Wednesday 11/3/10  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I’m writing this post from a coffee shop that’s two blocks from my apartment.  I’m living in West Philadelphia now with my girlfriend.  In the last two months, my contract finished with Invisible Children in Uganda, I moved back to the US (and was awed by the fall foliage—check out the pics), and I started writing a manuscript for a book about the bicycle trip.

For the next five months, I’ll work on the manuscript full-time, adding to and editing the writing I created throughout my ride.  I have a Word document with about 300 pages of trip writing in it.  I’m excited to have the chance to go through this writing and strengthen it.  Often while writing during the trip, I found myself racing a dying computer battery or exhaustion at night in my tent.  The content I put on the site was quickly created and posted before I had much of a chance to edit it.  I’m hoping the finished manuscript will be a more accurate and polished representation of what I experienced on the trip than the writing on this site was.

So, three years after I set off from a New Jersey suburb by bike, I’m both sad and proud to end this chapter of my life.  The trip didn’t follow the exact route I thought it would, but that’s completely fine by me:  it pushed me, allowed me to listen, and helped—at least for a few years—to satiate my curiosity.  It was a physical test, of course, but it was more challenging mentally and emotionally than I expected it to be.  More nights than I revealed on this site I spent lonely and restless in my tent.  I sobbed or collapsed, filled with self-doubt, on more than one occasion.  I entertained dark thoughts on desolate stretches of road; I fought to quiet an ever racing mind.  But the trip exposed a new world to me, one filled with good people and sacred scenery.  It unmasked the “news” we receive from mass media for the nonsense I now know it to be.  It taught me how to better control my thinking, to be a more conscious person.  Perhaps more than anything else, though, the trip taught me that the world is still big, that people aren’t out to get us, and that we all want the same things in life:  love, health, security, knowledge, opportunity.

Because the world isn’t a scary place, and because human-powered traveling is just so damn rewarding, I’m convinced this trip won’t be my last.

To those of you who encouraged me along the way with your comments, emails, and kindness:  I’ll never be able to fully explain how much those small acts meant to me. Thank you.

More to come as life unfolds,

Andrew

Sunday 9/5/10  Gulu, Uganda

Last weekend I visited Sipi Falls, a famous area in southeastern Uganda near the Kenyan border.  Five co-workers and I spent two days hiking, eating delicious food, sitting by a fireplace, and reading.  The trip was so relaxing.  A four hour hike the first day took us to three different large waterfalls.  The scenery in this part of Uganda looks very different from what we have up here in Gulu:  more bananas, more palms, more things growing on top of things growing on top of things.  Despite getting a flat tire on the way down and realizing our jack didn’t work (now I know that 12 people can lift a car long enough to change a tire if they need to!), the trip was blast.  Here are a few pics.

Thursday 8/26/10  Gulu, Uganda

Below is the second feature piece I wrote for Glimpse.  I worked with an editor to see the piece through four drafts over the course of a few months.  Although its theme isn’t the cheeriest one, it accurately captures a facet of my experience in Uganda.

As I pulled onto Kampala Road, that madhouse stretch of tarmac that connects Gulu and Uganda’s capital, I shifted into fourth—my bike’s highest gear—and pulled hard on the throttle. Air whizzed into my helmet. The greens of the head-high cassava plants and stalks of sugar cane at the road’s edge began to soften and blur.

Zigzagging down quiet dirt roads through the Ugandan bush, I traveled for two hours without seeing a motorized vehicle. Everywhere around me, lean Ugandans were slamming hoes down into the rain-softened earth, preparing their land for planting. I putted along on my tiny ride, swerving around puddles and potholes as best I could, but crashing my bike twice into ditches lining the road.

Having never set off on any sort of motorcycle trip before, and with my past riding experience limited to quick runs into town, I struggled that first day. My bike felt clunky and slow in the mud; my wrists were sore by lunch. I knew nothing about motorcycle maintenance. I had no planned route, no map. All I knew was that I wanted to head south, and I knew I only had four days to work with.

******

Tired, sunburned, and dusty, I pulled into Lira six hours after leaving Gulu, happy to have my first day behind me. I found a cheap hotel room, showered, and took a bicycle taxi to a small bar outside of town to meet Mark, a Ugandan friend and co-worker of mine.

When I entered the joint, I spotted Mark, a married man, sitting with six girls in their mid-twenties. A bunch of beer bottles were huddled together at the center of their table like penguins waiting out a blizzard. “These are my friends,” Mark said, nodding to the girls. I ordered a beer, and Mark introduced me to the girls—university students mostly. We made small talk and half-danced in our seats whenever a club hit thumped through the speakers. At one point the owner of the place, a stocky woman with braids named Anne, sat down with us. She did this thing where she would clutch her breasts every time she laughed, as if any good joke could trigger her body to jettison her breasts like a space shuttle ditching used fuel tanks.

Anne was warm and talkative, but pushy when it came to advertising her guesthouse next door. “Many whites have stayed here already. You’ll like the rooms, I’m sure,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. After a few rounds of beers, and despite my explaining that I already had a room secured in town, she insisted on showing me the guesthouse, on running through the peculiarly high prices of each of her rooms.

As we walked from room to room, I felt uneasy. I began thinking through the laughs we’d shared just 30 minutes earlier, how Anne almost went out of her way in the bar to make me feel comfortable. Was all of that genuine? I wondered. Or, was Anne simply priming me for a pitch at the end of the night?

