Too many new concepts

This year, we get to celebrate the dawn of 2011 with a missionary family that lives in Soroti, a town northwest of Mbale. They have three adopted children, one African American girl and two Ugandans.

                “Where did those children come from?” Lucy, our laundress asked me this morning, seeing them running around with Josh. “They are not Karimojong.”

                “No, they live in Soroti.” I answered. Lucy looked over at the woman who was carrying around baby Zulia.

                “Where are their parents?”

                “Right there, can’t you see?” I pointed to the white woman. “She is their mother.”

                “That white woman? She has married the black African?”

                “No. Her husband is there.” I pointed him out, standing with his son, Moses who was peering into the chicken pens,

                “Then how can she have black children?”

                “She has adopted them. Do you know adopted?” Lucy only stared at me, and then slowly shook her head. I attempted to explain, “She did not give birth to them, but she has taken them as her own children.”

                “Oh, so they are orphans. The parents have died?”

                “I don’t know. Maybe.” Lucy looked so confused.

                “Why don’t they give the children to their relatives?”

                “Because now they are their family. That white woman, she is the mother to them, her husband is their father. They are all one family.”

                “But they are black children! How can the white family have black children?”

                Gosh, it is the hardest thing to explain the concept of adoption to a Karimojong. They simply don’t understand it. Here, even if a child is an orphan, the relatives would rather send them to an orphanage a hundred miles away then have to feed and clothe them. And on the rare occasion that an orphan is taken into to a relative’s family, they are only fed on the understanding that they will be the ones cooking the food and washing the clothes and caring for the smaller children. A slave basically, with no prospects beyond work in the home and no prospect of school at all. They are not really welcomed into the family, but simply given a food to eat and a place to sleep at night. But now, here is a young mzungu couple living in Soroti, Uganda, caring for three black children who are not even related to them! They must be crazy! No one seems to grasp the idea that these wazungu are now the children’s parents and their loving family.

                Today is the last day of the month, and therefore payday. Zulia’s mom had asked me to watch Zulia for a bit so I wandered out onto the porch, where Cosmas was, awaiting his payment.

                “Maria, who is that child?” He inquired.

                “Have you seen those visitors? It is their child.” I answered

                “Those white visitors? Yes, I have seen. They even have two more. But where are the children’s parents.”

                “No, those visitors are their parents. They have adopted them. ”

                “So this girl’s parents are dead?”

                “I don’t know.”

                “But then why have they taken her? Is she Ugandan or from somewhere?”

                “She is Ugandan. Even the other small boy, he is Ugandan.”

                “What about the other girl?”

                “She is American.” His face portrayed his shock at my words

                “American? You have blacks in America?”

                “Yes. They are there. They are African American.” I could tell by his face, that the concept was hard to grasp. African American? So she is American? But she is black? He shook his head in confusion. It was too much to take in in one day. “Her name is Zulia.” I said. Zulia stared up at Cosmas with big eyes.

                “Julia, ejoka?” He took her tiny hand in his and shook it gently. She didn’t know what to make of that, but she smiled anyway, showing off her four teeth. Boy, is she a cute little bugger.

Christmas feasting

People say that Thanksgiving is the holiday where you stuff yourself so full that you can hardly move, but I disagree. On Thanksgiving, you have one enormous meal during which you may, if you chose, gorge yourself, but Christmas lasts for a whole season. Christmas cookies start being made weeks in advance and consequently begin being devoured weeks in advance. Then you have a Christmas Eve party, a Christmas dinner, and sometimes even more food on Boxing Day. Then of course, you must diet for the week up until New Years Eve when you are subject to eat even more. I think I should win the prize for most eaten this Christmas. Not that I totally gorged myself the entire day. While I didn’t exactly diet, I wouldn’t call myself a pig. But see, it’s very rude to refuse food and when you’re invited over to everyone’s Christmas dinner, what can you do but accept?

