Share

This is about inner travelogues.

More than 30 years ago, I picked up Stephen LaBerge’s remarkable book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming and it changed the way I think about sleep, consciousness, and reality itself. The method I learned from it was simple, so simple that it almost felt like a game.

During the day, whenever I noticed anything with writing on it—a sign, a book spine, a billboard, a magazine cover—I’d look away, then quickly look back and ask myself, “Has that changed?” It sounds almost silly, but the point was to make that question such a habit that it carried over into my dreams.

After a few weeks of doing this, it did. One night in the middle of some dream about walking through a train station, I saw a sign with words on it. I looked away, then looked back, and sure enough the words had changed. In that instant I realized: I’m dreaming! The sudden awareness flooded through me and the world around me sharpened into vivid color. The air felt electric. I could feel my heartbeat, but there was no fear, just exhilaration. That was the first time I consciously took control of a dream.

Most often, when I realize I’m dreaming, I love to take off flying. My favorites are those dreams where I’m soaring like Superman, weaving through clouds or gliding just above treetops.

When Louise and I lived on a floating home in Portland, and later on a 46-foot boat in Washington, DC, the gentle rocking of the water beneath us seemed to trigger those dreams even more often. The movement of the bed at night stimulated my vestibular system, the part of the brain that senses balance and motion, and it felt as if my body was already halfway to flying. The moment I realized I was dreaming, I’d push off from the ground—or from the deck of the boat—and lift into the sky.

Right now, Louise and I are on a cruise ship (we’re theoretically on vacation for our 53rd anniversary, which was yesterday), and the motion of the ship trips me into lucid dreams, provoking me to write this article. (It’s one reason why we love cruising for vacations.)

Lucid dreaming became more than just a nighttime amusement. Once I was aware I was dreaming, I learned I could ask myself questions within the dream and get surprising answers. I’d ask things like “What’s the lesson here?” or “What do I need to understand?” Sometimes an image or voice would appear, sometimes I’d simply feel a kind of knowing. It wasn’t mystical so much as deeply personal, a conversation with a part of myself that didn’t need words. Once I was able to conjure my grandmother, who died when I was 7 years old, and have a conversation and loving reunion.

Over time I began to see how powerful this practice could be. You can use lucid dreaming to overcome fears by confronting them safely within a dream. You can practice public speaking, or flying a plane, or performing music.

Neuroscientists have found that rehearsing actions in dreams activates many of the same brain regions as actually doing them, which means you can literally get better at real-world skills while you sleep. Some people use lucid dreaming to heal from trauma by re-entering old memories and reframing them. Others use it for creative inspiration; Paul McCartney said that the melody for “Yesterday” came to him in a dream.

The doorway to all of that starts with awareness: training your waking mind to question reality. That’s why LaBerge’s technique is so effective. Every time you look away and back at a written word and ask “Has that changed?” you’re not only testing your environment; you’re training your brain to notice inconsistencies.

Dreams are full of inconsistencies. Text, clocks, and faces shift and blur, because the dreaming brain is creative but not especially detail-oriented. Once you start catching those glitches, you’ll know you’re dreaming.

When that moment of recognition happens, the key is not to get too excited. The first few times I woke myself up almost immediately just from sheer enthusiasm. Now, when I notice I’m dreaming, I take a deep breath and remind myself to stay calm. I look at my hands or the ground beneath me to stabilize the dream. Then I decide what to do next. Sometimes I fly, sometimes I walk through walls or explore landscapes that seem stitched together from memories and imagination. Sometimes I just talk to people I meet and see what they have to say.

One of the most interesting discoveries for me has been how real it all feels. The wind on my face during a flying dream, the texture of the ground, the sound of voices are all indistinguishable from waking life (other than their apparent impermanence).

That realization alone has taught me something profound about the nature of perception. If my mind can create an entire world in such detail while I sleep, how much of what I experience while awake is also filtered through my own expectations and beliefs? Lucid dreaming becomes a kind of meditation on reality itself.

There are other benefits, too. People who practice lucid dreaming often report better sleep quality, less anxiety, and a greater sense of agency in their waking lives. It’s as if learning to steer your dreams also teaches you to steer your thoughts during the day. For me, it’s given me a deeper appreciation for the continuity between waking and dreaming consciousness. Both are parts of one ongoing conversation between the self I think I am and the deeper or even universal mind that seems to know more than I do.

If you want to try it yourself, start small. Each time you see writing—a street sign, a headline, the cover of a cereal box—look away, then look back and ask, “Has that changed?” Do it several times a day until it becomes second nature. Keep a notebook by your bed and jot down your dreams when you wake up.

Within a few weeks, you’ll probably find that question slipping into your dreams. The first time the words change and you realize you’re dreaming, take a breath. Smile. Then, if you like, lift off and see where the sky takes you.

Lucid dreaming isn’t just about entertainment, although it’s certainly fun. It’s also a doorway into self-knowledge, creativity, and freedom. The part of you that dreams is the same part that imagines and creates while you’re awake.

When you learn to navigate that space consciously, you’re exploring the frontiers of your own mind. And for me, there’s still nothing quite like that first rush of realizing I’m airborne, looking down at a world that feels utterly real, knowing I built it all inside my own head.

Share

Louise and I just returned from a fascinating trip to several of the Baltic nations. We’d visited them back in 1992, as they were emerging from Soviet domination, and the contrast with today was startling. Most interesting was the introduction we got to ancient Baltic pagan religious practices that have seen a huge revival.

Back in 1992 when we visited, there were no stores or restaurants that one could easily find; everything was a drab gray or dirty brick, and the little kiosks on the street that sold booze and cigarettes were largely run by the Russian mafia. People were terrified to speak with strangers, particularly Americans. Today, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are vibrant, modern places with generally progressive governments, and members of both the EU and NATO.

In Riga, Latvia we spent a day with a woman in her 50s who told us terrible stories of how the Soviets had terrified and oppressed the people of that country when she was young. As was common across the nations controlled by the Soviets, nearly a third of the country were employed to spy on the other two-thirds. What was most fascinating, though, was the deep dive into Latvian traditional pagan spirituality that she shared with us.

Latvia is a bit more than twice the size of the US state of Massachusetts, but while Massachusetts has a population of almost 7 million people, there are only 1.8 million in all of Latvia. More than half of the entire country is dense forest, and the people traditionally considered the forest and its spirits to be a vital part of their spirituality.

While the Catholic conquest of most of Europe around a millennia ago (they conquered Latvia in the 13th century) outlawed the old pagan religions and destroyed most all of the ancient sites, the Latvians first brought back their ancient religion of Dievturība and its practices in 1850 as part of the “First Latvian National Awakening” (which was primarily political/nationalistic).

From then through the early decades of the 20th century it was based on folk stories and practices that had been secretly passed down through the generations. In the ancient Baltic religions, the god of the moon is called Mēness, and is also sometimes considered a god of war. Virtually all of the Baltic sky gods and goddesses have families, with elaborate stories of weddings and lineages. In one of the stories, Mēness is a competing suitor with Auseklis, the morning star.