*****

I hit the road early the next day, only to be handed a two-hour delay after heading out of town. The culprit was a two-inch nail that had shredded part of my rear tire. Mark helped me track down a mechanic who came out to meet me by the roadside, a scrawny guy with dirty fingernails. I had two choices, the mechanic explained: one basic tire that would get the job done—the kind most motorcycle drivers use in Uganda—or a high quality, more expensive tire that would last longer.

Before I could even think about my options, the mechanic said, “I think you will want the more expensive tire, right?” At the time, his assumption didn’t bother me. It wasn’t until I was back on the open road—back with no distractions and a head full of thoughts—that I worked through what the mechanic had said.

He, like Anne the night before, assumed I was wealthy because I was white. Without knowing if I was a broke student or a volunteer spending a few months in Uganda, he judged me. Simplifying me, he pegged me as just another rich white guy. I’m sure most white people he had seen in the past had been development workers, people living in the North to help the region recover from its decades-long struggle with Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels, and yes, some of them were probably earning good salaries. But I wanted to tell him I was different. True, I worked for an NGO, but I made next-to-nothing; I wasn’t one of those UN fat cats.

I hated the invasiveness of his assumption, the way that judging me left him feeling like he understood me, like he could read me. This assumed understanding simplified me in a way that I found frustrating. How would he feel if I made similar assumptions about him? I wondered. I could assume from his tattered shirt that he was materially poor, but absolutely nothing about his appearance hinted at what he valued, at his morality, at what his history was.

*****

In the afternoon, flat plains gave way to rolling hills with a backdrop of jagged, shadowy mountains on the horizon. When I reached Mbale at dusk—sore from two long days on the bike—I found my way to another cheap hotel, dropped my bag, and headed to a restaurant that a taxi driver recommended. All tables in the place were full when I arrived, but just as I was about to turn to walk out, a young man wearing a bejeweled baseball cap waved me to his table. “Please, no one is sitting in this seat. Join me, it’s no trouble.”

Richard was a university student at Makerere University, Uganda’s most famous and competitive post-secondary institution. Intoxicated with a potent mix of hope, knowledge, and greed, Richard talked incessantly about the potential wealth and excess his future held for him in Uganda. He was studying tourism at school, he said, so he could run his own business and get rich one day. According to Richard, Ugandans needed to learn to help themselves, to figure out a way to stop relying on foreigners and NGOs to swoop in and save the day.

“What type of business are you interested in starting?” I asked, cutting through a soft mountain of matooke with my fork.

“Anything. I want to start a business that attracts whites,” Richard said.

Only minutes later, Richard was asking me if I’d be interested in working with him to start a hiking business in southwestern Uganda. I told him I knew nothing about hiking in southwestern Uganda. He protested, saying that surely I knew the type of information he needed to keep the business afloat.

I was confused. “What do you mean? What type of information do you think I know?” I asked. He explained that I knew enough ‘whites’ to make the business bloom, with the logic being that all of my white friends could frequent the business enough to keep it profitable until word of Richard and Andrew’s Famous Hiking Spot in Southwestern Uganda spread throughout the White Universe. He was serious; I wasn’t sure what to say.

Again, I felt like I had been judged, like I’d been tagged with a label I didn’t have a chance to earn for myself. In Richard’s eyes, I was qualified (and colored properly) to be a responsible business partner. My whiteness, somehow, had made me eligible for space in Richard’s dreams. I didn’t even know Richard. He licked bits of chicken and stew from his thumb and forefinger, and an awkward silence settled in over us.

“So what do you do up north in Gulu?” he eventually asked. I told him, explaining the types of development programs that Invisible Children, my employer, worked to implement. “How can a guy like me get a scholarship with your organization?” he asked frankly.

“I’m sorry. We only give scholarships to students who are from the North. We’re trying to help students who have been affected by the LRA conflict.”

Richard said nothing at first. His eyes went steely and still, carrying a new tension that wasn’t there before. He looked at me and then picked up the scrawny chicken leg floating in his bowl of oily broth. In between messy bites, he said, “So wait,” chewing, chewing, chomp. “I want to understand: Do you give scholarships to students who are HIV positive?”

I told him we did.

“See I don’t like that,” Richard snapped, shaking his head and reaching to wipe broth from the edges of his mouth with the back of his wrist. “No, I don’t like that. I don’t think you help Ugandans much by investing in people who are just going to die in a few years. Healthy students like me could actually do something with a scholarship.”

*****

I awoke in the morning to metallic skies and pockets of cold fog that had puddled at the bottoms of hills. Just as I headed out of town, my cell phone rang: it was Richard. He didn’t waste time with pleasantries and cut right to the point: “I…uhh…lost my bus money and don’t have enough to buy another ticket. Where are you?”

I didn’t tell him where I was; instead I told him I was insulted. “How dare you call me and ask for money after the conversation we had last night? I thought you want to try to help Ugandans help themselves. Didn’t you say that last night, that Ugandans have a problem relying on whites?” I asked, incredulous.

Silence.

After a few seconds, Richard said, “It’s not like that,” and the call went dead.

Furious, I thought about how Richard had now judged me twice—first thinking I was business savvy and networked enough to help him run a business, and then assuming I was naïve enough to believe his ridiculous bus fare story.

Ominous clouds overhead opened up and started spilling raindrops the size of dates all over the place. I took cover under the tin veranda of a closed shop by the roadside. Alone and hypnotized by the din of the downpour, I thought about being white in a place where whiteness was a signifier for more than lineage, where ‘white’ and ‘rich’ were synonyms. Sadly, I realized I had no secret for circumventing stereotyping, at least when it applied to meeting new people.

