The Tsunami

The pictures in the slideshow below were taken by me and my brother during our trip to Ko Lanta over Christmas 2004. They are in chronological order, and they attempt to tell the story of those days, depicting isolated moments before, during, and after the tsunami struck.

For a bit more about our experience on Ko Lanta, read the post below.

(The music is Pearl Jam, Release.)

Attaching a Purpose

I hadn’t been awake long when I heard my brother JJ outside our beach bungalow in Ko Lanta talking to our dad. Although it was the morning of December 26th, back in Seattle it was Christmas night, and JJ was wishing him a merry Christmas. It was the beginning of our last, lazy day on the small island off Thailand’s coast in the Andaman Sea, but when my brother yelled “Shane, get out here,” his tone indicated something was wrong.

When I came outside, he pointed to the beach where we’d been lounging for the past few days, but the beach was submerged. The water had risen to the point where sand met land, and the current was running parallel to the shore like a river.

At our resort’s reception area, no one knew what was going on, but in the minute or two it took us to get there from our bungalow, the sea had receded. We sat down to order breakfast, looking out at the Andaman, trying to make sense of its behavior.

Soon we spotted a set of waves far offshore. They weren’t much larger than the surf you might see along the Southern California coast, but these were out of place. In the three days we’d been there, we hadn’t seen anything that would resemble breaking waves, just gentle ripples lapping the shore. Something else—this I didn’t realize until I returned to Los Angeles—was the speed of these waves; they were moving too fast.

They charged ashore, roiling the sand as they surged, sweeping tables and chairs up at the restaurant. As the waves crashed into the restaurant’s foundation, the hotel manager ordered everyone out. Amidst the following tumult of confusion and misinformation, we spent the day atop a hill waiting for the approach of rumored waves. We slept atop the same hill that night beaneath a full moon setting into the Andaman.

We returned to our resort the next morning. Indicated by the ribbon of detritus, the water had come within feet of our bungalow door, and there was minimal water damage throughout the resort. My Reefs, which I’d taken off per custom before entering the reception area, had been washed fifty feet from where I left them.

When we walked up and down the beach, witnessing the decimation of other resorts and bungalows, the destructive force of the wave became clearer to me.

At the airport in Krabi later that day, the gravity of the tsunami was more pronounced. Everyone was trying to get back to Bangkok. Everywhere around us people’s faces told stories of a wave far more devastating than what we’d encountered.

When we returned to Bangkok, where news and information was more readily available, the magnitude of the tsunami that struck Southeast Asia, India, and places as far away as Zanzibar and East Africa crystallized.

More than five years after the wave, that day serves as a reminder of nature’s fickle way.

I remember telling my students after the tsunami that my New Year’s resolution was, simply, to have a New Year’s resolution the following year. After witnessing a natural disaster that killed more than 180,000 people, I resolved to make it another year.

For at least a few years, that resolution seemed good enough.

***

Tomorrow, my brother and I will return to the islands of southern Thailand, and we will stay again on Ko Lanta. I’m not sure what this reunion will bring, but the lesson from our first encounter is clearer to me now than it was in the days and weeks that followed Christmas 2004. It is also clear that the resolution of five years ago is woefully inadequate.

I have learned since then that it is not enough to simply resolve to get to the next year. Whether it is next year, next month, or even tomorrow, it is not nearly enough to simply count the time as it passes. Some purpose must attach to that passage of time. There must be something more.

"Blessed with less"

The uncharacteristic warmth and spotless blue sky of San Francisco greeted me as I left the bar. It was mid-afternoon two summers ago and I had some time to kill before meeting my friend, so I turned south on Polk and crossed to the east side of the street toward Broadway away from Russian Hill.

From about halfway down the block, I made eye contact with the man at the bus stop. He was sitting on a bench facing me, and as I approached, he continued to watch me. His wild beard favored necessity to luxury, but his eyes were soft, and his smile broad. As I walked past him, the warmth of his dark face melted my apprehension and I greeted him.

“How are you, sir?” His clothes were tattered and his hands rested calmly on his knees.

“Blessed with less, friend.” His voice was gravelly smooth. “Blessed with less.”

I was already passed him when he repeated the words, but they drifted on the air and stayed with me. At dinner that night, I said them aloud to my friend and marveled at their simplicity and the man and the moment that was so fleeting.

