Wrapping Up An Adventure of a LIfetime

My brother asked me if I was going to write another blog entry about Uganda before leaving. I know I haven’t been as regular with the entries as I had thought I would be, but I’ve been busy actually living in Uganda, and that’s a lot harder than you would think! I’d like to think that G.R.I.T.S. in Kampala won’t stop even after I’m back in the states. I’m still processing so much of what I’ve experienced here and as I gain insights into the whole Uganda/African experience, I may want to share them with everyone who has enjoyed reading this.

One of many wonderful evenings at "Iqan House,"
 home of Carolyn Wade

So here I’m going to just share some random thoughts – and trust me – they’ll be very random - as I contemplate leaving. Some of the things I share were ideas I had wanted to write about and never got around to, some are just observations about life in Uganda versus life in the United States.

Life on the Hill

Living full time on the Bahá’í Temple properties has its rewards but also its challenges. Yes, I get to look out my window and see the Mother Temple of Africa day and night and yes, I only have a 30 second walk to my office. However, being on the hill 24/7 often meant working 24/7. I hold the keys to almost all of the buildings and offices on the campus – with the exception of the Temple itself and the Temple Director’s house. We have dorms and other housing here on the properties and we rent out the space to Bahá’ís who are traveling through Kampala or who have some business to attend to here. Sometimes these guests do not call ahead of time and will simply show up in the middle of the night, at which point I have to go to the Centre, find bedding for them, get the keys, show them to their accommodations, etc. Because I live on the hill, no one has any hesitation about coming to my home anytime to ask for a myriad of things, or sometimes just to visit. And I don’t mind the occasional visitor, but no one here has any concept of privacy. It never occurs to anyone that I may want to just have some down time. And closing the door and putting up a sign never worked. They just stand outside the door calling “Auntie Joyce, Auntie Joyce” until I open the door! Mostly it’s comical, but sometimes it’s frustrating and overwhelming.

In a Facebook post after I got my cats I mentioned that they came to the office with me. It didn’t occur to me how that would sound to someone who is envisioning a different environment for a Bahá’í National Centre. A friend who used to work at the U.S. National Bahá’í Centre quipped “Your cats come to the office with you?” and I realized that Uganda normal would not necessarily be normal anywhere else. I’ve only been to two other Houses of Worship besides this one – the House of Worship in Wilmette IL and the Lotus Temple in New Delhi. In both cases, the Haziratul’Quds, or National Centre is on separate property from the Temple, and in the case of the Lotus Temple, some miles away from each other. So visitors are only exposed to the Temple and the beautiful gardens, and there’s some pretty good security to keep visitors in the places they’re supposed to be. Here, the National Bahá’í Centre is within sight of the House of Worship. And while there is some fencing around the 45 or so acres of Temple land, that hasn’t stopped people from creating gaps in the fences and using the Temple property as a conduit to get from point A to point B. While many Ugandan visitors do stop at the Temple, many, especially children, just see the grounds as an open area where they can travel through, lounge and have a picnic lunch, or play. This is not necessarily discouraged by the Bahá’ís. Everyone in the area feels this is their property and we want people to feel welcomed. However, it can lead to potential problems that for this muzungu, can be frustrating.

We don’t have a separate visitors’ center to receive guests who want to know more about the Bahá’í Faith and the Temple. We do have Temple guides who escort guests and answer their questions, but the only other place they can bring them after seeing the Temple is the National Centre. So again, unlike the U.S. Centre or the Indian National Centre, anyone can walk into our National Centre at any given time during business hours. The Publishing Trust bookstore is there so guests often want to come in and purchase something. The guests aren’t so bad, as they have a legitimate reason for being there and usually are accompanied by a guide. But the neighborhood children – I call them “free range children” – often will show up and want to all come in and run around the Centre, use the toilets, which then end up broken, etc. And it’s all a distraction to attempts to get any work done. So yeah, I took my cats to the office! They were the calmest part of the office!

The thing that is lovely about the Temple property and its gardens is that it’s actually one of the only places in Kampala that is a park like setting. And because we’re perched atop one of the seven hills that surround Kampala, it’s usually a bit cooler up here and a constant breeze blows – making it a refreshing place to visit. Subsequently we have a lot of weekend visitors from the city itself – people who are anxious to get out of the hot city and be somewhere pleasant and cool. On Sunday afternoons especially we have many Indian visitors – there is a large Indian population in Uganda – and they like to just enjoy the gardens and fresh air. One Sunday afternoon when we were having some big event, an Indian family came and two young adolescent boys proceeded to set up a cricket pitch right in front of the Centre! I had to gently encourage them to relocate their pitch as there were people coming in and out of the Centre and I was worried about someone getting hit with a ball!