Things were never awkward between me and my Ugandan co-workers and friends—we knew each other well enough—but I still fought against my whiteness when first meeting strangers. For someone who believes in travel the way others believe in prayer, someone who feeds on the raw, revealing conversation only two strangers can yarn, realizing that white otherness will always plague me in places like Uganda left me deflated.

*****

On the way back to Gulu the next day, I stopped at a small cluster of mud-brick stores by the roadside to let the bike’s engine cool. I bought a bottle of water from one shop and nodded to four or five men—all drunk and smiling—who were lounging on benches nearby.

“How are you? Hello, how are you?” A tall, lanky man with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel stepped into my line of sight.

“I’m OK, thanks. How are you?” I asked.

Without answering, he launched into a rant of compliments, telling me how nice my motorbike was, how I looked like a skilled rider when I parked the bike, how shiny my helmet was. I knew what was coming. Finished with his flattery, he waited for my response.

I said nothing. Instead, I gave him a deadpan, stone-cold look of indifference. I was too tired to defend myself. He leaned in close to me—less than six inches away—propping his hand on his knee. His breath was stale and spoiled with alcohol. “Five hundred shillings for me, for some nuts or crisps,” he whispered.

I stared at him.

“Just five hundred,” he repeated. He raised his eyebrows at me, as if to say, that’s not too much for a white person, is it?

I looked at the other men sitting around me. They were consumed in their own conversations and didn’t take notice of the man and his proposition.

“Why?” I said, turning back to him. “Why should I give you money? Why?”

“We’re friends,” he answered.

“No we’re not. No, you don’t even know my name. We can’t be friends yet—we just met each other,” I objected, frustration hijacking my words.

The man smiled and shook his head in disbelief. “No, we’re friends. We talked much just now. We’re friends. Only five hundred,” he pleaded.

“You give me something, then I’ll give you something,” I said. “Give me five hundred shillings first and then I’ll give you five hundred shillings. Friends should help each other out, right?”

The man turned and walked away.

Not but five minutes later, an even drunker man approached me, and without any introduction or conversation of any kind, simply said, “Some small money. Small money?” The man held onto a bench to keep from falling down and extended one shaky open palm to me. His eyes, watery and tired, were the color of plaque.

Without hesitating, I said “No. Why? Who are you?”

The man just grinned. It was clear he couldn’t speak English.

His loose, drunken smile, for some reason, made me both furious and perplexed. I turned to the other men relaxing in the shade on the benches across from me. “Excuse me, can you please ask this man why he’s asking me for money? I don’t know him. Ask him what he’s doing.”

The men laughed. They said something to the drunken man in Luo, one of Uganda’s dozens of dialects, something that made him recoil, made the smile dissipate from his face. He barked something to the group.

“He thinks you should help him because you’re white,” one of the men explained, laughing. “White people have money, so you should give him some. That’s what he said.” The man paused. “But don’t worry, he is just drunk. It’s OK.”

It wasn’t OK. The drunk was yet another person reading me, and worse yet, he was misreading me: part-time waiters back home earn more than I do. “No, wait,” I said. “I want you to ask him something more. There are lots of big Ugandan men in Uganda, lots of men with big fancy cars and nice clothes. Why doesn’t he ever ask the big Ugandan men for money? They have a lot more money than I do.”

The man translated for the drunk. The instant he grasped the meaning of my retort, he again recoiled and snapped.

“He says that with you it’s…different. Of course those men would never give him money. With you, the chances are good.”

*****

I made it back home to Gulu by the end of the day and headed straight for my favorite local restaurant. As I worked through my plate of rice, beans, and malakwang, I thought about the last four days, the last 1,000 kilometers. I had set off hoping to reconnect with Ugandans, to learn about new sides of the culture I had never experienced before. High on idealism, I imagined having long, illuminating conversations with strangers over drinks or meals. This didn’t really happen.

My whiteness had, like some sort of blinding force field, repelled the types of genuine, unifying experiences I had sought. It had lured people into judging me, into being less curious about me. I couldn’t bond with strangers over our common interests because the people I hoped to bond with constantly reminded me of how different we were.

The owner of the restaurant passed by my table and saw the dusty backpack by my feet. “Where have you come from?” he said, smiling.

“Mbale and Kampala.”

His eyebrows shot up. “On that thing?” he asked, pointing to my mud-caked bike out front. Before I could answer, he shook his head and, laughing, said, “You whites are crazy, you know that? Really crazy, honestly!” Still shaking his head, he dropped my bill and walked back to his perch behind the front counter.

Sunday 8/1/10  Gulu, Uganda

Below is a piece I just had published on Glimpse.org.  This is one of two feature pieces I wrote for the website.  It went through four drafts and was written over the course of three months.

A slow, thick summer breeze carried grimy city humidity down New York’s Fifth Avenue. As a river of lunchtime crowds coursed around us, I stood with a chatty girl my age. With her clipboard, brochures, and pressed shirt, she looked identical to her co-workers scattered up and down the block. We were both sweating—she from the heat, I from the awkwardness of the moment. Knowing her ability to keep my attention would directly determine the success of her pitch, she told me about life in India; about how desperate the children were there; about how, for a price, I could support a child and be the change I wanted to see in the world.