The man was not complicated by the worries of everyday life. In his voice there was no hurry or desire. There was only content with himself and his situation, even though at that moment, the clothes he wore, and his comfortable seat on the bench were the man’s only possessions. Still, there was a simplicity in his life, an ease to his soul.

His smile was at once pain and sorrow, but more than that, understanding and happiness. Understanding in the meaning of those words, and happiness in the confidence that they were true.

In the nearly eighteen months since, the words have stayed with me, and I have been reminded of the warmth of his smile.

***

Rose Namaganda worked for the owner of Shumuk House where I stayed in Kampala. She cleaned apartments Monday through Saturday, and she usually arrived before 8 a.m. After letting herself into the apartment I shared with my friend Dan, she would often walk through the front room to the bedroom and stand on the threshold to see if either of us was awake. If not, she’d knock on the open bedroom door, just waiting for one of us to respond to the repeated rap. In this way, she was a sort of alarm clock.

In addition to providing wakeup calls and cleaning our apartment, she negotiated to clean our clothes. Prior to working at our apartment complex, she had been a typist. In her spare time, she worked as a seamstress to supplement her monthly salary of $50. And through all of this, she has been raising her sons, Cyrus, James Joel, Joshua, and Isaac. Cyrus, the oldest, is ten.

Rose also rolled her eyes at our stupid jokes, but secretly found them amusing. She warned Dan and me about the dangers of Kampala women, and she chastised us when she found empty beer bottles on a weekday morning. In this way, she was a sort of mother.

“Wake up. You are lazy,” she would tell me.

“I am not lazy, Rose. I don’t have to be at work for an hour and a half. I’m sleeping.”

Some mornings she arrived with pineapple for me that I had given her money to buy the previous day. She insisted she knew where to get the best pineapples at the best price and she taught me the best way to slice one.

Once every week or so, she’d inquire about the state of our wardrobe—specifically, the degree of its dirtiness. These questions led to laundry negotiations, during which she argued the weight of clothes and insisted that the filthy state of certain articles required more strict attention and subsequently warranted higher wages.

She wanted to know what America was like, whether or not it was different from Uganda, and after seeing the US Soccer team on television, why our team had “white, brown, and black” players.

Toward the end of our stay, she brought us homemade samosas, a Ugandan pastry, for breakfast.

She also liked to watch African Magic, a Nigerian-produced soap opera that captivated far more Ugandan viewers than it should have. On the occasion that I found her watching the show in our room, transfixed in front of our small television, I told her she was lazy.

She asked about my family, especially my mom. She tailored a traditional Ugandan robe for my mother from silk. And on the day I left Kampala to return to the U.S., she helped me pack my bags.

I trusted her implicitly.

I helped her apply for a bank account. After acquiring passport-sized photos and an Identification Card from the director of her local precinct, she opened a savings account in the days after I left Kampala.

Through our daily conversations, I learned that she has a brother living in Florida. One of her older sisters worked downstairs two days a week doing the books for our apartment manager. And she lived with her youngest sister and her four sons.

They are her life. She beams when she tells you that Cyrus is the best student in his class. When Isaac, her youngest, was sick, she described the difficulty of getting him to the clinic and buying the expensive medicine for him. On her modest salary, she supports her sons, including paying tuition at the private school they attend and covering rent for the apartment where they all live.

***

Early in the summer, I told her I’d love to meet her children, and upon her invitation, my roommate Dan and I visited her home.

We left with her from our apartment after she had finished her workday on the last Saturday of our time in Kampala. With her we rode to her home in the back of a taxivan. Filming the experience and generally making idiots of ourselves, Dan and I struck up conversations with the people in the van while Rose just looked away out the window and smiled, half embarrassed, half amused.

On the ten-minute walk to her home, we stopped by her two oldest sons’ school, less than a kilometer from her house. At nearly five o’clock on a Saturday, they were still in class, preparing for the upcoming exams at the conclusion of the school year in late July.

After a dirt road up a hill and a turn or two (top picture: Rose and Dan on the walk home from the taxivan), we finally came to Rose’s home. Her apartment was one-third of a long row house, the dirt road running its length. The front door opened onto the street. (Middle picture: James Joel and Cyrus kicking the soccer ball out front.)

