People were saying all kinds of things. But the local authorities assured us that this was just another case of the sort of wanton violence that erupts occasionally in the West Nile. The tourists, unfortunately, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Living in the wrong place all the time, as I did, that didn't really make me feel a whole lot better. I secretly hoped that some of the other expats in town would pack their bags and go home so I could follow suit. But no one did. Not Coby and Bernard. Not the four Italian families. Not the missionaries who were sprinkled all around town. And certainly not Pauline and Terry, who, I got the feeling, had lived through worse in their long overseas career.
But still, I was uneasy. I didn't want to come across as too much of a scaredy cat, but was I really the only one who was unnerved by the hand grenade?
“Are you worried at all about our safety here?” I asked John.
“That was just a fluke. Things like that happen all over the world. Remember that social-work student who was murdered right down the street from our apartment in Brooklyn? We didn't leave Brooklyn because of that.” He was right. But then again, he was a guy who had blithely lived through a coup in Burkina Faso.
“Bernard says if places like this were peaceful and stable, they probably wouldn't need development workers,” Coby said when I brought the subject up with her.
“So you guys aren't thinking about leaving?” I asked.
“Nah,” she said. And I trusted her judgment. She was a nurse and had a child to think about. She and Bernard seemed sensible enough. But then again, they had spent the past seven years in Nicaragua, which at the time was in the middle of its own civil war.
As a precaution, CARE put armed police guards in each of our compounds at night. I was definitely not thrilled about having a man with an AK-47 sleeping on my porch at night. But since it was widely believed that it was off-duty policemen who were responsible for most of the trouble around town, it was always a good idea to pay them to keep their friends away.
After that, nothing happened. And I mean nothing. That was the thing about life in Arua. Life was day after day of languid nothing much broken occasionally by some adrenaline-pumping, life-threatening crisis, which was then followed by another long stretch of rather dull nothingness until the next explosive crisis. It was hard for friends and family back home to believe that our life could actually be dull. “Are the elephants rifling through your garbage cans?” an old colleague from Brooklyn asked.
Ha! I thought. Like we have garbage cans!
The elephants weren't anywhere near my garbage, although every kid in the neighborhood was. When I found a group of kids playing with an empty tampon box, I made a mental note to tell Aisha to do a better job of burning my trash. Except Aisha had mysteriously stopped coming to work a week earlier. One of the Italian families was getting ready to return to Italy and recommended that I hire their house girl, Rose. Young and healthy as an ox, Rose had the added advantage of knowing how to make spaghetti sauce and pizza. So when Aisha still didn't show, I hired Rose.
Then one day I saw Aisha in the market. “I thought this would be a better job for me, madam,” she said from behind a huge pile of potatoes. And I certainly agreed. It just might have been nice if she'd informed me. But Rose was doing a fine job of keeping house and even cooking. The only complaint I had, and it was minor, was that Rose had strong body odor. But in this she was not alone, as I was discovering. Rose was not the only one in town who stunk. And I took it as another reason to find something to do outside of the house.
Dear Susan,
Fill me in on the latest gossip at work. No, wait a minute, don't tell me. I already got a letter from Christine (you know her, she's the new and improved me at the AIDS prevention center). Why didn't you tell me she was doing my old job so well?? I've been gone four months and she's already written four grants, published an abstract, and snagged my old consultancy! Here I am doing absolutely nothing with myself—feeling useless and grungy to boot. My hair is a mop and my face is breaking out (and you laughed when I packed that tub of mud mask!).
I know, I know … I chose to leave all that behind (what the hell was I thinking??). Now I am on this new path with new challenges and there will be new achievements and successes to come, RIGHT??? I won't just sit out here in the jungle for two years twiddling my thumbs, RIGHT? This is the beginning of a whole new life for me. And success in this life can't be measured in grants and abstracts and consultancies. So how the hell will I know if I am succeeding?
Last night all the expats in town got together for a progressive dinner party. We went to a different house for each course. We had bruschetta, grappa, and tiramisu at the Italians; crisps and beer with the Brits; curry with homemade mango chutney at the Canadians (who used to live in India). It was great fun, great food, and fabulously interesting folks.
But for some reason I woke up this morning hating this place. All I could see in front of me was this endless stretch of empty days. I am networking nonstop—both here and every time we go to Kampala. But it never seems to amount to anything. I'm beginning to think I was not cut out for this life. Fabulous dinner parties are just not enough to keep me feeling fulfilled. Worse yet, all the other wives here seem to breeze right through this. They never get homesick or full of anxiety. Pauline told me that once I get used to this life, I'll never want to go home again. Meanwhile, I'm wondering if it's too early to book tickets home for Jean's wedding.
Well, I have to go eat some lunch. Then one of the other expat wives is coming to pick me up for a trip to, oh, I don't know, somewhere where you can buy green beans. Everyone is very excited about this. Should I be worried?
