Dear Friends,
Tomorrow I will have been in Uganda for a month.
Every morning I wake up at seven to gospel and/or Christian rock music (I am rooming with a Born-Again Christian who likes to start her day off with a healthy helping of Jesus). I spend most of my day traveling between villages visiting and interviewing people and in the evenings I write profiles and articles. I love the work I’m doing here and I feel like it’s been a very good “match” – I am getting so much out of living here and think in turn I’m also able to give a lot to MIHV in return.
I am deeply grateful to the people I meet everyday who welcome me into their homes and tell me their stories. I spend six or seven hours a day sitting with people and having conversations about their family, education, aspirations for their children, their sex lives, marriages and separations, religion, childhoods, reasons for using (or not using) contraception, and their goals for their communities.
Today Specioza, a 50-year-old woman, brought out a blue plastic photo album filled with photographs of her ten children. Another, Benedict, told me how while giving birth to her fifth child, labor was obstructed and her uterus ruptured. That child, who died in birth, would have been her first with her husband. As she told me her story, her husband picked up his three-year-old daughter from his second wife, who he married shortly after Benedict’s hysterectomy.
Sometimes it’s a bit strange, going up to strangers and asking them what type of contraceptives they use and why, how their religion affects their decisions, how being one of three wives affects them emotionally or their children financially. But when you get past the initial fear of asking such personal, at times painful, questions, you realize it is a glorious opportunity to be invited to ask these questions. It is an opportunity to begin to know a country, one woman, one family, one story at a time. Sometimes, when I’m walking along the little paths that weave past mud houses and through the fields of banana trees, I inhale Uganda and try to exhale gratitude.
I cried for the first time during an interview recently while talking to a 14-year-old girl named Fatumah. Fatumah’s parents separated when she was an infant and the family lost contact with the mother. Fatumah’s father raised her and her siblings. When Fatumah was 11 her father was diagnosed with AIDS. The girl’s older siblings had moved away and Fatumah became his full time care taker. He died a year ago.
School started for Ugandan children about two weeks ago and when I spoke with Fatumah, a few days before school would begin, I asked her what grade she was going into. She explained to me that she was kicked out of school last July because of overdue school fees (Uganda has universal primary education, but school fees for secondary schooling can be prohibitive, even for families where both parents are living). She plans to spend the fall working her family’s small farm to raise money so she can go back to school. When I asked Elijah, one of MIHV’s Ugandan staff if he thought she could feasibly do this, he said it was unlikely she would ever go back to school. “Other expenses will come up,” he explained. “Who will pay for the paraffin for the lamps?”
I asked Fatumah how much she owed the school. She owes 15,000 Ush for the construction of a new latrine, 5,000 Ush for lunch, 14,000 Ush for her uniform, 3,000 Ush in exam fees and 7,000 Ush for school supplies. When I realized 44,000 Ush (about $27) is keeping a 14-year-old from going to school, I started crying. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to cry in the middle of an interview, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be any good at this job if life here didn’t make me cry sometimes.
Take care,
Sarah
4 comments:
$27. That's a week of Starbucks for many of us. You are right, the playing field is never level. In this case, Fatumah's playing field is riddled with potholes and craters. Keep writing, keep telling their stories. keep engaging the issues of justice.
It is so much easier to ignore "them", the third world poor, the women and children...when they don't have names and faces and stories. Fatumah's story is compelling and heartbreaking. In some ways, sad and oddly hopeful because so little will make a huge and dramatic difference in this girl's life. In other ways overwhelming, because the problems are so complex and systemic. I'm going to hang on to the first idea; that everyone's little bit of help can make a momumental difference in someone's life..
ohhhhh.
i have nothing to say.
things like this make me feel so ... helpless.
I want to be where you are. I want to be helping. I guess we'll just postpone it.
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