Earthquakes suck

Sometimes when I walk to and from the Beading Program I get the urge to sit under this huge broken house. There are a few broken houses that I pass on my way. One is just so big. It hasn't been reduced to rubble. It is just sort of tilted and half crushed and looks like it is being held up by a palm tree. It is three houses away from where I work, right down the street from where I live, right up the hill from where most of my friends live. This house was the first big broken thing I saw when I got here a couple months ago. I saw tent cities from the air. And I saw a lot of crumbled walls on my tap tap from the airport. And then I saw this house and right away I had the urge to sit under it and wonder about HOW something like that could happen. But I resist that urge because I know its stupid to sit under something big and broken.

I took a moto around the city today to do some errands. As I was riding I thought about how weird Haiti looks as I pass it. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Like there goes the staircase that is now leading to nowhere. There is the parking structure that is tilted 45 degrees. There is the tall condemned building with its walls that look like they are made of noodles and not of straight cement blocks. There are the wacky makeshift tents covering every available open space. And there are the formerly tall buildings that now look like stacks of pancakes. Its likes Dr. Suess but without the bright colors.

Its strange because Haiti does NOT look like the pictures on the news. I was looking through a few of those yesterday and I was marveling at how every photographer got a pic of the sky that makes it look like the apocalypse. They are all grey and red and dark. Haiti is a Caribbean island, the sky is basically always beautiful! It feels like they took that one moment when the clouds were getting ready to pour and they all took pictures of the burning bodies under the creepy sky. Do you know what I mean? It annoys me that Haiti is burned in people's brains as looking like that. THAT is not Haiti. But at the same time… seeing the big broken house in my neighborhood feels like something much bigger than any of those dramatic photographs captured. Something that I would never be able to wrap my brain around no matter how long I sat and looked. The earthquake broke things and broke people. It didn't end on Jan 12^th. The earth kept shaking for weeks and months. And now people are broken. Heck, I am broken and I wasn't even here for any of that!! Please pray for Haiti, for healing and for reconciliation.

"The ruins and rubble and brokenness don't go away by themselves. It's an interesting metaphor for the lives around me and for myself. It is excruciating work to clean up, clear off, pile up, and remove. Tears and sweat flow freely here." - Shelley

A month in Haiti...

... goes by extremely fast! People have been coming and going from the Apparent Project Guest house and the Clay family household every week for the past month. This past week we had an awesome team leave us. Thank you Sarah and Nate Woodward for being such great leaders!! The team brought down a ton of supplies including miles and miles of elastic and beading thread and bags of silver clasps. Much needed items. They also distributed tents and baby formula and built our first house! They were a huge blessing to our neighborhood.

I rode a motorcycle today for the first time in my life. It was great. I went downtown to see the destroyed palace and the fallen Iron Market. The downtown area had so much destruction. Its crazy. The saddest part is seeing the buildings that fell and the levels are sitting on top of each other like pancakes and you know that all the people are still in there dead. Its like there are giant tombs all over the city. But weirdly life goes on all around them. People have set up shop right next to these demolished places. I think the strangest thing is seeing a place where there used to be a building but now having just nothing there. Some rubble has been cleared. And its like some buildings never even existed. Its disorienting. Sometimes I can't tell where I am because my landmarks have disappeared. Or the landmark is now a tent city. There used to be this beautiful area right in front of the palace that is now covered in tents. We stopped next to one of these tents today and a man called out to me, "Excuse me can I talk to you for a minute?!" exactly like the man from this video... Hilarious. I asked him for his number, naturally.