All of the ancient gods are associated with natural phenomena, often protecting nature against despoliation. While most of the sky gods are male, the underworld is ruled by goddesses. The Earth is called the Earth Mother (in Latvian, Zemes māte, who is principally responsible for the welfare of humans along with the goddess of human fate, Laima.

There is also, in Latvian, Smilšu māte (“Mother of the Sands”), Kapu māte (“Mother of the Graves”), and Veļu māte (“Mother of the Ghosts”). Crops are overseen and helped by Jumis and a number of female gods, including Lauka māte (“Mother of the Fields”), Linu māte (“Mother of the Flax”), and Mieža māte (“Mother of the Barley”).

All of the Baltic people have forest divinities; in Latvian there’s Meža māte (“Mother of the Forest” sometimes also called Medeinė) along with Krūmu māte (“Mother of the Bushes”), Lazdu māte (“Mother of the Hazels”), Lapu māte (“Mother of the Leaves”), Ziedu māte (“Mother of the Blossoms”), and Sēņu māte (“Mother of the Mushrooms”).

Our Latvian friend told us that mushrooms are incredibly important to Latvians and the best places to find them and wild blueberries in the forest are often tightly guarded secrets passed from generation to generation. Meža māte also oversees the welfare of forest animals.

There are also water deities like Jūras māte (“Mother of the Sea”),, wind deities like Vēja māte (“Mother of the Wind”), sea deities like Jūras māte (“Mother of the Sea”).

The ancient places of worship are typically round and typically 15 feet in diameter, although all that survives are the post-holes as they were made from wood. It’s believed that many are the ancient forerunners of saunas — which are culturally significant throughout the region — much like Native American sweat lodges.

The tenacity of these religions is attested to by the neighboring Lithuanian king Algirdas in 1377, being burned after death in a massive funeral pyre in a fully pagan ceremony, defying the Catholic church authorities. His closest relatives and friends threw lynx and bear claws into the fire to help him climb up into the afterlife.

Back in 1925, a Latvian named Ernests Brastiņš, along with his colleague Kārlis Bregžis, published a manifesto, Latviešu dievturības atjaunojums (“The Restoration of Latvian Dievturība”); the movement it sparked spread quickly across the nation. It was the codification of the ancient pagan practices that emphasized egalitarian social perspectives, a deep reverence for nature, and the ancient gods.

But then the Soviets showed up in 1940, outlawed all religion including Dievturība, and in 1941 sent Brastiņš to a Siberian labor camp, where he was executed in 1942. The movement he helped found, though, lived on. A 2016 study found that roughly 20 percent of Latvians claim Dievturība or a variation on it as their religion.

The Latvians are fiercely independent and frankly terrified that if Trump is elected he’ll help destroy NATO and hand their country to Putin. They erected a giant poster of Putin’s face with a skull-like visage, two stories high, across the street from the Russian embassy, as well as a collection of Ukrainian flags in the park across the street from the embassy.

Children come every day to bring their stuffed animals to lay across the street from the embassy in remembrance of the 100,000+ Ukrainian children who’ve been kidnapped and shipped to Russia, the world’s second-largest producer of child porn, and the tens of thousands who’ve been killed and maimed by Russian bombs and missiles.

We lived in Europe for a bit over a year in the 1980s and have spent a fair amount of time in the Baltic region, particularly Finland and Denmark. I’d never thought of Latvia as a place it would be fun to hang out for a week or more, though, until this trip. Now I’d love to spend a month getting to know the country, it’s people, and its ancient religion better.

Share

(With this post, we’re adding a new feature to Wisdom School: a travel section. Hope you find it interesting and useful!)

A few years back, Louise and I traveled to Costa Rica to film part of what was planned to become part of Leonardo DiCaprio’s movie Ice On Fire. More recently, we discovered that Costa Rica is home to one of the world’s dozen or so “Blue Zones,” places where large numbers of people live to 100 and beyond.

This March, we decided to revisit the country to see how things were changing in the face of political pressure and climate change.

At the airport on our first trip, we picked up a taxi to take us to our destination, about an hour away. The driver was chatty and his English was nearly perfect, as is common across Costa Rica. Comparing stories about our families, we discovered his son was a physician, working at a hospital in the capitol city, San José.

“Here in Costa Rica, healthcare is free or very inexpensive, depending on how much money you make,” our driver told us. “The cab company deducts the cost from my paycheck, I think it’s around 7 percent of my pay, and there are no co-pays or deductibles. Poor people and the unemployed don’t have to pay anything.”

“What does it cost if you have to go to the hospital?” Louise asked.

“That’s totally free. There’s no charge. There’s also no charge for doctor’s visits or for drugs.”

We were both amazed that this tiny country that most Americans would consider “poor” has a healthcare system run much like the best in Europe. We later had lunch with an American expat who’d had two surgeries in Costa Rica and told us the hospitals were state-of-the-art, albeit not as fancy as American ones, and the care was the best he’d ever had.

Our driver then started telling us about his son, the pride of his life. The young man had gotten great grades in school, which made him eligible for college.

“Was that expensive?” I asked, thinking that most American cab drivers couldn’t afford the $200,000 to half-million dollars it costs to go to an American medical school and wouldn’t have a good enough credit rating to co-sign a loan.

“College is very inexpensive here, too,” he said. “It is heavily subsidized by the government; it cost about two thousand dollars a year for my son to go to medical school.”

This March when we visited the country, we stayed at the Occidental Tamarindo, a hotel complex on the Pacific Ocean. They have three restaurants, one Italian and one Sushi, as well as a giant all-you-can-eat buffet: all the food in all the restaurants is free, as are drinks. It worked out a lot less expensive than staying in a fancy hotel and having to find a nearby restaurant for every meal; the place also caters to families.

It still being spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, we expected the weather to be mild, but it was well into the nineties every day we were there. The locals — including an American who lived down the road in a large English-speaking expat community — said the weather was very unusual; the North Atlantic has been hitting record temperatures last year and this, as well as has the Pacific, the result of global warming.

The hotel was about a mile out of town, a small community packed with stores catering to tourists. One place offered horseback rides on the beach, another took people out for scuba or freediving trips, and there were dozens of restaurants. The shopkeepers were laid back, as were the restaurants; the place had a gentle rhythm to it that seemed to match the waves and surf all along the beach.

Every evening, folks staying at the hotel would join locals on the beach to watch the stunning Pacific sunset, joined by dozens of howler monkeys who’d flit from tree to tree and occasionally try to make off with food left out in the open by visitors who didn’t know the routine.

Talking with locals, we discovered that Costa Rica was the first country in the modern history of the world to abolish its own military. A brutal junta had ruled the country prior to the end of the Costa Rican civil war, which soured the people on the idea of a military that could again rise up to seize power.

On December 1, 1948, right after the civil war ended, the leader of the governing junta, José Figueres Ferrer, demolished a wall at the Cuartel Bellavista military headquarters signaling the abolition of the country’s army.

The following year, Article 12 of the new 1949 Constitution made it official: “The Army as a permanent institution is abolished. There shall be the necessary police forces for surveillance and the preservation of public order.”

