Meet Peter

A few blogs ago I mentioned that I am helping a young man go back to school.  What started as an acquaintance on the street has turned into a pulling at the heart strings as I learn more about Peter and his story.  So I’d like to introduce you to this young man who has such a drive to go to school, improve his life and be a role model to others with the same plight.

I meet a lot of people on the street and we have brief casual conversations that consist mostly of greetings or “no, I’m sorry I don’t have any money to give you.”    With Peter, this became a dialog about what he was trying to do to get the 100 or so street kids in Gulu off the street, fed, back into school or at the least back with families.   It wasn’t until later that I realized Peter had also been a street kid, getting random help from random people, working at odd jobs and getting a meal when he could.  Yet Peter never asked for money or even implied that he was in need himself. It was only obliquely that I learned he was trying to get back into school.  The focus was always on "his" street kids.  He never mentioned that all of the money he had saved for school had been stolen (story to follow). That came to me quite by accident from another woman who was in Peter's life when it happened.

Fast forward to my deciding to help Peter get into Gulu Public Primary School (Grades 1 - 7) where he will have shelter and food as well as education.  Peter’s been on the street for a few years and has developed a level of autonomy that’s doesn’t fit too well in a school where you have to ask permission to go to the latrine!  Yet, he’s wants to do well  and is following all the rules.  So far - so good, and his teachers are noticing.

Last Sunday was Parent’s Day at the school – and I guess as his sponsor, I’m the closest thing Peter has to a parent, so I went, signed in as a "parent," was given his test results and stayed to visit.  I learned more about his history and had a fascinating conversation as Peter asked me about things he'd heard about the United States.  Sooo interesting to learn what Ugandans have heard and how it's been interpreted in the context of life in Uganda, half-truths and all. 

 The more I learn about Peter, the more amazed I am at how this young man has managed to hold on to such a single vision and motivation to be educated.  For the first few years of his life, Peter and his nine siblings were raised in a village on the outskirts of Gulu.   Evidently the mother left the picture early on and his father was left to raise the kids alone.  They struggled for food and all of the children were expected to work in the fields or otherwise contribute to family livelihood.  Peter made it to  P3 before it became evident that his father would not/could not continue to send him to school and it became a source of chronic conflict and later abuse from his older siblings.  So he went to live with another family after physical violence erupted as he became the  referee to keep his older brother from stealing food from the Peter's younger siblings.   The new "family" got him through another year of school, but that living arrangement fell apart as well.  (Nearly every family I meet here has at least a few extra kids living with them or has sent their kids to live with someone who is better equipped to handle them.  The nuclear family is nonexistant here for the most part.)

Once again, Peter realized if he were to have any chance of going to school, he’d have to fend for himself this time on the street and so he has – making his way through P6 with odds and ends of jobs and  “support.”  One of those “supporters” was a minister in Kampala who had the kids sleep and work on his compound, paying them the equivalent of about $40 per month out of which they would have to pay for food, medical expenses and a telephone to be at his beck and call when he needed them.   But no school….   The pastor enticed them with offers of “if you learn to drive, I’ll buy you a car”  but the pay wasn’t enough to get the training and there was no “time off.”  Again, Peter realized he had to do this on his own as the disparity between the way this man treated those under his care, and his claim of being a “man of god’ became more obvious and more disheartening.   (It's no wonder Peter became suspicious when the Church of Latter Day Saints - Mormons are prominent in Gulu - offered to pay his school fees IF he would join their church and agree to do their preaching their way and prepare to leave the country for a few years.)

