I am Here if You are Here

A tomato plant has somehow found its way out of the concrete ditch that circles our flat. Over the last few weeks it has produced first yellow flowers, then small green tomatoes. Today the first two tomatoes are big and green and more flowers are blooming. It looks like we are going to have a lush tomato harvest soon from our concrete ditch.

I also notice a flowers growing out of cracks in the steps sprouting bright purple heads. Northern and eastern Uganda is in drought but we have plenty of rain here to the west of Lake Victoria. And this fertility in the cracks and crevices, seems a sort of symbol. At the market today one of the final year medical students who did field placements last year with me, recognizes me and wants to talk about a NGO project he is planning for children. We make a date to meet. Sometimes where you think there is little fertile soil, glorious flowers poking out their fine heads.

The colleague sharing the flat with me for the past couple of weeks has gone off to the game park. Lake Mburo is about three quarters of an hour away. To me it makes a wonderful early morning tour followed by a cup of hot tea from a thermos in the early African morning sun. His idea is to spend the whole day, get his money’s worth, he says, so I am glad to have a whole day on my own.

Around two o’clock I decide I need to take a trip into town. Nothing much to do in town other than a need to seek out others. There are of course tomatoes, avocado, onion, garlic, fresh coriander and cumin seed to purchase in anticipation of a visitor arriving on Monday. As well, I remember to pick up a couple of baskets in natural dyes that have been set aside for me by the basket woman in the market. Her stall is being upgraded and the money goes directly from my hand into the carpenter’s.

“Good thing I dropped by today”, I say amidst much laughter.

I pick up some samosas at the Tumweereza Bakery on High Street but pass on the bread which tends to be dry and crumbly. Then I drop by the pharmacist to get some antihistamines and buy some English Leather soap at Pearl Super Shop for my sister who can’t find it in Canada. At Pearl I meet the staff from the newly constructed Catholic pediatric hospital just outside of town and stop to chat.

Today I have been reading The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers, about his ancestor who was missionary among the Mashona in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He mentions that the traditional Mashona response to "How are you?" is:

“I am here if you are here”.

To which one replies, “I am here”.

It seems an appropriate greeting for today and for Africa. You have to be here when you are here.

When I arrive back home, I find I am without the newly purchased baskets. I must have set them down at the last stall I visited. So I head back in to town and sure enough find the stall owner waving them over his head when he sees me heading his way.

The boda-boda driver who takes me back into town asks if he can stop enroute for some ensenene, local grasshoppers, which are spread out live on sheets and in clear plastic bags in front of the university. A bag cost 500 UgS/- approximately 25 cents.

For a long time, like many whites, I didn't eat them. But grasshoppers have always been a special treat for Ugandans, especially good for malnourished children because of the fat content. Now, I too appreciate their sweet, crunchy flavour when fried and salted. I am especially pleased to be able to take a picture of them on sale by the roadside as I sit on the back of the driver's motorbike waiting for him to make his purchase. The green branches to the side are supposed to keep flies away.

This is where I have been today. I am here if you are here!

Team Building in Ruhururu

Our last workshop on Team Building in Bwezibari is by far the most smoothly run of them all. However it doesn't start off very promising with only one participant on site when we arrive at 9:30 am. Having passed the Health Center ambulance, which serves as a general all-round vehicle for the Health Center, returning after having dropped the trainers off, we were surprised when we arrived that we couldn’t find them. They turned up about 45 minutes later by which time 29 participants have gathered. I guess they were getting their marketing done early when they found no one at the site.

At the last workshop we provided some formal feedback to the trainers who have been facilitating these workshops. They have been doing a wonderful job, are enthusiastic, engaged, active and interested. They have adapted to the changes we have added in and the newer material that includes community development. They have taken turns so all trainers have facilitated all the sessions and have begun to include the volunteers who have also begun to be trained as trainers to facilitate sessions. We also suggested that they all need to concentrate on pre-planning each sessions so they not only have all the material ready to go but have run thru in their heads the lessons they want to pull out of each exercise. Amazingly, they have responded to the suggestion about advance preparation and the material needed for each sessions has been prepared in advance and the lessons to be drawn appear to all be elicited. As well it appears that without prompting they are tying the questions they ask to elicit key points after the lessons to actual behaviour within the groups. I can barely believe it.

