Booty and the Bomb: Part #1

“You look nice and fat”

Interesting times at the YOFAFO Chalet. Thirteen volunteers been and gone, my butt grew to a more acceptable size, there’s been a terrorist threat, Doreen washed my hair, Beth (18 months) has learnt to ask if she can drive the car, and there are 30,000 refugees just over the border in South Sudan who don’t have any water.

I am currently sitting in a hotel room in Kampala, checking out the African version of Big Brother. Biggest brotherist difference seems to be the allowance of drinking and smoking in the house. My attention span for that lasted about five minutes, at which point I flicked the channel to find a documentary about Africans teaching some white guy to use a bow and arrow. Interestingly, the guard at the house I live in has a bow and arrow. I thought he had killed someone with it the other day. It was night time and we heard a flurry of thumping and banging and came running out to try and see the robber. Turns out the guard had picked up a giant log and was bashing a snake! Erin was very happy it didn’t slither into her room. Jo was giggling hysterically and a little too excitedly (he killed a lizard recently. But we can't really blame him, because whenever he refuses to wear pants, Doreen tells him a lizard his going to eat his "pushu". I don't think I need to translate. This will also explain why Beth has a fear of frogs...)

So do you want to hear about the terrorists or my backside first? Since this is a blog and I can't actually hear your response, I'll make the call this time.

I’ll stick to wear priorities lie in Uganda.

The downside to putting on weight as a female, is Westerners give more respect to women who look malnourished. Even if men don’t find it instinctively more attractive, and if magazines say they want to support a healthier size… they do not. Waifishness has become a symbol of grace, beauty and brains. If you are skinny then you must be working hard, you must have a sense of self control, and self respect. Confusion of internal and external perceptions are things we all struggle with.

In Uganda, if you are skinny, you are just scrawny. It’s a symbol of poverty and illness. How will you carry the children, the jerry cans of water, the matooke on your head with a bottom that size?!

Dickson says my arms look “fatter” and Valence says I am looking “healthy”. So even if my weight gain is a result of bloating and fatigue in response to my body not being able to process the food it is trying to make sense of, somehow it is more attractive. Normally, I would either go into a jogging frenzy or hide in my room for a couple of days after being told “you look healthy” or “you are looking nice and fat”. Because at home, this is supposedly literally translated to “you’ve gotten fat and lazy”. Yes, I understand this warped interpretation of a compliment may in fact just be my own screwed-up-body-issue-sense-media-influenced-disordered-view-of-myself. But I don’t think I’m alone.

I may have felt a twang of illness at these comments, and perhaps text a “frown face” or two to a friend. But there came a point when I was relieved for the added padding. I am still undecided on whether the extra attention from Ugandan men (ie. “Whoah!”, “Madame, madame, I love you, you are beautiful”, “Madame, pllleaaasee, give me your number”, “Wooooowwwww”, “Madame, what is your name. Please, I love you. Where are you going? Let me come with you”) is such a good thing. But as I have recently discovered, there’s no way you can dance properly in Uganda with a bony bum. (**NOTE: This goes for men too.)

It began with the arrival of 13 volunteers from the United States. The group of girls, aged between 19 and 22, were led by university lecturer Tiffany Hammond Christian. Tiffany first met Valence about five years ago. He had been invited to visit the United States by a university professor and was due to speak at the Appachalian State University. Tiffany was lecturing in development, saw Valence’s name on the list of available invited speakers and agreed to have him present to her class. When the class was finished and Valence left the room, Tiffany started to continue the next part of her lecture. But her class was silent. And then hands went up in the air.

“We want to go,” the students said.

“Go where??,” asked a baffled Tiffany.

“We want to go where he is going. We want to go to Africa.”

Tiffany made her first trip to Africa with 10 students in tow, no one to meet her at the airport (the group was going on safari before they were going to meet with YOFAFO) and no idea if the driver she had wired money to was even going to pick them up. She was as nervous and scared as any other traveller arriving at a very foreign airport for the first time. Except she was also answerable to a university, and the parents of 10 young people. Brave move.

Tiffany brings bubbles and glitter paint and becomes the star attraction at Kitoola.

In 2012, Tiffany brought her fifth group to Uganda. Each year, the group of students has spent time working with YOFAFO on a project in the village of Kitoola, connected with the community, and also found time to take in Uganda’s “Africa condensed” wildlife and scenery. White water rafting, hand drum lessons, horse riding in the rainforest, giraffe spotting, booty shaking and chimpanzee tracking.

They built the foundations of a four-room classroom block, and built on the foundations Tiffany has set for a long-term relationship with the community of Kitoola. And I was privileged enough to be a small part of their experience.***

It was challenging to begin with. So often our images of volunteering in Africa are of white girls in their 20s, hugging black children. This is not as easy as it looks! It wasn’t until I spent the day with the group, on their first day of brick laying, that I realised I had not had the level of interaction with children in the community as most volunteers experience. I was completely overwhelmed. And feeling unwell did not help the experience. There were so many children, and they were so desperate to engage. They kept jumping right in front of the camera lens, so I couldn’t actually take a photo of anything. As I tried to capture the volunteers in action, all I had was a blur of hands reaching and waving at me. Their giant smiles even became angry as they fought for a position in front of the camera, scolding each other and slapping each other’s hands away. No matter how many times I yelled “Extend! Extend! Daio!” (move back), they smothered me. They wanted to see the photo I took, and groped at my phone, losing the pictures as they squeezed the touch-screen. Even when I sat down, they crowded around me, waiting for some kind of performance. “You bring for me what?”. I had no crayons. No face paint. Just a pair of blue eyes, staring back at a still frame of a field of big brown eyes. I tried to make the photo in front of me fade away, as nausea set in and my palms became sweaty.

