Saying Goodbye

It’s really hard saying goodbye indefinitely to the place that feels like home. I hate to leave here and I’ve become really attached to these children. We did our wash this morning which ended with Jah-jah and Cathy taking over because we looked ridiculous trying to wring out bedsheets with our hands. We left the majority of our clothes for them to have and the sheets we brought. I wish I could leave more. I took my last trip to Kampala today to set up the international bank account for the orphanage. I will not miss Kampala. The diesel, sweat smell and orange dust sticks to me, and as thrilling as being called “white” in Lugandan everywhere you go sounds, it isn’t. We came home to everyone running to the gate to greet us. Sophie grabbed my hand as soon as I entered and Jah-Jah gave me a hug. It was as if I had been gone for weeks.  We had our last lunch here and I spent the rest of the time constantly taking photographs and collecting things. I collected large pieces of the demolished house for our final project together. They painted on the flat surfaces and they came out looking beautiful.

I took some portraits and we interviewed Resty, Norah, Isaac and Ssebanatika. They were sad to be interrupted from their art. They did art all night, only stopping to have some of the oatmeal we gave them and some poshu and beans. Ssebanatika kept asking me after each drawing if I would show it in the United States. Isaac painted a plane for me that said “see you in America.” Joweria gave me this long sappy letter that almost made me cry. She thanked me for everything in broken english and I felt so important in that moment because I had helped her in some way.

I took long exposures outside at night. They came out fantastic. They jumped around realizing that if they moved they became blurred. Lydia kept doing high kicks and Marvin would squeal with delight every time the preview of the image came up. Actually, it was right in my ear, but I didn’t mind for the most part (my ears did). It was really enjoyable to share it with him.

I am so excited to compile the art show to profit the children This doesnt feel like the end, it still feels like the beginning but there is still this small hurt for what I know will be longing when I leave.

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I don’t want to leave

I woke up this morning around 6:30 AM to film the children leaving for school. They greeted me with kneels and “goodmorning lashel.” Once exiting my room, Sophie immediately grabbed my hand and put hers in it. She held tightly on a little green chameleon toy, a pokemon, I think. She was quiet as she observed me and her brothers and sisters leave. Some watched me and acknowledged the camera by giving a glad wave from the gate with their uniforms neatly ironed from Cathy’s hardwork the night previous. Abdu ignored me as he passed. He was a little testy because they wouldn’t allow him stay home from school again because of his hurt toe. For the kids here, Mondays are like everyone, extremely difficult to wake up for.

Immaculate and Mgabou stayed home sick and went to the clinic early in the morning with Cathy. They sounded  sick with labored, heavy coughs and they barely moved all day. Mgabou had his blood taken and the results came back that he was positive with Malaria.

I set up the computer at the home to access the internet and then signed Cathy and Massy up for an email account at yahoo. This took a little longer than I expected due to the computer being well, a PC and also being 18 years old… All is well though and they were extremely happy.

We decided to pass out bubbles and disposable camera for the children to share and take pictures.

We’ll develop them back in the states and exhibit them as their personal photography - with some editing.

We walked to the internet cafe and my favorite part of this walk is passing this tin wall/gate up that has in dripping, white letters: “dont nock without pamission.” I enjoy it too much.  We got called white in lugandan some more and came back to find Joweria and Abdu walking home from school. Cathy grabbed Joweria’s backpack to relieve her and I carried Abdu’s for him. We arrived to a chorus of “welcome back” from everyone playing outside. We took more pictures and passed out some flutes, which we had been delaying. Cathy had them line up and taught them how to play, which helped order the noise chaos a bit.

I found a cd that I knew William would cherish for his collection so I secretly gave it to him and he grinned and immediately ran away to work on some new creation.

Yesterday Lukman fell about 4 feet and face-planted it straight into the rocky soil. He had this deep gash in his forehead that Heather fixed up after his tears wore out. Today we checked on his bandaid and all of the children tried to get into our room to see the process. He felt so loved and cared for, just because of a simple, little bandaid.

