can you write the time?

So. I've had a bunch of conversations this week about what it means to be creating locally but with an international vocabulary

I'm at the coffee shop reading a recent draft of a script Eric is writing for our loose adaptation of Antigone. A small man with a smooth walking stick, white hair, black rimmed glasses sits at the table next to me and we talk.

Is that a computer?
Yes.
What company do you work for?
I don't work for a company.
Where is the company based?
I don't work for a company?
Where are you from?
I'm from the United States.
People are rich there.
Some people are. There may be a lot of money in the country but not everyone sees it.
Do you think it is by god or by chance?
What?
That some people have much or some people have little?
I don't know.
But you think about it and you tell me. Is it by god or by chance?
So, I do. He leans in to hear, his face down and when I am done, saliva falls from his mouth like a blessing as he sits up to meet my gaze.
What's your tote?
I don't know.
Maybe you don't understand my question.
You are asking me about a totem - an image or an animal or thing that a community holds sacred.
No. That you can't touch. What's your tote?
Um...
Is blood or milk thicker?
Blood, I think.
And we all have blood. And the breath you cannot see. See, you have sat here, I have sat here, we have started a conversation and we have not abused each other.
Yes, the body of our conversation.
Is it god or chance?
I don't know.
Who knows?
And the woman who is dating his nephew comes to take him. He says, give me your number. And now write the date. And the time.
Did I miss his name or forget it?

The international conversation is not the universal conversation. Unless somehow the untranslatable is part of the vocabulary.

trip to Garden City mall for bacon pizza

...and...

running errands in Kampala. meeting with Kaya and then to the embassy to drop off some forms and then to the doctor. I don't bring enough money for a boda boda after coffee so I walk most of the way from CafePub to the embassy. parliament to gaba road before finally jumping on a mutato.





























































































































































































































































doctor is supposed to start seeing patients around 5pm but he doesn't show up til 8pm. he works in three other hospitals besides the clinic and he had an extended operation. doctors don't make so much here so many have private practices in addition to their work in the hospital. he writes a prescription by hand. his handwriting reminds me of water, of silhouettes after dusk. your handwriting is beautiful. yes, it's like art to me. i like to make something beautiful.

for Monica...

Kampala Rd.
















mutato, more or less the bus















it's campaign season for the presidential elections
on the news yesterday, they said Museveni is threatening to stay by force if he is not voted back



















Maribou stork















refrigerator















waiting in the car...















there will be a party for the last day of school this term.















stuck in jam















we pause while the student driver attempts the intersection. road rules can be impromptu here...

Victorious!

Last class of the term with the directing students. After reading 36 papers telling me how students would direct their play in realism because it is about real life, I managed to bring home a point that I have no idea (really) what it means to be real on stage and that directing is not about imitating what some guy in Russia dreamed up 200 years ago, but what you want to dream up today. The young man in the green sweater who played a lovestruck woman brilliantly earlier this semester says, well, you really changed how we see.

This seems to be the main way that I can be useful right now. I am trying to encourage process because what I see of directing here tends to center around executing a script - blocking charts, assembling props lists, kind of thing. But there's no training in, vocabulary for, or rehearsal time to internalize a world or event. So I ask questions.

Other way I think I can be useful here - to be a catalyst for people to do the things they want to do anyway. It could be enough that the students wrote the paper. Or that Philip wants to bring his play to schools. Or that Stella wants to write a proposal to open a vocational sewing project for war affected girls in the north that earns them income in a way that is mutually beneficial to her garment business. I think I can offer permissions by practicing continued engagement, by continuing to be here.

Victorious is the name of the three year old girl who has moved in with us. (Muzungu, do you also have a child who is three years?) Victorious is learning English - very fast. The kid is way smart. Yesterday she learned "what is your name?" And when you repeat the question, she screams "Victorious!"

asleep

somehow slept through sunday. flattened down as if by a firm hand. the children came in and covered my floor with grass and letters. as if that fairy tale where the woman sleeps for a hundred years and she wakes up in thorns, wakes up to nothing she knew.

Tonny, one of the actors in our show, got a job heading PR for UNDP in Juba, Sudan. They vote for their independence from Northern Sudan in two months and his job is to interface between UNDP, the local gov't, the local people and the international community. He leaves next week so we saw him off Saturday.

a pork joint near Lake Victoria. A big hole in the ground, with brick and a grill and giant giant logs on fire in front of the grill. Not underneath. Underneath a giant hole so the pieces of pig can drip boiling grease. Dip pig in salt, in onion and eat. hot. A small shack by the side of the road full of people. We called ahead to place an order.

