I moved to Seattle in December 2011 and have since started a new blog, which you can access here.

(It has very little to do with Africa.) 

Mosquitos in Winter

I swallowed the last of my malaria pills yesterday, tossed the empty bottle into the recycling bin and then assembled my scattered belongings for a ride across town to the newest in a series of temporary dwelling places. It's scarf and winter coat weather here, in late-December Seattle. It's easy to forget that a short while ago in Uganda, the mosquitos were out and biting, and the medication might prove useful after all.

Since my plane landed a week ago, I've been feeling about as incongruous as a mosquito in a snowstorm. I took off almost immediately to Los Angeles and sat at my aunt's side for three days, until she finally stopped breathing on the eve of my scheduled return to Seattle. One of the hospice nurses, just making conversation, asked me what I like to cook, and I couldn't remember, since I barely made anything during the 15 months I've spent in Africa. I realized that I have no idea how much it costs to mail a letter in the U.S. these days. I'm feeling sick and sluggish and dazed; the Kampala half marathon was a month ago, and I haven't run since. I've been otherwise occupied with reports and goodbyes and planning the logistics of this transition back to the States.

Which I am so incredibly ready for. I'm finding immense gratification in tiny achievements, like navigating my way through town in a stick-shift truck on loan from a generous friend, buying oatmeal, recalling my long-neglected password at the ATM, spotting familiar mountains on the horizon during unexpected breaks in the typical grey drizzle of the northwest winter.  I'm surprisingly moved by the sight of weathered wood on old Victorian homes, of picture windows glowing golden in the early morning sunlight. I'm not usually this sentimental, but I can't help it. I feel like a long-lost northerner come home again.

I'm not by any means "done" with Africa, I'm just done for a while. I'm even plotting (with some seriousness) a trans-Africa bicycle trip, but that wouldn't happen for several more years at least. In the meantime, I'm planning to plant myself here long enough to begin to feel grounded again.

And so the blog ends here. Thank you for reading. The writing and readership have done a lot to help keep me sane in some pretty far-flung places surrounded by circumstances largely beyond my control. I'm taking back some of that control now. And so this chapter ends, and I don my winter coat and step out into the next.

Lango 101 and Why it Matters

...along with the easy happiness I had come to associate with the country, I was aware of a new and perhaps less superficial sensation - that sense of familiarity and alienation that comes to one who knows a place well, but who can never hope to become a part of it.

                                                       -Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow

Every morning on the way to work, we pass a gaggle of construction workers slowly producing a large house from piles of cement, bricks and iron bars. And every morning, I try out one of my new Lango phrases on them. A tia wor a teech, I say today, meaning “I’m going to the office.” I’m going to come visit you this Saturday, one of them tells me. Tell me where you stay. Okay, no problem, I reply, continuing on my way. Plenty of people here say they’re going to visit; I’ve found it best not to protest, just to nod noncommittally. The ones who actually follow through are few, and usually feel awkward when they show up at your door, in your territory.

I must have passed these same laborers during my first couple of weeks here, but I don’t recall them. At the time, I was still assembling my essential Lango vocabulary, and wasn’t bold enough to be greeting too many strangers in a language I didn’t yet have any kind of ear for. And they ignored me, in turn.

Until you learn a language, you will never really understand the people who speak it. This is one of the great challenges of the humanitarian world, where most of the big players are expatriates who have no real personal stake in the places where they work. While I'm hardly among the more influential of these folks, I still find my lack of insider perspective limiting. I'm here to evaluate a project, then to recommend ways to modify the intervention to increase its impact in the future. But, as I am reminded every day, my logic does not always apply here, and what I see as a great solution may well dissolve into vapors when tossed out under the glare of the Ugandan sun. 

Simsim (sesame) drying in the open air.

Here's an example: Most rural families here rely on subsistence agriculture for the bulk of their food supply. The harvest for the second agricultural season traditionally takes place now, in November, and crops are set out in the sun for several weeks. Once dry, they're moved into storage, and provide the family's primary calorie supply for six months or so, until the next harvest.

But: In recent years, the rainy season has been continuing well into November, perhaps because of climate change. The frequent late-season rains prevent thorough drying of crops, which often succumb to rot and must be tossed out. Four months of heavy labor in the fields, gone. And people lamenting their losses, year after year, but continuing to apply the same outmoded harvesting practices.

To my western mind, the answer seems obvious, constructing some kind of shelter, built of local material, that allows for airflow while shielding the harvest from direct rainfall. But so far this idea has been met with rejection. Too much work, say the villagers. We couldn't manage it. I don't know where their skepticism comes from. Are they simply resistant to any kind of change? Would shelters really represent too great an investment in materials and effort? Or are there other technical issues I'm just not seeing?

