And I thought I wasn't going to see any...

I was looking for a pic of my big tree, but was reminded this Sunday morning adventure last year instead...


There's a snake in the Sunday school tree!


The schoolboys are going to get it. (Lokwan, the littlest of them all, in up in the tree pushing it off its branch with a stick.)


It was just a small one...

Africa Mornings

One of the things I liked about staying in the main house alone last year (sleeping in what's now Amy's room) was waking up with a view of basically the whole compound getting ready for the day.

Of course, it didn't always start out cheerfully. There was a rooster somewhere that would start crowing loudly at first light, too early to get up. Honestly, I wanted to kill it - I'd stick my head under my pillow but it still kinda drove me crazy sometimes. Good thing I never ran into it during the day...guess it was a wily old thing who was used people wanting to wring its neck!

Still quite early, the compound came alive. Even half-asleep I could smell smoke from the cooking fires, coming through the window screens. It sounded like there were about a hundred children yelling and playing, although really there were probably a dozen, and they were being sent for water. At that point I usually put on headphones and U2.

Maybe half an hour later, I'd open my eyes and see brilliant red flowers on the tree outside my window. I always looked at the green pods dangling from the branches, imagining they were green mambas. There never were any, though.

Then I read the day's entry in the prayer journal that Rocky put together for me. Sometimes it was from a close friend, but usually from someone I didn't know very well. God knows what he's doing in having such a variety in his church, all united in one body. One time when I'd gotten up in the night sick from malaria and was in a really bad mood, the Bible verse someone had included for me was "My [Christ's] strength is made perfect in weakness..."

Now I can picture little girls sloshing water back in jerricans on their heads, while their mothers made breakfast out of posho, which looks kind of like cornmeal. I'm not sure how I'd do with that. There's no roosters in Billings, thankfully, but then I can't smell my next-door-neighbors cooking (or search for snakes in the pin oak by my window).

Airplanes

I was just thinking today how much I like...and dislike...British Airways. They have a nicely-designed, helpful website, they're relatively easy to work with, they provide good inflight meals. (Yes, I really like airplane food!) But they didn't design their seats for short people, and they didn't design enough bathrooms for a couple hundred passengers on a 10-hour flight. If you have a window seat, you're probably only going to get up a minimum of times. Which means you inevitably wait till you really need to use the bathroom. And half the time you have to stand 10 minutes in line, even if looks like it should be quick because there's only 1-2 people ahead of you. What to do? At least waiting around is a good time to grab a snack from the kitchen!

My tips for flying (hopefully i'll follow all of them next time):

• Have your water bottle in easy reach, NOT stowed in the luggage rack where it really does you no good
  
• Bring something you can comfortably scrunch against the window to sleep on, should you be so fortunate as to have a window seat (There's nowhere to put your head in an aisle seat. But thankfully I've never been in a middle seat, as that must be worse!)
  
• And don't wait too long to get up if you do happen to be inconviently trapped in one of those window seats. Don't wait until the people next to you are sound asleep!

Travelling by yourself isn't too bad, but it just gets really long and tiring. I never realized before how much we need interaction with people we know! Even a slight aquaintance would be nice, although you can meet people on the plane, provided you're not too busy trying to sleep...or pretend to sleep. This last time on the flight to Entebbe I met a couple young guys visiting family after years in the US. One of them let me borrow a CD of Lugandan songs (so I would be more cultured) and once we arrived was going to loan me 1000 shillings so I could call Craig. Maybe even a little too nice to me, but I think it was just out of the goodness of their hearts...

And maybe someday I'm actually going to travel with someone from Billings. ;)

The best and the worst

I've realized lately that in some ways I only tell the "good" parts about Karamoja - less so online than in person, where I tend to have the standard answer of yeah, I loved it, and yeah, I'd love to go back. Part of that is even though I've seen a lot of the negative things, and think about them as part of my experiences, I still love the Karamojong. But I need to be quicker sometimes to tell other that there's things there that will break your heart.

Nothing captures this better for me than the afternoon I became friends with Mama Chipa. (Her first name is Joyce, but since I mention the other Joyce often, I'm going to refer to her Mama Chipa - it's common there to be called after one of your children, whether you're a man or woman.)

Amy, Nolan, and I went to Joyce and Rose's village for a Bible study. It was a hot afternoon, very dry. I'd gone to the clinic for a malaria smear after lunch but by 3ish, when we set out, I'd forgotten about it. Going to the village is one of the greatest experiences, though not always pleasant.