Then Lake Victoria and the sunset and the full moon rise. Full moon in the leaves of a palm tree. Lake Victoria huge like the sea. There are men fishing in low boats, thin sillhuettes against the islands. Small waves, and then bats. The water gets deep immediately. Is deep already. And in the dark, a thousand moths bash themselves against light bulbs, but we don't know their names.

what next?

So today, I returned to Mulago. My roommate Rose kindly kept me company. I admire her practicality, so it was great to have her company and insight.

Friday is screening day at the Uganda Cancer Institute. A series of health workers and survivors spoke to the 40-50 people, giving testimonies, giving instructions on how to breast self exams, on healthy diets, giving general info about the disease and treatment. Then the invited people from the audience to come up and teach to see if the info is being communicated clearly, which I thought was a wise strategy.

A lot of ngos have used theater to raise awareness on AIDs and the woman, Margaret, who runs the survivor group here wants to use theater to raise awareness for breast cancer. Cancer is so new here and the funding for non-infectious diseases is only beginning to get more attention. I am going to write a script for her this week. This week is also the two year anniversary of mom's death, so a nice gift to me to feel like I have something to do with my hands. This woman Margaret impresses me. She's sweating of flu and running around processing papers, assisting with screening, outlining the play. She mentions that her cousin took her to a church who wanted to pray for her instead of a mastectomy and she tells the preacher, no I'm going to get this treatment. It's not the defiance that impressed me. It's the explanation she gives. Everyone wants to help. They don't want you to have to go through something like getting your breasts cut off. They just don't know how to help.

The other project that I committed to today: I'm working with some members of Theater Factory to tour a comedy about post-election violence in Kenya to schools, Crazy Storms. To give students a picture of theater as rigorous and as local (not just Shakespeare). Theater Factory is a weekly comedy show that's been running at the National Theater for 7 years. They create an impressive 14 new sketches each week based on newspaper articles. Their work is tight and professional, with vital and imaginative physical comedy.

I came home today and before I had even taken my backpack off, bent over my computer and was attacked by children. A 5 year old begins combing my hair and the three year old smudges her thumb firmly across my forehead. Can you ask her why she is doing that? It's the sign of the cross. She says it's so bugs don't bight you.

excess

I walked into a sign a couple days ago. I was walking by the hole I fell in a few months ago and thinking too hard about how I'm so clumsy and I don't like the way I make a spectacle out of my injuries because it doesn't feel honest when I walked into a sign and had to sit down for awhile. Light concussion. Nauseous. Fuzzy. Irritable.

It sucked, but it was useful in making me stop. Walking home, I noticed how people sit alone by the side of the road under trees. A woman roasting white 1/2 corn cobbs to sell for cars and the sweat over her face.

I sit with my roommates and talk about their plans. Stella wants to open up a shop where she employs people to sew who don't regularly have access to income. She talks about her time visiting prisoners and the effects of their imprisonment on their whole family. She talks about girls in underpriveleged areas. How can her fashion business position itself to give back to her community (how to define her community)?

(I am interrupted here by the two young girls I live with. One is 5, the other is 3. The 3 year old only speaks Luganda so the 5 year old translates for me. The two like to pretend they are lions and they jump out from behind my bed and growl at me when I enter my room. The 5 year old says she is asking - muzungu, do you also have children who are three years?)

We watch tv here. Badly dubbed soap opera from south america or india. Dubbed into english with cartoon voices. There's one I like thats east meets west set in developing India and Brazil. There's a character who is schizophrenic and his family is ashamed about his disease and then other members of society have to sensitize them to his condition as an illness that can be treated medically. All the men are in love with Brazilian women but have arranged Indian wives. The rapid switch from incense and robes to sky scrapers is fascinating and makes me think about what people are navigating here. The sitting under trees by the road. The prevalence of cell phones with no real mail system and undependable email - extension of oral culture.

One of the things I do with my time is to work as a guest artist at Makerere, the local University. The one that Obama's father attended. The students make skits and I throw a couple of basic drama concepts on the table. Today the skit was about a woman who marries a man in her clan, even though it is against culture and then they have a baby which is a stick, or maybe a chicken. In the skit, one of the characters prays to rid the father of the curse of his daughter, and this young man's performance is amazing, a 3 minute chant ending in gutteral sounds. Get out.

(I am interrupted here by the young woman who works in our walking in with a plate full of fried grasshoppers. For reals. They're really good. Like crunchy fish. Salted and cooked with onion.)

There's also reality TV here. Where contestants come from various African countries. The country to country gets fierce. In Africa Big Brother, the man from Zimbabwe was voted off as the runner up and then (according to my friend) the president of Zimbabwe gave him some large sum - like $200,000 - as a consolation prize.

Concussion, Monday, anyway. I spent the night in some sort of cathartic tantrum. I can't remember content. But I woke and started writing. All of a sudden: writing.

