Interview with Lydia

I actually meant to write about my interview with one of our students, Lydia, yesterday. But with rapidly diminishing internet time, I ended up writing about the People interview.

And like yesterday, there is little time left for me online, so let me say this, and you will learn the rest of the details when I return to the States:

Lydia was abducted at age 15. She was forced to be a wife to a commander in the LRA, had a child and lost a child in the bush, and lost a leg to a land mine while fighting with the LRA. I knew most of those bare-bones details of her story going into it.

But what I didn't know (and neither did Steve or any of the other students) was this bomb she dropped mid-interview: She lived next door to Kony (the leader of the LRA) for five years. She said that the man in the news photographs of "Kony" is never Kony. The real Kony does not have dreads or the signature crazy look in his eye, but is a slender, intelligent man who always wears his hair short. She knows that this is the real Kony because he is the person that everyone answers too... including others who sometimes claim to be Kony. He also has fifty wives... far more than any of the other LRA commanders. I asked Olee if her description of Kony was accurate, and he insisted that he had met the same man Lydia knew... not the man from the newspaper photos.

More later...

Interviews

A reporter from People magazine (the London desk, which covers less Hollywood and more actual news) is here in Kampala to do a story on Steve and Outside the Dream. After trying to arrange an interview time with me for the past couple days, the reporter and I snuck out to the neighborhood watering hole for some warm Krest cola. (There has been no electricity here for almost a week.)

Nothing all too interesting was said in the interview; but afterwards, we sat on our 20-cm-high stools for a good hour, discussing his other work. It sounded facinating: a story on Afghan women war refugees in Pakistan, the tumult in Sierra Leone, and four stories on Iraq before and after the war.

The last was fodder for a long discussion on his experiences covering Iraq. Needless to say, he had no compliments for how the White House had waged the war or for its decision to go to war in the first place. He was in Iraq until the day before Shock and Awe (does Sony still own the trademark on that phrase?), and he made it clear that things were more-or-less safe under Saddam for those who could keep their mouths shut about his innumerable flaws. But, what surprised me was just how dangerous things had gotten for reporters since 2004 .

Yes, the blagh-osphere has been 'buzzing' about this for a long time, but he described the situation in 2004 as fairly safe for a cautious reporter. He explained that in 2004, he did a follow-up article on eleven subjects whom he had written about before the war began. He said that he was able to find nine of them (some outside Baghdad) using only local taxis and a translator. He never used any kind of military escort. Now, he says, hardly anyone leaves the Palestine Hotel. If they do, interviews are never longer than nine minutes. Nine minutes is considered enough time for an ambush to be set up for the reporter.

... I never knew People magazine covered anything beyond the sex lives of Hollywood's most pathetic. But, maybe there are some interesting stories beyond that picture of Jennifer Aniston snuggling with Vince Vaughn on the cover... maybe.

Gulu

After we arrived at the UNICEF Night Commuters shelter in Gulu, we pulled the camera from the boot, and I reviewed with Wasswa how to use it. He and Olee set off with the camera while I discussed with a few aid workers about the security situation.

While the statistics for driving around Gulu are frightening (you are more likely to be killed on a two-hour drive down the roads to the camps outside Gulu than on a one-month deployment in Iraq), the violence is seasonal. In the dry season (now until March), there is not enough greenery to shield the LRA soldiers from helicopters of the Ugandan army and the UN. Also, during the dry season, food and water is scarce and most of the soldiers head to Sudan or the Congo. It was during these periods, that many of my students survived off the piss of older soldiers.

The Loa north is much quieter than the Buganda south. But, everyone in and around Gulu was anxious to talk about the civil war. Despite the armed-to-the-teeth military presence, Museveni is held only with contempt here. And most people I talked to believed that he is intentionally prolonging the war for personal profit.

The argument goes like this: By allowing the civil war to continue, Museveni garners military equipment and support from other nations and can continue to build his army, and the horrors of the war inflate foreign aid to Uganda, which is syphoned off to his friends and other government officials by at least 50% before it reaches those it is intended to help. The other half of the argument is that it is difficult to explain why it has taken Museveni twenty years to catch one person. Yes, Bush has dropped the ball on Bin Laden several times, but most people know more-or-less where Kony is (some of my students have even met him), and he is despised by surrounding communities and protected only by his soldiers.

