My last sunrise in Uganda threw amber-gold watercolor onto the clouds I love.
My friend Caitlin asked me to tell her the biggest thing I am taking away from my time here in Uganda. An inordinate number of souvenirs aside, there is a lot I am bringing back in my perspectives, my desires, and even my eating habits. I have grown immensely more comfortable with the person I am and confident that that person can not only survive, but even make a positive impact in the world. I have gained an unlikely tolerance for eating large amounts of food and drinking multiple sodas in one day. (I hope that I don’t suffer from cravings for carbonated, caffeinated sugar-water when I get back. I wouldn’t be surprised if I did.) I’ve gotten used to thinking in terms of acres, dry and wet seasons, tribal politics, and selling charcoal to pay for school fees.
But Caitlin asked for the biggest thing, the single greatest impact this small, beautiful country has had on me. It is a realization that came to me within my first two weeks here, yet it has continually shifted shapes and reasserted itself in unexpected ways. The simplest manifestation is this: people are people are people. The most obvious symptoms are the ones I recognized first. People here, like people in America, like (probably) most people on Earth, need food, want to care for their children, like to have nice clothes, and either are proud of the house they own or worry about paying rent. Oh, and they like to be happy. I think the difference here might be that most Ugandans don’t seem to depend on external circumstances to make them happy as much as Americans do. They don’t feel entitled to the material goods that are supposed to “give” them happiness; they may be discontent with their standard of living, but they decide to be happy with what they have. Women decorate the half of their one room house that is partitioned off as their living room as proudly as if it were a Victorian-age parlor. Children amuse themselves to no end by transforming junk into toys; some string and an old iron become a boat to tug around, and a bicycle tire rolling along the dusty ground is fun in and of itself.
On the other side of the coin, many Ugandans are by no means content with their lifestyle, as they will bluntly tell you; expecting you, as the almighty and rich mzungu, to enable them to become as materially blessed as you are. I will never be sure whether strangers I met wanted to talk to me because I’m white, because I’m a girl, because they think I have money, or because they were just being friendly. To a lesser extent, it has been hard not to be suspicious of the true motives of friends I have made here. If I were black, or if they knew I was poor, would they be as interested in me? There is no way to separate the quality of my experience here from the color of my skin.
In this way, as well as some others, many of my expectations and subconscious idealizations about Africa in general and Uganda in particular have been shattered, leaving the familiar knowledge that people are people. People in Uganda aren’t, as I longingly imagined, poverty-stricken gurus of how to live life happily with few possessions. I held this ideal as the object of my passion, love, and desire before I came here; if the ideal isn’t true, what do I love, what am I compassionate about, what do I desire to learn? The challenge, I have realized, is to allow the picturesque to fall apart, revealing a basic, common, real-as-murram-dirt humanity. The choice is exposed: do I continue to search for the pure, simple, poor yet happy Acholi widow on whom to bestow my love and hopes for the secret of joy? or do I love reality despite its unsatisfying and disillusioning flaws? I have chosen to love. The pain I feel at the idea of leaving this place in twelve hours is all-too-real evidence of this.
The challenge of loving reality in the face of crumbling, imaginary ideals has been both reassuring and disappointing. It means that there is no secret to happiness that cannot be found in my own life, in my own culture, because no such secret lives here in Africa. At the same time, I feel let down and lost because my search for how to live in joy without material possessions has hit a dead end. I can no longer strive for asceticism as the sole standard by which I should find true joy; no such standard exists.
Yet even this disappointment contains its own hope and the seed of a new challenge. If Africa does not hold all the answers, then maybe America has a few of its own. Maybe I can live the life that I long for within my own culture and country, not longing for some ideal environment within which I can easily find true contentment. At the same time, a new obstacle faces me. As some of you might know, I have tended to be overly critical and pessimistic towards the thriving American culture of consumerism. My justification for this was the juxtaposition of my country with that of the mystically simple joy in the face of difficulty I saw in Africa. That joy has indeed proved to be mystical, though a real, imperfect joy still exists here. However, I can no longer judge myself, my friends and family, and my culture against an imaginary standard. Try though I might, I cannot pretend that America fails to be strong against the allure of materialism while Africa succeeds. Like any serious relationship, true love exists when you choose to love the reality, not the ideal. I have learned to love the reality of Uganda. The hope I have found here is to learn to love the reality of America.