                Christmas morning began with the usual amazingness. Family time around the tree, listening to music, eating frozen mangos and pumpkin bread that Mrs. Okken made for us. At ten, we dressed up in our new finery, crammed our family, Amy, Leah, Mrs. Jantsch and Dr. Greet into our five-seater Toyota Land Cruiser and headed to Namalu for the Christmas service at the Trinity Church in Namalu. We met the Wrights there. Pastor Emuron, when he invited us, had told us the service would start at ten, which of course meant that he would start playing Christmas music on his boom boxat 10:00. And what music it was. Not just Christmas related songs, but gospel songs with a kind of 60s beat in the back ground.  I love how people blast cheesy music everywhere. It makes me happy. Then the service began with the most energetic singing in the world. Pastor Emuron’s wife, Linda, played the drums so quickly…and she never once missed a beat! I’m pretty sure my arms would’ve fallen off if I’d been drumming. She was also leading the songs most of the time, which takes serious skill. I only knew some of the songs. Many of them I had never heard before. But I still clapped away till I couldn’t feel my fingers. People were dancing, raising their hands in the air, praising God with enough enthusiasm to warm the coldest heart. Happiness seeped into everything, shining on people’s faces, radiating from the entire church building. After the sermon, there was more singing, during which more and more people came in through the door. Girls in their smart holiday skirts, men in their brightly flowered blankets, and everyone covered with beautiful beads, danced their offerings up to the front of the church. People brought anything they had, be it money or not. One woman brought a huge pot of porridge, while others brought a plastic plate or a pen or a couple of live chickens. The chickens, plate and pen were auctioned off to the congregation, one would pay 5,000, another 2,000 another 3,000 until all the chickens were paid for. Then the singing commenced again as row by row people danced back down the aisle.

                Pastor Emuron had been expecting us to join him in a Christmas feast afterwards. So he led us into a little thatched building and sat us down…all 15 of us. His daughters started bringing out the plates of food. They just kept coming! Posho, matoke(a bland banana that tastes like a bland potato), rice cooked with meat, chapatti, cabbage, huge pieces of goat meat, chicken, irish (potatoes), spaghetti, two kinds of soup, beans, liver, kidney and intestines. And to top it all off, a boy came in with a crate of soda for us. I bet you they could’ve fed the entire US army with the food they had prepared. They must’ve been cooking all morning! So we sat down and dug in. By the time we had all eaten our fill, the three tables of food still looked untouched. Pastor Emuron and his family had not eaten anything in this time, so now he called all his family that could fit in the building in and they all thanked us for coming and scolded us for not finishing the food. We all laughed and in turned thanked him and his family (which is just about as big as our mission including grandchildren) for their cooking. It was almost 2:00 when we loaded into the vehicles and started home.

                My good friend Susan had invited me, Anna, Mrs. Jantsch and Leah to come and share her Christmas dinner with her since her husband had been called away that morning on urgent business. So Dad dropped us off at the road side and the four of us made our way towards her home. She too had been cooking all day. There was rice cooked with onions and tea to make it brown (a Susan specialty), white posho, more chicken, beans, soup, and scrambled eggs. Let me tell you, Susan is I think the best cook I have ever met. She insists that she really has no idea how to cook and just makes it up half the time, but I have tasted her food and I say she cooks the best posho and beans I have ever tasted. But today she had cooked for us a special Christmas meal. SO we all sat down in the cool of her house and ate once again till we thought we would burst. It only took one plate to fill me up. But the food was so good, I wanted to eat more. I think everyone expects you to finish the food when you go to their house for Susan too scolded us for not finishing it. Well, the eskari will be happy tonight, she said.