So, Kony's soldiers continue to kidnap thousands of children (one place we went to had lost on average ten children a week during the last rainy season) each season and force them to fight or be 'wives'.

In the drive from Gulu to the Otwal IDP camp, we passed by a school, where a few years ago, LRA soldiers had entered and captured every student from. In Otwal (the camp Olee was living in when he was abducted at the age of nine), we met Olee's family and hundreds of others displaced by the war. We even ran into a boy Olee had abducted when he was a soldier.

Since being in Uganda, I have met at least two hundred children from the north, and although my work here has been focused on those displaced by the war, every single child I have met has either lost family members to the war or has been abducted. After having traveled to Gulu and seen what the terrain was like in the surrounding areas, it is even more difficult to understand how this war has gone on for 20 years. No one lives in the bush but soldiers, and even with the most modest of infrared systems, it would be easy to protect most of northern Uganda from the LRA.

The most far-out of conspiracy suggests that Museveni delibeately funds and arms Kony (perhaps that was what my Loa friend at the party meany by 'there is no Kony'), but even Museveni most ardent admirers cannot explain why he has failed to end the conflict in the twenty years he has held power.

- - - - -

One last story:
On the second day in Gulu, I worked with a fourteen-year-old girl who had watched her parents killed when she was abducted five years earlier. Her father had been tortured before he was killed, and they slowly chopped off his body parts with a panga in front of her. She lived in the bush with the LRA for three years. When she finally escaped (many of these kids escape... there is little organization or morale in the LRA), she found her grandmother living near her home village with her two younger siblings. She has taken care of them since she was thirteen.

Now, they are all Night Commuters, people who walk from their villages into Gulu at night for protection from the LRA. Every night, thousands pour into Gulu to sleep in Night Commuter centers, hospitals, and the streets.

After taping her story, one of those running the UNICEF center suggested we go with one of the kids to see where they lived. We piled into the car. But, neither Olee nor Wasswa would go. This was daytime during the "safe season" on a trip only a few kilometers from town, but even Olee, who had fought with the LRA and knew that this was the safest time possible to go, would not venture toward this girl's village.

Specious Cognates

Learning Luganda was at first an incredibly frustrating undertaking. It is the first prefix-based language I have studied, and I still have not found anyone who can break down the various parts of words for me. But once over the 'hump', it really isn't so bad. People speak very slowly, and the language sounds similar to other languages I have studied.

My mnemonics for vocabulary have all been based around what I originally called "specious cognates", cognates of foreign words that I thought were coincidental rather than related to any actual language loans.

For example, one of the first phrases I learned in Luganda, was "Guangi". The way it is pronounced with a raising of the voice at the end, it sounded to me almost exactly like this Japanese phrase:

"Ima Nanji?"
Ima nanji means what time is it in Japanese. In Luganda, "Gwangi?" is what you should answer when someone says your name. A: "Blake" B: "Guangi?"


This was a cognate of the most specious variety indeed. But, there were other 'cognates' that I was not so sure about. For example, "table" in Spanish and Luganda are both:

"Mesa"
Now, in Luganda, table is pronounced with a "z" sound: Mezza. But, it seemed almost impossible to me that this was not a borrowing from Spanish or Italian. I asked around, but there was no Italian colonial influence here like in Ethiopia or Eritrea. And, there were numerous other words that sounded like Spanish to me too, that I knew were not cognates, so I wrote this one off as a coincidence.

However, while driving back from the Otwal camp on Thursday with our "let's get out of here fast before we get shot" driver, Deo, I had a conversation with him about Ugandan names. In Uganda, most people have an African name and a Christian or Muslim name. For example, "Ojok Charles" or "Josephine Hilda" or "Ochen Mohammed". But, many of these names are spelled wrong... all the time. ("Michael" is always "Micheal".) I asked him if these mispellings were also in Ugandan Bibles. And then, I hit on the most obvious linguistic influence from Italian that I had for some reason not considered.

