Saturday, July 26, 2025



Flooded: Thoughts from Uganda

A man stands up in the back of the mud pavilion and begins to shout. Through the holes in the plastic sheeting that attempts a ceiling, sun spots dance around the group that has gathered flashing the occasional man in the eye causing him to flinch and search for composure. The women sit in a corner where sun spots don’t reach. The heat is sweltering and the faces of children fill the dirt windows impeding any possibility of a breeze.

Here I am again.

The man who stands is a Congolese refugee, one of dozens who have packed into the small room. Outside, on the dusty football pitch of New Congo Stage, the Somalis and Burundians are preparing for the evening’s match, an awaited occasion for all to participate. But for now, here in the mud pavilion, only Congolese are permitted. I had signed up to be in the Congolese group.

In Southern Uganda near the borders of Rwanda and Tanzania, amidst it all, the priest—our trusted and beloved leader— has finished our practiced introduction, “We are students from America. We come to learn, and to experience the conditions of life in Africa, we want to hear your stories.”

“Imagine a man who cannot swim,” says the man shouting. “One day, due to circumstances entirely beyond his control, the man is pushed into a lake. Now you journey to Uganda and sit beside the lake watching the man drown and you say to him, ‘what do you need while you are drowning? Will you tell me the story of how you were pushed into the lake? What does it feel like to be drowning?’”

Thunderous applause filled the room.

The man was right and I knew it. It was because the man was right that I had come to visit him—just another mazungu forcing a smile. Yet as I sat there, I felt refreshed by the man’s comment. He deserved to feel that way. He had every right to confront the bullshit that he and the severely impoverished are handed daily in the honest disguise of good intentions. While I did know how to swim, I had no boat. I had me but no system. And thus I chose to stay on shore. I justified my inaction.

But what gives me the right?

Familiar neural pathways take their course: Why am I here? I care about my world and want to understand it. The suffering…But I wont do shit about it. Why pretend? Communication. Solidarity. One day. What am I waiting for? Graduation? More education? For a day when my tools and influence are big enough? I should cash in. Now. The cash is in my pocket. That is what the man wants. No, finish school! Cash in when it will matter. It matters! Remember the individual, don’t climb too high. Keep the latter. Stay grounded. For Wall Street and donated millions or humble solidarity? Oh! for an informed balance.

Now come the excuses. External: “I am sorry, you know I am a student, when I graduate then I can do something,” and “I can show you a website where you might find scholarship opportunities…” Internal and even more pathetic, “just finish school figure out the problems that mean the most to you work on acquiring the necessary skills do not procrastinate that would be wrong and completely amoral figure your shit out quick find a meaningful point of reference isolate a problem and hit it.”

But the privilege to “figure out which problems means the most…” feels too burdensome for the moment.

Language fails me. A stable resolution does not arrive. Instead, confusion. I cannot separate scale. I cannot separate the human brain from patterns of political oppression; I cannot separate a well padded neural pathway from societal stereotyping, family norms from a changing climate, my attraction to women in Western shopping malls, journeys from the history of linguistic consciousness; I cannot separate the human need for legitimate external authority from thriving demagogues, religious orthodoxy, or the subjective (or perhaps not) value judgments behind society’s egoist obsession with its own origin. I cannot separate Piggy from the noble savage. And so for now and like always I let sophistication pardon me. Cash remains in my pocket.

I look around, the faces, the dirty, sweat, its all so extraordinary. Extraordinary because reality is fucking ruthless and everything is so goddamn gorgeous. I want to stand up and shout and scream and rage and flood the world with myself so that next time things will come out right. Pulsing—my ego. Stop it.

And I oscillate—bouncing between determination and letting that determination diffuse when the irony of humanity takes over. A brutal cycle it is—retrospectively questioning the genealogy of my motives. What did the thinker say, I forget.

So I embrace privilege and talk big and maybe you do too.

For now the man takes a seat. The applause subsides.

An old man approaches the tent and whispers instructing me to join him at the back of the room. I obey.

“You know son, when scholars speak, they are just asking why eating a sandwich better than a genocide?”

But my scale remained inflated.

“Sure,” I say.

Words like infinity and rage flicker.

Maybe you say something different:  “god, perhaps?

“But we agree right?” continues the old man, “life outside the lake is better than drowning at the bottom.”

My learned scholar translates, “individual and therefore collective freedom is favorable to oppression and fear.”

We leave the tent and begin to walk—a digestive constitutional.

“So how can we stop the drowning?”

The old man continues, “But now I can no longer free the drowning man. You know son, the customs of my generation and the realities from which they arose are no longer important. I can teach my grandson to farm casava, but he asks me about micro-loans!”

The learned scholar lingers, his voice calm with the pride of eloquence, “In our globalizing world, individual prosperity is increasingly at odds with that of the collective because familial kinship ties and economic interdependency is exported to foreign lands without interpersonal relationships. It is human relationships that mitigate the ruthless nature of capitalism and the destructive psychic nature of Natural Man. With diminishing continuity between the experiences of generations, the structure of authority will also have to change.”

We continue to walk and I follow the old man to a bench on the banks of Nakivale Lake.

“My boy, take a seat.”

He sees me grimace at the water.

“Go ahead, take a sip,” he says pointing at the cloudy green water. I hesitate.

He continues, his words now equipped with the weight of my refusal, “Every man needs water to survive just like every man enjoys warm roasted meat prepared by his loving wife after a long day in the fields.”