The fight to have your photo taken is not easy!

 And then I heard her bright voice beside me: “Are you sick?”

Mutesi Robinah

She looked about as close to a pixie as you could find in a human being.

“Yes, I’m not feeling very well.”

She shooed the other children away, telling them I was sick.

Her name was Mutesi Robinah. She wrote her name in my red journal.

“Do you have grandmothers? There is mine over there. And that one there is my mother, and that one there is my sister. Sister, come here! She is shy, she won’t come”

Her grandmother was small and shining in a golden yellow traditional dress, and her mother was laughing with the other women, cooking our lunch.

“What is your favourite colour?”

When I came back a week later, the surprise in her voice couldn’t cover up her smile, which looked like she had been expecting me to arrive that very moment.

“You are back.”

She was tiny and her feet were bare, her school dress too big. When the rest of the children were playing soccer during a match between the teachers and volunteers, and the students, she lay down to rest. When she wasn’t resting, she was by my side. One hand held mine, and she insisted on carrying my 1.5 litre bottle of water on her head for me. She showed me how she could dance a little, at the same time as carrying it. And just let an amused smile creep from her mouth when I tried to do the same.

 

I noticed her friend and her looked very similar. I asked if they were sisters.

“We are twins.”

In fact the girls were triplets, but the third girl had died. Their mother couldn’t afford shoes for them, or school fees. But Valence is allowing the girls to attend school for free, because they are such good students and because their mother and grandmother are YOFAFO community leaders. The girls are on his list of children needing child sponsorship.

Three of the girls from Tiffany’s group are going to sponsor a child. I am going to sponsor Robinah.

When there are so many vulnerable children in the world, the advertisements about child sponsorship start to lose their impact. We become overwhelmed at how much needs to be done, how many people need help. We wonder if international development has outgrown child sponsorship programs, and know something more drastic needs to be done to address human rights and wealth inequalities. But in the meantime, Roinah still needs to go to school. And when you look at Valence and see how much difference one sponsorship can make for a community, and see the excitement on Robinah’s face at the prospect of owning a pen that works so she can do her school work, it’s a little easier to see the truth in the power of small things.

I promised Robinah I would go back to visit her before I leave, and bring her, her sister and her friend a pen. So if I haven’t written about going back to visit her in the next fortnight, please write me an email and hold me to it. *****

Now, back to bottoms. My friend Erin Burn, a girl from the UK who has been volunteering in Uganda for four months and is developing a health promotion program for YOFAFO, has been attracting a bit of attention around Lugazi for her rear-end. As it has grown steadily rounder on Doreen’s cooking, and her love for Rolex’s (prounced like Roll-eggs. Quite literally, it is fried egg rolled up in a chapatti), Erin has been hearing the words: “Kabina Kanene!”.

It means “big bum”, and is a compliment. **NOTE: Erin's bum is NOT big. Just more grabbable than when she arrived.

I am still not Ugandanised enough to render myself ready to hear those words, but I was grateful for some extra cushioning on my last visit to Kitoola. It was Tiffany’s group’s last day in the village, and it was the evening following the teachers vs. students soccer tournament. I had learnt how to say “I don’t eat meat” so I didn’t have to chew down on a goat the community had especially killed and roasted for us, and was ready for the disapproving looks. I received them, but had my moment to make up for it….

I cannot explain to you how these bottoms shake. Mine does a pretty good job, but I have at least taken some dance classes in my life... and it still doesn't move the way it should! In this part of Uganda, it is something children must know from birth. I have seen girls as young as three or four getting their wriggle on. There are variations on the move and beat, but it basically involves pretending you are a duck, sticking your bum out and shaking the water off your back. All the while keeping perfect posture. And even if your bum is portly enough, everyone must have a special skirt thing, or a jumper tied around their waist to accentuate the visual impact of the booty-shaking. Generally, the women do the shaking, and the men have some other moves or are performing hand percussion. The hand drumming also seems to come freakishly naturally to people here. At lunch times, you won’t find children in a computer room or playing cricket. If they are not skipping, resting, running with a bicycle wheel or playing soccer, they are playing the drums. And when I say drums, I mean there are six children standing around playing plastic bins. As they get going, even the teachers ditch their yard duty and start leading a small schoolyard festival – the children in stitches of laughter as Mr So-and-so starts shaking it with Mrs So-and-so. And the dancing and drumming are never without vocal interjections which sound something like a cross between the Aussie “Coo-eee!”, a wolf whistle, and that Indian call done when one opens their mouth, lets out a soprano note and repeatedly hits their mouth with their hand. It goes something like this:

“YOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!”

The school had organised special dance performances for us from the children (with the school principal giving the students the “yoyoyoyoyoyoooooo!” cheer during the dancing) , which was just amazing. But it wasn’t until after the goat (which I DID try… but spat out) that we were asked to join in.  I was privileged enough to have the school principal as my butt-shaking teacher.

The goat.

Now, no matter how many films I make in Uganda, no matter how many volunteers I recruit, no matter how much I fundraise for YOFAFO in the future, my greatest achievement has to be this one.

“You dance like a Ugandan”

*** In 2013, Tiffany will open up the opportunity to join her group trips to Uganda to all members of the community, not just students from her university. To find out more, visit www.facebook.com/youth4uganda

***** If anyone would like to sponsor a child through YOFAFO's child sponsorship program, please contact myself via this page, or Valence via info@yofafo.org