The point is that seemingly good solutions won't work unless the people they're intended for people are willing to embrace them. To accurately foresee that is no small matter. And while I can never hope to be a part of this place - there's no escaping my western upbringing, or this white skin - I can try to gain insight, by reminding myself of how little I know, by asking lots and lots of questions, and by showing my interest in the Lango, which I partly try to accomplish by making small strides in language learning.

Last week, for the first time in my short humanitarian career, I met a beneficiary who speaks English. I was thrilled; all of the questions that would normally pass through translators could simply be asked, and answers given. She was my age, recently divorced, with four children, two oxen, six goats and one plough that she shares with another beneficiary household. She told me that while the cash she received from our organization has certainly helped, her household is still not back to where it was before the LRA displaced it. Occasional sales of goats keep her children enrolled in school, but it will take some good luck and disciplined management of crop sale money to build the family assets back up. None of this was particularly surprising, but somehow hearing about her situation so directly made the project more real to me, and highlighted its potential value to individual people facing pretty significant challenges.

So when I try out my rudimentary Lango, joking with people about how many husbands I have or asking about what they like to eat, or grow, I'm not just trying to make a spectacle of myself (although that often can't be avoided). I'm trying to forge a connection, to show them I am open to their ideas, in hopes that some of their perspective will find its way into my report, and make the projects designed to help them a bit more effective.

For my Aunt

It’s been a solitary weekend. Although I’ve been introduced to a veritable posse of expats here in Lira, they were all out of town this weekend, headed to Kampala for meetings, Zimbabwe for trainings or Kenya for breaks. There are a couple locals I could call, but frankly, I’m suspicious of their motives; one girl, the friend of a friend’s friend, asked for my number at a dance club at the end of the evening, even though we had not even been introduced, and the other asked if she could call me while tallying up my purchases at the grocery store where she works. Some tell me Ugandan girls are just shy, and won’t start up conversations with white girls they don’t know, and their asking for my number is just an indirect way of proposing friendship. But I don’t feel like putting myself in an unfamiliar situation right now, don’t want to be expected to take a trio of Ugandan fillies out for beers (as inevitably happens) and talk about clothes, and hair, and men.

My heart isn’t here.

My aunt is in the hospital. She’s normally the first one to read my blog entries when I post them, responding each time almost at once, with unflagging praise. Now she’s hooked up to a breathing machine, in an induced coma, fighting an abdominal infection following an extended cancer-removal surgery.

When I last saw her in LA, three months ago, neither of us knew that she was sick. We wandered through the Venice Canals, ogling ducks and display case homes. She insisted on buying me a few tops to augment my utilitarian post-Congo wardrobe. As usual, we nibbled on vegetable slices and fruit and hummus and a little cheese, and sipped wine with her neighbors at a nightly “cocktail hour” in their apartment complex’s courtyard. I kept her company as she fed and cleaned up after the sickly cat of a neighbor who was on an extended trip to Europe. One morning the cat showed signs of kidney failure, and my aunt, the most devoted cat lover I have ever known, tried her best to stay calm as she made arrangements for him to be put down.

In short, her life as I knew it was carrying on as usual.

She was diagnosed in September, shortly before I left for Uganda. Her surgery, in mid-October, went as well as could be hoped for, I was told, although the cancer was more extensive than the doctors had previously thought. I even spoke with her as she lay in the hospital, recovering. She sounded like herself, upbeat, levelheaded and even a bit image-conscious despite the sedatives. “My legs are so bloated,” she told me. “They’ve been pumping all these fluids into me.”

And then my father emailed a few days later. My aunt had returned to the hospital with debilitating pain in her abdomen. Apparently she had acquired an infection during the surgery, and in her already-weakened body it had gone systemic. She was in critical condition, and on life support. My dad was flying out to see her. 

When my 93 year-old grandmother was dying in Massachusetts two years ago, my aunt spent the better part of two months by her side, trying to ease her mother’s considerable physical pain, along with the anxiety and uncharacteristic moodiness brought about by a series of opiate-based painkillers, and her frustration with her sudden helplessness. It seems unbelievable that my aunt now needs someone to offer the same support to her.

And here I am in a rainy town in northern Uganda, carrying on with the day-to-day but acutely aware of the cruelty of distance, with five more weeks to go before my evaluation is complete and I return to the US. According to my father, my aunt’s condition, though still very serious, is slowly improving. He says there’s a good chance she’ll fight off this infection, and although there will be plenty more challenges ahead, we should have a moment to breathe and regroup.