                Normally, we go to the dance down at the Catholic Church every Christmas, so Susan escorted us back to the mission so she could continue with us there. I decided to stay home and help mom with the cleaning up and cooking for tonight’s mission dinner at 6:00. Was it already 4:00? Oh boy. So after processing the fresh green beans we had brought up from Mbale and putting them aside in a pot, I lay down on the couch and slept off the several pounds I had gained since noon. Mean while, James and Bobby were playing with James’s new iHome speaker that he got for Christmas and decided it would be really funny to blast fart noises that came on James’s iTouch, in my ear on the speaker’s top volume. Happy Christmas to you too. I threw a pillow at him.

                I hardly need to mention the sick feeling in my stomach as I munched down the third delicious chicken dinner since noon. Mr. Wright had created a culinary masterpiece out of chicken, bacon and mushrooms. Then there were green beans, mashed potatoes, cooked carrots and bread. And Mrs. Jantsch had baked a chocolate bundt cake for desert to go with Mrs. Okken’s Christmas cookies. It was all very well prepared and absolutely delicious, but I still ended my day collapsed on the couch. Oh, what we missionaries suffer!

warning! opinons expressed in this essay are strictly a means to a literary accomplishment and not the opinions of the author.

The Christmas season is a time of cheer. A time when everyone spends the majority of the time and money before Christmas making sure they will have time and money on Christmas to do with as they please. A time when  everyone gets all hyped up for one day on which all the kids wake up at 6:00 so as to make the day last as long as possible, and all the adults wake up to bouncing children at 6:01, wishing they could take advantage of the day off and sleep in till 12:00. A time when every catering company, fancy restaurant, cookbook, incredibly talented mom, fussy aunt, sneaky child and just average motivated person is busy in the kitchen, creating (or inspecting the creation of) gargantuan amounts of rich, sugary, not-very-good-for-your-average-diabetic, food. Of course, it’s not till Boxing Day that everyone truly appreciates the money spent, sleep lost, and food gorged part of the season.

This aspect of Christmas is a given. Every family everywhere sympathizes with each other come Boxing Day. However, by some this sympathy is shown by congregating at one house and giving each other trinkets and treats in order to comfort—the “bigger gifts to the bigger spenders” rule generally evening things out—while for others the sympathy is shown by the literal meaning of the day and is simply sent through the mail in a box. Over the years, the tradition of being social has slowed to a trickle. Instead of coming over to spread holiday cheer and enjoy each other’s expressions of joy as gifts are revealed, one simply stops over for a Christmas cookie, drops the box under the tree, then mutters something about putting another log on the fire and escapes back to the cozy  sweatpants and steaming cup of cocoa, to laze around in peace. I find this a much more rational way to spend Christmas.

Over the past few decades, statistics have shown that the percentage of sick children during Christmas has dropped considerably.  Statistics have also shown that over the same space of time, the rate of car crashes due to icy roads has also dropped. According to this chart (insert chart) since these are the only two things which have changed, it is only logical to assume they are connected somehow. Our next logical step is to consider the causes of both these tragic occurrences.

Our first issue, child illness during the Christmas season, can be illustrated by this second chart (insert second chart). We see here that the top reasons for child illness are INFLUENZA, PNEUMONIA, FOOD COMAS and OVER CONSUMPTION OF CHRISTMAS SWEETS. All of these can be directly traced back to socially connected Christmas traditions, namely family/ friendly gatherings. Everyone knows that it’s not half so much fun to have snowball massacres and build (and consequently get busted for building) anatomically correct snowmen when you’re not doing so with a large group of people. Both of these activities encourage spending excessive amounts of time outside which could lead to any number of illnesses including INFLUENZA, PNEUMONIA and FROSTBITE.

It is also common knowledge that every family attending such gathering is requested to bring some sort of food item. However, while this is common knowledge to us party-poopers, the families who are asked to contribute the food have apparently no idea that everyone else was asked as well and so bring enough food for the entire gathering. Let’s do the math on this one. If everyone brings enough food for themselves PLUS everyone else you get…WAY TOO MUCH FOOD! Once this is realized, each contributor begins to feel rightfully sheepish and so, as penance, stuffs themselves fuller than they thought possible in a useless attempt to reduce leftovers. This can result in FOOD COMAS or, in the case of children who slyly slip their meat and potatoes to the dog and instead survive the entire night on pecan pie, sugar cookies and candy canes, a SERIOUS SUGAR OVERDOSE.

