T.I.A.

(This Is Africa)

And I really don't want to leave. I miss everyone so, so much, and I feel like I've missed out on a ton these past few months. But being here is such a wonderful opportunity to do what I love... write stories, go look into that grassroots effort to save chimpanzees and improve a village's economy, help get this online newspaper off the ground and become more professional, go places like the DRC or Sudan and find out what's REALLY happening there... I don't know. I feel like I'm leaving too soon, before I can get everything out of this experience.

Memphis and the Third World

Someone reminded me of an issue I’ve been trying to reconcile for a long time, especially since I’ve been here: the poverty in my own society — my own neighborhood, no less.

Memphis is stinted by poverty; that is no secret. That, coupled with the poor public education system, the high dropout rates, teenage pregnancy rates, infant mortality rates, and violent crime rates (not to mention countless other depressing statistics), paints a picture not so pretty. And in some ways, not so different from Uganda or Rwanda.

The poverty on this continent is obviously more shocking, more heart-wrenching to witness. People with literally no food and no way to get it. People whose limbs are thin enough to break with one hand, and weak enough that they can only sit on the side of the road holding a hand out for money. People who have to crawl to get anywhere, either because they lost their legs in war or genocide or to harrowing diseases like elephantisis, or their feeble limbs simply have no strength to bear their weight. People whose entire families were murdered, and they grew up with no options, no aspirations other than survival.

But those are the poorest of the poor. One rung up, countless families consist of an older sibling caring for his fellow orphaned siblings, each member struggling to string a life together while still trying to go to school. Primary education is free, but beyond that, it costs a pretty penny. So most people stop going to school after primary. Most houses are mud huts; most beds are mats on the floor; to most, electricity and water are luxuries of the rich. Hunger reaches beyond the homeless. Malaria, and various other diseases, infects far more than just the lowest rung. If a child makes it to her fifth birthday, it is cause for real celebration. Malnutrition is simply a fact of life, as is danger… Fear is a daily occurrence, unless they’ve just become numb to the feeling. Elections bring violence; power goes to whoever has the most ammunition. Men have absolute power over women, and adults over children. Few exceptions to the rule.

The poverty in the developing world is crushing; it’s a death sentence, much worse than a hard way of life. But in some ways, sometimes, I think I’d rather be poor in Uganda than in Tennessee.

An orphan in Rwanda goes to his cousin, his aunt — hell, his third cousin twice-removed — when he needs school fees. He either works as a houseboy in his benefactor’s home, or the fees are paid (begrudgingly, usually) without strings attached. The generous aunt or cousin hopes that the kid will use his education to get a good job, and never have to come asking for money again. Since I’ve been here, I’ve met countless families housing their distant relatives, paying their way through school. It is a norm here.

But back home, I feel like that would almost never happen. Our highly individualistic culture seems to isolate the poor, the homeless, strangling them, leaving them with no way to escape their plight. They are usually addicted to drugs, slave to their cravings. Many are mentally ill. Not that those aren’t stereotypes about the homeless here, but it seems a much harder burden to bear utterly alone. And we blame them for their condition; it’s America, the land of opportunity. The rich are rich because they made themselves that way; the poor are poor because they did something wrong… right?

We don’t recognize that opportunities are lavished upon the already rich, not so often upon those without immediate privileges. All too often, I feel the poor don’t really have a chance — they can’t pull themselves up by the bootstraps if they don’t have boots, after all. Here in Africa, at least, poverty is recognized as a problem of society as a whole.

Bottom line: Memphis, with its embarrassing rates of children dying needlessly, of women having babies before they can legally consent to sex, of kids dropping out of school and falling into gangs and violence as an alternative, of men abusing women, of people judging others by the color of their skin, seems to me a Third World microcosm within our First World.

Someone told me today that he pays for his cousin’s school fees because “it’s morally right to save them.” I recognize now how lucky I have been in my life… I’ve had the world at my feet. Most people don’t, for no other reason than bad luck. I don’t know how to rectify that injustice, but I do feel the need to do SOMETHING. Both in Memphis and in a wider scope.

Rwanda Part 2: Gorillas!... Then Back to Uganda

Long, long story short, I got to go gorilla trekking, only because a woman at the tourism office took pity on me and let me stay in her house, eat her food, and get a ride to the park for free. It was incredible. The hike there wasn’t bad either, only an hour, but it was fraught with stinging nettles – nasty and painful plants everywhere on the volcanoes. We spent exactly one hour with the Umubano, meaning friendship, group of gorillas: one silverback, a couple adolescent males, a couple females, and two five month old babies!! What was amazing was not how human they looked, that I already knew, but how human they acted. Small gestures and interactions between the gorillas were just like those in a human family… just with a few more wives and a LOT more hair.

