Top 10: #5 - Visiting Nancy

Flashback to Gulu, before our group moved to Anaka and that’ll take us to #5 on the list. They day after we met our teachers at the Invisible Children Educator’s Conference (about a week into our trip), Kelley’s teacher Nancy invited the Anaka group to visit her family in their village on the outskirts of Gulu. After a week of non-stop traveling around and meeting with educators and speakers and embassies and schools, we were a bit overwhelmed and felt quite removed from the actual people, so needless to say we jumped at the invitation. It has since become one of the best experiences since arriving in Uganda.

We walked to Nancy’s village from the Acoli Inn, taking a back road past a hospital and the “weather station” that was literally a metal pole stuck in the ground behind a barbed wire fence. We walked out of Gulu and into the Africa that I had pictured in my head before my arrival – round, thatched-roofed huts, jerry cans full of water, women carrying babies on their backs and bundles on their heads, kids in ragged clothing smiling and playing and happy. We walked through a cluster of huts while their inhabitants looked on, interested, and arrived at Nancy’s, a hut so identical to those we had passed that I would not have been differentiate it from the others around it.

We were introduced to Nancy’s very-pregnant sister and then ushered into the “guesthouse” – a circular hut petitioned inside into two halves by several hanging sheets suspended by cording from nails in the walls of the hut. The section into which we entered was sparse but inviting; we sat at a handful of chairs arranged in a semi circle in front of a bookshelf; a wooden table with four plastic chairs sat opposite the doorway. The tin door squeaked on its hinges and several sets of chocolate eyes peered through the opening: Nancy’s young nieces, nephews, and neighbors had arrived to check out the pale visitors. Nancy went out to find her 18 month-old son, but when she brought him back in, he had little interest in these weird-looking newcomers and hid his face in the crook of his mother’s arm. Nancy’s nearly year-old nephew, David, was braver than his cousin, and happily sat with (and drooled all over) Morgan.

There’s little differentiation between blood-relatives and just-plain-village-children, so I’m not sure who was actually a relative of Nancy’s, but here, that doesn’t really matter, as the attitude is that everyone of an age to look out for the children has a responsibility to do so. As we sat in the hut, a handful of children came in at Nancy’s urging to “introduce themselves.” In a fashion more organized than most anything I’ve seen in Uganda thus far, the kids entered the room and shyly paraded around to each of us, practicing some of the English they have learned in primary school: “Hello, my name is…” Some were painfully quiet and Nancy had to translate the whispers of most of them after their introductions, but she also explained that many of them had never seen a muzungo before, let alone had one sitting in a hut in the middle of their village. Despite their shyness they wanted to stay around. One little girl in a lacey pink dress came and sat beside me, never looking me in the eye. Instead, she focused on the light hairs on my arm, stroking my arm like a new pet.

One at a time, some of the braver kids ‘performed’ for us, first a verse of the Ugandan national anthem, then the song of Ugandan school children – more acquired knowledge from their nursery or primary school experiences. The best part was that the kids had absolutely no idea what they were singing, nor what the actual words should sound like in English. (Kind of like the joke that Grandma tells about “Hose, Can you See?”) It wasn’t until we arrived at Anaka that I learned the real words to the two songs, but the jumbled English made the kids at Nancy’s all the more precious.

After the 11th or 12th child had sung his or her version of the anthems, we decided to return the favor (and get some fresh air!). We took the kids outside and taught them the Hokey Pokey and the Chicken Dance; they thought the muzungus hopping and flailing around outside of their huts were side-splittingly hilarious, and our group of 12 kids quickly turned into more than twenty, with another handful of kids peering out from behind or between huts. When we ran out of children’s songs we grabbed a stick and drew a game of hopscotch on the red clay ground between some huts and taught the kids how to play. With Nancy as translator, they then taught us their version of hopscotch, a more squarely-shaped ‘board’ with the same general idea of throwing a rock and not stepping on any of the lines.

