On a calloused street in Mbale, Jimmy presents what is.

In Mbale, Uganda, midday, on a cratered stone-slab sidewalk cracked by rain and calloused feet, three or four dignified brown-skinned school girls walk, heads shaved close, in orange cotton, orange-belted dresses. Unmistakably public school uniforms. They are headed home.

Doctor, 20, looks expectantly at me. He is chewing gum. I tell him to brief me on the situation, for camera-etiquette. I have visited the streets of Mbale off and on for a few days, and all said and done I’ve been working in Uganda for a little over three weeks, shooting video footage more or less constantly. I am becoming used to the people, but at the same time, what in the world can I possibly do in Africa?

“We go?” Doctor begins down the street. Doctor has spent the last hour looking for his half-brother, who lives on the streets. I am hoping that his half-brother stays put where he found him.

“I know the streets.” Doctor says in a high pitched voice that denies his chiseled, compact build. I met Doctor at Pallissa Children’s Concern Project, a struggling Christian orphanage and school run by a local Ugandan man. I am staying at PCCP with 11 other American students and the one American woman who brought us to Uganda. Doctor is one of the oldest orphans there. When I asked him if he could find his brother earlier, because I wanted to reunite them, meet an active street kid, and get it all on tape, he agreed without hesitation, no doubt excited to finally get a paid trip 25 miles in to Mbale from Pallissa.

As we walk, I follow a few steps behind with the camera. Doctor, who rarely goes by his given name, John Francis, used to live in the Mbale streets and ran with a rag-tag gang of other orphaned guys. His father was shot in the North in 1989 by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel army that is comprised mostly of young boys and girls. As one of my Ugandan friends put it, “These under 18 years?” He holds up his hand like he is measuring the height of a child about to board a ride at the carnival and drops it to his side. “They like.”

Doctor’s mother died of AIDS in 1997.

Ishmael, Shebban, Banga Moi, Ochan. I ask him about the other members of the clan, and what they did. “When I was in the gang, I was around 14 years old, and the oldest was 24.” It is in this gang that Doctor got his name. He continues: “The youngest, he was seven. He was sort of a spy for us. We sent him somewhere and said, first go and do this, and if someone catches him, we come.” When the little guy invariably got tossed around by other competing kids, the gang would come out of the crowd to back him up. “If it gets an occasion, an occasion is maybe, somebody is giving out money to needy children, you have to fight for that money. If you had managed it you defeated them all and took some of the money.” If you wanted to eat, he said, “You had to get these moneys.” Modus Operandi: the cutest beg for the money, the strongest steal it.

Relentless, oblivious, cheerful reggae-tone music bursts out of nearly every store window. We stop suddenly. Doctor presents Jimmy, his half-brother. Jimmy, 16, wears cutoff pin-stripe black pants, cayenne peppered with red dirt. A collared shirt, ripped from neck to mid-chest is loosely tacked onto his shoulders. A simple blue necklace hangs from his neck with an equally simple blue cross on it.

His eyes are about 10 miles down the road. He looks at Doctor like he looks at me: blankly. We are strangers. He looks past us like we expect him to know more than he does. Here he is, simply because he is. Doctor has not seen Jimmy for seven years. He has told Jimmy that they are brothers. I can see in Jimmy’s eyes that he does not understand. He cares, but he does not understand.

I can’t really think of too much to say. I think I ask doctor a few questions. Jimmy doesn’t speak English so I speak as if he isn’t there. Finally I correct myself and turn to Jimmy, “How long have you been on the street?” He looks at me, squints his eyes a little bit, pupils focusing past me. Doctor says, off camera, three years.

There is constant stream of foot-traffic, bicycles, public buses, Toyotas (with huge stickers on the windshields, “God’s promise”, “Jesus is the way”, “Allahu Akbar”). Men and women sit in front of every store and sell fresh produce, shoes and cheap necklaces. Jimmy is no doubt used to everything I don’t see amid all of this, kids drinking petrol to get drunk. Stealing. The fights. Worse things, using little boys as women, not eating.