Inside, a curtain divided the 10-foot ceiling of the front room. Behind the curtain were the beds where Rose, her sister, and her sons slept. The room on the near side of the curtain was filled with a couch and table upon which sat the sewing machine Rose used for her tailoring. There was also a small chair and a television sitting upon a stool. All told, the apartment houses six people but is no bigger than the largest bedroom in your house, and while it has electricity, there is no running water.

The “living room” is where we spent most of our time during our visit, watching a Ugandan educational quiz show and eating Rose’s best dish, potatoes and rice with boiled greens. It was delicious.

Her youngest son, Isaac, was visiting his aunt in Jinja, so when we arrived Joshua, her second youngest, sat quietly, but inquisitively studied our white, unfamiliar faces. With the chocolate we'd brought, we coaxed a smile or two out of him, but it wasn’t until his brothers returned from school bringing with them the comfort of familiarity, that he opened up.

The back door led into a dusty courtyard behind the apartment. Laundry lines hung lengthwise across the courtyard and there was an outhouse in one corner that was shared by her family and the tenants of the other apartments in the row house. As darkness fell in the courtyard, we kicked around a soccer ball Daniel had picked up at the store earlier that afternoon.

From the back step where she was cooking dinner over an open flame on a makeshift grill, Rose stood and watched us play with her sons, smiling. And before we left, I took a picture of her with her sons and sister on her couch, and there was that smile again. It was a familiar smile.

A Sense of Familiarity

Exhaust thickens the air outside Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International Airport, but it isn't until you get into the city that the familiar smell of Bangkok fully matures. There at street level among the vendors and the motorbikes, humidity mixes with pollution or the occasional whiff of sewage or the smell of grilled meats, and the slightest breath of wind can turn stale air fresh and sweet with the smell of fruit sold on the sidewalk.

The Bangkok air has a character that is at once vague and distinct, equal parts charm and reminder.

Being in this city for the fourth time to visit my brother, walking on the street, and smelling the smells reminded me of arriving in Kampala last May. I remember the van ride along the road from the Entebbe Airport into Kampala for the first time, I remember a sense of familiarity with the thick air of the third world, and I remember smelling that same air when I left Kampala in July, trying to put my time there into perspective.

People ask me about my experience in Africa, and I have not yet found the proper way to sum it all up. But I know there are still a few stories to tell--stories that not only reveal the beauty of East Africa and its people, but also suggest something about people everywhere.

Wheels of Justice, Part VI: "On Appeal"

It was appropriate, the gathering of vultures on the Bank of Baroda building across the street from the Court of Appeals. It was a Thursday in mid-June, and evidently, the birds knew the fate of three defendants hung in the balance, and they awaited the verdict. Through the open windows you could hear their ocassional squawks that mixed with the faint sound of car horns and the high-pitched squeal of brakes, the scrape and smack of construction workers, and the click and hum of the overhead fans that circulated the muggy morning air.

When the three, peroxide-wigged and ornately-robed federal appellate justices entered, those present in the courtroom rise and quickly come to order. Any humor found in their traditional garb evaporates as they peer down from the bench.

"Are you ready to proceed?" the principal judge asked the defense attorney.

"I am not," she says. "I have been unwell and have had other matters in lower courts."

The principal judge removed her glasses with a professorial look of disapproval. "This takes precedent."

Through the attorney's profuse apology, it becomes clear that she is not prepared for the appeal hearing. Whether she has been unwell or her other professional obligations have prevented her from fully preparing, she will not argue the appeal today. The appellate justices, seemingly to their chagrin, declare that the hearing of the appeal will wait until August.

As this declaration is made, the three defendants in the dock look on. Because the proceedings are in English and it is likely the defendants--one woman who looks 40 and two men that are at least ten years her junior--have only a spartan understanding of the official language of the court, they don't react to the words and gavel of the judge. They simply look on, wide-eyed, the meaning of what has just happened an unknown.

A uniformed officer from Luzira Prison collects them and leads them down the stairs to the holding cell before their return to prison at the end of the day. It will be a return to a place they know well.

***

After the courtroom cleared out, I approached the defense attorney who had not been ready to proceed. Because of the noise in the courtroom, it was difficult to understand the nature of the decision being appealed, so I asked her what the case was about. It was a murder case.