When the kids lost interest in their hopscotch (because the lines got so scuffed you could no longer see the board) they decided to show us a game they invented called “kick the bottle.” We – the American teachers, Nancy, and Nancy’s sister, sat in plastic chairs outside of the huts as the kids set up for the game and a young girl from a neighboring hut brought us juice boxes on a plastic tray. The oldest boy, probably around 10, took an empty Coke bottle and set it on the ground between where we were sitting and the hut about 15 yards away. He then made a blindfold out of an old scarf and proceeded to tie it over the eyes of another boy, maybe 6 years old, and pointed the little one in our direction. We pictured the blindfolded child soccer-kicking the glass bottle projectile-style at our heads, and expressed our concern to Nancy, who told us not to worry. The premise of the game is simple: Blindfolded, you walk towards the bottle on the ground and try to kick it over – in reality, much more difficult than it sounds, especially when they start spinning the participants in circles before setting them off to kick. Our kids have laptops, Wiis, and other toys that blink and beep and whir. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a group of kids have as much fun as these kids playing a game they invented in a remote village in Africa. And it’s been even longer since I’ve seen mothers enjoying themselves as much as Nancy and her sister were, simply watching their children play.

One of the neatest things about watching the kids was their interaction with one another; the little kids idolized the older ones, and the older ones took an almost parental role of the younger ones, picking them up when they fell, carrying them around when they were tired, reminding them to play nice and take turns. The oldest boy organized all of the little ones so that each had a turn to ‘kick the bottle’ and did not take a turn himself until the others had all successfully knocked the bottle over or gave up trying. When the rest of the group had all had had turns, the little ones – who clearly idolized that oldest boy – watched and laughed and cheered as he took his turn. Another interesting thing is the lack of tears – these kids don’t cry. They don’t complain, there are no tantrums. The little ones can entertain themselves, and any issues between the slightly older children are sorted out on their own, generally quickly and without much of a scene. We mentioned this to Nancy and she found our observations surprising, saying, “They only really cry when they are sick.” There’s a lesson here, I think?

After ‘Kick the Bottle,’ the children wanted to show us some of their traditional dancing, and the scarf used in the game quickly became a waist-wrap for one of the older girls. The boys scavenged up props: several long poles for spears, and some shorter sticks and tin can lids for drums. The boys’ dance was clearly demonstrative of a hunt; they ‘stalked their prey’ in two rhythmic lines that jumped and stepped to the beat on the tin can lids, and when they got closer to their seated audience, they yelled in an attack that quickly erupted into giggles and disarray. David, the littlest member of the dance troupe, drooled and laughed and jumped around with the older boys, round belly protruding from under his t-shirt and skinny legs caked with layers of red dust.

After the children’s dancing, we walked across the street to see Gulu’s traveling dance troupe’s daily rehearsal; the majority of the village was already there, spread out on bamboo mats or in patches of grass on the hill beside the worn-down dirt ‘dance floor.’ The children were all with us, hanging onto our arms and legs protectively. We were ‘their’ muzungus and they were not going to share us with any of the other children from the village! The dance we saw was a courtship dance; women formed one half of a circle and men the other while three men played drums of various sizes in the middle of the circle. The women wore bells on their right ankles and added to the intensity and rhythm of the dance with every step. At one point, one of the women separated from the group and danced among the men to ‘choose a husband,’ and cheers and laughter rose up from the audience when she singled out one of the men as her choice.

Behind the dancing, we watched as a group of 20-30 children played in an empty pickup truck at the top of the short hill. One of the children put the truck into neutral and the rest got behind it and pushed, sending it rolling – slowly at first, then picking up speed – down the hill. The children chased it as it rolled, some jumping onto the running boards or into the bed, until it came to a stop when the ground flattened out. They then got in front of it and pushed it back up the hill, only to repeat the ‘game’ when they again reached the top. I think I can speak from the other Americans with me when I say we were picturing the worst – a small child getting pushed under a tire or hammered by the truck’s front bumper – but none of the African adults seemed concerned in the slightest, and the children did seem to be enjoying themselves…

When dance rehearsal was over, we made our way back to the village where we briefly met Nancy’s mother and brother-in-law who invited us to stay for dinner. We had our Invisible Children kick-off dinner to attend with our Ugandan partner teachers that evening so we couldn’t stay, but we promised to return on one of our weekends in Gulu – I’ll be sure to let you know when we return!


Ugandan national anthem:
Oh, Uganda,
May God uphold thee,
We lay our future in thy hands.
United, free, for liberty,
Together, we always stand.

School Song:
We young women and men of Uganda,
Marching on the path of education,
Singing, and dancing, we join together,
Uniting for a better Uganda.