Heart Bleeding
A while back I mentioned feeling overwhelmed by the Sunday New York Times and so to scale back I got a subscription to The Economist, a British weekly that does an excellent job of covering most of what is going on in the world in a format that takes only an hour or three to skim over. A part of my subscription was a small pocket guide called World in Figures which is essentially a statistical overview of economic indicators and other data.
I was excited to look it over, filling my head with useful and useless data. Reading it over is in many ways like having that big atlas you had as a kid, looking at a map and sounding out the names of cities and other geographical waypoints, letting your imagination wander with the sound of each aloud: Reykjavik, Cape Wrath, Prague, Bergen, Macchu Pichu; in the Google age one can accompany this sense of wonder with a series of Google Image searches to look at pictures as food for imagination.
But along my journey through the pocket guide I began noticing my country, Uganda, at or near the top of many lists. Wow, I thought to myself; Uganda never wins gold medals or makes headlines in the west, we're at the top of... and then I began to see those lists, bad lists, the type of lists that you'd never want to toute in front of others and say "that's where I'm from."
My heart sank when I read fertility statistics saying that the average number of births per woman in Uganda is 7.10. If that's the average then women like my mother, who only had three, are countered with women who have children in double figures. I don't think it takes a stretch of the imagination to assume that the average woman in Uganda does not want 7 children.
A page turn later there's another sad statistic: we finish at the top of the list for the lowest median age - a tender 14.8 years. The median is subtly different from the average (in this case not in a good way) and what it tells me is that not only is Uganda a country in which children make up most of the population (if you're willing to assume that adulthood is generally at the point where one exits their teenage years). What is even more disturbing is that this is the second wave of consequences in the country's battle with AIDS, in which so many of the adults have died and left their children to fend for themselves.
A couple of page turns and I'm looking at GDP per head. Although Uganda has a few countries ahead of it on the list (we rank 14), our GDP per head is $240. On the top of the page, the top countries on that list have GDP per head around $50,000. I'm not a professional economist but it doesn't take a genius to see that GDP (how much stuff the country makes) is not evenly distributed across the population so that $240 per person may, for your average villager, translate to an amount that's much, much lower.
And so my heart bleeds for my country. It bleeds for my family there. It bleeds for the people we'd see outside of our car windows during our summer visits, when we were on vacation from American school. I can't be one of them, and I can't not be one of them.
It's been so long since I was back, but I do remember a few things of Uganda besides my relatives - I remembered how much people gave us. I remember how when we visited the choice goat was slaughtered, or perhaps the "fattened" chicken - once we visited an aunt who had nothing to offer us but eggs, so we ate omelletes and drank tea while she and my parents talked over us in Luganda. At the time I used to hate eggs but that was an offer I couldn't refuse. I remember the outpouring of love we'd recieve on our visits and now, at 30 years of age and far, far away, I understand more what it meant. Just before my sister and I left for school, we made one last trip back and in it I remember clearly one of our many "send offs" in which an old woman was speaking in my mothers language, in words that I couldn't understand with a message that was as clear as day: when you go to America, don't forget us.
I haven't.
7:56:43 PM 
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