Nairobi - Zurich - JFK 3 December 2009

Zurich Airport

How about an older dispatch from Northern Uganda?

SCRATCHY JOURNALS, JOSEPHINE, OLOO

25 OCTOBER 2009

In the yard on Sunday, there are 10 hens, 3 cocks, 9 baby chicks and 6 teenage chicks. Josephine says the chickens with the yellow legs are the best. She has a dream of a chicken operation with 300 birds, to raise them and sell their eggs, but she doesn't have the money to start it up. If she could build her own house with brick and iron sheets, she could live there comfortably and care for her children. Josephine and George have four kids: Daniel, Selly, Walter and Betty, but they take care of (and pay school fees for) 15 children in all.

Josephine Ongom is tireless. She's a nurse, and she is working night shift at the hospital. During the day she works in the garden, tending to the cassava field or weeding around the simsim (sesame) plants.

On her day off, Josephine took the extensions out of Selly's hair, a 12-hour marathon of unbraiding and combing. I helped in my half-assed way, coming and going: organizing my bags, unbraiding, washing my clothes, unbraiding. It was after dark when they shampooed it in the silver light of the LED lantern and the stars.

Josephine said if she met Joseph Kony she would say, Come home now. She would forgive him, though his rebels destroyed her home and buried thousands of weapons in her yard. George took me to their home in Oloo, his native village, about 12 km from Alebtong, and we sat in front of the house where he was born, the house that Lord's Resistance Army Brigadier General Sam Kolo commandeered for three months. The rebel leaders lived in this house and wrecked their other house nearby. There were 3000 armed rebels in the area; Esther and her husband and kids were living there and they were able to get away. At the time, George and the family were living in Hoima, where George was working for the forest service. George reported the matter to President Museveni, and his army, the Uganda People's Defense Force (UPDF) deployed helicopter gunships to Oloo. Sam Kolo later turned himself in, crossed over to the UPDF side, went back to Oloo and dug up the weapons on George and Josephine's property, effectively confiscating them for the government, riding away with a full truck-load of guns.

It's my last week at A River Blue and Emmanuel and I are finally friends. Emmanuel is Colline's son, he's nearly two and half. He feared me for the first few weeks, running away whenever I came near. Then he would shyly smile at me and hide his head in Colline's lap. Eventually, he would come up to me and say, Jenfa! and run away. Now he follows me everywhere and we hold hands and when I say, Emmanuel! How are you? He says, I'm fine, with his scratchy squeaky baby voice. Then we high five and low five and give the thumbs up.

The future is unwritten.