thoughts on travel

I just finished reading a book by Rosemary Mahoney called "Down the Nile" in which she describes her travels down the Nile, alone, in a fisherman's skiff. I love the last line of the book. It rings so true for me.

"Travel never makes one cheerful. But it makes one thoughtful. It washes one's eyes and clears away the dust."

New videos on CAR-must watch

Charity: Water along with ICDI (a group we worked with in CAR) is focusing it's September campaign on raising funds to drill wells in Bayanga among the Bayaka, a group we did extensive tree planting work with. These videos make me cry as I am transported back into the life of CAR. Watch and be amazed.

charity: water 2010 September Campaign: Clean Water for the Bayaka from charity: water on Vimeo.

The Bayaka. from charity: water on Vimeo.

The Fastest to Die - By Patrick Vinck and Phuong Pham | Foreign Policy

For those interested in the impact of the these past years of war and decline in CAR. It is a tragedy that continues to place itself out and one that won't go away easily.

On a side note, school season is fast approaching. For those interested in helping out again this year, please let us know soon so we can plan. Last year we sent more than 31 children to private school thanks to YOU.

The Fastest to Die - By Patrick Vinck and Phuong Pham | Foreign Policy: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

My time in Quebec

I will write more soon but if you want to see some of my pics from my time in Chicoutimi, follow the link to my photos on facebook....no facebook account necessary.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=179426&id=1044881256&l=d1dbfb4523

How do I show you love?

I like to show love through service. Darren and I sometimes run into trouble because we both like to show love through service. We often play out scenes where we are both trying to nudge the other away from the sink in an effort to be the one to do the dishes. Unlike many couples who fight over trying to get the other spouse to do the dishes, we fight over the right to GET to do the dishes. Two servants married to each other can be fun and comedic. The same can be said for two servant sisters.

Clarisse and I found ourselves in a very interesting predicament while in Gaza performing a nutritional survey. It is important to remember that Clarisse is six years older than me, thus in Central African culture it is my duty to show her respect, more respect than I would show to a younger sibling. Besides the respect she is owed, I also love her as a sister and friend so want to show her love and respect.

In Gaza we stayed at the EEB health clinic, where we performed the survey and treated the most severe cases of malnutrition. The nurse who runs the clinic is one of Clarisse and I’s cousin, and he was our host for the four days we were in Gaza. There is an empty, four room house where we were housed and ate our meals, courtesy of the fine cooking of our cousin’s wife. Clarisse helped our cousin arrange the rooms and she made sure we had a room together so we could have maximum sister time. We each had a single bed to sleep on, basically four legs with a thin sheet of plywood on top to put a foam mattress on. In our case, there was only one mattress between six of us. Our cousin decided to give the mattress to me, as, in their culture, I am this cousin’s older sister and he wanted to show me love and respect.

When Clarisse and I went in to get ready for bed I took one look at the sleeping arrangements and an instant stubbornness rose up inside of me. I was determined that Clarisse should have the honour and privilege of sleeping on the mattress. Clarisse is, like me, equally stubborn and she was also bound and determined that I was to sleep on the mattress, plus it was the wish of our cousin, so for her the matter was settled. I placed my sleeping sheet on the plywood bed and Clarisse instantly removed it and put it on the mattress bed, at which point I snatched it back onto the wooden bed. We went back and forth like this with the rest of the team laughing at us from outside the window. I decided a compromise was in order. I proposed that we take turns sleeping on the mattress, that way we could both show each other how much we loved the other. I knew we would be there three nights so to maximize Clarisse’s sleeping time on the mattress I insisted that she take the first night. She relented and I am sure that she had the better night’s sleep; mind you, she did have the worst place in the car while I had a much less cramped seat so she certainly deserved and needed a good night’s sleep.

