Tuesday, December 26 Kassanda

Today, they arrived about 20 minutes early! I understand that though, because our destination was Kassanda, which is a very long way from anywhere! The trip begins with a drive through town, then out of town as though we were going to Mpigi. But at the very outskirts of the city suburbs, there is a round-a-bout and we turned northwest instead of southwest. We were on the road to Kassanda!

Vincent reported that Priscilla was feeling much better. He had found ice and put it in the plastic bag I gave him. He said between the ice and the medicine, she wasn’t hurting today. He said she was telling everyone about riding the elevator. It amazed her to be so high! My room is on the second floor, which is the third floor for us Americans because the ground floor here is 0. He said she seemed much happier this morning. He also said she is normally a very talkative little girl, but she is afraid of me!

There was still no one in the city! We flew through round-a-bouts that had been parking lots all last week. Still, most pedestrians were remaining on the sidewalks, or waiting patiently for an opportunity to jaywalk. We didn’t even come close to running over a boda boda!

The world changed as soon as we left the round-a-bout. The jungle started almost at once. The drive is incredible. It follows a low ridge line that is just high enough to provide decent views of the sweeping valley and taller hills. There is a whole rainbow full of greens in this jungle, with occasional red or yellow or purple flowers thrown in for spectacular contrast. This is farm country, so the road is lined with small stalls selling a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. The homes are about the same as in Kampala’s slums, a lot of home-made brick and plenty of mud walled huts.

The story, however, is the road itself. The sides have flaked away until there is barely a whole lane of pavement left! And what IS left is filled with potholes, which leads to a strange story. When he was here, Jim would sing about how much he hated the potholes. I never heard him call them pottieholes, but somehow, they did. So every time we hit one, one of them would start singing about pottieholes! It made for a very odd day because we were in potholes more often than we weren’t!! And these were crack your head on the ceiling holes because Vincent WOULD NOT slow down unless he saw a true axel breaker.

For all the years we’ve been going to Kassanda, there has been a road project here. It is now complete, which means after you go through about 10 miles of this destroyed roadbed, there is a decent road with a bit less erosion (but still plenty) and far fewer potholes. This also means every driver has the opportunity to tempt fate and absolutely FLY through this lovely jungle.

After an hour of this fun, we were pulled over by a military unit. Vincent pulled the van off the road and killed the engine. Two uniformed me came to my window and talked to me. They spoke in a friendly way, but their faces showed no friendliness at all. Finally, one of them opened the back door and said something to Vincent. The other one asked me if I minded giving this man a ride. They slammed the door and the smelly man and his very large gun sat beside Joseph as we drove on down the highway (at a much slower rate of speed!). The man didn’t say a word for the fifteen minutes he rode with us. Vincent suddenly swerved into a wide dirt road and stopped. The man climbed out. He almost thanked us!

It turns out this was the road to Kassanda, so Vincent plowed ahead on this wide, somewhat maintained road. The maintenance soon ended and we were riding on a washboard filled with pottieholes! The game became to go as fast as we could swerving from shoulder to shoulder at will in order to avoid leaving the oil pan in one of these caverns. The really interesting thing is that oncoming traffic was doing exactly the same thing! So not only were we jarring our teeth out and suffocating in the red dust, we appeared to be in constant danger of a head on crash because either we or the oncoming car were on the wrong side of the road, still going as fast as possible. When someone decided to pass, it became almost comical! There would be three cars out of place all at the same time with no particular indication of which direction any of them might choose to go next!

After nearly an hour of this, we reached the tiny village of Kassanda. This is a very remote place! The road we followed is apparently the only way in and it passes through a swamp that often floods the road. The round-a-bout has a four foot tall pile of dirt that has grown over with grass. It’s about six feet in diameter. We went around the circle and headed out of the market area along a better road. The sign for Kassanda EPC was on our right.

We arrived right at 11:00. There were about a dozen kids there waiting for us and Elder Michael, a military officer who has spent a lot of time in Northern Uganda. He and Joseph talked for a while, then Joseph turned to me. “The pastor has told everyone to come at midday, not 11:00 as we told her. I have asked Michael, ‘Don’t you know that we are white now? We follow the clock, not the sky.’”

In any event, we decided to go see their new land! A church in North Carolina donated the money to help them last January. At the time, they were having trouble with a land lord who was telling them to move or he would seize their church. He even let his daughter start a small school inside the church and told the church they couldn’t stop it. The church installed doors and locks and DID stop it, and that made the landlord even more angry. So I delivered the money for them to buy the new land. A year later, they haven’t moved. They said the landlord backed off because he was elected to Parliament. He was using them as a way to show the Muslim majority in the area that he would stand up to Christians. Once elected, he has left them alone with the understanding that they will move “soon.” The new land is properly recorded and the only hold up is that they can’t move until they have an approved toilet on the site. They are raising the money for one now, and have begun digging!

