Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Exchange Rates
Saturday, June 21, 2008
We went to the same junior high...just saying...
"He's quick and he's strong," Mr. Love said of Mr. Obama. "A lot of people still don't know that he's left-handed, so he can get to the basket and get his shot off, even though he's not the most explosive or tallest player on the court."
Saturday, June 14, 2008
An Exciting Night
A funny thing happened to me the other night. I'd been enjoying a nice conversation and meal with Rev. Patrick and his family at his house, just stone's throw from mine. Usually one of us has an excuse for me to stop by, food is brought out, and I'm happy to be eating dinner around a table with a family. The news was on, the kids were catching bugs by the flourescent light. Good times. I remembered from before there was a pretty big heifer with horns tied up somewhere near my path, and I was pretty relieved when I made out his glowing eyes and resting frame as I passed him. I must've let my guard down a bit, because I ran into the pitch black 3-year-old like someone had moved the couch around while I was out. "Oh! Sorry, sorry!", I said, as he/she stumbled humbly out of my way. "mmMMMPh" he/she responded.
Now, I can rarely pass towards home without stopping by the house of the archdeacon Rev. James Okoyo. Most nights you can find he, his wife, and some of the nieces and nephews he's taking care of, sitting outside taking supper or evening tea. And despite adamantly protesting that I had just left Patrick's having eaten my fill, I can't leave without doing some damage to a bowl of beans and millet bread. One of those nephews, David, recently got some school fees assistance from my good friend Elizabeth Duncan in Charlotte. That night we were doing some picking on the guitar, which David's become particularly keen on. While David and I are playing and eating, mom is lying by the candle light grabbing the slow trickle of white ants - insects with large white wings that come out of the ground searching for light after a big rains - settling near her light. Two households collecting insects, but this was small scale compared to what I'd find at home.
Just around the bend I enter the gate to the bishop's compound to find the entire front side of the house lit up like a rock show. Two of the house staff, Helen and Apiyo, are patrolling the walls with brooms and buckets in hand, and as the white ants swarm to a particular light, they swat them down, make them into a pile, and scoop them by the handful into the baskets! They invited me to try my hand at it, and I successfully nabbed a few of them, but they kept swarming my reflective head and neck, and I just couldn't cope with that.
The next day, you could see evidence of the magnitude of the infestation, or harvest, by the wings which littered the ground, not just where people had lights on, but everywhere. And those who had harvested them were ready to capitalize, drying thousands in the sun, then sorting them and roughing them until their wings fell off. The sell for about 500 shillings ($.33) per cupfull. When boiled and shaped, they make a meal not unlike hamburger patties with a salty soup, and with a gritty crunchiness from the exoskeletons and legs and such. It can be a satisfying meal if I can just shake the image of what it is I'm really eating. That's tough to do.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
So, I got malaria.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Motorcycles and starry nights
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Afternoons at the Office
And these mangos are DELICOUS! I'm not entirely sure what mangos are like at home, but my hunch is that they're imported, reddish-purple or orange in color, and have a consistent texture, like a banana, not pulpy. These mangos are pulpy, juicy, sweet and tangy! And they're everywhere! I can't step outside my office without seeing two or three prime ones just lying on the ground, freshly fallen. Here, Susan demonstrates how to give in to the temptation. Abandon your desk, bring a chair outside, fill a basin with water (not shown), and prepare somewhere to collect your skins. You can find your first couple on the ground (mentioned above), and as many as you have time or energy to separate from the tree above you. Use a long stick to knock or hook them, or other fallen, unripe mangos to shoot them down (also above). Don't worry about being a loner; once you start, others will follow.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Developments for Okweyo
It's a beautiful Saturday morning, I'm picking mango pulp from my teeth. They're now ripe, and everywhere. Best practices in Uganda are to plant a mango tree by your house and in your yard for the wonderfully cool and complete shade they provide. When they get big and fall, they hit your tin roof with enough force to give you a jolt, even if isn't your roof. Also this morning, this nice fella' here stopped by to greet me.
Monday, April 14, 2008
As things here develop...
Monday, April 07, 2008
Hectic Travel
I've made it to Umtata, South Africa, 3 hours northeast of Grahamstown along the N2, and home to the mission work of YASCer Jesse Zink, Jennie McConnachie and the African Medical Mission of Itipini founded by her and her late husband Chris in the early 80's. Jesse's phenomenal blog is linked on this blog. If Grahamstown was distinctly European, Umtata is distinctly African. To compare this region of South Africa, known as Transkei, to Uganda is delicate: Uganda, especially the north, has little infrastructure (dirt roads, spotty electricity), but village life, subsistence agriculture and tribal norms still flourish; Transkei has paved roads, stop lights, grocery stores, nearly every first-world amenity, yet substantial portions of the population live in crowded, filthy shanty-towns and ...well, I don't know how they provide for themselves.
