Omusaija Akaija (A Man Came)

I was sitting on my back porch after coming back from my first bike ride around the villages near to here. I don’t know if I’m normal or not for this, but when I don’t want to do things and don’t have pressure to do them, I will just sit or lay somewhere and think. I don’t do anything but think. When I’m outside, I like to watch the wind blow the trees or the birds fly around while I think. As I was sitting there, lost in thought, I noticed a man walk across my yard. This is unusual; people don’t usually come into my yard unless they are coming to see me.  He was mumbling to himself, presumably in Rutooro, and he walked over to one of the trash pits which my neighbors and I throw compost into. I figured by then that he very likely has a mental illness, thus cannot hold down a job, thus lives on the streets, and he was looking for food. He looked into the pit, did not see anything he wanted, and moved on without noticing I was there. I did not see him for a few minutes, and I assumed he would not come back through my yard because he had gone to other places looking for food. He did, however, and this time he saw me. I tried to greet him, but he was too busy repeating “Thank you very much” over and over again. He had picked up about half of a pineapple that I believe my neighbors threw in there. He left again, and I contemplated going in, since I was finally starting to cool down from the bike ride. Instead, he came back with sugar cane to thank me. (I am not sure why, but sugar cane seems to be the going thank you gift for us abajungu.) I have no idea where he got the sugar cane from, but I tried to get him to take it with him. Even with the best Rutooro I could come up with (which was only “You have” while pointing to it…), he refused to take it. I have not seen him again today, and I don’t expect to. I wish I had remembered I have far too many beans left from last night to eat. I would have given him my beans. Now I guess I’m going to make friends with my neighbors giving them sugar cane....

Even while I sit typing this up, I don’t know how I feel about this story. I don’t know what I want to say. It is very sad and very strange, but I think it brings to light a bigger issue. Mental illness is something that is simply ignored in Uganda. If you ask a Ugandan if mental illnesses exist, they may say yes, but there are very, very few psychologists or psychiatrists in the country, and they may very well all be in Kampala. Even in our own country, mental illness is still very taboo. It is a difficult subject to bring up, to talk about, to accept, but it is a very real thing. In your lifetime, you will probably deal with a mental illness at least once. Anxiety and depression most commonly go diagnosed because we as Americans think we can fix it on our own. Perhaps you can. Perhaps you don’t need anything other than a bit more exercise, a bit more time with friends, family, and/or God. But there are many, many cases where anxiety, depression, or other mental illnesses go untreated in America. It is the norm here for them to go untreated.

While we were visiting Entebbe during All Vol/Supervisors’ Workshop, one of the women in my cohort made a very good point. She is very passionate about people, and also very well-travelled, and so she has been able to really get to know people in much of the world. We were talking about perceptions of Africans in general, how many of them are poor comparatively speaking, and how Westerners, especially Americans, will come to a country like Uganda, do a week or two of volunteer work here, and go home to tell everyone “The people there smile all the time! They’re always happy and so friendly!” She went on, though, to point out that depression and anxiety especially, but also mental illnesses in general, are rampant in countries like Uganda with very little mental healthcare. The people work all day long to hardly have enough money to feed their families. Although it is not wrong to say that Africans or Ugandans are happy, it is wrong to brush over the fact that mental healthcare just does not exist. At the time, this statement did not sit with me quite right. I have not seen many people with signs of depression or anxiety, and I have been here for over three months now.

I truly believe in finding the similarities between America and Uganda, not the differences. People here enjoy many of the same things we do: spending time with family and friends, watching TV shows, gardening (called “digging” here), for some, cooking or even cleaning. They don’t necessarily have the stress we put on ourselves about being timely or being involved in EVERYTHING because the culture is different. Ugandans are happy a majority of the time, and so are Americans. But today I see that I completely agree with her statement, although I want to take it further. In America right now, there is a fight on healthcare reform. Mental healthcare needs to be destigmatized in order to have a healthy nation. The same needs to happen here in Uganda, as well as around Africa. The value of mental healthcare is incalculable. Many, many, many studies show that a healthy mind leads to a healthy body, which in turn leads to a healthy life. I don’t know that it’s my place to push for healthcare reform here, but now the idea is at least out there. It may be 20, 30, 50, even 100 years before mental healthcare is completely destigmatized, completely normal in Uganda or in America, but you have to take the first step for the journey to begin. Maybe I can only take that first step with a handful of Ugandans, but it doesn’t take much to start a revolution.