The third night was the trickiest night of the bargain. I went to bed early, taking my turn on the plywood bed. I had just fallen asleep when Clarisse walked in, saw the mattress on her bed and abruptly woke me up to tell me to change beds. I told her that it was my turn on the plywood bed but she did not agree. She said that tonight I was to listen to her, my big sister! I said, “but it is only fair, I slept on the mattress the night before, it was her turn”. Not good enough apparently. I refused to move so she refused to lie on the mattress. She laid out a wrap (like a wrap around skirt) on the cement floor in the corner and insisted that if I didn’t sleep on the mattress she would sleep on the floor all night. I continued to refuse and said that if she didn’t take the mattress I would sleep on the floor next to her. At this point we were starting to laugh at the utter ridiculousness of it all, and it only got worse as I got out of bed and laid down on the floor next to her. We were each trying to convince the other to take the mattress and in the meantime we were rolling on our sides laughing.

It reminded me of when my sister and I fought over a toy and since we couldn’t agree to both play with it in peace, our parents would take it away saying, “if you can’t agree to play together with it, no one will play with it”. Thinking of this gave me the solution to Clarisse and I’s problem. Isac, the Swedish doctor had come up with us and he did not have a mattress to sleep on. He had yet to go to bed, so I proposed that since we couldn’t agree we should give the mattress to Isac. We snuck into Isac’s room, stripped his plywood bed, put the mattress on top and covered it up with his things. Clarisse and I crawled onto our plywood beds giggling and waiting for Isac to come in. When he got onto his bed he started laughing and we told him that he had become the solution to our problem.

In the end we showed each other love by both having a rather uncomfortable sleep on top of a sheet of plywood and I think we both went to bed happy for not giving in. We will be laughing over the incident for years to come.

Time for good-byes

I think the hardest part about saying good-bye is not knowing when you will return next. Everyone is anxious to know when we are coming back to stay for good. My answer, “I don’t know”. A totally unsatisfactory answer, even if true.

I spent yesterday in a meeting discussing strategy for moving forward with the agriculture work and CEFA, the new NGO/project in Gamboula. It was a good meeting with input from everyone present and I think we are in a good position to move ahead with the work.

Today I went to Clarisse’s garden for the morning. Her mom and oldest daughter were in the process of preparing cassava that had been soaking in a nearby fish pond for several days. We arrived in time to help remove the peel of the cassava which was then ‘washed’ off in the fish pond water and thrown into a giant bowl called a cuvette. I was ready to wade into the pond to do my part in washing the cassava but Mama told me that there were little bugs in the water that would ‘eat’ me so I should stay on the edge and help peel. The little bugs turned out to be leeches, which I have no desire to let eat me, so I gladly sat on the edge peeling. After three days in stagnant water cassava develops a distinct smell, sweet and fermented-like, which, after showering and putting on cream, is still on my hands. With some friends arriving to help, I was displaced from my peeling job to the job of lugging huge basins of wet cassava on my head, up to the small shelter built within the garden. I was not given a full basin, not having a neck able to support a large load and having just had my hair braided. I put a little cloth ‘donut’ on my head, was helped to heave it on top and stalked off down the trail, one hand helping balance the basin on my head. I managed to carry the empty basin back to the pond hands-free which I was pretty proud of. On the way home I carried a stack of cassava leaves on my head which met with many comments from other farmers along the road.

I have one more full day left in Gamboula, and while I am very excited about going home, it is not easy to leave here. Despite all the depressing things about this country, the nutrition garden and the Women and Children Gardening for Health program continues to be a bright light in the community. Nadege’s energy and love for her job amaze me; the garden is humming along despite the lack of rain and staff. It is easy to see the negative things around, the things that are easy to depress the spirit, but one look at Nadege and the garden and the women working away, meeting people like Mariam and seeing women receive seeds and machetes, there is hope. We can’t just roll over and die, we can’t just leave people in their misery, despite how normal it seems.

