Uganda - Hope North

Today my friend gave me a birthday present. A t-shirt that says Rwanda. Woven on the heart: a woman holding a baby. He knocks on my door. “This didn’t fit me,” he says. “Happy Birthday!” I am elated. I turn 30 next week. Golden birthday. Who remembers anyone’s birthday? And standing in the doorway of our bedroom with its big wooden beds and regal white mosquito netting and sheets that say Ndere Center in bright colored cartoon font, I suddenly feel lonely. There is a French word Erik taught me two years ago – it means something like to lose your sense of being at home in the world. I forget the word now.


I was born at 12:18 am on July 30^th in Seattle, Washington. My mom didn't go to the hospital right away after her water broke. When she finally got there, the hospital staff had to carry her from the car on a stretcher – upside down – so I didn’t pop out at the front door. Her whole labor only lasted three hours. And there we were. I read that in the beginning, babies literally can’t recognize any space between their bodies and their mother’s bodies. Strange how even now, she can be familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.


We depart for Hope North. Usually, we take these small buses with fold out aisle seats to Hope North. But today, we walked out to the Ndere Center parking lot and meet the VIP bus. It’s made in Japan. It has modular seats in the back so you can have a meeting or more bus seats. It seats – maybe 30 people? We are Zak, Orena, Katori, Amanda, Zoe, Dana, Lauryn, Cristina, Erik, myself, Arthur, Harriet, and Kenneth’s sister. 14 and two bus drivers. One for driving and one for keeping the driver company. The bus has air conditioning. I feel like a rockstar. I put on sunglasses.

The trip to Hope North takes about 6 hours. I’m reading The Transformation – sprawled out on the VIP bus. This is a book of poetry where the poet is wondering how to write for or about a “we” when she is a colonizer living in a colonized land (Hawaii). Or in a relationship that happens to have three people and not two. Or in New York trying to parse out personal mourning from nationalism after September 11^th. The structure reminds me of Badou when he talks about the major shift in consciousness (Western? Global? French?) that happened in the middle of the 20^th century was: communal subjectivity could no longer be assumed. ‘We’ got broke. And now the thing we share together is not so much an image of ‘together’, but a searching for ‘together’. Our searching becomes a space and we meet in it.

There are corn fields. They look dry.

We stop at an attractive restaurant with a large outdoor patio. It’s exciting because we get to order lunches. Posho and beans was voted group favorite. Tables are swirly and erratic like polished tree trunks.

And Hope North. We arrive to ululations and drumming – welcome visitors! Down the dry dirt road, we meet a young dancing community to welcome us to their home. Rose, an older woman who lives at Hope North and is like a mom and a dance teacher and a woman with a heartbreaking smile, she dances with them.

Out of the bus, the familiar round houses with tin roofs. The familiar line of chairs under a tree that might be a stereotype of Africa. It almost feels like home.

Hope North was founded to provide a safe space for children effected by the war in Northern Uganda. From 1987 until recently, a man named Joseph Kony led an army of rebels in Northern Uganda. This army drove a lot of families from their home. Many have returned as the north becomes more stable, but still many in Northern Uganda live in IDP (Internally Displaced Peoples) Camps. The LRA also abducted many children and forced them to become soldiers, or sex slaves. The stories either register for me with the gleeful impossibility of horror films or as too sad to say much about. The army has now moved to Congo. The Ugandan government has been in negotiations with Kony to disband, but nothing has come of this yet.

So, here Hope North teaches children that have been orphaned, that have been forced to become soldiers, that have had difficult lives. It seeks to give them more than a high school. It seeks to give them a sense of community. It is modeled after a village. Families live here. The students eat, sleep, dance, learn and live here. A couple hundred students here at one time. The school gives them a story of their life that is larger than the moments of trauma they have lived and the carry with them. It gives them a sense of being at home in the world. Or at least, that is its goal.

They have a well put together web site. I recommend it: http://www.hopenorth.org/

I go for a walk. In the dirt roads through the dry corn. I walk and walk until I’ve walked away all the daylight. I can see the stars. I can see the milk of the milky way. I can see the dry corn smell in the dark.

Hope North has set a table for visitors in the middle of a field under the stars. I can see the dim oasis of candle light and on the horizon, lightning. We eat chicken and beans and rice and posho and coke and wine and okra cooked in a little round house by the bus. We eat well. After wards, we gather by the fire with the students and faculty. The students dance and teach us traditional dances. There is a peace corps member from America named Christian and he gives a speech as well – in Acholi! All the students laugh. Sam welcomes us and someone throws a log on the fire. I am feeling so tired. So tired. I go to bed under the misquito nets that I hung with Rose – she let me work with her even though it made the work take longer. She is very kind.

In the night, it rains. An army drums relentless on the thin tin roof. Wake up! Wake up! The rain has come! It has not rained for a long time here. I hope it will help the corn.

Today was made possible by California Institute of the Arts.

*this photo was taken by Zak Landrum