Because we have such beautiful gardens, the Temple grounds are also a magnet for wedding parties who want to have their wedding photos made here. The rules about where you can get married are very strict in Uganda, only “approved” or “gazetted” churches, mosques, and in our case the Temple grounds, are places where people can get married. Since many of the churches do not have gardens like we have, couples will have their wedding at a church, then their entire entourage, complete with cars that are decorated with colorful ribbons, make their way to the Temple and the whole wedding party emerges from the cars in order to have their photos made. I’m in a few of those photos as some couples wanted to be able to show that they had a muzungu in their wedding! We were having a Bahá’í wedding one afternoon and when we emerged from the Temple where a devotional service is always held before the vows are exchanged in the Centre or on the grounds, there were no less than FIVE other wedding parties on various parts of the grounds having their wedding photos made.

So for all its frustrations at times, the Mother Temple of Africa, the grounds, and the National Bahá’í Centre reflect the culture that is uniquely African – and it’s not for me or any other expatriate to complain about how it’s not like the other Temples – it’s for me to understand the culture and accept it as it is.

Free Range Children

I mentioned earlier about the numerous children who often use the Temple property as a playground or as a shortcut from their home to another destination. I call them “free range children” because that seems to be exactly what they are. When children are not in school, once they’ve got any household chores done, they’re free to roam about – usually in large “packs” of 5 to 15 children. These might be extended families or groups of friends and school chums. They’ll range in age from toddler to 13 or 14. In the large busy African families, older children are responsible for the younger children and have to take them with them wherever they go. And so they show up on the Temple grounds, usually pretty well behaved, other times not so much. On a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, if I am at home, the kids will drift by my cottage and realizing a “muzungu” lives there, will often stop and simply stare at me – or come to the door wanting something, anything, just so I’ll talk to them. Most of the time I don’t mind it, but there were days when I felt like a freakin’ animal in the zoo.

However, some of the more enterprising of the Temple guides took the opportunity to take the free range children and create junior youth programs or children’s classes with them. And in discussing junior youth programs, it has to be acknowledged in this culture that in tandem with the junior youth programs there should be corresponding children’s classes so that that the junior youth can participate without worrying about their little brothers and sisters.

Initially I was somewhat in awe of these packs of children roaming about freely. But then on reflection they’re not doing anything differently that kids from my generation and older did in the United States. We have become so frightened of everything in the states – and not without good reason – that our children can no longer roam about with their friends looking for things to get into. I think my generation may have been the last generation who could do that before child abduction started becoming so much more prevalent (or at least known about) and we all called our children in from playing in the yard and shut and locked the doors. There’s still an innocence about childhood in Uganda that we can only dream about. And they’re not without their problems either. Sometime later I’ll share about the issues of child snatching here that’s tied into child sacrifice for some witchcraft type rituals which are still practiced in some parts of Uganda. One of my young adult male friends has pierced ears because as a child that was a way parents protected their children from being snatched by a witch doctor. The children have to be “pure” to be sacrificed for the rituals, and a child with pierced ears is not considered pure, so lots of kids, including boys, had their ears pierced. Really, I’m not making this up!

A lot of life in Uganda, especially once you get away from the city of Kampala, is like the U.S. in the 50s and 60s. And yet I don’t see it as “backward” as some might think – but rather a simpler and different pace of life. Something I think Americans could learn from.

I realize that I’ve written over 1800 words and I still have a lot to say. So I think I will still be writing about Uganda even after I’m back in the states. As I said earlier, I’m still processing everything I’ve experienced in the last 18 months. I want to write more about things like language, communications, relationships between men and women, racism and tribalism, and so much more.

Rosalee Landry, visiting from Maine, with our beloved
Edith Senoga

But I will end for now with this – this has been the experience of a lifetime and I’m so glad I made the decision to uproot myself at age 57 and come to a world so completely different from what I grew up with. I wish everyone had an opportunity to do something like this. Every American teenager should be required to go to a developing country (Europe and Australia don’t count!) and live for even just a few months. I think the mindsets and attitudes of our overly spoiled children will be dramatically altered. I think we’ll find an easier path to a world peace if Americans will learn to look at people in Africa, India and South America as equals, brothers and sisters, and not as “less than.” And the only way that will happen will be to go and live among their African or Indian brothers and sisters, and start trying to understand how they manage their lives. I’m a long way from totally understanding much about Ugandan culture, but at least I understand that my Ugandan family will be in my heart and soul for the rest of my life. My life has been so much more enriched for having had this opportunity, and I thank God for it.

Diane Gable and Rosalee Landry, friends from Maine. That's the Nile River in the background folks!