One example goes like this. In the Puzzle Pictures exercise, everyone is given a single piece of a puzzle. Five pieces make a picture. Puzzles are unfamiliar to people here. They don’t play with them as children. A Peace Corps volunteer told me she gave a puzzle to the children in a family she stayed with and after counting the pieces they didn’t know what they should do with them. So just making the pieces fit together is something of a challenge. Some people are better at finding other matching pieces than others. But always one or two people wander around, not fitting in any puzzle, until with almost the whole puzzle together, a group goes looking for their missing piece. Some people and their pieces are also sent away from a group because they are the wrong colour.

The lessons that can be drawn from this exercise are many. When you have just one part of the puzzle, it means nothing, but when you have all pieces, you have a picture which means something. You feel bad when you are not included in a group, no matter what the reason, even if it is just because your piece is not needed. Some people are more active in finding matching pieces than others. Some people wait to be found. Even when you have all the right pieces together it takes time to make them into a picture.

Obviously it works best in debriefing people if you select someone who had trouble and ask them how they felt, what happened and what they did or ask the person who found other matches early, what they did that worked best. Our facilitators have finally done this. This is when I figure that I am getting an additional lesson as well, that when one facilitates well in a group, magic happens. I am reminded of this a little later when we do the exercise Build With What You Have. Each of three groups is given a heap of what looks like junk and asked to construct something. In the past they have mostly rearranged it into a store or home. This time we specifically say we want a building made. One group has made a grass hut of a traditional healer. When at the end everyone goes around to the three groups to see what each has constructed, one person is left at each site to explain to others.

At the final site, one of the two men who came to this workshop in a sparkling white shirt and shiny tie, has made himself a corncob pipe and is drumming on a tin can, mumbling loudly, playing, for all it is worth, a traditional healer. As the onlookers say, amidst great laughter and applause, his group has constructed a building but he has made theatre out of it.

When the groups sing the songs they have composed about the work they will do as volunteers, their enthusiasm and conviction carry far beyond this hopeful church in the green hills of Africa. They are silhouetted against the church windows, the male and female voices a counterpoint to each other weaving together in graceful effortless harmony.
About half way thru our workshop in the nave of a partially constructed church, local schools children are let out for recess and we are swamped. At first the participants try to get rid of them, shooing them outside, but finally they give up and tell them to be quiet. Amazingly it works and until the recess drum goes, they sit at the windows and on the floor and quiet as stone statues. Now where else would this happen?

A while later a group of seven women are returning from market, a couple with small children. They come tentatively to the door and look inside at the single group working on the benches at the back of the church. I smile and greet them in Runkankole wondering if they are participants. They answer shyly and then sit down at one side of the church to quietly pray before making their way home. Photos: Puzzle Pictures; Groups Sing; School Children Join US; and Traditional Healer Drums

Team Building Training In Uganda

We are headed out to the village in Bwezibwera in Southwestern Uganda for a day of Team Building. The Ministry of Health is launching a nation-wide program of Volunteer Health Workers (VHW). In the parishes where our child health training project works, many of our volunteers have been chosen as VHW. As our volunteers have been trained and working for five years and have formed cohesive groups that are proud, self-reliant and active, many are not sure they want to give up this identity and the connection with our NGO project. This is despite the fact that funding has drawn to a close so it looks like our project may be coming to an end. This has resulted in them thinking of themselves as better than and apart from the other government volunteers. We are concerned this may affect team work as VHWs and want them to start to work together as a group, hence the Team Building day.

We are out early in the crepuscular light of early dawn. The red murram village roads take us past milk cans being collected and tied on the backs of bicycles for delivery or waiting by the road for transport to larger centers. Local sales appear to be part of it too. Milk is plentiful here in Ankole. African Tea is almost half milk, my favourite breakfast drink.

We are weaving our way over and around the hills. At one small widening of the road, the driver finds out the trainers we were meant to collect are elsewhere and we trace our way back to the health center. While we are stopped, I am able to photograph people winnowing peanut shells after the peanuts are passed whole thru a grinder. The whole operation is set out on a grass mat by the side of the road, stunning in its simplicity. I have seen such tableaus before but never knew what was being ground. My African colleagues identify it right off, so distinctive the equipment. It makes me aware of how much else I look at but don’t really see.

We arrive at Mirongo at 9:00 am and there are about 30 volunteers already gathered. They trickle in over the next two hours and by 11:00 there are 83. They arrive by foot or bicycle, climbing up over the crest of the hill, many of them delayed by the need to dig in their shambas before the sun gets high in the sky as it is the rainy season and digging must be done in the early hours. About 20 of the group gathered are our volunteers, the rest are newly appointed to the volunteer health worker role by the government.

We use a variety of interactive exercises. The five trainers each take one group and change groups after each exercise. At the end of the day, one of the participants who is new to such training, says in awe, “We didn’t come with pens and paper but we have learned a lot.”