In the years since Costa Rica set that example, Panama, Mauritius, Iceland, Vanuatu, Grenada, Dominica, and Liechtenstein have all abolished their standing armies.

Interestingly, that was the original goal of the Founders who promoted the Second Amendment here in the United States.

It started with Thomas Jefferson’s concern that the new nation he’d helped birth might end up the victim of a military coup because a standing army had risen up during times of peace (as had happened so often in European history).

Jefferson disliked and feared standing armies so much that he demanded that James Madison add a ban on them to the Bill of Rights. If Madison wouldn’t do it, Jefferson strongly implied (to Madison and many others), he’d sabotage the Constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention. And without Virginia’s vote for ratification, the Constitution would die.

An early draft of the Second Amendment shows this clearly: it included a conscientious objector provision for Quakers, letting them opt out of the militia.

Back then, “bear arms“ didn’t mean “own or possess a gun.” It meant, “be a member of an armed militia or army.”

  It read:

“A well regulated militia composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

Jefferson’s idea was to replicate what Switzerland has done for centuries: every man between 17 and 47 years old was a member of a local militia, with his gun either at home or stored in a local armory, who could be mobilized in case of an invasion. Jefferson was so enthusiastic about the idea that when he became president in 1801 he refused to build up the army left over from the Revolutionary War.

That idealism came to an end, however, when England and Canada invaded the US in the War of 1812, making it so far south that they burned the White House. After that disaster, there was no more discussion here in the US about ending standing armies during times of peace.

Modern Costa Rica employs a strategy similar to Jefferson’s desire for what today we call the National Guard. There’s a national police force that’s well armed and could be called into the defense of the nation if it were invaded. In the meantime, they keep peace and order without the conspicuous displays of military parades and armaments characteristic of armies.

I asked a few Costa Ricans what they thought of this while we were there; universally, they both supported their nation’s lacking an army and were openly proud of it. 

Costa Rica has just about everything a tourist — particularly an eco-tourist — could want. The country’s east and west borders are the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with beautiful beaches, small towns, resorts ranging from the vegan eco-resort we visited while in Tamarindo to five star deluxe accommodations. You can find dozens of eco-tourism resorts, hotels, hostels, and accommodations all around the country, most quite reasonably priced.

There’s even a town on the coast that’s outlawed cars. Las Catalinas is an intentional town that was built starting in 2009; today it’s a bustling, thriving destination. Surrounded by a thousand acres of tropical dry forest, the locals call their pace of life “downshifting.” There are forty-two kilometers of walking trails through and around the town, along with the normal (but car-free) streets.

The “Blue Zone” peninsula of Nicoya has been the subject of much study by longevity experts and scientists. Residents frequently live past 100 and stay alert and active right up to the end. Their diet is about 95 percent vegetarian, people get lots of exercise, and there’s a vibrant sense of community, all contributing to a long, happy life.

There are mountains and dormant volcanos, jungles, forests, and miles of agricultural land in Costa Rica. The capital city, San José, has a population just over 300,000, and the second and third largest cities, Puerto Limón and Alajuela, are 55,000 and 42,000 people respectively. While there’s plenty in San José to satisfy anybody looking for the amenities of a big city, nowhere in the country do you feel like you’re in a dangerous or intimidating “big city.”

If you’re looking to escape the US for a few weeks or months, particularly during the US’s winter months, you can’t go wrong with Costa Rica. And you’d be supporting the people of one of the most progressive countries in the western hemisphere.

Share

Edges are where all the action is. Biological edges — from seashores to the edges of rainforests — are always the areas of greatest biodiversity. Human edges — from conflict zones to places of learning — are where we find the most visible truths about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. 

The edges we face today — the threshold — are ones that may well affect the future viability of our civilization, and perhaps even our species. For a glimpse into the worldwide thresholds we’re approaching, I visited the cultural, ecological, and political edge of Southern Sudan on the Darfur border.

On the border with Darfur, Sudan — 16 March 2008

It’s late morning, and I’m sitting on the dirt ground typing into an old, AA-battery-operated pocket word processor (a Zaurus ZR5000), in part because the nearest electricity is over 500 miles away. So is the nearest paved road, and the nearest building made from anything other than mud or grass. This is Gok Machar, South Sudan, just a few miles from the border with Darfur, a village that’s swelled from 8000 people to over 45,000 people as refugees flee the bombings and murders that are taking place as I type these words just fifteen miles to my northwest. About three hundred people have arrived just this morning, most with nothing more than the clothes they are wearing, many with stories of relatives who died along the way as they fled here or before the UN could pick others up to bring here.

When we first arrived on the African continent we looked out onto the nighttime savannah beyond our Nairobi hotel and it was truly a startling site. The landscape was huge, horizon to horizon, like the movies you see of these parts of Africa. The land here in South Sudan is just as vast and flat. The 45,000 people around me share one single hand-pumped well (drilled a decade ago by the United Nations), and no other infrastructure beyond that. No buildings, no roads, no septic or sewage, no schools, no clinics or hospitals, no stores or even storehouses, nothing. Most live on a patch of reddish dirt about ten feet square with a few of their possessions marking the perimeters of their “home,” sleeping on the dirt, or on a ragged piece of cloth or, the lucky few, a piece of salvaged tarp from some previous relief mission. Stick-thin women and children with bellies swollen by malnutrition outnumber the men, whose peers were murdered by the Janjaweed or taken as slaves to the north,.

The air is so hot and dry that even smells of body odor vanish. My nose is encrusted with dust. 

The land is barren of any vegetation at all other than the occasional large tree with roots deep enough to reach into the water table thirty or so feet below us. Dust devils blow up and around, tiny cyclones that seem to erupt from nowhere amidst air that is so hot and dry it feels as if we’ve been wrapped in glass wool insulation and tossed into a furnace’s heating duct. 

One relief worker we met on the way here, who was leaving the Darfur area via Juba in South Sudan, said, “If there is a hell, it is much like Darfur.”

This being a refugee community, it is thick with disease, as refugees not only bring diseases with them but are among the most vulnerable of all populations to disease. There’s Buruli ulcer, a flesh-eating and incurable (other than by surgery) disease caused by a bacteria related to leprosy — I saw a case of it yesterday in a girl who had just arrived from Darfur. She had a hole in the side of her shin that was about four inches long, two inches wide, and three-quarters of an inch deep, nearly down to the bone.

Ebola was first discovered here and in nearby Zaire. Eighty percent of the world’s cases of Guinea Worm disease are here in Southern Sudan — the microscopic eggs are in the guts of tiny, almost invisible sand fleas that infest food and water, and about three months after eating one, the worms hatch. Over the course of the next year they grow throughout the body, often boring out through the skin causing an ulcer that can take months before the worm fully emerges, causing dreadful and incapacitating pain. There is no cure.