And I’ve learned that even though this experience is ending for now – I can now look for other adventures in life. Heck – I’m even going to try living in Texas for a while! That’s bound to be quite the adventure! Yeehaw!

Sometimes Babies Just Die

We parked Carolyn’s car on the side of the rutted “main” road through the tiny village of Kyabando. The eight people we had managed to cram into the car, all staff members at the National Bahá’í Centre, clambered out and began the slow walk up to the compound where Mary and her family live. This was no easy climb, we had to squeeze ourselves between houses and straddle mud and refuse, trying not to slip and fall. The younger staff took the hands of us older folks to help us up. We kept going, ducking under laundry hanging on the lines to dry, dodging charcoal burners where people were already preparing their dinner, and attracting the attention of the children since there were two “mzungu” in their midst – it is unlikely that white people have ever come up into the private domain of the poorest of the poor who live in this ramshackle little neighborhood.

We finally arrive at the cluster of run down homes where Mary and her family live. The houses are three in a row, made of mud and sugar cane poles with metal sheets pounded together for roofing. Already in the compound people have gathered and are sitting outside of Mary’s home, where she lives with her husband and five children, although now only four children as we have come to pay our respects and condolences and grieve with her over the sudden death of her baby daughter Grace.

In an earlier blog post I wrote of the high mortality rate in Uganda, not just infant mortality, but death in general. From HIV/Aids, malaria, cholera, typhoid, or just the hazards of everyday life in Africa, there is no family that I have met since arriving in Uganda that hasn’t been touched by early deaths. Already since being here, this is the second child of a member of the staff at the National Centre that has died. In the spring of 2012, the 17 year old son of Jesca, the longtime secretary of George Olinga in the Office of External Affairs, died from sickle cell anemia. Jesca’s daughter, only 12 years old, also is afflicted with this insidious disease, and she was so traumatized by the death of her brother, realizing of course, her own mortality, that Jesca had to leave her job in order to get her daughter the psychological treatment she needs to cope with her physical illness. Now, after spending morning and lunch hours laughing with Mary, the staff cook, she is suddenly called away because something has happened to her baby daughter Grace, a bubbly, plump, and happy 8 month old girl, whom everyone at the National Centre had adopted as their own. Not long after Mary returns home, we get the impossible news that baby Grace is dead. No one knows why, she was napping, and then she was simply gone. The family will never know what happened to her, there will be no autopsy. Unlike in the United States, where sudden deaths at home have to be investigated, it’s doubtful that even if the police had been called, anything would have been done. Sometimes babies just die, and it’s a cruel fact of life in Uganda, and most probably anywhere in Africa. I suspect that this is why there are large families and education about birth control goes largely unheeded – you have a lot of children because you know that not all of them will survive to adulthood.

Once we arrive in the compound to join the other mourners, we are invited one by one to go into Mary’s home and grieve with her. Ordinarily, tradition here is that the mourners gather around the body of the deceased, sitting vigil for hours on end, not talking, perhaps occasionally keening and crying. But Mary’s home is a small room – maybe 10 feet by 10 feet, in which six people have been living, so only one or two people at a time can go in to see Mary and the baby. The homes are on a slope with the door facing uphill, so in order to keep rain runoff from coursing down the slope and into their home, sandbags are piled in front of the door, forcing us to climb down into this tiny room.

Lying on the mud-packed floor, upon which straw mats have been laid, is the shrouded body of little Grace. Mary kneels beside her infant daughter, keening and wailing the mournful cry that only a mother who has also lost a child can fully understand. There’s not even two square feet of room on this floor for others to sit or stand, the entire room is crowded just with the beds that the family sleeps in – triple decker metal bunk beds line two walls. There are no windows, nothing but an open door to let in air. The room is suffocatingly hot, even with the door open, and I can only imagine that one possibility of Grace’s death could simply be that she suffocated in this airless room. I kneel down beside Grace and stroke her face and the little tufts of hair, while trying to console Mary at the same time. Two other times I’ve had to bend over the shrouded body of a child who has died, and one of those was my own son Hayden. I know what Mary is going through, and there’s nothing I can do to console her, to take this grief away.

Before leaving I hand Mary two envelopes – donations of money collected by the staff and also donated by the National Spiritual Assembly. In Uganda, this is the best response needed by most people when a loved one dies – contributions of money to help with burial expenses. While there are funeral homes, those are reserved primarily for the wealthy. I’ve yet to see a city cemetery in Kampala – I don’t think they exist. Many churches have cemeteries, and we have a Bahá’í cemetery on the Temple grounds but  most people simply buy a wooden coffin and either take their deceased loved one to the village where the family is from for burial, or they simply bury the them in their own compound.