Having children isn’t hard; raising them is the difficult part

Hamada-Gaza is at the same time hopeless and resilient. It never ceases to amaze me that people in difficult circumstances don’t, at some point, just decide to roll over and die. After seven hours on difficult roads, across bridges that required everyone to get out of the truck, inspect the bridge and then re-load on the other side, we started work on Thursday. The purpose of our trip was to do a survey of the health of children from 0-5 years. Rather than go door to door, the hospital health team sets-up under a mango tree and people start lining up to have their children weighed, measured, poked and prodded. Our team consisted of me, the food security specialist, two nurses, a midwife and a doctor. For each child that we saw, we asked a series of questions that were recorded and will, eventually, be entered in a report.

On the first day, my job was to ask the questions, while Clarisse weighed each child and measured their height and arm circumference. I used all the language skills I have, pulling out my Sango, French and the few words I know in Gbaya and Fulfulde. Even then, hearing people’s names and recording them is a talent I am still working on. Clarisse gave several lessons on health and nutrition, specifically focusing on the foods that are appropriate for infants and children. It is common here to find mothers starting children on solid food and water as early as two months, while the recommendation is not to start until 6 months. Breast milk is best! Giving water too early also results in the early introduction of worms and parasites which quickly leads to malnutrition.

I was shocked not so much at the state of health of the children we were seeing the first morning, but at the answers to the survey questions. In particular, I was asking each woman how many children she had. It was common to hear 8, 9, 10, 11, up to 14. But when I asked them how many of the children were still living, the answers were shocking. A woman who gave birth to 14 children had 9 living. Five of her children had died, all at various ages from one sickness or another. No one could give you details, it was just a fact of life. As I asked the name of the child we were weighing, many women didn’t know their child’s proper name, as though they had too many names to remember or the name itself had no significance. Even worse was knowing how old their children were. Very few women could give an accurate age of their child. One woman had no idea how old her children were, except to know that her first child was around five. She had four children under the age of five and the oldest two were both very malnourished. I asked her if the four kids were really four kids that she had given birth to (as it is common to raise other people’s children) and she replied, “Yes. A woman’s work is to give birth”. I wanted to cry for her. Her husband had left her and she believed that the only thing she was good for was having babies.

On Friday a grandmother came with a 10 day old baby, born premature and weighing 1.9kg. We had to resuscitate the baby 5 times before the Doctor finally gave up and she died in the early hours of the morning. I think the baby girl was the first child I have seen die right in front of me and it was a tragic and emotional experience. What was worse is that they had this baby at home for several days before bringing her to the health clinic, where the government ‘nurse’ on duty proceeded to give this tiny baby girl everything from quinine (for malaria), several antibiotics and diazepam, all within a 24 hour period. Before coming to the government health clinic the family had tried various forms of traditional medicine, and, as a last resort, brought the child to the Baptist health clinic. By then it was too late and it made me so angry to know that this baby suffered so much at the hands of ignorant people. With only ten percent of children attending a school that barely works, there is little hope for the future.

There are many different food taboos that have been passed down generations in the region that make it a very difficult place nutritionally as well. Children are not supposed to eat papayas or bananas, as it is said to give them worms. They shouldn’t eat eggs, fresh meat (only meat that has been dried over a fire) or fish (the smell of fish is what makes kids limbs swell, supposedly). The end result of these taboos is children ending up with kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition resulting from a lack of protein where the belly and limbs are severely swollen. Pregnant women are also subject to many of the same taboos resulting in low birth weights and generally unhealthy children. I am convinced that a bunch of men got together, decided on what was the best tasting food in the village and then made up a bunch of rules that made sure they were always the ones to get to eat them. With this sort of ignorance, what will it take to save the next generation? Certainly it will take more than a few visits from a village health team.

On the road of sorrows

Wednesday I am heading to Hamada-Gaza, a town far north of Gamboula along some very horrible roads. I think it takes a day to get there; that is if the bridges are passable and it isn’t raining. I will be in the company of five staff from the Gamboula Hospital who will be going to assess the health and nutrition situation which, by all accounts so far, is not at all good.