In parts of South Sudan sleeping sickness — caused by a parasite named trypanosoma that’s transmitted by the bite of local flies — kills more people than AIDS. This is also the world epicenter of onchocerciasis — another worm that grows more than 1 1/2 feet long inside the body and spreads thousands of eggs to all the organs — soon to become more worms — over the decade or so it takes to kill a person. Sometimes the smaller worms work their way into the cornea, causing blindness which gives this parasite its common name: “River Blindness.” 

There’s also visceral leishmaniasis, tuberculosis, leprosy, yellow fever, dengue fever, various bacteria and mycoplasma that cause severe and deadly forms of pneumonia, and many, many of the people in this village are infected with malaria (a particularly nasty, drug-resistant, and usually fatal form, P. falciparum, is the most common here in Southern Sudan).

All of the refugees have horror stories to tell. Most were burned out of their villages, some shot, beaten, stabbed, and/or raped (including the young boys). Many had been taken as slaves and were only allowed to escape when they became too sick, lame, or old to be of value. The women and girls have particularly horrific stories to tell about gang rape by the northern Arab Muslims, with the specific goal of impregnation so they would have “Arab” children, thus destroying the racial/cultural/religious/tribal lineage of their families and thus their culture. (We saw many “Arab-looking” young children among these very dark-skinned Sudanese women.)

The sun is relentless, the air still and thick. At night it gets down into the 90s, and the sky is so big and wide and we are so far from any electric lights that it looks like you can reach out and touch the thick horizon-to-horizon strip of the Milky Way.

And yet the human spirit is not crushed by this.

In the community around me children are playing, women are cooking and talking, the men are regaling each other with tall tales. 

Every night in different parts of the community they bring out the drums. The music and the singing begin, people dance and talk and chant. Young people flirt and old people gossip, and the children play with sticks — always sticks, because there is no metal, no plastic, no stones, no toys — and because you can do a lot with a stick. (They’re actually a fairly rare commodity: firewood is hard to find.)

The trip we were on was organized and sponsored by Michael Harrison’s Talkers Magazine and Ellen Ratner’s Talk Radio News Service, in collaboration with Christian Solidarity International, a Swiss-based charity that has been working in Darfur for several years. South Sudan is the most undeveloped and barren place in the world. When the British pulled out in 1956, as Churchill did with Uganda, they simply and abruptly left, creating huge vacuums in power, social and political infrastructure, and, perhaps most importantly, because the entire colonial economy had been geared to transport resources and raw materials from Sudan to the UK with little by way of compensation going back the other way: a huge business vacuum.

To the north were the lighter skinned Arabs who generally took the attitude of early European-ancestry Americans — these very dark-skinned Africans in the south, with their animist and tribal ways — must be inferior peoples.

From the notion of simple superiority/inferiority came the rationale for all-out genocide, as the Arab government in North Sudan — Khartoum is the capitol and biggest city — undertook a covert but not particularly well-concealed program of extermination of the Black Africans in the south. This got going soon after the British pullout, but really stepped up in 1972 when the various tribes of central and southern Sudan began to fight back. They were called rebels and terrorists, but by and large most were simply fighting to maintain their own homelands and protect their own people. 

In the 1980s, oil was discovered throughout Sudan, but particularly in the South. This put the conflict on steroids, as the north was no longer simply trying to consolidate land and drive out the Africans to create an Arab state, but also wanted the oil. Several groups emerged to fight against the north but the SPLA ended up the primary of the armies, and when the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was finally signed in 2005, the SPLA had effective control of the south.

They also got half of the oil revenue from the south (the rest going to the north, which kept 100% of its own oil revenue), although there has been no accounting for the oil revenues: just ‘trust me’ payments to the South from the North.

The result of the increased revenue — at least for the moment — has been that portions of the South have been able to approach or even cross the threshold of safety and security that exists in any society between those who can grasp for the higher needs of a culture (education, innovation, social change) and thus evolve, and those who must spend all of their mental and physical energies simply surviving from day to day.

Back in the 1970s, psychologist Abraham Maslow, the founder of the school of Humanistic Psychology, posited that there is a “hierarchy of human needs,” with safety and security at the very bottom, followed above by social and family needs, then relationship needs, then intellectual needs, then self-actualization and spiritual needs. 

Wherever a person is on this hierarchy, everything above that point is invisible to them. When you’re worried about survival because your car is spinning out of control on the highway, you’re not thinking about enlightenment, or even what car you want to buy, for example. 

For the purposes of this book, I’m positing a critical threshold in Maslow’s hierarchy, which I call “Maslow’s Threshold,” that being the line at the top of safety and security and below all the other needs. Because the people in South Sudan are so close to this threshold, war is an omnipresent risk. The legalized mass killing that is war is the ultimate failure of people to cross this threshold.

The crisis that the people of Darfur and Southern Sudan are facing — the threshold that will determine their future survival — is a microcosm of the “macro” issues we are all facing as the world slides into peak oil, resources (particularly water) run low, human population explodes, and our atmosphere has developed a fever that increasingly is confronting people around the world with many of the same conditions Darfurians and Sudanese face daily.

One of my personal goals for this trip was to find ten stones to build a small altar, anoint it with oil, and say the 91st Psalm over it. It’s an eccentricity I learned from my mentor, Gottfried Mueller[ii]. The problem I encountered is that there are no stones. 

None.

This land is so incredibly ancient that all the stone has been weathered to dust. I can’t even find grains of dirt big enough to compare with a typical grain of beach sand.

This (and the adjoining countries of Kenya and Tanzania) is the land where humanity began. And in many ways it’s just as it was 160,000 years ago when modern humans first emerged here.

The little hut I’m sitting in as I type these words is held up with a square of sticks — the main supports being about 3 inches thick, those around the edge of the roof around a half-inch thick — tied together with a rope made of braided reed. The walls are woven reed, and the roof is a carefully woven grass of some sort.

There is not a nail in sight. Not a brick or a stone. While it’s a very utilitarian technology, it’s also one that has probably existed as long as has mankind.

One of the relief workers from CSI, Gunar, yesterday remarked to me, ‘‘You will not find here a wheel, unless it’s imported. They are living without the wheel! And there are no stones. This precedes even the stone age. These are ‘clay age’ people.’’

“Why?” I asked him. Why, when this part of the world has had contact with metal and technology for centuries, do the people still choose to live in the Clay Age?

This is one of the really big questions that Sudan must confront as oil revenues make the nation richer, and increasingly the developed, Arab north comes into collision with the tribal Black African ‘clay age’ south. 

This is not an issue of race, of IQ, or (as some racists are fond of evoking) ‘motivation.’ There are people from this part of the world who are among the world’s most elite scientists, engineers, and writers. One of them is currently running for President of the United States and his grandparents lived in a hut much like this one, only a few hundred miles from here in rural Kenya. 

Instead, perhaps, it’s an issue of what works. Marshall Sahlin coined the term ‘the original leisure society’ to describe people who live tribally. Given enough resources, there’s really not a whole lot of work to do. And before oil was discovered and the current war and evangelical Islam and Christianity came to this region, the winter rains produced enough food and wood and reeds to make it through the dry summers. There was no reason to “work.” But oil, “civilization,” and the religions that came with both changed society in such a way that it became necessary for many people to do productive work (particularly of food) so that others could participate in non-productive (at least of food) social functions.

