Back to the Sunshine

The Sunshine Hotel! I’m back in Lyantonde. I’ve dropped in to see the folks I worked with in July and early August at the Rakai Community-Based AIDS Project. Alas, I won’t get to see my students again. They are on break this week and their graduation has been re-scheduled for next week. By then I will be far away. But it is so nice to once again see Julie and Vincent and Wycliffe and Francis and others on the staff. It’s quiet around here now though! No interns, no Nicole, no Tonopah or Rose. And many on the staff are, as usual, in the field doing the work they do so well.

Goretti asked me this morning if I wanted to get online. (Is it warm on the equator?) The last time I sat in this room, five of the seven interns were at the one internet hook-up. Now they are back at their respective universities – Makerere, Kyambogo, Uganda Martyr’s University – and I sit here happily gorging on internet time but missing Maggie and Justine and everyone else. It’s fun when Francis comes in to talk for awhile, then Goretti, then Mayega, then Julie. Yesterday I walked with Julie to the farm and found Angela in the farmhouse and John Ssemaguzi in the banana field. John looked healthy and stood with his usual beautiful posture. Angela was recovering from another bout of malaria.

This week has been a time of revisiting and savoring and moving into the future. Earlier this week I was in Masaka just north of here visiting St. Jude Family Projects, the organic agricultural NGO headed by Josephine, who I met at the Kenya workshop and symposium. It was wonderful to see Rael as well, a young Kenyan woman who graduated from the Manor House program a year ago and is new on the staff of trainers at St. Jude. And, as fate would have it, a whole bunch of folks from Manor House were at St. Jude on a two-day study tour, so as well as seeing Josephine and Rachel (Rael’s Uganda name) I had the joy of spending time once again with Nyongesa and Joshua and Mlegwa and Margaret and a bunch of the others who let me be part of their lives for that wonderful month of August. This week, for two sweet days in December, I was reconnected with these people who are intent on creating healthy soil and sustainable lives.

The Kenyans (many of them making their first-ever trip to Uganda) left Thursday morning in the school bus that brought them from Kitale. I was planning to take a public bus on down to Lyantonde, which is an hour south of Masaka. But Josephine was very concerned about the Ebola outbreak and insisted on sending a driver to take me. A few years ago hundreds of people died of Ebola and now cases have erupted in western Uganda near Congo, but who knows where it might spread. Apparently it’s been known since August but only recently reported, and lots of people are really pissed at the government for not publicizing the outbreak sooner. Whether it was a matter of medical confirmation (the official word) or the deliberate withholding of the nasty news until after CHOGM, I don’t know. The reality is that some people have died from the virus and others are scared, and I’m having to not do what comes naturally to me – shaking extended hands.

The chances of being exposed to the Ebola virus are probably exceedingly slim, but it was protective and loving of Josephine to drive me to my next destination. And it gave us a chance for more conversation. Six months here and I still have so many questions and so much I want to know.

As for the fun-loving ladies at the Sunshine, they welcomed me back and laughed in glee to see the photos I printed of them. My room has received a fresh coat of white paint, but the same holey (not to be confused with holy) mosquito net is hanging over the bed. In July I took it down and hung up my own permethrin-treated mosquito net for the duration. This time I got out some thread and repaired about twenty holes in the Sunshine’s beleaguered old net. Maybe I’ve picked up some of the resourcefulness of the people in this part of the world, where locally available you-name-its are used to fix everything from broken bicycles to holey exhaust pipes (and stores have names like “Blessed Hardware” and “God Almighty Automotive”).

And yes I celebrated my birthday by living that day with the same gusto I’ve been living most of these days. Actually, until that evening I forgot to tell anyone it was my birthday. Too busy leaving some dear people and arriving to others. Malko sent me a sweet “Happy birthday, mum” SMS and then I learned that his day is coming up so we made a plan to celebrate together when I’m back in Kampala on Sunday. I do love birthdays, mine and others, and it was fun having tea and chapattis with Julie at the Sunshine that evening, and now getting emails from daughters and Don and family and friends. YES! as my student Ruth would exclaim if she were here. I am now officially and happily 54. Maybe I should start acting my age, whatever that means.