I found a spot in the parking lot and walked in. I stood there for a second, gawking at the enormity of it all, and walked back outside to get a shopping cart. I had forgotten how it all worked.
Up and down the aisle I strode with my cart. Slightly shaking. Confused. Lost. I stopped at the check-out lines with my still empty cart just to observe. All the people knew what they were doing. They knew the rules. I remained still. Staring.
Finally, a person in a blue vest asked, “Can I help you?” How did he know? And what a relief! A puppy lost in this vast world, I welcomed my rescuer. I had felt so alone…and more fearful than awe-struck.
I returned home on Monday, May 5th and have found the re-adjustment to life in Tennessee exhausting. You’d think returning to familiarity would be easy, especially since I wasn’t gone for too long, but, coming from over two months of walking everywhere, having minimal luxuries, and living simply, America is overwhelming.
My brother graduated from the University of Tennessee my first weekend back, so I was sent to Sam’s Club to pick up his cake…by myself. I thought I could handle it, but going alone to a warehouse-size Wal-Mart just five days after returning from Uganda was frightening. Nothing I have written is an exaggeration.
Yes, I went to supermarkets in the capital that resembled Food City and Shoprite with their shopping carts, check-out lines, and uniformed employees, but for the majority of my trip, I lived in Gulu, whose supermarkets consist of three or four aisles of shelves containing dusty cookie boxes, rat-bitten snack bags, and tacky plastic novelty gifts. We bought our groceries at the open market instead.
So am I happy to be back? Of course. Landing in Knoxville to find my family and a dozen of my friends waiting at the airport explains it all. It really is overwhelming, though. Readjusting to daily routine, returning after two months of tremendous personal growth and transformation, having to smile and tell people what they want to hear when they ask, “Did you have an amazing time?” “What was your favorite part?” “If you could sum it up in one word, what would it be?”
The truth is, I can’t sum it up. Those who really want to know will listen as I ramble on and on about everything. Others will take that one word, pat me on the back and say, “Well, I’m happy to see you’ve come home alive.”
I’ve been home for two weeks and have only now found the time to write my last update.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
During school inspections several weeks ago, George, a teacher trainer in Gulu, helped guide me on my first day of official business for the Ministry of Education. Since that day, he’d wanted to have me over for lunch or dinner, so Ben and I joined him for lunch on Tuesday. (I never pass up an opportunity for home-cooked traditional food.)
We drank our sodas inside and moved the table and chairs outside when George’s wife brought out the lunch. The shade of the mango tree kept us cool as we devoured the rice, posho, and tender meat. A light breeze often came and went, seemingly with the children who flew by us, laughing as they played.
We held our final HEALS art session in the afternoon and said our good-byes to our good friends there. The boys we had been working with for the past few weeks kept quiet. They knew the reality: we were leaving, but we had become so attached to each other. They became my little brothers, and though I’m not sure how they viewed us girls, they certainly acknowledged Ben as their big brother. Without question.
That’s what I love about this work. Connecting with people. And really, that’s what it’s all about.
To see beyond nationality and skin color, to see beyond who has what and who doesn’t, to see beyond need and obligation and just connect on a human level.
I hate that we had to leave, though, for our sake and theirs. To have worked so hard at building up trust and breaking down tension and leaving right when we were comfortable with each other. I’m sure these kids have seen a lot of that. People who help, pour out their hearts, and turn around and go home. Year after year, coming and going. I don’t particularly like that we had to do it, but we didn’t have a choice. My family needed me home.
That evening, we called up some of our boda boda driver friends and invited them to join us for a concert. Yes, you read that correctly. We had boda driver friends. You see, Gulu Town is small, so it is often that you hop on a boda with a driver you’ve had before, allowing you to figure out who are the safe drivers and who are the reckless ones.
They met us in town with their bodas and took us to the concert: a peace concert sponsored by War Child Holland, which advertised the event by parading through town with banners and instruments earlier that day.
The concert itself wasn’t spectacular, but the idea was, and the fact that so many people came for an event that promoted peace and peaceful thinking was a step in the right direction.
