Drops of Perfectionism

Sweat beat down my brow as I bent over, submerged in the wild humidity of equatorial Africa. It was Day Three and I was still transitioning from -40 degree temperatures of Minnesota to sweating at nine o’clock at night (and nine in the morning, for that matter). One of the women sloshed another bucket of water at my feet, its droplets fanning out like a fern leaf on the dusty floor. They continued to haul buckets of water from the nearby orphanage, although if they had looked closely they might have noticed that the sweat running down my forehead and neck was more than enough moisture to mop the whole room three times over. I was pretty sure that my own perspiration was some sheerly defiant water droplets that had I guzzled before we started cleaning. Apparently water wages a quick war for its re-emancipation in that climate. I noticed that none of the women working around me had a single bead of sweat on their foreheads. I had a long way to go to be African.

While they carried water and I supplied my own from endless perspiration, the room slowly took shape. First we washed the paint-splattered cement floor, pushing dirty water out the door and soaking up the rinse water with small, thin towels. I scanned the room thinking about how many spills we’d have on the scratchy cement. To my relief the women started carrying in rolls of synthetic flooring to cover the rugged cement. As we fit five long strips of flooring over the cement the room began to look more like a classroom. A second cycle of carrying buckets and scrubbing floors ensued as we now washed the floor covering, covered in dust from sitting in storage over the dry season. Water, scrub, water, scrub. The women seemed to be moving faster than me, but I just couldn’t get some spots clean. Anxiety welled up in me as I began to feel nervous that they would think I couldn’t manage their kids, that I was terrible at cleaning, that I was slow or inept. I scrubbed harder and harder at what was now an invisible mark. Cautiously, I glanced to one side to see if I could tell how true my fears were.

At this point it would have made for a great story if my palms slipped and sent me spiraling into a face plant my little puddle. Oddly, however, that kind of humiliation I could have survived. The thought that I was too incompetent or too 'soft' to wash a floor on my hands and knees was far more painful. But as I looked to my right and my left a second time, a bit of a laugh welled up in my throat. This is Africa, I realized. My eyes wandered to the dusty plain on the other side of the window and the sand pillars swirling up into the sky. There is no such thing as perfectly clean in Africa. Little did I know that I was about to meet several species of mammoth spiders and countless scorpions that would reinforce this understanding that you couldn’t build anything to keep Africa out of Africa.

We finished the floor up pretty quickly after that, and I realized that in a mere thirty minutes of being down on my knees with a rag and some water, I knew what one of my great lessons from Africa would be. Letting go of performance, of perfection, was the thing that would hit below gut-level. The following three months of cleaning up after anywhere between 8-20 kids on a daily basis continued to show me the futility of breaking my back to have a perfectly clean classroom. And likewise, a perfectly clean soul. The idea of doing everything right, disguised by the pretense of meeting God halfway, gave me every reason to be legitimately afraid or anxious because living like that made me responsible for good in the world. It is a rare moment that changes our lives entirely, but it is a defining moment when a change to your mindset shifts more than one way you view the world. In that chasm between good and perfection in a humble classroom underneath the peak of Kilimanjaro, I had a moment where I saw a different mindset.

The good news is we don’t have to be drenched in sweat to dial it into our lives.


Above: African student dancing in the heat, not sweating

The Greatest Life

This summer is about as predictable as weather in the Kalahari desert. More than a long stone’s throw from the Kalahari but much closer in mind than body, I am living/working in Eastern Pennsylvania as a Teaching Assistant for a couple of science courses. This is my second summer working at this camp and every day I find myself amazed at what students only eight or nine years younger than me seem to think are good ideas. Junior high dance moves are the first thing to come to mind. The oh-so-suave ‘sidle-up-next-to-the cute-girl-on-the-quad’ move is next. The endless giggling and gossip among girls about who is cute. And of course, little matchmaker students who seem to think they’ve found my husband-to-be. I have to admit, though, that in spite of some of the absurdity of it all there is something charming in the vivacious ardor with which they attack life. Or perhaps I should say, with how they choose to live it.