I went back to Kampala afterwards, planning on going hiking or to one of the various game parks in Uganda (the fact that my wallet had been stolen kept slipping my mind).

But I ended up just staying in a hostel there for four nights. I was, I admit, a bit reluctant to go back to less-developed Gulu, especially as I was so enjoying the company I met in Kampala.

I talked to a soldier in the Indian battalion of the UN mission in the DRC, who told me that the conflict there will never end until the nation’s mineral stores are depleted, and that the UN soldiers are essentially useless with such a weak mandate. An international photojournalist who had just been to the Congo and is now headed to Southern Sudan. He also told me journalism school was useless, which was a bit disheartening. I met a Dutch woman working as a counselor for HIV patients, a European musician who volunteered in a grassroots campaign to save chimpanzees in an unprotected area of Uganda (the #1 place in the world he wanted to visit was Nashville, TN!), a preacher who had the humility to say that missionaries and humanitarian workers in general often go about helping developing countries in unhelpful ways, and two guys my age who were traveling and making a video about the on-the-ground effects of NGO’s and missionary work.

Africa turns out to be a great place to meet very cool non-Africans. Interesting…

Back to Rwanda Part 1: Camera and Aftermath

So everyone left me for the States or Kilimanjaro or somewhere... but Lily Kruglak, her dad and I got a ride with Stefanie and Apollon back to Rwanda. God, I love them. Best academic directors ever, to use my overused phrase of this semester: "Ahh, this is the best/my favorite/any other superlative (insert object/person/place) ever!!!"

The morning after we got to Kigali, I went to town to get ready for gorilla tracking. I needed a gorilla permit in the first place, then a bus ticket and a camera. I headed for the camera first, thinking that would be the easiest thing to find.

If you want something Western, and it exists anywhere in Kigali, Nakumatt Supermarket is the place to find it. That was my first stop. But the only decent camera I found there was 250,000Rwf, about $500... and it was not worth that much. Used to Uganda's constant bargaining, I asked for a reduced price, but the saleswoman was pretty stubborn. So I walked around the store moping until some random guy found me and asked if I had been to this other store to look for cameras. I couldn't pronounce the store's name, much less find it in the huge city, so he offered to take me there himself.

Well, that store had moved or disappeared, and we ended up hitting about 6 stores looking for a camera and matching USB cord. Finally found a nicer camera than the one in Nakumatt, for less than half the price! But it was unbelievably complicated; you have to test the camera, the battery, the memory card, and the USB cord before you can buy a camera... it took around four hours. And the random guy hung around to help me the entire time.

Next morning the so-called nice guy (his name was Venuste) stole my wallet. We were having coffee, having a grand old time, about to leave, then I turned for a second to pack my backpack. He nabbed my wallet and disappeared. My wallet with my gorilla permit, all my money, my debit card, and my phone.

Murchison Falls

We were finished with our research and presentations, so we headed to Murchison Falls National Park – our last hoorah with SIT before everyone left from Kampala. But, of course, Africa couldn’t let us go without one more adventure together!

We arrived to the park (according to Lonely Planet, the “best all-rounder” in the country) in a school bus that magically fit all 23 of us and our luggage. We hopped out of the bus and into a boat for a safari cruise.

Our little boat cruise was great - tons of hippos, the occasional crocodile, and distant elephants. We had our very own crate of Nile Special on board, too, drinking Nile on the Nile! It rained… maybe downpoured is a better word… for a while, but soon cleared up, and stayed clear for the rest of the ride. Thank God; it would have been a pity to miss the beautiful waterfall that gave the park its name!

We got back in the bus to go to the hotel afterwards. We were staying in some place outside the park, and we were in a hurry to get there before dark. Apparently there was an accident on one road, so we took an alternate route, which I guess was… shitty.

We got stuck in the mud in the park with our 2-wheel drive bus. The weight of all 23 of us and our luggage pretty much ensured that we wouldn’t be getting out any time soon, as did the wheels spinning deeper into a rut in the once dirt, now mud, road. So, William, our academic director, (what a fantastic guy!) said, “Girl power!” and suggested all the girls get out and push the bus. Which we did, barefoot in the mud. As he sat chuckling inside the bus.

Our efforts only succeeded in nearly tipping the bus over in a deeper rut on the side of the road. It was dusk by this point, and William insisted that we get back in the bus. We were a little skeptical – if we got inside, we were sure the bus would completely flip – but obeyed when he told us why he was so insistent. Lions, of course.

Recap: we’re stuck in the mud in the middle of a national park in Uganda; our bus is at a 30-degree angle with the ground, and lions are coming (they never actually came, by the way). And to make the situation better, we keep the engine on and running to “scare off the animals.” Even if someone did come to tow us out, we’d run out of gas before we could go anywhere.

