Getting Past The Data

Experience makes ideas authentic – and makes statistics either increasingly real or entirely dubious. The CIA says the average age in Uganda is 15. Today I met two sisters in the Otika family who, together, care for twenty-five children. Some of the children are theirs, others are left by deceased parents who fell victim to AIDS, war in the North or another unnecessary, untimely end. Fifty percent of Ugandans are under the age of 14. Such is the demographic of many poor countries, and caring for so many children makes moving forward difficult.

Yet the sisters I met do work to move forward. Emma works everyday except Sunday, twelve hours each day, in a store in Gulu that sells school supplies. She uses her earnings to pay for someone to watch her youngest children and to send the others to school. Joyce works at the local Catholic school as a teacher, sending her own kids to even better boarding schools in the capital of Kampala. But both the sisters have HIV, a disease that of course will likely bring them an early death. And information that suggests the CIA’s numbers on HIV in Uganda (4.1% of the population in 2003) are off. Of course, I could have simply happened to meet two people entirely unrepresentative of the whole, but that would speak to the manner in which statistics can mislead as well. For these two women and the twenty-five children in their care, Uganda’s HIV rate, whatever it is, is a vital issue.

I met these two women through my acquaintance with their brother Peter, who came to Pittsburgh as an asylum seeker, then fleeing government persecution and rebel violence due to his reporting for one of Uganda’s newspapers. Today I also met their mother, who has a faint scar stretching between her right ear and her nose, marking where government troops slashed her after killing one of her sons and leaving her to die in their burning home.

And they welcomed us enthusiastically – there is another Pittsburgher here, Megan Young, who has been collecting stories on behalf of Peter’s organization. They greeted us with open arms and treated us to great generosity. Much of the community came out to meet us. We ate a lunch of chicken, rice, malakwang (a local green), ground nuts, and boo (pronounced bow, another local green) with ant (yes, ant). The children gathered around us, happy to practice English (they speak Luo as a first language and learn English at school) and simply stare at white folks. We shared candy with them.

Emma walked us across the community to an open space where chairs and mats had been set out. We sat on the chairs with a group of adult men, most of whom were teachers. The children sat staring on the mats. We talked about Peter, a few of them were related to him, the World Cup, and the ongoing war. They showed me malakwang, boo, and simsim in the garden. One showed us into his hut. It was late afternoon, and we were again served food. This time we received sodas, beans and cornbread. Emma told us she’d never received a visit from an American before.

They all told us that what they’d like to share with the world most is their desire for peace in their region, and their desire to simply work their land and get access to education for their children. That, when I’m not writing here and learning more from them, is precisely what I’ll work on.