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!)