After half an hour, I found myself signing her clipboard and turning over the number to my debit card. I walked away from her feeling like I had just done right, like I had done something that would make my parents proud. My girlfriend at the time later told me the way I acted on the street that day was one of the reasons she loved me—I was compassionate.

Now, after spending the past year in Uganda living amidst the fallout of giving, I barely recognize the person I once was.

“I don’t understand why we can’t just deliver it.”

Margaret, my Ugandan co-worker, was staring at me, a thin sliver of a smile veiling her disapproval. Between us at the edge of my desk was a stuffed envelope: a square, manila bomb that neither of us wanted to set off.

A few American visitors had stopped by our office and left the envelope with Margaret earlier in the day. They wanted her to give it to one of our organization’s mentors, hoping that it would find its way to the young girl it was addressed to. The girl, a friend of the visitors, had no mailing address and lived in a village out in the bush. Margaret wanted to honor their request; I wanted her to understand why that would be difficult.

“And what happens then?” I asked. “What happens when we deliver this? Should the girl send a package back to the states? If so, how will she pay for it, for the postage?”

Margaret reached out and snatched the package off the desk. Before I could stop her, she slid her finger under the envelope’s flap and opened it up. One by one and without saying a word, she removed a handful of items from the envelope—pencils, a small Frisbee, a packet of candies, a letter riddled with pleasantries and questions—and laid them on her desk, as if to say, See, nothing in here is a threat. Nothing. This gift is harmless.

“It’s only a gift,” she said, waving at the items spread out before her.

“I know, I know that,” I said. “But it puts pressure on the person who receives it. The girl has to answer the questions posed in that letter. She has to spend money on a response, money she probably doesn’t have.”

Pause.

“And plus, passing this on to her feeds unhealthy stereotypes—the whole white-people-falling-from-the-sky-with-gifts-in-hand thing. It’s dangerous if Ugandans equate white people with gifts. And who are these Americans anyway? Are they friends of this girl? What type of relationship do they have?” I had raised my voice.

Margaret stared back at me, unsure if she should respond. Flushed and uncomfortable, I wondered if I was being too harsh, if I was overreacting. Could a few pencils and a Frisbee really change the way a child thinks?

Giving to charity is often a straightforward, linear process. First, a donor learns of a situation that inspires him/her to take action—to give. Then, he/she passes money on to an organization. The organization takes that money and applies it to programs aimed at helping beneficiaries. Finally, program staff on the ground work with beneficiaries to pass on strategies or materials, the real world manifestations of the donor’s funds.

Transparent as it may seem, this process has turned my adoptive hometown of Gulu, Uganda into a town at odds with itself, a place capable of churning out moments mired in philosophical conundrums.

For years, because of the way Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) used this area as a staging ground for their decades-long war with the Ugandan people, Gulu has been sitting at the end of the giving process, acting as a goodwill receptacle for international organizations and private donors. Situated along a key trading route near the Sudanese border, Gulu has morphed from a quiet village into a bustling town in the last century. Its high population density made it a target for the LRA, a group that used child abductions to fill its ranks. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, with donor funds from overseas, NGOs began applying salves to community wounds.

However, just as the fighting here—the child abductions, the rapes, the stolen cattle, the middle-of-the-night murders—has scarred the lives of the Acholi, Langese, Karamojong and other northern tribes, the help that the fighting has sparked has also left a wound.There are scores of tangible benefits that have come from the area’s NGO initiatives, but these programs—these vehicles for giving—have also delivered changes in the way people think, created often dangerous shifts in how people see their peers, their work, and on a larger scale, their position and potential in a stratified world.

“I was shocked when I saw my family not digging,” my Ugandan friend Joseph said. “It was the start of the rainy season. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked them when I saw them sitting at my mother’s hut. I asked, ‘Why aren’t you preparing your fields?”

He stared out at the black ribbon of asphalt ahead of us, a narrow road that connects Gulu to the nation’s capital, Kampala. We had a few more hours to go before reaching home, and with a busted radio in the car, words were our only comfort. I waited for him to continue as he dug through the memory.

“You know, they had just returned from life in the camp. For ten years plus they were receiving food from the World Food Program. One of them said to me, ‘We are not foolish. We decided not to farm. We are still waiting to meet the right NGO that will help us with food.’ Tssssssk! Can you imagine?”

I told him I couldn’t.

“These are farmers! And they were telling me they are not going to farm?! How can this be?”

The path that connects my house to the main road into town is a narrow, orange footpath that cuts through a gauntlet of brush before opening onto a small dirt road. Late for work, I trudged down it one morning, oblivious to my surroundings.Then:

“Excuse me, excuse me, sir.” A short man in a faded and stained black t-shirt was walking next to me, smiling. “Good morning, sir,” he said, extending his hand. We shook.

“Do you remember me?” he asked. I stopped to get a better look at him.

“No.”

“You said hello to me just up the road there. It was a week or two ago I think.”

“OK,” I said, unsure of what he was getting at.

The man leaned in close. He had a gap between his two front teeth that was so large I wondered if it was actually a space where an extra tooth had once been. I suddenly became aware of the possibility that this man had been waiting for me to pass, that he’d studied my morning routine and planned this encounter.

Whispering now, he said, “Well, actually, I was hoping, uh, that you would maybe be my friend.” Pause. “I think we would make very good friends. We could spend time together and talk. We could give advice to each other, just like friends. In my heart, I know you to be a very nice man.” Saying this, his voice rose a bit, making his sentence sound more like a question he was asking for the first time.