Haitian culture is always confusing to me. Whenever I think I am starting to grasp something I am reminded of how much I do not understand. In Haiti people go to the doctor frequently. Or they would if they had the money. A couple days ago I had some dirt in my eye and it was a little red. A Haitian lady told me I needed to go to the doctor. I started to try to explain that I didn't. It was just irritated and would go away. And she replied, "Go to the doctor." All of that to say, it is confusing me about when someone legitimately needs to go to the doctor or hospital. One friend is pregnant and says she is bleeding and has pain and wants the doctor, but her boyfriend says she is just trying to kill the baby. One friend is talking about suicide because he is lonely in a tent all by himself. He has random intense pain where he can not walk and had just been very strange lately. One friend has an intense burn on her chest from when she was a kid that has started giving her a lot of pain recently, also has a baby who almost died yesterday from a freakishly high fever. One neighbor has a twelve year old who is literally the skinniest person I have ever seen, the mom just laughs when I talk to her about needing to feed her daughter more. One friend has back pain everyday, one has a headache every other day. I swear when you ask people 'How are you?' The acceptable responses are, 'good', 'not bad', and 'sick'. Mwen pa kompren.

Haiti Post Earthquake

First impressions...

I was in Haiti 3 times in 2009 and the last time was 3 weeks before the earthquake happened. This is the first time I have been to Haiti since the earthquake so I thought I would record some of my first impressions this time around. Honestly Haiti seems in many ways the same. A friend made a joke the other day that people new to Haiti come down here and point to a building and say look at what the earthquake did. But they are really just pointing to an unfinished building that looked that way for years before the earthquake.

This is not to minimize the impact of the earthquake. Everyone I know was effected. Everyone had a relative die. Literally every single day for the past two weeks I have learned of another friend whose mom or dad or child died on January 12th. Everyone is also displaced now. My first day back in Haiti I took a walk to the "slum" that I hung out in last summer. I knew that one house had fallen down, but I was totally unprepared to see the place practically leveled to the ground. Where there used to be a small cornfield is now a field of dirt covered in tents. Even people whose homes did not fall down are sleeping in tents for fear of another earthquake. Some missionaries are even still sleeping in tents out of fear of another big earthquake which is supposedly coming sometime.

I never want to be one of those people who only reports on the sadness or hopelessness of a place. So many stories from Haiti and Africa make the places sound like hell on earth. In truth there is TONS of joy here. Haitians are fun, goofy, and vibrant people. Sometimes I think only in Haiti could people make jokes or laugh about an event that caused them so much pain. Sometimes when a loud truck goes by or a fan vibrates against a door all the Haitians will run outside, fearful that another earthquake is happening. They get outside and realize that it wasn't an earthquake and immediately collapse in laughter and begin to mock each other for the way they ran from a fan. Its terror and then hysterical laughter right next to each other.

I am going to try to write about Haiti the way I experience it... which for the most part is joy filled days and once in a while almost crippling moments of sadness.

Funny story

This is an excerpt from a final for one of my classes. I would rewrite the story... but I am tired. An update from Haiti is coming soon.

"I didn’t come to Africa to help anyone, I thought I came to live in solidarity with people, maybe even people who in the past I would have thought of as people who needed help, but I had a very strong gut reaction to being placed in a situation that put me on the other side of the line. A couple weeks ago I had a funny experience of being on “the other side” of the line. My family is constantly out of water. At the beginning of the semester we had a water tank hooked up to our gutters so we almost never needed to go to the well to collect water. A month into my time here our water tank broke. I am not clear on the details, all I know is that since then we have had to go get our water from the well and sometimes from Tech Park. By “we” I really mean my younger siblings, and once in a while me. A few weeks ago I took a couple jerry cans to Tech Park. I was unsure exactly where the tap was. I was wandering around the residential part of Tech Park, trying to follow the directions one of my siblings gave me. I had my younger sister with me, who also did not know exactly which tap we were headed to. A Ugandan woman, I assume a UCU staff member or wife of a staff member, stopped me and asked me what I was doing. I explained that I was looking for water. She asked, “Drinking water?” and I replied, “No, just regular water”. She looked at me and my sister and then said, “You have no water at home?” I told her we didn’t. She asked again, “You have NO water?” The way she said it almost made me laugh, it just made me sound so pathetic. She told me where the tap was and then told me to come back to her door and she would give me water if I couldn’t get it at the tap. I really appreciated her generosity. I was mostly amused at the complete role reversal I have experienced here. I have lived in places where kids come to the door and ask me for water. In that moment I was the person who was going door to door for water. And I did not feel pathetic or even poor. It was humbling to have someone else see me as that. It was more humbling, in a good way, to have the line gone. I am not on the side that helps, the side that has, the side that gives. I guess in some ways I am now on the side that receives, but mostly I feel like there aren’t sides now. Sometimes I give and sometimes I receive, the line is blurred."

