‘The Queen is Coming…’
When Americans hear that age-old line ‘the British are coming’, we know it’s history: we studied it in our country’s great books; we chalked it up to the basic fact that Paul Revere ‘rocked’ that late Bostonian night -- his single voice potentially changed the fate of an entire nation. Good for him! Good for America. Now, I’ve just arrived in Kampala, Uganda a few days back only to discover the British are coming here too, yet under a slightly different guise. They’re waging war…and they don’t even know it, yet. On the day I flew into Entebbe Airport, I found a slightly worn, slightly overwhelmed team of friends: 2 Americans, 1 Brit, and 1 Zimbabwean. We loaded up our 1991 Hiace Toyota taxi van and started our 45 minute drive home to Nansana, our suburb village of Kampala, the capital city.
I’ve been so anxious to get here. We have somewhere around 70 AIDS orphans. The numbers are probably higher, but they go off to school once we find a sponsor, and there’s an ever constant flow of waiting, wanting, adorable ones ready to replace them each day. Our kids are abandoned for a myriad of issues concerning AIDS and poverty and every kind of destitution. We pick them from the city streets, the slums, the bad places. Some of their parents traveled from the villages to find a ‘better life’ only to find corruption and more destitution when they discover money is the only means to eating, and when money isn’t an option, then dying is. They die and their kids, well, that’s the dilemma. Abandoned. Left to beg. Confused. Futureless. So what else is there besides sniffing the available glue or paraffin to stay warm and ignorant to any possible impending future of more sadness and pain.
Street kids in Africa. It’s an epidemic. It’s a serious tragedy. But I show up only days ago to stories that will rock any journalists mind – because these stories don’t have to be embellished or manipulated for drama. These stories are real life and we’re living it.
As our 14 passenger taxi cab manipulates the pot-hole infested city streets, ‘They’ are further bulldozing what’s left of the roads, literally. Why? Because the Queen of England is coming in July of 2007. But don’t get too excited, they’re only repairing the exact drive she will be taking around Kampala, the rest will remain the rundown, untouched disaster it’s been since Ide Amin’s historic dictatorship.
The Queen is Coming. Sounds exciting – doesn’t it? Not to the real inhibitors of the streets – little kids (the reason why we’re here in this chaotic mess of a city). There are thousands upon thousands of kids who have nothing to do but beg and peddle minor doo-dads to the locals in order to live another day. And, yes, there are also homeless-handicapped folks everywhere as well (the ones who walk on their hands and can’t run from the police; the ones who are blind who weren’t born that way, but contracted a totally preventable disease like measles and now are assigned to sidewalks and sewage gutters because there is no other hope for them, no other place for them to be stuck).
So, as we drove home, my friends frantically relay story after story -- the pain glaring in their eyes ~
‘What are we going to do?’, they kept asking.
Every night they’ve been in the streets, the alley ways. Dan (23) brings his guitar. They have their click of street friends that dance and tell stories.
‘But they’re gone now,’ Dan explains.
‘We can’t find them anywhere,’ Nicky (18) adds, ‘the Queen is coming and for at least the next 10 months each kid and handicapped person (the dread of the city) will be hunted and thrown into a detention camp’.
‘Our friend, Friday – he dances on his hands since his legs are useless under him and he dances with a joy you’d laugh in shock to see -- told us of the devastations in the 90’s when Bill Clinton came to visit. He escaped the prison camp, but knows it’s coming again…’ Dan went on and on. I listened and couldn’t help but wonder,
- Do you think my former President has a clue that when he planned a visit to Kampala as an act of good-will they ‘cleaned-up-the-streets’ by throwing thousands of little abandoned children in prison?
- Do you think he has a clue that handicapped people everywhere were rounded up and thrown, literally, into prison camps with no food, tortured, maybe left to die?
- Do you think Clinton’s guilt for the Rwandan genocide (which he didn’t even orchestrate at all, he only ‘knew of’ and is now trying to rectify his guilt) could stretch as far as Uganda, a country that he visited and unknowingly or knowingly (doesn’t matter now, does it?) caused severe pain to the helpless in order to establish that ‘good will’ with corrupt, deceitful, undermining government leaders??
Yet, the Queen is coming this time around – Clinton’s ‘visit’ is water under some bridge somewhere now – but with the Queen’s visit comes fear. Real people are literally running and crawling for their lives. ‘The British are coming’ and we’re at war, only the victims are less than four feet tall. We’ve seen it – all the little kids being herded like cattle -- 4, 5, and 6 years old. Screaming, scared, alone. And get this, those ‘official’ bad guys are paid per kid to clean-up the street children, so they’re not about to let one escape their terrifying grip.
‘I think what makes me the most angry is they ‘clean-up’ the begging kids by throwing them in prison’, Julie (22, and recent college graduate) tells me. ‘They’re raising a mass generation of uneducated thieves, idle hands, and so much energy is spent getting rid of them instead of asking: Where are they coming from? What are the causes of street kids? How do we solve the growing epidemic of street kids? And soon they’ll just be thieves, liars, and beggars for a lifetime.’
‘When we first started hanging out with the street kids, they were scared of us. Later they told us they thought we’d chop their heads off, that we sacrifice kids, some sort of witchcraft threat to steer clear of any help’, Lottie (newly 19) explains.
‘Yeah, there’s lots of horror stories from the kids who’ve escaped. They don’t know who to trust, they have to run from the KCC (Kampala City Council). If they’re caught, they’re thrown into solitary confinement and forced to fill a bucket with their own human waste,’ Julie continues.
‘And when they’re catching kids it’s an awful sound’, Nicky recalls, ‘…they just grab them by one hand and chuck them into the back of a truck. We even saw them grab a random guy walking by that wasn’t homeless at all. They’re really big guys, the KCC. You’re just helpless against them. I burst into tears and I wasn’t even the one being taken.’
‘They do awful things to rid the streets of these children like putting poison in bananas and placing them in the bins where the street kids dig for food – they kill them,’ Dan says.
‘As far as the Queen is concerned, she’s always done work in charity. Maybe if she knew first hand what was being done in her name, she may change her plans?’ Nicky says, but Nicky is always finding the positive spin in every dreadful situation we encounter anyway.
As our van finally pulled into our driveway, I thought to myself, ‘Welcome back’, hoping the realities would soon disappear. I had a luxurious ten minute break before Sali and Elijah came to visit me. I missed them so much. They’re eleven years old. I love them. They use to live with us in our family and go to school. Unfortunately, they had tasted street life – no discipline, no structure. And when you’ve spent ten years begging for money, you don’t actually have much time to learn to read, or develop analytical skills. They were light-years behind in school and a foot taller then all the six year olds in their class. We knew they needed private tutoring, but no one had the time. I regret it now.
However, today they came to visit. They’re still alive, that’s all that counts. They were hiding out because they had just finished running from the KCC and were scared, needed some clean water -- and a hug. But most importantly, the fear in their eyes confirmed what my friends had just finished telling me – this is no urban legend.
So I question how Paul Revere knew what to do to save his nation? The British are coming – we’re at war.
