Tombstones and Banana Trees by Medad Birungi Read Free Book Online Page B

dignity. You might find yourself hoping tomorrow will be better, but that hope eventually feels more like folly than truth.
    For those living in poverty—aching poverty, extreme poverty, absolute poverty—life is flawed. Poverty brings its own darkness, beneath which it seems impossible to move. The lack of resources, whether they be a pot to cook in or a blanket to sleep under or some land to farm or seeds to sow, robs life of the oxygen of hope.
    But that is not the whole story. There is always oxygen somewhere. There is always hope. There is always the potential for things to change. And they did, eventually, although not before every cell within my body knew what it was to ache.
    In the middle of his depression Job understood that when a tree is cut down it is right to hope that it will sprout again (Job 14:7). Isaiah also said that from the stump of David’s family a shoot would come (Isa. 11:1). Winston Churchill defined success as moving from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. Some of those who have suffered the most understand that tough times come and go but tough people stay. After storms there are always showers.
    I have already told you about Uganda’s beauty. The area of the southwest has a character all its own. The land is dramatic, with the horizon defined by volcanoes lurking over the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Rwanda. I grew up in the hills and valleys that surround those jagged peaks, an area abundant in its fertility. Yet even though in many places the soil is red like the last rays of the evening sun, it can still be rocky on those mountain paths. Your feet get stronger, building their own leather that protects them from minor cuts, but they cannot escape the jiggers and they cannot protect you from a machete.
    I was so often hungry in the years after my father abandoned us. When the pain got too bad, and I felt brave enough to risk it, I would climb banana trees like a monkey to eat the fruit at the very top that was ripe but eaten only by birds. Once I made the mistake of choosing the fruit at the top of one of my uncle’s trees. I must have been very hungry that day, for as I perched among the branches I did not hear him approach. I did not see him attach his machete to the long stick, and I did not see him take aim at my foot. But I felt the pain. The cut was deep, all the way through to the bone, and once I had fallen to the ground, I could see that it was bleeding profusely. He abandoned me on the ground right there, just like his brother, my father.
    I am grateful that a woman saw me. She screamed and then bandaged me with cloth from her dress before taking me home. Though the cut was deep, the humiliation inflicted greater pain. It took me many years to forgive my uncle; after all, these bananas were only food for the birds. Why would he not let us eat them? If we had a father around, people would not have treated us like this.
    We call the type of home we lived in “self-contained.” It sounds nice enough, but it really means that you share your living space with your livestock. Because we did not have a secure area out in our compound where our goats and chickens could be kept safely at night, they slept in with us. It was untidy and dirty, but the animals’ fleas were far from poor: Our bodies and blood provided them with an easy-access, open-all-hours banquet.
    The danger outside was never far away. Hyenas, wolves, even lions were all known to have attacked at night, especially before the national parks were established throughout the 1970s. If we needed to relieve ourselves in the night we would have to go out to the forest; even though nothing bad ever happened to me, I never liked it. As soon as we had the money to buy a bucket, we used that instead.
    After my father left we had nothing to sleep on or under. Gradually we began to acquire a few replacements for the possessions that were now doubtless being used by my