Project Summary:
We worked in three areas of Uganda. First we worked in Kampala, the capital city. We stayed there from July 6th to July 27th, and worked with children in two organizations – Focus, an after-school program for kids in the slums of Mulago; Cornerstone, a house for street children - and with children at Bishop’s Secondary School in Mulago (an area right outside of Kampala). Then we worked in Lyantonde (down south) for about two weeks with an organization called PARDI, an orphanage/outreach program for AIDS orphans. Then we went up north to Gulu for the last three weeks of our project, staying at the Gulu Cornerstone house and working with the children there. We left Gulu on August 28th.
Continue reading ‘Reflections on the Summer: Project Evaluation’
In Uganda, all movement halts for the rain. Life pauses, patient, watching raindrops fall, droplets that land with a ting on tin rooftops and delicate splashes into growing, red puddles, with a million soft thwumps into the grass and the maize and the soft, fertile orange-red earth. Life pauses, patient, and takes a few slow, even breathes as it rests beneath rooftop overhangs and crowds into shops and homes. Huddled, life watches the rain.
In Uganda, rain is a perfectly good excuse for schoolchildren to be late to school. Kampala businessmen caught at lunch by a storm sit for hours over long cups of tea, unrushed, unworried, all appointments and deadlines put to rest for the rain. Taxis, even, cease to run: Boda men abandon their bodas to crowd beneath trees or into small, corner-side shops – they must be bribed with extra-high payment to venture out to the wetness.
Continue reading ‘Pausing for Rain’
This blog is for Mickey, as I never pass a food stand without thinking of him!
Chapatti stands are ubiquitous in Uganda. At any point of human traffic, whether by foot or by bus, along dirt or cement, among building or trees – in any place of human congregation, chapatti stands spring like mushrooms.
I have never yet seen a woman chapatti vendor. Usually they are boys, between 13 and 25 years, and often a crowd of friends hangs around the stand, chatting and milling and haranguing passing muzungus to “Jangu, jangu, you first come – you come and you buy!” Most of the boys are school dropouts – or rather, force-outs, or fee-outs, as the case may be. Perhaps some of them hope to rejoin classes once they have raised a little money at the stand. Perhaps some of them work selling chapattis in the evening, and go to school during the day.
Continue reading ‘Chapatti’
We sit in a small, darkened room before a stern, middle-aged man. Besides us kneel two of his children, estranged since his second marriage, and a friend of ours and the girl’s. Daylight noises call through cracks in the walls and the window – children, roosters, washing and shouting – but only their ghosts slip through, curiously out-of-place and dampened by the dark air. Adorned in a long, bark-cloth robe, the man sits straight up, an expression of ominous dignity on his shadowed face and a long wooden pipe in his hands. By lighting this pipe, he tells us through our friend’s translation, he will call the spirits into his own body, and they will speak with his own tongue. Call them, urges his young daughter, light the pipe and call them! What is it, we ask, this mysterious substance that calls forth spirits? Marijana, he replies heavily, and we mold our faces to match his own serious expression.
Continue reading ‘The Meeting Fortold’
This church is small – half a dirt floor and half cement, a red clay stage and four walls of multi-sheeted tin, held together by long wooden beams. A stained-light window of dappled sky and trees peers in from above the curtained stage, a triangle of light and warmth that meets rivers of sun streaming through cracks in the walls, lighting the congregation. Inside the church dwell a few potted plants, plastic chairs set neatly in rows, a worn black speaker held aloft on a rusty pedestal, and one surprising corner of musical instruments – a small drum set, an electric guitar, a keyboard, and microphones that stretch to the stage.
Continue reading ‘Devotion’
After a whirlwind two and half weeks in Kampala, we are setting off for Leontonde in Southern Uganda for the second leg of our project. In our first stint at recording, we were able to capture some great narratives and youth interviews, all in the midst of meeting with Uganda’s most esteemed Parliament Member (a big climate activist), visiting the tombs of the late Buganda kings, roaming around Nakasero Market, mastering boda rides, eating large amounts of great local food, having a few run ins with a chicken, meeting and interviewing a witchdoctor, attending two church services…generally just having a fantastic time.
Continue reading ‘Update’
The soil of Uganda is red. On occasion, it is a deep, soulful red – a red that winds along the blue of the Nile, circles the deep lake, or cuts like a liquid-ruby trail through hills of rich, shifting green. Often, though, the red is weary, deadened by time and neglect and sorrow - a dust that drapes the country like a thread-worn shawl. It is this dust, a brown-red, rusty shade of silence, that slowly coats the dresses of the village girls, the brand-new shop fronts full of promise, the leaves on the trees along scenic dirt roads – which might, themselves, be a shade of unimaginable emerald life but for the ever-creeping wash of rusted red.
Continue reading ‘The Soul of Uganda’
