A friend of muine visiting the Headquarters of Poverty in busoga posted this online:
We have been talking about poverty and there is no lack of evidence for it. But to be confronted with real people heavily struggling with its ugly head is quite a different thing. Take this man I visited. He is about 80 yrs old and was once a prosperous farmer, with 2 wives. But somehow life has been very unkind. The two wives left at some point. He now lives alone, except for a slightly younger sister who tries to care for him, as much as is possible with her own disabilities and old age. I had visited him about 20 yrs ago, with my late dad, and so I sort of still had the same lingering memories. I was, hence, quite thrown off to discover that even the path leading to his house had meantime been overgrown with bush (especially kapanga) and definitely no car had driven that end for a very long tme. I ended up having to literally drive through bush with the car getting scratched (a re-vanish had to be done later). Before leaving later that day, I organised and we did some basic slashing to restore some kind of accessability and decency. The slashers and hoes we used were long not used and would have needed sharpening. But there was no time for that. So we made do with what we had, in the scorching noonday sun.
When we arrived, the old man was in his room, hardly able to answer our koodhi calls. It was dark in the house (which he had built in better days with local bricks and iron roof) and it was even darker in his room.We were hit by an unmistakable stench of sickness and lack of care! I hesitated to immediately enter the old man´s room and instead advised that we first look for his sister, who would be better placed to handle the situation. When she finally came from the garden, bare-footed and back heavily stooping, I was very touched when she broke into pure joy, doing some Kisoga ululation in greeting. She even summorned all her energy for a tired and aged trot to come and embrace me. Nobody had embraced me in a long time with such purity and abandon.
She then led us to the semblance of a living room, dusting an old and creeky chair for me, disappearing in the darkness of her ailing brother´s room to help him come out to greet us. It was almost like an eternity as she helped him up and into a kanzu which somehow got put on with the front end behind. But that did not seem to matter now! Supporting him on one side and his walking stick helping on the other side, the tragic couple stumbled and struggled out of that room. When I saw them at the doorway, I rushed to help her out and took over. She indicated an even creekier chair where he could sit. Very, very slowly and as carefully as I could, I lowered him onto the chair, fearful it would finally collapse when it least needed to. I pulled my own chair nearer his and focused on figuring out how to engage him. His eyes were hollow, face heavily sheepish and voice a far-cry from the strength of many years ago, when I visited him. As far as it was feasible, we held a conversation, if you could call it that, his sister filling in most details. I had some bottled water in the car and so I found it imperative to offer him water. I poured it in a metallic gama (I had not seen such cups for ages) that was on the nearby table. With trembling hand, he took the cup and drunk! The way he drunk, he must have been really, really thirsty....
In putting some detail together, I concluded the most important issue here was lack of the most basic care for a very sick man and at the bottom of this was biting poverty, with all its vagaries and ugliness. I did what I could for this situation, including financing delivery of milk every day and some money for a medical check-up. But I was all the time nursing an uncomfortable feeling deep in me that this could be a far more prevalent situation all over Busoga, especially in the villages, than I ever really imagined. Our people were really heavily languishing in the unforgiving claws of poverty and basic want...
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