Diamonds may be a woman’s best friend in North America, but here, they result in famine and hardship. Men, seduced by the prospect of striking it rich by finding a large cache of diamonds hidden beneath the ground, strike out into the bush to dig large pits and sift the soil looking for diamonds. The problem is that it is much like playing the lottery, with about as equal odds of winning big. You may win two dollars here, ten dollars there, but not enough to feed your family for more than a few days. In the meantime, if your wife is not digging beside you, she is laboring in the family fields without her co-laborer (her husband) and likely her older sons are also absent. Thus, when the husband comes home empty handed, not having held the winning lottery ticket, instead of losing a dollar or two a week playing the lotto, the family suffers much greater losses in the form of malnourished, diseased and dead children. Without enough food to eat from the family garden, or enough money to buy food or medicines in the market, families suffer to the point of death.

This has been the case in Hamada-Gaza, a village whose woes are augmented by a lack of roads that can support large vehicles (such as supply trucks or bush taxis), an overall drop in diamond demand and prices, increased food prices and decreased food production. It is a recipe for disaster. The team from the hospital will be going to help assess the severity of the situation, teach the local health clinic about how to ameliorate some of the worst cases with specially formulated milk and we hope to bring an empty car to bring the most urgent cases back to the hospital. I hope to explore the state of agriculture in the area, assess the availability of seed and see how CEFA could be of help. I will be glad to have Clarisse with me and I know, as hard as it will be to see starvation, it is a necessary part of my time and usefulness here.

The Importance of Earrings

It is a common practice here that within a week or two of giving birth to a baby girl, to pierce their ears. As babies are likely to pull out earrings and swallow them or rip holes through their ear lobes, pieces of string are tied through the hole until they are old enough for earrings. While the practice may be a result of the desire for adornment, it also serves the very functional purpose of identifying the sex of the child. Any child without their ears pierced is automatically a boy. Because of head lice and other fun critters, it is common practice for girls and boys to shave their heads, so without earrings and the pre-pubescent lack of breasts, it is hard to know who is who.

Enter my visitor from North America, an agriculture missionary in Cameroon. She just arrived in Cameroon last month and is spending two weeks with us in Gamboula to get her agricultural bearings and to glean ideas from Roy and me. She is very tall, has medium length hair, and is not, currently, wearing earrings. So during her first two days here she has caused quite a stir, as she and I have been wandering around in the gardens, in our sneakers and pants. Most people are convinced she is a man with inappropriately long hair, and when I correct them and inform them she is in fact a woman, the first question they ask is, “why aren’t her ears pierced?”

As few topics of conversation are taboo here, particularly among family members, we discussed and laughed over her dilemma while having lunch with Clarisse and Nadege. The moral of the story is, if you are coming to Central Africa and you plan on wearing pants, be sure your ears are pierced, or else you will be the topic of some very interesting, if not embarrassing, conversations.

An Update on Thankfulness

I have had the privilege of working with Mme. Thankful (the lady from an earlier post) this past week. She has been a joy to work with and even though she only speaks French, I have been making do with my kindergarten level language abilities to discover how truly thankful she is.

First, however, I must make a correction to what I wrote in an earlier post. Mme. Thankful is a Cameroonian woman who was married to a Senegalese Muslim, so she was also a practicing Muslim. Her sister died in childbirth 18 months ago, leaving behind a baby daughter with a serious breathing abnormality that resulted in Mme. Thankful taking the two month old to a major hospital in Yaoundé, Cameroon. During a two week stay at the hospital the bill amounted to more than 200.000 cfa (more than $400 USD, 5 times the average monthly salary). At the end of her two week stay the family’s money had run out and she was counseled to take the baby home and let her die. It was at this time that a family member of Mme. Thankful, who lived across the border from us in Cameroon, told her about the Gamboula Hospital. So Mme. Thankful brought her daughter, Happiness (no I am not making up the name) to our hospital where she was treated for three months. At the end of her stay she was overwhelmed with the generosity of Clarisse, the nutrition garden, the missionaries and staff, thus her desire to come back to Gamboula to help us. As a result of her stay here she became a Christian, and is about the most thankful mother I have ever witnessed. She adores her adopted baby and responds to her every cry.

