“Today is not a celebration, but instead a day of remembrance … the fight against AIDS is a collective effort, but it begins with the individual.” Those thunderous words were sternly uttered by the shiny grey suit sporting Local Council member. It was World AIDS Day, and there I was uncomfortably situated on a broken white plastic chair, in the former Internally Displaced Persons’ camp of Koch Goma. As this fella’s proud piercing voice boomed, my soft gaze found 42 curiously bright eyes staring at me. Twenty-one young barefoot, malnourished, northern Ugandan youth inquisitively assessed me. Only two smiles were present, and the remaining kids’ eyes were securely locked on my body. I glanced down and noticed a swarm of flies happily playing in the open wound on the right knuckle of one boy’s big toe. His glassy eyes remained stagnant as his ripped black shirt and mud-stained khaki shorts looked three sizes too small. I glanced up to find his eyes, pointed at his wound and he remained expressionless. The aged, split gash appeared infected. After subtly removing myself from the situation, I found the nurse with whom I rode the two hour long journey with. She checked the lad’s abrasion and almost frustratingly informed me, “Our First Aid table is only for emergencies. He should go to the health clinic over there.”
In front of the health clinic was a manila painted concrete slab where six older adults took refuge from the sun. As with the masses, they expressed positive alarm at the munu’s presence in such a place. In my broken Acholi language skills, I explained and showed them the kid’s toe. One hunched over older woman’s response was, “Take him to the First Aid table.” After calming explaining the situation, I was informed, “That is infected, and there is no doctor here today. Tell the boy to come back tomorrow.” The young dude slowly wandered away after a local yelled something towards him that I couldn’t quite grasp. I was clueless, so I bought a piece of boiled corn and sat next to one elderly women clad in a vivacious yellow dress, accompanied by a walking stick.
While biting a tough faded yellow colonel of corn a squeaky and sweet voice appeared, “Are you hear for World AIDS day?” It was that of a 29 year old female who, due to her physical dimensions, appeared 17. The frail women kindly explained that she was there to learn more about AIDS. In our discourse she informed me that she longed to head back to school but, “in our culture when a girl becomes pregnant, people will stop sponsoring her education, because she is now a mom … I didn’t even want a child or think it was real that I could have one … I want to go back to school but have no money.” After she dryly spat out those details, close to four minutes of silence ensued. “I have to go take some alcohol at my auntie’s shop,” were the somber words that finally broke the stillness. I wished her well and ominously thought, “Wow, it’s not even noon yet on a Wednesday morning.”
I was intrigued with my surroundings and couldn’t tell what I was essentially feeling. Was I reeling off the notion that 12.4 percent of people in this district are HIV positive? Or that just a few years ago thousands of folks lived literally cramped on top of one another without proper access to food, running water, or safety in this very spot I stood that afternoon? Fearing rebel groups, fearing government troops, fearing starvation, fearing AIDS, fearing Ebola, fearing disease, and perhaps fearing life. What did I fear a few years ago … how to get beers on a Sunday night at Syracuse University when the liquor store closed early?
Once in a group meditation session in San Francisco, I was jarringly frustrated at the injustices in life, and thus I approached the leader after the session. When I explained my irritation at the instability of humanitarian insecurity in these polar opposite worlds people live in, he peered in my incensed eyes and delicately stated, “It’s actually only one world we live in.” To this day, I’m brought back to the spiritual leader’s acceptable statement. After all, I suppose we do live in only one world. But, I may argue that this world has vast and uneven boulevards that intertwine and also remain exceedingly distant from one another. Who can travel down which roads at which times? What does it mean that I was born on a wealthy, white, privileged, heterosexual, male road?
I had a terrific evening last Saturday night, hanging out, grubbing down, and chatting the night away with my coworker, his wife and their three children. Franklin (I’ve disguised his real name) is my age, but based on demeanor, style, and posture seems a bit older. The other day, he jarringly laughed when I pulled my laptop out of a bag that was wrapped in an old red tee-shirt I used as a covering case. “Oh Neil, I love your style, my brother” he shared as his white crooked front teeth were visible from miles away.
As we sat out in the open air surrounded by grass huts, we shared innocuously ridiculous tales about our upbringings. As the evening transformed into night, we got into it. Here’s a brother who lost both his parents to the war, lost a sister of HIV/AIDS after she was “raped” by government troops, and currently lives next to one of his brother’s three wives. “Our culture here is very different than yours,” stated Franklin while spitting out a fish bone that was caught in between his teeth. “You know, my brother is a busy man with all of his wives, but we are trying to make things more equal for men and women here.”
We conversed a few hours longer, and then he escorted me to catch a boda back to town. I wondered, “Does it ever end for these people?” And then I optimistically stopped the boda driver and asked him to drop me just outside of town. As I strolled my way up the dimly lit road, I thought, “Perhaps I’ll never get an appropriate response to that question.” But, the ways in which Franklin and his brothers and sisters face life with such determination and resiliency, makes me wonder. The world appears quite differently in northern Uganda than say Albany, New York. Do we as humans adapt to what we’re faced with? What has Franklin done to deserve living a marginalized life in a subjugated area of this earth? Is it marginalized and subjugated to him? Or is that how I see it as an educated white man studying in an absurdly expensive liberal arts graduate program? Isn’t it my privilege that allows me to travel and write about such mysterious “foreign” places?
snaps from World AIDS Day
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