Mulago

Today I joined a group of women from Seattle looking to develop connection with cultural workers here. Today they were touring the cancer ward at Mulago and one of the women was hoping to connect the community outreach people with theater makers in the hopes that theater could be used as a tool to sensitive people to cancer and spread information about diagnosis and treatment.

Mulago is the largest hospital in Uganda doing amazing things with limited resources. Challenges include: people are not familiar cancer, so they often come late to hospital. When they do come, they often need good time to raise the funds for medication. There is a program to give people free cancer drugs, but often there is enough for only 5% of the patients. The hospital will have some drugs and not others and it will be on the families to buy that drug independently. Or people have enough money to pay for 3 rounds of treatment, but they need 6. By the time people are ready and willing for treatment, they are often in stage 4 cancer.

I thought cancer treatment was brutal, but cancer untreated appears to be a rough way to go. One woman with breast cancer offered to show us her breast. These kinds of offering of witness amaze me. Hair like fire. Two grown daughters in light green dresses tend her on the bed. She smiles with her whole face, taking careful time to greet visitors. Her breast eaten pink. Eyes smiling open.

Most of the care in this room is palliative. People usually stay one or two weeks.

Outside, it rains. Air through the open glass slats smells cold and clever.

The hospital has better success rate with lymphona, Burkitts. A cancer that strikes children here peak age 7. A mother pours milk through a tube in her son's nose. Asleep on a tiny bed with a yellow t-shirt written on "children are the future". This one, if detected early, has about an 80% success rate.

But it's difficult to track the success here because there is no real way to follow up with patients after they leave. If they are cured, we never hear from them again. If they pass on, we never hear from them again. There is some initial planning for a program that can track patients through text messages since most people here have a cell phone, or know someone who does.

The two buildings are relatively clean and well kept. Apparently, a legislator in the federal government had advanced lung cancer and had to get chemo at Mulago. He complained to Parliament that the ward had cockroaches and even rats and so the government invested money to start a cancer center. Growing numbers of oncologists. Growing numbers of partnerships with US institutions (mammogram buses parked outside from Yale New Haven and Dana Farber). It's a big project - making cancer publicly visible and building the infrastructure to treat it. A lot to accomplish with fitful funding, but moving forward.

I learned a small program offers patients or family members of patients the ability to sew dresses and other clothes for sale, since they are often leaving jobs in their villages to come here to Mulago.

Every Friday, they offer a free clinic for women to come and screen for breast and cervical cancer. I am coming back this Friday to learn more about developing a small outreach theater project with survivors.

Centre Christus

I traveled to Kigali to go to my friend Evas' wedding to Elijah. Beautiful and a story that needs to be told in itself.

And also. The next day.

Evas' pre-married home is a few blocks from where I usually stay when I visit Kigali, a Jesuit retreat center called Center Christus. Located close to the airport. It's where the first killing in the genocide happened. 17 religious men and women.

OK. I'm a little shy to tell this story. I went to Center Christus on Sunday for mass because their mass has beautiful music. I came late and people were standing outside the windows or had lined up chairs outside the doors. I sat in a free chair on the cement pathway outside the door and a small boy in a batman t-shirt put ripped pieces of a green and yellow leaf in my hand. The bits of language I could hear I couldn't understand, French. I think French. But the rhythm I know, in a quiet way. The boy returns with more leaves to hold.

It's quiet here. And I notice myself wishing for a way into this quiet or that I knew the names for things here. I notice I wish I could find someone to teach me. I remember noticing this as a surprise, like opening a box of once-favorite clothes you forgot owning. Maybe.

Unnerved. I wander the city, new cobble stoned. Clean. Vistas. Reminds me of Prague. Or Vermont, but I'm not sure why that one. I drink grape soda and write about a Clair Denis film I watched last week about globalization where a makeshift family of people who share an apartment building can't come together and also can't get out and they close the store Anthropology because it isn't of use to anyone anymore. It reminds me of the work of cultural exchange because of this myth of leaving the world as you know it to have some kind of unique and precious experience, but really there is no leaving the world.

And I find myself back in Center Christus in a round no-wall hut near the genocide memorial and an insistently living tree. And I sit with this - I wish I had a teacher - for a few hours. And the other things that come up. The sadness of the loss of life that remains underneath the spectacle of violence. What to give Evas for her wedding? What is peace?

When I got out of the shower yesterday, there was a Jehova's Witness from America having tea in the sitting room. Evas' sisters let her in because they thought she was a guest for the wedding. Her name was Abigail and she traveled with a Ugandan woman who had braces. So Evas' sisters, brother and uncle and I and the Jehovah's Witnesses squeezed into the living room and drank tea. I nervously tour apart and ate bananas. Abigail asked us to read a passage of the bible that promises a future of peace, of "exquisite delight in the abundance of peace". And I'm trying not to imagine that it's my job to save people from evangelism, but I find myself asking, but what is peace?

