Consider this/ Einfach zum Nachdenken

It’s six in the morning and at least a hundred birds decide to give a concert in the tree outside my window. I yield to the invitation for a sunrise service and catch two cranes feeding their young. It is my last day in Uganda, and I decompress in a hotel near the airport. On my veranda ants are busy devouring a cockroach- in an hour there will be no trace left of it.

A little later I go for a walk in the Botanical Gardens: monkeys look at puzzled a the muthungu (white man) who seems in a hurry- not a common feature of the local population. Lillies, vanilla plants, banana trees-the place is overgrown with plants of all types and redolent with tropical smells. The edge of the park borders on Lake Victoria: young men are trying their luck at pulling in some of delicious fish like Tilapia, but in the process are sure to have bilharcia worms crawl into their blood stream.The whole scenery seems very idyllic, if you add to it seemingly endless sunshine and friendly Africans everywhere.

Yet only three hours away from here, in the East of the country, people are literally dying of hunger. Uganda, the most fertile of sub-saharan countries, has lacked favourable weather. Rains have been scarce and unpredictable, thus making planting a gamble: will the crops get watered or not? That, together with the global economic crisis, has driven food prices up by seventy to a hundred percent. For people who struggled before, this has meant going hungry, saving on doctor’s visits and taking children out of school: if you lack the essentials, the “luxuries” must go.

All this could make you think that the population is depressed, hopeless, sad, and indeed there are those who struggle with their fate. But the surprising feature of people in this part of the world is their contageous joy and friendliness, difficult circumstances notwithstanding. Even though feeding yourself physically is a constant concern, people here seem to not have forgotten their need for spiritual food, and they remain spiritually hungry. I was speaking with a man who runs schools for the poorest and brightest of Uganda, to give them a chance of an education. Those who graduate will, in return, run orphanages in four cities in the country, while they go to university. In other words, he sees suffering and need on a daily basis, yet he believes that “Africa is a gift to the world”, and I think he is right. The pressure, suffering and deprivation seem to produce a rare beauty, almost the way diamonds are made.

Depending on how you look at it, this place is either paradise, lush and fertile, yielding its fruit quite easily; or mysterious, dangerous, threatening to harm or even kill you in a million ways. Life is precarious, even cheap, and certainly unpredictable. As a result, Africans take it as a gift, to be lived from day to day, while realizing that the physical is not what counts most: frienship, time, religion- that is what really matters. Not a bad lesson to learn for Muthungus!

# posted by tino @ Monday, July 27, 2009