23 January 2009

"And these are our white sisters..."

The above statement was used by the leader of a group I was with to introduce me, two other white women associated with MCC, and the male MCC service worker seconded to his programme. I was hungry, tired, hot, and already annoyed when the statement was made, so my reaction was probably greater than normal, but that one would offend me even on a good day. I confronted him about the statement away from the group but seemed to only confuse this man about why his introduction would bother me. After all, we are white, and the oil tycoons he was introducing us to had asked "who are the whites?" That I should feel excluded was an utterly foreign thought to him. That I wouldn't appreciate being pointed out as different and special and treated as his own special property also slipped through the cultural translation gap. The next day, I processed my feelings about this experience a bit more in my journal.
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Oh how it irks and frustrates and annoys and tires me to always be noted as different, special, outside. Mostly, I shrug off the children constantly pointing and calling out. But day after day, to always be so obviously different--is indeed very difficult. And made so much worse when it is someone we are working with, an adult who as had extensive experience with bazungu, who chooses to point out and make issue of our difference. Coming from someone in authority, that makes me feel even more excluded, even more outside, even more different, and with no hope of ever being conceived as just another person. This has been one of the more difficult aspects about spending this month in Hoima.

In my village, I have become a member of the community, part of the congregation, just one of the teachers. Walking through Bukoto, people regularly greet me and call out to me, but they do so knowing me, knowing my names, knowing where I live and what I do--they don't just single me out and make assumptions and call out to me because of my skin colour. I look forward to returning home--yes,
home--to Bukoto soon.

And I look forward to returning to the US, where I won't always be different, won't always stand out (at least for my skin colour), and won't always have to act and speak on behalf of everyone who is white, while also having to fight and react to layer upon layer of stereotypes about whites. In short, to be sincerely honest, I do sometimes look forward to returning to the anonymity of being white in a society where white is still the majority. It's just easier.

To always be identified not as an individual personal self, but as a representative of whites in general, is exhausting and overwhelming. It tires and frustrates me, and while I can usually let it slide off my shoulders like water, it is not so easy when I am already tired, sick, uncomfortable, or feeling lonely. It is difficult to just ignore the sense of exclusion and being outside the group day after day after day. Sometimes, it makes me want to retreat, to hide, or, as in this case, to directly confront the one who adds that final heavy straw.

Being experienced first, most, and primarily, as "white" denies me the ability to be known as an individual, as me, as Kristine Nakaweesi Amooti. It takes away part of my identity, stripping me of any claim to self-hood, and reducing me to a single physical quality (and
that not even one I would have previously considered a core component of my personal identity).

I have been thinking, and this came up a bit in conversations as we watched the inauguration, that perhaps this is somehow like the experience of blacks in the US. To always be identified as "African Americans," never just as "American." We discussed it in terms of Obama, who will always be known as the first
African American president of the US. He will never be measured in history primarily by his gender, political party, or personal history, but first and foremost, always by his race.

I have heard African Americans saying before how marginalising it is to always be considered not first as an individual, but as a black. To feel as if they are always having to speak on behalf of all blacks and to fight against layers and years of stereotypes that whites hold about them simply because their skin has a darker pigmentation. How they wish for the chance to be known first, mostly, and primarily as an
individual person.

Granted, I am not disempowered here in the ways that many blacks still are in the US, but I think I am getting at least a bit of the sense of the experience of being on the opposite side of the social majority. It is not that I necessarily want to become black, though somedays, I imagine it would be easier if it were so. Really, it would be nice to walk down the street and not be singled out automatically as different and strange.

Regardless of how well I assimilate into my community, how fluently I speak Luganda, how confidently I learn to wear a gomesi or dance the traditional dances--I will still always be considered and labeled immediately as different. In that way, I think the challenge and frustrations could increase the longer I live this way.

I dream of true diversity, of multi-cultural integration, where each and every person is respected and valued and experienced not only or primarily as a member of this or the other group, but rather--and foremost--as an individual person.

Funny Moment

21 January 2009 08:53am

One of the roosters seemed actually quite offended when I decided to hang my laundry
on the line behind the bishop's house this morning.
Maybe it is because I was stepping in a large pile of fresh chicken shit with my bare feet
at that precise moment.
This was funny after I had washed my foot again.