Another says, “I thought we were not getting the same teaching in each group, but I can see from the feedback that we have all learned the same things.”

It is exciting to work with people new to participatory methods. They are so keen and eager and seem to have Eureka moments at every other turn. The Picture Puzzles we have used seem particularly effective. Each person is given one piece of the puzzle and told to find others to make a picture. Some are active, circling the groups, holding their own picture piece up high for all to see. Others hang on to their own piece afaid to let it go,hoping others will find them. The pictures we use are bright and colourful photos of our local area of calender photos of West Africa. Not many of them have worked with puzzle pieces before so even when they find others that seem similar there is time spent in making it fit together.

Our facilitators are skilled, especially at holding the energy and enthusiasm in large groups. Many lessons about how to find a group, how to locate others like you so you can create a picture together and how the overall picture is much more obvious when the pieces are fit together, are readily made in this exercise.

A question in the feedback highlights that someone did not understand a lesson in an exercise and they easily review it for the whole group. It has been a totally successful launch to the Team Building training. In the car on the way back home we hold our facilitators’ meeting and decide we will introduce some community development exercises as well in the next training. And everyone agrees we are off to a good start.

Photos: milk cans ready for pickup; winnowing ground nut shells & putting the puzzle together.

Floods Create Havoc in Mardan & Swabi

Frontier Primary Health Care has been called again to respond quickly to a humanitarian crisis, this time even closer to home as the recent devastating floods in Mardan and Swabi districts have played havoc in their own communities of Ismailia as well as Kagan and Baghica Afghan refugee camps. This most recent disaster comes just weeks after the Internally Displaced Refugees in camps around Mardan had been repatriated to Swat and the camps officially closes. For several weeks following the closure of The Sheikh Yaseem town camp, where FPHC had beenproviding 24-7 coverage, FPHC staff continued to provide nutritional services to other camps as well as some medical clinics in the camps until all were closed.

On August 16th a heavy deluge of rain resulted in massive damage throughout Swabi and Mardan districts. Approximately 50% of the mud homes in the Kagan refugee camp were fully destroyed and the rest remain in dangerous condition. Ismailia Health Center was also badly hit with flood waters filling the clinics with mud and debris. The home of several staff were also affected including FPHC's hardworking, stalwart administrator, Said Zaman. Luckily he and his family all escaped unscathed.

The homes in the refugee camps were especially badly affected, as they are made of mud and wattle. Many of the injuries and deaths that occurred were a result of collapse of the homes which happened suddenly and catastrophically.
As many as 27 people died in the flash floods with many more injured and thousands now without homes. The EMOC Center in Ismailia as well as the Health Centre there, both busy and active clinical sites suffered serious damage to both medical and non-medical supplies.

FPHC vehicles and staff assisted in Kagan with the evacuation of people from the worst of the flooded area as well as arranging for cooked food for those affected. The health center at Ismailia and the emergency medical team provided emergency medical care to those injured.

There are ongoing concerns about the spread of cholera and typoid in the area. Staff and community are busy rebuilding their homes, cleaning up and shifting the debris and mud that has been left behind.Everyone is busy now cleaning up the damage and putting things right.

Photos: Kagan & Baghica Refugee camps and Ismailia.

Go For It

My strip of foam stretches out beneath the table. My friend has found a massage table in the hall closet and by lowering the legs as far as they will go, makes her bed against the bookcase that sits perpendicular to my foam. We are visiting our friend, Barbara. We have only the two days together so to optimize our time together, we decided to bunk with her in her small apartment.

We met through our Rosen Method bodywork so we continue with the same kind of activities we began then. We talk about old friends, eat great meals and drink strong coffee. We consult our horoscopes and read Tarot cards. We laugh a lot and discuss our soul work and where we are in our lives. And we cavort in thrift shops.

This is the first time I have seen Barbara since she moved from her childhood home in this same town, with its extensive rose garden to this Leisure Home. Barbara is 90 and remarkably between such visits we manage to keep in touch by internet mostly. Barbara's email handle is Go For It. She says she didn't understand about email addresses when she settled on it--didn't know she would be saddled with it-- but we think it is incredibly appropriate. Her favorite admonisions to us are a) Listen to what the universe is telling you and b) Go For It. Usually in that order. At one of our Rosen workshops during a tour of the local thrift shops, we found a board game appropriately named Go For It and brought it home for her.

Our forays into thrift shops are mainly for the purpose of searching for synchronicity, in as much as one can not really look for synchronicity but stumble upon it. To do this we notice what in the thrift shop (read universe) attacts us and reflect on what lesson it holds.