This contrast between vitality and apathy is something that has been on my mind for several days, and not just because of the ever-making and breaking of Bermuda love triangles out on the quad. It has been on my mind because of a story I read about in a book called “Life Lessons,” a deep examination of the realities of life and things that are worth valuing as we journey through our days. The story is about someone who never made it as far as any of my students here. He is someone who never made it as far as you or I. And yet, I’m here to say that something about this story I am about to give is bound to tell you and this boy with his bike have possibly changed more lives and hearts than I have in all my 23 years. The story is told by his doctor who treated him for cancer for six years:

“Some years ago, I knew a young boy who was eager to spread love and find life, even though he was at the end of his. He had had cancer for six of his nine years. In the hospital, I took one look at him and knew he was finished fighting. He had just had it. He had accepted the reality of his death. I stopped by to say good-bye the day he was going home. To my surprise, he asked me to go home with him. When I tried to sneak a peak at my watch, he assured me that it would not take long. And so we drove into his driveway and parked. He told his father to take down his bicycle, which had been hanging in the garage, unused, for three years. His biggest dream was to ride around the block once--he had never been able to do that. He asked his father to put the training wheels on his bicycle. That takes a lot of courage for a little boy to do: it’s humiliating to be seen with training wheels when your peers are popping wheelies and performing tricks with their bikes. With tears in his eyes, the father did so.
Then the boy looked at me and said, “Your job is to hold my mom back.”
You know how moms are, they want to protect you all the time. She wanted to hold him up all the way around the block but that would cheat him out of his great victory. His mother understood. She knew that one of the last things she could do for her son was to refrain, out of love, from hovering over him as he undertook his last, greatest challenge.
We waited as he rode off. It seemed like an eternity. Then he came around the corner, barely able to balance. He was terribly drawn and pale. Nobody thought he could ride a bike. But he rode up to us beaming. Then he had his father take off the training wheels and we carried the bike, and him, upstairs. “When my brother comes home from school, would you send him in?” he asked.
Two weeks later the little brother, a first-grader, told us that his brother had given him the bicycle as a birthday present, since he knew he would not be around for the birthday. With not much time or energy left, this brave boy had lived out his final dream, riding his bike around the corner and passing it on to his younger sibling."

The thing I love about this story is that There is unquenched life in all of us, and this anonymous, nine-year-old boy had a big bit of life to live in a ride around a block. A conquering moment, an epic moment, and for him, a victorious one.

In some ways, my recent trip to Africa was my ride around the block. It was humbling and scary to have to wait and get the ducks in a row for visas and funds, etc. It was tempting to fear that I was doing the wrong thing, or that doing something for myself was selfish or wrong. But there was also a fiber of my soul that felt just like this boy, that I couldn’t go on in my life without having triumphed over that great, big block no matter how hard it would be to pedal all the way around it and keep your balance at the same time. Except, my block in life came just a few years later than his, and his life has already moved on to what lies beyond this world.

Here’s to Africa, riding bikes, and passing on the giants of our life to younger ones who look up to us, hoping to be something like us and conquering the same hills we have ridden over in great and glorious triumph.

Israeli's Wish

I began this post over a month ago, on the winds of a 747 jet carrying me homeward bound. It was a long flight, totaling nearly 24 hours of flying/layovers from Kilimanjaro to Dar es Salaam to Amsterdam, then home. At the time I was planning to spend the night and day aboard the silver sleigh describing every last detail about Africa. Unfortunately exhaustion and more exhaustion hit, and the annals of Africa stayed lodged somewhere deep inside until now. But that is okay—maybe it just means that Israeli’s story was not meant to be told just then. Maybe the time was now.