“Cultural overhead” is the term anthropologists use. It’s a fancy way of defining how many non-productive people there are in a society. For every priest, king, prince, warrior, middle manager, or CEO — none of whom directly produce food or shelter — the average person must work that much harder to provide food and shelter for all. In some of our “developed” cultures, as few as two to five percent of us provide all the food for everybody. And they work damn hard and use enormous numbers of calories (mostly from oil - tractors, fertilizer, transport) to produce that food for the rest of us.

But in a society without such cultural overhead, without a nonproductive class of people, every family provides for their own, and in this part of the world that could historically be done in just a few hours a day (more during the rainy season, less in the dry season). The rest of the time is free to talk, play, and be.

The indigenous people of Sudan, for over 100,000 years, have by and large simply had a life of leisure and great simplicity in this unforgiving land. The dry season — what I’m experiencing right now — is a time of brutal, unrelenting heat and drought. Without preparation, you die in as little as a few days. The rainy season brings floods and the diseases often associated with them, from malaria to dengue, typhoid, and yellow fever. And yet, over tens of thousands of years, people have found ways to live in balance with this difficult continent. It’s a minimalist balance, to be sure, but how can we say that’s better or worse than ‘civilized’ societies with massive crime, conspicuous accumulations of wealth cheek-by-jowl with grinding poverty so intense that parents can’t even get to know their children as they must work so many hours just for food? And when considering life in South Sudan now, it’s vital to remember that while these people are living, to a large extent, with the technology of millennia ago, their culture from that time that allowed them to survive has been largely decimated by several centuries of colonization.

I took a break from my writing to stand up and stretch my legs, and one of the young men came over to say hello. He introduced himself as James, a Dinka, with a last name hard for me to pronounce: Saliahtja perhaps phonetically. His father’s name, he said. 

I asked him the names of some of the trees, and he knew the Dinka names for all of them, but the only English one he knew was the giant Mahogany under which we’ve been camped. 

He said that CSI is good in that they’re bringing supplies to returning refugees, but that the locals like him have to rely mostly on the UN’s World Food Program. 

He was born and raised in this region and told me about being here when the ‘Arab raiders from the north’ came in 2003, just at the end of the war. They took everything, he said. Our sorghum, our food for the year, they took it by force. With guns. Anything they wanted. They took everything.

Did they take people? I asked.

He looked down at his feet and softly said, ‘Yes. Yes.’ Then he immediately changed the subject, telling me the name of another tree off in the distance. He told me he is a member of the Episcopal Church, in whose compound we’re camped.

Later in our conversation I asked how life was here in the village. He said they are constantly afraid that the Arabs will return. Every day we are afraid, he said.

Before the arrival of Christianity, Islam, English, Arabic, the alphabet and “technology,” James’ ancestors knew not just the Dinka names of each of the trees and plants in the area, but their “spirits” as well. They knew which ones could cure which diseases. (Remember that more than half of all the drugs we use in our hospitals todaycome from plants and were first “discovered” by indigenous peoples. Most of the other half are merely variations on these, like aspirin is a synthetically produced form of the active ingredient in White Willow Bark, and Valium and that whole family of benzodiasophene anti-anxiety and sleeping drugs) is a synthetically produced form of the active ingredient in Valerian Root.) 

They knew the world in which they lived. It was the only way they could have survived.

They would have known, for example, that the bark of the Cinchona tree (or the local variation on it) contained a power that would kill parasites including the plasmodium that causes malaria. Although today we can cite the drugs contained in Cinchona bark (aricine, caffeic acid, cinchofulvic acid, cincholic acid, cinchonain, cinchonidine, cinchonine, cinchophyllamine, cinchotannic acid, cinchotine, conquinamine, cuscamidine, cuscamine, cusconidine, cusconine, epicatechin, javanine, paricine, proanthocyanidins, quinacimine, quinamine, quinic acid, quinicine, quinine, quininidine, quinovic acid, quinovin, and sucirubine),[iii] it took Europeans hundreds of years to learn from aboriginal people about the properties of the tree.

A tree known as Wontangue in the Bakweri language of Cameroon is known to modern science as Prunus Africana, and is more effective at preventing benign prostatic hypertrophy (prostatic enlargement, something that hits over 80% of men who live over 70 years) than any drugs so far developed. Kigelia Africana or Woloulay in Bakweri is effective for malaria and snakebites. Sterculia tragacantha or Ndototo in Bakweri kills worms in the body, as does Wokaka, botanically known as Khaya Spp.[iv]

Other African plants that are today used to manufacture medicines you’ll encounter at your local pharmacy include: Hyoscyamus muticus, Urginea maritima, Colchicum autumnale, Senna alexandrina, Plantago afra, Juniperus communis, Anacyclus pyrethrum, and Citrullus colocynthis.[v]

But James knew of none of them. As our culture moved across Africa over the past five centuries or so, it took away the ancient knowledge, just as we extracted minerals and plants for our own use and even took people from the continent to use as slaves. But we returned virtually nothing, and today the people of Southern Sudan live in a simulacrum of Clay Age life, the forms and external appearances intact, but the deep knowledge and culture necessary for both survival and happiness gone.

As anybody from New Orleans can tell you, refugee camps are the worst places in the world. While they often provide heartbreaking glimpses into how deep compassion and generosity can run (particularly among the refugees themselves), they also, by their nature, lack the ‘commons’ so necessary to civil society and so much at the core of every culture and civilization.

Yesterday at a refugee center a half-day’s drive from here, I was sitting with Ellen Ratner as a group of children lined up near our seats to watch their parents get the ‘Sacks of Hope’ from CSI. John had warned us several times in the past to be careful not to eat food that had had flies on it, and never to leave food out because of the flies here, and the sight in front of me brought all this to mind.

The way flies eat is they drop down their tongue — really a thick, hollow tube with a sort of sucker on the end — and vomit the contents of their stomach onto the surface they’re ‘tasting.’ As their stomach contents includes their digestive juices, when they quickly suck that slurry back up, it loosens and dissolves some of contents of the food they taste. This is why in places like Africa, with so many deadly diseases all transmissible by flies, when you see flies you should worry.

A little boy, probably seven years old, stood in front of Ellen and me, his face and body in profile as he watched his mother get a bag of grain. On his right shin were three or four open wounds — just scratches, really, probably from a brush with a thorn bush. But each was jammed full of flies. There must have been 20 of them, with others competing for the space. This is the beginning of the kinds of ulcers and sores we’d seen among the refugees when we first arrived — the girl and boy with giant holes in their legs — and without quick treatment this little boy will probably be dead in a few months. Unfortunately, that camp has no doctor or clinic.

People living in the Darfur region and South Sudan are well below the threshold of safety and security. Small changes — a meal, a bottle of safe water, toilet paper — make huge differences not just in their quality of life but in their ability to survive. These Sudanese also demonstrate — in their endurance of the evil behavior of humans bombing and murdering and enslaving people, in part for land, in part for oil for China — that no matter how terrible things are, people will still pull together, form communities, care for each other, and default to democracy. 

