Falling in love with places (or What Is Normal, Anyway?)

(Disclaimer: I just finished reading David James Duncan’s Brothers K for the second time. I read almost half the book in a single sitting, and I woke up feeling hung-over with it, it was that good. So, please forgive me if my writing style sounds or feels a big Duncanesque. Those of you who’ve read him will know what I mean.)

We met up and stayed with Alisha Damron this weekend, who had just moved into her new flat in Bunga (not to far from the Hospice) when we arrived. She plans to be in Uganda at least for the next 2 years (after spending a total of 10 months here in the last three years, when you combine all the summers together). And I must say – I envy her. Of course, the people she loves are here, including her boyfriend. Not only that, the place she loves is here. Her heart is here, buried in the Ugandan soil. Falling in love with places is different than falling in love with people, though they are connected, of course. It’s hard to love a place when the people you love don’t inhabit it. Or, you don’t love the people who do reside there in the first place.

Anyway, falling in love with places, with entire countries or regions, is different than falling in love with people, because places remain relatively static. You may flit about making or breaking plans, loving or hating the inconveniences of your new living situation, cursing or praising certain cultural practices or beliefs, etc. But Uganda’s personality remains relatively the same, even in the face of “development”.  It’s really you that has changed, matured, converted, apostatized.

I’m sorry to say that my hometown, Manassas, falls in the Least Loved category of places in my life….though right now it’s practically filled to the brim with PEOPLE I love, which changes my heart a little. Though Romania was a hard, often desolate place, I left a little of my heart there, up in the Carpathian Mountains, within the snow-covered forests and smoky communist bloc apartments where my friends ate curry and drank spiced wine and raised their babies.  And I fell in love with Costa Rica, though that felt more like a one-night stand, because I only saw “gringo” Costa Rica while roaming around on vacation. And I remember falling in love with Ronda, Spain….a white hill town with cobbled streets and remnants of Moorish Spain around every minaret-tiled church, every masala-spiced tea shop. I fell in love with Boston’s North Shore, where I spent 4 years in college puttering around old fishing villages and seaports, eating the best clam chowder and roast beef and marveling at the immense snow of winter and immense beauty of New England Autumns.

And I am falling in love with Durham , too, slowing making it my own, a place with strong memories and wonderful friends.

Uganda was, therefore, not the first or only place I fell in love with but it was the first time I felt that fierce, searing love that marked me forever, and because of my time here, I wasn’t and will never be the same – almost like being baptized , if I can say that as a seminarian. As Father Stephen says, you  must embrace Africa in order for Africa to embrace you. If you don’t, you will find yourself miserable here (as a Westerner), always impatient with the slowness, always angry at the inefficiency of transportation and various other aspects of life, always unsettled by sticking out (if you are white) in a crowd, always ill because you tell yourself the food is making you sick, always terrified of the safari ants and the dog-sized cockroaches.

But if you embrace Africa (let me say Uganda to be precise), then Uganda will embrace you, wrap you in her pain and her joy, her beauty and her sorrow, and you will feel like you are meeting a real, live person whose faults and follies are laid bare for you to accept or be repulsed by, rather than an illusory place filled with big-box stores and cement parking lots and cars, and definitely “no” poverty.

Grant it, I am repulsed sometimes when I am here, nearly every day, in fact – the flying ants wiggling under the doors, the dead cat in the drainage ditch, the lascivious glances from the boda boda drivers. But it’s the fact that Uganda  DOES repulse, unashamedly so, that gets me, as opposed to clean and bright American every-towns . I guess the problem I see is that American (or British, or Swedish, or South African, or perhaps someday, Uganda) every-towns  with their every-stores and every-culture normalize that lifestyle into every-ness.  I can’t speak for others but I can speak for myself.

Growing up in an every -town, with 5 strip malls all in a row, and plenty of housing developments with single-family homes filled with couples who do not know their own neighbors, multiple movie theatres, well-trimmed lawns and pot hole-free roads, and an Olive Garden-Loews-BestBuy- McDonalds-Walmart-Starbucks-Panera on every corner, served to NORMALIZE that life for me. Not only that, television and the movies further normalized the ever-town, because that’s all you would see (a whole other blog entry: global cultural industries and Ugandan teenage pop culture …..yikes).

Now, all things I encounter must measure up to That Which Is Considered Normal in my experience — the American suburb – which is really not normal at all but completely abnormal. The majority of people living on this earth do not live in every-towns where traffic runs smoothly and efficiently, where no one walks on the street and everyone rides a car, where trash trucks come every week to pick up your garbage and haul it to a mysterious land to never be thought of again, where the water out of every tap is safe to drink and roofs on buildings are generally not in danger of caving in, and most children you see outside are wearing disposable diapers and are probably inoculated for measles, mumps, and rubella, and most meat consumed is safe to eat and bought in sanitized shrink wrap from the grocery store, the adolescents sitting at the bus stop are likely going to high school totally for free (and both of their parents are probably HIV-negative),  and  the policeman on the corner is probably doing his job without bribe money and the local politician has probably never shot one of his opponents,  and local library is most likely stocked with enough books for the entire town to read if everyone decided to pay a visit at once.

This is not normal.

This is rare, strange, in some senses a model for development (Free schooling for all children? Access to clean water? Transparent politics? YES! YES! YES!),  and in other senses, it is a model that breeds isolationism and materialism. But I digress.

 I feel deeply, madly in love with Uganda, not because it is a better place by any means (because it’s not), or because it made me a better person (because it hasn’t), or because it has something which America may lack (it might, but probably not). I fell in love with Uganda because Uganda represented to me a corner of the earth that was actually…. normal, as statistical earthly standards go. Normal for me has changed drastically as a result. And “normal” in many ways is heart-breaking. That’s the hardest part, to know that these daily frustrations, these inefficiencies, these epidemics and droughts, this corruption and political terror and human brokenness are normal.

But it’s eye-opening to also discover that close family ties, the desire to look to the past (with emphasis on tradition), an agrarian notion of time, the dirt that coats my feet on walks to the market and washes down the drain in the shower, the vast stretches of horizon uninterrupted by buildings or power lines, the fly in my soup and ant in my bread is…normal.

Of course, I’m not saying that this “normal” is good or correct or best. Good Lord, some things in Uganda need to change, stat. Believe me, every time I return to the US, I feel like praising God that I can fill up my water glass straight from the tap, drink it, and feel reasonable sure that I won’t contract cholera.But I am less quick now to measure my Western normal up against the world I see out my window as I type this. I am less quick to judge something as “bad”, “under-developed,” “evil”, “dirty” and the like when my standard of normal is just not sustainable for this culture, country, continent, and the planet.

 I’ve had to adjust my standards a bit about what normal actually is. But doing so has incredibly transformative. Frankly, I will never be the same.