April 20: Work at ATIN

around the dinner table.  posho, beans, and fish!

Sadly, one of the girls at ATIN tested positive to HIV today.  She is about 13 years old.  They have not told her yet because they want to do it in the most supportive way possible lest she return to the streets to try to forget her problems through reckless living.  She most likely contracted the virus through sexual activity either by force or as a means to earn money, which in the end is not much of a choice when you’re a 13 year old street girl in Lira. The kids hold on to you when you enter the gate at ATIN as if you’re a war hero, as if they never want to let you go.  Greetings and farewells are big deals in Africa especially among street kids and orphans.  The wounded attachments with caregivers that were truncated or underdeveloped want to compensate by clinging and trying to avoid ‘goodbye’s’.  Of course, all males who come to help and work with the kids are called, ‘Uncles’ and all females are called, ‘Aunties’.  For the first while, since I arrived with a car, I was called ‘Uncle Car’ until they learned my name. 

must strap the mouth because pigs are talkative during transport

I’m currently shepherding the procurement of shelves, filing cabinet, school desks, and two couches for ATIN.  Finding the carpenters is easy.  Getting their prices is easy.  Settling on the guy you want to build your furniture easy.  The only tricky part is getting them done by the due date.  This is where all bets are off and you get into the trenches and even start employing some less than puritan tactics to motivate the carpenter. 

I have learned that he will tell you that he can have it completed when he knows deep down that he cannot.  I am trying to work on this area of communications so that he can speak freely and tell me the truth.  His tendency is to tell me what I want to hear so that he keeps my business but I try to tell him that if it isn’t done on time then it actually hurts any chance of doing business with him again but he isn't usually thinking that far ahead.  I massage it a little by reassuring him that I would rather have him say a day later and it be the truth than tell me what I want to hear only to come on that day to find it is not done.  This is the critical part of the negotiation. 

the carpenter Charles and I after coming to an understanding

So, you have to push hard but then allow a back door for the guy’s honest truth to come out.  Somewhere in there you have a deal.  But it requires constant vigilance.  I will drop by the carpenters tomorrow and the next day just to let him see my face and have the reminder reverberate throughout his nervous system.  Deep down I’m hoping it instills some light flickers of fear as stress can be a powerful motivator.  I might even buy him a soda.  Kind of like a peace offering, a salve to ease the pain of this rigorous muzungu timetable.