The thin wood of a bench bolted to the hut. What does peace look like and how is it enacted? The sound of traffic. Why this narrative of peace made visible in the image of someone dying? An airplane lands. I am spending time with my desire for a teacher. An uproar from the soccer match at Amahoro stadium washes down the hill.

When it is five o clock, I return to Evas' former home because we are going to visit her new home. We have 10 minutes, you should rest. I sit by the bookshelf. There is a book for GMAT. There is a book on weddings. And then there is a book of small plays about saints by the playwright I used to travel with here.

I am reading. Water on the floor. About the intent towards a structure of writing that is continuously opening to wonder, about closure as idolatry. Peace shaped as metaphor, metaphor as space of and between multiples, decenters the individual. Maybe I am praying for idolatry, not guidance. Something to rest in, not rest.

To the taxi bus. Up hill. High walled side of the road. Evas in a yellow dress. Pieces of wedding cake. We can't get the TV to work. Visitors. Peas. Black sofas. Outside, the cool dark. Red cement. The size of a new life.

Evas and Elijah get married

I travel to Rwanda to view my friends' wedding - Evas and Elijah. Gorgeous and the two radiate confidence as they pass from one house to another.

but that's our culture

Yesterday.

We returned the palletts that we rented for Cooking Oil set to Jinja. Alex Wasswa, a theater practitioner who helped up assemble materials for this show, runs an art center there. By coincidence, the owner of the center, uses an unusable stage to store palletts.

Jinja is a tourist town about an hour and a half from the city's capital. Past tea plantations, an eclectic forest, a sugar processing plant, a bottling - (what do you call that factory, plant?) and over the river Nile.

JB and the gentleman who drove us were telling me stories about corruption - the large highway built in Kampala that was supposed to have 4 lanes each way, but has two because so much of the budget when into kickbacks. Soldiers who sell their bullets. A massacre that occured in the north because the general had been telling his bosses that he had twice as many soldiers than he had in order to pocket ghost salaries/rations. And this sense of Uganda as a country with very little nationalism. In my experience of nationalism leads me to associate this word with a fundamentalist concept of identity and xenophobia. It made me think there is also something positive about a collective project, collective sense of stake.

Also, it is interesting because something I note about Ugandan culture is a high value on social thinking and action. Even the rhythm of the language includes gaps for emphasis and response. There's a high value on sharing what you have - food, rides, air time, favors. But at the same time, rampant corruption and individual pursuit of immediate gain.

We'd moved on to a conversation about homosexuality in Uganda when we got pulled over by the police for speeding in a section of the road with an ambiguous speed limit. He demanded the driver's original permit to hold on file. The driver steps out to work out the bribe he's going to have to pay to let us continue the journey.

Uganda's institutionalized homophobia has gotten a lot of press. There was a law proposed by this guy Bahati that takes Uganda's already legal oppression of homosexuality and takes it to another extreme. Death penalty for some cases and legal liability for knowing someone is gay and not outing them. The law hasn't come close to being passed, but it has coincided with an increase in persecution for people who are gay or perceived as gay.

I have heard the argument that homophobia is part of Uganda's culture and that national sovereignty is at stake in criticism of oppression of sexual minorities. This argument makes me a little sad because I heard on CNN that a Ugandan paper published the names of 100 people it identified as gay with the caption "hang them". It's one thing to say that the issue of legalizing marriage practice is tied to sovereignty, but how can this kind of fear or violence against any minority be a respectable choice? This is also fascinating to me because of the strong sense of nationalism implied (as opposed to the conversation about corruption earlier). I wonder, how do individuals decide when to value sharing or collective action and when not to? How do individuals decide what to accept as tradition? I voiced this question to another Ugandan gentleman today and he responded what's more alien to Africa than Christianity? (Not to say that Christianity is an invalid part of present African culture, but to highlight the fluidity and choice involved in continuity and transformation of culture).

We arrive in Jinja. The art center used to be an auto shop. An American couple owns a cafe and craft shop that generate revenue for the center. They have an outdoor stage (that stores the palletts) and the indoor theater in a huge gorgeous warehouse space. Plans for music practice rooms, a recording studio, class rooms, and apartments for a possible artists in residence program.

When we visited, Alex was hosting a workshop for a program he is running in Uganda for UNESCO: recording the region's intangible heritage (performance practices, rituals, social customs, indigenous knowledge and representation, cultural spaces, oral traditions, language). Field workers approach community-identified experts and record information about that individuals' articulation of their culture as it is presently practiced. The records are then kept in a local space chosen by the community. UNESCO also helps provide access to younger members of the community to facilitate transmission. In some cases, they have even organized to broadcast some information on the radio at the request of the communities.