At a certain level, our modern consumer society is built on a truth and a lie. The truth is that if you’re living below the threshold of safety and security, a little bit of “stuff” can create a huge change in your mental and emotional states, and the quality of your life. If you’re outside alone at night, naked and cold, you’re miserable. If somebody brings you inside, gives you clothes to wear, a warm blanket, a fire to sit by and warm food to eat, a comfortable bed to sleep in, then you move from “unhappy” to “happy” pretty fast.

The lie is the siren song of our culture. “If that much stuff will generate that much instant happiness,” the lie goes, “then ten times as much stuff will make you ten times happier. A hundred times as much stuff will make you a hundred times happier. A thousand times as much stuff, a thousand times happier. And Bill Gates lives in a state of perpetual bliss!”

In this region, we’re seeing the failure of modern thinking. The failure of a consumerist society that values its stuff more than it does other people, cultures and the environment, so it’s willing to colonize, pillage, and then desert another nation. The failure of a communist/capitalist society that will support a nation that engages in genocide, because there’s oil to be had. The failure of modern Islam to learn from the mistakes of twelfth-century Christianity and see non-Islamic peoples as inferior or as potential proselytes, rather than respecting cultures, peoples, and property.

As the large parts of our world are sliding below that threshold — today over three billion of the world’s nearly seven billion people don’t have reliable access to safe water, sanitation, or food supplies, and desertification marches on across the planet — we can see in Darfur the potential future for much of the world as well as validation of the idea that there’s something to be done here, something possible, something that’s part of our DNA.

We can lift others above the threshold, and confront the coming environmental and economic storm of the next century, but it’s going to require a comprehensive approach covering the environment, commerce, population control, energy, politics, the empowerment of women, and a dramatic reevaluation of how we power our society.

These are our thresholds: it’s up to us if we decide to step across into a new way of understanding and knowing the world, or fall and fail as so many cultures have. 

[i] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/03/health/main597751.shtml (a February 3, 2004 report from Sudan by the Associated Press’s Emma Ross, “Sudan A Hotbed of Exotic Diseases: Country has unique combination of worst diseases in the world,” and http://www.cdc.gov.

[ii] I wrote a book about Herr Mueller and my time with him titled “The Prophet’s Way,” named after a trail in the forest near his home in Stadtsteinach, Germany.

[iii] http://www.rain-tree.com/quinine.htm

[iv] http://peopleandplants.org/web-content/web-content%201/wp2/geo.htm#International%20medicinal%20uses%20of%20Prunus%20africana%20bark

[v] Batanouny, K.H. 1999. THE WILD MEDICINAL PLANTS IN NORTH AFRICA: HISTORY AND PRESENT STATUS. Acta Hort. (ISHS) 500:183-188

You can’t say, “Civilization don’t advance,” however,
for in every war they kill you a new way.
—Will Rogers, Autobiography

Share

I first traveled to Uganda in 1980 with Herr Müller, and then went back a year later with Horst Von Heyer to locate and negotiate the acquisition of land for a Salem village and hospital. My first trip there was both spiritually devastating and enlightening, and I carried along a small notebook and a pen; every night before I went to sleep I wrote down the day’s events to share with Louise when I got home.

A few months after my return to the US, I published my notes in our newsletter, and one of the readers who was the editor of East/West Journal asked me if he could publish it in an edited form. I consented, and the publicity from that article appearing led to several appearances on NPR and gave a big boost to our efforts to raise money for Uganda.

From this experience, I saw firsthand the impact of Herr Müller’s prediction of the “curve of time,” and how world events are accelerating. I also learned how the older tribal cultures of that part of the world view the future. And I saw Herr Müller putting into action, with no pomposity or high-sounding words, his philosophy of practicing acts of mercy as a spiritual work.

Here’s a copy of my original notes, along with some of EWJ’s editing:

Uganda Sojourn: Light in the Heart of Darkness

First published in edited form in East/West Journal

Kampala, covering several square miles, is built on seven hilltops. Before its destruction, it must have been one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Now everywhere are burned-out buildings, broken glass, and tens of thousands of hungry, haunting faces.

Young boys urgently cry out “cigarettes” among the thick crowd. Burlap bags lay empty upon the ground with small piles of tobacco and salt upon them. They are part of sales in the vast, teeming black market. Corrugated metal and cardboard shacks house thousands of people in endless rows of fetid squalor. Urine and rotted waste clog the dirt paths of the market, as we gingerly navigate through the crowd, avoiding mud and pools of overwhelming stench. There has been no running water in this city for over two years. Young children everywhere stagger about in dazed desperation, their parents brought to death by famine, disease, war, and the insane, random murders by soldiers and associates of the former president Idi Amin.

Night is approaching. We must flee the market before the 8 p.m. curfew falls and an army of young Tanzanian soldiers, their rifles puncturing the night sky with staccato bursts of machine-gun fire, fans through the city. Two years ago, when Amin was overthrown and his brutal dictatorship ended, Ugandans welcomed the Tanzanian liberators from the south. But the combination of an unprecedented drought in this area as in other parts of East Africa, and an escalating civil war by factions still loyal to Amin and other dissidents have plunged this once peaceful and fertile land into another round of fear and chaos.

In the morning we find the bodies of those who could not find shelter before the night descended. During a short walk, Mr. Müller and I count nine corpses, huddled in death next to buildings or sprawling half-naked in the streets.

Everywhere we come upon razed buildings, bullet holes, and the devastated ruins of a once-beautiful country. The first night we stay in a church dormitory with no water or electricity. The only food is white rice and stale white bread. Boiled rainwater is served on request, caught from the gutters, runoff from the roofs. We sleep on small steel cots in cement block rooms. There are half-inch steel bars on the windows, and the massive gray door in our cell has only a small glass-with-embedded-wire window. We are locked in for the night.

In the morning we rise early and leave by 8 a.m. for Mbale, a small town on the fringe of the famine district and the site of a large refugee camp. Our route will take us through miles of jungle and over the waterfall which is the source of the Nile.

We arrive at the Mbale camp just as the sun begins to set, a heavy grayness covering the jungle. Approaching the first cluster of mud huts, we are surrounded by perhaps a hundred people: children, adults, enfeebled elders at the end of their lives. Sweat, urine, and the smoke of hundreds of small twig fires make the air bite and cut into my nose and lungs. The Earth is hard as stone, a red clay, and all about us are littered small bodies—crying, moaning, yelling for food or water, staggering about or sitting, staring emptily. Hunger haunts us as we walk about, incessantly tapping us on the shoulder as everywhere we are brought face to face, hand to hand, skin to skin with the hollow pain of empty bodies and frightened souls.

A toothless, graying old woman makes her way slowly through the crowd toward us. Her shuffle is slow, and she seems to wince with every step. Her breasts lie flat and dry, hanging down to a wrinkled and shriveled stomach. She cries out softly to us in Swahili. Rev. James Mbunga, a government official who is accompanying us, interprets: “I am a widow with eight young children. As my husband is dead, no one will help or care for me and my children. We shall die. Will you please help us?” A lump fills my throat.

