(this photo was taken during a visit to one of the PROMETRA-organized Buyijja Traditional Healer Village Groups, it doesn't directly have anything to do with anything I wrote about in this post but I think it is one of the best photos I have ever taken, the women are in line for free herbal medicine, prepared by the village group).
Wow- don’t know where the last 5 months have gone!
I have been busy with various school visits where I either do girl empowerment work or yoga with both genders, a variety of tasks for my internship with PROMETRA Uganda (founded by Ugandans to promote and support traditional medicine), and doing a research project on PROMETRA-affiliated spiritualist healers. (Spiritualist healers heal under the guidance of spirits, which includes messages received through dreams, possession, visualization, and intuition. An account of a spiritualist class I attended yesterday is below!)
One particularly enjoyable and fulfilling recent weekend (which deserves its own post) was when one of my PROMETRA coworkers and I went to visit the orphanage that my friend in the Peace Corps manages and helped set-up. The orphanage is primarily for AIDS orphans. When my friend came to visit us at the Forest School, the three of us had the idea to take traditional medicine to the orphans, so my coworker taught them how to make medicine for their common ailments with the herbs growing around where they live. Around 40 or so orphans were super attentive as he showed them samples of the different medicinal plants he found all over the orphanage grounds, and taught them their medicinal value and how to use them to prepare remedies for 5 of their most common illnesses. After the study session he sent them out to try and find the plants for a cough medicine themselves (half of them had horrendous coughs), and they ran all around, enjoying the scavenger hunt. Some of them had their notes with lists of the 8 or 10 plants for the cough medicine, and would check off each plant as other children brought them. We then prepared and starting boiling the ingredients, and while waiting for it to finish I did some yoga with them, including some breath work that is supposed to help with stress and anxiety. We also started off the program with yoga. Afterwards kids can usually sit still and focus!
I also went to Rwanda over Christmas, which is a very clean and beautiful country (they have banned plastic bags!), and where (kind of refreshingly) people mostly ignored me. The absence of trash and friendly harassment was quite in contrast to my daily life in Uganda. Then there was the visit to the somber genocide memorial center, where I learned interesting facts such as that Hutsi and Tutsi were originally socio-economic classifications that could change with time (I think anyone with more than 10 cows was classified as a Tutsi), but the Belgians made it a more concrete identity by putting it on people’s ID cards, which contributed to the animosity between people. My friend theorized that people mostly ignored me because they largely fault whites for the genocide and don’t want to have much to do with them. I don’t know if that is true or not, but seems plausible. Over one million people were killed in the genocide, 1/10th of the population!
Since it is hard to know where to start with the thousands of other things that have been happening, I think I will start with an account of yesterday, which was a particularly nice and interesting day at PROMETRA Uganda’s Forest School of Traditional Medicine.
We (the PROMETRA staff) usually head out to the Forest School on Tuesday afternoon or evening, depending on how many people we have packed into the car that day. If there are more than 5 of us in the 5-seater, we usually go when it is dark or close to dark, to avoid tickets from the police. Sometimes the car breaks down and then we take the ubiquitous white and blue “taxis” (shared mini vans bought used from Japan, most still have Japanese writing on them) which stuff in anywhere from 15 to 20 or so people and their luggage, including chickens etc.
Since there were 7 of us we went a bit late, and as usual stopped in a place called Kyengera on the way, where we are each given 1000 schillings (about 45 cents) to get snacks like roasted plantains, meat on skewers, and chapatti from street vendors. I got 6 “gonja” (the roasted plantains) and then a little bag with some chicken, French fries, and cabbage. I also got some bones and meat for the puppies out at the Forest School- that alone cost me my 45 cents! The conversation in the car was (also as usual), mostly in Luganda, which I am finally starting to understand more of.
We arrived after dark and joined the caretakers who stay out there fulltime (including a lovely teddy-bearish middle aged woman, a fun14 year old boy who is saving money for school fees so he can study again, and a shy and very sweet young man with a goofy smile who takes care of the animals). We joked and chatted in the outdoor kitchen while eating jackfruit and posho and beans, and drinking tea and juice made from bananas and crushed sorghum. My new Luganda-English dictionary kept some transfixed, it seems that many had never seen one!