Worker Renewal

a plate of homemade chips [french fries]
1,000 /=

fresh veggies for guacamole
1,500 /=

chocolate fondue
16,000 /=

fresh pineapple and mangoes for dipping
2,000 /=

cooking scrumptious junk food with MCC friends in Uganda
PRICELESS

Inauguration Night Quotes

One of the highlights of this week was watching Obama's inauguration on live TV with some other American friends a few evenings ago (after a long and tiring day of touring). The evening resulted in some fun pics, a few rounds of Speed Scrabble, an unexpected exchange with an elderly American couple, and many more quotes...
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"I'm really two people." --Matthew, explaining his dual citizenship
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"Wait, the ceremony is already over. It was so short. ...Oh, we've obviously been in Uganda too long." --Post-inauguration comment
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"I congratulate my American friends on this historic day, when u have a new president. I join u 2 celebrate this moment." --text message from David, our Ugandan MCC Programme Officer
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"Do you know what Obama stands for, what he really stands for? If you really knew, you wouldn't support him. He stands for immorality! ...I believe in morality, but you young people, I know you don't believe in that!" --Elderly woman to friend who just finished PhD in political science and who actually understands far more about Obama's politics than her single-issue voting seems to allow for
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Elderly man: "Killing babies is the same as killing people, you know. Murder is murder!"
Me: "Well, you could probably say the opposite as well. Killing people is the same as killing babies."
Elderly man: "No, it's not the same!"
--Unprovoked exchange with the husband to the elderly woman mentioned above, after having approached our table and making polite small talk following the inaugural festivities. We were shocked at their rude rebuke, but they stalked away too quickly for any real conversation.
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"I think the reason why women aren't president is because we pms. I couldn't be president because I pms too drastically. I mean, the public opinion of me would be bipolar. One day, I'd be awesome, and the next, I'd be so pissed, I'd probably attack someone." --Emily H.

Quotable Quotes

My journals have quite a few (mostly humourous) quotable quotes from the past few weeks, so I thought I'd share...
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"Desire, someone will step on you." --Emily H. to my newest six year old friend who was tagging a bit too close to me during a volleyball game a few weeks ago
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"Your hair is so soft. It feels like a cloud. If I ever felt a cloud." --Emily H.
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"You are a tall bouncer. ...I think you have such power. ...You should become a boxer. You could be the best boxer." --Levi, a new friend from Kotido
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Steven: "You want to look like Superman."
Me: "I look like Superman?"
Steven: "Yes, in the face."
Me: "My face looks like Superman?"
Steven: "Yes."
--An unprovoked dinner line exchange with ten year old Steven, the older brother to Desire

12 January 2009

"A God big enough to be God"

From Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir, by Joan Chittister [an amazing book, which I appreciated both the first and second time my good friend gave it to me ;), and which I now consider one of my favourites]. I'm going to quote a large section of the chapter called "The God Within: Who Shall I Say Sent Me?", but I'd recommend the whole book to anyone interested.
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Finding a God big enough to be God was a spiritual task of no small proportions. I started over. If God is not God, or is at best only half a god, a male god, then where do we go? The Jewish Apocrypha teaches in reference to the picayune nature of the gods on Olympus, 'If the Greek gods steal, by whom shall their believers swear.' I knew the feeling. When God cannot possibly be God, the soul loses hope that there is any God at all. And the heart goes dry.
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But to confront the heresy of God the Father, I discovered quickly, is to be called a heretic. It is to come face-to-face with the possibility of exclusion, one way or another. We must accept the notion that God excluded femaleness from the Being that is God. Or, we must deal with the possibility that in reclaiming the fullness of what it means to be made 'in the image of God,' we may well be excluded from the community that taught us to believe that in the first place. To belong we must either diminish the very definition of God or demean the spiritual status of femaleness. A woman who is willing to do that mocks the God of creation. Any man who is willing to do that does not really want God at all. He simply wants himself writ large.
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... I began to realize that the God they were giving me to believe in was too small a God to possibly be worth a life. At least, not a woman's life.
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What's more, I found that this God did not lead to God at all. If the God we say we worship, the God of all being, lacks the feminine--rejects the feminine--then this God is not God. This God is lacking in being. And the being of woman lacks something of God.
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It is not easy to find the way back to the essence again once an image is cast in stone. This image of the superior male and a male God had been taught in male institution after male institution for centuries. By this time, it had done an untold amount of damage to the image of women. Worse than that, it had completely blinded us to God.
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But the search for God is the spiritual quest, the eternal journey, the breadth and depth and height of the universe. To find God means to be obliged to search beyond the images of limitation, to the essence, to the mystery, to the spirit. 'God,' Juanita Helphrey wrote, 'is a cloud forming, an eagle soaring, a voice from the wilderness echoing through your ear.' And so I considered my own understandings carefully and wrote,
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God is. God is love. God made woman, too, in God's own image.... Those three sentences have become enough for me. They have become my life. They sustain me; they caution me; and they drive me on. There is not much time left now and these are the ideas that go with me into 'The Valley of Death.' Not the doctrines, not the dogmas; not the so-called 'definitive' statements about the otherness of woman--all of which are just one more example of male attempts to capture the power of God for themselves.
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This time the God I sought was big enough to be the God of Being. No other spiritual idea has had as major an effect on my life, on my sense of self and of my sense of the real meaning of God as the God, who as well as being Father is also 'God my Mother.'

