Don’t Get Afterbirth On My CDs, Please

Verse two, comin with that Olde E brew

Meth-tical, puttin niggaz back in I.C.U.

We left Lake Mburo and headed towards the Rwandan border. At the crossing, men with wads of Rwandan Francs approached the SUV looking for a deal. I disembarked and officially signed us out of Uganda in a small tin-roofed shack. On the other side we got our passports stamped and assured Rwandese officials that we hadn’t come from Ebola-infested Bundibugyo.

I expected to find in Rwanda a slightly degraded version of Uganda; I assumed that visible traces would remain of the genocidal civil war 13 years ago during which 1 out of 10 people were murdered by their neighbors. Instead, we drove into a superficially upgraded version of Uganda. The homes and people looked much the same, but there were differences presumably due to the efficiency of a near totalitarian government in a small country: smooth roads free of potholes, motorcyclists wearing helmets, hedges along the hills to prevent erosion. Less easily explicable, people’s gardens were more colorful and well-tended.

All along the road people walked in twos and threes, uphill and downhill. Many carried water in those still-ubiquitous yellow plastic jugs. My co-pilot, L, claimed that the rolling green hills behind them have twins in China.

To reach Akagera National Park we turned onto a descending dirt road. By that point we’d been in the SUV long enough for a vague sensation of the U.S.A. to have settled into my skin, perhaps linked to an anesthetic pumped out by the A/C. I ate cookies and spoke unrestrained American English. The Grateful Dead sang of sharing women and wine. We rambled on contentedly in our metal and plastic cocoon.

In my contented daze I noticed something peculiar about yet another group of people walking on the side of the road. It was larger than the others and moving with haste. A few people together carried something of considerable weight. I stopped chewing long enough to dumbly mumble “Wonder what’s going on there…”

L, a physician with experience in rural Zimbabwe, recognized the situation instantly. “Someone is sick. They’re carrying him to the hospital.”

“They’re walking to the hospital we passed ten minutes ago? Jesus. It’s uphill the whole way.”

“You want to go back and give them a lift?” The idea hadn’t occurred to me. Did Newton’s Laws permit us to reach behind the windshield-shaped TV screen and pull someone into our 15-miles-per-gallon living room? Confucius smirks:

Seeking a foothold for self,
love finds a foothold for others;
seeking light for itself,
it enlightens others too.
To learn from the near at hand
may be called the clue to love.

I slowly lowered my foot onto the brake pedal. “Uh…yeah…yeah…we should go back and give them a lift. It would be the Christian thing to do.”

We turned around and pulled up alongside the crowd of about twenty people. Four young men in the lead carried a stretcher made of bamboo and palm leaves on their shoulders. A human form sagged inside. I rolled down the window and leaned out as if to request a cheeseburger with fries, biggie-sized, and large Coca-cola with extra ice. Rwandese unhappy meals came rushing in: heat, odor, panicked voices. I addressed the nearest stretcher-bearer:

“Parlez-vous Anglais?” No response.

I tried an alternate method.“Ogenda wa?” [Luganda: Where are you going?] Nothing.

Then, in my impersonation of a French accent, “Hospital?” Affirmation all around.

We got out of the car and set about clearing the back seat of all luxury: a box of books and CDs, name brand backpacks, head lamps, extra shoes, a 2 liter 7-Up bottle, L’s toiletry bag containing no less than ten tubes of various creams and lotions. During this process she somehow ascertained that the woman in the stretcher, the woman now being held up on wobbly legs by two men, was pregnant, with apparent complications. L laid a pathetically small dish towel on the backseat and said “We may have to deliver in the car.” Right. I’ll be ‘round back having an upchuck.

A team of four hauled the pregnant woman into our improvised ambulance. She half-sat, half-lay in the middle of the back seat, supported by a woman who could have been her older sister. Next to them, crammed farthest inside, a barefoot man in a sport coat decided for unknown reasons to crawl across everyone to exit rather than open the door to which his back had been pressed.

With three people and the mother-to-be remaining inside the vehicle, we were ready to roll. I gently closed the back door, climbed behind the steering wheel and, leaning forward, accelerating gently, began the meandering climb up to the hospital. A quick calculation of the risk of flipping the SUV or plunging into the roadside drainage ditch or plowing over small children on swervy bicycles versus the urgency of transporting a grimacing woman full of baby and baby juice to the delivery room yielded an optimal speed of 50 km per hour, plus or minus ten.

I accelerated less gently. L turned around in her seat to say “It’s OK, Mama.” Mama moaned. I glimpsed her head being stroked in the rearview mirror.

We reached the first of several goddamned speed humps. Mama moaned louder. Children shouted “Muzungu! Muzungu!” oblivious to our precious cargo.

The drive was taking longer than I’d expected. “How far back is the [Shoulder Angel: “Don’t say ‘goddamned’”] hospital?”

“It must be just ahead. We can’t miss it – it’s too big.”

My foothold on the gas pedal deepened further still. Energetically waving kids faded into clouds of dust. A white sedan came flying down the hill and I honked it over to where the other lane would have been, had there been lanes.

