the hard lesson

I am here in Uganda. I am with children who are happy - so happy, at
least some of the time. But life here is unmistakably tragic. Tragic
and beautiful. Beautiful and devastating. It seems that life is
beyond our control - out of our control. Like the floods that ravaged
the harvest in Eastern Uganda last week. We wait and see what destiny
has in store for us - whether it will save us or spoil us.

One of the street children I teach ran away last week. We scoured the
streets. Instead of finding him I found over 400 other street people -
newly born babies, toddlers, retired men in search of the government
pension they had been promised, refugees, people in exile, mothers
with daughters, abandoned children, orphans.

After some days we found him in a disused house that was home to drug
addicts, drug dealers and street children. A pit. He was out of his
head. How old is he? His height tells me he is 10 but his hands tell
me he is a very old man. I don't know his age - neither does he. He
is the child of parents who fled the genocide in Rwanda. Uganda was a
safe haven. Except it wasn't. AIDS kills without borders. They died
in a foreign country leaving behind two children with no extended
family to take these children on.

The boy was so small when he became an orphan. His sister was forced
into a marriage with a man many years her senior - she was around 13
when she married - a child bride. Her husband, an alcoholic beat her
senseless on a daily basis. She finally left, taking her two small
babies and became a prostitute.

Meanwhile the boy was given to an old Rwandese lady who had no family
or children - she had been a coffee farmer in her youth and was
relatively wealthy. But with no pension, her wealth ran out and she
was left in the hands of poverty. A good woman but old. So old. The
boy was her carer - collecting water from the stream, cooking,
cleaning. At the same time he got sexually and physically abused by
the neighbour. It was then that he began running away. The old woman
died. He had nowhere to run from and nowhere to run to.

After some running he came and lived with me. He didn't run away
until the day I had to say goodbye and had to leave. Then he ran.
And he has kept on running since. What was an act of courage and
survival became a destructive habit. Living on the streets makes the
young die when they are old. A 10 year old, old man dying on the
streets. The streets make men out of boys. It robs children of their
childhood. It happens every day, every second. All over the world.

So when we found him he was out of his head. Not on drugs, just from
sheer exhaustion of fighting and picking through the scrap on the
streets and having no food and being dehydrated. He is with me now.
He sleeps in the classroom at the school until his new room is fixed
up. He will be staying with 5 other ex-street children. Will it last?
Can he break the habit of running to the dangerous yet familiar
streets? I don't know. I can't think anymore.

I love him.

I want his life to be restored but I know it can't be what it should
be. The hand he was dealt is really too much to bear, For him and for
those around him.

And I have learnt. He is my teacher and he has taught me that I need
to engage with pain. It is a principle that threads and weaves itself
through my life. When I attempt to ignore pain and suffering then I
help no one. If I turn my face away from pain I will also limit what
I see of joy. I don't know why or how but they are inextricably
linked. He has taught me that too.