I set up for acrylic painting  and demonstrated how to do gradients, which Isaac loved. Later on, I helped Ssebanatika draw dog paws, which turned into foreshortening. He asked me if I would show this specific drawing in America. He finished it with  bright colored pencils and titled it “the man touch the dog.”

We cut up some Cliff bars that I had bought for the trip here (I had bought a lot) and served them to the kids as a small treat. They absolutely loved them. Fighting over seconds and trying to grab handfuls of the little sticky squares.

Massy and Cathy keep reminding me at different times that they’ll never forget us. Massy says she thought she would have never expected to meet people like us in her life, and raises a piece of a chocolate brownie cliff bar.

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Lubaga Road

We live on Lubaga road but sometimes it changes to Rubaga just because l’s and r’s are so similar in Lugandan. This morning we began by doing some art… Resty and I drew elephants from reference pictures and then Frank and Abdu joined in. We talked about colored pencils and how to  make stronger pigment. Resty came and got us for church and we walked to Lubaga church. She tells us that our tribe paid for the church to be built. We walk and Heather asks me if I feel famous because everyone is staring at us because we’re white. Stopping everything we’re doing to yell a “whats up” in broken english or call us myzungu. I didn’t understand a word of the service but I enjoyed it. tI was very beautiful, decorated with very large arches that were painted pink and green and resembled those popular paisley purses a little bit. After church we came back and had lunch and I drew Jane while she watched, giggling. Then I began to take pictures which segwayed into me lining them up for some more beautiful portraits. The most amazing thing about these pictures is how natural they are. I don’t have to tell them to look or act a certain way. These are my favorite pictures so far… They are beautiful children and I want to take every single one home with me. I spent maybe two or three hours shooting and then got ready to go out to dinner with Cathy. While I was waiting, I just sat and watched the kids played. Resty was leading about 10 of them in the dance Cathy was trying to teach them  yesterday and William was assembling and disassembling one of his new inventions. Parts were taken from an old lock and put into a power strip. I helped him by pulling apart some colorful wires and making a head ornament for him. Norah came over and asked if they could teach me, They laughed hysterically while I attempted it. Then they asked me to teach them ballet, which they had heard about from us the other day. I laughed and said okay, trying to mimic what I thought ballerinas looked like.

In some small way, dinner was a way to thank Cathy for all she’s done for us so we went to Grand Imperial Hotel for dinner and a dance show. During the show they perform dances from all over Uganda, I recognize one from the movie, war dance - the Acholi tribe.

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William the Inventor

Today was… pictures, a lot of pictures. Doing a group project involving painting each child’s hand green to represent leaves on a tree. It is a little bit like those tacky kindergarten projects but it was so much fun to do and the kids loved it. They formed this giant line, pushing each other and trying to cut and have green paint spread across their hands.

I’d push their hands down on this massive tree and then we’d immediately wash it off to prevent chaos. Even Jah-Jah, Massy and Cathy wanted some paint on their hands…     They performed for us while Cathy taught them a new dance. At one point Allen farted and everyone around her started rolling on the ground in complete hysteria… I was laughing so hard I had a few tears in the corners of my eyes. We filmed almost 2 hours of Cathy taught them. We look like a joke when we film because I have this minidv cam rented from FSU that’s probably 3 years old and an external mic that I hold above my head on a flimsy wire. So that’s my boom mic…I’m so pro. For lunch they ate the leftover mac and cheese that we made for them last night. They were loved it so much, they kept fighting over it.

Abdu messed up his toe by wrapping a rubber band around it and cutting the circulation off. He stayed home from school Friday and we put some gauze around it and wrapped it because it looked pretty awful. It healed up today but he kept asking for a bandaid. He’d ask me for one and I said he looked okay and didn’t need one he played the “mom said no, ill ask dad” card and went and asked Heather right after. After this he went and got Muzafalu who has this horrible looking cut on his shin, we put a bandaid on that one.