On this day, Alex was talking to field workers about how to catagorize cultural elements in the low ceilinged room of the old auto shop, staring at the projection of the UNESCO power point on the white cement wall. Conversations like: when dance counted as performance, and when it counted as a social event. One gentleman, who apparently enjoys dramatic rhetoric, told Alex "How dare you say [a dance from his culture] was not for entertainment!" - which led to a discussion about multiple purposes and distinctions between relationships to audience in entertainment and ritual. Another interesting topic: how to dictate if something was a living part of culture and so needed to be recorded, or a discarded part of culture (the need to allow for and record contradictions, to record with limited censorship the community experts' self-definings). Sometimes, they say, people are very adament that something is no longer a part of their living practice - the example that came up in the meeting was a tradition in that region of beating the bodies of suicide victims with sticks.

Another one of the field worker's (who had come to see Cooking Oil three times) journeyed with us back to Kampala. There's a dance company there who fuses element of Latin dance and African dance. The perform the last Wednesday of every month at the National Theatre. They are physically energetic, sensous, playful and - what's the word - not acrobatic. Ah, athletic! That's the word! The performance was structured as a sample of different dances - tango, cha cha, merenge (sp?) with a MC's that introduce the next dance. In the end, the audience comes on stage and dances too. Something that thrilled me was that they recycled part of our set ( a skeletal series of frames) and lights in a gesture towards formal experimentation. They hung a curtain over the middle two panels and played with dancing in sillhouette, revelation of body parts over the edge of the curtain, and casting shadows of dancers on the curtain to multiply dancers in front of the curtain.

Outside, two European clowns perform to a group of hip hop dancers. Graffiti out of the mouth. It doesn't rain, but the ground is wet. I go out til 3 am for my friend's birthday and discover an Iranian restaurant near the US embassy called Flamin' Chicken that has an impressive amount of trust among its employees. popcorn black tea empty street

after independence day

Saturday was Uganda's Independence day. This meant traffic jam on Sunday because the president's convoy was driving through Kampala as part of national celebrations. Shannon, JB, Albert and I on the way to (the large shopping market in the mall) Uchumi to eat pizza counted 17 cars. I've heard it said that when the president first came to power, the convoy was 5 cars. I wonder why now there are so many?

The discovering of self as nation is a present phenomenon here. The National Theatre has these announcements they play at the beginning of Cooking Oil, the climax is a recording of the National Anthem and everyone stands up when it is played. I've seen people stop and hold silence even when it is being played outside or in another room.

Trying out my new camera in the morning. It rains. Fresh fruit margaritas at the Mexican/Chinese themed bar. Night and the dogs.

Larium Nightmare Number 1

I dream that I am dead and the only person who can see is my own fear and I can only escape it by brute force. I gauge it eyes out with my thumbs and it dissolves. Then I am not afraid, only disappointed that I am already dead.

Dear larium, thank you for reducing my risk of malaria. Now, please don't make me crazy.

Anyway, I think I'll be up a while now, so maybe this is a good time to catch up on my blog.

Today... woke up at 6am so I could do a radio interview at 7am for Cooking Oil. Uganda Broadcasting Center built by Idi Amin - recording studios wrapped in cement lace. Afterwards, I sit upstairs in my friend Aggrey's office full of educational posters - don't steal medicine, don't buy votes - outside the window, Kampala in the mist. He makes tea.

I'm reading a lively book written in 89 criticizing the industry of foreign aid, or the industry of development, as a place where people make money out of creating narratives about and servicing poverty. This point of view feels a little extreme, and then you read about companies willing to put $10 million into Southern Sudan to develop animal shaped cities. I want that to be a joke, but my friend working in the area as a photojournalist says she's seen the plans.

So much running around. The US embassy to pick up my mail. I finally get my badge printed. As I am waiting, I read a wipe board that describes cars available and their state. "sweet ride, no a/c, no radio" or "no driver's side seatbelt, no a/c" or "sucks". The embassy's mixture of performance of authority - with the security checks and escorts - and this casual or informal banter truly fascinates me.

Other errands, I visit Rwangyezi at Ndere who has just returned from the world expo in China. He says the thing is twice the size of Kampala, built in 8 months, immaculate and on time. Electric buses and urban planning proposal pavilions without end. Dreaming a better future. Three highrises were built to house the expo people and after April nothing else will remain.

Above is a picture of Cooking Oil, the play. We opened last weekend to small but enthusiastic houses. Two more weekends to go...

can't sleep

I dreamt a chart. Looking for ways to organize language so that it oscillated between sound and symbol; direct experience and progression of meaning, story. Something to do with one's hands...

Cooking Oil is a practice in patience, but still moving forward.

neighborhood dogs, shhhhhhh

...this is hours...

