Technical Immersion Part 1 – A Nice Hotel and a Tragic Reminder

So, on Monday of last week, our training group split up into groups and fanned out across the country, visiting different towns and organizations on our “technical immersions”.  My group of six people headed south to Kalisizo (my future site) for the water and sanitation immersion, where we met up with Colin, a volunteer who is a couple weeks away from the end of his service, and Max, one of my counterparts who manages the brick business that I talked about a few weeks ago.  This time, instead of taking one of the small minibus taxis (also called “matatus”), we rode on a coaster, which is a slightly larger minibus where there are actually defined, individual seats, so they don’t try to cram quite so many people in each row.  On the way, I was sitting next to a really nice artist who makes small greeting card type things out of pieces of paper and other stuff he finds laying around on the streets (so they’re very environmentally friendly!).  Anyway, they were really good, and he gave me a couple samples, so I might try to use those at some point.

Getting back to the story, we got into town a little after noon, and Colin took us to the hotel where we would be staying (which was a fairly short walk from my future house, so I had conveniently packed a couple little things to drop off there).  This hotel, called Nabisere Guest House, was outrageously nice…I’m talking hot showers, flush toilets, comfortable beds, and a TV in the room (the TV only got two channels, a soccer channel and some other channel with random shows, but still, it’s a TV)!  In other words, if you want to come visit, you wouldn’t even have to take a bucket bath in my bathing room or go to the bathroom in my pit latrine (unless you’re just really itching to try that stuff).  Anyway, on Monday, we just kind of hung out, I showed the group around town a bit, and we had dinner at the hotel.  Tuesday, however, was a pretty full day.  We left the hotel around 9 am in a private minivan (still a tight fit with our group of 6, Colin, his counterpart, and the driver) to head south for about 45 minutes, and then we turned left onto a dirt road, which took us the whole way to Lake Victoria, after another hour or so of driving.  Along the way, we stopped at two schools, because Colin, who is also a Master’s International student, was doing water and sanitation surveys at a bunch of different schools for his research.

Sign at the entrance to the burial ground

About 15 or 20 minutes before reaching the lake, we also stopped at a burial site of over 2,800 victims of the Rwandan genocide, which was pretty intense.  The small site wasn’t quite completed yet (it will eventually have some educational info on signs around the site), so we could go in and walk around for free.  Colin and his counterpart told us the story of how those bodies got there.  Apparently, after a mass killing in Rwanda, the bodies were dumped into a river that flows from Rwanda, through Tanzania, and into Lake Victoria at the southern end of Uganda.  The bodies floated the whole way to the lake, where some Ugandans saw them, took the bodies out, and brought them to this burial site on top of a hill nearby.  Admittedly, I still don’t know a whole lot about the Rwandan genocide, but, obviously, any instance of mass killing is a horrendous tragedy, and I don’t think anything I can say would do any sort of justice to the experience of being in that place and just feeling the sense of sadness and loss.  Thinking about it now, I’m finding my thoughts return to the Holocaust Museum that my parents and I went to in St. Petersburg, Florida, right before they brought me back to PA for the summer.  Of course, this memorial was not nearly as elaborate as the Holocaust Museum, but the general feeling and somber weight of the place is similar.  And of course, this type of thing always brings me back to those perpetual questions that I am never able to answer…How can we do this to one another?  How can we treat other human beings with such callous disregard for compassion, humanity, or even life itself?  How is it possible for one group of people to feel so far removed from another group of people that they are able to take away the lives of millions of men, women, and children?  And maybe the most frightening question of all...What would I have done if I were placed somewhere in one of those situations?  None of us can really know until we’re actually there…Would I go along with the crowd?  Would I stand up and fight?  Would I try to find some way to just get myself out of there?  I would like to think that, even in the face of tremendous personal danger, I would love others enough to somehow stand up for their right to live, but I might be so scared at the time that I would be completely focused on self-preservation.

Part of the burial ground

Not too long ago, I finished reading a book called Waiting for God, which is a collection of essays and letters by the 20^th century philosopher Simone Weil.  She describes true love for our neighbor as one of the most difficult, and yet one of the simplest, things we can do.  In the face of tremendous suffering and affliction, “the love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’  It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.”  In other words, if I understand what Weil is saying, nothing about me places any more importance on my own survival than on the survival of another, so the true response of love would be one that does not focus on my own self-preservation, but on the humanity of the person who is suffering.  And this person is not just a member of some group that is being persecuted.  This person is an individual, with his or her own life, with a family, with friends, with a home.  This is a person who thinks, feels, and loves, just like I do.  Even in situations not as extreme as the ones that have brought about this line of thought, I should never reduce an individual to the point where he or she only becomes an opportunity for me to do something good, for me to feel like I’m being a good person.

A memorial plaque, saying that 2,827 people are buried at the site

In a different essay, Weil writes, “God is not present, even if we invoke him, where the afflicted are merely regarded as an occasion for doing good.”  I know I have fallen into this trap myself.  Any time I passed by someone on the street in Tampa asking for money, thinking to myself, “Oh, I just don’t have the time to stop and talk right now.  I’m just too busy with school, with research, with everything.  I promise, the next time I see someone, I’ll stop and talk for a minute or two,” I was seeing that person as an object, merely as a receiver for the kind word that I might say, and not as someone who truly matters, just as much as I do.  If I would be able to see each person in that way, I think I’d realize that, while I might have the opportunity to talk to 3 or 4 people in this “group” each day, I might never have the opportunity to talk to that specific individual again, and that might be a loss that is not recoverable.  Talking to one person instead of another on the street might not seem the make that much of a difference to me, but, for the person who is left out, it might be the last straw in a long succession of disappointments and rejections.  Or, for the person who does have a conversation, it might make all the difference, bringing a glimmer of hope into his or her life.  Even when I think I’m doing good, I need to check myself, asking if I’m doing what I’m doing because I think it makes me a good person, or because I truly care about the people around me, enough to focus on their lives, their feelings, their pain, more than on mine.  And that includes anything I do over here in Uganda.  I can see how it might be very easy to get a bit cynical over the next two years, and to become frustrated with certain things about Uganda, foreign aid, and development work in general (and there might be future posts where these topics are explored).  But that frustration should never lead us to stop trying to find a better way, to stop searching for a better world.  As long as one person still suffers from a preventable disease, does not have enough food, or remains in a perpetual cycle of poverty, this work can never be done, because that person has just as much value as I do, a value that can’t be quantified in any sort of cost-benefit analysis.  Every life is precious.  Maybe I can modify a famous quote from Mother Teresa to say this concisely…Each individual person may feel like only a small drop in a vast ocean, but, without any one of those drops, the ocean would be significantly less.

A view of Lake Victoria (way off in the distance) from the burial ground

Okay, so that was quite a tangent.  I had planned on talking about all of technical immersion in this post, but we’re getting pretty long, so I’ll split it up and talk about the rest of it in a few days.  I’ll be very busy over the next few days, because we have our “language proficiency interviews” on Thursday and Friday, which is basically an oral test that can last up to half an hour (if we’re good) to see how well we know the language.  Based on how well we do, we’re placed at a certain proficiency level.  There are three big categories, novice, intermediate, and advanced, and then three sub-levels within each big category, low, mid, and high.  To pass, we need to achieve an “intermediate low” level.  We’ll see how that goes…