At one point in the day, Pons came in while we were drinking some tea and was rolling on the ground laughing and repeatedly saying “pig-e-wei-wei.” We had to ask what this was or meant and Norah said that he was saying he was going to beat us in Swahili. We laughed for a very, very long time.

While I was taking pictures today I came across William working on another one of his inventions. I’ve never seen anything like this. This little boy collects all kind of mechanical and random objects and uses them in these pretend machines that he builds. This is what I’ve noticed in his collection so far: Half of a blue soccer ball that he wears on his head usually when he’s inventing, a unicef press badge that he wears around his neck while inventing, a mattress coil, gears from a bike, a power strip and other random unidentifiable mechanical objects. It’s superb.

Norah and Resty, Joweria, Specioza, Ben, Cathy, Massy and Isaac sat up with us until past midnight asking us questions about America. They asked us if we had parents, what we did when the power went out, if we had tribes, if we had homework, if we had a king, if we had elephants and on and on and on. Yep.

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“You people, school is good”

I saw this scrawled in chalk on a wall today while we were on our way back from Kampala to get ingredients for the dinner we wanted to cook. Cathy says “you people” whenever she’s trying to get everyones attention. Anyway. Our trip to Kampala went as it usually does, a lot of people telling us we’re white, like we didn’t know we are already. I was saddened again by how much poverty is on the street. There was this beggar, she looked to be around 5 who was rocking back and forth, holding her ear and just weeping, she looked like she as if she was starving to death. I felt completely helpless in coming to her aid. The young beggars target us because they know we’re foreign, so they surround us in the street with their empty palms facing up to us. I know that giving them what makes the situation worse. I still don’t know how to go about helping in situations like these.

We heard the children had never tasted cheese or grapes so we bought ingredients for macaroni and cheese and a lot of grapes, which are incredibly expensive. We bought everything to feed 50 people, carrying it back to the home was definitely tiresome. We set up for an art show to display all of the kids pieces from over the time of us being here. I hand-painted a sign and added a little something for the event too. It was not the most organized of art shows. All we had to hang was some scotch and duct tape, but we did what we could and the results were great.

So we had lunch and cleaned all of the dishes to attempt to say thank you, but I don’t know how we ever will be able to adequately. They really have done so much for us. Here in Uganda, they don’t have garbage men, or garbage pick-up, you burn all of your trash, or you heap it somewhere on your property, even the plastic.

It rained today and afterwards there is a lot of runoff of mud that turns into dust when the water evaporates so there is this ritual after every rain to sweep the ground outside. Every available broom is taken so I just sit back and lazily take some photos.

Norah asked if we could do more work and draw tonight. I wanted to but since I committed to cooking, I could not. They did art a little bit on their own and I wanted so badly to work with them.

We put 20 liters of water in a giant pot that we put over a fire and waited for that to come to a “rolling” boil. This man called Cyrus was visiting the home from Ohio. He was involved in an organization dealing with helping orphans and told us about his wife who was adopted from Africa to live in America. His accent gave him away almost immediately, the first American accent I’ve heard in a month. It was good to talk to someone who was like-minded. We ended the night by presenting our 15 lbs of macaroni and cheese to everyone and finished up with a desert of mangos and grapes. They didn’t love the macaroni and cheese which is probably for the best, the grapes were a huge success though and it was so interesting to watch them eat. I’m going to miss them all so much.

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For me, I want

When I’m passing out canvas or pieces of paper for class this is what I hear constantly: “for me, I want.” We worked on paintings and drawings for around 4 hours tonight. I kept hearing “for me, I want” so they could start on another piece. They never want to stop creating. Our acrylic painting lesson for tonight was using pattern and design with an animal as the focal point. Acrylic paint was really hard for them at first but they’re getting so much better. I had the younger ones drawing with colored pencils for free drawing, which usually just happens anyways. I had some reference pictures passing around for them to share too which had some interesting results.

