It will change your way of thinking, if not your life entirely.  Re-entry is no small picnic, especially when you really see America, or to be more exact, the United States, who asks for your weak, tired and huddled masses (although most of us fly now and bypass Ms. Liberty).  Lately it just seems like some kind of breeze and breeding ground for your fat and your slovenly.  One smirks at what we are calling ‘tough times’ when returning from Uganda and its environs.

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I learned in high school history, true or not (however it seemed plausible to that pliant mind I have to keep moving onto and along its own mini-treadmill), that revolution does not arise from the bottom-most point, but rather once the conditions begin to improve, once there is hint that things might be better without a tyrant or a ‘-garch’ or an ‘-ism’ of most sorts.  In other words, all hell breaks loose on the upswing.  I’ve always found that fascinating.  Some of the Ugandans with whom we ate and breathed with sitting on their colorful mats (the women), while men were perched in plastic chairs, might suspect as much, but no decent gusts of hint were blowing in the wind, unfortunately.  Whatever wind there was just barely helped to physically cool the senses of clean sweat were you fortunate enough to be perched outside of the automobile and boda-boda belching of soot in any part of town, Kampala, except for maybe the hill where the ambassadors live.  Perched is a good verb for East Africa — you wait.  You wait to haul something, chiefly non-potable water.  Kids do it, and they can make it playful.  Women do it, because they did it yesterday and the day before, and when they were kids with their mother.  Water is the noun, here.  In Jinja, not far away but it can seem so, bubbles out the source of the White Nile in the northern portion of Lake Victoria, where no one will swim.  Lots of creatures like worms or microscopic snails enter any orifice and burrow deep into your tissues.  No one is really all right in East Africa.  Bring a boatload of tissues if you’re sensitive in the slightest.

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Yet the children run and play and laugh loudly and dance and sing and proudly wear their bright, clean, colorful school uniforms and pose together — no shyness in front of any camera for these kids — look like a dentists dream collection of white teeth from who knows where.  It’s not the only baffling part of dropping into the culture.  There is always more.  For the most part these kids are fatherless, and in many instances motherless, too.  And in plenty of instance they’ve been abandoned to one of the biggest hearted people you’ll ever hope to meet, like Mama Dorothy, a living (albeit with the infernal diabetes) matron saint to the village of Birra on the outskirts of Kampala, who takes in ‘orphans’ to the tune of 20 or so at a time.  Life is communal.  All help in whatever way their age or health allows; all get along like one big happy family, the hierarchy fast in place, animals scurrying through the rat-rooted compound only to some time be caught to have its neck broken in order to provide a protein source to balance out all of the starch and mashed up plantain, called matoke, served at every meal.  Pretend that you like it, as will any self-respecting guest taking food from these people who have nothing but offer it all, and you’ll get a heaping ice-cream dispenser blob more.  You have to watch the East African guests, who prefer to eat with their hands, in order to understand enough to waste a little.  It will feed something else.  William McDonough’s concept ‘Waste Equals Food’ has been in play here before he was born, although the stomach squirms just a little at the thought.  Beer can serve the same purpose, but my belly stretches a little distended, even though I’m not cloyingly trying to fit in.  One learns that family here is not created by blood relationship — more it’s by where you are hauling the jerry cans full of brackish water.

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What go could possibly want credit for these places, one constantly asks himself, and yet on the other hand there exudes an innate happiness embedded into the people, always singing and preaching an undying love for one another in speech after speech after speech.  If you stumble with public speaking off the cuff go visit a widows’ group and you will get plenty of practice.  Like being served the matoke, you are not allowed, or more, you don’t allow yourself, to shy.  You are on stage, an ambassador of hope; you have to take the reigns.

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Missionaries mostly seem to get it all wrong.  Why might one’s inferred or preferred god be any different than those or it already floating above the fray.  These brightly colored people, other than the malarial eyes, don’t appear overly, poor, tired, weak — huddled sometimes, and able to en masse understand a little bit of microfinance in order to buy pigs enough to help build a collective chicken farm.  Now eggs will help make meals a lot more palatable.  One chicken coop at a time, just like Greg Mortenson’s Pakistani schools for girls, and exponential growth isn’t past the realm of comprehension — remember that the moon shots are being remembered now ‘not because they are easy, but because they are hard’.  Only those types of impossibilities (remember, everything possible has been done and the world did not change, according to Sun Ra — and that is a true story between this rock and hard place called East Africa, believe me) can inspire.  Barack told NASA that he’d go to the mat for them if they can ‘inspire‘ the nation, and the globe.  A vision can be attempted; blindness hasn’t a chance.  Working alone is alongside that blindness, is blindness, navigating the same dugout canoe, seeking ‘fished out‘ Nile perch.  No amount voodoo seems to be spawning more fish — thousands of fishermen live and shit on top of one another in order to gain some individual advantage, to get ‘one up on the Universe’, a sentiment Alan Watts so wisely howled about.  Mama Dorothy, where is your speech?  The President, now apparently in that position for life, whatever term that might mean out here, needs Mama Dorothy and her ilk, needs to learn that a rising tide can float all boats.

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Why do we cut learning and lust for whatever glitters or used to taste of salt.  Sweat tastes like salt, and tears, of course.  Just look at these obese slobs in their T-shirts and a size or two ago shorts, sitting on waxed floors in the promised land, mostly because the kids have taken the few available seats.  I’d like to stick a water jug on their heads, watch their spines bend into the ‘C‘ grade people we seem to have embraced.  Move the people in and out, listen to the clanging of the turnstyles, turn those tables, wipe away the slime.  They can’t get up, beached whales; a culture spiraling, spiraling down.  We think we need be wealthy to be healthy.  How did we get so sick?  Watch the black East African children, smiling, brimming with self-esteem — make it past the age of 20 and you’ve got it in spades, political correctness and HIV be damned.  Swing up, sweet chariot…we need a dinger.