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
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
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.
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