We drove back to the round-a-bout and turned out opposite the way we came in. Within 300 yards of the round-a-bout, we turned down another track that looked much more like a place for goats to run than vans to drive! Vincent, of course, wasn’t phased by this. He headed straight down the steep track. At least it was dry today!

Suddenly, I recognized the place. We were pulling into the secondary school where we first met Irene. Irene was a beautiful young girl, the lead singer in the choir, and an excellent student. She planned on becoming a nurse, and we were ready to help her do it. But she disappeared as she graduated from high school. She was an orphan, and apparently, an uncle sold her to someone to be a wife. We’ve never seen her again, and neither has anyone in the church.

We parked in the school yard, and the head master came out to greet us. He took us through his garden to a field planted in corn. He led us through the nearly finished stalks to a point behind a small building. The purchased land started here. We walked the length of the building, then a bit further and he said this was another marker. Then we turned through the corn field. They call it maize here, and that’s a great name for this field, though the spelling slightly off. We were in a maze! The corn wasn’t laid out in any pattern I could imagine. Our leader kept ducking between corn stalks, in one direction, then another. Suddenly he stopped and started sweeping his foot across the ground. “I know the marker is here somewhere,” he said. He kept looking in a widening circle, but he had no luck. Elder Michael began helping him and so did Joseph. I tried to help, but I didn’t know what I was looking for so someone had to look again everywhere I went.

After a few minutes, the headmaster said, “I knew it was here. It is here.” He pulled back the grass and pointed to a pineapple plant. They had planted a pineapple plant at the corner marker. Sure enough, there was a marker at the base of it. The fourth marker was easy to find from there. The land slopes a bit down toward the school. It is presently covered in corn that is about to be finished. It appears they will be able to move as soon as they get the toilet built. I tried to videotape the plot, but between the corn and all the guys trying to get in the shot, I don’t think I did very well. It never fails, if you get out a video camera or still camera, people will walk in front of you so that they will be in your picture! This has nothing to do with age. Young and old both enojoy this. I don’t know why one would want their backsides in the middle of an otherwise great shot, but Ugandans seem to desire this above most other things! They never say a word, they just block your shot then go on until you’re ready to shoot again!

We drove back to the church and found a few more kids there, but still no pastor. Another elder had come and she said she had been told midday. In African time, that could be anywhere from 11:00 until 2:00! So we sat down and the kids sang every song they knew. Then they sang a couple of them again. Then Joseph talked, then I talked, then Pastor Faith came in. She ran to me and shook my hand. “I am so, so, sorry,” she said. “I was trying to cook, but my son is so sick. I had to stop cooking and take him to the hospital. I want you to come to my house to eat after we are finished here.”

I knew it would be useless to ask what was wrong with the child so I asked if he was going to be okay (thinking that if he was going to be okay, there would be hope for me if I caught it from the cook!). She only said, “Ah, he is sleeping now.”

We had 100 pairs of shoes to distribute. Again, things were highly organized. They called out names three at a time and the kids came up. Despite all we’ve done to spread things out, it appears that shoes are a benefit of church membership here. It’s not as though these kids didn’t need shoes, but it would be nice if some of them were used in the community. Instead, we seemed to have the kids in the church and their cousins.

I looked up from the shoes and saw Jimmy Semitala at the back of the room. Jimmy was one of our first sponsored kids. He was attending a Muslim school and had refused to go for prayers. So the school allowed him to wait under a shade tree in the yard during prayers, and Jimmy was using this as a time to preach to the other kids! He was doing well in school, but it turned out he did not have a P7 certificate. He had gone to school that year, but his father didn’t pay the registration fee so Jimmy was denied entrance to the test. His father later bought a P7 certificate with someone else’s name on it, so when Jimmy entered S4, he changed his name. But he came to Vincent and told him the trouble. When Vincent approached the school, they wouldn’t cooperate at all. They threw Jimmy out, which made Jimmy mad at everyone and he dropped out of sight for a while.

Now, he’s back as the youth leader at the church. He works a little at whatever he can find, but when he saw me, he wanted to talk. He agreed to go and sit for his P7 this year, and he asked if we would allow him to start a technical course in computers. He said he knew of jobs in Kampala if he had computer skills, and the school would let him start while he sits for P7. So he could get one of his two computer years behind him while waiting to complete his exam, and the school is fine with this. I told Jimmy I would talk to his sponsors and see if they are willing to help him.