Back in Gulu again, he found a bit of support from a reputable faith based organization here.  I met a Canadian woman there who knew Peter’s story and told, "Peter has had true miracles in his life,” and proceeded to tell me the story of his school money being stolen.  Seems Peter worked at digging a latrine for this organization all one school term, staying out so he could save his earnings to pay for the next term.  He put his money in the bank, an unusual thing for ANY Ugandan, much less a street kid.  On the day he went to withdraw his funds to pay for school, he discovered his account had been cleaned out by his landlady no less: filmed at the ATM.  Under the recommendation of the banker, Peter went to report the situation to the police and HE was thrown in jail, as the police assumed it HAD to be the street kid who was stealing.  After three days the banker followed a hunch and went to the police, only to find Peter in the slammer.   The fact that the banker tracked down the landlady’s crime AND followed up on Peter’s situation with the police could certainly qualify as miracle’s here in Uganda.    The money of course was gone, so there went another lost term of school. Still - Peter persists and is not an angry young man. 

Anyway, when Parent’s Day came along – unknown to me until the last minute – I had already made plans involving the library and a group of volunteers all scheduled to work.  In trying to explain to Peter that I might not make it, he stopped me and took my hand in both of his, looked into my eyes and said, “Don’t worry – all that you’ve done for me tells me you love me.”   Oh lordy – I have no words for this. 

So of course, I made it a point to get to Parent's Day and spent a little time chatting with Peter, took some treats only to discover other kids are “disturbing” his locker.  translate that “stealing” from his locker (no lock).  I've now supplied a lock...

So this is Peter’s story.  He’s working hard, has an incredible spirit and an ability to forgive that continues to inspire me.  His story is unusual only in that he continues to get up and try again, remains positive and committed against all odds, to living a life that matters.  

Hearing Aids De Ja Vu!

This morning dawned unexpectedly quiet....   Always a welcome event here - and rare.  So beautiful was the silence that i turned off the fan and reveled in it.  Constant Karaoke...  Must be a new bare somewhere, but everytime I woke up last night, there it was again.    This morning's silence was almost deafening buy comparison ;-)

My work mates are off in Kampala this week and I'm in Gulu trying to get other projects moving forward and somehow that has not proved fruitful, but the week is young.  Trudged to the library this morning all ready to sort children's books and it was totally locked.  Where IS everyone???  So I went to the market instead, found a not totally wilted bunch of cilantro and look forward to ANYTHING with cilantro on it.   There appears to be MO meat in Gulu...  "it is not ready yet."  I don't want to know what that means.   Thank goodness for foil packed tuna in my care packages!   It seems we may be getting the fallout from the Kenya elections.  we were warned of it, but supply routes are down due to Kenya's election turmoil.  No yogurt, no pickles, no meat...  odds and ends, but things that make life here a little easier.

Managed to get my power tuned back on.  Most of Gulu was without power for 3-4 days last week. everything rotted in the fridge.  When it did come back on, Umeme - the power monopoly - flippantly decided to disconnect mine.  I got the bill one day, paid same and they unplugged me the next.  No justification.  Seemed I was going to have to pay them to reconnect, but managed to find someone reasonable there and they issued the reconnect order.    Miracles never cease, they are sometimes just long in the coming.   This all happening during the week of International  Women's Day.  Did you know there was such a thing?    Me neither 'till I came here.  This is how I "celebrated" it:

My side of a  conversation with my PCV friend Erin, from Padjule: “Really?   Starkey – (the worlds largest manufacturer of hearing aids) - is coming to town?     You’re meeting with them?  How come? When?  Can I come?  How in the world are they going to fit hearing aids in Africa???   This I have to see.”

And so it began – but first a little background. 

In a former life – in my twenties – when I’d come back from Europe totally broke and on food stamps because-I-couldn’t-find-a-job-ANYWHERE-not-even-waitressing – I had to take a job placement test at the Department of Public Welfare….    If they were going to give me an emergency ration of food stamps, they were damn sure going to try to get me employed. Before I went trekking off to Europe after my first divorce, I‘d quit my job as an audiologist doing diagnostics for an ear, nose and throat clinic in Austin, caught the cattle-car-$100-Icelandic Airlines flight to Amsterdam and visited my sister in Tunisia.     Before I left, I’d humored a friend of mine and under some duress had told him my ideal version of the job I’d like.  I told him it would be a job "managing a state-funded program for delivering hearing aids and related services to indigent elderly." Where I came up with that I’m not sure – such a program did not exist at the time.   He suggested I plug in a salary, so I did and it was unreasonable for a young audiologist with no administrative experience and almost as little experience working with hearing aids and the elderly, except that  I’d tested hundreds of them.  So I plugged that order into the great job-bank-in-the-sky and left for Europe, not giving it another thought.

