In Lira Northern Uganda, the house accommodation for myself and other workers
for the humanitarian organization have a huge yard and a brick wall- that
surprisingly has no barbed wire on top of it.
Guards are needed
twenty-four hours a day. Despite having a job, the guards are so appreciative
when I bring them a meal. Not once did I see them pack a lunch—so I asked about
it. They say – no food to bring.
I wonder about the IDPs just outside our
metal gates the guards supervised twenty-four hours a day. When we roll out with
our vehicles to go to work, I witness their poverty disaster and their
unmitagating life/death war to just survive. Inside the house I just left,
unwashed dishes with discarded food threaten more illness among our house
occupants—two already were ill the first week I arrived for my consulting
work.
Would begging forgiveness from the starving IDPs begin a process
for erasing ignorance and moving from what is invisible to a self-evident
transparency for the unwashed plates of foodstuff?
It is like living in
a college dorm room with teenagers discarding and disdaining anything to do with
being a disciple to oneself, which is the true definition of discipline. I get
the sense that entitlement comes with the power of their positions in
humanitarian agencies where they do the great work- the great projects and will
not do let alone see the small acts left unwashed, undone or ignored.
Isn’t this Gender Based Violence- since it is the women, the girl/child
that do all the small acts left unwashed, undone or ignored? Women perpetrating
violence against women victims in their rushing out the door, or “too tired”
since we do the great acts to see the invisible female hands working.
No
need to concern themselves with that as Mother Nature with her microbes and
bacteria—the parasites in the water incurs diarrhea and fever quite
easily—forging accountability for their lack of reverence for food and the house
with guards. Having an illness, diarrhea or infections allows for plenty of
laments about the conditions they must work in and add another halo around their
necks not their heads.
Blind to the teeming poverty and starvation of
the IDPs when they drive through the metal gates to work, they do not even
recognize or see the swirling masses outside the brick wall. I wanted to take
all the uneaten food and give it to them.
Deep inside I realize how
honoring what we have by recognizing what privileges and wealth we have is a
means to be accountable and responsible for our actions as opposed to giving a
few food scraps to great numbers of those in need.
Unfortunately, I felt
the hot sting in not listening to all those mothers who would shake a finger to
their healthy children and proclaim, “Children are starving in Africa eat your
vegetables.” Those mothers still had the profound sense that we are all one
family and what happens to them happens to us.
The World Food Programme,
which has one of the best humanitarian policies, that does not exclude had to
cut food rations for the already starving internally displaced peoples by 50%
due to a shortage of funding in Uganda. Other humanitarian organizations
purposely cut food rations to prod the internally displaced peoples to grow
their own food.
Ugandans facing that inhumane prodding by what is
labeled as helping aid or humanitarian efforts to lower food rations and add in
seeds to plant have repeatedly pointed out that when the refugees go to plant
the fields or fish, they are killed, maimed, abducted, raped, war brides or boy
soldiers.
I guess the humanitarian policies think that at least giving
the desperately plighted and poverty stricken refugees a choice between starving
and planting with all those random acts of violence as great acts and efficient
policies.
Perhaps instead of starving a slow death, going to plant seeds
or catch fish is a more dignified quicker death. What a humanitarian
choice.
Meanwhile, dishes are left unwashed, counters filled with spilled
products that only the rich can afford to get as they in their pride drive to
work to keep working on their never finished great work.
When I go the
market in Lira, I buy only from the women stalls. I pick each tomato despite
their uproar of not taking the pile of four—it is a rule that I ignore. They
smile and say okay but there is no negotiating the price of four tomatoes, which
barely equates to 50 cents. I shrug my shoulders and tell them—I pay for
quality.
With my small economic contribution, I can make a dent—the
small act of buying my own food or items that I carefully selected becomes a
distribution of wealth. What is more important it is done with honor and a
mutual exchange long forgotten.
I am adhering to my spiritual practices
of appreciating and honoring my own household, my own living conditions that
have a front row view of the catastrophic poverty.
I do not leave
unwashed dishes or scraps of food and buy only what I can consume.
Right
in front of the house is a giant Mahogany tree where all thousands of bats
roost. Often it is 2 AM before their screeching communications is finally
completed. The IDPs sleep near this magnificent tree with the roosting bats in
the opposite but equal distance as my bedroom windows while their windowless
shelter in a barely erect and abandoned building has no roof to speak of.
That gaping roof abandoned windowless internally displaced people
shelter lets in the night sky and the searing sun. Yet, they do not dare to seek
respite under the Mahogany tree since it grows right next to the brick compound
wall of the house I live in.
I know that the brick wall is around every
westerner, every humanitarian worker, and every christian fellow/and their
wives.
The tree with bats brought curiosity; I think of the metaphor or
the message that thousands of bats roosting in the tree in front of the house
compound brings. For the IDPs the blood sucking poverty and the war violence
that scars each of them is the message.
For us with the wealth of food,
home with a brick wall and metal gates what is the message? Of course, all in
the house compound with metal gates and guards would express their humanitarian
work in organizations that attend to those of need as a consciousness.
I
know that “our so-called consciousness” in humanitarian work is a big act, a
great work but it regretfully is not a small act.
In a way the
“consciousness in great work and big acts,” is more like buying the entrance fee
to the staircase to heaven primary bringing with it “burn out” and
“workaholics.”
The universal lament is “there is nothing else to do
socially” when they choose a sense of separateness and the power to do decisions
upon peoples lives. Is it the brick wall or hitting the brick wall repeatedly?
Is this what the thousands of swarming christian organizations do as
well with their entitlement to give and never trade places with those who
receive their desperately needed aid?
The talk or the associating with
others in the “great big work” becomes an exclusive club bent on excluding as
most lament all the hard work they do, the meaningful work and pout when no else
understands or have no one to talk to about it.
The church only
associates with their own kind and manifests where they choose to gather after
hours—lament their sacrifices and/or talk of their illnesses or diseases from
working in forsaken landscapes. But they claim they are helping those in need as
they are further removed from any sense of “one family.”
They never do
get to know their neighbors or the teeming masses right outside the metal gates.
It would be too hard to see them not as objects of their goals on a humanitarian
scale or their saintly projects.
I guess they need the poor more than the
poor needs them? It is a quandary since how else would they buy their way to
heaven?
As I grapple with the horrific scenes of humanity before me, I am
prostrate on the ground with immense gratitude and appreciation for what has
been given to me. I know my limitations and I know that small acts are
limitless.
This is what I observed and continue to bear witness to them:
they are profound teachers and I claim my place as the student.
Small
acts are mutual exchanges that are intimate with our neighbors, family, friends
and those strangers that always have been our family to begin with.
I
come to Uganda, to Bosnia, to India and Sri Lanka to learn and grow—a mutual
exchange that identifies so-called victims as my teachers of a wisdom that is
not buried under the superficial layers of wealth and its entitlement to
purchase the entrance fee for heaven’s staircase.
Frankly, I am full
with dealing with my own issues facing the disparity and the wide gulf between
those that have and those that do not. I am taking down the bricks one by one
from the brick walled compound and sit whenever I can and watch the bats coming
to roost in the giant mahogany tree.
