I came to the The Aubey School, where everything is covered in a fine white dust because it is located across the road from the cement factory. I had spent the previous day walking through the village next to the school with Stella Maris, who at 21 has spent the last year organizing a collective of ten of the village’s most impoverished and marginalized women. Both of her parents died of AIDS. Stella was raised by her Uncle in this village, but won scholarships and attended boarding school until she completed the equivalent of high school. She is now attending a certificate course part time and volunteering to train the women’s collective in nutrition and health care counseling. She raps and sings as well. She loves Beyonce.
When I showed up at the school I expected, as I had been told, that I would take a tour of one of the gardens the School’s outreach arm had started in a local village. Peter, who had been working for the organization for 10 years, Joseph, who teaches in the morning and does outreach in the afternoons, Stella and myself piled on to two motorbikes that wove between semitrucks headed in and out of the cement factory. Then we turned onto a dirt road lined with run down shops. The shops quickly disappeared and we were on a long red dirt road that cut between deep green hills and was populated by only our two bikes and the occasional child or pair of children, who come to the road from who-knows-where and were headed some place equally as remote.
We drove for a 1/2 hour, then we passed some goats and a stream where women were bathing and two boys were fishing. We drove and we passed some children who just about lost their minds screaming, “Mzungu!” (white person) when they saw me. We kept driving.
Then we turned on to a smaller dirt road and huts began to appear. We drove another mile and I began to hear clapping, then women ululating. There were 20 or so of them seated beneath a tree with 40 or so children. One woman stood as our bikes entered the village proper and began jumping as she started a call and response song. The organization’s chairwoman shook my hand and inexplicably rubbed her face on my chest. I was lead into a structure where I sat in the cool dark on a bench next to Stella for a bit, then I was told to come outside. We were going to attend a meeting.
The woman and children were reassembled in the shade of the structure. Six simple chairs, one of which I was directed to, formed a row in front of the assembly. However, before I could sit, the simple chair was removed and replaced with a what, in comparison to the other chairs, looked like a throne – albeit made of unevenly cut and roughly sanded wood. That was were I was to sit.
Peter, the Chairwoman, Joseph, the Village Treasurer, the Secretary all conducted a formal meeting, which I will refrain from describing in too much detail because I find it a bit hard to recount. It was one of those experience which when you go through it you do what’s asked of you, and recalling it you either blush or shake your head and laugh or shake your head and sigh.
Here are the highlights. After introductions I was told to give a speech – a speech about what? I knew and still know next to nothing about the organization. Give a speech, something inspirational. Okay. I gave a speech. Then villagers spoke. Three women, as translated by the chairwoman, gave the same basic information. Their husbands had died of AIDS, they didn’t have the resources to feed their children let alone the orphans of their brothers and sisters whom they were also raising, and whatsmore they were sick too. The women asked, “What are you going to do about it?”
As I later learned the outreach workers have a plan to help introduce poultry farming into the village and the villagers had submitted a budget, but the capital to start the project is non-existent. Peter’s answer to the women was long on words like unity and patience and short on details. It did include this statement, “We have brought visitors to help. We have brought this white man.” The meeting ended and the chair woman rubbed her face on my chest again.
First days at work are confusing. We loaded back on to our motorbikes and headed back out onto the long red dirt road. Where was the garden I was supposed to see? It’s hard to say.
