Some nights.

I always joked lightheartedly about the suitcases of protection that are toted to Africa. You give stuff in exchange for life allowance. When I saved 15,000 and toted that over to Uganda the first time I went. It likely saved our lives--but didn't improve our standard of living at all. Sad but true.

In the more rural places of Uganda, family is interested in what can be exchanged for mere existence. What is this muzungu good for? For the stuff they bring? For shiny beads?

Good questions.

Just hope not to die for stupid things the next time I attempt to reunify my family.

Why I love you.

Why I loved you when I loved you, is subject to interpretation.

You were not my wow factor. You were ordinary. You worked hard. You had a winsome personality. ... Until of course, we were us. Then no longer was the winsome... Only the silent stoic man of thought and overwhelm.

Should I have married somebody who was extraordinary and larger than life. Should you have been the wow factor that was beyond expectations? Certainly that would’ve helped some things but it would have hindered others.

I did not need someone who was all that. I just needed somebody who was ordinary and traditional in the best of ways.

The Secret Mission

Today I post a movie I made of Gracie. We watched Undocumented, a series on Netflix. The girls came and watched also. I sometimes don't know how to feel because years ago, I wept alone. Now I weep with those who I identify with. I weep with my children. I weep for lost children. I weep for people who's lives are consumed by paperwork, immigration legalities instead of meaningful work.

I thought that we would be much further along in the process now but we aren't and my daughters are beginning to construct their world perceptions around our reality.

Here's Gracie's take on the plans we should carry out to get our Daddy back.

Today, I hate my birthday!

I’m tired of living alone with my kids. I’m tired of making absolutely every single meal and washing every piece of clothing and cleaning every corner of my house all by myself. At times I forget the important things because the list of important things to do is so long that I can only manage about 50% of it. Last month one of the things that fell off the list was figuring out when to take my car in for an oil change. I failed to do so, now I have a vehicle that has engine failure.  I burned up the engine.  I can’t figure out when to do my taxes. I’m not sure if I’ve paid all my bills at the beginning of this month.

Today is my birthday.  And I hate it. Nobody is bringing me flowers. Nobody is bringing me presents. Nobody is initiating any kind of celebration.  I just want my husband with me today to do these things for me, with me.  I walked 2 blocks with my daughters to the local restaurant and had a birthday lunch. Then Glory cleaned our bedroom up and brought me up and showed me this birthday present surprise she had for me. I think God I have these little people in my life who will only grow to be more of a blessing and who will soothe the sorrow I carry with me beneath the surface.

Prayers of 6 yr olds

last night, New Years Eve Night they prayed for...

Mommy, so she can stop coughing. They prayed for the angels and Jesus to help fight the devil to keep him away from us. They prayed for daddy to come to America. They told God to help us bring daddy to America so we don't have to be poor Americans. They prayed that we can have money. They prayed that their skin could be healed and that they would not be itchy. They prayed that their baby brother could be alive again with Mommy's sister.

By the time they finished I was sobbing and coughing so much I couldn't pray and they didn't notice I couldn't add my prayers. They went to bed discussing why Mommy is crying. "Mommy misses daddy."

But truly the tears would not stop for many more reasons than that. I cried because every request they made of God was an impossible request. I've been coughing for 3 months. We've been trying to get daddy to America for 8 years and now it seems there is another barrier and delay. We've been struggling with their skin issues since they were born. The job seems unattainable especially if I'm coughing this much.

Everything they asked for seems like calculus. For children this small, should they not be praying about cupcakes, candy and presents and mundane things like that?

Childhood Trauma

There are things that I sometimes wonder about.

Like the way I've seen people fight for food.

I wonder why it is not a comfortable relaxing time around the table where everyone enjoys and shares and the communication is easy and afterward everyone relaxes and is satisfied.

I thought it might be because life was like this once.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1Oaph3hvV0

The memory of hunger follows into adulthood. The requirements for satisfaction are different. Struggling to get what to eat and accomplishing it is a different sort of satisfaction. The following video is the same sort of fight but obviously nobody is actually starving. These grown men are well fed, well dressed. They are staying in a place that is well furnished but they play the same roles as the children in the other video. Even the commenters identify and "miss" this way of relating to others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YrGRuuqka8

Without sounding too much like a colonialist, is it possible to consider this "fighting for food" behavior as the broken part of the brain or the psyche or even the DNA. Recent studies show how trauma effects the DNA. Is this broken? Is this tradition? Is this brokeness rolled into a tradition?

https://changingmindsnow.org/

Caught in the Glogal Drama

I wanted to post publicly about the Tiananmen Square type incident that occurred in Ethiopia a few days ago. Then I remembered—I am an American living in Uganda. Ethiopia is very close by. Their government doesn’t seem to have any qualms about killing journalists reporting the “wrong” information. I remember my husband’s deportation. Our lives were uprooted in every way possible and the proceedings did not make sense or line up with what “normally” happens. Any small protest/person that sounds somewhat legitimate but comes into the crosshairs of a regime that handles hundreds of trillions of dollars—there is no need to sweat about using $100,000 to squash that person and all his relatives. 

Considering all things, I think I will let others do the speaking.

Recently an article about Alfred Olango’s killing by El Cajon police officers brought back into the limelight particulars about my husband’s case and the suspicions I’ve had about it since then. But of course any evidence is classified in some dusty forgotten room in the archives of some classified department of covert government agency that handles it. 