And so, to you, my lovely aunt, I send this message from across the world. I love you. Keep fighting. Come home. Read this.

Running Under an Equatorial Sun

As we come into view of the compound, a wild-haired man cries out and launches himself towards us. The attention is nothing new; the sight of two white folks in fitness gear is quite unusual here on the footpaths of Lira's rural outskirts, and provides much hilarity, and occasional terror, for the many members of the under-10 crowd we come across. However, this is the first adult to respond to us with such enthusiasm. He's carrying a small bottle, I note, no doubt some kind of home-brewed liquor, foul and potent.


We figure he'll lose interest quickly, and so choose to ignore him, continuing our Sunday afternoon trail run. But he's pretty impressive for a drunkard, and his flip-flopped feet keep pace with us even when we speed up, hoping to lose him. All the while he mutters unintelligibly, though it's clear he's mocking us. The villagers who spot us with this unlikely third on our tail smile with a bit of sympathy, until finally his grunts fade off into the distance, and we are alone again.


I'm in Africa, and I'm running. Anyone who has been following my humanitarian adventures in the last 16 months might guess at how significant this is, at least to me.


When I first got my job offer for South Sudan back in 2010, I had about two weeks in which to resolve my work with the census, come up with a pile of red tape-intensive documents such as a criminal record check and an international driving permit, bring a slew of vaccinations up to date and transport all of my possessions (there aren't too many of them, thankfully) from California to Massachusetts. Somewhere in the shuffle, I mistakenly chucked out my running shoes.


I figured I would just make do with the only footwear I'd brought with me, a pair of sturdy trail shoes. When I arrived at the base, the other American stationed there gave me hope. "I try to go running a few times a week," he said. "We can go tomorrow if you want."


True to his word, he approached me at around noon the next day, when the equatorial sun was directly overhead and the thermometer at 90-something degrees. "You feel like a run?"


"Sure," I replied, not wanting to appear wimpy in front of my would-be running pal, though silently questioning his sanity. I felt better once we left the compound, jogging at a reasonable clip towards an abandoned airstrip, the carcasses of decades-old plane wrecks coming into view. Scraggly grass poked through compacted orange dirt, with the figures of children in the distance, playing soccer before a net-less goal.


Suddenly, we stopped, in front of a schoolyard where two towering teams of Dinka high schoolers were facing off across a volleyball net. "So I usually stop here for a while and either play or just watch. You feel like playing?"


"Um...I guess we can watch for a bit," I muttered with ill-concealed surprise. We had been running for about seven minutes. And so we watched. The volleyball match wasn't all that impressive, but those kids were sure tall. 

After we'd watched a few points, it was time to move again...back to the base, apparently. "So, d'you wanna run back, or d'you feel like walking?" asked my compatriot. 

"Let's run," I offered, my disappointment tangible now. We took a shortcut back to the base, completing a whopping 12-minute loop, at an easy trot. 

"Yeah, so I really like running," my pal repeated. "I try to get out a few times a week. It helps keep my stress down."

He was the most athletically-inclined expat I've shared a base with since. 

Congo was no better. In fact, it was much worse. My housemates, when I had them, aspired to consume large volumes of whiskey. I managed to convince one of them, with a sizable gut, to join me for a yoga session, once. (After which we recovered over whiskey and wine.) 

When it came to running, I would definitely be on my own. 

Except that I wouldn't really be alone. The second I left the compound for a run, the alarm was sounded, and quickly spread to every single one of the hundreds of barefoot and gleeful children who inhabited our overpopulated neighborhood. Soon several dozen of them were right on my tail, giggling, poking my freakish white skin, demanding money, candy, a reaction. 

I tried to summon my inner Zen and just ignore them, figuring that they would tire after a few minutes. I was right, kind of. But when some kids tuckered out, a mob of reinforcements would emerge from thirty new doorways. I couldn't hack it; I was seeking respite from the many stressors of my cooped-in compound life, and this swarm of over-eager taggers-on behind me only stressed me out more.

So my Congolese running ambitions fizzled out.

Of course, I got back to it right away once I got back home in the States, building up to a half marathon that I ran with an old friend in September. I'd simply resigned myself to regressing for a couple of months during my stint in Uganda.

Then I met a German fella with an extensive knowledge of Lira's footpath network and ambitions to run the Kampala half marathon in late November. He's an excellent guide, and a pretty reliable deterrent, so far, to mobs of children, if not to the occasional enthusiastic drunk. 