But Umtata for me almost wasn't to be. I prefer to travel African style while in Africa, and that means taking the bus or taxi-bus in the town center that leaves whenever it fills up. African style travel is an asset when you prefer to let plans present themselves. Working against me that day was my cell phone, which parted ways sometime in Cape Town. Jesse was arriving in Umtata the same day from his vacation with his parents in Cape Town and knew I'd be arriving, but not when or how: today I'd be winging it.. Sunday morning I awoke, said good-bye to my hosts in Grahamstown, and walked with my bookbag and small duffle twenty minutes across the sleepy college campus and to the taxi-park on the edge of the township, whereupon I chatted up two men who were quite sure I'd have a hard time at finding a ride to Umtata today. The only way would be if I hitchhiked my way to East London or Kingwilliamstown, and connected from there. The guys couldn't have been nicer, as they found some discarded cardboard and began abbreviating my best bet in pen: K*W*T*, signs like I'd seen on the side of the road by countless coloureds and blacks, and not surprisingly no whites. Would you have turned back? I had a place to stay that night, and Monday could have worked, too.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Acceptable Loss
So no one worries, while in Cape Town my cell phone was stolen out of our rental car. I think a door was left unlocked (probably me) and we were thankful a cell phone and some loose change was all we lost. Apparently, Cape Town criminals don't appreciate Jack Johnson or Charles Mingus - clearly Matt and I still have work to do in our respective missions. I'll pick up a cheap cell phone soon (maybe tomorrow) and let everyone know what my new number is when I get to Uganda.
My time here in South Africa so far has been wonderful, and there's more still to come. I'm taking a bus from Grahamstown, where I am now, to Umtata to visit Jesse Zink (see his link on this blog) for a few days before finally flying home to Uganda.
Talk to you soon!
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Vacation in South Africa
Apparently my Ugandan visa expired back in November, but a little smoothe-talking in Entebbe paved the way. Fellow-YASCer and newly-ordained Episcopal priest Stephen Mazingo picked me up in Jo'burg, and drove me through the absoutely breathtaking a jaw-dropping beauty of the South African interior, especially the Free State. We arrived in Grahamstown at 10pm Monday of last week. Grahamstown is Chapel Hill, in short, except with a township and shanty town constantly visible in the distance. All of Monday amounted to culture shock. In Grahamstown, I enjoyed some western comforts and saw some beautiful natural sights. But the townships were always in the back of my mind, and to tour them and look down into town was, again in short, profound.
Sunday morning we finished our drive from Grahamstown to Cape Town and connected with my friend, Rev. Michael Lapsley with the Institute for the Healing of Memories, who pulled off a minor miracle by securing two tickets for Matt (fellow YASCer, based in Grahamstown) as guests of the Dean of the Cathedral for the Installation of Thabo Makgoba as the next Archbishop of the Province of Southern Africa. We must have made quite an impression, for as you can see we were front page material in the Cape Times the next day. The service was beautiful and extremely powerful. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu was among the three who laid hands during the installment, and President Thabo Mbeki was humble and statesmen-like in his official greeting. Archbishop Makgoba spoke eloquently and with humility about the role of the church, and I felt honored and purposefully led to be present there.
Yesterday we hiked to the top of Lion's Head, which immediately overlooks Cape Town and the bays on every side - breathtaking. Today we're going to Robbens Island, where Nelson Mandela, as well a long history of freedom fighters of all kinds, was kept prisoner for twenty years. Every day seems to strive to out-do the last, and I'm having a blast.
Thank you all for the chance to be here.
Talk to you soon!
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Substantive Quotes
I came across one of the biggies the other day:
I went to the wods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived....I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... -H.D. Thoreau
I do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is charity that hides a multitude of sins.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
My ACC Basketball Bracket
2008 ACC Mens Basketball Tournament | |||
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Printed: 3/12/2008 10:37:44 AM | |||
Pool: | ECM2008 | Bracket: | BracketChamp |
Pool Owner: | ps | Bracket Owner: | johncsimpson |
Victory Margin (point difference) = 6 |
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Dr. Rachael, Cow Whisperer
So... It's close to dusk at the compound one night about a month ago, and I'm taking a stroll around the grounds seeing who's where doing what. Specifically, I was coming to check on one of the cows. The day before, we (others, not me) noticed that she was bloated, with a painful amount of air trapped in one of her stomachs, and subsequently tried a variety of ways to release some of that air. The first involved force-feeding soapy water, with the hope of dissolving whatever was trapping the gas. As an emergency measure, we (again, others) tried what I can only describe as driving a rod through the side of the cow in an attempt to puncture the stomach. Interestingly enough to me, this plan failed because the stake coud not puncture the tough hide.