They came in all shapes and sizes, from toddlers to late teens, and these kids really needed shoes! Most were barefoot. Many wore torn and tattered clothes. Most of the kids were very thin. The first time we came to Kassanda, there was a boy who got one brown and one black shoe. When I asked him about his shoes, he said, “Sir, there are no others like these!” I tried to explain there was, in fact, the mirror image of his pair right there in the stack, but he wouldn’t believe me. He did believe, however, when they made him exchange the black one for another brown!

Today, the same thing happened and I believe it was the same boy! He got two black ones this time, but they were totally different styles. They had to almost wrestle one of the shoes from him!

It took more than an hour to get the shoes out. We had brought a number of other things, including plastic necklaces, bracelets, and rings. We were out of boy toys except for a few ping pong balls, but the boys liked the rings, so all went well. We had brought Bibles from America, and Pastor Faith had decided she wanted to give Bibles to children who had passed P7 and those who had passed S4. There were four of the former and one of the latter. They had me make the presentation and take photos of each recipient. Then, we awarded them one of the soccer balls Jon had bought. We brought them balls a couple of years ago, but it seems the boys burst theirs, then lost the girl’s ball. So this ball was given to the girls!

Finally, we were down to the half ton of school supplies that we had bought. “Elder Jim, you should find a comfortable seat,” said Joseph as he opened the bag filled with pencils, pens, crayons, and rulers. I sat down at the back of the church with a group of little kids that were scared to death of me and picked on them while Joseph, Michael, and Grace asked incredibly silly questions in English to test the kids. Every kid knew every answer, so it was a group of waving, squealing (by Ugandan standards, anyway. They really aren’t all that loud!) kids trying to win a single pencil or pen.

This did go on for a while! Finally, Grace got the bag from Joseph and grabbed what was left. She hurried through the crowd passing out what was left to whoever was closest at hand!

So we were finally finished. As we walked to the van, Joseph told me they wanted me to visit the homes of two of the elders and Pastor Faith. So we loaded the van with several extras and drove to the main road and across the street to Elder Michael’s house. Michael is in the army. His home is in the barracks. He lives in two rooms with his wife, five children, and youngest sister, who is 8 (the same age as his third child). Michael has fought in the war in northern Uganda. He told us today that he is being sent to the Sudan next month. He will be in Darfour.

We entered his house and sat in a concrete floored room with several nice chairs. There weren’t enough chairs, however, so Grace had to sit in the floor. I made her take my seat. “Why are you doing this?” asked Joseph.

“In America, it would be rude for a man to take a chair and let a woman sit on the floor. So I want Grace to have my seat.” This created a storm of laughter!

Finally, Joseph said, “Now she will be even more stubborn!”

As I sat on the mat in the corner, I saw something white scurrying across the floor. It was some kind of winged insect that was in a hurry to get under something. A few minutes later, a much more serious black bug came out of nowhere. He seemed to have a stinger, and possibly, pinchers, or else he was a cockroach. In any event, I was sitting on the mat he probably came out of!

Michael served us fruit: popo’s and pineapple. The pineapple was wonderful and the popo edible. Michael has five kids. He had his daughter and sister sing several songs to us, including one about telephoning Jesus every day. Then, he had each child present his/herself. They stood at attention before us and announced their names, their father’s name, their mother’s name, their school’s name, their class in school, and their ranking in the class.

Everyone wanted their picture taken, so we went outside. Michael noticed that every one of his children had taken off their shoes and socks and were running around barefoot. He yelled at them in Luganda, so we had to wait for each child to find both shoes and both socks. While I was waiting, an elderly lady who smelled strongly of alcohol came around the end of the house. She kept talking to me very loudly in Luganda. I finally told Michael’s wife that I didn’t understand. “She is simply greeting you,” she whispered.

So I shook the ladies hand and asked how she was doing. She hit me with another string of Luganda. I looked at Michael’s wife. “She wants you to take her picture.” So I focused and got a decent photo of her. When I showed it to her, she laughed and laughed!

Finally, the kids were ready. Michael lined everyone up, then had his kids to kneel down so that I couldn’t have shot their shoes if I wanted to. But once everyone was set, I snapped away! And they were pleased with the results. I hope I can send Michael one of these prints before he is deployed next month.