More than nine years earlier, according to the attorney, the female defendant had killed her husband in a fit of rage when she discovered that he was having an affair. After stabbing him to death, she chopped up his body in the hopes of feeding it down the hole of a outdoor latrine. When she realized that parts of the body were too big to fit into the hole, she sounded an alarm.

When the police showed up, the woman admitted to taking part in the murder, but also implicated two men--the same men that stood with her as co-defendants.

During the first trial nine years earlier, she contradicted her statement to the police, testifying under oath that she was the only person to have a role in the killing. That testimony, however, was not enough to overcome the earlier accusation. She and the men were convicted of murder and sentenced to life.

It is a curiosity that a murderer who confesses to a crime in court and claims she acted alone would not be sentenced alone. But in Uganda, the fact that she told police upon her arrest that two men were accomplices (a seemingly obvious fabrication from a criminal facing a potentially lengthy sentence) was enough to convince the lower court judge that these two men were involved. The only other evidence implicating the men was the testimony of a witness who said he saw the men "in the area" the night the crime was committed.

But for the last nine years, the men have sat in prison, awaiting their chance to appeal. This is another indicator in the painfully slow justice process of Uganda. As time ages the court record and whittles away at witnesses' memories, two men who have spent nearly a third of their lives in prison must rely on the mercy of three appellate court justices and the abilities of an attorney, who while seemingly well-intentioned, was unprepared to argue their case on the day of their appeal.

From that day back in June until now, they have waited, passing their lives in Luzira Prison, hoping that they will soon be free. Some time next week, barring another delay, the two men will learn their fate.

Roads to Nowhere

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads."
-Dr. Emmett Brown, Back to the Future Part II

I don't know if Doc ever took the DeLorean to Uganda in 2009, but he might as well have. Because like Doc and his flying time machine, Ugandans don't need roads either--or more precisely, don't have them. At least not roads in the sense that you or I know them.

The roads of Kampala are generally paved, but they are scarred with axle-breaking potholes. Many of these potholes are large enough to swallow up a small car or motorcycle taxi, and they can delay traffic by turning a two-lane road into a narrow bottleneck.

One such pothole exists at an intersection on my way to work. It is big enough for me to lie down in, and it forces cars that could otherwise gently merge into traffic to come to a complete stop before turning hard into a fast-moving traffic lane. And it is not alone. Big bastards like this are everywhere.

On one late-night motorcycle taxi ride, my driver and I were almost sent sprawling when one crept up out of the darkness and flattened the driver's front tire. He was able to get me back home on the flat tire. I don't know if he was as lucky.

On a busride to Jinja to go rafting, the road from Kampala backed up, bringing traffic to a standstill. The source of the delay was a wide, multi-cratered gash in the road that forced all traffic--in both directions--onto the shoulder, invading a roadside market.

The potholes are comical at first, frustrating upon spending more time in the country, and ultimately emblematic of the gross inefficiency of basic public works projects that are victimized by the greed of government employees who would rather buy cars for themselves than roads for their constituents.

***

I was able to witness the birth of one of these potholes on the street below my apartment over the course of a few days. It was like watching the creation of the universe. From nothing came something.

It began with a slow trickle of water originating in the middle of the street, running down into Kampala Road. It grew over the next day or two until it was a puddle a few feet across that emptied with the splash of wheels running through it, but slowly filled again, its source some unseen force below the tarmac of the street.

The leak went unattended for so long that if you looked at the section of road downhill from its source (which didn't seem to alarm anyone in its first three or four days of life) you would have thought that it was raining.

By the next day, my roommate Dan and I had taken up watching the pothole in the afternoon when we returned from work. Nursing Bell Lagers, we'd excitedly watch to see if cars would run through the pothole, hopefully soaking someone either on a bike or on foot that was unlucky enough to be in the splash-radius. Was this a bit childish? Yes. But also unceasingly entertaining.

Later that night, on the way to the gas station across the street to collect the deposit on the now-empty bottles of Bell, I saw that a group of men were working to fix the leaking pothole. Without any apparent official uniforms or vehicles, the men had sectioned off the street and were shining lights down onto the still leaking pothole.

By the next morning, the leak was no more, and the pothole had been filled with a red, dusty clay that smoothed over the road. Over the following days, the dust slowly hollowed out until it was again a crater, but at least without the leak.

