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.