Apwoyo matek, Uganda. Amari bene wubibedo icwinya kareducu. Thank you, Uganda. I love you and you will be in my heart forever.
~Heather, from her blog The Greatest of These Is Love (9/15/09)
What Heather expresses here concerning issues of being viewed as walking money by virtue of your skin tone and nationality applies to Senegal and the entire region as well. Many of us students here have received requests for financial assistance and more than one divorce has come about between American students and locals when the issue of green cards came to the surface. Honestly, you have to wonder why you're suddenly so desirable and popular in certain social contexts; I can tell you this, its not because they appreciate my intellectual capasity, because that hardly communicates through the mild language barrier. And it can't be by dress, because I'm grungy compared to the lovely ladies dressed to the nines who stroll down the dusty streets here. No, I am tubab, and thus I am a resource.
Regarding image and expectations, it is truthfully critical to walk into any experience with the least preconceived notions as possible. If you don't, then your job is to deconstruct them on site. I did not come to Africa expecting to find happiness gurus who could maintain eternal positivity in the face of poverty, but I certainly did have a certain notion of Africa as this incredibly "different," dare I hazard the word "exotic," locale. It is wonderfully to walk down the street these days and suddenly realize that I'm on another continent because, frankly, it doesn't seem that odd 99% of the time. Its not Africans and Foreigners here; it comes down to people -a bunch of people who happen to be in the same place at the same time, striving for something in life and seeking to connect with others through the process. Sure, I constantly run up against cultural differences but, as Heather says, people are people. It is so simple and yet so profound.
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Below I have included my response to Heather's entry and her reactions thereafter:
Heather, this is an absolutely beautiful that strikes a chord in me on so many levels. I hope you don't mind if I ask everybody reading my blog to please come and see this entry; it speaks volumes to what I hope to communicate little by little through my own entries.
How are you coming along in your project of learning to love America in all its imperfectness? What you say about breaking illusions as being the real process of learning is absolutely true.
Isn't it wonderful to know that we are all just like anybody else? And yet, so unique individually and culturally? The layers of difference and commonality are endless, enmeshed, and ever-shifting. Beauty incarnate.
Love,
Jocelyn
Heather:
thank you so much for letting me know what you think, jocelyn! you are welcome to share this post with anyone...a huge part of why i write is to help communicate what i learn about the world to people who maybe haven't had the chance to learn the same thing. i'm glad you like it. :)
i have had a really tough time learning to be back here and love america. it's been a little over a month, and i'm just now feeling like i'm on my feet again. (it didn't help that i only gave myself a week before school started.) i think that being out of this culture and country for three months has made it nearly impossible to ignore all of the things i didn't like about america in the first place. where before, i could put up with aspects of this culture that annoyed me, now i feel like they are glaring and unavoidable. things that i thought used to satisfy me don't anymore.
although that all sounds super doom-and-gloom, it's like a painful but good pruning. from this i'm learning what can truly satisfy me and make my life as fulfilling as it was this summer. i can have a fulfilling life here; it just means seeking out truly edifying habits and places, rather than numbing out on what my culture tells me is fun.
yes, one of the most humbling lessons and joyful truths is how absolutely human everyone is. it shatters any ideas that superiority or greater wisdom lies in one culture or another. when i find myself wanting to look down my nose at people who seem to be absorbed in materialism, i remember that many ugandans are just as proud and anxious to have and acquire possessions. once my lens of judgment has cracked and fallen away, i can truly appreciate the individual and simultaneously universal beauty in each person i meet, and it humbles me.
:)
ReplyDeleteI really like hearing your thoughts. Not having preconceptions is so necessary...because you never really know what to expect. What if I tried doing that here, in America? It would be a challenge. Hmm...
Thanks for making me think.