The pothole remained in that state until I left Uganda nearly three weeks later. And it serves as a reminder of the problems the country still faces.

Driving on a highway or surface street in America you take for granted the smooth, paved road. It is a natural and obvious part of our everyday lives that most of us cannot remember being without.

Yet in Uganda, the idea of a paved road or consistently running water or uninterrupted electricity is not a given, but a luxury that citizens still hope for and do not expect.

A young man who worked in the High Court with colleagues of mine has lived in this country for the last ten years of his life. His father is a consultant for the development of roads and highways. The young man, Vuk (pronounced Vook), told us a story of a road project outside Kampala where a company owned by the President's brother had received a contract to pave a new road. After six months and millions of dollars, less than one kilometer had been paved. There were no repercussions for the brother or his company.

The politicians and members of parliament and police chiefs and directors of road development and those lucky enough to be within the long arm of nepotism and cronyism are getting rich and living a life of excess in Uganda. The country's citizens are breaking axles and getting soaked.

Wheels of Justice, Part V: "The Trial"

The clock tower of the High Court rises impressively from cream columns and archways, giving it elevation over State Square Park and a view of southern Kampala. From the tower the clock bell tolls away the hours for all within earshot as the clouds lazily pass overhead, and it serves as a reminder of the day's business within.

Inside, the courthouse is a labyrinth of corridors and stairwells, offices and courtrooms. It is the epicenter for criminal justice in this country, and it is grossly overmatched. Here, the trials for capital offences--murder, rape, aggravated defilement, aggravated robbery, and treason--begin their journeys through the courts, but there are only five courtrooms, and they cannot reasonably serve as a forum for the thousands of crimes that are committed each year.

In each courtroom, dark-stained wood panels the walls, the judge's bench, the witness stand, and "the dock," where the defendant stands throughout the trial. It is an imposing place, the courtroom, and for most defendants and witnesses who enter, it is an entirely foreign environment.

Years of courtroom dramas on television and in movie theaters have introduced most Americans to our justice system, and if you were to be led blindfolded into a courtroom, you would immediately recognize where you were when the blindfold was removed. Moreover, you would be familiar with the procedure as a trial got underway.

The same is not so for Ugandans.

When an aggravated defilement trial began three weeks ago, the defendant, victim, and other participants, through their actions, revealed just how foreign a place a courtroom can be. And, sadly, how difficult the administration of justice can be in Uganda.

***

As the trial begins, the defendant is brought to the dock, a penalty box of sorts where he will stand for the remainder of the trial, and the charges are read by Justice Lugayizi.

The man, no older than 20, is wide-eyed as he listens. He does not understand what is being said because, like most defendants, he is either uneducated or under-educated, and speaks only broken English. So when Justice Lugayizi finishes detailing the case, the charges must be translated into Luganda, the defendant's original language.

The translation poses several problems for the court. Certainly, it delays proceedings while the clerk must translate the words of the judge to Luganda, but then also translate anything the defendant might say back into English. Also, Luganda's origins are thousands of years old, and the language does not have perfect analogs for words like "judge," "attorney," and "criminal charges," the legalese of the courtroom.

Further adding to the problem is that no proper recording device is present in the courtroom. The official court record--the document that is supposed to represent precisely what transpires in court--is hand-written by Justice Lugayizi. There is no video, there is no tape recorder, there is no stenographer. Anything that an attorney or judge might later wish to review will be in the form of hand-written notes. And much as a judge may try, he or she cannot possibly record everything that is said, particularly after it has been filtered through an interpreter who is paraphrasing the words of the accused or a witness.

To my mind, this is the most glaring problem in Uganda's courts. Without a true, accurate, and dependable court record, the administration of justice is impeded to a degree that would have every case in American courts thrown out on appeal were they tried by Ugandan standards.

Yet here, due to a lack of resources or funding or innovation, trials proceed. And as they do, more problems are revealed.

***

When Justice Lugayizi finishes reading the charges, he asks the man, "What do you have to say to these charges?"

Through the interpreter a response comes: "I don't know about them."