She has been working in the garden all week and despite nearly stepping on a snake the other day, she has persevered and has left us with a tremendous gift to pass on to those needing the garden in the future. Mme. Thankful is also a seamstress and has been sewing for me in the afternoons. My brother, Remy, gave Clarisse and I some beautiful fabric as a souvenir of our visit to the diamond mine last week and Mme. Thankful has transformed it into a beautiful dress that I wore to church this morning. I have never received so many compliments before. While I wear pants and t-shirts all week it is fun to ‘dress-up’ on Sundays and be a little girlie. I will have to wear it one Sunday in Victoria.

The Diplomat

Last summer I spent a week in the capital, Bangui, working with Roy and Benoit to establish a National Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). The NGO, Centre for Experimentation and Formation in Agriculture (CEFA), will follow through with the original agroforestry work started by Roy ten years ago. CEFA will be working at three sites: an experimentation farm which will conduct small-scale trials in order to improve staple crop, vegetable and animal production in the region, a demonstration farm where successes from the experiment farm are demonstrated for the general public to visit, and, of course, the nutrition garden, whose program continues as usual, but now under the umbrella of CEFA. I have been working with Roy since the summer to establish the NGO’s statutes and regulations as well as work on funding proposals and strategy papers for how CEFA will go about its work of village extension and training. Since arriving in Gamboula I have been working on making some of our ideas operational, looking at staff needs and planning the year’s activities. We will be having our first board meeting on April 7 for which there is a lot to prepare and is one of the primary reasons for my visit.

As a board member I have also had to respond to official requests for help and liaise with the community. The other day CEFA received a letter from the Mayor’s office requesting that we pay a particular tax, but of course the request made no sense to me. Benoit and I drove down to the Mayor’s office after I got all dressed up in my most diplomatic office to discuss the tax. It was a very good meeting and I realized that this is the type of work I most love doing. Not that discussing and negotiating taxes is particularly fun, but I do like meeting with community officials and I think developing relationships is a large part of what we doing here. The government here is extremely corrupt, so working with officials is not always pleasant. Instead of fighting corruption, missionaries and NGOs have had a tendency to give in to it, which does not make changing the system any easier.

After visiting the Mayor’s office we drove over to the Catholic mission. We were looking for the Priest, but, as he was not in town, we were greeted by a wonderful Sister who invited us in for a cold drink. I thought, when she said cold drink, she meant water, but instead, she pulled out a large bottle that looked awfully like beer. She put two large glasses in front of us and proceeded to pour each of us a large glass of beer. Now, many of you know that I am not partial to beer, having never really gotten past the first sip. But I am also a hospitarian. By hospitarian I mean to say that I will eat, or at least try, anything that is served to me. So, bottoms up, I downed that beer, along with a banana for good measure and laughed to myself about the oddity of the situation. Here I was, in a nun’s house, drinking beer with my Central African boss who, as a Baptist, is not supposed to drink alcohol. I guess Benoit is as much a hospitarian as I am.

Adoption

I am adopted. I am the thirteenth child of Madelaine and Francois Nguebe, better known as Mama and Papa. I was visiting Mama the other day with a young missionary kid and introduced him to my mom. He gave us the most confused look. “But, but, but...” he said, looking at us, “that’s not true”. I suppose, in the flesh, it does look a bit impossible, with me a snow white Caucasian and the Nguebe’s as black as any Central African. But in spirit, I have become an Nguebe, the thirteenth, if somewhat pampered, child. As an adopted child I admit to having special privileges. When I first entered the family, five years ago now, I was chastened for sitting on a mat on the ground when a perfectly suitable chair had been hauled out of the house specifically for me to sit in. It used to be a big deal when I arrived in the afternoon to sit and visit, more along the lines of the patron coming to your house. Over the years though, the bond of adoption has strengthened. While I have yet to do dishes or make gozo for the family meal (the cassava staple), there being plenty of children and spare wives to do these tasks, likely better than me, I am slowly losing my place of privilege. While you may not think this worth rejoicing over, it is something I have sought after from the beginning. No more chairs of honour or friends addressing me as “Madame Darren”. Now, when I arrive, I am greeted with the same titles of respect that any other Nguebe would use for each other. I am “Angela”, “Mama”, “Aunty”, “my daughter” or “my sister” as the case allows. I have never been happier.

