“it was there before you noticed it.”

In the mornings I walk to work. The road is red dust and it cakes into my fingernails so deep only scrubbing a load of laundry gets them clean again. The road is lined with round traditional homes, businesses selling odds and ends (and airtime), the occasional cow, and notably, people. I feel shy and awkward walking to work, surrounded by children walking themselves to school, precious in their uniforms. We exchange the obligatory “hello, how are you” and some children respond, and others look away (a completely tangible mix of wonder and fear on both of our parts). Sometimes I try out my greetings in Lwo: I say Kopango, meaning hello/how are you. The response is Kope, meaning I am fine. My conversations usually don’t sustain much longer than that.

The quote in the title of this post is from the book “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” by Alexandra fuller. Appropriately, this book is a memoire of a British woman who spent her childhood and adolescents living with her farming family in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. The subject of the quote, if you did not assume, is poverty.

There is poverty in Pader. There is poverty in Uganda, in Africa, and the world. It is a global reality tied up in complex systems of power and paternalism and globalization and indifference. Poverty is not simple. Money certainly won’t fix it. (and capitalism definitely won’t). Access, equality, human rights, education, innovation, and infrastructure just might.

Before Pader was in my vocabulary, before Uganda was on my radar, before Africa was part of my geography, these places existed.

And poverty, too, was there before I noticed it. And honestly, it will still be here after I am gone. My ability to perceive poverty, to take notice, does not validate its existence or make it any more real than it was before (especially for those who know it most intimately). But now it is a part of my reality (and responsibility), too. It is part of my humanity.