I stayed up late that night packing because Lindsay, Holly, and I were to be out of town the next day, and all four of us were leaving for Kampala on Thursday. Despite that one night back in March when I found a cockroach in my bathroom, I had typically been lucky when it came to finding creepy crawlers in my room. Usually, I had the ants and geckos, moths and centipedes, but Tuesday night…shiver…las cucarachas had a fiesta in my room.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Lindsay, Holly, and I woke up at 5:00 AM and waited for a half hour for our friends Tom and Apolo—British brothers with Ugandan parents—to pick us up. The sun hadn’t yet risen, and the electricity wasn’t working, so we sat…in the dark…waiting.
Good news is, though, that the boys’ parents own Country Bakeries, a chain of bakeries in northern Uganda with the most delicious breads and baked goods. They brought us chocolate muffins, cookies, and fresh bread to make up for their getting lost.
They picked us up, and we were off in the mysterious darkness of the early morning to Paraa, western Uganda and home to Uganda’s wildlife. In the two hours it took to drive to this part of the country, I watched the sky fade from midnight blue to soft pink to silent grey—my favorite.
We made a pit stop outside the park’s entrance, allowing me to discover the giant stripe of dirt extending from my right shoulder to my left hip. It was 7:30 in the morning, I hadn’t yet entered the game reserve, and already I was filthy. (Dirty seatbelts.) The boys teased me, but I embraced the dirt. I looked more rugged ;)
The adventure began. Though we’d been awake for several hours at this point, many of the animals had just woken up. The heavy grey sky complimented their sleepy eyelids, but as the hours passed, the animals became livelier. Well, except for the water buffalo. They sat lazily in a giant puddle, unfazed by the mud caked onto their slick hairdos.
We saw warthogs looking mischievous, a number of giraffes in the distance, and every kind of deer you can think of. Elephants are my favorite, though, so I had been praying that we’d come across at least one.
After quite a while of seeing nothing but trees, grasses, and more deer, I saw them. Nine or ten of them. They were so far away, but I didn’t mind. I made our driver stop the car, and I stood up through the sun roof, and just watched them. Beautiful.
I finally got back in the car and we continued our journey to the Nile River. Just as we made it around the bend, we found another elephant. He was eating and hid so well in the bush that only his head and injured trunk were visible. But he was huge!
When he spotted our vehicle, he raced out of the bush and onto the road, where he extended his ears, threw back his trunk, and roared at us. He prepared to charge our car, and we were ready to speed off, but we couldn’t. Tom was hanging out the back of the car to get his once-in-a-lifetime video shot of this elephant, which really could have been his once-in-a-lifetime shot because that elephant was angry. If we sped off, Tom would have tumbled right out of the car.
He finally came to his senses and closed the back door before the elephant made any moves, and we escaped to the Nile, where we found a hippo walk nonchalantly out of the water, onto the bank, past our car and the people just feet away from him. Hippos, mind you, are some of the most dangerous creatures in the world. And here this guy was, just hanging out, oblivious to the onlookers around him who shook as they frantically took their pictures and walked speedily to safety before the hippo realized where he was.
On the ride back to Gulu, it really hit me that my time in Uganda was coming to an end. I was leaving for Kampala the next day—leaving Goddy and Stella and their famous tea and scrambled eggs…leaving Ali, our waiter friend who was often too cool to show us how much he cared about us even though we knew all along…leaving Robinson and our discussions on language barriers…leaving Filder at her tailor shop…leaving the children who either run towards us smiling or run away from us screaming…leaving the boys at HEALS…leaving Lucky…leaving Sandy…leaving dirty feet and cold showers…the sweet flowers and lush fruit…the smiles and muno calls…leaving the mango trees and roaming cows and moaning goats and tone-deaf roosters and pouring rain and cool breezes and soft sunrises and skies that will take your breath away. I was leaving everything I had grown to love about Gulu.
You know the musical interlude in movies? It’s usually on a road, and the camera zooms in on the main character who gazes out the window. She doesn’t speak, but the music tells you exactly what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling.