As Barbara says these days, "When your reach for the glass, the glass comes towards you".

She is currently reading Chilton Peace's The Death of Religion and the Birth of Spirit, along with a large pile of similar books. Years ago he wrote The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and it seems Chilton-Peace has ventured even further afield since then.

On this trip up and down the aisles, my friends locate a picture on glass of an owl. To me it looks like a make-work project as the frame is damaged and will need to be removed to be fixed but they are thrilled with it.

"Owls, says Barbara, "are about wisdom and letting go."

The exquisite Sterling Silver brooch I find of a hare in chase, in the same thrift shop, shines up with a bit of rubbing and I realize I have a real find for am amazing $2.25.

"Rabbit," I note outloud, "better not mean fertility at my age."

"Maybe fertility of ideas," says Barbara, "and clarity of eye and transformation."

It is amazing what our serenidipity approach uncovers.

Barbara is adamant enroute home that we take the car through the car wash. Well, the car is a tad dirty after the drive down to Seattle. She acknowledges later in a light-hearted way, that it was important for her to go thru the car wash. For her, as well as for us, somehow washing all the dirt and grim off prepares us to shine, indeed to trail clouds of glory. It is wonderful and reassuring to be surrounded with such a perception of the world.

Later when I acquire the lovely children's storybook of Pele the Lamplighter, with its exquisite drawings and enchanting story, Barbara reflects how it is an invocation to continue to light lamps as we go. Nothing escapes her eagle eye. We are learning not only about going with the flow from Barbara but to Go For It !

Photos: Barbara with Go For It Game

Frontier Continues Work in IDP Camps

The health group I work with in Pakistan, Frontier Primary Health Care, is based out of Mardan, North West Frontier Territory. Right now they are in the epicenter of one of the most massive movements of internally displaced persons on the globe as the number of people fleeing from Swat, Bajaur, Lower Dir and Buner, just north of them moves past three million.

The executive director of FPHC, Dr. Emel Khan, came to Canada last year to present the keynote address to the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada in Halifax. He also visited the west coast to initiate links with UBC and Simon Frazer universities. We secured a small grant later in 2008 for his wife, Dr. Wagma, the deputy director of FPHC, to take courses in conflict resolution at the Justice Institute of BC.

As the disaster unfolded in May, FPHC was among the first to respond, providing emergency and maternal care at their 14 health units. This has continued. FPHC now has a formal agreement with UNICEF for provision of health and nutrition services in the camps. The provincial health department has provided an ambulance and driver for use. Local and international organizations wanting to assist are asked by the government to coordinate their services thru FPHC, including specialist physicians from the large government hospitals from outside the area such as Punjab.

They are providing round the clock coverage to the largest camp in Mardan, that near Sheikh Yasin town with a population of 12,000.

To continue this level of support FPHC have hired 90 temporary staff members including physicians, dispensers, lady health visitors (LHVs), assistant LHVs, EPI technicians and nutrition assistants. Until a formal agreement was in place, FPHC was providing care with their own staff who number only 120. In addition to emergencies staff provide general OPDcare, MCH care, immunization, TB control and diarrhoeal disease control.

FPHC have also established nutrition services in six IDP camps that are screening children and pregnant women, providing nutritional supplements and sharing information about preparing healthy balanced diets. Prior to establishing nutritional services, three staff members, including Dr. Wagma received seven days of training on UNICEF’s emergency approach to nutritional support.

The agreement with UNICEF does not include medical supplies so FPHC struggles to provide what they can. More about FPHC can be found here.

Photo: FPHC provide emergency care during Mardan floods.

Vintage Drapery

I was waiting for my friend at the ferry dock about 5:15pm. It was the computer ferry when hoards of hurrying workers from Vancouver scramble onto the dock and head for the car park.

A fellow came up behind me, someone I didn’t know, and said, “ I like your outfit.”

I had on Capri pants and a short-sleeved top made out of vintage drapery material. The kind called barkcloth, which I have used to make cushion covers and futon covers. Brightly coloured, bold flowers and broad sweeping lines. You’d recognize it if you saw it.

“It’s like 50’s drapery material,” I replied, looking down on the large, lush hibiscus and lilies painted in vibrant colours while I continued to keep an eye out for my friend.

“My mom had one like it,” he said, grinning. His face was open and friendly with a squint in one eye making it slightly eschew. He too seemed to be waiting for someone.

It was a boiling hot day so I added, “Well, I am glad it is an Indonesian knock-off because that thick drapery material would be much too hot today.”