"Deo," I asked. "What is your full name?"

"Deo Gracias" he answered.

"Thanks to God?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "It's Italian." (I didn't have the heart to tell him it was neither quite Italian or quite Spanish.)

"Deo," was there a strong missionary influence in Uganda?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "Many Italians."

Now, here's my confession. I wrote my specious cognate post (below) before I left for Gulu. So, I did not try to seperate the real cognates from the fake ones. In fact, I tried to emphasize what I thought were humorous or particularly unlikely to be real cognates. And while, I am 90% convinced that "mezza" and "zaboni" (Lugandan for soap, almost idential to the Italian word, sabone), the rest are pretty much a private joke that I thought I would let you in on.

SPECIOUS COGNATES of LUGANDA, Volume One

Gato
Many Luganda words are homonyms, or near homonyms, with Spanish words. One of my favorites is "Gato", which in Spanish means cat. In Luganda, "Engato" means shoe. "Hold on!" I enjoy screaming. "I need to tie my cat." To the untrained Luganda ear, it sounds as if I am tying my shoe, when I am really giving Pussy's tail a difficult time.


Niu Bi
"Niu bi" is a very common Chinese slang, particularly in western China. It means "cow cunt," or "cool and surreal." It was explained to me this way when I first heard it in Kunming:

Li Mian: "You don't know 'niu bi'? It means 'cow cunt' but also 'cool and surreal.'"

Blake: "Ah."

Li Mian: "Have you ever seen a cow cunt? If you had, you would understand."

(Blake had seen many cows, but could not remember seeing the vaginal orifice of any particular cow.)

Blake: "I am not sure."

Li Mian: "Well, when you see one. It is very surreal because it is big. So, when something is really cool and surreal, we say it is 'zhen tamade niu bi" ("real fucking cow cunt")

In Luganda, a homonym of 'niu', Chinese for 'cow', means 'very' or 'extreme', and is often added on after an adjective for strong emphasis. I often find myself thinking of 'niu bi' rather than simply 'niu' because of the extra volume and weight of the word.


Mwa mwa
In American culture, parents and their young children, often say "mwa mwa" instead of kissing. It is the kind of thing a disaffected father might say when (or instead of) kissing his young child when s/he comes home from school.

As I walked through Kibuye market, holding a live chicken and a bag full of fly-infested produce, I heard a Ugandan say, "Mzungu, o-mwa mwa" or what sounded to me like "Mzungu, you mwa mwa." What he really said was more like "Whoa! A poor Mzungu" In Luganda, mwavu means "poor" and "dejected."


Shibuya
Kibuye, the aforementioned neighborhood on the edge of Kampala, is a stark contrast to Shibuya, a neighborhood in Tokyo. The Ugandan Kibuye neighborhood is full of old motorcycle parts, an enormous meat and vegetable market, and enough Malwa to inebriate a young George Walker in New Orleans. The Tokyo Shibuya is home to teeny-boppers and the "shibuya-kei" style of Tokyo Pop. Both are pronounced identically, and both are covered with Japanese characters (as all Ugandan cars, motorcycles, and mechanical parts are relics from 1970s Japan. For the Kanji romantic, it must be very nice to come to Uganda and be able to read right to left again.)


Dooka-Doo
This phrase from an endangered subculture previously known only to exist in the "South Slope" region of 16th street Brooklyn originally was this subculture's cognate of the English word "deodorant". But, it soon morphed into new semantic values, including "Nani-nani-boo-boo," "I don't understand what you're saying," or "Blake, shut the fuck up!!!"

I never expected to hear the phrase again outside of obscure linguistic monographs, but at a student's baseball game in Kampala, at the first crack of the bat, everyone began chanting, "Dooka! Dooka! Dooka! Dooka! Dooooooo!!!" In Luganda, it means "Run! Muthafucka, Run!"


There are many other "specious cognates" I could bore my readers with. ("Abuelo" in Spanish means 'grandfather' whereas in Luganda, it means 'outside' is another favorite.) But, I am going to assume that if you've read this far and are still curious to hear more, you can just buy me a warm cup of malwa (french cognate of "Bad shit"?) when I get back to New York.