“Soon,” says Mr. Müller gently. “Soon, I promise, we shall return with some food for you.”

As we walk back to our car through the makeshift “village,” night descends. The air becomes cold, and people retreat into their huts. Outside one deserted hut we find three young children lying on a mat, naked to the approaching evening chill. Two of them are nearly dead. Their bodies look like skeletons, swollen heads on shrunken skin, too weak to even lift up or to make a sound. The third, a bit older, lifts himself up with obvious pain and tells his story. Their father is dead, their mother has never returned from a trip looking for food. Tears choke my eyes as we turn and walk away from these dying children. Forcing down the trembling in my throat, I whisper a silent prayer. I recall that back home in the United States today is Thanksgiving.

Tonight Sanford Unger of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” show has arranged a satellite call to us, routed to our “hotel.” He interviews me about the situation in the camps and the bush, and I later learned that the interview ran that night in the US as ATC’s Thanksgiving special. Twice while we’re talking to NPR we’re cut off by the military when Unger asks me questions about troops and the dangers of being shot.

The next morning we leave for the northern region of Karamoja where starvation and disease are reportedly at their worst. We load into an aging Mercedes and pull out of town. The sky is a vast expanse of blue, the sun burning down, scorching both earth and people alike. As we travel north on the dusty, broken road, the terrain gradually becomes more and more desert-like. We pass through expanses of scattered grass-covered plains dotted with occasional mesquite-like trees. A game preserve, this area was once home to herds of lion, buffalo, zebra, elephant, and other African mammals. Now all are gone, the victims of poachers and hungry, fleeing troops and refugees.

As noon approaches, the air becomes painfully hot and dry, the plains pregnant with death. Rev. Mbunga points out skeletons by the side of the road, those who couldn’t make the eighty-one-mile march to Mbale. Their bones were picked clean by buzzards and ants. Empty eye sockets stare at us as we pass.

About one p.m., we come to a huge, barbed-wire-enclosed compound with cement and corrugated iron buildings: the Namalu prison Farm, scene of countless atrocities under the reign of Idi Amin, now a hospital and feeding station for the Karamoja refugees. As we pull into the compound, I see several hundred mostly naked children huddled around one large building. From inside I can hear shouting and crying—this is the feeding center. The United Nations has been trucking in food recently, and each child is allotted one bowl of ground corn and powdered milk per day.

We stiffly climb out of the car and walk up to the building. Hundreds of sparkling, expectant eyes and outstretched hands greet us. My hands are grabbed and shaken over and over as we walk in. All around us, pressing against me, are huge bellies, festering sores, malaria, tuberculosis, yellow fever, worms, lice, cases of leprosy. At first I recoil, trying not to touch these sick and dying children. Then I remember Jesus’ words, “I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick . . .” Looking into these innocent, helpless faces, I lean forward and meet their handshakes and hugs. Is Jesus here? Truly these children are the least of the least. “As you did to the least of these, my brothers, you have done to me . . .”

Inside the feeding room we meet Ann, a thin Irish woman with brown hair, green eyes, and freckles who supervises the feeding. The floor of the large building is covered with tattered little bodies, some obviously near death. Ann directs us to the medical station next door. There we are met by hundreds of disfigured and nearly dead people. Dr. Jacques from the French Red Cross shows us around the TB wards, the malaria area, the “emergency” area. All are large empty cement rooms—no furniture, smashed out windows, with sleeping, unconscious, and moaning people lying on the hard dirt floors. The human suffering is more than I could have ever imagined.

We spend a few hours walking about and talking with the medical staff, all French nationals. We learn they are out of medicine, that nearly everyone has malaria, and that TB is rampant. Mr. Müller promises to send emergency medicine from Europe.

A mother carrying a baby approaches me. There are tears in her eyes, and her tone is pleading as she lifts her child to show me two large holes in the skin of his buttocks, areas about the size of quarters, where the skin and flesh have been eaten away revealing the muscle beneath. The child makes no sound or movement as the mother continues to stare hopefully into my eyes and cries to me in Swahili. He is the same age as my young son back in New Hampshire, and I wonder what I would be saying if I were her, what I would be thinking, if I would be able to endure the agony of watching my son die as I hold him in my arms.

“She is asking for food,” Rev. Mbonga says. “And she wants you to heal her child.”

My eyes fill with tears and I have to turn away. Herr Müller says, a crack in his voice, “Tell her we will send food and medication as soon as we can.”

Rev. Mbonga translates, as I look back at the woman. When she hears his words she looks at me for a long moment, as if trying to decide if we are telling the truth, and then silently turns and shuffles away.

On the way back to town and our “hotel” we stop at another refugee camp in Sirocco. A native ceremony is going on, and I take out my pocket recorder to tape it. Children start clustering around, and I play back a bit of their own voices. Shrieking with delight, hundreds of them crowd about me. Meanwhile Rev. Mbonga and Herr Müller sneak back to the car to get out several hundred loaves of organic whole wheat and sesame flat-bread which we have brought from the bakery of the Salem Children’s Village in West Germany.

The ruse works only for a moment. We had hoped to give the small amount of food we were able to “smuggle” into the country in our suitcases only to the most needy, those unable to come out and beg for it. But as soon as the food is out of the car, Rev. Mbonga and Mr. Müller are attacked by the mob of children and teenagers. A sea of screaming, hungry bodies descends on my friends, threatening to trample them. Within seconds all the food is devoured: we frantically pile into the car and drive off.

In a town between Sirocco and our hotel, we visit another refugee camp. They have some food, although there are hundreds of people on the edge of town who are starving. The village elders invite us to an evening ritual.

Twelve old African men sit around a fire, with Herr Müller, Rev. Mbonga, and me spaced at every fourth man. Near the fire is a brown clay pot about two feet in diameter: it’s filled with a frothy brown liquid, and the men each have a long straw made from a reed of some sort that goes from the pot to their mouths.

The man to my right, toothless and shriveled, clad only in a wraparound that was once half a bed-sheet, says something to me in Swahili and offers me his straw.

“What is it?” I ask Rev. Mbonga.

“It’s the local brew,” he says with a faint smile. “The women chew up a few different roots and herbs, then spit it into the pot. Water is added, and it ferments for about a week. The herbs are supposed to connect you to their gods: they’re probably mild hallucinogens. It’s probably alcoholic enough that you won’t get sick from it, but you can refuse without hurting his feelings.”

“Are you going to drink any?” I say.

He shakes his head. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

The old man says something to me.

“He said that it will open a door to the future for you,” Rev. Mbonga says.

I look at Herr Müller with a question in my eyes. The man next to him offers him his reed, and Herr Müller, without a moment’s hesitation, takes a long draw on the straw.

I turn to the man next to me and do the same. It tastes bitter and thick, like a milkshake with wormwood, and the bite of alcohol is unmistakable. The other men around the fire all murmur and drink from their straws.

The men begin to talk to us. Rev. Mbonga translates.