Five years since my adoption, I am sitting on a couch with Remy to my right and Clarisse across from me, watching French TV in the bar of GEM Diamonds-Likaya, an hour and a half from Berberati. Clarisse and I came to Berberati on vacation, two nights only, but it is a stretch given Clarisse’s responsibilities at the hospital and the kids-nieces, nephews and grandchild-we left crying at home on our way here. After spending the night at our sister Elise’s house, Remy, the firstborn and family patriarch came to pick us up this morning to take us to this Central African bush paradise.

Perhaps paradise is too strong a word, but since it closed operations it has become a very tranquil place to visit. It has more amenities than you could find anywhere in Berberati, the second largest city in the country. No outhouses in Likaya, just flush toilets, hot water showers, air conditioning and a second story bar overlooking the river. C’est tres bien!

It is hard, if not impossible to characterize a family, let alone a country. As far as the Nguebe’s are concerned, they are a Central African family that has been transformed by a living God. They are far from perfect. Between the twelve brothers and sisters (six of each sex) you can find any number of faults, but no more so than you would find amongst my dad’s own eleven siblings. However you break it down though, there exists something different among them. I have met them all and, while I know some better than others, generosity and perseverance are common characteristics.

In Memorium

A good friend died last night. Kylee died after giving birth to a
beautiful baby and my heart goes out to her family and friends around
the world. I have few words to express how I feel right now. I do feel
vulnerable. Our lives are so fragile. But we shouldn't protect
ourselves in a bubble, rather we should seize each moment and live
with the joy of being alive.

I will miss you Kylee.

Regarding the Uncelebrated Holiday....

I take it back, I did celebrate, I had to, I swear. We recieved a summons to the party at the residence of the sous-prefet (he is like the boss of several mayors in a district). When I say we, I mean Roy and Aleta as representativs of the agrilcuture work here. However, they have important visitors so they could not go. I went looking for the Central African head of the program, Benoit, but he had conveniently slipped away to his garden, not being one to celebrate the holiday either. So that left me. I figured it was duty to go, so I got dressed up in my finest, took the keys to the truck and headed to the party. On the way, I ran into Nadege and coaxed her into going with me. She got all fancied up and we sat amongst 60 or so other invitees to the party. Everyone else in attendance was either a local organzier of the President's political party, moslty women, or funcitonaries of the local government, from the mayor, the military, police, etc. We ate, we drank (pineapple pop for us, beer for everyone else) and took our leave after about 2 hours.

While it wasn't exactly fun, it wasn't torture either. I had a great time talking with Nadege and we laughed at the various people around us. I didn't have to pledge allegiance to CAR or anything like that but I didn't get to give any speeches either.

An uncelebrated holiday

Today is a holiday in CAR but I am not celebrating. Today marks the 2003 anniversary of the current president coming to power through a somewhat bloody coup d’etat. Not something I would think of celebrating myself. Condemn, yes. Celebrate, no. So while everyone else is downtown watching the parade and worried that if they don’t show up they will be considered as an opponent to the current regime, I am taking my chances at home. Besides, I can’t see much that the current regime has accomplished since seizing power in 2003, unless you count five rebellions, astonishingly high rates of malnutrition and displaced people as accomplishments.