“My mom really liked hers. She died recently” he said, somewhat sadly. "She used to say, Scarlet!”, he exclaimed laughing, throwing one arm out at the side. “You probably know that skit.” He demonstrated again, throwing one arm out at right angles to his body, “Scarlet!”

I looked down at the material. Not much scarlet in it. I smiled at him and said thank you, not at all sure what he meant. But it is not that often that someone you don’t know comes up and tells you they like your outfit. Such happenings can make your day.

Just then my friend walked over with someone in tow and a request that we drive him home as well, so we engaged in making arrangements and introductions. My new friend had slipped away, probably spotting who he was waiting for and I didn’t think about the exchange until later that evening.

Still wearing the Capri pant outfit, I was explaining the interaction to a friend as a typical kind of connection created here on the Sunshine Coast.

She laughed, “He meant Scarlet O’Hara!”

Then she went on to explain, “When Scarlet was destitute and hungry and wanted to seduce Rhett Butler, she decided to go to him to plead for food but she had no dress to wear so she tore down the green satin curtains and made a dress out of them.”

Something stirred in the deeper recesses of my mind.

“Then”, my friend went on, “Carol Burnett used to do this funny skit when she pretended she was Scarlet O’Hara but had left the rod in the curtains so whenever she turned from side to side, she would hit people with the curtain rod. It was hilarious!”

For me it was a glimpse into someone else's very special family stories. We all have them. They are how we make meaning and embrace ritual in our lives. For my new acquaintance, a chance encounter with an outfit sewn from vintage drapery material invoked his mother and her enjoyment of her drapery outfit, as well as Scarlet's and Carol Burnett's take on it. He got me to thinking about my own family stories and the need to savour them.

Photos: vintage barkcloth drapery

Up the Ying Yang

Jerry Seinfeld might indeed be the originator of “Yada Yada”, but my brother coined the term “Up the Ying Yang”. Without the help of a TV program drawing millions of viewers or a stand up comic, my brother launched a descriptive, evocative phrase at the age of 5 that has since circled the globe!

Do you have family jokes, words and phrases that only your family enjoy? You might be sitting on something that can spruce up the rhetoric of the English language.

When my brother was young, I often read bedtime stories to him in his room in the basement. We had the Grimm’s Brothers Tales and Hans Christian Anderson’s folktales but I frequently read him books that I was interested in. When I was fifteen and he was five, we were reading Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth.

Supper times at our house were a time of conversation. Older kids would be asked about school and my brother, who was not yet in school, would be quizzed about the book being read to him. It was in retrospect excellent preparation for gathering and presenting one’s thoughts. My brother surprised me when he was asked, because he remembered the name of the book, that it was about China and even the trip the characters were making up the river.

“Where were they going?” my dad continued.

My brother struggled. “Yang, Ying, Yat” before he blurted out confidently , “They were going up the Ying Yang” . Then he looked around proudly, sure that he had got it right.

“Up the Ying Ying?” My father asked his eyebrows raised as the rest of us hooted with laughter.

“He’s close”, I opined. "It’s the Yangtze River.”

We laughed long and loud, so my brother, as kids will do, continued to use the phrase. If he couldn’t find a sock or tee shirt-- it was up the Ying Yang. When we were heading off for a car ride to visit my dad’s friend and none of us had ever been there, we were heading up the Ying Yang, accompanied by peals of laughter. Soon the whole family were using the phrase to mean the unknown, the lost or even someone who was confused for any reason.

I was at university when I noticed other people around me were using it. It has an onomatopoeic ring to it which connotates bewilderment and confusion. It is self explanatory, providing a verbal embellishment of a situation. I can’t ever recall anyone needing to ask me what it meant. It is also a very descriptive way of saying someone is off topic.

Later when I was teaching at university, I would occasionally use it and soon I noticed others were using it too.

Now it is out there and it has a life of its own. The other day I heard someone, whom I am sure that my family and I have never spoken to, using it on the radio.

If constitutes a wonderful personal story about something, but I am not sure what. Either it is that we are all connected in vocabulary terms by only six degrees of separation and our unique family joke has made it out to the world. Or it could be related to to the 100 monkeys truth, that when a new skill is learned by 100 monkeys on one isolated island it is not long before monkeys everywhere have acquired the same skill—a sort of collective transfer of consciousness for monkeys. It is also possible that a wonderfully evocative phrase began for similar reasons, about the same time in several widely separate locations around the same time. What do you think? Do you have such a family story?

Photos: Bro and his pumpkin crop, Bro painting in dad's shirt in the bath