When we got there, it took a few minutes to go around inviting the women to join us. We ran into Mama Chipa, who was about seven months pregnant; she was getting loaded on etoule or beer. She was really pleased to see me for some reason - "ah, my friend, Amanda." I'd greeted her often (she lives on the compound, the wife of a clinic staff member), but didn't know her very well at all. But today she took a bronze bracelet from her wrist and pushed it up onto my own arm. Amy took a picture of us, her arm tight around my shoulder.

So, we were friends. When the study was ready to start a few minutes later, I asked and teased her to sit down on a mat next to me, with a bunch of the kids. Maybe it was a mistake; but we were going to read about Mary, pregnant with Jesus, and seemed to tie into her life.

All meetings like this in Karamoja start out with singing and clapping. Mama Chipa got right into the spirit of things, leading enthusiastically. She in fact took over singing, leading us in repeating verse after verse till we wondered if it would go on forever. :) It was fine, but she was obviously drunk, and the kids were laughing hysterically at her antics. But she did stop, and I know she wasn't so inebriated that she wasn't bothered by being the butt of these kids laughter. After we prayed, she whispered to me agitatedly that she had to go. Amy, Nolan, and I were doing a good job of teaching her kids, and she was glad of that. All I could say was "I think they want to learn from you, too."

I don't know how else to say this: it broke my heart to see her go, embarassed and confused and unable to stop herself. Maybe it was partly a heightened emotional state from malaria (I found out I did have it), but I think I would have had to fight back tears anyway. It was the most intense grief I've felt for someone else in a long time; through meeting her in the village, I got an insight into her life that I never would have had elsewise.

That was only one part of the afternoon, though. The highlight of the study was Nolan's memorable illustration involving a piece of stick and a lighter - what even one sin against God deserves, and what Christ took in our place: he burned in God's wrath instead.

Then we trooped over to the neighboring group of huts...several kids tagging along, as usual..to see Lodem's wife, who had just given birth to baby Kris. To get inside the mud hut she was in, you had to crawl single file through a tunnel about three feet high, into a dark room full of smoke from the fire in the center. Lodem's tired wife was sitting on a mat, naked from the waist, holding her new baby. Amy knew enough Karamojong to (with another woman to translate) talk to the girl and give the baby a gift.

Nolan and I waited outside, with the kids. A tiny little girl sat in my lap, holding on tightly to my fingers whenever I had to put her down for a minute. She was so solemn; like some of the other little kids, she just needed to be close to someone, and she wasn't afraid of me. This is a typical third world country tear jerker stories, I guess. At the fence, after we climbed through and were heading back home, she started to wail. She and some of the other children got through the wire and ran after us. What are you supposed to do? You can't take this kid home with you. You don't want to make her love you. So you can't pick her up and hug her and say "come on with us." We had to send her back and ignore the tears.

It was a weird afternoon. I felt strung out from malaria - it numbs you in some ways and opens your eyes in others. Somehow the experience was exhausting and horrible and good all at once, a golden afternoon with plenty of heat and dirt.

And that, in some ways, is Karamoja to me.

Karamojong Lesson

My favorite language lesson this year was one afternoon walking with Joyce's six-year-old son, Aleper, over to Martha's house. We pointed to things along the path and I would say the word in English, Aleper in Karamojong...things like mud. That was our favorite. I can't remember the word now - maybe ecoto? (c=ch as in church) But it was fun to say. And Aleper really liked to say "mud." He repeated it with the cutest pleased look on his face.

That kid was the best teacher, too - I might have picked up more from him than from Rose even. Which still isn't saying much, of course. :)

Girls from Kopetatum.

And now it's time for the regional news...

(Thanks to Google Alerts doing their job and alerting me.) The last harvest in Karamoja was indeed pretty good - or at least normal - so the whole area should have enough food to get them through the rest of the year. That's the good news; the article goes on to talk about the many displaced people in Northern Uganda, which is often ravaged by the LRA. (See this Uganda conflict blog for some more info.)

In other news, the government of Uganda is what? burning Karamojong guns. I kid you not, it's all in this statement. Now maybe I am rather prejudiced against the gov't and in favor of the K'jong, even though I realize that many of the Karamojong are murderers, thieves, drunkards, wife (or husband!) beaters, etc. But is it fair to make them sound like savages, and burn their guns because you don't want to outfit the military with AKs taken from "criminals"? It's a good thing they didn't do their gun-burning in Karamoja, because I think there might have been a riot. But anyway, I suppose this might also be a good thing, as far as eliminating some of the violence in Karamoja.