“There’s the hospital,” I said as I missed the turn. Throwing the vehicle into reverse, I let the engine stall out. “Jesus Christ.” [Shoulder Demon: “Let him have it, motherfucker!”] Eventually we came to halt under the awning of the hospital entrance.

Scanning the many faces milling about the entryway, I was comforted by the sight of a woman with a nametag. “Hello” I said.

“Hello” she answered back. Praise the Lord.

“This woman is pregnant,” I said.

Suddenly another name-tagged individual appeared, a rather burly fellow in a navy blue clinician’s coat. “You need to move your vehicle.”

“This woman is pregnant,” I repeated.

“You need to move your vehicle forward.” He gestured to the drain running under the SUV. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Can we take out the pregnant woman first?”

The parking attendant posing as a medic then moved past me and actually managed to shut the door on Mama’s legs as her friends were helping her out. At this L’s nostrils flared, but she retained her professional calm. Annunciating carefully, she said, “Please put this woman in a wheel chair and then we will move the vehicle.” He continued to point to the drain while someone else arrived with a wheelchair. Mama slid into it and was immediately whisked into the building, her friends following closely behind.

We finally moved the vehicle forward and then just kept right on going, back down the winding hill, over the humps, past the people and homes and storefronts, and into the unpopulated savanna of Akagera National Park. Over the next two days we did what you do in a game park while Mama did what you do in a delivery room. I looked to my distant cousins for the answers to all of this. To the zebra: “Where did you get your stripes?” To the giraffe: “Why is your neck so long?” To the buffalo “How did you get so thick?” But only the hippopotamus gave me a response.

“Hippo, why you so phat?”

Yo I gets rugged as a motherfuckin carpet get

And niggaz love it, not in the physical form but in the mental

I spark and they cells get warm

I'm not a gentle, man, I'm a Method, Man!

Baby accept it, utmost respect it

(Assume the position) Stop look and listen

I spit on your grave then I grab my Charles Dickens

Gimme an O

from today's Daily Monitor (Kampala):

"US Democrat candidate Barack Obama phoned Kenya's opposition leader Raila Odinga to express grave concern over the election outcome."

[Kivuitu is the chairman of Kenya's Electoral Commission. ODM is Odinga's party]

If the dialogue above is too small, it reads:
Obama: "Cousin, sorry about your votes. Clinton did a 'Kibaki' on me here as well...but I'm not rioting!"
Odinga: "I'm very sorry cousin..but are you sure your electoral commission didn't 'Kivuitu' your votes?!"

Excerpts from Andrew Sullivan’s argument that Obama is the only escape from the Baby Boomer infighting that, beginning with Vietnam, has driven American politics in an ever-tightening downward spiral

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.

This latter point is the most salient. The act of picking the next president will be in some ways a statement of America’s view of Iraq. Clinton is running as a centrist Democrat—voting for war, accepting the need for an occupation at least through her first term, while attempting to do triage as practically as possible. Obama is running as the clearer antiwar candidate. At the same time, Obama’s candidacy cannot fairly be cast as a McGovernite revival in tone or substance. He is not opposed to war as such. He is not opposed to the use of unilateral force, either—as demonstrated by his willingness to target al-Qaeda in Pakistan over the objections of the Pakistani government. He does not oppose the idea of democratization in the Muslim world as a general principle or the concept of nation building as such. He is not an isolationist, as his support for the campaign in Afghanistan proves. It is worth recalling the key passages of the speech Obama gave in Chicago on October 2, 2002, five months before the war:

"I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars."

…The best speech Obama has ever given was not his famous 2004 convention address, but a June 2007 speech in Connecticut. In it, he described his religious conversion:

“One Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, he would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works. “

To be able to express this kind of religious conviction without disturbing or alienating the growing phalanx of secular voters, especially on the left, is quite an achievement. As he said in 2006, “Faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts.” To deploy the rhetoric of Evangelicalism while eschewing its occasional anti-intellectualism and hubristic certainty is as rare as it is exhilarating. It is both an intellectual achievement, because Obama has clearly attempted to wrestle a modern Christianity from the encumbrances and anachronisms of its past, and an American achievement, because it was forged in the only American institution where conservative theology and the Democratic Party still communicate: the black church.

Obama is deeply aware of how he comes across to whites. In a revealing passage in his first book, he recounts how, in adolescence, he defused his white mother’s fears that he was drifting into delinquency. She had marched into his room and demanded to know what was going on. He flashed her “a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry.” This, he tells us, was “usually an effective tactic,” because people

"were satisfied as long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time."

And so you have Obama’s campaign for white America: courteous and smiling and with no sudden moves.

…To be black and white, to have belonged to a nonreligious home and a Christian church, to have attended a majority-Muslim school in Indonesia and a black church in urban Chicago, to be more than one thing and sometimes not fully anything—this is an increasingly common experience for Americans, including many racial minorities. Obama expresses such a conflicted but resilient identity before he even utters a word. And this complexity, with its internal tensions, contradictions, and moods, may increasingly be the main thing all Americans have in common.