Trees, bicycles, and other things I really really should leave to the pros

My life now revolves completely around trees and how to grow them. When I spoke briefly with Gabi last night on Skype, she brought it to my attention how absolutely random this whole thing is: I came to Uganda to work with an HIV/AIDS organization and gain experience in public health work, and now the entirety of my existence is devoted to planting trees and starting up nurseries. The randomness of all this is further amplified by the fact that I am probably the most unqualified individual on the face of the planet to be running a tree project (I'm not sure what else to call it... but I'll have to think of a catchier name than “tree project” if I'm going to secure any grant funding!). I don't know a darn thing about planting or growing trees, not to mention grafting them, breeding them, transplanting them, and whatever else you're supposed to do with trees... ummm.... and here I am starting up a tree project with a group of people living in poverty with HIV/AIDS in rural Uganda! Random, right? Yes, but I love it.

Now, the more I think about it (i.e. the more I attempt to organize my so-called thoughts into coherent paragraphs for my grant proposal), the more I am coming to see that planting trees actually is public health work, believe it or not! To put it in a daisy-chain kind of way, trees = dependable source of fresh fruits, dependable source of fresh fruits = sustainable source of income and food security, sustainable source of income and food security = improved nutrition, improved nutrition = improved health and wellness, improved health and wellness = improved adherence to ART regime (due to increased ability to manage side effects) and reduced susceptibility to opportunistic infections, improved adherence to ART regime and reduced susceptibility to opportunistic infections = longer, healthier, better life with HIV/AIDS among the group members! Thus, trees = improved health and quality of life for people living with HIV/AIDS.

And here's another daisy-chain for you: trees = source of fruits/seedlings/wood to sell, source of fruits/seedlings/wood to sell = income generation, income generation = economic empowerment, economic empowerment = ability to make and enforce key personal decisions without the constraints of economic dependency and financial insecurity, ability to make and enforce key personal decisions without the constraints of economic dependency and financial insecurity = increased agency, increased agency = ability to choose and negotiate safe sexual practices, ability to choose and negotiate safe sexual practices = reduced spread of HIV among the group members' families and communities! Thus, trees = reduced spread of HIV.

I have a couple more sequences like that, but I think you get the picture. Trees are very powerful public health tools. But public health is a marathon, not a sprint. You should probably know that the work that we're doing really is comparable to planting a seed, because the trees themselves will take about two years to start producing fruits and thus all these desired beneficial health outcomes will take another few years to really materialize. Change is slow, and big change is even slower, so we're just starting with the trees and putting the process in motion. This is a little difficult for me to stomach sometimes because I can get impatient in the scope of it all, and I have to listen to Nancy's voice in my head: “Patience is not time, it's trust.” And I trust that we're doing a really good thing. A slow, frustrating, maddening, confusing, arduous thing, but a really good thing nonetheless. Thereby I love trees and I couldn't be more excited about, energized by, and immersed in my work. Yes, it is probably the most random work I've ever done (even more random than Food Avenue). But if all the randomness I've encountered over the course of my life has taught me anything, it's that random things always end up being the best things anyway!

Okay, so now that my life revolves around planting trees with Patrick and friends, I have to travel from town to the Budondo sub-county multiple times a week. After trekking out there first by motorcycle and then by matatu (the taxis/buses “licensed to hold 14 passengers” that carry like 25+ people), both of which involved a lot of waiting around on other people and being reliant upon other people to secure my transport, I decided I needed to get a more reliable and independent source of transport. Enter my new bicycle, which my friend Tristan and his host organization hooked me up with for a mere 140,000 shillings (which is about $73 but hopefully worth it!). When I first got it, I headed off in the direction of the FSD office and somehow ended up on a highway to the west of town, biking through the green, green hillside under the umbrella of the late-afternoon sun. I didn't quite know where I was or where I was going but I didn't care. And there was something very liberating about the simple physical act of pedaling the bike and feeling the wind in my face and bumping through the rough spots and potholes, all the while being completely free of thoughts and worries. As an added bonus, I didn't crash on the highway or get hit by a giant truck and die.