Now, let’s look at the second issue: car crashes due to icy roads. This one, quite frankly, is so simple, you can sum it up in one short phrase—“spiked eggnog and icy roads don’t mix!” Did you ever wonder why eggnog tastes so good? Or did you, like so many others, get pushed back and told to let the adults go first. In the end, specific adults got a few more rounds than others and then decided that the party needed a little more “spike”, and so went out in a very crashable car which should have expired in the 1800’s to fetch it? That and the combination of all the ambulances rushing to pick up the kids in food comas makes for some pretty nasty car crashes.

Over all, as statistics prove the dangers of congregating about Christmas time far out strip the benefits. It is just as fun, and not nearly as dangerous to curl up  on a sofa in your pajamas with a mug of cocoa, coffee, tea or other such warming beverage (other than spiked eggnog) and just be lazy. Plus, with the recent improvements of the postal services all over the world, you don’t have to worry about being unsocial. Dollar store trinkets and cheep Christmas cards sent through the mail are lifesavers. Besides, if you use this method of celebrating Christmas, you are upholding the tradition of Boxing Day. And that’s what Christmas is all about, right? Upholding tradition.

a very fun week beginning

It was two weeks before Christmas and all through the house, every creature was stirring with the necessity to go down country. So down we went. We left Sunday after church, stayed in Mbale that night with the Jameses, drove to Jinja Monday, stayed at the Kingfisher then took a day trip into Kampala Tuesday and drove back Wednesday.

                That Sunday, as we were making our way to Mbale we saw a sign for the CPCC power project just past the Amaler prison. There was a mabati building, draped with power lines that shone with the flickering light of newly installed electricity. Heaps and heaps of telephone poles rose in some places taller than the building. Maybe this was the beginnings of what Museveni had said about giving Karamoja electricity.

                Monday noon found us sitting at a wobbly, orange-clothed table at Ozzie’s, a small restaurant in Jinja run by a lovely old Australian lady. They make the best burgers I’ve ever tasted in my life. It’s a small place, with only 8 or so small tables and a tiny kitchen off the back, but the white concrete walls bear the mark of true beauty. On them rest several very impressive paintings by a fellow named Angello. His color-usage is amazing. If I were a millionaire, I would buy a big house and turn it into an art gallery of his work. Well, other people’s work too (Katie’s for instance and Rachel’s), but definitely a few Angellos too. Also decorating the walls of this quaint eatery are numerous pamphlets, advertisements and brochures for organizations like ADRIFT, NRE, and less well known safaris, game parks and tourist attractions. Among these was a small white booklet labeled “street children in Jinja S.A.L.V.E. international” I picked it up and started to read. “Our research shows that just over 1 in 10 street children beg. Tourists play a significant role in keeping children on the streets in Jinja, as they are enticed by cash handouts.” hmm. Food for thought.