There were nine kids at Nyumba ya Furaha, and Israeli was one of two boys that I was a little scared of at the start. Tall and rough looking from the bones that pressed unabashedly at his skin, Israeli seemed maybe the least friendly of all the boys. Or at least the least affectionate. I have never been so wrong about anyone in my life.

Israeli may have come off crude and rough, but not one of his escapades with hammers and machetes and stoning some poor lizard gave any real reflection of his soft heart and unusual thoughtfulness. Israeli, in a line, was akin to the Rambo edition of Rodin’s Il Penseur, the famous statue of a man resting his head upon a closed fist, lost in deep reverie. Il Penseur was probably the last thing you’d think of when you happened to catch Israeli in his natural habitat--wildly chasing after donkeys with a stick or scaling trunks of wispy saplings and swaying back and forth, singing at the top of his lungs. But then again, moments where Israeli walked me back to the base and taught me the song “I see the Moon” in the fading rays of an equatorial sun were hardly reminiscent of Rambo, either. The real revelation of Israeli’s life all unfolded in one amazing afternoon at Nyumba ya Furaha.

It was a day when three other volunteers had come to Nyumba ya Furaha and suddenly you could focus all your attention on one kid at a time instead of listening to six kids stumbling through English words at all once. I made a bold move and singled Israeli out to read to me, then read several books to him. Later that night Israeli chased after me when I got up to go back to my home at the base. Catching my arm beneath the ethereal glow of the moon, he planted dozens of loud kisses from the hand all the way up to the elbow and back down again. It was impossible not to laugh, and simultaneously impossible not to cry. Israeli was more than lovestruck--he was showing that he had felt loved that day. Loved beyond the average. Could it be that what we do—even the simplest of things like pulling a little kid up next to you and reading him a crazy book—show kids that they are loved? That night it showed me that it was, and from then on, Israeli was my friend.

I’m not going to pretend that Israeli was a sappy romantic every moment after that. There were still plenty of shenanigans ending many a spider or scorpion’s life at the threshold of Nyumba ya Furaha. On one memorable occasion I caught him rubbing dirt into a fresh, open wound won in a flailing race around the house. The dirt, he thought, would stop the bleeding, and when it didn't he put leaves over it to try and cover the cut. He was amazed when I cleaned out the cut on his foot and placed a band-aid over the small, red gash. And I, in turn, was amazed that he felt this was unusual care for a cut or bruise. I don't think that it was unusual care, but I do wonder that perhaps Israeli never took the time to show anyone his scrapes and bruises.

Israeli asked me a lot of questions about myself, about America, about my home. On one occasion he accused me of lying when I told him about a box that washes your dishes for you (how do you explain a dishwasher appliance to someone who’s never seen even a washing machine?). It’s hard to say how long or how much of all our talks Israeli will remember, but there is one thing I hope he will never forget. He will never forget his wish. And neither will I.

One afternoon, Israeli and I were reading a book about a small little bear who wished for all sorts of things. I nonchalantly inflected my tone up and down according to the voices and the ridiculousness of all the little bears wishes, until Israeli stopped me and asked me what the word “wish” meant. I was half amazed. How do you explain a wish? How does a nine-year-old not know what it was? I didn’t know the word in Swahili but I explained it as best as I could in English and he moved on, leaving me no indication that it would be a significant word later on. Two and a half hours later, after homework and showers and eating ugali with our hands, Israeli and I found ourselves facing a pile of plastic bowls in sudsy water. As we talked and sang, we began to laugh until someone talked about home. Israeli grew more serious and turned to me, wet rag dripping water on the floor, and asked, “What was that word you taught me earlier?” My mind began racing back through the day to all the words we could have talked about. “Wishii?” Israeli’s accent added an extra syllable to “wish” as it rolled off his tongue with a long vowel sound.

“Oh yeah, 'wish.' It means something you want very much. The thing you want more than anything in the world. It doesn't have to be a thing--it could be being with a person, or going to a place, or having something you dream about happen...”

