R.I.P. African Dream

Uganda, Uganda, Uganda.  I gone da Uganda and I gone dun come back.

So what happened within those three and a half months.  Sure you’ve all been reading all about it but the Stacey Nelson that arrived on February 2^nd is surely not the same one that left on May 15^th.  Both of them were doomed to 20+ hours in airports and both were combining coffee and free inflight wine to go with their peanuts because both were anxious.  The first was about to embark on the journey of her life.  What she didn’t know was that Africa was not as scary as others made it seem.  What she did know was that she was about to scratch an itch that had been there for a long time.  The second was returning from this journey, deflated from having left her heart in Uganda.  Love is unexplainable, and dramatic, and wonderful and I use all these words to explain my love for Uganda.

At peace, in the Pearl of Africa.

The exact time is unknown when I decided that I wanted to go to Africa (generalizing the entire continent into one destination).  It was somewhere between my Freshman and Junior year of high school.  Back then it was as flippant a dream as wanting a chocolate chip cookie or for my belly fat to go away—it was an appetite I had without realizing the A to B connection for making the dream to come true.  But the more I said it, the more it became clear the reason I was saying it: my appetite was growing stronger.  The mysterious, the awe-inspiring, the forbidden fortress that was “Africa” kept glowing in my mind.

Things moved along and in college, I was accomplishing things I had never even dreamed of wanting.  In fact, I’d never really wanted anything in my life.  I had no passion, except for maybe a constant striving toward happiness and positivity.  (Today I still stand as the most positive person I know, and I’m proud of it.)  As my softball prowess grew, reporters would ask what I wanted to do with my life.  Without other worthy goals, I would say, “I want to go to Africa.”  The only excuse I had to justify this want was to help the many people suffering there.  I’ll admit this was not the first straw on my camel’s back, but it was a darn good reason.

As you all know by know, this fascination with Africa took on a new life when I started researching about children in conflict.  Being a philosophy major, I could argue both sides of anything in my mind but this was the one issue within my lifetime that I found horribly, indisputably wrong.  All of a sudden, the two things I cared most about became apparent and they were conveniently intimately related.

The fascination with exotic Africa and the moral convictions growing within me turned into stubborn determination.  After being picked for the USA team, we had a minute to describe ourselves in front of the group for team bonding.  All my weird quirks like refusing to tie my shoes, still using CDs rather than iPods, and my fascination with the color yellow were all subsequent filler facts for the allotted time.  The first line that came out of my mouth, “My name is Stacey Nelson and I want to go to Africa.”

So Mrs. February 2^nd was on board the airplane descending into Entebbe Airport like Alice’s free-fall into wonderland.  Driving to the hotel in a cab through the darkness on Entebbe Road, all I could see were candle-filled shops with people, animals, and things just as darkly mysterious as dodos, wingwoms, and cheshires.  But this was AFRICA.  To say I wasn’t scared is a huge lie.  I was scared to constipation my first day walking the streets of Kampala, in a group of five!  The first night, I remember being a total crackhead with germ phobia, which is a hard concept for anyone to grasp who knows me well.  (By the end, I’d accepted my old ways and the saying that “African germs are lazy.”  Building my African immunity, right?)  I didn’t feel safe until I began travelling by myself, which is a little late, but better late than never.  Coincidentally, this is when I felt totally submerged, and totally in love with Uganda.

Along the way, the thing that moved me most were the friends I made.  Uganda is the easiest place in the world to make friends, I’m convinced.  Heck, 50% of people who say, “Hello, muzungu,” consequently ask you how you’ve been and for your contact information.   The others that ask for money or for a visa can be interpreted in different ways: either as opportunists trying to take advantage of you or opportunists trying to take advantage of an opportunity to get out of their desperate situation.  (I just always looked at it as the latter because of something I tell myself: “the worst they can say is ‘no’.”)  To counter this though, Ugandans reciprocate with their offerings; they shine with their hospitality, their warmth, and their welcome.  Always self-conscious of how we outsiders are perceiving their country, they always ask, “How do you find Uganda?”

To answer, lets ask that girl flying home on the May 15^th flight: “How did you find Uganda?”

On that day, and still today, I found Uganda to be everything I imagined it to be, yet opposite because I found the reality, not the fantasy.  People there are suffering.  This is the exact words of a handful of Ugandans I spoke with.   Amazingly, I didn’t see it as much as I heard it mainly because I was walking the streets everyday with smiling people, not living in their homes where there wasn’t enough food to go around.

The biggest pain in my chest is the lack of opportunity for hard-working people trying to make it out of poverty.  Even if poverty can’t be totally solved, at least these families could cross the threshold from extreme to relative poverty with just some small opportunities.  There is a big difference between the two levels of “poor”.   The latter is linked to the economic ladder, clutching to the bottom, while the former, frankly, is not at all.  Extreme poverty perpetuates itself because there’s no opportunity for growth.

The other pain Mrs. May 15^th was feeling was a major headache.  This was the flight I discovered that all spirits on international flights were free and the anxiety of returning home kept sucking them down during the second meal service.  Flying over Greenland and Canada, seeing the sun reflect off ice-covered lakes and ice-capped coasts, it dawned on me that the journey had ended.  Actually, it felt like the dream had too.

For so long, I’d been carrying with me this drive toward venturing to this forbidden land, with a mission.  I’d had a great time being there and now, not only was this longing satisfied, but the only thing I felt I’d learned was how complex and intertwined the problems in Uganda (and more poetically, Africa) were.  Millions of people are stuck.  The weight of their problems—the hospital costs, the number of children to feed, the amount of school fees that can’t be raised—is a weight that, when you times it by millions, could crush all the happiness in the world.  But it doesn’t; their spirits are resilient.   Yet, you can’t ignore the million pound monkey on Africa’s back no matter how great of a time you had being there.

So here I am, staring at these sparkling white giants wondering where the hell I’m going. Why am I leaving?  Why didn’t I do the thing I was so tempted to do and miss my flight to stay a few more months?  Most of all, the thought that is still haunting Mrs. May 24^th is: If you’ve left, then what are you going to do with this knowledge now?

I’ve scratched the itch, I even made a little difference (I hope) with the chicken farm and other projects.  But the dream, the unshakable, stubborn longing, is gone; it’s satisfied.  When will it start itching again?  No doubt it’s lost it’s zest and left me with a sort of somber topic to post: a dream deterred.   I keep hoping that this is just a temporary feeling, still aching from the forced break-up.  Dear Uganda, it will be a long time before we can be together again, and I look forward to the day, but now I’m stuck in my former world feeling powerless and disconnected to you.

I’m hoping that I start to feel normal again, to feel inspired, to feel like I have the power to make a difference, and that I get back that glowing dream.  Until then, I’m still feeling the love: calling all my Ugandan friends, sending love to Maama Lubega, and (by carrying some responsibility toward my previous convictions) plotting how I can use my law degree to get back to Uganda. But things have changed, now I’m forced with the choice of either locking these ideas in the past or doing a “lock and load” to bring Uganda again into my future.

I’ll admit it, still in there I have the same naivety toward the exotic continent that makes me generalize Egypt and Uganda and Mali and Zambia into one big, huge, lustering idea: Africa.  I guess that dream is still in there: a dream absurd; but now I know.  My passion has just got to be found again, fester like a sore for a little bit longer, get that itch back… and of course, explode.

Until then, I’ll keep you posted.  And if you haven’t read some Langston Hughes.

Thank you for reading, dear readers.

Weebale (Way-bah-lay): Goodbye.

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