Easter and Finals and Hippos

• The internet has gone to crapsville lately, that is my excuse for the lack of blogs. No wait. I have a better excuse. Every night I bring my computer home and plan on writing a paper or a blog or doing some sort of homework. And every night one of my siblings takes my computer and plays Akon for 4 straight hours until the battery dies, or commits suicide due to Akon overexposure. That's a big problem among computers in Africa, Akon overexposure. Its tragic.
  
• I went on a safari last weekend and it was amazing! We camped in Murchison Falls national park. Hippos, warthogs and baboons were always wandering around our camp. We saw leopard tracks. We saw tons of giraffes and hippos and elephants. We had this van with a top that popped up and we could hang out the top while elephants walked right by us. SO COOL. It reminded me a lot of snorkeling. I could have gone back every weekend. We went on a game boat ride on afternoon down the Nile towards the falls. It was beautiful. The next morning we hiked around the top of the falls. It was exactly like when I was a kid and we used to hike around the national forest in New Hampshire, except this time we had an armed African following us around to keep away the hippos… We actually got in trouble with the guard because we ignored the signs and walked right up to the falls. Like sat on the edge and dangled our feet in the spray of the falls. Have I mentioned that I love Africa?
  
• Easter with my family was ridiculous and amusing. My host dad, who is never home, gave us a huge African guilt trip (African guilt is the WORST) about not being home on easter during the day. Well we got home for easter supper and we asked, do what did you do today? Nothing. Did you go to church? No, but we had soda! The big easter celebration that we missed was soda. Which admittedly is a big deal… but still. My mom had sent me a box filled with candy and easter eggs. I considered putting on an easter egg hunt for the neighbor kids, but then decided that an easter egg hunt in the dark for my teenage siblings would be a better use of resources, as in more candy for everyone. Hahaha. My siblings were hilarious searching for the eggs. 2 were hidden so well that they couldn't be found until the morning. The next day we died easter eggs, this was MUCH less popular than eggs full of candy. Who wants eggs full of eggs? Blech. The egg salad that I made was also NOT popular. As in looked at with disgust and not touched by anyone African.
  
• We had easter Monday off so I took the break to do a ton of chores that I have been needing to do. I was going to wash clothes, and bathe, and spend like an hour scrubbing all the dirt out of my feet. I ended up fetching a ton of water and helping Sarah do the entire family's laundry. We spent hours washing clothes (by hand) and chatting with each other. At one point she turned to me and asked, do you like talking like this? I was like ummm THIS is my favorite thing about living here! It was one of those perfectly mundane but yet perfectly wonderful days.
  
• This past weekend was spent studying for exams and hanging out with a good friend. Exams here are 3 hours long and people use the entire time! I finished first in my African Old Testament class. I used an hour and a half and then I stared out the window for a while. Then at like 2 hours I finally decided to be brave and stand up and turn my paper in. The professor smiled at me and said, "I knew you would be first." This morning I had a history of East Africa exam. It took an hour and twenty minutes and I wrote twelve pages! I have discovered that length and repeating yourself really bode well in African schooling.
  
• I have more to write but Suzan is stealing my computer. Will post again tomorrow.