“Yes, that is the word,” Israeli nodded. “I know what my wishii is. My wish is to go home.” Israeli’s eyes glazed over a little bit and he continued, “I was supposed to go home last Christmas, but then couldn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe this year, for Christmas, then I can go. I have a friend at home…I like my friend. I want to see my friend again. Next time I see Nasari, I tell him I want to go home.” Israeli turned and went back to wiping the next cheap plastic dish in his hand and thinking about his wish. I stood there, taking in the deepest wish of his young heart, and learning something from this little boy. In all my years of living and breathing and thinking, I wished many a wish, too. But never was my wish like his, never were any of them so profound. Israeli wished for a long-lost reunion; he held on to the edges of a love frayed by time and distance and the life in African villages. Yet the time and distance did nothing to diminish the love that Israeli had connecting him to his nameless friend. Of all the things Israeli wanted in the universe, it was to be with someone he loved being with.

I’ll let his wish affect you the way it will—I know that his wish affected me in a way I never expected to find as I continued on this journey of life. Simultaneously humbling and emboldening, I’ve never forgotten that sweet, unexpected wish that day, enlivened by his own burgeoning hope that this could be the year that he could go home for Christmas. It didn’t matter what he had lost in the year before when he couldn’t go home to see his friend. Disappointment swallowed none of his hopeful zeal. He knew what he wanted, and he was ready to make a wish.

I see the moon

And the moon sees me

Lord love the moon

And the Lord love me...

-Israeli's Song

A Boy Named Blessing

Somewhere across the plains of Africa, under the rising shadow of sunlight gathering a mighty mountain in her arms, there is a boy with spider legs and an outie belly-button running across the flat-nosed land. While he runs for many reasons, he always runs when he is on his way to school, trailing behind his housemates with longer legs and lighter packs. If you knew more about where Baraka has come from, you might wonder to me why, or how, he fits the merrily into his eagerly galloping feet. But then, maybe if you knew more, you might not wonder at all.

Baraka was my first friend at the Joyful Home. Shy myself and slightly worried that I had gotten myself into something I couldn’t handle, I was a little timid as I entered Nyumba ya Furaha that first Monday. What if the kids didn’t like me? What if I couldn’t really talk to them? What if…the what if’s continued as I walked in and saw one of the Korean staff standing at the bookshelf with a small boy. In broken English she told me that I would read with Baraka for the first hour that I was there, and that was all we could understand of each other. The rest of the kids were out back washing their clothes and shoes by hand as they did every day after school, so Baraka and I were left alone with a book of kid’s stories and our own shyness. That next day was the same—the kids out back washing their clothes and Baraka and me reading about a sly little fox trying to convince a stream of animals to climb into a vat of boiling water. While that little fox didn’t make any friends that day, Baraka and I did—you could say that that was when it happened, actually—that was when I made my first friend at Nyumba ya Furaha.

Baraka was my homie after that, and I loved him more and more for it. There is something amazing about a six-year-old’s character (although if you ask Baraka how old he is, he thinks he just turned eight) and how they have no shyness asking to be close to you. Before the end of that first week Baraka only left my side when called by one of the ‘aunties’ (Nyumba ya Furaha staff). Daily jaunts to my room to retrieve my Bible and an overly-exciting ‘torchie’, as my kids called my flashlight, were accompanied by my vivacious friend who never once tired of being put up on my shoulders or holding my hand along the way. Sometimes I’d race him, and always never win; other times we’d have jumping contests or story-telling time or just look up at Kilimanjaro and talk about the amazing things of the mountain.

