Suubi (or, Hope)

You have got to be kidding me, I think, when I awake Sunday morning at 4am. The muezzin isn’t even up yet! I take half an Ambien and crawl back to bed. Four more blessed hours of sleep and I am feeling much better. I even manage some dry toast for breakfast, and two more slices for lunch.

I am glad to be feeling better, not only because I am a big fat giant baby when I’m sick, but because it’s Sunday and Sundays are Suubi days, when all of the women come together. Today we will be buying the necklaces that they have made with the clasps they were given last week (the women buy their own paper for rolling the beads, and their own varnish, and the plastic thread they string with, but Suubi provides the clasps).

We head out around 2pm, the lumbering Mystery Machine bouncing along the pockmarked roads on the way to Walukuba. We pull up in front of Santa’s house, and a handful of women pile in, wrapped in brightly colored fabrics and mismatched skirts and t-shirts, laughing and chattering excitedly in their native tongue (or tongues, as the case may be – with over 40 tribal languages spoken in Uganda, it is not unusual for one to be multilingual). Most of the Suubi women are Acholi, from the north, refugees of a lengthy civil war. The documentary, Invisible Children, helped to bring international attention to that war’s most innocent victims: children kidnapped and forced into marriage or service as child soldiers.

At the meeting place, I sit beside Gertrude, who teaches me some basic Luo (the language of the Acholi): ningo (hello), kop ango (how are you), kop pe (I am fine), apwoyo (thank you) … Gertrude has five children, aged twelve (er, I think…) to twenty-two; she lost her husband in 1999 and has not remarried. “It is difficult,” she says. To find someone who will help care for children that are not his own, that is. We form a small assembly line: Julie takes the necklaces and pays the women, Ashley inspects them for length and tension, and Gertrude and I re-fasten the clasps.

When business is finished, I help Santa serve water to the women who want it, narrowly avoid giving a speech (although Daisy warns me I should have one prepared for next Sunday), and load the Mystery Machine with the bags of completed necklaces. We pick up a couple more women for the ride home, squeezing fourteen into a vehicle built for seven. There is more laughter and more chattering, and I am struck, for the millionth time, at how these people who have so little seem so much happier than most people I know who have so much.

I think of Gertrude, raising her five children on her own after her husband’s death; and Betty, whose baby’s father took off when he learned of her pregnancy; and Agnes and Mary and Scovia and Margaret and Joyce and Sumini and Pross. I think of their wide smiles, and the light in their eyes, and their laughter like wind chimes.

I think of all these things and hope only that their smiles get bigger, the light in their eyes brighter, and their laughter never ceases.