Contemplating God

God is.
I think perhaps that is the most true thing I can say. As soon as I extend the sentence, it becomes less true, whether because I use a false noun or adjective, or simply because whatever word I put in that place can never fully encompass all that is god.
I am what I am.
The god of Moses chose no name, but claimed to be being itself--life, breath, being. To be--that verb which can't fully be described--is to be in the presence of god. God is.

We might not have snow days, but...

On a Monday about a month into the last term, when the rains had just begun, I woke up one morning in the middle of a downpour. Time conscious American that I still sometimes am (or at least, was), I got up to bathe and dress like any other day. I put on sneakers, packed my books in a dry bag, pulled out my raincoat, and intended to head to school.
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My family was incredulous. "Don't go now. It's raining." (Yes, I can see that.) They assured me that the students wouldn't move in the rain, and that no one would expect me to either. As evidence of this, my three primary school-aged siblings weren't even in uniform yet.
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I let Maama talk me into staying home later than normal to take tea and macaroni, but then, it was after 8, and I was getting nervous. I was supposed to teach at 8, and I didn't quite believe that no one would move in the rain.
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As I left, my father insisted on giving me money for a boda, since I refused to stay inside out of the rain. Moving through Bukoto Town, my family's admonitions rang clear: I was the only person out in the rain, and multiple people called out to ask if I didn't fear the rain? (At that point, I didn't, though after a few more encounters with it, I would also choose not to move during storms). There were no bodas around (strange at that time of morning!), but I didn't really mind walking.
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When I reached school, slightly damp, it was exactly as my family had predicted: the only students around were boarders, and they were studying on their own. Thankfully, my good friend Roy found me and took me to her room in the girls' dorm, questioning me intensely about why I had come to school in the rain.
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We took tea again. I changed shoes and hung my wet coat to dry. Finally, around 9:30 or so, the rain had stopped enough that the students were coming.
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By the end of the term, I had learned to roll over and sleep a bit longer if I heard rain when I woke up in the morning. In fact, if I woke up still feeling really tired, I would spend a few moments wishing for the rain to start before crawling out from under my warm covers.

On the topic of rain...

The weekend before the PLE, our P7 candidates had gotten uniforms to wear at the school where they were going to sit for their exam. The uniforms we were given were old, torn, dirty, and missing buttons. My wonderful students wanted to look very smart when they sat the PLE, so they planned to wash these strange garments on Saturday morning. They wanted to mend them, too, as they told me on Friday evening, but they lacked the needles and thread. Since I had both in abundance (though no buttons), I promised to bring them on Saturday afternoon.
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On Saturday, I put threads, needles, and safety pins in my bag and set out for school. I was only going to visit for a few minutes, as lunch was almost ready at home and I had some other programme that evening. As I left my house, the sun was shining very brightly. I took the path toward Kakunyu which bypasses the trading centre to avoid having to explain where I was going quite so many times.
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By the time I reached Bukoto Primary School, the sky was dark with clouds*, but it wasn't yet raining, so I thought I could make it. Well. By the time I got back to Bukoto-Kyanjale Road, it was pouring (hurricane strength, by American standards). I just kept going, though I rolled up my jeans and took off my flip flops so I could run faster. Within minutes, I was soaked completely through. When I reached the bottom of the parish hill, three of the girls ran down to grab my bag and shoes and run up with me. We all arrived in the dorm dripping and laughing.
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Roy wasn't around, so the girls took care of me, giving me a sweater and lesu (cotton fabric wrap) so I could change out of my soaked clothes. As we waited for the rain to cease, they fed me bread and jolly jus (like kool-aid) from their personal chests. We laughed about my barefoot dash through the rain (which left me with bruised heels for the next few days), and they styled my hair for me, tying it back with another lesu.
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"Do you like my hair this way?" I innocently asked them.
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"Oh yes," dear Bazilla replied, "it's very smart. You should do it like this every day."
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"Is it not smart the way I normally wear it?"
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"No, Auntie. This way is smart."
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"This way" meant having my hair combed down over my forehead, to where it almost reached my eyes. Unfortunately, they didn't have any gel to keep it this way, but I promised not to run my fingers through it for the rest of the day.
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What better way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon, than with the boarding girls of St. Jude.
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*In my journal where this was first written, I spelled "clouds" as "crowds." After all, both words are pronounced the same in this part of the country. Good golly, even my written language is beginning to assimilate.