When I came back to Austin, it was after Nixon’s impeachment, the first oil crisis, I  had no money, no job and no prospects for any of the aforementioned.  So I dragged myself into the exams one morning after having been out most of the preceding night and took an absolutely horrid standardized job test and did so badly I was convinced I would never be employed. 

A few weeks later, I received in the mail, a letter from the Department of Public Welfare, the gist of it being: would I like to “come interview for a n"ewly developed Title XIX (medicaid) program tasked with delivering hearing aids and related services to the indigent elderly of Texas.”  And – the salary was precisely what I’d plugged into my formula a year before as I was packing my bags for Europe.    Really – you can’t make this stuff up. 

So – somehow, I beat out several other very seasoned audiologists with administrative experience and got the job.  It was trial by fire,  but I learned a lot in the three years I ran it before leaving again – this time to live on a sailboat for a year, cruising during storm season in the Gulf of Mexico and the Bahamas.  I was beginning to suspect I had come from gypsy stock. Anyway, that was the last time I’ve had anything to do with hearing aids or audiology directly.

Bill Austin on the left

 Fast forward a few decades and a few countries... When the news about Starkey coming to Gulu found my ears, I felt history repeating itself. Of course I had to see how a fairly high-tech process requiring testing, medical screening, fitting, hearing aid batteries and counseling was going to work  in a third-world environment where virtually NONE of that could reasonably be accomplished.  Coming from the audiologist’s background where testing and “proper” fitting rules,  I first viewed this with a lot of skepticism.  I'd been told that this is the brain child and passion of Bill Austin, the founder of Starkey Hearing Foundation and that he approaches it with evangelical zeal.   He devotes most of his time and talents now to traveling around the world and dispensing hundreds of thousands of hearing aids to hearing impaired kids and adults in response to Clinton's Global Millennium Initiative.

I'm glad to report that there’s been a lot of humbling and many reality reality checks between the arrogance of my twenties and the walk along this impossibly dusty road, past the cuk-madit (main market), numerous boda stands and a slew of Ugandan’s  amused to see a Munu walking that road. When I finally arrived at Saint Monica’s orphanage and clinic, it was the scene of much going on.  There were tents set up, with hundreds of men, women and children lined up or  sitting in staging areas waiting for the next phase of what proved to be an orderly, well orchestrated process.

 
Making all this happen were about 30 Americans and at least as many Ugandan volunteers milling around with red Starkey shirts and blue Global Health Corps t-shirts. There were also a few beefy guys around sporting Pros for Africa shirts.  Quite a group.  Global Health Corps is a Barbara Bush (daughter) initiative and Pros for Africa is consists of professionals from different areas, one of which if NFL  football players.  Witness Tommie Harris working with with a couple of different women below.

The next image that came into focus was a long, skirted table with piles of  what looked vaguely like a buffet of shrimp (wishful thinking...), but upon closer examination the piles revealed themselves to be  hearing aids divided into “power groups,” from weak to mega-strong and then body-aids for those who are profoundly deaf.   

Explaining that I was a Peace Corps Volunteer and former audiologist,  I was warmly welcomed and invited to observe and be part of the process.  What I saw there was a well-oiled machine: a very streamlined, practical process that – in the states- would be scoffed at, but was a fairly brilliant adaptation to the realities of the third world.   Lack of medical care means ear infections don’t get treated and what starts as a correctable temporary hearing loss, turns into a permanent one.  The Quinine given for treatment of Malaria is ototoxic and if given in too large a dose (common) you’re malaria (that time) may be cured, but you've lost your hearing forever…  and so it goes.  Here, the mere opportunity to hear something overrides the first-world concern of “is it perfect?”   While we were there, one child considered to be retarded immediately started mimicking the fitter's vowel sounds when the hearing aid was turned on.  Instead of being an outcast, with little hope of developing speech or integrating with his community, he'll have a chance at a normal life.  Others might just be a bit more tuned in, but here, that can save your life. 