I love the way you say good morning

I waited to write this post until I was not in the world's worst mood. And good thing I did because I woke up on the right side of the bed this morning and I feel like myself again. I thought I would be able to write about Rakai this week. We had an IMME trip there this past weekend. Fun Rakai facts… Rakai is in rural Uganda, 5 hours or more from the city. You can see Tanzania from it. It is thought to be the epicenter of the aids epidemic. HIV first appeared in the world in both Rakai and in somewhere in Zimbabwe at the same time in the 80's. The number of people infected with HIV in this area was over 30%. The infected rate is still higher than the rest of Uganda but it is now below 10% which is amazing. The point of our visit was to meet missionaries living in a rural community and see what their life was like and how they were responding to the needs of their community. I, unfortunately, spent the entire weekend sick in bed. So I didn't really see much of anything except the drive up and the drive back and the inside of the guesthouse bedroom. I had a fever and was incredibly dehydrated. I had to hold onto something while I walked because the world was spinning so much. So miserable. My contacts wouldn't stay in my eyes because I didn't have enough fluid in me. And my mouth dried up and stuck together. It sucked. Anyway if I had to get sick it was nice to do it in a place with a flush toilet and with all of my friends around. The weekend is a blur but I do remember one moment when a bunch of people were standing around my bed and saying things like "if you get better… I will download the next episode of Lost" or "If you die I will be very upset." Hahaha. Helpful!

As soon as we got back to Kampala we went to the doc and I am now getting better. Which is good because along with sickness I became extremely negative. Hating everything and everyone. On Monday my school had given me crackers and juice from Kampala because that was really all I could eat and I hadn't eaten anything all weekend. I told my siblings not to eat them because it was seriously all I could eat. I left the house for two hours on Monday and when I got home I found an empty juice container and a box with 3 crackers left. Too tired and much too defeated to confront anyone I went to lay down in my bed. I picked up my water bottle to take a sip and found that had been drunk as well. I sat on my bed and thought, "this is a low point." And then I wondered if my family was trying to kill me. Not ok. I hadn't been able to keep down any water since Friday and now I was finally ready to drink and there was not a drop of water in the house. It sounds ridiculous and funny now. My family is so strange I have to laugh. But I did NOT laugh at the time. The next day I got an incredibly well timed email of encouragement from Becky. I cried when I read the email which made my Ugandan friend very uncomfortable. Crying is not ok here unless someone dies. Becky thank you tons for the email, I needed it.

Right now I am sitting in my house, in the dark, listening to the giant rain drops on the tin roof. I love the rain but it seems even better today than most days. It is amazing what waking up on the right side of the bed will do. Today started good and got better. Before I left the house this morning I was at the edge of our property and my 20 yr old brother said to me, "hey, thanks for choosing to come to Africa." So sweet. This may have been influenced by the fact that I cooked him eggs Ugandan style for breakfast, and that I had let him watch like 8 straight hours worth of Lost on my computer (PTL for the extra battery). But I am going to choose to believe that none of those influenced his comment. He is just a sweet guy. I mean when he is not tripping me or lying to me or threatening to kick me out of the house. So sweet. Then later in the day I found that my siblings had opened the Post It note application on my computer and had left a note for me. Tonight I cooked an American meal. I made pasta with butter and tomatoes and parm cheese that I just received in a package. I bought honey at the store here and we had rolls with butter and honey. I think it was the best thing I have eaten in 3 months. But not the point. After the meal Sam whispered in my ear "I need to find an American so we can always eat this food." Then I had to forcibly take the honey away from Kevin so she wouldn't drink it. I think if she could she would just inject the sugar. J

At the beginning of the semester the school told us (students who are doing home stays) that our primary involvement is to be with our family. The students who live on campus can get involved in clubs and on campus activities, but we are to be with our families. I remember thinking it would be so dull. I worried that I had only brought one book to read for fun. What will I do with this Ugandan family every day??? Well it is not dull, not ever. It is frustrating, fun, strange, and confusing. I think if I spent every minute of every day with my family I would still never totally understand them. But every day I learn a little more about them and a little more about myself, a little more about how strange we all are and a little more about how the same we all are. I love how people are essentially people everywhere. To me that is Imago Dei, that thing that is the same in me and you and my Ugandan family. I have not yet opened that book I brought.