Reflexively, without giving his request any thought, I started shaking my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Thank you for the compliment, but I’m sorry: I can’t be your friend. I know this sounds strange, but this is not the first time people have approached me like this.”

I explained to the man how more than a dozen Ugandans have started the same exact conversation with me before, and I told him, too, how many of those people later asked me for money to help pay their kids’ school fees or buy bus tickets to Kampala. The man protested at first (No, no, you have me wrong—I’m not like those people) but eventually he smiled, wished me a good day, and left.

Later, feeling horrible about the way I brushed off the man, feeling like life in Gulu had turned me into a cold stranger to myself, I talked to Sarah, a Ugandan co-worker, about my response. “Was I being too harsh?” I asked.

She laughed.

“No, of course that man wanted to be your friend so he could get things from you—money or a ticket to the US, probably. Ugandans never speak that way to other Ugandans. It was OK that you walked away. Really, it’s OK.”

Sarah also told me about ‘pen friends’: about how when Ugandans get an American pen pal, they start writing letters with only the culmination of the relationship in mind. “In Uganda, if I have a friend writing letters back and forth to me, in my mind, I think, OK, now I have someone who will help me in the future. Letters usually lead to more,” she said.

I thought back to the letter the Americans dropped off, to the envelope and the conversation I had with Margaret. I wondered how many people in the developed world stumble into these types of relationships. How often do we give and, in the process, let our good intentions pull us right into the snares of complications we didn’t bargain for?

Here in Gulu, many Ugandans see white foreigners as inherently wealthy, perpetually ready and wanting to give out a couple of bucks or a free meal. In turn, these foreigners—often development workers like myself—doubt Ugandan advances of friendship and question motives. Some Ugandans try to ‘double-up’ on support from different NGOs or attempt to embellish their personal histories to meet vulnerability criteria on applications; others like my friend Joseph’s relatives are left with crippling dependencies after a program’s phase-out.

One NGO in town that was providing thousands of scholarships to high school students across the North scaled back their operations last year. With other local organizations unable to ‘absorb’ the now scholarship-less students, hundreds of kids were left scrambling for school fees. I came home one day to find a white envelope waiting for me by the front door. Inside I found a portrait of a teenage girl and a letter written so perfectly it must have been drafted a few times. The girl in the photo, the letter’s author explained, needed help—‘just some small money’—to pay her school fees. For days afterward, I couldn’t help but think that high school kids who waved to me as I passed were simply hoping to lay the groundwork for a relationship that they could eventually tap for assistance.

Of course, cynicism doesn’t shade every relationship here. Genuine friendships between foreigners and Ugandans are not only possible: they are common. As an employee of one of the NGOs in town, though, as someone who is here working for an organization that aims to help people, I’m torn: I see how giving both supports and smothers people. Seeing this duality manifest itself in my community, realizing that giving is in fact a murky, perplexing act, has changed me.

I feel as if my empathy has been worn raw. Even living amidst a tangle of organizations that work to help people, I have been flooded with stories of physical abuse, children succumbing to sickness, and lost educational opportunities. I cringe now when I hear of new start-up NGOs taking root in town, immediately questioning their audacity and level of experience; I don’t flinch when students I am interviewing tell me about the way their parents were killed or raped; the sight of beggars in town—even the one with a thick stump for a leg who carries around his miserable plastic bag of mixed food scraps—stirs up not feelings of pity within me, but surges of frustration and anger; sometimes when kids see me and immediately ask me for money or pens (echoing the met demands they’ve made to other foreigners in the past), I stop in my tracks and, thinking out loud, ask, “Why? Why should I give anything to you?”

The trees lining the road by Kaunda Grounds trap the clouds of dust kicked up by passing cars and trucks. After a few rain-less weeks, the road is perpetually cloaked in a thick, reddish haze. Walking home on this stretch of road at the end of the day, as I was doing, is a gritty, eye-squinting ordeal.

A motorcycle emerged from the haze and screeched to a stop by my side. Both bike and driver fit the profile of one of Gulu’s hundreds of boda bodas, motorcycle taxis that take people around town.

“Where are you going?” the driver asked.

“Near Holy Cross Church, across from the prison,” I said.

“OK, let’s go,” he said, nodding toward the back of his bike. I hopped on and he sped away.

As we were driving, my hand raised to shield my eyes from the dust, I thought about a conversation I had had with a boda driver a few weeks before. The driver had asked me for money to help buy school uniforms for his kids. As I had done before in similar situations, I apologized and explained I couldn’t help him. The irony of the situation, however, was glaring: here was a person canvassing on his own behalf, asking for support in-person, and I was refusing to engage. Yet years before, someone on the street in NYC was able to get me to support a person in India I had never even met. I thought about how Gulu had numbed me, anesthetized me to the stories of brokenness that once surprised and saddened me. It took more now to convince me of someone’s misery.

When we reached my house, I pulled out my wallet and, before I could find a thousand shilling note for the driver, he smacked at the wallet in my hands. Startled, I backed away from the man.

“No, no. You don’t need to pay me,” he said, laughing.

I was confused. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Why not?”

“Because I’m not a boda driver,” he said. “I’m just driving home. You don’t need to pay me.”

A few weeks ago, I decided to make a donation to a charity on my girlfriend’s behalf. The charity—one she likes that provides people with clean water—applies 100% of its donations to program-related expenses (all administrative expenses are covered by a few wealthy donors). The organization has a straightforward website and forces local beneficiary communities to invest in their water projects; intentionality underpins everything it does.