Brady Forseth, Executive Director,  doing a fitting

Without going into a lot of detail there are a few really critical elements to the process of fitting a hearing aid.  In the States you would  start with an elaborate battery of diagnostic and fitting tests to determine type and configuration of hearing loss.   These would be performed in a multi-thousand dollar sound-proof booth with the latest tests including speech discrimination, etc.  Then you would test various hearing aids, “tune” them to reflect test results, re-test, etc. etc.  Anyone not doing all this would be considered incompetent or at the least unprofessional.  It’s a snobbery I know well and a luxury not possible here. 

As with every other service delivered in the environments of  developing countries, grass roots, practical and sustainable processes rule the day.   Just training people to respond accurately to a test – if you had an even remotely quiet place to conduct said test – would take too long and your high tech results would still have to be matched to real world limitations.  So here, the process looks more like this:

• ·      A med-tech (very skilled by the way) examines the ear canal with a photographic otoscope, where the ear canal shows up on a screen.  His job was to clear the canal, check for infection and send them for meds if he found something.   This is not a task for the squeamish:  many were totally occluded with wax that looked like tar and other stuff that had stuck there while they were trying to clean it them selves. Others have active infections.   More than a few, which I did not see,  had bugs that had taken up residence in the canal.

• ·      Ear molds were – for the most part – pre-made by an advance team that had come months earlier, taken impressions and sent the impressions for manufacturer elsewhere.  Those who arrived later without having been part of the earlier process, were fitted a well as possible from a selection of stock molds.

• ·      Some interesting screening was done to determine which power-model of an aid would be optimum, based on behavioral feedback.   Even in the States – with all of the technology in the world,   fitting of a hearing aid is still an art-form because of the variations in how people perceive sound and a myriad of other factors, both technical and perceptual. Getting useable feedback from folks who’ve never had something in the ear, who may never have heard, who not only don’t speak YOUR language, but often are non-verbal can be an adventure in subtlety.  Entire conversations here can be had with raising the eyebrows, so figuring out what that means when tuning a hearing aid can be - well - confusing.

 

• ·   After fitting, they receive some group counseling and get a bag to keep their batteries in.  This is interesting:  into each bag goes a handful of rice to absorb any excess moisture from the batteries being used.  A year’s supply is supplied by Raovac.   Once they can do everything on the checklist (put the batteries in, fit their ear-mold properly into the ear, turn it on, clean the earpiece, etc.) they are released with the contact of a local “support partner.”

The downside is, that people here – even the partners, don’t know much about hearing aids and the recipients themselves will be hard pressed to find help for the kinds of issues that routinely come up.  Two questions I was asked a few times were:

• ·        Will the hearing aid fix what is wrong with my/my child’s ear?

• ·       Are their any harmful side effects to using a hearing aid?  

The really tough questions won't show up until everyone is gone home.  So the system isn't perfect, but no system here is and this one is pretty impressive.

A few hours into the process,  the wind began to whip up a nasty dust storm followed by a grand Gulu downpour.  Chaos ensued: people scattered to move under tents, thousands of dollars of equipment had to be packed and people still ushered through the process.  And so the day ended in mud and lakes of water.  A classic early flirt with rainy season!

In a few months, I hope to help with a group being brought in from Erin/s region in the east.     Whodathunk I'd be doing this again after all these years.  You just never know where life will take you.

Children's Room Project!

-->

Finally – at long last – we are actually starting the project that was attempted in 2011. A burned foot, change of Town Clerk and LABE work intervened and conspired to stall the project.  And a truculent volunteer dug her heels and played the role of a power-mongering bureaucrat.  Her first question when approached in 2011 was “What will you give us?” after I’d already offered to organize the children’s collection (i.e time, expertise, all free).  Obviously that didn’t bode well.

