In Loving Memory of Ayermo Filder

[This post is dedicated to the late Ayermo Filder, an Invisible Children bracelet maker who sadly and suddenly passed away this weekend. Her loss is a tragic reminder of the terrible conditions in northern Uganda's IDP camps and the unflinching tyranny of HIV/AIDS. Below is a reflection on my experiences of the day of her death.]

The sky and its blinding white clouds hum; they seem to shudder with the same nervous electricity that I feel in my lungs. The long green savannah is layered in swathes of fidgeting sunlight. Wet, red road flings past us and up in small bits from the tires. We await death in the bouncing cab of a Toyota pickup.

Walking now, a wet and winding path through an internally displaced persons camp, dodging huts and small pools of milky water. Children waving, but do I wave back today? I do, but sadly.

There is a crying. A single bold crying in the air and then we are among the brightly colored women with sad faces. Three men carry the body wrapped in a rough gray blanket quickly into a hut. The observation is blunt and immediate and her body disappears into darkness. Then women that I know, old African women with tear-filled wrinkles stagger to me and cry on my shoulder.

We sit in furniture that came from nowhere. Just sit and witness the mourning. Women sit on the ground and stare down through heavy eyes. Sometimes a wailing rises up from a nearby hut, shrill and purposeful. An old woman with one arm wipes her eyes.

I mourn too, for the state of the world as evidenced by this camp and the gray covered body. I watch the women and study their faces as they decide what mourning looks like and my eyes are grabbed by movement. Twelve feet away from the hut carrying the gray-covered corpse a young girl dances. She’s facing away from the sad women, her body alive in the fast and slightly provocative movements of a traditional courtship dance. And she is so close! Dancing in this thick air of death, dancing in the middle of a concentration camp, dancing on top of the mourning, above the years of sorrow, her feet pushing the ground and its mud away, dancing the dream of every girl, and with that the dream of all who suffer.

Life and death dance so closely here; and it’s this moment, when we quietly acquiesce to our own weakness, that we hear hope most clearly.

The dancer and her friend laugh to each other and run away. I get up and walk out of the mourning and make a phone call, planning tomorrow’s burial. When I come back to my chair the slow, silent heartbeat of sadness is quickened by a group of soft-feathered ducklings, chirping their fairy chorus as they emerge curiously out from under my seat and playfully wander into a nearby hut.

Day in the Life: Lunchtime in Gulu

There's a little restaurant where I like to eat in Gulu. The food is good, and cheap. Barely a dollar for lunch and it comes fast. And it's never crowded. That's why I go there.

And the windows are mirrored on the outside. All along the side of the building a line of gold-tinted mirrors. And lunch time for me is also lunchtime for the kids.

Hundreds of children in all colors of washed, faded uniforms - blues and pinks and yellows - flood the streets and wander into them and dance around each other and laugh. And they stop at the mirrored windows.

They make faces and point at each other. They laugh and yell. And they can't see me, for once they can't and aren't pointing at me, the white man. But they're still laughing in the windows.

That's also why I go there.