Fortunately, William made some calls and found us a place to stay inside the park. A van came to rescue us at about, oh, 9:00? Not sure. But the only food we had gotten since breakfast – unless you count the Niles – was some cabbage and a piece of bread or two. Maybe a banana or hard-boiled egg. So, needless to say, we were all pretty hungry… and William said there was no food at this mysterious "student housing" where we were staying.

We got to the student housing, which wasn’t half bad if you avoided the latrine, and waited. William said he was going to get us food (and me a first aid kit because, of course, I had sliced my toe open trying to push the bus). But he didn’t, so we just went to bed.

Next morning, around nine: About an hour after we woke up, this monstrous tow truck thing showed up to take us to get food and our stranded bus. By the way, it had rained buckets all night, and we were terrified about finding the bus, and all our luggage, drowned and ruined. And according to the original plan, we were supposed to start a game drive at seven am.

We each got a juice box and one piece of chapatti for breakfast… chapatti has never tasted so good!... and headed down the muddy road. Our things weren’t destroyed, but the bus did smell like stale beer and rotten eggs, which was lovely. And it was covered in mud from the adventures the day before. But we were excited – we were going on a safari! Better late than never!

30 minutes after we began driving through the park, we left the park. We had seen one giraffe and maybe 3 buffalo. A warthog or two, perhaps. That was the end of our “game drive” because, according to William, the roads were going to get worse.

People were pretty upset. To say less than the least. But Rachel Gillete came to the rescue and got William to organize an evening game drive for a max of 12 people, for only $10 each.

We got a real safari truck and guide and everything, which made it better than our first game drive before we even began. But the drive itself didn't disappoint. Especially with the giraffes – they were everywhere! And little warthog families, and beautiful species of deer with twisty horns or straight horns or long, moose-like faces; all of it was incredible. We even got stopped by an angry elephant (though we couldn’t see him) who wouldn’t get out of the road when we were trying to leave the park!

Oh yeah, getting out of the park is another story. Apparently the park permits last exactly 24 hours, and ours had expired. We owed $300 more than we thought we had to pay. When we told them that we didn’t have the money and our director thought the permits were still valid, the park ranger got very defensive, accusing William of purposefully not coming with us because he knew this would happen.

So, after a lot of convincing on Rachel Gillette’s part, our knight in not-so-shining armor, William, came to get us out of our scrape. Actually, the whole rest of the group showed up in the van, like they were coming to bust us out… We were ready to run, too (maybe not me; I had fallen asleep in the safari truck). Lewie was suggesting that we all run into the park, find some lions and get eaten, so they’d be liable for the loss and feel really guilty. Later he revised that brilliant plan, saying that we just threaten to do that, to scare them into not making us pay. But eventually throwing ourselves to the lions was unnecessary. We got to leave the park, no fees required.


Success! And then to Kampala.

Changing Perspectives

It's so bizarre to think what is normal to me now!!
looking out my window to a see a woman carrying an insane amount of fruit on her head,
walking to the bathroom and finding hundreds of white ants on the ground and thinking nothing of it,
thinking nothing of the fact that there's no water... or electricity,
lugging a heavy jerry can of water to the bathroom to take a shower,
and having to go back down again because there's no bucket in the bathroom for the shower,
getting giddy over finding real ketchup or cheese,
smiling and saying, "yes" in a thank-you kind of way when your mom says you're "increasing" every day,
waiting for hours for a bowl of yogurt and granola,
walking past hunks of raw meat, raw fish, and live chickens on the street by the market,
waving at child after child after child who yells, "BYEEEEEEEEEEEE MUNO!" when you walk by,
refusing man after man who asks if you need a motorcycle ride somewhere or if you'll give him your number,
thinking something is outrageously expensive if it's more than 5,000 shillings ($2.50),
seeing children with distended bellies and flaky scalps,
seeing men with missing limbs and no one taking a second glance,
watching a tower of smoke rise from a massive pile of burning trash,
and pulling a mosquito net over your head before you go to sleep.

...I think the only thing more bizarre is what will be strange when I go home:
SHORT SHORTS. or skirts, or dresses,
stop signs and traffic lights,
people who don't acknowledge your presence when you walk by on the street,
people who think you have to be under 120 lbs to be beautiful,
air conditioning,
microwaves, stoves, toasters, refridgerators, freezers,
movie theaters,
department stores... and everything in them,
makeup and going-out clothes. and heels!,
just about anything quick and efficient,
meat that doesn't look like the animal it comes from,
wallpaper,
everyone I miss and love having experienced so many things without me these past few months,
and everyone asking me questions about this semester... I don't know how to explain it all!