I’m afraid I didn’t teach him very good manners—had you heard the richness of this boy’s laughter you too would do anything to make him laugh, all the time. I’ll remember the sound of his squeals forever, the way they came after I taught him all about tickling and pointing to the sky, one of my older brother’s many tricks to make us easy targets for tickling. I also taught him how to fence with sugar-cane stalks and introduced him to pizza, my lifelong love among all foods known to man. Some days, Baraka would come out of nowhere—just appear from amid a grove of trees—and ask me what the name of the song I was singing out loud as I made my way to Nyumba ya Furaha. And then he would take my hand in his and finish the song with me.

Singing and dancing and sugar-cane sword fighting were only the intermittent indulgences of our regular schedule. “You eatie here?” were three words I got used to answering every day as Baraka ensured I’d stay for dinner and would plant himself next to me at the dinner table, always making sure that there were two chairs next to each other. If anyone has ever wondered when typical male-territoriality begins, it’s as early as age six because Baraka religiously fended off any kids who tried to sit between us. The “You eatie here” phase gave way to “You sleep here?” phase where Baraka would ask me every night if I’d sleep at the Joyful Home. The one day that I finally planned to stay there he upped the question a little bit and told me it wasn’t just that he wanted me to be there, he wanted to sleep with me at night like a giant teddy bear next to a small baby. I don’t know if he uses that line on all the girls but man, did it work on me…I melted. From then on I didn’t want to leave him either, but Baraka belongs in Africa.

Nyumba ya Furaha is the only home Baraka will remember. Somewhere between the age of six and eight and having been at Kilimanjaro since for nearly five years now, Baraka has really only had one family and one home, the kids at the Joyful Home. I’ll never forget the happiness on his face when we celebrated his birthday sometime in February. He proudly sat in the center of the table and collected his homemade cards and well wishes from his friends at Joyful Home. For his sixth/seventh/eighth(?) birthday he received 9 homemade cards, a package of small plastic frogs, a small pack of cookies and a Dove chocolate bar. And even though I was in one of the happiest places I’ve ever known, my heart broke as I saw what joy comes out of…nothing…when all my remembered days I’ve had so much somethings. I couldn’t help but think that if only Baraka were mine, I’d take him home with me and give him everything he could want. But one of the truths I began to learn at Joyful Home is that I can give him things, but I can’t give him his happiness. He already has that.

The last day I was there, Baraka interrogated me about this business of me leaving Africa. I don’t think he much liked it. “You go to America?” –“Yes.” “Why?” –“Because I have to.” “You have to go to your family?” –“Yes.” “Why?” –“Because they miss me very much.” “You will remember me?” –“Yes, I won’t forget you.” “You will think of me every day?” –“Yes, I will think of you all the time.” “And you will tell your family about me, about Baraka your friend?” –“Yes, I will tell them all about you.” So here it is, me telling you about my special friend. Baraka found a way into my heart that no boy (or man) has ever found. I guess I messed up when I told my dad that I wasn’t going to fall in love in Africa.

The Pursuit of Happ(i)ness

Someone once said that love is blind. That someone must have known something very honest about love. I think he knew that love pulls a fast one on us, making us believe one thing but not cluing us into the fact that we may be the only one to see it that way. Maybe it's a little more like a pair of tinted glasses no one else has worn, this thing called love.

Why the focus on love? I am thinking about this because the last 11 or 12 weeks of my life have been colored with a lot of interesting things; things that sometimes makes me forget that I'm a white girl in Africa.

Notice, I seem to be forgetting myself more than anything. Frankly, it’s not very easy to forget you are living in the middle of nowhere in Africa. I wake up to an actual tambourine ringing at an ungodly hour, watch the electricity go off about 20 times a day and feel an unholy abhorrence in my tummy towards ugali and other African specialties. I can scientifically prove that there are more ants in Tanzania than there are stars in the sky and I am CONVINCED that Mt. Kilimanjaro is really just a cosmic science experiment gone bad. Seriously, who would mount a sno-cone in an open-faced sauna? Signs of Africa are everywhere around me. But somewhere between all the signs of life and the constant noises of kids and talking, I forget that I am in a hard place, that Tanzania struggles under a lot of pain, and that most of the kids in Africa will always think that Norway is next to Canada and the US, if they don't think Norway is a village, that is. But most of all, I forget that I am at an orphanage.