For the rest of the day, we mostly walk behind Jimmy. Show and tell. This market is where he sleeps a night. He has to go to bed late and get up early or he is beaten. This is one of the streets where he carries luggage for people, for tourists, visitors, and they give him some small money, 200 shillings, 400 shillings (12, 25 cents). Which, believe it or not, seems his primary source of income.

After Jimmy tells me each of these things, he just turns and keeps walking. Past the market a lot full of coal, or ash, or something gray, catches my eye. I stop, pan over and document a few pretty shots of the area with my movie camera. I ask Jimmy about gangs, about his, did he have one? Does he have friends on the street? How many? Has he ever hurt anybody? No? “He is a simple guy, he does not have a gang,” Doctor says, “I’m glad that he does not have to be like me, because for me I have my different heart, he is nothing like me.”

I ask him: Do you tell people your problems when you see them? Jimmy speaks, his face embarrassed, like this should all go without saying. “He said that he always tells some people, but here in Uganda he sees people, all who are, some who are poor, he just minimizes what he tells them. And it causes his heart pain.”

I pan back to Jimmy. I realize that, unlike most of the orphans I have met over the past few weeks, with Jimmy, if he isn’t enough, he isn’t enough.

Behind Jimmy: a swarm of kids the height of my belly-button. A few jump to try to get into the frame. Behind them: silent teens, just looking at me, twisting the front of their sweaty tank-tops. Behind them: enormous mountains of black soot packaged in bulging sacks. “This place is called market street. This is where they carry charcoal.” Across the street a few kids toss and kick a ball.

We walk. Doctor reminds me that Jimmy needs help. I agree and think about my wallet. I buy Jimmy a change of clothes (specifying durable and cheap because of the money I will need to get back to Palissa). I barter with a man selling underwear. I ask Doctor is this an okay price? He nods, but I still barter. I’m angry at what it is I can’t do here.

As I continue down yet another street I hear more than one stranger point and say forcefully, as if pointing out an elephant, “Muzungu!” and I am reminded of what I mean at a glance. Money.

We eat a meal. Doctor takes care to roll up Jimmy’s sleeves; he pours water from a yellow jerry can to wash Jimmy’s hands, then his own. Doctor takes care of Jimmy while I am there. The rest of the time, the seven years rest of the time before, Doctor never had enough money to afford the $10 motorbike trip to town. He tells me that when their mother died, they each had to take care of themselves. When we sit down to eat, again I want to be generous but I tell Doctor that we have to keep enough money for the ride back to Pallissa.

While we eat, a suited Ugandan man who helps with street children talks to me. He recommends I take a look at the Child Restoration Outreach center before I leave since I am interested in helping the kids here. We finish eating. Jimmy sips on a Coca-Cola.

Doctor and I stand kitty-corner across the street from an unremarkable pink building. I don’t know what to do, really. Do I go inside and talk to them? I turn to Jimmy. “Jimmy, why don’t you go there?” A moment of translation. Doctor says, “Only the kids with a sponsor are in CRO [Child Restoration Outreach center]…when you find a sponsor you can go to CRO. When somebody speaks to you and tells you to go to CRO.”

“How do you get a sponsor?” I ask.

“He does not have a sponsor.”

I ask Jimmy: “Have you ever gone in there?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You can only go there if they pick you from the streets.”

Doctor looks at me. “It is a different opportunity maybe. He says his only chance is speaking to you.” Jimmy just looks down the road, behind me, watching people pass. I think I understand why the CRO is the way it is, it is a difficult thing, giving aid and having to decide who gets it. I look at the neon green shorts, the black shirt, the underwear, folded and curled in Jimmy’s hand and they suddenly don’t feel like enough at all. I got caught up in the bartering and bought too much colorful Indonesian fabric last week. I am out of money, I think. I see Jimmy as a point of interest, I realize. I think Jimmy sees me as his way out.

j.m. betz november 2007