New revelations, from the Olango case, also underscore the suspicions I have had. My husband had spoken out against the existing Ugandan regime while in states, during a time when his status was in limbo with immigration. Things could have gone the other way but consistently despite our efforts and the unimaginable money we put toward the case, every decision pushed us closer to his deportation. We were spied on. Angela Minner at the office in Bloomington, had photos of me, my car, my routine, my house. 

Every conversation we ever had before and after that time was recorded. After Stephen was deported to Uganda, we had an unimaginable amount of phone calls between the two of us. The clicking on the phone was constant. Those phone calls likely saved his life. We didn’t completely realize it at the time but the fear and terror and blame that I verbalized on the phone about the complete personal financial ruin (of both of us) that followed his deportation was very real and to anyone spying, eventually it could not have been a contrived drama. I am sure I mentioned the house I kept at 40 degrees throughout the whole winter. I am sure I mentioned collecting rainwater from the roof and cutting the power to most outlets in the house. The bankruptcy. Dumpster diving for food. All of that terror and loss verbalized over the phone was followed by easy to find evidence. If all the wife fixates on is financial ruin, how can this guy be planning a coup?

And yes, that is what all African governments are afraid of—the coup that topples them from power. How did Lybia fall? U.S. funded insurgents who had enough bang power and strategic killing to convince anyone. Remember the guys who tried to topple the regime in Gambia. One was prosecuted in St. Paul in 2015.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/four-united-states-citizens-sentenced-attempting-overthrow-gambian-government

http://www.twincities.com/2016/05/12/minnesota-3-others-sentenced-for-attempted-gambian-coup/

The spies among us. 

I remember having a meeting with my restaurant’s business partners the day Stephen was taken by ICE. I wondered why him, who didn’t have a criminal history. I suspected a political motive because of how he spoke against the regime of government. That day, I began to voice that suspicion to my business partners. The particular response I received from one partner who was Ugandan was very peculiar and poignant in my memory, in that she emphatically denied such a possibility even before I was even half-way through my first sentence describing the suspicion. She was a U.S. resident for years but never got her citizenship and frequently went back to Uganda. Later, I was told she was a hired spy for the regime. Why, I queried, would she report her own business partner to the regime, knowing that it may likely have a negative impact on her investment. After a year of living in Uganda, I no longer wonder. I repeatedly see people urinate in their own drinking cups, literally and figuratively speaking.

Once I got to Uganda, and began living with my husband, there was an older guy who came around repeatedly, seeking small employment opportunities from my husband. He had the air of someone trying to escape something from somewhere else. He had a small house he rented from a close neighbor. It was barely big enough for someone to lay down in. He had a wife somewhere but it was odd that he lived by himself and cooked for himself and had not much else to do or reason to be there. We didn’t have anything to hide from him. And so he watched me there. I fetched water like any other African woman in that village, while the village ladies sat on their porches and jeered as I went by and my husband's niece who was with me laughed like she was embarrassed. I did masonry work for our compound. The man came over and watched in amazement. I tilled the garden. I did many things he would never have imagined a woman from U.S. to be doing. Then some time after, I returned to U.S. he vanished as though he was never there.

http://start.localnet.com/article.php?category=top_us&article=2ee94a1ffaa74b85a1a3697e0be19c5b

Soon after I returned to U.S. after our Ugandan wedding, the clicking noise on the phone stopped as well.

I discovered from Alfred Olango's case that very few Ugandans who are in deportation proceedings, are given travel documents by their own country’s embassy in D.C. Only 11 individuals were deported to Uganda in 2015 because specifically only 11 got travel documents from their embassy. Others couldn’t be deported because they didn’t get travel documents. So, any others remained in U.S.—refused by their own country.

The statement from the embassy in relation to Alfred Olango:

 “A message seeking comment from the Ugandan Embassy in Washington was not immediately returned. The country accepted 11 people who were deported from the U.S. during the 2015 fiscal year but it was unclear how many were denied.”

http://start.localnet.com/article.php?category=top_us&article=2ee94a1ffaa74b85a1a3697e0be19c5b

According to a released report by ICE, about 224,000 individuals were deported from U.S. in the same year my husband was deported, 2010. Let’s say only a few, perhaps 11, even 20 of those were Ugandans—a reasonable estimate, given the 2015 data. It is pretty clear that the government of Uganda has a hand in who gets deported and who does not. Individuals of interest get travel documents, per the orders of the Ugandan government, in liaison with the U.S. government.

http://cis.org/ICE-Illegal-Immigrant-Deportations

The U.S. is the prime location for all the friends and beneficiaries of the regimes of Africa to go to look around or shop. There were so many of those that came to my husband’s restaurant. Friends of Zimbabwe’s Mugabe would come and “talk politics” as they spent major money on drinks and food, while the Zimbabwean waitress would hide in the back. She feared any retaliation they might exact for any comment on her family back in Zimbabwe. I even have a photo of a Nigerian MP sleeping in a hotel bed as a friend and I were eating chicken and taking selfies with her in the background.

What should we make of this? Certainly, there is the economic and trade conclusions that the author of The World is Flat arrive at. But politically and from a military stance, how it is now possible to live and be a citizen in a country and fire bullets against its military, as it exchanges fire with the militia you join, in your homeland, while on holiday. Politically, some can make everything work together to assist them while others get caught in the cross-hairs, while governments secretly negotiate with each other, exchanging pawns. But really, none of this happened. Truly, you did not see this.