No sleep. No words here and my mind occupies itself with drawing an imaginary thought shaped line with a lead pencil.

I give up and listen to conversations about theater, genocide and theology on YouTube. 4:27
5:26
6:25

Nakayama

OK. Also this happened.

The refugee camp visit was heavy. It is not an easy way to live. Resources are scarce, future uncertain and the circumstances that brought them are traumatic. Hard to keep hope. Hussein tells us he wants to go back to Somalia. But isn't it dangerous? It is more dangerous than when he left, but here he is dying slowly. To be 30 and have nothing to do with one's hands, one's time. He's jovial and charismatic and he stays because his wife doesn't want to go back. He shows us her picture. She's beautiful, with her teenage daughter and they look so comfortable together sitting in the front yard. He shows us his cleats and pictures of him playing soccer. He wants someone to see that he has things he wants out of life. Everyone's got a plan, he tells us. I've got plans. He's funny, but his rhythm is frustrated.

I'm making space for you in my thoughts, in my heart. The little boy who asks me to pay his school fees. The woman who cries when Deborah asks her what kind of future she imagines for her daughters. The brother with dull eyes. The woman at the market with piles of tomatos who has adopted many, many children, married as a child herself, telling Deborah she still receives death threats for being Tutsi. Is it enough?

We are staying in hotel with a view of Mubende and the water in the air at dawn. The hotel itself used to be a headquarters for UNHCR staff working at the camp, 40 km away. It has a sauna but I don't know if that's from its time as UNHCR headquarters. It's nice for us though, cedar walls, and men pour eucalyptus over the rocks. There is a lot of space between the helpers and the communities in need. But people are living in the camps now, the space is attended to more.

Near the hotel, maybe 15 minutes up the dirt roads of the mountain is a traditional religious site. Nakayama. Past a road that says it goes to a traditional healer. Nakayama is a woman, a priestess who had a relationship with an old tree. A long time ago. When she died, her body was buried elsewhere, but the spirit came to live in the tree. No one knows how old the tree is. The sign at the road calls it a tourist site and we pay a young boy a dollar to tell us the story, but otherwise, there is nothing touristy about it. A community sits on the grass and prays by the tree. There is an old woman who tends the shrine. The tree has a thousand roots and each large fold of trunk reaching into the earth creates a separate area, or chamber, where one can approach Nakayama. You need to take your shoes off to enter the ground covered with dry pine needles. And you leave an offering. Coffee beans, usually. They smell sweet from rotting.

Go ahead, go pray.

So I do. And I remember my dream with the woman, the healer - will you make my strange dreams go away? - it is possible, the other possibility is to be fully inside them. and the wrinkles of the bark are skin, a dark green in tiny canyons, tree growing since memory and the sweet smell of coffee and the sense of breathing eyes lift up as if meeting a gaze (strangers, strange, I am strange here)

In the car, I do not talk the three hours home. What is it?

Sleepless. My bed is a four poster with mosquito net canopy and I lie in it staring at the dark of my eyelids. Can't sleep. And it occurs to me, my dream is not about dreaming at all. It's about being alone. Will you make me not alone anymore? It's possible, the other possibility is to be fully inside your own alone-ness. To be completely alone as a way of facing out.

OK. Only how? I vanish in sleeping.

Kyaka II

here's a thing I wrote for someone else's blog on a trip to a UNHCR refugee settlement, as research for Cooking Oil.

At the mouth of Kyaka II, a tree full of yellow throated birds.

Deborah Asiimwe and I climb high into the white UNHCR land cruiser with field worker Isaac Adra Ocotoko and two social workers from UNHCR and GTZ, (Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, a German NGO).We have come to this refugee settlement in Western Uganda to learn more about food aid distribution for Asiimwe’s production of Cooking Oil at Uganda’s National Theatre this October. – (If you want a link to more info: www.cookingoilplay.com)

Kyaka 2 is home to 25,000 refugees from Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and other neighboring countries. The settlement camp is run by UNHCR and the Ugandan government. The government provides primary education, organizes systems of representation and lends small plots of land to refugees to grow temporary crops. The UNHCR manages safety and contracts organizations to assist with food, health care, and other social services.

They contract for food distribution is managed by World Food Program. Every refugee in Kyaka is entitled to a monthly amount of 1.5 kilos maize, 1.8 beans, 0.6 kilos cooking oil, 1.5 kilos soy and 0.18 kilos salt. These numbers are established based on minimum needs for survival. Mr. Ocotoka added he was not sure the mechanism to determine this minimum and camp commandant David Mugenyi described a discrepancy between quantity and quality of food distributed in Europe and food distributed in Uganda. We spoke with refugees from Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia and all were happy to be receiving food, but they added it was not enough to get through the month. The maize particularly was contentious because it requires grinding and most people don’t have the means to do this. Some people even end up selling part of their maize to have the rest ground. Maize’s long cook time (almost the whole day) also leads to deforestation within the settlement.