As I clicked the ‘Pay’ button and completed my donation transaction, I felt comfortable, calm. Unlike that sidewalk sponsorship I made years ago, this donation was the end result of research. I thought about the donation before making it, considering the organization’s project history and long-term goals. No nervous sweating in the sun; no pulling of heartstrings.

Sure, my money could end up reinforcing negative stereotypes on the ground. And some of it might even be used to line the pockets of a local government official somewhere. But despite this, I made the donation because I still have faith in giving. I am still convinced of its potential, its ability to catalyze opportunity.

I keep this faith even though I don’t take charity at face value anymore; I’m more critical now, and this, I think, is a good thing. No longer an easy sell, yet still not an expert on development by any means, I have seen enough while living in Gulu to realize that anything can be packaged and sold, that any success story—no matter how small—can be made to shine when taken out of its context and slapped on the front of a glossy brochure. I know that, outside of a post-disaster/crisis environment, a gift that isn’t earned can be a wet blanket for one’s dignity. And I see how giving can make donors feel like God, like fate changers.

But I’ve also met the proud parents of scholarship students; I’ve walked into homes built with the help of micro-loans; I’ve patted the heads of healthy pigs being fattened for market. I have talked to beneficiaries who won’t go back—who can’t go back—to the risky, uncertain lives that once owned them, and their faces are impossible to forget.

Friday 7/23/10  Gulu, Uganda

**This is a short piece I wrote for Glimpse during the spring Correspondents Semester.**

South Africa’s striker sprinted at full speed with the ball, a rocket of legs and swinging arms tearing across the field.  For a split second the man enjoyed a wide patch of grass all to himself, but only for a second.  His fastest wasn’t fast enough.  One of Mexico’s defenders caught up with him and made a lunge at the striker’s feet, tapping the ball with the tip of his cleat just hard enough to push it out of bounds.

Hopes dashed, the two men sitting next to me threw up their arms and jumped from their seats.

“No!  No!”

“Elephant!  That man is an elephant, seriously!”

Grimacing and shaking their heads, they both swiped their beers from the table and took quick swigs, as if their disgust for the striker was a sour taste they could wash from their mouths.  Even though they had been cheering the player just moments before, praising his speed, this was the opening game of the World Cup, and we were packed into a bar in Gulu, Uganda with 150 other guys from town:  No player, not even one who had just scored, could bank on sympathy from this crowd.  The stakes were too high.

In Uganda, watching professional soccer is an activity that spans the tribal divide, something that’s managed to become ubiquitous in a place that is, for the most part, electricity-less and hence, television-less.  The names of Arsenal and Man. United players glimmer in sparkly font on the back windows of taxis; Wayne Rooney’s face stares back at you from the belt buckle of your waiter when you order lunch.  Ugandans’ fascination with watching soccer is only rivaled by their love for playing it.

No one lives too deep in the bush to kick around a ball; no village is too small for a soccer pitch.  Whether they are camouflaged with knee-high grass or speckled with grazing cows, open fields bookended with goal posts dot the countryside.  Packs of kids kick around ratty bundles of plastic bags held together with string or rubber bands; men—usually shirtless and sometimes barefoot—play competitive, sweaty games in the late afternoon. And because Ugandans know soccer, because they can read its goals and decipher its passes, they can appreciate brilliance on the field when they see it.

For many here, Lionel Messi is one of the greatest players of all time.  An Argentine prodigy with a mop of shaggy hair, he dribbles so quickly around players that he stuns them, sometimes leaving them tripping over their own feet and looking dazed.  He finds pockets of open space on the field and darts through them before you had a chance to notice they were there.  The entire atmosphere of a game can be sped up and energized simply if he’s in it.  And that left foot of his?  Dozens of goalies have cursed it while pounding the turf in dismay.

Ugandans either love Messi or hate him, but regardless, everyone respects his talent.  In a packed bar that reeked of beer and body odor, I watched Messi work his magic a few days after the World Cup’s opening match.  He snagged a pass at midfield and then, in the face of two defenders, faked left and then cut right, flipping the ball just over one of their feet with the smallest flick of his foot.  The crowd screamed and started half clapping with beers in their hands.

The man next to me turned and tapped me on the shoulder with his drink. “You see?” he said.  “There is a man who sleeps at night!”

I smiled.  I didn’t know much about Messi’s background or who he was off the field, but sitting there in that bar, shoulder to shoulder with a hundred guys I’d never met before, I felt like I understood Messi, too.  He was what we had in common.

Here’s a video of the goat being slaughtered.

Note: This video is a wee bit graphic.  Just a wee bit.

Twenty of us circled the guesthouse’s only pool table, a lopsided clunker with faded green felt, and—hypnotized—watched for hours as teams chased the elusive final black ball, the jokar.  The first official pool tournament for our organization, a methodically documented, highly competitive affair, saw staffers from two different departments go head to head in 18 games of pool.  There were upsets; there were shutouts; and there was even a little trash talking, a friendly shove or two.  I had already played a game, and so when I pulled my beer to my lips for a swig, the fleshy bit of my right hand between my thumb and forefinger smelled of baby powder.

David, a co-worker, walked into the bamboo and sheet metal shack that housed the pool table and waved me over to him.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You want to see the goat?  We’re getting it ready now.”

