Dancing by Candlelight

Dancing by Candlelight

Power went out just after we finished cooking dinner – spiced tomato & bean sauce still simmering, along with rice, cassava, and a side of bitter peas (I think they’re unique to East Africa). It being a Friday night, Catherine (my housemate) and I had intended to take a beer after dinner and unwind with a movie (I had Almodóvar’s All About My Mother in mind). But there’s no substitute for spontaneity. We lit up two candles, polished off the food and cleaned the dishes, not wanting to leave them for tomorrow morning since we have to be at the office by 8am (on a Saturday!).

Then out they came with my iPod, freshly loaded with Ugandan dance music, which I got from a burned mp3 CD bootlegged in central Kampala. The “luxury comfort item” I packed for Uganda were my rechargeable, portable iPod speakers, and they made a brilliant showing tonight. With the two candles still burning on the counter, I took a Nile Special Beer from the (now warming) fridge, and got down to “shakin’ ” it on the kitchen floor.

Catherine has one of the most outgoing and entertaining personalities that I’ve ever befriended. Earlier in the evening, she was modeling a Massai dress, singing mélanges from Phantom of the Opera in an impressive soprano, and telling stories of her days playing drums in a band with her brothers. And now she was teaching me how to break it down with African dance moves – specifically this slow hip swivel that’s all the rage in Congo.


Poison control shenanigans

This afternoon, my boss’s 2.5-year-old daughter got really sick and had to go to the neighborhood clinic. The simple blood tests didn’t turn up anything wrong, but she continued to experience severe lethargy, pain around the eyes, and vomiting. My boss suspected it was poisoning from the new toothpaste she’d started using the day before, since it was supposed to be for children 6 and up. As the situation was unfolding in the office, I remembered that I’d come across a US Poison Control Hotline during some of my environmental impact assessment research. So my boss passed me his phone, which was loaded with airtime credit, and I made the call. I figured my American accent would make things easy, but they asked for my home address, and sounded quite skeptical when I said I was calling from Iowa. I also tripped up by saying “she last took the toothpaste this morning, about 7 hours ago,” when the time difference meant that “7 hours ago” would have been midnight. Anyway, I got the advice and reassurance we needed, I instructed them to feed her some milk to neutralize her stomach, and sure enough, she was fine by the end of the day.


I wish I could capture more moments like this here. So much of my time here has been unexpected, so as to disrupt my normal modes of (a) planning for, (b) living, then (c) processing experiences. This blog has suffered partially from my preoccupation with my job. Scarce internet doesn’t help. But I’ve found it fundamentally difficult to relate stories from Uganda the same way I would from the US. I could now pretentiously claim that I’ve become zen with “living in the moment,” but that disregards all the fuzzy & disorienting emotions of culture-shock. I still can’t say I feel in control of my life here, as much as I’ve turned to my handheld personal planner and set goals for my work and personal development. Rather, I’ve been “swept up,” for better or for worse, with the demands of the surrounding community.

A friend I've made

How do I go about recounting how certain individuals here have drastically altered my worldview … and self-view?

There’s been a surreal element to so many of the conversations that I have with people here. I alluded in a previous entry about befriending a guy who is now a journalist for the Uganda TV broadcasting company, who also does freelance work making a documentary about the company I’m working for. Before I go on, I want to preface that I cannot come close to doing justice to describing this man’s character. I got to know Vincent (name changed for privacy’s sake) during a three-day trip to Western Uganda, along with my boss and another coworker. On the drive over, my boss joked about the intense challenges Vincent has faced during his lifetime, and if it wasn’t for him, Uganda would not be experiencing the unprecedented unity and stability that President Museveni has brought since 1986. Laughing and joking is such a robust emotional tool in Uganda. I got the idea that Vincent had serious stories to tell, but cloaked in the jovial banter in the car, there was no possibility of diving in of his experience as a child soldier.

Let me also remark that Vincent is the guy I mentioned previously who has diabetes and jogs for two hours a day to avoid premature death … and who enjoys a stout Guinness at the end of the day but takes it knowing he’ll run an extra hour the next morning. And for someone getting to know this guy, it seems he’s an exemplary self-made man, having financed himself to take a journalism course in the Netherlands, then come back to start a career in a tough field. He’s also got a wife and two daughters. On the final night of the trip, my boss (who usually is the social epicenter) was off for a meeting as we were taking beers. Realizing I had the most outgoing personality of the three of us, I decided to venture into conversation with the delicate question, “What were your aspirations when you were young, before the war? Did you know you wanted to go into journalism?” Maybe Vincent had gained respect for my active listening throughout the trip, and maybe he saw my genuine (and naive) curiosity of his childhood experience.

For whatever reason, he disregarded my specific question and began the story of how he became a child soldier resisting Milton Obote’s reign of terror and bringing President Museveni into power. In a matter-of-fact way, he told how there was absolutely no choice for the children in the village – their families were being robbed and their women raped by Obote’s army that every able man and boy (and some girls) had to resort to guerilla tactics from “the bush,” i.e. the dense, sub-tropical forest that covers much of Uganda. He was eleven, and left the bush when he was fourteen.

As punishment for his resistance, Obote’s army put his mother in prison, where she faced overcrowded, squalid, and malnourished captivity. But life in the bush was altogether different. They would begin each day at 4 A.M., so the morning dew would mask their tracks leaving their campsite. Fires at any time would draw attention, so they did their best to subsist on raw grains and what fruits and vegetables they could find. During times in unfertile areas, he even had to eat part of his leather shoe. Weapons and ammunition scarcity was as important as food. For surprise attacks on a group of fifteen of Obote’s soldiers, a group of eight child soldiers would have to scream and yell to seem like they were twenty so the soldiers would run away leaving their weapons. If the operation wasn’t successful … the kids would never reach their teenage years.

Toward the end of Obote’s rein, he announced amnesty to all child soldiers if they returned to the village. After nearly three years of horror in the bush, many children, including Vincent, risked going back. It was indeed a ploy, with reports of Obote’s soldiers massacring those kids who came back – setting fire to plastic jugs and letting drips of molten plastic eat through the children’s skin. With the Obote’s army soon to come, Vincent escaped with one other, layered between potato sacks in a heap on the back of a truck, with limited air and no ability to move for eight hours. He stayed with an uncle until Museveni came to power later that year, ultimately bringing peace.

As for veterans’ benefits, much was promised and nothing fulfilled. Most veterans are uneducated and unemployed in the villages, contributing to soaring alcoholism rates. They span all regions of Uganda and tribal groups. I asked if Vincent ever shared his stories with other veterans, seeking solidarity. But Vincent has created a new life with education, career, and family – leaving those three years in a distant past. It was a call to duty in which he had no reasonable choice but to serve. I get the sense that his sharing stories wasn’t cathartic at all, rather an unemotional retrospective, delivered to someone clearly wishing to develop perspective on Uganda. And re-telling this story does not adequately honor what I have learned. Now that I have a human face and friend attached to the atrocities of political unrest and war, as well as a vision of hope for a survivor, I hope to channel it into mission to serve humanity in what capacity I can.



I wrote this entry more than a week ago, but I’m just now getting a chance to post it. My work here is still providing fascinating experiences … which I hope to relate one way or another. I should be giving this blog a little more love – while still allowing myself to get swept up with opportunity here.