This morning we did our wash, Cathy felt like she had to step in and help us out because she didn’t think our clothes would get cleaned properly. She was right, I am terrible at washing with my hands. She let us have the jobs of hanging out to dry and rinsing. We made Cathy and Massi egg sandwiches with eggs over easy and cheese, they had never tasted cheese before. They loved it. We interviewed one of the children here, Aadah who was home sick from school, Jah-jah (the one they call grandmother), and Massy(who helps cook and clean). Jah-jah and Massy both began to cry when we asked them about their past and how they had come to work in the orphanage. It was incredible to be close with them in that way. The kids started to dance and sing for us and I took advantage of this by taking video and plenty of pictures

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Botfly day

They wake up at 4:30 in the morning to the sound of Maama’s whistle. They immediately start to do their chores. Marvin begins to sweep with the broom that is a short bundle of dry grass, the sun isn’t even up. We woke up with them this morning, hiding a camera in their room to get a shot of their morning ritual. They make their beds, mop the floor, sweep, cook breakfast for themselves and clean up before putting on their uniforms and walking an hour or two to school.

I finished a painting of the house, spent time drawing up the lesson plans for the day and editing pictures.

I took a few portraits of some of the children while we ate lunch and then worked some more after this.

Around 5:00 I began teaching perspective and I gave them a template for a pattern to make. I took a break while they were working to go outside to photograph the younger ones playing dodgeball and I went inside and found Kuda on Jah-Jah’s lap and she was attempting to squeeze something out of his neck. My first thought was: botfly, and low and behold there it was sticking its head to the surface to breathe. They were sprinkling salt and sugar on it to try to get it to come out. For those of you that don’t know what a botfly larvae is : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botfly

So, they’re nasty. One of my friends Kelly a couple months ago told me she had one while she was in Kenya so I had done some research on them and I knew that one thing you don’t do is try and squeeze it out while it’s still alive. So I gather ducttape and superglue to suffocate it to get it out. By this time Kuda is almost passed out because of how much pain he is in (the larvae have barbs on the outside of their skin to hold them inside and when squeezed it’s excruciating for the ‘host,’ in this case, Kuda) So we dust away the leftover salt and sugar and wait for the ducttape to do it’s duty. After twenty minutes we remove it and the thing has stopped moving. So we go in with tweezers and pull it out. Ugh, with a sickening pop it comes out of this huge hole in his skin. His eyes are rolled into the back of his head because of how much pain he is in. Cathy holds the botfly and the rest of the kids all gather around to gawk at it. Kuda is just laying there, still quasi-passed out, clutching a coke that’s supposed to make him feel better. I felt so bad for him.

I helped Cathy crack some eggs and she was surprised to see that I could crack them with my hands, she said she had never seen anyone do it the way I had. Some of the kids came in asking for help with their homework so we talked about the different types of clouds and how to spell the word “utensil.”

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Life Drawing Class With Edible Erasers

I woke up today around 6 while the kids were getting ready for school and handed one of my last disposable cameras to the children that go to Lubaga Martyrs School. Developing that role is going to be a complete surprise. Massy is one of the women that work here to support themselves. She cooks and cleans so that she can sleep here with her two children. Well, she made us some egg sandwiches and we watched some news on the small tv in the home. We made out some story about same sex marriage in California coming on between segments of static. Before arriving I expected America to have an influence but not to this extent. A few days ago I caught some interview of a nascar driver. Ugh. Well, after we spent more time adjusting the antenna, we gave up and moved on to do more productive things. I edited portraits I had taken earlier in the week for a database of the children, some of which, I am so proud of.