I followed him down a narrow ally adjacent to the guesthouse. At the end of the ally, tied to the rusty base of a water tank, was a healthy looking, coffee-colored goat.  As I was taking pictures of it and trying to pet its horns, David summoned two guesthouse employees—one shirtless man who carried a kitchen knife, and one young guy in a white tank top and a baseball cap.  Before I could even say hello to the two men, I felt David’s hand on my chest.  “Stand back.  You’re going to get sprayed if you stand there.”

“Sprayed?”

In silence, in a way that made it obvious they’d done this before, the men flipped the goat onto its side.  The young man lashed the goat’s legs to the water tower’s base.  The other man, the shirtless one, straddled the goat and clamped his hand around its mouth.  He pulled its head back and to the side, making all of the tendons in the goat’s neck taught and twisted.  Then, with the kitchen knife, with absolutely no hesitation, the man started…sawing.  ‘Slicing’ or ‘slitting’ don’t accurately describe the force—the labored cutting and re-cutting—needed to hack your way through a goat neck with a kitchen knife.  Sawing is the only way to describe it.

The second the shirtless man went to work, the goat began bleating wildly.  After 10 or 15 seconds of sawing, after the goat went silent for good, candy red blood spurted from the wet mess of red muscle inside the goat’s neck.  Some of it splashed onto the wall of the guesthouse, and a pool of it made islands of pebbles on the ground.  The shirtless man stabbed the knife into the goat’s spinal column, causing one single, final twitch to ripple through its body.

Horrified yet fascinated, I stood motionless as the whole thing played out before me.  Only once the goat was hanging from its front legs and decapitated save for a single piece of skin and a tendon or two—once it started looking more like meat than the animal it once was—did I take my eyes off it and turn to David.

“Oh. My. God.  I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Never?  You don’t see this in the US?  People don’t kill goats there?”

“Some people do, I guess.  But no one I know ever kills goats.  Or even chickens.”  Pause.  “Hey, David, I have a question for you:  When you see a goat or a chicken die like this, do you ever feel sad, like do you ever wonder what the goat is thinking about as it’s dying?”

He laughed and instantly started shaking his head.  “No, no, no.  I never think about that.  It’s just a goat.  When I see a goat being killed, I begin thinking about dinner,” he said, smiling.  I thought about how difficult it is to conceptualize animal rights in pet-less places.

I turned to the young guy in the tank top.  He was watching the shirtless man, almost studying him.

“Have you done this many times before?” I asked.

“No, just four times.  Actually, I’m still learning.  Here in Uganda this is a man’s work—the killing.  Men always kill and skin the animals, and women prepare the meat,” the man said.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

We introduced ourselves.  “Stephen, it’s nice to meet you,” I said, foolishly reaching to shake his hand.  He held it out, we both looked at it—at all of the goat hair and dried blood—and we laughed, settling for a nice-to-meet-you nod instead.

*****

Later, after I’d lost another game of pool and after my team had officially lost (“What’s the punishment for our team for losing?” I asked a co-worker.  “Nothing,” he said.  “You will just know that you’re the losers.  That’s enough.”), I joined four or five people seated behind the pool table.

Beatrice, one of my co-workers and a confident woman with close-cropped hair, had just returned from a three-month trip to the US.  As an advocate for our organization, she drove around the country with a few college kids and taught people about what our organization does, about why scholarships are so valuable in this part of the world.  The topic of my being a vegetarian came up in conversation, and Beatrice chimed in to back up my strange stance on food.

“It’s true what he says.  There are many people like him in the US,” she explained.  “They don’t prepare meat like we do here.  Their meat is not natural like ours, so people choose not to eat it.”

“Yeah,” I said, “lots of animals are treated with chemicals and hormones to make them grow faster.  Many Americans don’t know where their meat comes from.  I bet most have never seen a pig or a cow being slaughtered.”

Beatrice nodded as she took a long pull on her beer.  “Mmmm hmmm,” she swallowed.  “It’s true about the chemicals.  You know, there in America you can make a chicken get this big,” she said, holding her hands a foot apart, “in just one week—all from chemicals in the feed.  And a cow?  You won’t believe that it becomes full grown in a month!”  By this point, five or six co-workers had joined the conversation and were staring at her, completely incredulous with furrowed brows.  One asked the question all were wondering: How?

“OK, it’s like this,” Beatrice went on.  “You know soda bottles here in Uganda?”  The group nodded.  “And you know how there’s a machine that slams the metal cap onto each bottle after its filled with soda?”  Again, nods.  “Well that’s how it is with cows in America!  One by one, they stand on an assembly line and pass by some type of killing machine!  Then another machine cuts them, and another packages the meat.  It’s unbelievable, really.”  My co-workers started shaking their heads, laughing at the ridiculousness of the idea, at the way America loves its crazy machines.

Someone brought out a mountain of goat meat on a tray.  People straightened up in their chairs to get a look at it.  Staring at the food, I couldn’t believe that just two hours earlier all of that meat was inside the living, breathing creature tied up out back.  Beatrice plucked a cube of meat off the tray and ripped it in half with her teeth.

“How is it?”  I asked.

“Mmmmmm,” she said, smacking her lips.  “De-licious.  Try some, just one.”

“No thanks.  It looks good, but I’m off to meet John for dinner.  A vegetarian dinner,” I said, smiling.

“You’re sure, not even one?”

“I’m sure.  But you guys enjoy it though.”

I walked down the line of staff, saying goodbye to each one with a handshake.  When I reached Beatrice, she did what all Ugandans do when required to say hello or goodbye while their hands are dirty:  she held out her wrist and let her hand fall limp.  I shook her forearm, gave everyone a final nod, and walked out alone into the inky darkness.

