In Uganda, life is brutal, unless you are rich. The people I know, they are not rich. The people I know and I serve are very poor: malnourished children, orphans, old grandparents caring after one, two or more nephews and nieces after their own parents died. They are suffering from the most unimaginable diseases, they are dirty, hungry, they have nowhere to sleep, their wounds covered in dirt and puss.

Apart from helping these people through the generous help of the army of voluntaries and good people all around me, I take time to observe, to study them and to learn from them – to better understand their culture. We are so different and yet, all of us… we are just people.

What does it mean to live in those far-away villages? Very often, living = struggling to stay alive. It means finding water do drink, finding something to eat, finding a place to sleep.

Shelter. The third one is apparently… simple. Older people easily shelter children, even if they cannot feed them. Or you just cuddle on to the porch of some house, or wherever you can find a covered shelter to protect yourself from the rain that falls often. What you cannot protect yourself from, is the danger of the mosquitoes, the bite of which can cause malaria, and death. Is it really simple? Unless you are inside, carefully covered in a solid, good-quality mosquito net, if you sleep under the stars, you risk being dead in about two weeks.

How are the houses? Most of them are bad and very bad. Still, they are their homes, and even though they do not compute to our minds, as one would say… they are better than nothing. Inside, they have their banana fibre mat and mosquito nets – and, at least for the night, they are somewhat safe.

What about the first one and second one? Those are hard.

Water. You can drink water from mostly anywhere, but that water is unsafe. People take water in 20L plastic jerrycans (in which, once, there was oil) from the lake, from certain streams, from the boreholes – the safest solutions, but which are not free. You could say – yes, but why don’t people make more boreholes? Basically, because it is very expensive to make one ($4000-$8000), for a borehole going as deep as 25m (85 ft) – and it has to be executed by a professional.

Apart from that, you need to own the land on which the drill is executed, as one cannot go about drilling on public ground. Usually, children are those who are being sent to fetch water. Have you ever observed the arms of the children, in the numerous pictures I post? They have well-defined muscles, they are strong and apt at lifting weights which might be difficult for you, a fit, healthy adult. Children weighing barely 20 kg can carry two jerrycans, 20 L each, from the water-pump to their homes, because… well because there is no other choice.

And then again, there is the sad case of children who linger around the water-source, asking you if they can carry your jerrycan, for some coins – that is their daily sustenance, IF they are lucky. And yes, that is cruel, that is child-labour, but it is how life unfolds there: no mercy.

But is this water good to drink? Yes and no. The deeper the borehole, the safer the water. But if you procure it from a lake (and I have seen it happen) or if the water-source is contaminated, your life is, once again, in danger.

What about bottled water? It exists, and it is considered a luxury. In my own country, the kitchen-sink faucet water is good to drink. Let us ponder over this, and if our souls ache, it is for good reasons: we have become aware that we live in pure luxury.

Food. What do people eat? The food itself is not expensive – the equivalent of what you spend on one Saturday morning at the supermarket is enough to cover food for a month over there. It is THAT cheap, and yet many people cannot afford anything, because they have no income, no source of funds. Those who have a small vegetable garden are fortunate; they can sell some of it, they can eat what they grow, they can make do, but those are not many.

We buy maize flour, rice, beans, matooke (bananas for cooking), fruit like pineapple, bananas, oranges or mango, eggs, cow meat when we can. The problem with the cow meat (or any other form of meat) is that it needs to be cooked and eaten fast, as people do not possess refrigerators (or electricity for that matter).

One of the main foods is posho – maize flour cooked with water until it reaches a dough-like consistency. It accompanies nearly anything, or it can be served with a sauce made of a few beans, or meat, or veggies (in lucky cases). In orphanages, the main food is posho with beans, each day, the same thing over and over again… still, no one complains, because eating something is a real treasure that needs to be valued, even if that treasure does not change for days or even years.

Do they use forks, plates and the usual tools? Children eat with their hands until late in their childhood. Rarely have I seen someone use a fork – they are unessential tools. In a way, they do not own anything that is not strictly essential to survival, be it even a simple knife to portion the posho.

But what about people who have nothing to eat? How do they survive?

They don’t.

Veronica Anghelescu

Humanitarian Worker, Ethnologist