Another Homework

One evening, early in the term, at the last period of the day (4:30-5:30pm), we had already sent the nursery students and P1 up to P2 home. I wasn't scheduled for a lesson, but no one was teaching in the P4 class.
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Some of the P4 girls came and found me. "Auntie," they said, "come and teach us. Come and give us homework."
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I let them pull me into their classroom, but once there, I protested. "I already taught you two times today, and I gave you homework before lunch."
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"Auntie," they told me, "we already finished that work. Give us more."
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A bit incredulous, "You want another homework?"
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"Yes, Auntie, give us homework."
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So, at their persistent request, I gave my P4 class another homework assignment that day.
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I walked home that evening contemplating how much my students here desire to learn. Their innocent request for more homework (which only some of them actually completed) still makes me grin. I wonder how shocked a teacher would be in the States if a fourth grade class collectively
requested an additional homework assignment.
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And I wonder, too, why the US education system so effectively chases the love of learning out of so many children at such a young age.

On Preaching

It is not a simple task,
this thing they call preaching.
It is difficult at times
to interest,
to entertain,
to inspire,
to comfort,
to offer divine wisdom.
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But perhaps the greatest challenge,
the heaviest burden,
is to bear the responsibility
for what so many will do with the words you say--
or what they won't.
.
If you stand before me
and say what I want--
and what I expect--
to hear,
there will be nods
and smiles,
joy and laughter.
.
But sometimes,
your words bring a challenge,
and the sacrifice--or service--
you ask of me
closes ears,
furrows brows,
and hastens departures.
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The gospels teach love of enemy,
which is okay
if I must overlook
the fault of the one who looks like me--
but don't expect me
to call my government to account
for injustice it has perpetrated
on someone else's homeland.
.
The Torah calls for hospitality to the alien,
which is a warm
and inspiring concept--
so long as the alien doesn't try
to live in my neighbourhood,
attend school with my children,
or benefit from my tax dollars.
.
A Creator appointed caretakers,
and I am more than happy
to reap the fruit of creation's abundance,
especially if someone else
has tended that crop--
but I will only take offense
at your suggestion
that my irresponsible energy use
is polluting the environment
and causing famine
on a continent far away.
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To house the poor
and feed the hungry,
I suggest you start a committee,
and I will give a few bucks
(if I remember)--
after all, its not as if
it is really feasible
to invite them to my table
or offer a blanket in my home.
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And after all,
Jesus
was the perfect representation of God's will for humanity.
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I am called to simply have faith
in God's grand design for the world
--not
to work toward
the incarnation
of that design.

Breathing is the only way I know to pray...

When I search for you,
I do not find you.
.
Should I conclude
that you are no longer
present,
active,
alive.
.
Or is it simply
that I am looking
up and beyond and outside,
while you are present
below, before, and within.
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They have taught me to look for you
on the mountain,
in the storm,
in happy prosperity,
and most of all,
in the sacred charade of the saints.
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They have named you
Majestic,
Holy,
Powerful,
Sacred,
Other,
Supreme Judge of all that is.
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But I am learning to find you
in the quiet darkness of my own heart,
in the mundane rhythm of daily life,
in the tearful hope of the damned,
and most of all,
in those rare undeveloped regions of the earth.
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And I call you
quiet,
humble,
love,
peace,
Being itself,
the life and breath of all that is.
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Quietly, I contemplate the divinity of being,
and the being of the divine.
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Perhaps I have understood you most
when I stopped trying to believe
and focused instead on
simply
living,
breathing,
seeing,
feeling,
crying,
laughing,
touching and tasting and smelling.