It's a nice Friday evening, dusk settling in, and around back of the main house, there's a crowd around our poor, sick Bessy (name changed to protect the bovine). As I arrived, the Bishop warned "Eh, watch your step! This is what was removed from the stomach, 5 kilos of caveras (plastic bags)." After I stepped gingerly aside, I saw Rachael's blood-soaked hands reaching into the cow's left side, scissors and needle in hand, and a ten-inch hole out of which came those five kilos of caveras. (This is an interesting problem arising from a collision of old world and new. Caveras, while partially-banned by the government, are now used so profusely, they cover the ground in many places. And a problem absent in the western world - plastic ingestion by livestock - has emerged here.)
I was first just amazed at how calm the cow seemed to be, tied by a short leash to a power pole and with someone's hand in her side. Ample squirts of lidocaine are sufficient to do the trick here. Unfortunately, the needle available was not sufficient, being unable to pierce the tough rawhide (yee-haw), and Rachael caught a boda boda to town for something stronger. When she returned, having cleared the affected stomach of caveras and closed the succeeding layers of tissue, she began stitching the leather.
It was tough going, with each stitch requiring both hands and a lot of leverage, and she often had to rest as her hands tired. But she did it...well, almost. If you look below, you may notice the very last (bottom) stitch as the handiwork of yours truly. Now, I know what you're thinking, "How does he manage it all? Mission work, guitar playing, bovine surgery." I owe some of it to my extensive training, and my Leatherwork merit badge.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
A Night On The Town
First a rundown of an afternoon in town: From the office, Rachael and I caught a ride to town in Care, Int'ls sporty Subaru sedan. This is real style in Gulu, somehow better than the LandRovers and Toyota trucks everyone's used to. After stopping by the ATM, we took a quarter-pint of vanilla ice cream ($1), both the best and worst bargain in Gulu. Then, since I hadn't eaten lunch (at 4pm) we went to an Indian-run restaurant called KPS where I had a delicious plate of chicken and chips/fries ($2). Rachael took a boda home, and I picked up a chocolate doughnut($.35) I'd seen in the bakery window and headed over to Kope Cafe, the local 'muzungu' dive where I'm always likely to see a familiar face. Daniel, an Acholi friend and co-worker, was meeting me there at 7 for a night on the town.
I'm not sure if word has reached Gulu concerning exactly what defines a 'doughnut', but this was definitely just a dinner roll lovingly coated in very dark, bitter chocolate. Ok, I didn't really complain. Daniel rolled up about 6:30 and we headed out
So we're riding on his Yamaha DT motorbike, on our way to his house so he can change. Along the backstreets near his house, two goats enter the road. The first is a good judge of speed and briskly crosses. The second, like my sister driving, waits until we're almost upon him before sprinting. He doesn't make it across. We hit him (or her?), the wheel turns to the left, we're thrown to the right, me on top of Daniel, on the rocky dirt road now filled with amazed onlookers (not only is a muzungu passing through, on a DT - not a boda, but they just hit a goat and were thrown off). Fortunately, everything was fine, including the bike, the goat, and the passengers. We dusted ourselves off and headed to the show.
Across from Pece (peche) Stadium is a 5-story hotel, whose guests can presumably take in a free soccer match the one or two times a year a pro or semi-pro match may be played here. The first floor is all entertainment tonight. On the patio outside, by the street, a reggae band of unknown name or origin entertained a modest crowd of forty or fifty locals with hits from Bob Marley and Lucky Dube, with dancers in front and requests from the crowd (including Daniel's). The lead guitarist, dressed in Clark Kent's trousers, button-down shirt and tie, was clearly outclassing his mates. Very smooth, complicated licks he was playing while gazing off somewhere, like this was just what he did. His face didn't for a moment belie the music his hands were making.
So, that's a night in Gulu. Often the same, never ordinary.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Remembering Omarra
Our Monday at the office was cruising to a close. About 3pm, it was hot out. I was going between MS Hearts (the card game) and MS Word (the grant proposal). Rachael was at the computer next to me looking on the computer for dress designs she could make herself. "You know, if I make one I'll have to make three, don't you think? One for my Ph.D. (laughs), one for Omarra's graduation and one for his wedding." "Sure" I respond, "might as well make one for his Inauguration Ceromony as well." "Good idea!" It's always been clear that Rachael's drive to graduate from university, start lecturing and work at the diocese, and to apply to grad schools in America, was to give a better life to Omarra, her son, just a year old (pics and video from Sept.).
The compound is also a sort of free-range farm: cows, chickens, pigs, goats, guinea fowl. Omarra woke from his afternoon nap and walked outside, past the women doing chores and passing time in the kitchen. He found the bathtub by the pig pens, which served as the water trough for the animals, and fell in. It couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes before anyone began to wonder where he was, but that apparently was more than enough.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Encounters with Merton (updated)
- Merton on the bus home...
- Dealing with solitude...
