If you are alive, then you are not poor

Next morning I found my Ugandan twin who happens to be our tour guide. We share the same name and age. He exemplifies what the ambitious youngsters of these villages would like to achieve in life - run a business that opens to the outside world to bring income back to his fellow villagers and for himself to one day descend the mountain and find better employment opportunities. Currently, the best thing for them is to have foreign visitors coming so they could interact with the outside world and most importantly, to practice English.

Our tour guide and some other young adults our age were already one of the better offs in the village. He obviously spent a lot of spare time learning English so he could have this additional source of income compared to other villagers. Given his ability to generate income from the pocket of foreigners, part of his job is to distribute some of the tourguide fee to his fellow villagers. Hiking through the scenic rural Africa is not free - you go through people's huts and farms and they ask you for small amount of money when you go through their backyards. We even saw small kids asking us for money...cute little faces extending their hands out asking for only a penny or less. You can't help but feel emotional/sympathy for them.

The most touching memories of Africa for me were faces of kids. Their innocence is captured by staring at foreign looking faces with such an intense fixture. They would stop whatever they were doing in the field when we walked by and scream out "Mzungu" - white people. Only the older ones can distinguish Asians from Whites. As I was playing around with them, I managed to make an infant one cry as the youngest probably had never seen a "Mzungu" before. Another kid around 12 or 13 years old followed us and the tour guide through at least half of the hike, curiously learning from his elder how to be a tour guide when he grows up, and eagerly practicing English with me.

In the villages you really see how poverty is entrenched as a viscious cycle. The boys may go to school for three years and once they become strong enough, start assuming the family business of selling agricultural goods by carrying them into town. Most girls never even go to school (drafted for working on the farm and taking care of younger siblings). In most villages, you see lots of kids roaming around with very little adult supervision. Even four or five year old girls bear the responsibility of carrying around and looking after their infant siblings. The saddest thing is to see these kids with constant mucus hanging from their nose. They probably have never been checked by a health worker and child vaccination is unheard of. Even though everybody knows this, but seriously - providing basic basic health service and empowering kids through education is perhaps the most effective way for long term poverty alleviation for the entire village.

During a downpour in which we were only protected by "banana leaf umbrellas", our tourguide took us to his "new house" for temporary shelter. It was still mud-built but with tin roof to protect from the rain. While he eagerly wanted to sell us his coffee and yes, "pot", we discussed economics, income and a lot of personal issues. He would be ashamed when answering our questions (sometimes lying to us due to shame) as in how many people in the village had ever gone to college, where he lived as a kid or how much can one acre of coffee bean be sold for. His facial expressions alone indicated the hardships he had gone through, along with the rest of his village folks, during childhood years. The most memorable conversation was when we asked him, "do you consider yourself well-off or rich compared to others in the village?" and his response was "I don't consider myself poor because I'm alive". At first I thought he was just giving a clever joking response...but he was actually very serious and emotional. Yes you realize in this Ugandan village the precious of life - if you are live that means you've had enough to eat to grow up. That was such a simple but profound revelation for me.

We noticed that even though he is well off and respected in the village, there was still intense competition with other guys his age also well versed in English - including the owners of the resort cabins. Each young guy our age wants to be our tourguide, wants to sell his his stuff, and wants to get a piece of our American pie. We lectured him about the importance of avoiding intra-village competition - villagers ought to look out for the economic wellbeing of each other and help each other out with farming or tour guide business. Also in a very academic manner, we told him about microfinance in the form of village group lending which he had never heard of.

In the end, I'm not sure how much of that he took in but when you get once in a lifetime chance to bond with villagers in Uganda, you give it a try. When you work for the World Bank, USAID, UNDP or whatnot, you fly over 99.9% of the country and only see the beautiful trial villages and corrupt government officials.