Buikwe continued..

So the kids are amazing, would it not be for Paul’s charity they would not be going to school and would be locked into the cycle of poverty that is rural Uganda.  The food thing is totally real, they are undernourished. On the first day, while we were teaching one of the girls was lying down and Brendan asked why she was lying down and the headmaster replied “too weak, not enough food”.  For us this is an out of this world experience because our answer is lets go get her some food, easily solved. For these guys, they don’t have the resources to just go out and buy the solution and if they did it is a constant case of prioritizing the most needy members in the community…there may be someone who is needier for that last banana. We had a similar incident with one of the kids who was burning up with fever and we had to have her taken to the clinic which probably would not have happened if we were not around. Crazy I know….

My overwhelming observation was that everyone was dirt poor, sometimes hungry but they manage together and seem to retain a sense of community and happiness that I have seen few times in my life. I have not seen quite the same level of cohesiveness in Latin America or Asia, I will give the report on India when I get there. Amazingly 2/3 of the world population lives at this level of income.

There are little kids everywhere, there is little discretion given to who belongs to whom, yet everyone looks out for the kids collectively whether they are yours or not.

“William the conqueror”

For example this little guy, William was one of my favorites. He would hang out in front of Paul’s place in the afternoons when his mother was cooking maize over charcoal and selling it.

He had free range over the storefronts and street. Everyone knew his name and would look out after him. I don’t think these kids are used to as much “free play” and attention from adults as their US contemporaries. This little guy loved getting tickled and swung around in the air, and following a couple of sessions of this I couldn’t shake him anytime I walked outside. If you have ever seen the Budweiser “Wassup” super bowl ad, William laughs exactly like the guy who sticks his tongue out in the ad when tickled…hilarious.

Another example is Marion. She was in the house all day and everyday and at first I thought she was one of Paul’s kids. Nope, his explanation was that she hung out because maybe she felt loved. Her mother worked down the street and she could hang with her or come over to Paul’s house and hang out with his nieces. Either way she was treated just like family. She ate with us just about every meal and ran errands and helped around the house. I think she was about 2 and a half.

The usual look I got from Marion, very shy

Marion at play

Paul has some explanations for the close knit community which made sense. His rational was that hey, a couple hundred of years ago there are lions who knows whatever other dangers roaming around and you were happy to have a neighbor to socialize with and share the burden of survival. If something happened to you, the neighbor would take in your kids and visa versa. So neighbors were highly respected. He said this closeness is starting to disappear as people move out of the villages into the cities which is a tragedy.

Another observation that I had was about sharing. When teaching the kids, I used the western model of “it pays to be a winner” if you get a question right you get a candy. This is not really in their repertoire. Well the first candy I gave out, all the other kids looked at me like I was an asshole and the recipient took a lick from this jolly rancher and passed it around. Great for communicable diseases huh. That ended the pay for performance style of teaching. I have never seen so many seven year olds share things so naturally and without thought. Anytime I handed out a banana or chapatti it was practically split up and equitably divided before I could pull the next one out of the bag.

As for the life around the village, there is no power and no running water, people fetch it from streams and you stay up at night by candle light. Cooking is by charcoal see below.

they hand make bricks for the houses.

this is the shower, the toilets were long drop into a pit.

Paul’s place was a simply built storefront out of bricks with cement plaster and 4-5 spartan rooms behind it. It had an brick outhouse that housed the shower and toilet. Below are typical village houses.

Most are brick, the worse off are mud. Brendan did a mud building wall repair the week before and I was a little bummed I missed it. I was trying to figure out how they afforded houses, land. Paul told me that most everyone is a squatter, living on a landowners land for free and living off the crops that they grow on their adjacent 1-2 acres.  Mostly the people we came across who needed the help of village care were widows and orphans.

Ugandan HIV rates were as high as 30% in the mid 90’s and they have done a good job of getting things down to sub 10% however the demographics that you see are a stark reminder of HIV and the fact that many people are moving into the cities to find work. I think Uganda may be an exception to the overall Africa story which is 900M people of which 60% are in the cities, Uganda has 80% rural.

To be continued…