The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  As noon approaches, the air becomes painfully hot and dry, the plains pregnant with death. Reverend Mbonga points out some skeletons by the side of the road, those who couldn’t make the 81-mile march to Mbale. Their bones were picked clean by buzzards and ants. Empty eye sockets stare at us as we pass.

  About 1:00 p.m. we come to a huge, barbed-wire-enclosed compound with concrete 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 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, leprosy. At first I recoil, trying not to touch these sick and dying children. Then I remember Jesus’s 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.

  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 tuberculosis (TB) wards, the malaria area, and the “emergency” area. All are large, empty, concrete rooms—smashed-out windows, no furniture, and 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 that they are out of medicine, that nearly everyone has malaria, and that TB is rampant. Herr 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 the 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,” Reverend 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.”

  Reverend 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 she 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 under way, 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 Reverend Mbonga and Herr Müller sneak back to the car to get out several hundred loaves of organic whole wheat and sesame flatbread, 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, Reverend Mbonga and Herr 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, Reverend Mbonga, and me spaced at every fourth man. Near the fire is a brown clay pot about 2 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 bedsheet, says something to me in Swahili and offers me his straw.

  “What is it?” I ask Reverend 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,” Reverend Mbonga tells me.

  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. Reverend 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 clearer. I can see the details of the wrinkles in the skin of his face although he is sitting 6 feet from me, and now the wrinkles are starting to go away. His skin is getting slightly lighter in color, and it’s tightening.

  “What can be done?” I ask.

  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 Reverend 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.”

  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 developing 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; we decide to begin a Salem “baby home” nearby and to try to 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 seven o’clock to visit the camp just about a mile outside of Mbale. The sun is just rising, the ground and the 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. Reverend 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 flatbread, about 30 pieces. The three children are nowhere to be found. It has been two days.

  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 35 to 40 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 24-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 soymilk 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. 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. Having stared down the barrels of hundreds of machine guns this past week, we found the many roadblocks to be 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, that he hasn’t had water (or, presumably, a bath) for more than 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 the local importers haven’t been open for more than 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 1,000-shilling “payment” at gunpoint to a police officer to pass through customs, we then 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 with 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 30 or 40 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.”

  First published in East/West Journal, July 1981

  From The Prophet’s Way by Thom Hartmann,

  © 1997, published by Inner Traditions International.

  Russia: A New Seed Planted among Thorns

  From The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now

  Every second of existence is a new miracle. Consider the countless variations and possibilities that await us every second—avenues into the future. We take only one of these; the others—who knows where they go? This is the eternal marvel, the magnificent uncertainty of the next second to come, with the past a steady unfolding carpet of denouement.

  —JACK VANCE, THE HOUSES OF ISZM

  I WAS IN THE SCANDINAVIAN AIRLINES TWIN-PROP PLANE THAT landed at about noon on a gray, blustery, raw-cold December day in Kaliningrad, Russia. The airport is about 20 miles outside the town, surrounded by now-unused barbed-wire fences and empty guard stations. Inside the terminal there was no heat, and only about half the overhead lights worked. Remembering the lengthy interrogations I’d been through when entering and leaving East Berlin years earlier, I was expecting rigid formalities on entering, particularly because Kaliningrad was a “special zone,” an area of secret military installations and one of the former Soviet Union’s most sensitive places. Even normal Russians aren’t allowed to travel into the region, but on this day the immigration inspector just looked at my visa, stamped my passport, smiled, and said, “Welcome to Russia.” Nobody was even checking luggage for contraband in the customs area: I just walked outside, carrying my shoulder bag and the 5 liters of water I’d brought from Copenhagen.

  Outside, Gerhard Lipfert waited with the blue Volkswagen bus he’d driven from Germany. He greeted me with a huge hug, saying, “Welcome to Russia!”

  Inside the bus was a man named Herr Burkhardt, who’d been a foot-soldier in Hitler’s army, captured by the Russians, and spent decades as a prisoner of war in Russia. He was finally released and returned to Germany, where he now worked for Salem as a Russian/ German translator. His face creased in a wide smile as he welcomed me.

  The next morning we set out for an area about 200 kilometers from Kaliningrad, near the Polish border, where Salem has undertaken a project in Russia. It was bitterly cold, and the sky was so dim, the clouds so thick, that the world looked like an old black-and-white movie from the forties.

  As we drove through the countryside, I watched the passing parade of fallen-down fences, broken-down houses, ancient cars, potholed pavement, and the steady stream of old men and women hitchhiking. (Horst Von Heyer, a Salem colleague, once remarked to me that you can tell the poverty of a nation by the age of the hitchhikers. I’ve found this to be so very true, all over the world.)

  It was close to 10:00 p.m. when we arrived in a little town whose name I never managed to get straight. In the midst of rolling fields and gentle hills, the Russian farmlands, was this little collection of boxsquare houses, each identical to the other, each just a bit larger than a double-wide trailer home. There were perhaps 60 houses that made up the town, maybe five streets.

  We stopped first at Erika’s house. It was her mother’s birthday, a little old lady with a scarf over her white hair, her face wrinkled with age and weather, and a birthday celebration was in full swing. Twenty people packed the house, 15 or so of them in the living room, where a
long makeshift table that had been set up was covered with food and drink. There were potatoes and carrots next to a bottle of vodka. Beans and some sort of meat were next to another bottle of vodka. Several piles of Salem bread from Germany sat by a bottle of peach schnapps. Red beet soup and sauerkraut were next to the bottle of wine.

  People were laughing; the women were singing long songs, rocking from side to side together, hugging each other. Each person wanted to shake my hand, and every time anybody walked by me, they put their hand on my shoulder or back. At first it struck me, a rather reserved American, as overly demonstrative, but I then saw that this was how everybody was with everybody. Here was the soul of Russia, the heart of the people: touching, laughing, kissing, hugging, singing maudlin songs while holding hands.

  We were given places of honor at the table, and Lipfert gestured for me to eat the food. “This is a rare occasion,” he said. “And most of the food is what we’ve brought here recently. You can eat it safely, but don’t drink the water.”

  I didn’t have to worry about drinking the water. First a glass of sangria was put in front of me; we all toasted, and everybody downed his or hers in one gulp. Next was a tumbler of straight vodka. Then the schnapps. Then back to the vodka. I was accumulating half-full glasses in front of me, to the great amusement of my hosts, but my explanation that I was sick from the airplane seemed to soften the blow of my lack of participation.

  There was another surprise at the party: it was Horst Von Heyer, the Salem employee who had been shot in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq two years earlier, when Salem was trying to set up a program to help the Kurds there. Von Heyer, having survived the loss of his assistant in Namibia to a crocodile, and five bullets in his body in Iraq, was again up and around, a distinguished man in his late fifties who stands well over 6 feet tall and speaks perfect British English (and a half dozen other languages). It was great to see him. He’d taken me into Uganda the second time I’d gone to Africa, and we’d spent many an evening together talking long into the nights the year our family lived at Salem in Stadtsteinach. Now he was helping the Salem project here in Russia.