Then we all got in the van again and drove down the road a mile or so to another elder’s house. She lived behind the medical center, a two room cinder block structure with an ambulance parked outside. Her house was quite nice and she didn’t seem at all excited about our visit. We met her two children, then I made pictures. Then we were ready for Pastor Faith.

Her house was only a few doors down. It, too, was nice by Kampala standards. It was home-made brick, but it stood high off the ground and had concrete floors. The metal roof was at least 10 feet above the floor, and there were a number of places where light was shining through it. We sat on a couch and several chairs. Grace gave me the one she had taken because she said it was taller and I would be more comfortable!

Pastor Faith and several young girls started brining out food. A man came around with a can of water and poured it on my hands. There wasn’t any soap. They brought each of us a bowl with part of the chicken I’d seen at church in it. It was submerged in a thick dark soup. There was a bowl of matoke, sweet potato, greens, rice, and cassava root. I decided to be a vegetarian since in only three days, I will be taking my flight home. I ate a slice of sweet potato, some cassava, and some of the greens, which were a bit gritty. Some of the folks ate with their hands, which I hadn’t had a chance to observe closely before. They took gobs of the matoke and dipped it in the chicken broth and ate it. Sometimes, they got pieces of chicken with it. They ate everything very well with their hands. After the meal, someone brought the water can back around. There was soap this time!

Neither Pastor Faith nor the girls who served would eat at the table with us. They stayed behind a curtain in the middle of the room. She called through the curtain to participate in the conversation, but she wouldn’t come out!

When we were finished, we went outside for pictures. There was a very old woman standing beside the house. She was barefoot and her eyes were glazed over with cataracts. She was holding a HUGE stick. It was considerably longer than I am tall and it was about 3 inches in diameter. Pastor Faith said something to the woman and she through the stick away with a very loud comment. Faith said, “My grandmother says she will walk to her picture on her own.” The old woman wouldn’t even let one of her great grandchildren help her!

“How old is she,” I whispered to Faith.

“She is seventy-eight years,” she said.

The grandmother took the center of the picture with Faith beside her and her great grandchildren surrounding her. She held her head high as I snapped the picture, but she wouldn’t smile. I asked if I could make a picture of Faith and her grandmother, and this really pleased the old lady. But just as I prepared to shoot, a late arriving great grandson appeared. His great grandmother nabbed him by the arm and jerked him into the picture with a shouted order. The boy turned and faced the camera. He didn’t smile either!

I showed Faith the pictures and she said something to her grandmother who cracked a huge grin. She had no more than four teeth. As we headed for the van, I looked back. A great grandson was walking beside her at either arm. Both were behind her ready to catch her if she stumbled, but both knew better than to help her!

When I got in the van, I noticed we had added a young man with a bit of luggage. He sat the luggage in the very back of the van and it took up two seats. People KEPT piling in, and I counted as they all got out. We had 17 in our 14 passenger van with two of the seats taken up with luggage! It was a nasal extravaganza I will not soon forget!!

We dropped people here and there, except for the boy who came all the way back to Kampala with us. Vincent flew back in record time, but as we reached the outskirts of Kampala, we also found the traffic! Everyone was returning home from their villages. The traffic moved smoothly, however, and the lack of boda bodas and pedestrians prevented any backups at all.

Joseph escorted me to my room. We talked for a few minutes about the rest of the trip, then he left me around 6:00. I looked at my IM and found that Lisa had been online waiting for me. I thought it said she was there, so I waited for her until after dark. We finally chatted for a while, then I decided to go down to eat.

There was a schedule in the lobby saying that tonight was grill night in the garden. I have eaten there on grill night several times and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I started into the garden. A waiter came up to me. “I wanted to see what is available tonight,” I said.

He more or less stepped in front of me. “There is a buffet set up inside, sir. There is nothing out here at all for you to eat. Just some small things that would be of no interest to you. You must go to the buffet.”

I started to step around the guy, but he was holding up his hand in a stop gesture. I decided that being the only white person in the garden did not lend itself to making a scene with a rude waiter, so I went inside to the buffet. Something was going on because this staff, which is usually very attentive, didn’t acknowledge my presence, so after a minute, I stepped around them and walked over to the buffet. They had the same fish they’d been serving since I got here and a huge steak and kidney pie. I quickly decided I wasn’t THAT hungry!

So I returned to my room and IM’d with Lisa while I ate cheese and crackers, potato chips, and three small bananas.

There are only two more full days left and I’m feeling very depressed about all the things I haven’t gotten done. I have another conference tomorrow night at the church on money management, and a meeting with one of the college students in the early afternoon. I’m also going to do a bit of auditing. But time is slipping away!!