Cathy brought in some pictures of us from my birthday celebration at lake victoria and then we went through pictures of the children while she wrote their full names and ages. Godfrey picked us up to go into Kampala because he was delivering some of his cakes… We got money out to make the international bank account for the GreenHouse NGO official and then we went to shop for paper, erasers and ingredients for macaroni and cheese to cook for the kids. Carrying ingredients for mac and cheese to serve forty people was miserable. My elbows are still a tad sore. On the taxi ride back there was this little boy, no more than five, opening his palm to display the universal gesture to convey asking. He was putting his hand the window nearest me and there was a really deep sadness in his eyes. Lydia tells me to ignore him and tells me that these children are put out on the streets and like it there because they make the most money here. She says they are from northern Uganda where the war and displacement is rampant. We pass by a primary school and there are at least 8 children, all under age ten, some even around 3 or 4 years old. All with their palms out and wearing these pained, despondent expressions… It was just. sad. really sad. Especially seeing them all in front of this primary school that they probably couldn’t afford to go to even if they wanted to. Lydia reminds me that the orphanage is there to keep the children in our care from ending up like that but this isn’t reassuring, I still feel really helpless.

After coming home, I eat an entire mango and half of a tilapia cooked with royco from Lake Victoria. I put up more of the blog and set up for our lifedrawing. This class was probably the most unorganized. The youngest ones wanted to take part, and I didn’t want to turn them away from trying, so they all crammed in, attempting to draw our model(who is the mother/director of the orphanage).

The result was awesome and the five year olds drawings are hilarious and simultaneously great. I handed out their new erasers and they were all incredibly excited to receive them. Namizzi gets a hold of one and tests how edible it is. I decide to collect some of them back so they don’t all turn into food.

The youngest ones are outside drawing and painting. Namizzi shows me a painting. I ask her what it is and she says it’s the number 7 over and over again. Toddlers and watercolors. hah.

 Norah requests that we learn something new and challenging tomorrow so I draw diagrams for perspective. One point and two point and I hope they find interest in it. She asks if I can teach her to type later on in the evening and of course I say yes. So I end the night leaving Norah, Joweria, Isaac, Specioza and William with teaching them where the space bar is, where the specific letters are on the keyboard and homework on typing sentences with CapsLock on and the alphabet.

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Day 19

So, the internet is finally installed in the home. It’s broadband and it feels like it’s running at 26k, but I’m so grateful for it and to be able to update is just, well, a blessing.

Lets see.. to start off, I just received a drawing of a small pink goat and I assigned self-portraits for the older kids to draw in mirrors. One of my first lessons was portraiture so they are incredible at drawing faces. We drew a disposable camera today, under the request of Norah, the girl I work with the most. After we were through drawing it, Ssebanatika turned it over and over in his hands as if it was the most precious thing he had ever held. This went on for thirty minutes, he would hold it up to his face and just pretend to take pictures, then, turning the flimsy flash button on and off. They are fascinated with photography. None of them had held a camera in their hands until Sunday, when we had photography day. This day was, wow, so stressful. I didn’t have enough cameras for each kid so they had to share and were only allowed a certain amount of exposures. They were so excited and over-zealous I had to follow them around to tell them when to stop. I’m going to try and send them each a camera of their own when I get back home and raise some money.We walked into Kampala today, it has everything big cities do. Awful smells and huge amounts of people galore. Ugh. More Lungandan shouts of Myzungu (which translates to white) followed us like shadows. I took some pictures when the children got home from school, finished the greenhouse orphanage sign and was fitted for an african dress with a horse print on it.

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Photography

By far the most stressful day I’ve had with these children. I started by asking the question “What do you want to be when you grow up” and was the best response I’ve gotten to an art prompt so far.

The drawings they made were all fascinating and well done. I organized for photography. We used single-use cameras and had a limited number so they were not able to receive their own individual camera. This process resulted in, as expected, an unwillingness to share. I had to constantly be regulating their photo-taking. None of them had held a camera, let alone take a photograph before so they were all thrilled to experience it. They told me it was their favorite and at least three of them came to me afterward saying they wanted to become photographers.

After photography, I took some of my favorite shots on the minidv cam, I am so anxious about compiling this film. I cannot wait to have that type of media because it speaks in such a different manner from the others.

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