- On Merton and dealing with Goals and Methods in the logical framework...
After saying goodbye to Jesse and Matt and boarding the bus to Gulu, numbed by the din of Kampala's incessant buzz and baked in dust, smoke and scorching sun, I managed to finish Henri Nowen's Encounters with Merton, which I had been picking at for the better part of a month.
Merton was a trappist monk who focused his monastic life on solitude and living the contemplative life, and his writings have been a great complement to my missionary life here, recently. Solitude, as Matt and Jesse were able to affirm in our conversations, can be a new, imposing and strange fact of life for missionaries. Quite unexpectedly, I've found more encounters with solitude here than in any other time in my life, and learning how to live in that has been a real challenge. I think most westerners are uncomfortable with solitude (not just being alone, but alone with oneself, i.e. with the TV off), and especially solitude by circumstance and not by choice. It's often in the evening when others are eating with their families, or Saturdays and holidays, mornings and afternoons while waiting for evening plans.
One of Merton's important sights to me was that God speaks when we are silent, that my mind does not need to spin in order gain from or enjoy my solitude. And ultimately, that it is not a gift meant solely for our own spiritual growth, but like so many gifts of God, given so we may better listen and show compassion to those around us, especially those that normally confuse and anger us.
The last chapter of Encounters, the one read on the heavily listing bus as the sun was setting, focused on Merton's study of Eastern teachings and what they point to in our own Christian tradition. Inevitably I'll fail in conveying the full meaning of Merton's and Chuang Tzu's writings, but let me give a couple illustration.
1) I had a long conversation with an American friend and aid worker here. At length we covered the many and complex challenges facing Northern Uganda. In rhetorical desparation she asked, "So what's the answer? How do we fix this?"
The more one seeks "the good" outside oneself as something to be acquired, the more one is faced with the necessity of discussing, studying, understanding, analyzing the nature of good. The more, therefore, one becomes involved in abstractions and in the confusion of divergent opnions. The more "the good" is objectively analyzed, the more it is treated as something to be attained by special virtuous techniques, the less real it becomes (...) until finally the mere study of the means becomes so demanding that all one's effort must be concentrated on this, and the end is forgotten... This is, in fact, nothing but organized despire..."
- Merton in The way of Chuang Tzu, 23
If you ask 'what ought to be done' and 'what ought not to be done' on earth to produce happiness, I answer that these questions do not have [a fixed and predetermined] answer" to suite every case. If one is in harmony with Tao - the cosmic Tao, "Great Tao" - the answer will make itself clear when the times comes to act, for then one will act not according to the human and conscious mode of deliberation, but to the divine and spontaneous mode of wu wei, which is the mode of action of Tao itself, and is therefore the source of all good.-Merton in The Way of Chuang Tzu, 24
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Home For The Holidays
Let's recap the highlights: The first night we spent in Kampala, hosted by the Bishop's son, Rev. Ali. His new house has a breathtaking view a Lake Victoria valley. The conversation was a breath of fresh air, reflections on common experiences, stories from our training in New York City, like a couple of veterans on R &R. We were giddy (if I may be so bold to attribute this word to them on their behalf) with being together again, traveling, adventuring, with no agenda but fun.
The view from our room the first night. Lake Victoria is under the mist on the left.
History seemed to follow us wherever we went. On Sunday, we met the children and grandchild of the first Bishop of Northern Uganda, who served during the mid fifties and early sixties. Over lunch, Jesse and Matt were brought up to speed on the recent history of the Acholi people. The next day we marched with Bishop Nelson and religious leaders of all faiths for continued peace in the region. Later that night, we rang in the New Year at Acholi Inn. Among the four to five hundred people present, the muzungus you see below (preparing to march for peace) were the first to break the ice on the dance floor, soon followed by several children, and later by several hundred Acholi. It was a big night. And don't worry, we were up the next morning early enough to phone loved ones at home as the New Year reached them.
Despite big plans for Tuesday - renting motorcycles to spend the night by the Nile's Karuma Falls - the terrible violence in Kenya and its ripple effect through East Africa meant gas stations were out of petrol. We would have to kick it local for a few days. We created our own agenda: rediscovered the homespun pleasure of pirated country music videos, explored the market (where donated clothing from home is resold), had a rare and amazing swim and poolside afternoon at Acholi Inn, and ended with a delicious meal.
Late Tuesday night, while reading news from Kenya, we realized one of our fellow YASCers whom we didn't get to meet at training is actually living in the heart of violence, 20 miles from Kisumu, where the infamous church-burning happened. Her blog reports she's very safe in a hospital compound. Please keep her and peace among Kenyans in your prayers.
I just got a call from Jesse and Matt. Their safari was as amazing as it was full of hijinx and mishaps. They've called me out to join them in Kampala for a few days to see the Ssese Islands. We'll see what happens...