On the upside, my surrogate family is well and sends their greetings. The children in school this year are doing well and Clarisse’s youngest has started junior high school. She walks nearly 8 kilometres a day going to and from school but she is excelling and for that I am grateful. The nutrition garden is living up to its name, helping hundreds over the past year alone and is full of green leafy vegetables at present. Yesterday I helped dig holes for planting tropical yam: A task made easier by a sudden burst of rain, marking the coming of the rainy season.

Friday I hope to make it to Berberati to visit the other half of my surrogate family and spend some time with Clarisse. The following week I will be hosting a former ECHO intern who will be spending two weeks with me to learn about grafting and nursery management in the Central African context before she goes to spend two years in Cameroon doing something similar to the agroforestry work we have been doing here. I am looking forward to her arrival as I love training and am excited that Richard, the grafter I trained several years back, will be able to take a training role as well. His grafting has come along well and he has done some interesting experiments.

Paying a debt of gratitude

I arrived in Gamboula on Monday night, after spending Sunday in Yaounde resting after a long two weeks in Uganda and Kenya. Translating is difficult and tiring, but it was rewarding to be able to open up a new side of Africa, the Anglophone side, to Benoit. I hope it assists him in the on-going work in CAR and gives him hope for what the future of his country could be. It was fun to see his reaction at seeing new people groups, such as the Masai, learning that they don’t steal from each other and experiencing their generosity. It was moving to see Benoit’s interaction with former displaced people in Uganda; people who had lived in Internal Displacement (IDP) camps for twenty years as a result of the rebellion of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA have been terrorizing communities in CAR and fresh attacks occurred last week in the South East. Benoit asked them to go get him and take him home, to Uganda, as we don’t want him in CAR. Needless to say, they don’t want him back either.

On driving up the Gamboula road, I was greeted by Nadege, one of my sister’s and supervisor of the nutrition garden. She had been waiting for us by the side of the road. I jumped out the car and progressed on foot towards Clarisse’s house. As we got near to her house, she saw us in the distance, my white skin a beacon that I had arrived. She ran towards us, something rather unbecoming of an African mother, but she abandoned all sense of culture and just ran towards me, giving me a big hug. I knew then, what i have known for a long time, that this will always be a home of mine, no matter where in the world Darren and I find ourselves, we will always be welcome here.

I spent the morning with Nadege in the nutrition garden, weeding and talking and sharing stories. I have been trying to capture some of these stories on video and plan on sharing them with you via YouTube when I return to a high speed internet connection. One story is about a woman from Kentzou. She was a refugee from the banditry in CAR, married to a Fulani man, but not Fulani herself. Her child was terrible malnourished and sick and with the little money they had they took the child all the way to the hospital in Yaounde, Cameroon. After spending a lot of money they returned with their child to Kentzou worse off than before. Soon after, they arrived at the Gamboula hospital with little hope that the child would survive. However, the child did survive, and is now thriving thanks to both the medical and nutritional care she received in Gamboula. The mother was especially thankful for the nutrition garden, exclaiming every day over the vegetables, fruits and starches she was given free to help in her child’s recovery. They went home after three months and the woman continued to practice what she learned in the nutrition garden.

This mother recently came to visit Nadege and explained that she wanted to pay back her debt of gratitude to the nutrition garden. She gave Nadege some money to have a small area in the nutrition garden cleared to prepare a place to plant. The mother promised to come back with seeds and planting material to plant in this cleared space, in the hopes that her ‘donation’ to the garden would, in turn, help others who found themselves in the same position as herself: hopeless, hungry and destitute.

Surprise

I have never seen Benoit so excited as I have this week. From being 'decorated' by Masai women, a ceremony by which they present you with gifts of beadwork jewelry, to seeing herds of zebra, giraffe and wildebeest along side the car, to hearing that Masai do not steal from one another and that you can leave your house unlocked during the day. It was one surprise after another for him and I think he will have stories to tell for years to come.

More importantly, we met many community initiatives working to bring about food security. They were all run by Africans for Africans and I think this was very good for Benoit to see. He saw how the challenges here are not much different from the challenges in CAR, and yet here Kenyans are making a difference, finding local solutions to local problems. I think this will change how our project is working in CAR for the better and will give us lots to talk and think about over the next month.