Like a lot of people who come to a far-off place, I had a vision in my head of what an orphanage looked like and what working there would entail. And in none of those pictures did I see myself or kids having nearly so much fun, so many laughs, so much tickling or play so many games as I have here. I’m willing to admit that some of the…uh…mayhem...could be my fault. Simultaneously a pupil and a victim of my older brother’s torturing methods, I became quite a skilled instigator/actress in what you might call the art of provoking squealish, squirming delight.

But what I have sat down to write regarding Nyumba ya Furaha, The Joyful Home’s fitting KiSwahili name, is when that inner crust shakes every now and again you stop and really look at each child’s heart. You remember that they are not glowing with life because life happened naturally for them. They are here at Nyumba ya Furaha because life happened unnaturally, and they are learning to live and grow up despite the glitch in the universal system of family. Most of the time, though, you just don’t see this sort of sadness or anything to pity about these nine kids, and it isn’t because they have everything in the world. Quite the contrary, they have few things and eat few delicacies. New clothes aren’t new; they are just new to them now that they have been handed off from someone else who bought new clothes for themselves. They don’t go out for pizza on the weekends or have family trips to the movie theatre. On birthdays, they don’t get many gifts or cards with money from distant relatives. On Christmas, sometimes they don’t even go home or have a home to go to.

These are the moments where the thin veneer over happiness becomes a little more transparent, the moments where you feel how from one second to the next an entire one or two or three months of laughter vaporizes. This is when the tinted lenses come off and you see a very different world than the one you’ve lived in. But then, something amazing happens…a few minutes later, you can make them laugh again. You don’t have to put your rose-colored glasses on to tell that they are really happy children with true happiness lighting up their soul just then. But you do have to stop and take some serious stock of what you think about happiness if an orphan in Africa can be happier than you and the kids you know.

Strange though this may seem, I have nothing depressing to tell you about Africa or about the orphanage. Remember when I began, I was talking about love, not pain. So it is 500 words later, when I have let some of my day’s travels pour out onto an electronic page. You see, it isn’t depressing because, despite the unnatural outplay of one of the early scenes of their lives, these kids are not sad, not in the least. These few months here at Nyumba ya Furaha have been some of the most joyful, silly and ebullient months of my life( although in all fairness I haven’t a single memory before the age of three so those first few years could have been quite silly as well. No one was never crowned graceful for the methods they used to take their first few steps). So it is with these kids, some of them who were abandoned as early as age three/four. Against all odds, these kids have really mastered the pursuit of happiness that Thomas Jefferson penned into immortality even if TJ didn't really outline what happiness is.

All happiness may be at the end of the day is a memory. It is remembering that no matter what tints your shades at the moment, life still has value. And of all things happiness never forgets, it's the concept of value.

Take that, TJ.

Tales from a Happy Home

The natives here have a saying. They say that Kiswahili was born in Tanzania, got sick in Kenya, died in Uganda and was resurrected in the Congo. Hearing jubilant chatter float up from around the washing area outside Nyumba ya Furaha, you would have no doubt that Swahili was born here in Tanzania. The joyful banter of the nine kids at Joyful Home is a mess of yelps and squeals and the occasional blood-curdling scream when some unfortunate soul is ‘beaten’ by his brothers and sisters. ‘Beating’ is the English equivalent for everything from corporal punishment to rough play. Anyone who gives you a sharp smack on the arm is even accused of beating you. Rarely do the tears and screams last more than a few minutes. Tutayo, a Masai girl from a distant village, says it is because African babies are tough; they do not cry. No offense to Tutayo, but that is not quite right. African kids may rarely cry, but the babies are wailing all the time. But then if we’re honest, most adults are crying all the time, too; they just don’t let it show.

