitely not feeling so hot.

I didn't lose my cookies. I wasn't the first patient of Oberabic, but I couldn't resist the hook line. I did have a wonderful time though. Among the diocesan staff riding with me (in more comfortable seats): Bishop Nelson; the Diocesan Secretary, Rev. David Onyach; Information Officer, Rev. Willy Akena; and a journalist from Gulu, I was just along for the ride. Rev. David was the MC, Bishope Nelson shared special-guest honors with the president of MAP Int'l, and we were treated to traditional Acholi song and dance groups, whose songs celebrated the day and the promise a health clinic within a day's walk would provide to these people.

Bishop Nelson told the story of his trip here just a few years ago, maybe 2004, to the attendees. The car got them only as far as the site we were at today. To get to the village further up the road, they had to walk with Army escorts a further 5 miles up the road. LRA soldiers were in the village when they arrived, but that night they shared the village, all resting peacefully. This story illustrates just how fresh the reality of conflict is in the collective memory. The health clinic, in a way, is born of that conflict, since it serves the surrounding camps of displaced people. The clinic is a permanent presence to people for whom even the temporary has become permenant. I don't know how the health clinic will fit in to their future given the need to move out of the camps, where sustenance comes from relief, back home, or whatever that once meant to someone.

The State of Things in N. Uganda

For one month now I've been living and working in Gulu, capital of a district which for the previous twenty years was the pitch of a brutal civil war, an insurgency of resourceful, relentless bush fighters who kidnapped and raped wherever they could reach, and a government counter-insurgency that was at times equally brutal in suppressing rebellion. Here in Gulu, the battlefield was everywhere outside city center, which housed government army barracks. The diocesan office, from which I write to you now, was once a rebel headquarters. Every road I pass on today was at some point a rebel supply route or ambush. Nothing outside the very core of the city was safe from pillage or abduction.

Today, the LRA are in Congo and Southern Sudan, and peace talks with the government of Uganda and the ICC are stalled in Stage Three of a five part process. Ninety percent of the people are still in IDP camps, fearful of the returning home to isolation and lacking basic services (schools, medical, etc.)

Gulu town today has the look of a bustling regional center in a developing country, and it is. What is often harder to see are the scars of conflict and social upheaval. In fact, life in Gulu town, according to many residents, refused to bend to the realities of war. Even night life continued in the roughest of times, as people resigned themselves to the fact that death was a constant and unavoidable presence (like taxes). (Also I'll comment more on the night life when I've had a little more of it.)

I don't fully understand yet the state people are in, or have a sense of what they've been through. For many, I think there is only to live on and rebuild; that's the only reality now. I think their masks are strong, and built on pride and self-reliance. Maybe it's that a terrible reality has come crashing down, and we live now in jubilee, in the real presence of God's grace.

The next four months I spend here will be spent on three things: 1) gathering trainers and their funding for a Youth Entrepreneurship Workshop, 2) a diocesan youth festival scheduled for December focused on healing, 3) reconnecting churches to their nearest Anglican schools, and training their youth leaders. Right now, most of my time has been spent (somewhat unproductively) in the office, building contacts and relationships, and forming a vision for what the diocesan youth program can be, though, again, I'm only in the office for now.

Your support: your prayers, e-mails, Skype calls, care packages, words of conversations with others about life here; all these things encourage me when life seems lonely and the work seems elusive. Talk to you soon.

Calling a Kid a kid

I wake up in the morning to many sounds: trucks pulling out of the compound, roosters crowing, the bells of the Cathedral, the banging of a metal pole at the school next door signifying it's time for something, cows mooing, crickes chirping, exotic birds cawing, and kids screaming.

Yes, here in Uganda, and on this very compound, we raise goats, and I'm pretty sure that goats and lambs are male and female, and that their young are called kids. (If I'm wrong, just let it go. You don't have to post anything dramatic or hurtful.) Anyways, I quickly learned the connection between kids of humans and kids of goats/lambs: they sound exactly alike when they cry. There, a fun fact to impress your friends with.

I have some fun things to post about this week, if I get to it.

• The State of Things in N. Uganda
• The Story of Charles and Lawrence (you're intrigued by the ambiguity), and
• At Least it's not Y2K

Hopefully, also soon will be an e-mail to my list-serve, the YASC list-serve, and whoever I can think of that I know would like to read it but has somehow failed to be on either.

Tomorrow is Independence Day here in Uganda, celebrating 45 years of independence from the British Empire (even though some I speak to say the Brits weren't so bad, and their departure has had ambibuous results). So in light of probable celebration on Tuesday, the diocesan pre-emptively gave us today off as well. Vive Uganda!