Thanksgiving

I am truly thankful I got another opportunity to visit Karamoja this year! Now everyone seems to take it for granted that I'll be going back again. (2008! That's what I'm hoping for.)

The news from the Eldeens about the clinic is good. It sounds like the new staff truly cares for the people who come, rather than their own position or what they can get out of it. (The main hospital in Tekora doesn't like them, much, though. They are reluctant to take patients that the Nakaale clinic sends them; apparently they like to close early.) Perhaps someday their example will revolutionize medical care in Karamoja?

It's been a blessing having friends from Karamoja: I think of the schoolboys, especially Lokwii, who is somehow like a younger brother (but a taller one, like my real "little" brother), Elizabeth, and Joyce and Rose, who encouraged me a lot through their welcomingness and friendship (without an ulterior motive, such as an understandable "you assist me"). Thanks to Rose, and to Joyce's son Aleper, I know a lot more Karamojong that I would have otherwise. Which still is not saying much...

Some of my favorite memories of Karamoja are, in fact, of walking from the main house over to the Wrights' with Aleper, who was often just hanging out. It was a good, um, cultural experience in some ways. Once he had a tiny blue bird, with irridiscent feathers, that he'd captured and was keeping on a string. The poor thing was in a state of shock from being handled so much. But he was very proud of it, and I had to keep my mouth shut. Birds are something to be eaten...like rats...or sold to the mzungus, or in this case, played with.

I am thankful nooi for medicine! What could they do for malaria or amoebas 100 years ago, but try some herbal remedies or slaughter a chicken sacrifice? I don't think they had much success with either. Having experienced both sicknesses myself, it's a great thing to have modern medicine!

I'm still amazed how everything has worked out, and I enjoyed teaching the kids, and learned to like things like the odd smells in the village (minus the stronger booze and defecation smells). I don't think I'll ever try the innards of a goat, though. There are some things that are just too much, completely.

If nothing else, it would have been a good experience because of what Karamoja taught me about God - he cares about people, whether in a nice house in America or a mud hut in Africa; if you call on him there, he hears. Seeing the hope of women who have been through a lot more than me, and have had a lot more experience, was quite powerful.

Things just take time in Karamoja. I like the "slowly by slowly" lifestyle in many ways; there's less rush. It's hard if you want to see change - see men stop beating their wives, see women stop killing their babies by rolling on them when they're drunk. But ultimately that's a change in individual hearts and lives, not something that can be accomplished by cultural change. And it's already coming, "wadyo, wadyo."