With the exception of the driver and me, everyone in the car had fallen asleep. I, however, was fully engaged in the musical interlude of my stay in Uganda. I had on my headphones and pressed my forehead against the window, emotions raging inside of me. It was already early evening, but people were still hard at work. We passed the huts and overloaded bicycles and sugar cane stands and beautiful families and people who have seen too much and people who deserve to see good…and I started to cry. Leaving Gulu at this point in my life was as if a drought came and destroyed the green fruit that were just now turning yellow on the giant mango trees that have stood firmly for over 21 years, watching, listening, observing. Speechless.
And I…I am speechless.
May 1, 2008
We said our sad goodbyes to a genuinely distraught Stella and an unusually serious Goddy, and boarded the bus to Kampala. Arriving seven hours later brought a whirlwind of events and emotions. Frustration from the moment we pulled into the taxi park.
Holly fell through the floor board of the bus, taxi drivers swarmed around us, no one could understand us, people harassed us, and finally, when we’d reached Dick’s house in Kisaasi, the electricity went out.
May 2, 2008
The mosquito net didn’t exactly fit my bed, so I woke up to find my face and feet pressed uncomfortably against it. Yes, I had mosquito bites on my forehead and toes. No malaria though.
We spent the day at the Pincer Group’s office in Kampala, debriefing each other on our project visits in Gulu and Lira and discussing ways to move forward. Tom, Milton, and Victor (three of the leaders of Pincer) invited us to lunch with Renuka Pillay, Chief of Party for Creative Associates International, who works with the Ministry of Education and Sports and receives funding from USAID to develop and implement education projects. She is the most dynamic person I’ve met here. Intelligent and straightforward.
We had tickets for an Akon concert in the city that evening. I didn’t particularly want to go in the first place, but Uganda had been advertising the concert for weeks, so we figured it would be a fun experience and bought our tickets. Akon, if you are not familiar with him, is a hip-hop/R&B artist, notorious for some recent inappropriate behavior, to say the least.
Thankfully for me, he bailed on his fans. He didn’t show up for two concerts in Kenya scheduled before this one in Uganda, which he also neglected. We found out that afternoon, and I was relieved. It was against my morals to go anyway.
On the way back to Kisaasi, before going out and running into a security guard with a University of Tennessee hat, we rode in a matatu and got a taste of justice in this country, further illustrating my distaste for Kampala. Honestly, I can’t say anymore.
May 3, 2008
As I wrote in my last update, I met a girl named Agnes at Alokolum IDP Camp in July, and we’d kept in touch through e-mails and letters. I tried to track her down my whole time in Gulu, but it was to no avail.
On my second to last day in Gulu, though, I managed to get her phone number, so, a bit nervous, I called her. She was now living in Jinja, about three hours from Kampala, so she hopped on a bus to come meet me in the capital city.
Once she reached the taxi park in Kampala, I waited on the street corner, practically dancing because I was so excited. She pulled up on a boda boda and we both started to cry. At only 19 years of age, she looked so grown up with her new short haircut, her finest outfit, and her 2 year-old daughter Rachael in her arms. She looked like a mother: tired, over-worked…radiant.
Lindsay and Apolo joined us for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant where we ran into my friend Katie Dunn. I tried to get Agnes to try my falafel and hummus, but she winced. She preferred her chicken and French fries.
She and I caught up over lunch, and I learned that she stopped going to school because she could not afford it. She would have two more years before graduating secondary school. She now works as a house-girl in Jinja, where she cleans, cooks, and does laundry, all the while supporting herself and taking care of Rachael. I asked her why she’d stopped her education, other than financial issues, and she said, “I want my daughter to have a better life than I’ve had. I need to work for her to go to school.”
I want so badly to support both of them through school, but as a college student, that isn’t exactly easy for me. I’ve come to terms with the fact that my biggest impact in her life is through
mentoring, as it has been for the past year now. I am here to guide her, if she asks for the guidance, and encourage her when she starts to lose hope.
When evening set in and our day in the life of a princess came to an end, Agnes and I said a bittersweet goodbye. We were elated about seeing each other again and anticipating when we meet in December, but goodbyes are hard. That’s been an easy discovery.
Tom Duku from the Pincer Group picked Ben, Holly, Lindsay, and me up in town shortly after and took us to his home, which sat atop a hill overlooking the city lights under a canopy of stars. His lovely wife cooked us the most delicious traditional food in Uganda, and the two of them prayed over us and for us—for our work, our families, our journey, and our new relationship with them.