Kampala, here we come(?)!

The Land of Barefoot Bowling

Last Friday, I joined several colleagues for a fine Italian meal at a cushy outdoor restaurant. Last night, I bowled an unimpressive 91, and this morning, I pseudo-cycled up France's Alpe d'Huez at a spin class led by a zealous Canadian triathlete. It could easily be just another weekend in Seattle...except that our table's check came out to 289,000 shillings, the bowling alley lacked rental shoes, so we bowled barefoot, and the spin class...well, it was a spin class, I guess. Now it hurts to walk up stairs.

In other words, I've arrived. And while Uganda's capitol, Kampala, is surely swankier than my digs up north will be, it's clear that this will be quite a different kind of mission from my previous two in (Congo and South Sudan). The signs of relative stability and wealth are everywhere: in the clothing donation bin at a local supermarket, in the fact that no one has yet called me out for being white, in the way the motorbikes power, rather than coast, down the hills.

To be sure, the country's northern regions, where I'm heading tomorrow, have experienced a lot more hardship in recent years than has Kampala. For almost two decades, a frightening rebel group called the Lord's Resistance Army terrorized much of the north, raping women, pillaging villages and kidnapping youths to assert their power and reinforce their troops. Most of the population sought protection in overcrowded internal displacement camps. The Ugandan army finally pushed the LRA out of the country in 2005, and while the militia's raids continue today in several neighboring countries, most of the survivors in northern Uganda have had a chance to return to their land and try to recover their lives.

I'll be based in Lira, a large district capitol with restaurants, a swimming pool and other amenities. It's an important regional center, and a logical place for a base of operations, but a far cry from the isolated rural areas where our organization actually implements programs. I will be getting out into the field as often as possible, to supervise and guide the staff who will conduct the surveys for my evaluation, but with poor road conditions and still-rigid security restrictions (no overnighting in the field allowed!), both of which will limit field time, this is destined to be a largely "comfortable" post.

So tomorrow will bring a scenic drive northwards, across the rapids of the upper Nile, past a national park with intact trees and begging baboons. It's a far cry from Congo, and although I feel slightly guilty for the luxury, I may as well enjoy it.

Back In

I'm heading back.

Not to Congo this time, but to northern Uganda instead. It's a short commitment; I'll be there just two months, to evaluate a cash transfer project and write a report on it. Barely enough time to get situated. But I'm a bit more prepared this time than I was a year and a half ago to dive right in to Africa and the NGO world. And oh-so-well rested.

Nine months in Congo took it out of me. The lack of exercise, the walled-in lifestyle, the incredibly complicated and often depressing humanitarian situation, and especially the overbearing supervisor. When I went to France for break, three months in, I could barely remember how to ski. There were weeks when I literally didn't leave the compound, an area of maybe 450 square meters. I knew that I'd need a bit of free floating once I got back to the U.S. to start feeling like myself again.

nearing the summit of Mt. Rainier

And so, since my return home at the beginning of July, I've been indulging in everything I couldn't in Congo - hipster ice cream joints, burritos, rock climbing, hikes, glaciers, Goodwill, so-awful-they're-hilarious movies with the brother, half marathon preparation, wilderness medicine courses, and lots of glorious, anonymous, walking. The novelty of feeling unremarkable as I stroll down the street has not worn off.

And I've been visiting friends, scattered throughout the major cities of both U.S. coasts. Friends with architecture degrees that feel like surprisingly useless, and unbelievably expensive, pieces of paper; friends on libertarian pig farms whose swine snort up several tons of Pixie Stix, Keebler cookies, orange juice and other assorted supermarket refuse each evening; generous friends with funds who take advantage of the slow economy to get into biking shape and take me along to sample fine restaurants; friends questioning the value of their PhD programs; friends scouting out movie storylines in Madagascar; friends bewildered by the economy who have taken to living in homeless shelters to save money during the job search, or else working jobs they never would have expected to claim as their own. 

It hardly seems the time for too much introspection, especially as concerns careers. But I knew I needed a break, and that the humanitarian world, regardless of my persistent qualms about it, would be there for me if I needed it. I still feel, as I did when I left Congo in June, that I'd like to be more stable, and settled, and that I'd probably be happiest if I lived in a place more conducive to an active lifestyle, and for several weeks now I've been scoping out Seattle as a prospective home. 

But the bank account is nearly empty, and when I got the Uganda offer, it didn't take me long to accept. It's only two months, after all. And despite everything, I'm very excited to go back.