The oldest man of the group, long white hair, probably about 60 pounds, all skin and bones, wearing a cloth around his waist and sitting on the hard dirt cross-legged, says: “The world is fragile. Your American companies, sugar and coffee, they have raped our land. Now the Earth will no longer give us food because it is angry with what we have allowed you to do here.”

He is starting to shimmer. His face looks younger, and his features are changing, becoming more clear. I can see the details of the wrinkles in the skin of his face although he is sitting six feet from me, and now the wrinkles are starting to go away. His skin is getting slightly lighter in color, and tightening.

“What can be done?” I say.

He shakes his head. There is a little visual echo left in the air by the motion. “It has gone too far,” he says and now I can understand his Swahili even as Rev. Mbonga continues to translate. The men around the fire murmur their agreement. “The Earth cannot be saved by man: this is stupidity. The Earth will save itself, by killing off the men. Perhaps some of mankind can be saved, but the Earth will protect itself.” It made me think of the vision I’d seen a decade earlier in my rented room in East Lansing.

Another man interjects. He is younger, perhaps in his sixties, and I can see through his skin. A moment earlier it was black and solid: now it’s transparent, and I can see his veins and arteries, red and blue, and his muscles, as if looking through a thin film of dark gauze. His face looks compassionate. “This is the future you are seeing,” he says, waving his hand around him at the refugee camp, the bare ground, the dead trees, the big-bellied children squatting and watching us from a respectful distance. “One day it will be the white man’s future, too.”

I shiver, believing his words.

We sit and talk for another hour about the spirit of the Earth, the future, and the role Americans and Europeans have played in the rape of the Third World. The drug wears off, and I’m left with a dull headache. We leave, and each man shakes my hand in a grave gesture, as if he knows we will never again meet.

Back at the hotel it’s a dark night, and sounds of the African wilds fill the air through the open window. We discuss ways to help and decide to begin a Salem “baby home” nearby and to try and start with the three starving children we saw the night before in Mbale.

The following morning, our fourth day in the country, we leave the hotel at 7 a.m. to visit the camp just about a mile outside of Mbale. The sun is just rising, the ground and grass are wet with dew, and the air has a penetrating chill. This is the camp where we found the starving widows and the three babies lying on the hard ground. We take with us special food as we had promised. Most of the people are still in their huts, although a few are wandering about when we arrive. Rev. Mbonga leads us through the maze of huts and stinking mud to where the two widows live. One has eight children, the other seven. We leave them all our flat-bread, about thirty pieces. The three children are nowhere to be found. It has been two days. They have probably died.

Driving back to Kampala in the afternoon we stop in Jinja to meet with Mother Jane, a remarkable African lady who has started a “baby home” for thirty-five to forty children in her own residence. About five years ago, she rescued the first one, a baby boy, whom she found on a folded up newspaper at the edge of the river. The baby’s fate reminded her of the story of the infant Moses in the Bible, and so her home became known as Center Moses. Since then she has rescued countless other babies and children from garbage cans, burned-out buildings, and parched fields. Those we meet this afternoon range in age from a tiny, fragile six-month old (whose twin sister and mother died when she was born) to a young teenager who appears to be about seven because of malnutrition. They have no toilet, no medicine, no water, and only two more days of food.

“Only God knows how much longer we shall survive,” Mother Jane says. Despite the great anguish around her and in her eyes, she manages to smile and display a refreshing sense of humor. She tells us that her twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week work keeps her physically and spiritually strong. Her main concern, besides the omnipresent risk of disease and starvation, is people stealing her children for forced labor. We leave her six cans of powdered soy-milk for the infants, some whole wheat bread and sesame, and a little chamomile for tea to calm upset or ill children.

One little parentless boy, about three years old, his head barely reaching above my knees, runs up and warmly embraces my legs, holding me immobile. He looks up into my face and smiles angelically. “Will you be my daddy?” he seems to say. I reach down and rub his back and head, and we stand together like this for a minute or so. Then our party moves on, and I have to break his grip. I leave him sadly holding his face in his hands, and a lump forms in my throat.

It is about a two-hour drive from Jinja to Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Having stared down the barrels of hundreds of machine guns this past week, the many roadblocks seem almost normal. We arrive in Kampala and are driven to the International Hotel, a modern high-rise in the center of town, where we are invited to a reception in our honor by the Commissioner of the Ministry of Rehabilitation. The building has obviously been the scene of fighting in the recent war.

I haven’t had a bath in four days nor changed my clothes which are now rank with body odor and red Karamoja dust. As we sit down to a lunch of white rice and potatoes, I apologize to the Commissioner for my condition. He says not to worry, he hasn’t had water, or, presumably, a bath for over two years, and that, in times like these, we needn’t stand on formality. I notice that the clothing of his staff is old and tattered and recall that the factories and local importers haven’t been open for over two years either.

The commissioner is excited about our plans to help the French medical team and to start a children’s village in Uganda. He comments several times about the problems of temporary relief programs and says he hopes we will become a permanent part of Uganda.

That night we leave for Entebbe and after a one-thousand shilling “payment” at gunpoint to a police officer to pass through customs, we depart for Nairobi, the capital of neighboring Kenya. From there we will fly to London. I realize that I’ve contracted some sort of dysentery as I have awful diarrhea and every muscle in my body aches. Yet my discomfort is minuscule compared to those thousands of sick and dying people with whom we’ve spent the past week.

My thoughts keep wandering back to Mother Jane in Jinja with her thirty or forty babies. With a cloth wrapped around her head and the copper gleam of her face in the hot Ugandan sun, she appears as firm as a rock. Her love and faith are as timeless as the bones of humanity’s earliest ancestors which have been found in East Africa not far from here. I am reminded of the words of the psalmist, “I have been young and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken.”

East/West Journal Editor’s July, 1981 Note: In January Thom returned to Uganda with Dick Gregory and Horst Von Heyer and discovered that the situation had briefly improved following new elections. They negotiated with the government for land to begin a Salem refugee center and hospital near Mbale. However, by spring factionalism had broken out again and the situation has steadily deteriorated. Most international relief organizations, including Oxfam, have now left the country since they can no longer guarantee the safety of their staffs, and Ann, the Irish volunteer, was shot and killed by a sniper’s bullet as she was feeding children. In April, Mother Jane and Rev. Mbonga visited Salem Children’s Villages in Germany and the United States to help set up a supply line of food and emergency medicine to Uganda.

By that summer Von Heyer and Uli Bierbach had gone back into Uganda from Germany to start construction of the Salem facility on the land for which we’d negotiated with the government. The village that was started there is now run as both a village and a hospital. It’s still operating, and one of the larger of the Salem programs around the world.

Mother Jane died of a heart attack in 1984, and Salem Uganda took in her children. Louise and I named our youngest child after her.

This experience was, for me, both shattering and strengthening. I’d been in the slums of America and much of the Third World, but had never experienced children dying in my arms or people starving to death as I watched. It tested my faith and caused me to remember Herr Müller’s comment that “There are many mysteries, and we cannot know them all,” and to accept, simply, the reality of the here-and-now and to do the best I could to help solve the world’s problems without judgement.