Phenomenal Woman

A beautiful angel earned its wings today.

Maya Angelou had a magnificent impact on my adolescence, education and attitude. She gave me the greatest gift you could ever give a young woman-- insight. To someone who is in love with words and feels the weight and depth of what they mean and how you say them, I was captured by how she organized hers onto paper. How she seemed to so easily and perfectly explain to me how I was feeling. Her art was like therapy for me. I used to read some of her stuff and feel validated afterwards. As if she had just given me the courage to love who I am. It is as if she raised me from a girl to a woman.

Her earthly accomplishments don't even begin to compare to her unending spiritual initiatives. Words live forever. And they can pioneer equality, tolerance, peace.

Rest in Paradise.

You were a Woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal Woman, that's you.

Observing the Orphan Boy

I was watching you, you know,
when you were sitting. Obinere.

Sitting in the corner.

Sitting in the dirt.

Sitting on the front step watching flies fly by.

Sitting on the floor you slept and swept.

On a handful of black rags that was called Your Mattress.

I was listening when you were singing.

I promise not to tell. 

That you sing yourself lullabies in grunts and growls.

That ever so quietly you buzz

to hear something.

To hear yourself maybe?

Or maybe to prove that

you exist where you are sitting. Yamawe.

The whale song of a small invisible boy

with an invincible soul

that is so unsure of its invincibility.

I was crying for you when I saw your skin.

Marked and scared with Disappointment, Burden, Accident, Grief.

The coarse roads across your back that paid the debt of your rent as Orphan Boy.

Lost Boy. Pest. Scavenger.

Blistered and peeling from sleeping beneath the Equator's Wrath. 

Whithering away where you fell in boiling water. Where you burned with bleach. 

Twisting and racing in spider webs across your chest,  

being sure to steer clear of your never touched heart.

Pink and raw  where you were once creamy and oh so chocolate.

Scabies and ringworm and lice and fleas tell you

I Am A Street Boy
and selfishly find their home inside your skin.

As they say where you are from, It Has Remained.

I was celebrating when you found the scraps of mango.

A candied delight on a surprise Wednesday night.

Forgotten and left behind by Eating Men who no longer taste mangoes but have left there for you leathery skins to suck on for hours.
The skeleton of the meat you wished to eat.

A glimpse of something Sweet.

I was dancing for you when the others were dancing.

When you sat and you sat and you sat.

When you sat where you exist.

In the back. Behind the kitchen. In the dark.

It is the burden of the Orphan Boy; that sitting.

Wasting and watching and wishing the days away.

Melting in the lazy heat of days that bring nothing.

Why should you dance?

Would your muscles be stronger if they had things to do?
Your bones would be taller if someone spoke to you?

Only by miracle, your body grows.

Another year older and wiser.

in survival.

I am loving you now from Here.

In this Plastic, Gluten-Free, Buy One Get One Free, MTV, Do You Have Two Cars or Do You Have Three? country.

Where we print and sell your pain on ORGANIC 100% Cotton All-the-proceeds-of-this-purchase-save-a-life-in-Africa T-shirts.

V Necks with the silhouette of an entire continent stamped to our chests.
Our badge of servitude to The Least Of These. The Lost Continent.
As if you are not from that small Pearl of a country that rhythms your veins and bleeds Bakiga.

Because in our country, you are from Africa. As we understand it:
That Wave Your Flag, Waka-Waka Ay-Ay, Hakuna Matata, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, with no worries, Rastafari, let's go see the elephants, Garden of Eden where little dark children have names with too many vowels, stretched earlobes and protruding stomachs filled with worms.
Where little boys and little girls sleep on the street and dream of AK-47s and we say

That is life over there.

Here you are African Orphan Boy as the American sees you.
Not Mutungi. Not Moses. Not Manzee. Not Clever.
Here where we buy bracelets and stainless steel water bottles and trendy canvas-wrapped shoes with Your Continent as our logo and bumper sticker. 
So we can buy without The Guilt.
We buy tote bags and stuff them with food (we pay extra so it is organic)
That we are sure to waste.
The Civilized Ones.

I am loving you still even though I am embarrassed to tell you that  

I was born here.
In this Botox Twittering Empire.
Where we starve to be beautiful and put clothes on our dogs.
Where our government passes out food to people that do not want to work.
And it is destroying me.

Me? Destroying me?

And I sit and I sit on it.

Never knowing what to do.

I visit and I visit and I visit you.

I feed and hug and wipe and bathe and kiss and dance and twirl and jump and sing and laugh and cry and hold you.
And then I leave.
And that's never going to been enough to show you that I love you.
Orphan Boy.

Nimbakunda Munonga. Omugiisha.

Mother's Day

Scientifically speaking, moms are just remarkable. Somehow, her DNA was spontaneously and magically designed in this universe, just how it is. Just for you. And it will never, ever again be replicated. She is the only woman who exists the way that she does. And by a series of unexplainable experiences and circumstances throughout her life, she then created you. And no matter how extremely different you may be, how vary unique your existence is as well, in every practical way, you are half of her. And your sequence of DNA is purely magical to her. She watched her body design and create you. And now you are a physical being which stretches and grows her experience here on Earth. Your mother is the anchor which holds you to the ground. She is your point of reference in a spinning chaotic world.

And we must remember that mothers are human. That they have their own lives they are living. And that they have sacrificed a sufficient amount of years, a major chunk of their existence, to ensure that we do. We think of our mothers as superhuman, because they are so fast to protect and save us. Now that I am an adult who has parented,  I suddenly see--- my mother is human. And now the life she has created for me seems infinitely sweeter. 

If there is a single thing I have learned from my work in Uganda, teaching in public school, working in crisis intervention at a homeless shelter, fostering children removed from their homes, nannying young children in perfectly healthy situations----there is one thing I can say with absolute confidence, that I vow is unequivocally true and absolute---children crave their mothers. It is evolutionary and natural and magical. Somehow, as a living and surviving species here on Earth, we innately understand that we need our mothers in a way that food and water doesn't do it.

I am loving and grateful for the speck in this universe my mother and I subsist. In this giant, scary, confusing world, I always have a 10-digit number that leads me to the secure haven only mothers provide. That sequence of numbers, my mother's cell phone, feels as warm to me as a lullaby. I cannot wait until I have a child to love the way that she does. Hopefully my daughter is slightly less stubborn, selfish and spoiled then I was.

Love you mom. Everything I have accomplished this year would be impossible without you. I hope you understand that what was done in Uganda was done through you. 

Love always from your living monuments,

Tiff, Taylor, Michael, Gilbert, Bibianah, Kevin, Easter, Rehanna, Ollie, Chase, Ricky, Carson and the future grandchild your daughter is already secretly planning to adopt from Uganda in the next year or so. Seriously tho.

We couldn't possibly be here without you.