I’m learning to lean into uncertainty.
The landscape is a tiled tapestry of red roofs and green leaves. My mind has never felt so fertile, ripe with ideas and overflowing with words. Change has become the theme of my life.
So much in my life has changed this year. My job, my relationship, my home, my purpose. But change is also the theme of my work. Am I causing a lasting change? What does good change look like? Can I even change anything? Will my work change anything?
Normally overly patient, I’m trying to learn to be impatient. Change is slow, so slow that it may never come. Impatience is key for driving change. Constant change means a continuous education. I never stop learning what these new situations means. I’m not sure what my job should, but I know life should be this way, a constant process of learning.
Carrying 20L of water up a hill is my daily exercise, but surprisingly doesn’t get easier by day. I am pleased that walking is my default mode of transportation. The slight aches that came from sitting too long in front a computer have slowly disappeared. But in a country wracked with malnutrition, I’ve managed to consistently gain weight, about a total of 10 pounds. Despite my increased movement and my desire for it to be true, this weight is not muscle. This conundrum reminds me that often the problems people in poverty face are logistical problems, not ones based on resources.
The turmoil characterizing my life in Uganda thus far is now settling, sometimes in disturbing ways. I wonder if my prolonged time here has had a negative effect, by allowing me to normalize injustices.
It is most clear with children. Children being barefoot while wearing torn clothes. Children age 5 caretaking for babies barely a year. Children using knives or machetes as toys. Originally screaming in horror, the environmentalist in me has quieted some. Although I still cringe at its presence, I’ve gotten used to the use of plastic bags as ignition for a charcoal stove, the burning of trash, often plastic, in front yards for its elimination or the attitude of throwing trash anywhere one walks.
Although I’ve normalized these shocking experiences, I’d like to think I’ve humanized them too. My first month here was sad, every motion and experience reluctantly implying inferiority. Sometimes I asked questions like “Why has your child stopped coming to school” to be met with solemn faces. Faces that say, “Duh. Why is this foreigner asking such obvious questions? We live a life in poverty so we can’t afford to send our child to school.”
The dynamic has shifted from the analytical foreigner to friend. Used to limited experiences with foreigners who come with many questions, I’ve learned that much of the “information” I learned from interviews my first few months was inaccurate. They were prepacked nuggets of answers tailored to a foreigner’s experience. They were the seemingly realistic answers the foreigner wanted to hear. What do you want to be when you grow up? A nurse. A teacher. Why can’t you do this? No money.
This time was also overly serious with little laughter. Poverty is serious I told myself. You can’t laugh here. It was during this time that I silently judged them for what I thought of as ignorant, self-inflicted harmful behavior. Things like buying a lollipop over milk, or in other words, sweets over nutrition. Or spending 20,000 (~$7) during December to get your hair done for Christmas, even if you didn’t afford school fees that term.
It’s was only after reading Poor Economics that I realized my hypocrisy. I consistently make similar decisions in my life in America. Buying chips instead of an apple, spending money on new clothes instead of saving. Why do I judge people more harshly here for similar trade-offs? It seems obvious now, but the poor are fallible people who fall prey to laziness, procrastination and buying luxury goods they can’t afford. They just do it with less money. What I’ve learned from being here is that people in poverty are human too. They are fallible and make seemingly illogical decisions because we all do.
At first, the decision seemed illogical and pointless possibly fueled by ignorance and a lack of education in the village. They just don’t value education enough, I thought. But now I realize that these girls are human too. They value education but also want to look beautiful for the holidays. Asking them to not do their hair, although definitely a luxurious expense, is like asking them to give up joy. In all my years of reading about poverty, I never made the human connection. Didn’t connect the emotional trade-off I was asking for. Instead I simply labeled it irrational.
Now the seriousness of “solving” poverty has melted away into laughter and friendship. I’m still the other, the young white foreigner who has finished university by 24, is not married and has no children. In these ways my life experiences is entirely alien to theirs. I have more in common with the teenagers in the village than women in their twenties, most who are not working, married and have kids. But to all I’ve become a friend because I can greet in the local language. They see me carrying water daily. I am also in the women’s class learning tailoring and hairdressing. I’m learning these skills like them.
Although it seems trivial, I’ve finally grasped how make jokes they would find funny. Instead of serious questions like “why are you not eating enough?”, I joke with, “you are not going to help the Mzungu carry water?” The inability to conjure humor on demand is always an unpleasant, isolating aspect of being immersed in a new culture and language. Making jokes makes for better connections, but also more joy in daily life. It’s from these jokes that I’ve learned more truths than my first month of interviewing. Now they tell me not because I’m a power of authority conducting an interview, but because I am a friend that they are confiding in. It’s in these ways I’ve connected and built trust with the people of Mutoto.
Sometimes I feel the weight of the colonial legacy here and I wish I could reverse it. Tell these young African girls that their short kinky hair is beautiful, because I really think it is. Reinforce that they don’t need braids to make their hair long like mine. I understand the expensive contradiction of school enforced by colonialism: how we foreigners preach the importance of school, then teach them useless things like American geography instead of actual skills that can provide a living wage like construction or tailoring. School costs relatively a lot here. By the time they reach high school, it’s a lot of money to ask from struggling families for knowledge that doesn’t count much in the village.
It might seem like I’m underestimating the intelligence of these children by suggesting training in such professions. Like I am asking them to aspire to be a tailor instead of a doctor. But I find the assumption that professions like tailoring are inherently worse than being a doctor to be archaic thinking with harmful consequences. What harms people long run is not being able to work.
Work, a job, provides dignity in addition to an income. When you are not worried about money, you can aspire to do more. In this community, there aren’t many stable jobs that can provide for a whole family, but tailoring is one of them. And, as known from personal experience, it’s a difficult skill that involves a lot of training. In this way, I think it is much more impactful for the community to have them to aspire to be a tailor than doctor.
This isn’t to undermine the importance of a high school education. While work provides dignity, an education gives self-confidence and agency over one’s life. Yet, tailoring still demands an education. You need to be literate and know math well to take measurements and run a good business. The difference is that upon graduating high school, in addition to that useless American geography knowledge, many now have a skill that can earn them good money. They can use it to work to save up for college, or even support their families if they don’t go to college, which many in the village don’t do.
It is in these ways that I now look at any “solution” I bring in the greater context. I’ve come to view that “solving poverty” doesn’t mean educating the ignorance out of people. It means giving people more satisfaction in their lives the way they want. More opportunity to seek joy and laughter. That I shouldn’t care how a person is spending their income if it is making them and their family happy, no matter how frivolous those expenses might seem to me.
It’s when I mull over thoughts like these that I realize how much I’ve changed during my 3 months here. I don’t know if I will have made any lasting change to this village when I leave, but they certainly have made one on me.
Diary excerpt from early January.