I'll keep you posted,
Eve
Notes from (Way Out in) the Field
“Welcome aboard Missionary Aviation Fellowship flight 121 to Kampala. Our flight today should be nonstop, inshallah, and we expect to be landing in an hour, inshallah. Well, an hour after we take off from Arua International Airport, which will be as soon as that family of cobs leaves the runway.” I looked at my fellow passengers, both of them, and wondered why neither one was laughing. Our pilot intended the inshallahs—the commonly used Muslim phrase for “God willing”—to be funny, didn't he? And surely neither of them actually thought that the tin-roofed cement shed next to the dirt runway constituted an international airport. I could see that he wasn't joking about the wildlife delay.
“Once we are in the air,” the pilot continued, “we will be offering our complimentary beverage service. Feel free to turn around and serve yourself a soft drink from the cool box behind you.” Based on the accent, I guessed this pilot was British. I'd come to prefer the pilots who were Dutch, like Coby She was competent and full of common sense, which I'd begun to think of as a Dutch trait. “Before we take off let's all bow our heads for a moment of prayer.”
I wasn't sure if this was a good thing or not. I mean, asking for God's help when flying over the African jungle in a plane the size of a Volkswagen Beetle might very well be a wise move. But entrusting myself to a pilot who felt the need to ask for God's help before we even took off worried me. I bowed my head politely, though, as the pilot thanked Jesus for all kinds of things, but I was praying that there was a beer in that cool box for me. And I gladly added my “amen” when the pilot's list of petitions ended with a safe landing in Entebbe.
So far, Uganda had not exactly proven to be the boon to my career that I had hoped. It had been a boon to the newly established commercial enterprise of the Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF), since I'd spent much of the past three months flying back and forth to Kampala, chasing phantom job leads. MAF was a group of missionaries whose role had previously been limited to flying Protestant missionaries and their supplies around Uganda. An odd religious calling, I guess. But also practical, considering the awful conditions of roads to so many of the isolated places where missionaries worked. Though their planes were teeny—their jumbo jet was an eight-seater—flights weren't al
ways full. So MAF had recently begun selling their open seats to us heathens. Tickets were relatively inexpensive and came with a shuttle ride to or from the airport on the Kampala side, as well as inflight sodas and prayers.
So far, my quest for meaningful work resulted in little more than earning me enough frequent flyer miles on MAF to get a free flight anywhere I wanted to go. That is, if MAF gave out frequent flyer miles (they didn't) or went anywhere I wanted to go (they didn't). I zipped down to Kampala for every meeting, workshop, or conference I was invited to, handing out CVs and business cards like they were candy. Several times I was so close I thought I could almost taste a consultancy contract. Turns out I was just tasting enough tea and groundnuts to last a lifetime.
“I know what you're going through, Eve,” Elizabeth Marum said when I finally met her (two months after my first attempt) at the US-AID office. “On our first tour overseas, I followed my husband, Larry, to Bangladesh. I had all this experience, a master's degree, and I was finishing up my dissertation for my Ph.D. I gave the director of Oxfam my CV and told him I was looking for work. He glanced at my CV and then asked, ‘Can you type?’”
“Boy, back in the States I just assumed with my AIDS background I'd find something.”
Elizabeth nodded sympathetically and gave me a big smile. “If you were in Kampala, I'm sure you would. I'd find a way to use your skills. But Arua? Now that's going to be much harder. Not much going on there. But keep doing what you're doing. Try to get your foot in the door and at least see if you can get some short-term projects.”
I thought I finally had my foot in the door when UNICEF invited me to a three-day conference in November to evaluate and improve the training component of a peer education project. They couldn't hire me, of course. Like many projects in Uganda, this one was a partnership with a local agency, so UNICEF couldn't offer me a job without their agreement. But by participating in the conference, I would be introduced to all the players, and that, they assured me, would most likely lead to an offer. They could provide my room and board and a per diem of fourteen thousand shillings, roughly twenty dollars per day.
Even with the involvement of the world's foremost health promotion agency, this conference was pretty much like every other conference or workshop I had been to in Uganda so far. Speaker after long-winded speaker went on at length about their area of expertise, regardless of whether or not it had anything at all to do with the point of the conference. I began to suspect that speakers were paid by the word in Uganda, double for words that no one in the audience understood.
As usual, I was introduced with great fanfare and asked to sit up front for every session. As usual, no one asked for my input. Which might have been a good thing, because I don't know how well it would have gone over if I'd added my two cents: Quit yakking about gender disparity and inheritance laws and just stop all the unprotected fornicating already. By day two I was so frustrated that I considered leaving. Either that or chewing my own arm off.
I didn't leave, though. A mzungu couldn't just slink out quietly. Besides, I never knew what networking opportunities might arise. And the humor and camaraderie of the participants—community educators, mostly young women, many of them living with AIDS—kept me from chewing off my own arm.
“Auntie, I have a headache,” one of the participants said over lunch on day two.
“I am going back to the room to check on Margaret. She did not come to the session this morning,” answered the middle-aged woman that everyone called Auntie Lucy. “I will bring you back a tablet for your head,” she said, making her way across the dining hall, a big cement hall lined with long wooden tables and benches.
“Auntie,” another young lady called out before the stout woman could get out the door, “I cannot find my key.”
“All right,” Auntie Lucy called back. “First the sick. Then we will look for your key.”