I was about to give the 2 surviving orphan puppies their raw meat and bones, but was told we had to cook it first, otherwise they might get a taste for fresh flesh and eat the chickens. There are hens, roosters, chicks, rabbits, goats, kids (goat babies), cows, and calves out at the Forest School, and that is just the domestic animals. There are also monkeys, fireflies, rats, and many more wild things.
I went to bed fairly early, got under my pink mosquito net and read for a bit before passing out. I share a 4 bed dorm room with the female PROMETRA staff member, and other female visitors or interns when they are around. Last month we had a fine arts student from Paris who stayed with us all month (sometimes at my apartment in Kawempe), she actually arrived the same day as a microbiologist from Amsterdam! We have an endless stream of interesting visitors, from all over the world. Our last intern was half Oregonian, half Ugandan.
The next morning I woke up early, thinking that I would attend the sunrise agnihotra fire. Speaking of interesting visitors, for 2 months we had a biomedical/ayurvedic doctor with us, here to teach us an ayurvedic healing method called “homatherapy” (not to be confused with homeopathy), which includes the agnihotra fires. He has lived in Ecuador for over a decade, but grew up in Africa, and I think lived on just about every continent at some point. The agnihotra fires, made in a copper pyramid with cow dung and ghee, result in medicinal ash and ash that is good for agriculture. I now make them at sunset most nights at my place in Kawempe, but haven’t yet made the sunrise fire a regular practice, except when I’m at the Forest School. Anyhow, the fire didn’t happen due to a rain and lightening and thunder storm. I went back to bed and slept way later than usual. Usually after the fires I get ready to go up to the primary school on the hill next to the forest school to do yoga with one class at a time (each week I teach a different class). Before the yoga routine started I used to go up there and do whatever one of the teachers’ whims dictated. Towards the beginning I was asked to give an impromptu speech outside to the whole school, and then the kids asked me I think the most bizarre series of questions I have ever been asked including- “what kind of vaselines do you use?”, “do you like to dig?”, and “do you go for hairstyling or is that just natural?” The teacher told me that they know America from the “Commando movies”.
I didn’t go up to the school until almost 11:30, waiting for the ground to dry out a bit before we did yoga on it. We don’t have mats or anything and the grass outside the school is like the hair on a mostly bald man, and filled with pebbles. So before that I hiked down to the herbal garden area next to the forest school classrooms (the “classrooms” are just spaces in the forest, 2 have wooden benches). I weeded my garden which has one reddish purple herb called “massai” in it, which is good for anemia and blood purification. All trainees must have an herbal garden, containing only one herb. Some trainees were planting the trees that they were asked to bring last week, but over half of them hadn’t arrived yet. One of the cattle trucks that picks them up is out of operation, so after the first load was delivered, it headed back out for the second group.
Eventually the rest of the trainees arrived and classes started. The weekly general assembly was either skipped or happened while I was at the primary school. As I was headed to the spiritualist class I was called to write for an elderly illiterate woman during a quiz in Class 1, but I think that was a joke because my Luganda is really not sufficient at all. I went anyway and was going to try but they found someone else.
Then I made it to the spiritualist class, first you have to take off your shoes and then you walk down a little path to a clearing with a fireplace next to it. The topic of the day was “okwogolola”, or “spiritual cleansing for a specific problem”. I think largely because of the rain, there were only 4 students including me, two beautiful and lively women with bright eyes who seem to be in their late 30s or early 40s, and a short elderly man with a suit jacket on. Everyone in the class has to “have a spirit”, not just anyone can join the spiritualist class.
My coworker who usually facilitates the class had to help out in another class. One of the women speaks a bit of English, so I got some interpretations that sometimes left me a bit baffled- such as that a certain spirit gives people “body chance”. I have developed a fairly good spiritually related vocabulary in Luganda, so sometimes I could kind of guess what was going on.
We sang some songs that call different spirits while clapping and dancing and then sat back down.
Shortly into the session the elderly man got possessed. At first I didn’t even realize that he was, just thought he abruptly decided to start singing and shake a calabash maraca. (Sometimes possession is initially very obvious and dramatic). The women got their notebooks and sat close to him, as did I. In the spiritualist class we often “study with the spirit”, a different kind of hands-on study. The spirit that possessed him was called “Muwanga”, a Lubaale, or ancestral spirit, that was there during creation. I asked him what his job was and the answer was “spiritual diagnosis, spiritual treatment, and spiritual initiation” (I have a list of spiritual practices and rituals in Luganda so one of the students just pointed to the answers). He gave us a list of medicinal herbs to use in "okwogolola" (today's study topic).