(I smile considering the old man’s heartfelt comment and imagine the reactions of dear friends who happen to resist gender normative assumptions—a position that in my observation is often inexplicably comorbid with the vegetarian persuasion.)

The old man pauses, preparing his words carefully.

“Look into the water, can you see valves along the bottom? They have the potential to free the drowning man. Back when I was a boy I could see them very clearly. My father used to come down with his friends and unscrew them. But today the water is cloudy and the valves are ever distant and unrelated.”

He noticed my smile and reasserted his sincerity, “What if fighting politicians and warring soldier’s thought about their common appreciation for roasted goat? What would our world be like?”

The learned scholar interjects, “If we don’t adapt our patterns of social cohesion, our histories and blind adherence to external authorities, our problems will only increase. We need to embrace a common narrative between all human beings that can coalesce around ideas and aspirations that we all share—problems that confront us all.  It is a shift independent of culture, language, and tradition. Building solidarity between all humans, for all humans to be on the same team, will give us the best odds at thriving in our universe, at maintaining our climate. As our markets globalize, cannot our solidarity globalize along with our problems?” The learned scholar recoils back into my mind.

And for a second the severity of the day subsides and, “LeBron, D-Wade, and Bosh.” Stop it.

“Better, I guess,” I say in response to the old man’s query. “But doesn’t sameness require difference?”

This time the learned scholar interrupts before the old man can gather his thoughts: “With scarcity comes competition and the need for some to be like me and others to be different from me—boundaries of exclusion. Others. And so compassion will not save the drowning man; but living in a community where trust and empathy outweigh the games of power and the subsequent cycles of oppression will begin to impede the daily rainfall that continually refills the pond; but what about the rage: our aggressions, our social anxieties, our bitterness. Its about power despite our self-convincing disguises.”

“An astute comment,” I hear the Old Man tell me as the learned scholar catches his breath, “At some point there will not be enough goat to solve the conflict. But we must share the goat until it runs out, only that way can we find a more lasting solution.”

“I agree sir,” I begin, letting the scholar speak aloud for the first and only time, “But scarcity is our reality and reproduction is our end. And power is nothing but access to resources. My power is my ability to give the man shouting in the room a wad of cash—power is the possibility of decision.”

Frustrated, the scholar submits his last claim, “Authorities are systems that align an individual’s fight against scarcity with society’s fight against scarcity. They are constructed in the expressions of social similarity, of sameness. Common legacies of oppression, religious experience, ethnic fraternity—sameness matters; it frames our past and allows us to participate in our past. For good or for not we require a narrative to channel our energies, a common narrative to decide who is like us, a common narrative to exaggerate the results of this decision—this time boundaries for inclusion. But economics is impatience disguised as efficiency and sameness requires time and conversation and goat. Economic exchange without conversation will polarize our wealth and our sameness into isolation.”

“Smart,” I tell the scholar, and he smiles as if his articulations have given solutions to their subjects, “But why speak in language to which the drowning man is deaf?”

It seems the Old Man has been quiet for sometime. He kicks a small stone into the Lake and it quickly disappears from sight. “Let us return to the shouting man. But remember what I’ve told you: use the goat until it is no longer. Give the world a stake in its story. Then let it decide together.”

“So that I might understand the man shouting at me?”

Now I’m back in the tent, The Priest checks his watch, clears his throat and pauses in display of sincerity, “we must go now. It is getting late. Next time we will return with a new idea of how to help this man help himself.”

But the man begins again to shout, “if I can’t prove to you that I need your help now, how will I survive?”

And without refrain the scholar begins once again, as if awaken by a point of disagreement:

“Is this not a complete miscommunication of authorities? All over the world, authorities are coming in conflict with other authorities. Individuals are increasingly estranged from the fact that authority exists in the first place to promote collective survival in conditions of scarcity and they are accepting the prescriptions of old and irrelevant warring authorities. They are buying the narratives of those with power but failing to acquire ownership. And the demagoguery reins.”

“Shhhh” I say. “I believe you. And I am sure the shouting man does too.”

In a single file line, we exit the tent. The refugees remain momentarily inside so that we may pass through the small door and make our way to the bus. A small child plays in the dust. She catches my eye and runs over with an open palm. “Please, give me money.” She says to me with a smile.” And I reward her smile and her directness and myself. And now cash remains but not in my pocket.

Comments

2 responses to “Flooded: Thoughts from Uganda”

  1.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    The solar minimum is still with us. It is over 800 days long; not spotless, but weak since 2004. The typical minimum of the cycle is 486 days (spaceweather.com). Though we are not in an ice age, the minimum tends to cause rainy and snowy weather around the entire world. The hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center is that during a sunspot minimum the sun and earth’s magnetic shields are weak and cosmic radiation from the sun and deep space seeds the clouds. Denser clouds yield cooler weather and more precipitation. Rain and snow have been setting records as a result and there appears to be only a slight increase in sunspot activity this year. Some say this has brought an end to global warming for an unpredictable future.

  2. Francis Avatar
    Francis

    The solar minimum is still with us. It is over 800 days long; not spotless, but weak since 2004. The typical minimum of the cycle is 486 days (spaceweather.com). Though we are not in an ice age, the minimum tends to cause rainy and snowy weather around the entire world. The hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center is that during a sunspot minimum the sun and earth’s magnetic shields are weak and cosmic radiation from the sun and deep space seeds the clouds. Denser clouds yield cooler weather and more precipitation. Rain and snow have been setting records as a result and there appears to be only a slight increase in sunspot activity this year. Some say this has brought an end to global warming for an unpredictable future.

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