When I get settled in Gamboula I will start posting up a storm.

Quick Update from Kenya

I have found time to write a brief note after returning from two days out visiting projects with the Masai near the Ngong Hills. Benoit was eager to learn about their culture and their struggles with drought and floods that had wiped out more than 80% of their cattle. As we drove down the road we could see skeletons of animals long dead from the drought. I drank a lot of goat's milk tea and ate my share of roasted goat, along with Benoit's help. We learned a lot from the projects we visited and have a lot more to think about now for our own project, CEFA, back in CAR.

We are heading out to Narok tomorrow, and will be back in Nairobi for two more nights after that. I have not had an inch of excercise in weeks but look forward to getting into the garden once I reach Gamboula.

From the road,
Angela

Uganda, February 21-27, 2010

“When I get older I will be stronger, they’ll call me freedom just like a wavin’ flag”. K’naan said it and I felt it in Uganda. While poverty still has a hold in Uganda, I saw hope for a day free from poverty, free from reliance on IDP* camps and foreign assistance. Ugandan’s are a proud and independent people and from all of the projects I visited I was overwhelmed by the deep belief of Ugandan’s that they know the answers to their own problems, they have the solutions and many of the resources from within their own communities, and the assistance they require and are asking for is to complement this.

I was privileged to visit a grain amaranth growing project in Eastern Uganda called Garner Amaranth. They were growing and promoting a high quality grain amaranth for use as a nutritional food supplement which is particularly beneficial for people suffering from HIV/AIDS. For those unfamiliar with amaranth, it is in the same family as ‘pig weed’, a nasty weed in North America. Its seeds are slightly smaller than sesame but have a very high protein quality and can be ground into flour or popped, like popcorn, but much smaller, making it very digestible. We were treated to a tasty meal by Garner, which, not surprisingly, incorporated amaranth into every dish. I am not sure if it was the power of suggestion or not, but I woke up feeling healthy and strong the next morning!

From there we drove north to the Teso region of Uganda, an area affected by the rebel army of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). As late as 2003, the area had been attacked by the LRA and as a result thousands of people had been living in IDP camps; makeshift towns that housed more people than is healthy, disrupting culture, livelihoods and relationships. Now, fortunately for Uganda and unfortunately for the Central African Republic, Sudan and Congo, the LRA has been kicked out of Uganda and are operating in the bush on the shared borders of CAR, Sudan and Congo. Just last week, LRA soldiers had attacked a small town in CAR capturing 30 people who had gathered for shelter at the local Catholic church. Benoit, my Central African colleague, was most upset and asked Uganda to come and get him and see he can face justice. I am pretty sure Uganda does not want him back.

We had a chance to visit farming cooperatives and learn about the way they are organized and work together. It was inspiring and I know Benoit learned a lot that he will take back to CAR. While our context in CAR is different from that in Uganda, I think it was inspiring for Benoit to see fellow Africans, with similar food and agriculture challenges solving their own problems in an organized and, in many times, profitable way. We will have a lot to discuss when we get back to CAR as far as project organization and program planning go.

This trip has been valuable for Benoit to see his African brothers and sisters taking steps towards their own freedom in ways that can be achieved in CAR as well. With time, they will be singing freedom from poverty in CAR too.


This is Benoit seeing sunflower, an oil crop, for the first time. He is very interested!

On our way to Teso

This is just a quick note to let you know that things are going well
here in Uganda. We are on the road and I happened to find a free
wireless connection to quickly post this note. I have a fabulous team
and translating is going well. Benoit knows more English than he lets
on! We had rain all day yesterday which is badly needed here and
cooled things off nicely for our first day out. Though we were all
running on very little sleep yesterday, today we are refreshed after a
good nights sleep and plenty of grain amaranth in our lunch yesterday.
It was definitely a power lunch.

Okay, more soon from the road.
Angela