It struck me that although the food is little and difficult, it costs a lot. Mr. Ocotoka stated that much of the food eaten in the refugee camp is bought in that local area, then shipped to Kampala to be packaged, then shipped back to Kyaka for distribution. When we made this trip from Kampala to Kyaka, the gas alone cost $100 roundtrip. One of the 6 refugees from Congo asked us why they weren’t just given money to buy the food they wanted to eat. A small pilot project in another part of Uganda has begun distributing money for refugees to purchase their own food directly and word of this project has spread quickly, the GTZ social worker tells us.

We drive past small plots of land, mostly farmed by women. Deborah names crops for me: beans, tomatoes, cassava. Isaac mentions that pineapple does well in this region and he’s working to organize refugees to grow pineapple as a cash crop to ease them off dependency. The funding (to educate refugees on farming techniques) is a challenge though, since UNHCR does not have an agricultural mandate.

UNHCR mandate covers protection and seeking durable solutions for settlement (repatriation, assimilation into host country or resettlement into a 3rd country). Refugees arrive all of a sudden in large uncounted numbers with immediate needs, but the conditions that displaced them do not resolve immediately. The refugees that spoke to us had stayed in Kyaka for 6 months, 2 years, 6 years, 17 years. Life in a camp may not be a durable solution, but people endure it for long periods of time. What are the sustainable systems to support individuals or communities in limbo over years or decades?

I understood the policy as after 2 years, refugees moved from living off food aid to tending their own fields, although the refugees we spoke seemed to describe a combination of both. A charismatic man from Somalia explained he had no farming experience and showed us how he had hurt his foot with a hoe. A Burundian brother and a sister running a bar in the camp asked us to let them know if we heard of any jobs. The GTZ social worker mentioned work initiatives like training refugees to make sanitary pads, but the pair did not qualify because Burundi’s official languages are Kirundi, French and Swahili while Uganda speaks English (and over 40 local languages.)

The birds still hover in and over a tiny tree at the entrance to the camp, their song so persistent as to become inaudible. A sign for red cross. A sign for GTZ. A sign for Norwegian Development Fund. A dirt road. A three hour drive to Kampala. A design meeting skyped from Oregon. In a world with so much potential for global connectivity, what stops communities with resources from connecting to the needs of displaced communities? Is it possible to provide aid without perpetuating dependency? Where do I place myself to sustain listening?

And then later this...

Difficult to describe how the visit shaped the direction of the play. There are some obvious things. I saw people in the market selling WFP cooking oil in recycled coke bottles. That image made its way into the play. A young girl whose house we visited never looked up from working as she greeted us, that image made its way into the play. Plastic sheets over houses weighted down with buckets of rain water, went through a series of transformations in its journey towards the play. The wooden skeleton of a house draped with drying laundry. Two women complaining in the market that we were taking pictures without buying anything, markets are for buying, not for taking pictures. A mother who told us her daughters skipped meals sometimes because they were worried how they would afford secondary school (Ugandan government pays for primary, but not secondary school). What it means to skip a meal when you only have one meal a day. A mother who clearly loves her daughters.

I had just gotten the stage plan a few days before the visit and was in the middle of dreaming the image progression/ staging and I think what I witnessed in Kyaka - courage, hope, dignity in difficult circumstances - made me a little braver in some of my abstract choices for the play. Because that's the tool that I have to get at the emotional reality I witnessed.

Isaac, the field agent who met with us at Kyaka, came and spoke on a panel the opening weekend. He said the play resonated with his understanding and experience of foreign aid - the call to question the context of hard choices, not just the people who have to make them; the extra weight that falls on women in extreme circumstances, where families are forced to choose to support some children and not all; the disconnect between the people making choices about where to devote resources and the need on the ground. A sense that there is no lack of ideas for how to improve, but where is the commitment? Where is the will?

The most interesting (to me) conversation evolved around what was needed to make the situation better. One panelist suggested that things worked well if the whites showed up and supervised. She said the whites, and then swallowed a little as if she wished she hadn't said it that way, before continuing with her thought. An actress from the play argued that this is a kind of internalizing dependency and asked what organizations are doing to empower people to realize they do have a choice? - whether to accept aid, how to use it, how to define needs, and how to monitor resources and programs. The idea that change can only come through leadership is very strong, but not unquestioned.

Uganda, bits, pieces

I had a dream when I arrive to sleep at Ndere Centre that I am in the village and a woman has come through, who I come to learn is a medicine woman. Many people have gathered around her and I go too. She is younger than I expect. I ask her if she can make me stop having strange dreams. She said, it’s possible. Also the possibility of living in them fully. The very center as a way out.

