Teacher on Two Wheels

Above:  My garden .  Above above:  A watermelon in the garden.

I’ve started a garden behind my house in Gulu. Of the gardens I’ve had in the past in New Jersey and Japan, this garden is the most healthy and least difficult to tend. The soil here is rich and strong, and, like a kiln that turns wet clay into beautiful pottery, it magically morphs seeds into thick plants.

I’m growing about 60 tomato plants of a local variety, a strain called Moneymaker. I don’t know if Moneymaker tomatoes are part of the famed group of seeds once designed specifically for the developing world, seeds that sparked the Green Revolution in Asia, but these seeds produce plants that are incredibly drought resistant and hearty. My plants can go seven or eight days straight without rain, persisting miraculously under the unrelenting blaze of the equatorial sunshine. In Japan and Jersey, plants under similar waterless, hot conditions would have surely withered away and died.

Being in the garden centers me.  After a stressful day, I can think of no place I’d rather be.

Above:  Some of the tomato plants

I live in a house that is equipped to host 36 people. !!! Every room but mine is filled with six beds (split up over two triple-bunk beds). The house is set on a nice plot of grassy land just outside of downtown Gulu. Currently, 11 teachers are staying in the house with me, but 20 students from the US are going to move in at the end of June. The students and teachers are part of a wave of visitors that washes over Invisible Children facilities each summer. Come mid-August, though, all visitors will have left Gulu and things will quiet down.

I’ve been working on a few posts lately for IC’s blog.  The site has just moved to a new address.  Find it here.  Bookmark it!

I’m still trying to figure out a way to juggle writing for work and writing for this site.  When I sit and write at my desk each day for work, I feel less motivated to come home and write at night for Teacherontwowheels.  Hmmmmmm.  I’m still trying to figure out a good system for keeping the blog content flowing.

Thankfully, lots of the writing I’m doing for work is stuff that is aligned with the type of writing I’ve been doing for TOTW.  From time to time, I’ll cross-post stuff here that I’ve written for IC’s blog or other publications.

In the meantime, head to IC’s blog to read about an incredible 18-year-old Canadian who is unicycling across Canada to raise money for Invisible Children!  Go Phil!

Unless otherwise indicated, all the posts on IC’s blog under the category ‘IC in Uganda’ are written by me.  If one post on the blog floats your boat, or if one irks you in some way, leave a comment!

Above:  Home invader that entered the premises through an open shower drain

Monday 5/18/09  Gulu, Uganda

First came the white ants.  Clouds of them revolved around the lights outside, creating fluttering orbs of long wings and stubby bodies.

Moths arrived; a fist-sized one with disproportionately long antennae stuck itself to the railing one night and refused to move.

Without warning, grasshoppers, some inches long and splashed with color, landed from outer space.

A frog climbed up through the shower drain and sent an intern screaming.

Yesterday, ants–the viscious, blood-thirsty kind–found my shoes as I was watering the tomato plants.  From one’s shoes, legs aren’t hard to find.  So I wasn’t surprised when piercing pinches of pain started sliding up past my knees, but how did two manage to get onto my shoulders?

*****

The rain is here, and with it have come her creatures.  Some have been waiting months for the feel and sound of her coaxing patter on the skin of the land; moisture signaling a frenzy of ephemeral birth.  Others, less energetic ones,  seem to have stumbled blindly into the forests of fresh spring grasses, like lost fools bumbling down the dark streets of a foreign city.

Above:  Students interviewed for this article

**This is a piece I wrote recently for work.  This article appeared in a quarterly newsletter I helped write and organize for Invisible Children.**

When I asked a group of students at Pope Paul VI School in Anaka, Uganda what they first thought when they spotted their new classrooms, buildings built under IC’s Schools for Schools (S4S) program, wide, toothy smiles ripped across their faces.

“When I first saw the new classrooms, I wondered, Who put these buildings here?!” Betty, a 19-year-old student, said, smiling. “I walked closer and looked at them. I was excited for class to start.”

Nodding in agreement, Petra Faith, 20, added, “Yes, everything was organized in the classrooms, and I thought, For sure, now our education will improve.”

School for Schools, a program started by IC in 2006, gets students like Betty and Petra Faith smiling over school memories by improving both the structural and educational elements of 11 schools in northern Uganda. Through constructing things like classrooms, bathrooms, water pumps, and libraries, and by strengthening in-school education through teacher exchange, teacher workshops, and emotional literacy classes, S4S is changing the cores of its partner schools. More than 1,100 schools around the world work throughout the year to raise money to fund S4S projects in Uganda. For some of the 11 schools, schools like Pope Paul VI, the S4S program is doing more than improving educational infrastructure—it’s letting students return home.

Read More…

Above:  I couldn’t take a picture of malaria, so instead, here’s a picture of a boy who, judging by his smile, doesn’t have malaria.  One of the most common illnesses treated at the clinic where this photo was snapped, however, is malaria.

Sunday 5/3/09   Gulu, Uganda

The morning started out fine.  By lunch, I felt myself dying.  I told my co-workers that, should I die from whatever was ailing me, they could have my most valuable possessions.  James?  My bike.  Cass?  My old yellow shirt.

When I got off the motorcycle taxi in front of the health clinic, I almost fell over.  My head was pounding.  My spine felt like it was filled with magma.  I was so achy my hair hurt.

A quick pin prick and 20 minutes later, the doctor confirmed it:  I had malaria.

*****

Outside malaria zones, malaria is known as a monster with 27 heads, an appetite for fresh baby’s blood, and a fondness for eyeball stew.  Inside malaria zones, however, it’s an illness that, although stronger than many other types of sickness, lacks mythical notoriety.  Here in Uganda people get malaria all the time.  It’s true that it can kill children and the eldery, but nearly every adult I’ve met has had it one or two (or 20) times.  One co-worker of mine gets it three or four times a year.  Malaria, for him, is like an annoying cold that comes on at the start of fall or winter.  Another co-worker gets it once every 10 years.

Yesterday one co-worker kindly explained why I got malaria after two short months in Uganda, while other people get it once every decade.

“You’re white,” he said.  “Mosquitoes like white people.”

“I never heard that!” I said, laughing.

“It’s true.  If we have a crowd of people sitting around at night, the mosquitoes will always find the mono.  They can smell you, I guess.  Maybe your blood tastes better.  I don’t know.  You people should start wearing black clothes to cover that skin!  Or paint yourselves black!”

*****

For two days I sweat and shivered my way deep into the recesses of malaria misery.  One hour would find me zipped up in my mummy bag with teeth chattering so hard I feared they’d chip; the next I’d be naked in bed in a pool of my own sweat.  Back and forth, back and forth.  The fever broke after two days of taking medicine, but still, five days later, I’m not totally right.  My head still hurts.  I feel out of sorts.  The thought of working up a sweat on a bicycle riding a single mile (much less 60 or 70) seems totally absurd and downright masochistic.  For someone without access to water (I drank 20 cups or so a day while sick) or medicine, I can see how the disease can be deadly.  In Africa, malaria’s Mecca thanks to a mixing of factors that create prime conditions for it, children most often succumb to the illness.  One co-worker spoke about malaria as if it was Death itself when we bumped into each other at the clinic:  “Malaria came for my life when I was a child.”

*****

Under the shade of a wide tree, 15 of us sat and ate.  I told Eric, a Ugandan and chronic sufferer of malaria, that I just came down with the M-word.

He smiled that big toothy smile of his and extended his hand.

“Welcome to Africa, buddy!”