We sit for a while longer as the sun is beginning to set and as more mourners arrive. One of the other traditions is that the mourners come and stay for hours and sometimes days simply to be with the family and to comfort them. They’ll bring food or help with cooking the food and many will stay overnight. We are not among that group, and as soon as we think it’s appropriate we make our way back down the hill and to the car.

When we leave the compound we are told that the plan is to take the body of Grace to Kabale, a village inthe far southern region of Uganda, close to the Rwandan border. This is where Mary’s family is from. However, it is such a long way, and this family has little money, and we all wondered at the wisdom of this. Mary and her family are not Bahá’ís and so not bound by the laws of burying the deceased within an hour’s journey from where they died, but we can’t imagine them going to the expense of taking Grace so far away for burial.

The next day, however, we learn that the family has reconsidered, knowing that they couldn’t raise the money for the transport to Kabale. The owner of the property where they live has offered to let them bury the baby in a plot of land just steps away from their home and so the burial will be held at 2 p.m. that very day.

I’ve long held that funeral and burial practices have become too “sanitized” in the United States. Many of the traditions I am observing here with this death and burial is what would have happened in the U.S. 100 years ago, although I am sure there are still pockets of the U.S. where this more natural form of burial is observed. In the U.S. now, funeral directors take over the preparation of a body and set visitation hours are given for mourners to come see the family. Sometimes still, perhaps after a burial, people will congregate in the home of the deceased to continue offering consolation to the family, but more and more it’s a very clean affair – perhaps you only go to the visitation to see the family, but don’t go to the funeral, perhaps you can’t get off of work to go to the funeral – any number of things can happen that insures a bit of a disconnect with the whole business of death. However, in Uganda, and probably most traditional societies, it is expected that everyone stops everything they are doing to come and mourn with this family. In the smaller villages the entire village would come and sit vigil with the family, and no one would think of leaving until they feel they’ve done everything they can to help this family. It is with this in mind, and the fact that we love Mary and her baby, that the same group who went to visit the previous evening, decide to go to the funeral and burial that afternoon.

So we make the same trek back up the hill and find ourselves sitting in roughly the same places we sat the day before. I am sitting where I can see into the room, and I see two women helping prepare little Grace’s body in the coffin. While attending to this chore, they start singing the Luganda version of “Shall We Gather By the River.” More and more people begin to gather, but also daily life is still going on about us. Children are playing about, oblivious to what is happening. Women are peeling and cutting matooke to cook and serve the family and visitors later. I’m a bit disconcerted as I realize that in the very spot where we’re likely going to have Grace’s funeral, there is pile of matooke peels swarming with flies, which are also biting the guests. No real effort has been made to sweep the compound and make it clean – life simply goes on. I realize that this is my test, and shut my mind to it. The Christian minister arrives, soon after they bring the tiny wooden coffin out into the open space and set it down on two planks. A white embroidered cloth covers the coffin and on top of that Mary places a photo of Grace.

The minister starts his sermon, but I get the feeling he doesn’t really know this family or anything about the baby. In fact, later in his sermon he openly asks for her name and how old is she. His sermon is a bit random – spoken in Luganda –  but in deference to the mzungu he has someone translate for us. He then invites a friend of the family up to read a message from the parents. That is when we learn that the money we donated was used to purchase Grace’s coffin. When other people are invited to say something, James, one of our Temple guides speaks for the Baha’is in attendance. Afterwards the minister comes to speak again and we can tell by what he is saying that he is a bit threatened by the Bahá’í presence. We all move with the family and the pall bearers to the small plot just yards away and while they are burying Grace the Bahá’ís begin singing one of the verses from the Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh that we have learned to sing in Luganda. Mary very quickly begins to collapse from watching her child being buried, Carolyn and I move in to help her away from the burial site.

The saddest part is that while in the States the parents of a child who has died will be given time to grieve, and would be told to take all the time they need before going back to work – Mary will likely be at work on Monday, back to her routine of cooking the lunches of the National Centre staff. This won’t be because we won’t give her the time off, it’s just that she won’t know what else to do. She’ll worry that she might lose her job or that she won’t get paid if she doesn’t come, and again, this child’s death is too common in Uganda for it to take too much time out of normal life.

In contemplating Grace’s death, in seeing the conditions in which Mary and her family live, I’ve really mused over what the answers are to this kind of suffering I’m witnessing. I don’t think there are any pat answers, and I have opinions only, no real answers. I won’t go into any of this now, and perhaps in a future blog post I’ll try to come to terms with this experience. All I can really do right now is pray for little Grace’s soul, and rest assured that she has been received into the “sea of light” and is buoyed by the many souls who were there to greet her.