Passionate Pursuit

I always checked the mailbox on Thursday afternoons when I came home from school because that’s when Sports Illustrated showed up, and each week I scoured it. I’d lie down on the floor of my bedroom and systemically work through the entire magazine. Rick Reilly’s column on the last page was always first, then the articles, then smaller features. I even went through the advertisements for pictures of athletes I could put up on the walls of my bedroom.

Probably around the time I was sixteen, I came across this Nike spot with Barry Sanders. It immediately went up on my wall.

I kept it with me through college, made photocopies for my students when I taught, and I still have the original taped up next to my bed even now.

I love the ad because it is a call to action. It encourages us, as I said in an earlier post, to attach a purpose to our lives. It is not enough to live. We must extract some meaning from the lives we lead rather than simply getting from one day to the next. I’m not necessarily talking about sweeping, Meaning-of-Life conclusions, although they’re good too. Sometimes it’s about the little things, those small things that we forget too soon after they happen or don’t even bother to remember at all. This is an idea that Rick Reilly, that SI writer from the back page, conveyed in a column nearly ten years ago.

Life is about finding your own meaning, your own happiness, and pursuing it passionately. It is about living your life, not necessarily the life others—your boss, your parents, society at large—are telling you needs to be lived.

When I made the decision to spend last summer working in the Ugandan courts, some of the people I told were concerned with the decision. Their questions suggested that by walking a less traveled path, I was hurting my professional prospects and that I would be bettered served by working in the legal system in the States. Some friends and acquaintances said things like, “At least it will be a good line on your resume.” At the time, I agreed with them.

What sticks with me now wasn’t that these people were averse to me traveling to Africa. Rather, it seemed that they were averse to the idea of a person bucking convention. That the decision to leave a good job as a teacher and head to law school was an indication that I was beginning to take life seriously, and working in Uganda wasn’t consistent with that mentality.

To me, however, I was taking living seriously. I had dreamed for a long time about going to Africa. I didn’t know where I wanted to go, and I didn’t have a particularly clear reason why—just that I wanted to go. So from the moment I first heard about the opportunity during the first day of law school orientation, I decided I would not let it pass.

***

Matemwe is a small fishing village on the far side of Zanzibar just off the coast of Tanzania. I spent three days there, intent on decompressing from my time in Africa, trying to put the experience in perspective. During my stay at Keys Bungalows, I didn’t look at a clock, use a cell phone, or put on shoes. I occupied the space between my bungalow, the bar and restaurant looking out over the Indian Ocean, and the beach.

There is little tourism in Matemwe, and fishing drives the economy. The fishing fleet—comprised exclusively of old, wood trimarans—is seaworthy but not luxurious. They anchor between the beach and the breakwater about 50 meters offshore, and the fishermen can walk through the coral to the boats when it is time for the fleet to leave.

Because the winds off the Indian Ocean constantly howl, the breakwater is long, running parallel to the coast for nearly a kilometer before opening to the sea. This protects the fleet when it is at anchor, but restricts it as well. At low tide the breakwater serves as a barrier to the ocean waves, and it is only when the water rises that the fleet can get in and out of harbor. For that reason, the fisherman’s working day is dictated by the rise and fall of the tides corresponding with the moon. The result is a rush hour at high tide, with dozens of boats setting sail to head for the fishing grounds at once.

With the fisherman gone for the day, the women wade out into the pool formed by the breakwater to harvest seaweed and calamari among the coral. Submerged paths of white sand weave safely through the jagged coral and sea urchins to the harvesting grounds.

Along the beach, young teenagers set up sticks as goalposts and a ball of wound yarn, fishnet, and rope serves as a mostly spherical soccer ball. Younger boys race homemade toy sailboats in ankle deep water, learning the lessons of the wind they will need when they become fisherman, and little girls sift through the sand looking for shells to sell to tourists.

Upon the return of the fleet, the market at Matemwe bustles, but some fisherman choose to conduct business face to face in the few restaurants along the beach. Late in the afternoon I was reading when a fisherman carrying an octopus walked up the steps into the bar. Carrying it at his side as he approached Simba, the cook at Keys, the octopus’s long tentacles dragged across the sandy planks of wood. As Simba and the fisherman finished negotiating the price of the octopus, I moved to a hammock to continue the book.

It was Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Moments later with the sun dropping behind the east-facing beach, a rhythmic thwack rose above the sound of the wind and interrupted my reading.

Thwack, thwack, thwack.

I looked out in front of Keys Bungalows onto the beach where a young boy was sitting on his knees, swinging a meter-long stick in a sweeping motion over his head before accelerating it down, hard toward something on the sand in front of him. He was wearing a dirty shirt and jeans that were cut below the knee. In this way, he looked a bit like a pirate, but Country Man, another worker at Keys, told me he was a beach boy, one of the many young children who wander up and down the beach looking for ways to earn money. Country Man sometimes would send him to pick up cigarettes from the store or buy fruit at the market and pay him a delivery fee.

Simba had hired the boy to help him prepare the night's meal, specifically, soften the octopus. Because the octopus was fresh, it needed to be tenderized before he cooked it. For this work—a ten-minute session of repeated clubbing—the boy was paid 500 shillings, about 50 cents.

A bit down the beach and closer to the shoreline, black sea birds fought against the offshore wind, working their wings without progressing before diving back to the sand. On ground they summoned more energy to hop back up into the wind and repeat the process. My thoughts wandered from the curious behavior of the birds—an endeavor that seemed to expend energy without any apparent benefit—to my work in Uganda and the safari in Tanzania. I had come to Zanzibar to make sense of my experience, but placing the past two months in a proper context was something that would wait, so I returned to the book.

The Alchemist is a story about a boy called Santiago. He is told that it is “the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.” But it is not enough to have dreams. After all, we've all had dreams. Santiago is told that when a person is young, “they are not afraid to dream and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their Personal Legend.”

But that is just the story's beginning.

***

Later that evening over a plate of fresh grilled octopus, Simba asks about the book I am reading and I explain to him that it is about a boy pursuing his Personal Legend, the purpose for which each of us was put on the earth.

I tell him the octopus is delicious and ask Simba if he has a Personal Legend. From the other side of the bar, he takes a long draw on his cigarette and contemplates the question.

“To make people happy,” he says finally, exhaling the smoke. “Hakuna matata.”

He laughed at the sound of his native Swahili and I took another bite of octopus.

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.