Crying or no crying, Tutayo is right about one thing at the orphanage that I work at. For all the kids and all the ‘beatings’, there is not much crying. Just like its Swahili name, Nyumba ya Furaha, the Joyful Home really is a fountain of joy overflowing on a dry, dusty plain beneath a quiet mountain. It seems there is always laughter there. And like every truly beautiful thing, laughter does not come in a word. It comes in the midst of life, unfolding itself in a single, unsuspecting moment but lasting for eternity in the memories of those who beheld it. The glorious thing about laughter is that it moves not by car or wave or pen, but through the heart, so you can carry it with you everywhere. Let me carry some of our laughter to you, today.

The Joyful Home carries nine kids who together make up one of the oddest families you could ever picture. Just now, the oldest, Neema, is 13; the youngest, Baraka F, might be as young as six. In February we celebrated his seventh birthday but depending on the day you ask him, he may or may not adamantly insist that he is already eight. Between Neema and Baraka F there are seven other kids, two more girls and five astonishingly energetic boys.

I haven’t met all the kids you’ve ever known in your life, but I assure you that you have never met kids who clean as much as these kids do. Every morning they rise with the dawn and make an astonishing raucous with dripping buckets, water squeegies and wet rags as they clean the Joyful Home and themselves. Cleaning subsides into a feast of white bread and sweet tea for breakfast, where they eat all their meals at three wooden tables in one of the bigger rooms in the house. Breakfast is usually uneventful, except for the one day that a visitor joined the morning meal. In the middle of bread crumbs and scalding tea, a scorpion slid out of hiding and into full view. Mad chaos broke out among the table-dwellers save for one kid who was strangely silent. Israeli said nothing, just bolted up from his chair and shot out of the room as a discussion broke out about how to get rid of it. The talkers were far too slow. Before any plan could be plotted, Israeli came barreling back into the room with a machete brandished high and sliced the scorpion in two. He casually tossed the machete aside and sat back down to his bread and chai.

I know, I know, machetes and nine-year-olds and slicing scorpions in two all sounds very exotic, but if you knew Israeli, this would not seem odd at all. His hobby is banging things—walls, dirt, floors, the small doghouse the kids built outside the Joyful Home. When he doesn’t have a hammer in his hands it is usually because someone has taken it away. Israeli’s obsession for hammers and hitting things was strongly comforting while we sat in the immigrations office watching officers talk about our visa papers because we knew that if worst came to worst, we could count on Israeli to come bust us out of prison.

When there are no hammers to play with or people to break out of prison, Israeli plays with normal toys like soccer balls and toy cars and flashlights, or “torchies” as the kids affectionately call them here. And of course, there is one more toy ever-presently at hand for young Israeli, and that is the vast and wild land of Africa. Beyond the unfortunately scorpion there are ants, bugs, beetles, grasshoppers, flies, wiggle worms, centipedes, millipedes, donkeys, and fellow boys to chase around. I once saw Israeli grow tired of even all these toys, though, and watched as he climbed to the top of a slender tree growing just out front of the Joyful home. And when I say slender, I mean this was a gangly sapling. A sloth would have turned its nose up at this tree. But the stone the builders rejected became the capstone of Israeli’s great day as he shinnied up the smooth bark and planted himself right smack on top of the tree. The thin wisp of a wood shuddered back and forth as the willowy boy began full out swaying back and forth as though a huge gust of wind had come up. All that had come up was a burning song in Israeli’s heart. I melted into laughter as I watched one happy kid swinging the treetop back and forth and belting out a loud song at the top of his lungs.

Welcome to the Joyful Home.

On the Banks of the Nile

There are many ways to get to Jinja, Uganda, and all of them have two things in common: fear and a recurring urge to hurl. Especially if your mode of transportation is a coach bus of which you had slightly misplaced expectations when you stepped aboard back in Boma.