                Mom and I went into the market on Monday to do among other things, Christmas shopping. We walked down rows and rows of woven mats, cheap dress shoes, clay cooking pots, plastic jewelry and dried fish. They have the randomest things in the entrance to the market. People were shouting at me as I passed “Do you like to eat this kind of fish?” nope. Not at all. I think it’s the only smell in the market that I really can’t stand. But thanks for asking. We continued on through the part of the market where the produce is sold. I walked past heaps of oranges, mangoes, pawpaw, star fruit, passion fruit, jack fruit…fruit that I’d never seen before. This is the most colorful part of the market. Then the heaps of oranges turned into heaps of onions and garlic, the grain sacks full of green beans turned into grain sacks full of cinnamon bark. Vanilla beans, coriander seed, pepper corns, cardamom pods, rock salt, pink, yellow and red curry powers, crystal sugar, dried hot red peppers…the list goes on and on. This is the spice market, and consequently the best smelling part of the market. Next, in order to get to the clothes market, we had to cross what is affectionately called “blue jean central” or “the place with the creepy pastor dude who sounds like Gollum”. There is in fact a man who calls himself a pastor who stands amid the piles of jeans shouting at people about the fires of hell and need for repentance. I mean, he has half of a good point there, but too much of a good point can quickly turn to a very bad one when he takes to picking random people out of the crowd and assessing their personal sins from their attire. He once physically grabbed an unsuspecting tourist who happened to be scantily clad by African standards and made some very unfair accusations about her. Thankfully, he was not there today, so we continued our spree in peace. We walked from heap to heap searching through American thrift store rejects for a church shirt for James that was not Hawaiian, ripped up, or size XXL. Unfortunately, we had no luck. We did happen to find a surplus of rainbow colored hats, though. And a very cool belt with a glittery picture of Obama on the buckle. The entire time, this weird guy followed me around trying to sell me these cheap lace table coverings. He seriously would not get it that my table did not “need smart clothing” as he put it. Aiaiai. I argued with a guy over the price of a pair of jeans, getting him from 18,000 down to 5,000, only to remember that I was saving my money for Kampala. What a pity, for they were awesome jeans. And not a bad price, too.

                Tuesday morning dawned cold and drizzly, a very handy thing when you’re going to be working up a sweat carting stuff to and from stores all day. Every store in Kampala was decked out with mammoth amounts of cheesy Christmas decorations. At the entrance to “uality hoping village” (actually Quality Shopping Village, but some of the lights don’t work) there’s this inflatable Santa thing that changes position every ten minutes. It scared the flamingo out of me when it suddenly dove forward as I walked in the door. After the grocery shopping was done, we went over to Garden City Mall to eat lunch at the food court and go to Aristoc, the awesomest book store in the world. It was so crammed with Christmas decorations and security guards, you could hardly move, but I did find some rather good things in there. Then, James, Dad and I went to watch a movie in the CINEPLEX which, can you believe it, I had never been to, while Mom and Josh went bowling at “Alley Gators”. I tell you, that bowling alley is scary! There are these life size figures of alligators everywhere. Crawling on the walls, clinging to the ceiling, and all are destroying bowling pins with their monstrous yellow teeth. Sends shivers down my spine.

It was a very fun Kampala trip, even if it only lasted a couple of hours. Even driving back to Jinja and then home was fun simply because of everything you could see by looking out the window. You never know what you’re going to see out there. People wear, do and carry pretty strange things. Such as a coffin or bed frame or thirty live chickens on the back of a boda. I mean, people do and wear weird things in America, but somehow the weirdness varies from continent to continent. Nothing eventful in the way of flat tires or running over animals happened on our way back to Karamoja, so we arrived home safe and sound, with minimal injuries. J

Thanksgiving 2010

Let’s see, a month ago where was I? Ah yes…in the back of our car with James getting jostled along the Junction-Napenenya freeway.  Mzee Asiyo had asked for a ride to the Museveni rally so mom was driving Mrs. Wright, Amy and Lomongin and us there. And let me tell you, that was one of the smartest parties I had ever seen. Even fancier than Huruday! We were surrounded by a sea of yellow t-shirts with President Yoweri K. Museveni’s head, decked with the usual wide brimmed safari hat, printed on them. The words “Stability and Unity”, which were printed on the back of the shirts, jumped out of the yellow sea like black dolphins.