After dinner, we strolled next door to his neighbor, Milton, also from Pincer. In an effort to get Tom’s attention, one of Milton’s children yelled, “Uncle Tom!" My heart sank. My uncle who passed away was Uncle Tom, and it didn’t hit me until that point that Tom Duku resembled him: kind, gentle, jolly, spiritual. A blessing. What a gift for me, and what a way to end my remarkable stay in Uganda.
May 4, 2008
The big day. Sad. Anxious. Euphoric. Tortured, really. Our flight didn’t leave until 10:00 PM, so we had an agonizingly long day in Kampala before leaving for the airport. I thought goodbyes were supposed to be quick and painless.
Cathy Piwang eased our pain by having us over for an afternoon tea with the Chief Justice. She served us her famous chai tea, chocolate cake, and good conversation. She’s just like my mom: beautiful, caring, and resilient.
The four of us did not want to leave her home, but time gave us no choice. After two and half months, we returned to the airport in Entebbe. Coincidentally, three of us wore Tennessee orange (Ben in his UT shirt), and from the line to the check-in counter we heard, “Go Gators!”
Oh yes. Entebbe, Uganda. Go Gators. We knew exactly to whom those yells were directed. The Florida fan smiled with his family in our direction, so we responded with what came naturally: “Go Vols!” The battle carried onto the plane when we took our seats and off the plane when we landed in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam. Overwhelming. When you go to a foreign country—a third-world country no less—you know the culture shock you will face, so you are prepared when you finally face it. No one, however, prepares you for the return shock. I stepped off the plane and stopped. I stood for I don’t know how long, watching, observing, staring. It wasn’t the McDonald’s, the chocolate shops, or the cheese vendors that shocked me; it was the people. The way they interacted with each other, their obvious attempts to keep up with fashion trends, the superficiality of many of them. I can’t even put it into words.
The initial shock I faced in Amsterdam helped ease me into the return to the United States, allowing me to bask in the glory of all the food I’d missed while I was gone. First reintegration into American culture: bagel and cream cheese. Second reintegration into American culture: chocolate chip cookies. Don’t judge me. I missed those cookies.
Since we had some time to kill before Lindsay left for Nashville and the other three of us left for Knoxville, we welcomed the opportunity to experience to the fullest extent the utter coolness of the airport in Detroit. Moving walkways take you through the concourse whose walls change colors in sync with the music blasting through the place. Greens, blues, and soothing music shift to reds, pinks, and dance music, bringing your mood with it. We were amazed, so we rode the walkways to and from the concourse…three times.
By afternoon, we landed in Knoxville, where my family and closest friends greeted me with open arms. Ben’s mom brought freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies, and the rest is history...
But my journey isn’t. As cliché as this sounds, my time in Uganda changed me. I’d already had a passion for people, culture, and service before I went, but this time, my emotions weren’t as tested as they were back in July. This time, I encountered personal struggles and revelations. I lived away from my family and familiarity. I grew up.
After my visit to Uganda in July, I didn’t feel called to return this past semester, but I am so thankful I did. I belonged in Gulu. I belong with those people. I belong with the work I did. Now, my most difficult battle is trying to get my family to understand that I’m not running away from them; I am using the moral base they’ve blessed me with to run towards the people I work with—whether in my backyard or abroad.
And finally, this isn’t about the fame or course credits. It isn’t about falling into the fad of humanitarianism, and it’s not a phase I’m going through. I don’t expect you to praise me or pat me on the back or admire me in any way. It is a way of life. Experiencing, observing, learning. Seeing a problem and wanting to do something about it. Loving people because they are my brothers and sisters. It is nothing out of the ordinary. It is expected. It is how we’ve all been born to live.
And I challenge you to embrace it.
To see beyond nationality and skin color, to see beyond who has what and who doesn’t, to see beyond need and obligation and just connect on a human level.
Once she reached the taxi park in 
mentoring, as it has been for the past year now. I am here to guide her, if she asks for the guidance, and encourage her when she starts to lose hope.