Trust me, you'll have no regrets about the coach from Boma to Arusha and up through the border between Kenya and Tanzania. It's when you find yourself sitting in the window seat when the driver takes a diagonal turn on unfinished dike in a construction zone in Nairobi that you become very Catholic very quickly. As the engine groans and stretches up over the soft pile of dirt on the high edge of the ditch even the most arrogant of people would convert to the school of penitence. And when you get to the top of the hill and start to feel the road giving out, grain by grain, as the unfinished form sinks under the weight of the bus—that's when you outright pee yourself in between the Hail Mary’s and Lord’s Prayers.

All this for a glimpse of the source of the Nile. This is your life on the line for playing dentist in the mouth of the world's mightiest river. This is why you’re on your way to Uganda.

You can tell when you have crossed into Uganda, and not just because you walked through two huge iron gates guarded by soldiers with rifles when you left Kenya. You can tell because the earth was all of a sudden a deep, rich hue of red buttressing a jungle of incandescent green grasses. The air smelled wet, like the keeper of a lighthouse on the Great Lakes, bearing that fresh, soft scent of tropical moisture responsible for the lush foliage enveloping trees and vines. This precursor to the outskirts of Jinja left you salivating for what you would find further down the road, should you survive the rest of the coach ride. After only moments of crossing the border you can taste the earth, taste the air, taste the endless assault of emerald on your retinas.

Shortly after the border evidence of the great river is already upon you. A giant green hill subsides into a sprawling view of a vast waterbed rising up from the equatorial jungle. As is typical of the African bus system, we were left by the side of the road. But this time, the side of the road has its charms, because it was the last hill before you descend into the valley of the Nile's mouth. The river quickly became a part of my life over the next week as I set up camp in this town of 100,000 that became a bookend of conflict during civil unrest decades back. I found myself in the river a number of times, first dipping in on the edge of some waterfalls, then dropping in headfirst when I bungeed in from a platform built on the ridge of a cliff, then swimming over rapids when our raft capsized on the last leg of a whitewater run, and finally crawling out of the river soaked from head to toe and walking through a native people’s backyard on my way up to a waiting, open-air bus that wound through the northern outskirts of the city like a bear walking on a balance beam. This was my third trip into Jinja from yet another bearing, and it is here on this road coming from the north that you begin to question your definition of poverty.

That’s the thing about poverty, is that it is defined. Many a person sitting on that bus has scanned the modest villages left in the bus’s dust, seeing image after image that fits his or her definition of poverty. Straw-roofed huts, ripped white buildings with broken windows, naked kids running around, meat rotting in the open air. People carry goods on foot and clothes are darkened with sweat and dirt, well-worn and hanging on human frames as if stretched one too many times over a wide loom. If you’re not careful, this is all you see when you’re on one of these roads.

You’ll miss the signature posture of an African woman carrying fruit on her head, perfectly balanced with practiced control. You’ll miss the tempo in their movement, the slow-going, in-every-moment type sense that these people aren’t just nonchalantly walking, running, and moving, but they are feeling every moment of their lives. You’ll miss the remnants of a garden so breathtaking in itself you almost lose your need to see inside Eden. You’ll miss the way the kids’ faces light up as they chase after the bus, chase after you, in between make-believe worlds and playing in the grass.

I’m not saying it’s not a hard life. I’m saying think twice about what you think of poverty. Think past the definition, think past the gag-reflex, think past the pity to see what is actually going on there. You just may see things that redefine how you associate money and happiness, comfort and joy, quality and life. For all the poverty this city faces on a daily basis, when you start looking—seeing—you still see an immutable quality in life there.

If Uganda is a Pearl, then Jinja is its shining face. There is more to tell about Lake Victoria, Entebbe, Kampala, and the roads that connect them all, but it would be best to see them with your own eyes. When you're choosing your path to Jinja, however, I'd stay away from coaches if you can.