So with this thoroughly pleasant biking experience under my belt, yesterday I got all ambitious and decided that I would indeed bike myself to Budondo to talk trees with with Patrick and Kabi and whoever else was around. Now, the bus/motorcycle ride to Budondo is about 20 minutes or so and involves using motorized technology to tackle the series of very large hills. So between my gear-less bike and my muscle-less body, I had to walk up the hills and the same ride took me about an hour-and-a-half. An hour-and-a-half in the big hard sun being pelted by dust and dirt from the motorized vehicles zooming by and wishing with every ounce of my being that I had five gallons of ice water to pour over and into myself. It was pretty strenuous, but the scenery was straight-up breathtaking and every person I passed was totally amused by me (you don't see many women or mzungus riding bikes around here, thus a mzungu woman on a bike is quite the anomaly) and greeting/laughing with these amused strangers kept my mood light. And when I finally reached Budondo, I was the most exhausted and most proud I've been in a very long time.

After spending an awesome day in the field in which I witnessed the formation of an entire vegetable garden due to the hard work of Patrick, Kabi, Peter, a bunch of really awesome women whom I'm meeting again on Thursday, and a couple of awesome mzungus from this NGO called Development in Gardening, the time came to embark on the journey back to Jinja. Because I'd ran out of my half-filled water bottle about halfway through the ride there and was thereby miserably thirsty for the remainder of the day, I decided I would pull over to buy a bottle of water before I got going. So I bought a nice little bottle of water. And by nice little bottle of water I mean to say a nice little bottle of water and a litre of Fanta (because in my state of dire thirst I simply couldn't help myself, and I even paid the deposit on the bottle). The ride back took me yet another hour-and-a-half in the beating sun and it was all kind of one long, drawn-out blur of heat and exhaustion and eyes stinging from the dirt. At one point, after I'd been going for like an hour and felt like I was going to collapse, I remember seeing this massive steep hill ahead of me and the only word I could think of was “_____” (go ahead and use your imagination to figure out what that one was...). So I was pushing my bike up this hill thinking “___, ___, ___, but I made it! And I arrived home and took one look in the mirror and it was not a pretty sight: picture me, except soaked in sweat and with skin the color of terra cotta, with blisters all over my hands and a really really sore butt, and with an extra dark mustache where sweat has accumulated. Not one of my better looks. But needless to say, never has a cold bucket shower felt so so so so so good.

Well, tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn I'll be headed back out to Budondo, just me and my bike. I guess most days from now on will include three-plus hours out biking in the sun, burning off all those matooke calories and turning into a red-dirt-sweat-creature. All for the sake of the trees. Fun times DEFINITELY accomplished!

Bye for now! Sula bulungi! (Have a good evening!)

Help me pleeeease!

So I finally have a direction for my work here: promoting income generation (and thus economic empowerment, food security, and educational opportunity) through sustainable livelihoods approaches and asset-based community-driven development. This entails assessing the multiple components of people's livelihoods, identifying and mobilizing individual and community assets -- which probably won't be physical or financial assets but more in the vein of human, cultural, natural, and social capital -- and channeling collective action to stimulate positive social and economic benefits for all the individuals involved (as well as the community at large).

I think this essentially amounts to being a community organizer for poor rural people. Unfortunately, I know very very little about A.) sustainable livelihoods B.) rural poverty reduction or C.) community organizing.
Oh, and because collective action is always more productive than what an individual (especially a resource-strapped individual) can achieve alone -- and I'm assuming this principle extends to income generation and community development -- I'm also exploring the possibilities of forming/joining a cooperative, something else about which I know nothing about but I am definitely interested in learning more!

So this is an open call to anyone and everyone who knows even the tiniest bit or has even the most limited experience in co-ops, small-scale agriculture, small business development, or community organizing. I want to hear all your advice, stories, lessons learned, and crazy ideas. Seriously, I know you're brilliant people, please help me out here! I'm begging you and you would be an unbelievable help to my work.

Leave a comment or drop me an e-mail at heidi.tenpas@gmail.com (which is, by the way, my new Uganda e-mail address because apparently Heidimail has an adverse reaction to Ugandan computers). I can't promise you I'll reply, because 85% of the time the internet fails when I'm in the process of using it, but just know in your heart of hearts that you are helping me out like nobody's business and who knows maybe one day I'll give you a "personal favor" in return (just kidding). Also you all need to get skype because it's the coolest thing on the planet and, strangely enough, functions way better than the internet. Yeah the internet has biiiig issues which is why I haven't posted pictures yet. But stay tuned they're on their way!