Time passed and, as volunteers, we finally got deep enough in our projects and gained enough credibility to try again and take time away from our primary work.  Although, the library task is in line with LABE’s goals and secondary projects are encouraged, things just needed to come together.  It took a while.  Another volunteer had some university books donated  - though no funds to GET them here.  Shipping books is pricey even via the M-bag route which coast around $250 - $300 – as some of you already know!

Since getting the books here wasn't working, we put our heads together, and re-engineered the original idea - boosting literacy and reading.  We approached the library (study center) again are were lucky enough to find the real librarian there and he was very excited about the project.  He’s not requiring us to jump through administrative hoops (you have no idea how huge this is) and embraces everything we’ve suggested.  So – we have been granted permission to claim a secondary room as a children’s room, but to do that we must clear the existing chaos:  organize thousands of newspapers for several years (back to 2009!)  into title, year, date, day, getting rid of thousands of duplicates, etc. etc.    Here's a sample of what we found:

There is no storage or shelving for them so we have been creating a makeshift system using discarded grocery boxes.  There is also no money for binding the newspapers.  So witness the current solution (below) – boxes with paper separators….    Makes us realize anew how fortunate we are in the States to have funded libraries!  When life gives you boxes - make shelves...  Samir, our favorite local grocer, gave us these.  That may not sound like much, but other places wanted $7 US for a discarded box.

After the newspapers, there are rooms full of old donated books that need sorting – and hundreds of books for the adult section have to be processed and some discarded.  Some of those will go to the new library in Wakiso my homestay host is starting and others will hopefully  go  to schools and a local youth center.

There are new shelves in the adult section and they are empty.  ALL (thousands) of books must be moved from old shelves to the new ones. When that’s done, the children’s room will get the current (more child-friendly) shelves and by then we should have at least the newspapers done and the text books figured out.  THEN we can start categorizing the hundreds of children’s books into reading level categories.  Forget Dewey Decimal System, no one will ever refile a book by number and there is no such thing as a card file or inventory of books.

Since there are not children’s chairs or tables,  we’ll shorten the legs on a few adult tables and make them available for kids.  We’ll get a few mats from the market and create play and reading areas, paint when we can get paint donated….  And!  There is a  local teenager who is a budding talent and we’d like to encourage him – sooo – we’re hoping to get him to paint fun images on the walls to brighten the place up.  Here's what it looks like now:


That blue thing you see is a huge iron gate being stored.  We have no idea about how to get it out of the building since it's both taller and wider that the door. I'm thinking of painting it and calling it the "Gateway to adventure" - or some such.

Ahhh it goes on and on.  Creating the space is only Phase I.

The bigger challenge is “mobilizing” schools, parents and children to get them to USE the room.  As I’ve said before, this is not a reading culture.  In the library, there are only text/academic books, nothing for pleasure reading.  Our goal is to provide a children’s space, so children and parents will have a place to get books, come for reading-hour,  have some puzzles available,  and plan some kids activities. This means visiting schools, holding events for children, and maybe someday creating a mobile library to get books to the field.  Some of the doors have already been open by LABE as they take the books you all have donated to the field to Home Learning Centers.  

In the meantime, life goes on.  I've visited my sponsor-student, Peter, who has now been in boarding school for about a month.  so far, so good.  He's happy having a place to sleep and three meals a day. 
His challenge seems to be math, so one of our new PC education volunteers has offered to meet with him to see if see if some tutoring will help.   

OK - gotta get to work.    House-sitting for some friends with a mischievous "teenage" cat who has managed to drag in an interesting assortment of critters over night:  I've counted one large roach, a large strange moth with a long funnel looking proboscis, a big lizard and a huge grasshopper.  And that's just what I can see scattered around and need to remove before I find them in pieces when I get back.  Seems she likes things that crunch (lizard legs....)

Onward through the dust...