He had some funny characteristics, like he would start singing a song and then would stop suddenly and say “amaze”, (“it’s finished”). All spirits have a special way of greeting people, and he greeted while crisscrossing your arms with his. He often laughed. I wish I could have understood everything. Usually when I take photos in that class no one notices or cares, but today I took a photo of the man when possessed and he started looking at my camera strangely. The women tried to reassure them that it was nothing bad, smiled and said “tewari” (it’s nothing). Then I idiotically decided to show him the photo and he jumped back in surprise or horror when he saw it, the women motioned to me that I should not do that. Lesson learned!
One of the trainees told me that it was that spirit that gave her her only daughter, that before that she could not conceive. I asked some things like if he sleeps, the answer was “in his house” (shrine?) and if he dreams. He said he does not dream but gives dreams, and if the person doesn’t understand them he will give another one. I also asked if he could possess someone in America. The answer was something like that he could if he was offered coffee berries (this is requisite in spirituality here), alcohol, and tobacco in a pipe. I tried to ask if he would speak English if possessed there, but I don’t think my question was conveyed clearly or answered.
At one point he scribbled something on a piece of paper, and I asked if it was Luganda. One of the women said that it was “spirit language”. They folded it and put it in the man’s notebook. Later when the man was no longer possessed he took it out and looked at it. I asked him if he could read it and he answered that the spirit was teaching him to read spirit language.
The cow bell rang- lunch time! Trainees from all classes wandered from their various spots in the forests to the giant pots filled with white corn porridge. People gathered and drank their lunch, sometimes supplementing it with sweet potato, cassava, fried chapatti with peas inside, etc.
I heard the agnihotra mantra “tryambakam” being recited, so I joined some of the village leaders for the training session, as I didn’t yet know that mantra. The ayurvedic Dr’s main trainee was leading the session, asking us all to repeat it with him, first together, then alone (I really butchered it, amusing for everyone I think!)
I started the hike back up to the upper area of the Forest School, where we sleep. On my way I saw two of the people who live at or around the Forest School gathering water in “jeri-cans” from the spring, so I joined them and helped carry one of them up the semi -natural stairway that starts just after the spring. Wow- so that’s what it feel like to carry a jeri-can full of water! You always see people carrying big jugs of water here (even small kids), as most people don’t have running water.
I went up to the community library (the end slice of the big multipurpose building). There is a small collection of books, which I recently increased by getting 4 boxes of books from “Books for Africa”, via a Peace Corps volunteer. I also digitalized all library titles (meaning I just typed a list of all of them) and organized everything by subject. The “Books for Africa” donation we got includes titles ranging from “The Invisible Force: Traditional Magnetic Therapy” to “Favourite Memories of a Country Vet”, to “I’d Scream Except I Look So Fabulous by Cathy Guisewite” , to “Leading the Charge: Orrin Hatch and 20 Years of America by Lee Roderick” to “60 People to Avoid at the Water Cooler”, to a Swedish-English dictionary. I am just picking out some of the more ridiculous or irrelevant ones, but we got some very useful books and when we opened the boxes in the office it was like Christmas morning.
While I read a magazine about Traditional Medicine and HIV/AIDS, some trainees who were done with their classes filtered in. Divided from us by hanging bed sheets, the free community clinic was in full swing. Third year trainees and a PROMETRA staff member see and give herbal medicine or make plans for spiritual treatment to community members for free every Wednesday, and have a LOT of success stories. The clinic is in need of quite a few items, if you happen to have an unneeded cache of medical diagnostic tools laying around- let me know!
Just before the cattle truck left with the remaining half of the trainees, I had a meeting with one of the spiritualist trainees who is going to be teaching one of my girls’ groups to make traditional crafts. I gave her some of the money she needs to buy the supplies that she will use to teach them to make bark cloth, baskets, mats and brooms. Finally almost everyone left, and I went to play with the puppies. Later I wandered around the hilly fields by the buildings and found one of my coworkers picking medicinal herbs for mental problems. We went to the sunset agnihotra fire and then to the fireplace outside of the hut shrines on top of the hill to pray. Shortly after, just 5 of us piled back into the car and we zoomed back to Kampala, mercifully spared from any (major) car problems. We now no longer have half of the driver’s side-mirror, but that didn’t stop us from getting home in good time!