Thank you for your prayers. I appreciated them more this week than in any other so far. Everyone sounds stressed with school and work right now in America. So I am praying for you. Leaving for Safari tonight. Will write again next week. Happy Easter!

Biebo

I have no cohesive thoughts in my head so we are returning to the bullet points.

• Today my sister, Kevin, told me that if I laugh too much I will go mad.
  
• What have I used for toilet paper this week? Magazine, newspaper (from a package I got from Juli), notebook paper, a leaf and a sock. There is plenty of toilet paper in Uganda. But it is never in the bathroom. And this week it was nowhere to be found in my house. FYI leaves are not absorbent.
  
• I went shopping this weekend to look for varnish that my family needs. I was unsuccessful but I did get to spend a lovely day in Kampala with Suzan, my favorite person in Uganda. We visited some craft markets then got a late lunch at 1000 Cups, a coffee shop that is popular with the Mzungu crowd. We got free coffee with our meal and it was delicious. I think I appreciate coffee more now that I have gone through the process of making it. Or maybe I just appreciate it because it is different from the milk tea that I drink every day.
  
• I cleaned my part of the room today. My part of the room consists of my bunk bed, top bunk for my things, bottom bunk for sleeping. Under my bunk is for storing wood and serves as a nice hiding place for the rats to run when I chase them off the top bunk. My sisters, both in goofy moods today, came in and out while I cleaned and commented on all of my things. "You never use this, give it to me." "This fabric is nice, you make a dress." "Ah you are good for cleaning." Kevin must have told me to give her 11 different things. Hahaha. Sarah was just please that I was cleaning. Yesterday she made me bathe and then show her my feet to see if I had gotten them clean. I had not. J They are permanently stained with orange dirt. The other day after I bathed my Toto commented "Ah Kelsey you are clean for once." Isn't this culture supposed to be indirect communicators?
  
• The other USP students and myself went to Ndere Cultural Center to watch some dancing on Wednesday evening. It was maybe the best show I have ever seen. The dancing was great, but the commentary in between the dancing was hilarious. Funnier than any stand up I have ever seen. We saw dances from all over Uganda, it was especially fun for our group because we have (badly) learned a few different tribal dances. I can sort of do the Acholi and I can attempt and horrible fail the Buganda. I just cannot shake my hips as if they are separate from the rest of me. Its amazing. At the end of the night we went on stage and danced. I don't want to brag but 3 different Ugandans told me that I am a good dancer. Hahaha. Oh and in the middle of the evening it started to rain so we all danced our way indoors.
  
• I am starting to get sad about leaving. A Ugandan friend told me that I am not leaving today so I cannot think about it. This culture is SO not future oriented. Its all about the past.
  
• Yesterday evening my brother scolded me for brushing my teeth in the wrong part of the yard. I had just asked my sister if it was ok to brush there and she had said its fine. He scolded me for like 3 solid minutes before I stomped away annoyed. It is difficult to tell which part of the dirt is ok for brushing teeth and bathing and which part is not. You know? But I was more annoyed because I had just bought a bunch of first aid supplies to clean and dress a wound on his foot. And I was sort of like cut me a freaking break. Anyway after I stomped inside I lay in my bed annoyed for a while until my sister crawled into my mosquito net and joked around until she got me to smile. I love my fam. I fixed Sam's foot later. No idea why but I am like designated nurse of the house. Probably because I brought like half of a pharmacy with me to Uganda!
  
• Kevin is with me at school right now. She just found a cooked egg in my locker that has got to be over a week old. She is breaking it open. Kevin is like a bottomless pit. Never full.
  
• I was walking home from a friend's house on Tuesday and I ran into my friend Nate who was playing with a monkey in bush. The monkey belongs to some street vendors and is named Angel. He was not very angelic, mostly hyper.
  
• I have been trying to upload photos for weeks. Internet has been horrible lately. I can get on for a few minutes and then I lose it. I have learned to type everything in word so I don't lose it!