Thursday 5/27/10  Gulu, Uganda

I have a student in my class named Ronald Reagan. Okot Ronald Reagan.

Here in Uganda, it’s common for people to name their children after famous Americans.  The guard at our house, for example, is named Abraham Lincoln.  Like his historical namesake, Ugandan Abe is tall, introspective, and knowledgeable on a number of subjects (he brought a dying avocado tree in our yard back to life in the blink of an eye).  A guard that sometimes subs for Abe is named…no joke…Michael Jackson.  As silly as it seems, I never cease to find humor in these names.  The other day, as we were waiting for a few more students to file into class, I wanted to make a formal declaration that the lesson would only begin once the Prez arrived.

I met Ronald Reagan for the first time two months ago.  He’s a student in my creative writing class, a twice weekly affair that is held at a school here in Gulu.  My students—all Ugandan teenagers aged 12 to 15-years-old and non-native English speakers—have never had any type of formal writing instruction before.  None.  The extent of their previous writing experience is limited to the three and four sentence-long answers they have had to give on past English exams.  No five-paragraph essays.  No short stories.  No poems.

For them, writing English is like when a kid meets a distant relative who comes to visit from out of town:  shards of vaguely familiar info take the place of a cohesive story; choppy bursts of chatter block out fluent conversation.  They’re familiar with English and can speak it fairly well, but they can’t stitch the language together on the page.

Our class focuses on the basics, mainly because I’m not sure what else to focus on.  I’ve taught creative writing to fluent English speakers before, and I’ve taught lots of ESL classes, but I’ve never combined the two subjects and rolled them into one.  We’re starting from scratch, labeling topic sentences and practicing how to proofread.

So far, considering how little writing practice my students have had in the past, their writing has been solid and, for the most part, captivating.  For every two pieces about a relaxing weekend spent with family out in the countryside, there has been one piece about a student’s childhood fondness for eating dirt; one story about a student’s memory of a midnight raid by rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).  Because of the area’s decades-long war with the LRA, most of my students have spent their childhoods living like adults.  At once, their writing is both mature and innocent, a record of a fusion of life stages.

A map from this Wikipedia page that shows global alcohol consumption.  Uganda is the lone dark spot at the center of the map.

Monday 5/24/10  Gulu, Uganda

**Below is an article I just wrote for Invisible Children’s website.  It’s about how too many men in the developing world are squandering money—what could be their kids’ school fees—on alcohol.**

Nick Kristof, the famed humanitarian issues columnist for the Times, recently wrote an interesting editorial piece about alcohol consumption and its effect on education in the developing world.  In it, he describes how many men living in poverty spend large amounts of their already-low income on booze, cigarettes, and sugary drinks.  For what a man spends on a single drinking session at a neighborhood bar, he could send one of his younger children to school for an entire term.  Two MIT development economists, Esther Duflo —one of the world’s most innovative economists right now—and Abhijit Banerjee, have discovered that the world’s poor spend only 2% of their incomes on educating their children; by contrast, the poor spend two, three, and four times this amount on tobacco and alcohol.  So what’s the issue?  Why aren’t parents spending more money to keep their kids in school?

Kristof proposes that not enough women are holding their family’s purse strings, that too often men decimate their family’s monthly funds before they’ve been applied to the most urgent expenses.  Solution to the problem?  Kristof poses two:

1.  Get family finances into the hands of more women.  If women are able to step up and steer their family’s finances, giving their husbands a small weekly allowance and nothing else, the chances are good that money will be spent productively.

2.  Invest in microfinance projects that help communities convert to savings-based mentalities, rather than consumption-based ones.  At Invisible Children, we couldn’t more emphatically agree with this.  Teaching people to save is vital in seeding financial stability and empowerment.  That’s why we’re so excited about our Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA), an IC microfinance program that teaches hundreds of villagers in Uganda to save and loan money together.

In 2004, the last time the WHO compiled global per-capita alcohol consumption figures, Ugandans were the world’s leading consumers of alcohol.  Read that sentence again.  The world’s leading consumers of alcohol.For five cents a piece in Uganda, you can buy small plastic bags of whiskey or gin at nearly every small grocery kiosk; many people in remote rural areas don’t even spend any money on alcohol because they brew it themselves at home.  This practice of home brewing, one that remains both common yet prohibited by law, is notorious for producing dangerous batches of the national drink, waragi.  Hundreds of Ugandans die or go blind each year after consuming tainted batches of this alcohol.

As Kristof reminds us, no issue exists in a vacuum.  A school fee payment of a measly couple of dollars a term swells to become a looming barrier to education when booze, cigarettes, and cell phones make up the foundation of a family’s expense hierarchy.

–Andrew

Saturday 5/22/10  Gulu, Uganda

I just returned to Gulu from a three-week trip home to New Jersey.  During my visit, I spent two weeks with family and friends in Jersey and one week with Erica in New England.  The trip was energizing.  I was home during the height of spring, so everything was in full bloom and coursing with life.  On the road trip, Erica and I drove north slowly with no set destination, making it as far as northern Vermont before we had to turn around.  Many of the days the weather was perfect:  mostly clear skies, high 70s, and low humidity.  We drove with the top down and zigzagged our way across Vermont using only its quiet, two-lane roads.  Between this road trip, some of my mom’s amazing home-cooked meals, and time spent with friends, the visit home provided me the exact energy boost I needed to make it through the chaotic summer ahead.  Below are some pictures from the trip.