People were dancing in the streets, bells on their knees, beads on their heads and black and white Colobus monkey tails raised high over their heads. Some people held posters on sticks, others waved dried banana branches in the air, and others just waved their hands over their brightly crowned heads in praise. There were people all around us, still dancing and singing, but only half as much as they had been before they noticed us. White people AND the president. What a day! We made our way down the slope into the valley. The crowd got thicker as we neared a large tree under which were grouped approximately a million soldiers, AKs in hand. One of the soldiers, spotting us, came toward us quickly and pulled us out of the line. He apologized repeatedly and then led us towards the place through which the entire crowd was funneling. It was a metal detector. Like you would see at an airport. Under a tree. In the middle of Naturum. The shiny metal arbor looked more out of place than we did. We were then given the mzungu treatment which means that everyone else had to stop and wait as we cut in line. They asked to see our phones, wallets, purses, cameras… I thankfully had nothing on me of importance so I was free to look back at the hundreds of people lining up to walk through this thing. They all had metal bracelets halfway up their arms and legs.  I watched as a boy walked through the metal detector and freaked out when it beeped. A woman soldier walked over to him and searched his pockets. He had a little tin box of math instruments in his pocket. She took it away, looked through it, and then gave it back. He snatched it from her hand and took off towards the brightly colored tents that were set up to welcome Museveni. We followed suit.

You know, being a mzungu has its bad points. Sometimes I wish I was black just to cut back on the racial discrimination. But it also has its handiness. We were spotted in the crowd and given seats under one of the three tents. In front of us sat Mzee Asiyo. It’s understandable that he should be given a front row seat for he was once a member of parliament and ambassador to the Congo and he and Museveni were, according to him, old chums. But that we should get a seat behind him basically made my day. We wouldn’t be able to see anything if we were in the crowd.

So we sat and we waited. And waited. And waited.  Groups of singers from different villages came in, village at a time and sang and danced songs of greeting. At one point the nephew of Museveni came forward and shouted that in order to get more votes, they brought a gift. Now I noticed the stacks and stacks of cases of water bottles. These were passed out, first to those in the tents, then to the rest of the people. As Museveni’s nephew chucked them into the crowd, people scrambled all over each other, punching and fighting to get the bottles. Boy am I glad mine got handed to me.

In the center of the clearing a man hacked away at what used to be a small tree. When it had been whittled to his liking, he called to a man who brought out the Ugandan flag and a coil of rope. It was a beautiful sight, the black, yellow and red stripes dancing with the wind and the crested crane actually looked like it was flying, or at least flapping very energetically. A big truck with a water tank on it then drove through the clearing, a man walking behind it with a hose, spraying water all over the ground, drowning the dust that could dirty the flag and the president.

Finally he came. He climbed out of the car and went to sit in the cushioned chair that had been set on the red carpet next to the little table with the tissue box on it. There was a wastebasket behind him and a bunch of flowers on the table. A girl started singing the national anthem and I joined in feeling very patriotic. A truck with a podium on the back of it drove up in front of the flag and with great pomp and ceremony, the president made his way to the top.

And what a speech that was! He said that the only problem in Karamoja was the guns. He said if there were no guns, then there would be no fighting and everyone would keep his own cows and allow them to reproduce and there would only be profit for everyone. After explaining the problems of Karamoja and how to fix them, Museveni went on to promise the same thing he promised at the beginning of his last term, and the one before that. He said that he will pave the road from Mbale to Tokora to Moroto. He said the reason he didn’t do it last term was because in order to merit a paved road, there must be at least 200 vehicles traveling that road per day. But there aren’t. And this is all due to the cattle rustling and guns in Karamoja.

Yoweri K. Museveni made a lot of promises that day. He promised among other things, paved roads, 800 mill shs for Namalu water supply, a hospital for each district along with 200k worth of immunizations, increased commerce, and last but not least, to put Karamoja on the power grid. To hook up power lines from Mbale to Nabilatuk to Moroto. Then he took a sip of tea from his white china cup and said “I would stay longer to discuss this with you but I have to go to Amudat. I will be back.” He climbed from the podium, and turned to leave, but first he had one last stop to make. He made his way over to his good friend Edward Asiyo, shook his hand, exchanged a greeting, then left to the sound of hundreds of people singing his praise.