Thanks a ton xoxo
Haha I should get back to work -- yeah I'm sneaking a post on the blog at work. Which I think is okay because I actually don't have anything to do until Thursday when the real fun begins. So right now I will either go 1.) take 4 pills each out of hundreds upon hundreds of containers of ARVs or 2.) play with really adorable kids in the childcare center. I think I choose #2, though counting drugs all day is quite fun. Alrighty goodbye for now!

Take a thousand different feelings, put them in a blender for five minutes, and that's about how I feel right now!

So since I can't compose my own words to encompass my thoughts, I'll steal some of Michael Franti's: "It seems like everywhere I go, the more I see the less I know." I never really got that line (what? see more, know less? huh?) but now it pretty much sums up my mental state as I take in all the absolutely incomprehensible sights around me. Every day I go somewhere different, meet new people, encounter new realities, and every new experience just diminishes my sense of order and cohesion and "knowledge." It's not a good thing or a bad thing, just a strange thing, because I'm used to being able to comprehend and interpret the sensory input around me and draw some marginally legitimate conclusions from it, but I pretty much gave that all up my first night here! I've completely let go of the need to interpret or find cohesion in the rampant contradictions. Instead I'm just taking it all in, moment by moment, and accepting that I know nothing.

Yes indeed I feel like I know absolutely nothing these days, which makes it that much harder to try to identify a specific need in my "community" (which is not one specific place or one specific group of people as far as I can tell) and design a participatory, sustainable project to help people empower themselves towards better lives. That's what I'm supposed to be doing (key word: supposed), but I'm having trouble getting anywhere close. Because I know absolutely 100% nothing. Haha, at least I have a blank slate to work with!!

On a completely unrelated note, today I worked all day in the children's care center at TASO (for children in the pediatric ART program and the children of TASO clients) and witnessed something I just wanted to share: All through day, amidst the chaotic atmosphere of boisterous kids and fussy babies and tired mamas and busy TASO staff, a woman is coming and going with a tiny tiny baby strapped to her back. Sometimes the baby is asleep, but mostly the baby is weakly crying and coughing with this horrible cough that makes you wince when you hear it back it sounds very painful. When the mama takes her baby off her back to sit and eat you see the baby's flaky skin and skinny limbs and little ribs and distended belly. All day the two of them are around, and I wave and smile and greet them (which is the extent of my communication abilities with Lusoga speakers) but I can't actually have a conversation or ask what's up with them. So at the end of the afternoon, they're the last to leave. Dorothy and Solome give the woman a bag full of nutrition supplements and milk powder and send them on their way. Once they're gone, I ask how the baby was doing, and I learn that she wasn't a baby at all but a two-and-a-half year old girl. I was shocked. This tiny body appeared to be that of a 4 month old baby and really belonged to a 2 1/2 year old girl -- a very malnourished, very sick little girl about to start an ART regimen because she is not doing very well. I don't even know what to say, what to tell you. That's AIDS for you. I guess. It breaks your heart into a million pieces and makes you question how such suffering even begins. But TASO is a wonderful wonderful wonderful treatment provider and if anyone can boost that little girl back into good health, it's TASO.

So there you go. I don't even know what to think or how to feel about that or anything else for that matter but there it is. Just one little story out of a billion unexpressed stories that are unfolding in front of my eyes minute by minute. I hope you can take something away from it, because I'm still grasping at nothingness, trying to make sense of it myself. Which probably won't happen, because I'm pretty sure that nothing actually "makes sense" in the end anyway.

Have you ever seen things that make you question everything? That don't fit in the framework of how you process the world? That steal your thoughts and words and leave you just sitting there? I feel like we all have those moments, especially when we're in unfamiliar settings. The world is brimming with nonsense and contradictions and sights of soaring joy holding hands with gnawing sorrow. So if you wouldn't mind, I would love to hear about your dumbfounded times too.

Much much love!