On the ground in Uganda before the September flood, after a twenty-year war.

A loose tangle of overweight clouds bumble and bulge in the fading blue sky, no doubt with the rest of their leaderless army following them, unseen, just over the horizon. I, in my too-big flip-flops, one two one two idly along the dirt road. I stop and check all the settings on my slightly near-sighted and dusty black video camera. With my hand still in my shirt, I rub the thin cinnamon silt off of the lenses of my glasses for good measure.

There, in the LCD flip-out screen on the camera, the African soil almost looks like it’s ideal romantic red. Up the red a little bit. There we go, African soil red.

Now in viewfinder: National Geographic African soil red. Now: African skin black, actually, East Ugandan blackblack.

At this point I’m neglecting to hold the hands of any of the six kids accompanying me to the trading center down the road, where villagers from Palissa District grind millet, get water, and buy Coca-Cola. Where a few of the shops have lights once it gets dark. Where still, most storefronts will stay dark when it gets dark.

Zachariah, 15, reaches for my arm and hesitates. If my hand wasn’t stabilizing the camera, he would probably hold it in hopes that he could be the one out of the six to guide me. With the hope that he could pull me away and show me his Uganda.

I have held countless young clammy hands (and used increasingly less hand sanitizer) over the past four weeks. I have held the hands of many men my age. In Uganda, it is a casual cultural sign of friendship. But today I am holding the video camera and that does, justifiably, require both hands.

When I finish recording, I challenge myself. I point to each kid and say their name. Lawrence, Zachariah, Joseph, Bomba and….

I pause. The next boy waits for me, he says “You do not know my name. But I have told you back just the other day, when you recorded my story.” A shamed smile. “You do not know?” A look to the other, named, orphans. He tells me his name.

And that’s not how it should be at all. It really isn’t. Maybe it’s just that those kids are the ones who found me. Possibly, just the ones that struck me.

Hypothesis: In the past twenty-five odd days I have been introduced to two-hundred and forty orphans, each of whom has asked me to tape his or her background, who plea for monetary support, who need it bad. Each one trumps the last until eventually there are so many names I can’t remember a new one. This is what it is like to really be needed. This is unsettling.

But I can’t tell them that. I really can’t at all.

I also can’t tell them this: Nyanzi, Lawrence. I remember Lawrence because he wanted so badly to know me and he is like me, and I just remember him because of that. And he has needs, and he has asked me for things, like papers and pens, but I never felt like he was begging. And I think I want to help Lawrence, oddly enough, because he never begged for anything. Or maybe just because I felt like I meant something to him more than money. And that meant a lot to me.

Lawrence is 14 years-old. He quietly walks next to me in his green and orange jersey, his eyes glisten as he looks up at me (and consequently, the camera) and he gets a chagrined smile. In Lawrence’s mind nothing that gets all the way from his head through to that chagrined smile is worth saying. I spend a lot of time looking at that smile.

Before I can force myself to hear anything, Zachariah, the one with the speech impediment, blurts out, “You have been VERY busy! You have left us to go to Mbale!” Muscles the words out. He stretches his neck taut to say “very” like he does, chin forward, twice as loud as the other words. Zachariah wants to be a preacher. He will do well.

“Yes.” I nod my head. “I’ve been filming in Mbale.” I’m filming a documentary, I hope, and I hope I finish it. That’s important to me. I’m too deep into it. Lawrence asks, “And Mbale eh? What did you think of that place? It is very nice. It is very nice, Mbale.”

Mbale is a thirty-minute scooter ride from Palissa Children’s Concern Project. PCCP being the officially named, but tawdry, nearly non-functioning orphanage that has housed me and ten other Northeasterners among former-child soldiers and former-street children for the past three weeks.

Bomba, the shortest, and most secretive of the grouop, slips next to my camera-arm. I pan to his face, an already round-thing now bubbling wide-angle in my viewfinder. He surreptitiously prepares to pull me aside to ask for money, to ask for support, to ask for some private time, Mister Jon. His hands are already splayed finger-tip to finger-tip. I don’t know where he picked it up.

Zachariah bumps into my left arm and holds up his elbow. He cups it with his other hand. He twists his hand over the wrinkly skin over the tip of his elbow, covered with scars and whatnot from twelve-years of being a kid and probably three-years of being an adult. Like all of these guys, Zachariah has spent the last few years begging for money and carrying tourist’s luggage up and down the streets of Mbale, Lira, Soroti, Kampala, before he was picked-up by “Uncle” Paul Osilon to live at the orphanage.

He points that wrinkly elbow at me like a fully-operational video camera. He twists his hand, the focus ring: “You were busy. So busy filming! Yes Jon, you are very VER’ (that one doesn’t quite come out) busy!”

Bomba smiles and kicks at a rock in the road as we walk. He shakes his head and clicks his tongue. “Ah! We have missed you, Jon.” Lawrence chuckles an embarrassed chuckle. He smiles. “Yes, you see, Mister Jon, we have nothing to do here, we do nothing but wait for you to return to us. We were worried you were leaving us.”

I lower my camera. The road curves a little bit. Most of the people from Namilimbre Trading Centre walk around us, dirt-stained yellow jerry cans (probably full of water) balanced on their heads. Young men approach on their bikes and ring their bells. The kids pull me to the side of the narrow road as the bicycles coast past. I am not savvy on road etiquette. I let my camera hang on my shoulder by its strap and hold the hands of the closest kids because that’s what you do in Uganda. You hold hands.

Lawrence: “Mister Jon? Mister Jon? Do you have these things, these clouds in the sky like this in the USA?” He looks up and I look up. Sumo clouds are beginning to squid-like swim over the dark green mango and jack-fruit trees to the north. It is getting late. “Oh yeah. We get a lot of rain in Providence.” I tell them from behind the camera. “Should we go back?” I ask. We continue to walk away from the orphanage. No one seems to stop. “Take me back.” I say.

I will leave in three days, ending my four week stay and flying into the comparative wasteland of Washington-Dulles Int’l Airport. In a little over a month clouds just like the billowing blue ones I see now will vomit torrential rains just north of us in record volumes, beautifully expelling sheets of rain no doubt, in blue over blue. They will make rivers out of the red soil roads of Soroti and other northern towns. They will displace over 500,000 people throughout East and West Africa.

For me, I will sit in my third-story apartment in the East Side, like I am now, at night. I will have time to read about mud and thatch houses crumbled and melting into purple Ugandan mud and it is then that I will do what I am doing now, here, and not there. Safe. Trying my best to write something with a period at the end of it.

j.m. betz october 2007