Saturday Night in Kalisizo

A more typical day in Uganda…woke up at 5am to prepare for a car to come pick us up at 6am. 7:30am rolls around, no car, no electricity, no breakfast, no coffee, and no numbers to call…..moments of panic set in when we realize we might get stranded here at the guest house for the day…..language barriers, traffic, hunger……things eventually work out and zebras are seen and Pringles are popped and sunburns happen and electricity comes back on and rice and beans dinner is about the best thing we have ever eaten…..

Something about staying in Kalisizo makes me feel like I have had the emotional wind knocked out of me….it is not a sudden thing, this loneliness….it creeps like the creeping dampness in london, slowly climbing up my body until it invades my thoughts, until it hurts to think…..I remember this loneliness well from years ago when I had much less strength to fight it….I don’t know why it happens here, but I have some theories….

One of my favorite things to do in Uganda is to ride around the countryside, taking in scenes of daily life—people collecting water, cooking food, fixing bicycles, drying laundry, sleeping under shady trees, bathing babies—the currents of life as it is lived day in and day out. I find the predictability of these flashes of daily life somewhat soothing. But when I really think about these drives, I am horrified by how sensitized I have become to the poverty around me. The reality behind my collecting water—the reality is that there is a long line (of mostly women and children), some of whom travel miles to collect cans of dirty water from a single pump, water which will inevitably claim the lives of many children vulnerable to diarrheal diseases. The reality behind the scenes of cooking can be seen in the children in the villages, who run around with swollen stomachs and popsicle stick limbs as a result of protein malnutrition. Without proper nutrition, these children will never reach their potential, never be able to concentrate enough to excel in school, never grow properly, never be completely healthy. They will never have a chance. How have I become so used to these images? Why am I not outraged every minute of everyday here? I know the answer—because it is too hard. If I were to allow my outrage and disbelief to the surface, I fear it would consume me. It is easier not to think about it, easier to see this world as if I was blind to it. See it as a tourist—someone who takes all that is beautiful about this place and packs it into photographs, briefly acknowledging the parallel human world and then pushes it into the shadows of memory. But I will never be just a tourist in this country. These images exploded into my life when I was fifteen and have haunted me ever since. I have attempted to understand this world through an intellectual exploration of history, anthropology, sociology, public health, and medicine and I have found no answers. In fact, as I have become more and more educated, I feel as if I have moved farther and farther away from understanding….Instead of turning my intellectual inquiries into action, I have built a wall around myself. I can’t feel in this prison in my mind and when I can’t feel, I can’t learn and I am disconnected from the outrage that is required to be an agent of change.

Staying in Kalisizo, we are actually physically isolated from the world beyond the armed guards and heavy locked gates. In this physical isolation, much of my days and nights are spent inside my head and I alternate between being profoundly bored and being profoundly anxious about all the things I don’t know and don’t understand about life and death. No wonder I feel the desperate need to escape–not Kalisizo but my own thoughts. Part of the goal of this month in Uganda was to apply my newly acquired medical knowledge and I realize now that was a joke. My knowledge of medicine means nothing and once again, all that I am doing here is taking away…..Learning far more about myself than anything else.