It’s just past midnight and quiet – occasionally crickets or the sound of cars. Thursday. Coming to the end of the first week of rehearsals for Cooking Oil.

The adjustment has been a little rougher than I anticipated. Struggling with digestion. The only days I don’t feel sick (fever, nausea, I wake up and my clothes are soaked through) are the days I don’t eat. For some reason, I am craving peanut butter. Why? I don’t usually eat that in the states.

I’ve made a couple trips to the doctor. He fascinates me. A British version of the doctor character in House, but working in a developing country/former colony for 18 years. In the waiting room the first time I went, I met a peace corps volunteer who is working with small communities setting up grassroots savings and loan projects. She was telling me that many local organizations vying for international aid struggle with mission drift. I think this is similar to small arts organizations in America. But she noted that in America small arts organizations have the ability to apply to many different sources for funding. She says small organizations in Uganda will get access to very few funding sources, so you try to make your project sound relevant to whatever you can get your hands on. The waiting room has a fishtank with tiny striped fish.

It turns out the doctor directs – what is it – a British theatrical tradition – pantomime? Like a serial comedy performance. It’s for a group of resident mzungus (white people) called KADS. They are the only group that sells out the National Theater, he tells me. I tell him he should come see Cooking Oil, and he responds – not likely. But I think that’s just his character. He talks to me for 20 minutes about funny moments in pantomime, the acoustics of the theater, the problems with parking.

I found a budget sheet of the National Theater lying around. The theater makes its money off of first renting out offices, 2nd parking, 3rd wedding meetings. Revenue from productions wasn’t even a line item, it was written in the margins. Shannon, the scenic designer, points out that – how great that space is used/useful and not empty – and then also, I’m tearing my hair out in the tiny room I’m given to rehearse in. I don’t do table work. I’m having to make up a process of carving emotional anchors through sound and rhythm because I can’t put anything on its feet. And however creative constrictions can be, I’m nervous that I’m going to be expected to “block” a show two weeks before we open with people who have no training in the physicality that I work inside of. We’ll have to find a way to make this work.

On Monday I will move into the house where I’ll be living. Looking forward to cooking my own food. I haven’t imagined past oatmeal and peanut butter. And being able to boil water to drink and not drinking bottled water all the time. I am living with a Ugandan fashion designer who I met in the Newark airport. Stella Atal. The flight kept getting delayed and we were both afraid we would miss our connection in Belgium, so we met at the gate desk. She had a beautiful African bag. And then the next week in Kampala, I called her by accident – cause I had saved her number as someone else in my phone – we got to talking and it turned out she had a roommate moving out. She lives walking distance from Ndere Centre – which is one of the places I’ll be working here in Kampala. She designed the furniture and the artwork in the house – a coffee table filled with dark coffee beans under glass – and she has dogs that are pets. One of them is a little shitsu. I’ve never met anyone in East Africa with a lap dog. That one is Puppy, she says. It came with the name.

This is the village inside Kampala, she says. I walked through there today, also by accident. Dirt roads. Her road is a dead end road. It stops 20 feet from intersecting with another dirt road. She says people hire men to come and dig the roads in the middle of the night so they meet each other. Because the government is supposed to do that, so they don’t like people doing it for themselves. But then the government doesn’t do it.

Along the road – low, orderly houses. A little boy pouring water out of a small hole he’s punctured in a water bottle. Tiny shack-built shops that sell food, cell phone cards to top up your minutes. I am lost so I pick a road and walk straight – I am trying to meet Stella for lunch by her studio.

An older gentleman stops me on the road. What are you doing here? he asks me. Who do you work for? I stop and suddenly realize how sick I feel. I’m trying not to throw up. I’m an artist. I’m working at the National Theater. Where are you from? I tell him I’m from the United States. It must be very hard for you being here in Uganda, he says. (Don’t throw up.) Well, sure there are things I’m used to that I don’t have here, but I also get to work with talented people and am met with incredible hospitality, and those are real gifts to me. Where are you from in the United States, he asks? I tell him California. He says his son lives in California. He drives a truck. (I want to lie down on the dirt.) I say, Ah, California is a beautiful state to drive in. And, as we part, he says “Thank you.” but earnestly. For stopping to talk to him. I want to learn this capacity for gratitude.

It turns out I walk back to Ndere, which is good because I lie down. I wake up and it’s late, late. I’m supposed to meet Deborah at 3pm in the National Theatre. The US Embassy in Uganda has given us a grant for Cooking Oil that we need to process and we’re also trying to see if we can travel to UN refugee camps in the south west to learn more about distribution of food aid and how it impacts local communities/economies. Bodaboda to the theater. Meeting. Rehearsal. Comedy Night. Night. Right to Ndere.

1:30am. A noise I can't identify.