“And you?” Auntie stopped in front of me as I was finishing my lunch of matoke covered with a watery fish sauce. “Do you need something?”
“I don't need anything, thanks,” I said. “But I was wondering why everyone calls you Auntie?”
“Oh,” she said with a laugh. “This is our African tradition of Ssengas, aunties who teach the young girls about life and sex and traditions. To prepare them for marriage. In my village, I am the Ssenga. So here, I am everybody's auntie. Even yours!” She let out a deep baritone laugh.
“You need something, you tell your auntie,” a young woman at my table said and everyone nodded and giggled.
That evening, when we were back in our rooms getting ready for dinner, the electricity went out. I had noticed a lantern and matches in my room, which I hadn't needed because the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling shed enough light for the tiny room. Suddenly thrown into darkness, I wished I actually knew how to light the kerosene lantern.
“Auntie Lucy?” I called, walking with my lantern in the direction of the room that had been a beehive of activity for the past two days. “Can you help me light my lantern?”
“Oh, silly girl,” Auntie said, but not unkindly, “how can you live in Africa and not know how to light a lantern?”
How can you people call yourselves health educators but not know that simply lecturing people won't make them change their behavior? I wanted to counter. But I had to admit that making fire trumped understanding the Health Belief Model on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, so touché. Auntie Lucy patiently instructed me in how to raise the wick just enough, but not too much, and how to replace the glass top to protect the flame.
“Come, now we will collect the others for supper,” she said, taking my arm.
“Ladies, listen to your auntie,” she bellowed as we made our way along the winding pathways between the low cement buildings of the nunnery that now doubled as a conference center. “Everyone bring your lantern to supper or you will not find your way back afterward.” I was still surprised at how quickly it got dark in Entebbe. Night falls as swiftly as a guillotine this close to the equator.
The women emerged from their rooms, carrying their lanterns. Like a string of bobbing fireflies, we wound our way to the dining hall, which was lit by candles that the nuns had set out on the tables. As I ate supper with the other participants, everyone's tongues seemed a little looser. Maybe it was the candlelight; or the fact that the organizers and presenters had gone back to Kampala for the night.
“Are you married, Eve?” a woman on my right asked, passing me a huge bowl of matoke.
“Yes, I am. And you?” I answered, scooping a small amount of the sticky yellow mush onto my plate. I was hoping one of the other bowls being passed around held a less starchy starch.
“Yes, but my husband died of AIDS. Now I am the second wife of my husband's brother. So I am a widow and a wife!” I watched her ladle a greasy chicken sauce over her heaping plate of matoke.
“You do not care for matoke?” a woman across the table asked me.
“Oh, I like it,” I said, ladling a fair amount of the sauce over it. In truth I found it tasteless and hard to digest, but I wasn't going to disparage the national dish.
“Did you want to marry your husband's brother?” I asked the woman next to me as I passed the sauce bowl. All the women at the table laughed.
“Here it does not usually matter what we want,” someone answered and several others clucked in agreement. “It is tradition in most tribes that when a man dies, his wife or wives are inherited by her husband's brother.”
“This is one of the reasons why AIDS spreads so much here,” Auntie Lucy explained. “If her husband died of AIDS,” she pointed to the widow/wife, “then she has it too. And when she goes with the brother of her husband, he will have it soon and give it to his other wives.”
“Yes,” said the widow/wife. “This is a very big problem for us.” Someone passed me a bowl of boiled potatoes, which I heaped greedily on my plate.
“Ah, this one prefers potatoes!” Auntie Lucy yelled as if she had unearthed the secret of
my soul. The women clucked and slapped their thighs.
“Did you wish to marry your husband?” a young woman on my right asked me.
“Yes, of course!” I said. And I heard giggles.
“Why did you choose him?” a woman sitting opposite me asked.
“I loved him. Isn't that why you get married?” I said.
“Oh, no!” several of them said in unison while others let out hearty laughs.
“Sometimes there are love matches,” Auntie Lucy said.
“But not very often,” added another woman.
“Me?” said a young woman on my left, “I do not want a husband. What good are they? They just bring you more work and more mouths to feed.” There was a murmur of agreement.
“Well, they are good for sex!” the woman across from me announced to the thigh-slapping chuckles of several others.
“But not much else!” a woman shouted from the very end of the long table.
“Ah, besides, I have AIDS now,” the young woman on my left continued. “So some men will not want to marry me now.”
“Does having AIDS make it so that no one wants to marry you?” I was pleased at how open these women were to talking.
“Marry? Maybe not,” chimed another woman. “Have sex with us? Sure. A lot of men here do not care.”
“Here life expectancy is what?” Auntie Lucy asked.
“Forty-seven,” I answered before I realized that Auntie Lucy was playing Socrates, like Adam often did.
“When you get infected with HIV, you do not just die. No, you can live with it, sometimes for some years,” Auntie explained as others nodded. “So for many men, especially those who are already older, they are not so afraid of getting this disease. They think, Sure I will die soon anyway. Why should I change my ways?”
“And changing health behavior is very hard,” I added, suddenly understanding the AIDS situation in Uganda much better than I ever had.
First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria Page 15