You or I understand the correct answer to this question is "Guilty" or "Not Guilty." But because the defendant has not been to court before, has not had the luxury of seeing this type of drama unfold in a fictitious setting on television, and most glaringly because he has inadequate legal representation, he does not know how to answer this simplest of questions.

His attorney, a lawyer who privately practices but has been appointed by the state to represent this specific defendant for which she will be paid a pittance--probably no more than $15 for the entire case--has little motivation to expend energy on behalf of the accused.

Therefore, it is likely that as trial begins the defendant and attorney are meeting for the first time, and the attorney's familiarity with the case doesn't go beyond the fifteen minutes or so she might have spent reviewing the file prior to court.

It is obvious that the most basic legal counseling along the lines of "When the judge asks you to answer the charges, you say 'Not Guilty,'" has not occurred. The obligations of the attorney have not been fulfilled, and it is possible that the defendant will pay with years of his life because he does not understand the nature of the proceedings.

After asking the question several different ways through an interpreter, Justice Lugayizi finally elicits a satisfactory response from the defendant: "I didn't do it."

***

The first witness called is the victim, Esther, an eight-year old girl who was only six at the time of the alleged crime. Her serious and thoughtful eyes scan the courtroom are awake with wonder. The dark wood, the ornately-robed judge, the policemen, and the visitors to the court compose a scene entirely new to her, and at times it seems as though the setting overwhelms her.

The first thing that Justice Lugayizi must do prior to questioning by the prosecutor is to ascertain whether Esther understands the nature of an oath. This is crucial because it will determine whether or not corroborating evidence is necessary in order to satisfy the burden of proof.

When asked if she knows what an oath is, she balks. Her eyes wander the courtroom, and she looks to her mother, but she is alone, and she must answer the question herself.

"No." Her voice is nearly inaudible, but when asked to speak up, it rises softly above the hum of fans and the distant sound of traffic and pedestrians on the streets outside.

"What would God do if you told a lie?" Justice Lugayizi asks.

The girls eyes search the courtroom again. She is keenly aware of the presence of the accused man.

"Do you know what God would do if you told a lie?" Justice L's voice is gentle, a father of six and grandfather of two, he has dealt with young children before, but Esther remains silent. She is the center of attention in this new and strange place.

Perhaps the only familiar things here are her mother, who sits next to her while Justice Lugayizi ascertains if this eight-year old understands the significance of testifying under oath, and the man accused of defiling her. With a sideward glance at him across the courtroom, she sees him, but does not ever fully turn to face him.

"Would your mother be upset if you told a lie?"

"Yes," she says, only a whisper.

"Why would she be upset?"

Esther shrugs her shoulders.

"How do you know your mother would be upset," Justice Lugayizi asks.

"Because she beats me." No one in the courtroom flinches.

In America, this answer from a child in a court would likely get the girl taken from her parents by Family Services. While what you or I imagine a beating to be is likely different from that of a Ugandan, whatever is conjured does not alarm anyone in the courtroom. The beating of a child for lying not only seems to be acceptable, but an understood part of the culture.

After further probing does not reveal Esther's clear understanding of the meaning of an oath, Justice Lugayizi determines that her testimony will not be under oath, but she can still answer questions of the attorneys.

***

At different times during the girl's description of how she was raped, her mother buries her face in her hands. Her tear-streaked cheeks expose her pain as she must sit next to her daughter and listen to the horrific testimony, but she cannot speak with her, and she cannot touch or comfort her daughter.

The direct and cross-examination continues for nearly 30 minutes, at the conclusion of which, the details of what exactly transpired remains murky. The testimony is rife with inconsistency, and issues as simple as where the girl currently lives are plagued with confusion.

But a few things are clear. Without further evidence, the man will almost certainly be found not guilty; the language barrier in these courts--while certainly understandable as a product of Uganda's tribal origins and colonial past--represents a significant obstacle to the administration of justice; the preparation on the part of both attorneys would, at the very least, suffer scrutiny of the most untrained American eye, and at most, is a criminally gross miscarriage of justice.

Ultimately, it amounts to this: In a court of law, an eight-year old girl told that she was raped. The man accused of the crime may spend the next 20 years of his life in prison although the evidence is sparse. Or he may go free even though he repeatedly raped a six-year old in her own home.

This case has not yet been resolved, but it is indicative of the confusion and difficulties that characterize the criminal cases of Uganda's High Court.