Jason in America
Been here now for more than two months. At least twenty of the fifty pounds lost are back, the right side of the road is right again, wearing shorts, Seinfeld reruns, dollars and cents, Budweiser, boneless chicken breasts, grape jam, walking city streets happily anonymous, late sunsets, Spring to Summer.
Knowing I’m going back is keeping me from worrying about missing thing, faces, smiles, Kampala street corners, chapati’s, Chili Top-up hot sauce, the sense of being needed by people to do something I know I can do and then enjoy doing it.
The first month I was back I had the chance to feel that sense of being genuinely needed here at home. For me, rare. I followed Grace around America. Grace is 24 and a second-year student at Uganda Christian University. At 15 she and 139 other girls were taken from their boarding school in the middle of the night by a group of rebels who’ve been terrorizing Northern Uganda for 18 years. 109 of the girls were released a day later--Grace was among the 30 who were kept and she was a soldier/wife/slave in the rebel army for seven months before she escaped. The story of some of the girls was told in a book called The Aboke Girls, Grace’s story was told in a cover story of the Chronicle of Higher Education in August of 2003. Someone from Amnesty International read the Chronicle story and invited Grace to come to the US and talk about her experience. One scheduled event in Chicago turned into several in New York, several in Chicago, several in Boston and several in Washington, D.C.
I did my best to be wherever Grace was. We ate McDonalds pancakes at JFK, ate Popeye’s in Times Square, talked to Spike Lee in Central Park, laughed at camels at the Lincoln Park zoo, had carrot cake on Michigan Avenue, ate Popeye’s in Union Square, got rained on before the rest of Manhattan on top of the Empire State Building, noticed daffodils everywhere, saw a PETA billboard about being kind to chickens on I-95 North, ate steak and eggs in Harvard Square, watched The Return of the King, ate hot dogs while getting rained-out of a night game at Fenway, stuck around for the sunny make-up game and more hot dogs and a Red Sox win, watched Pirates of the Caribbean, watched Rocky, listened to Gordon Lightfoot on the way to D.C. from Boston, watched Rocky II, watched old Godzilla, watched all the Star Wars movies, drove all over northern Virginia listening to Willie Nelson while looking for Rocky IV, found it, watched it, watched the sequel to In the Heat of the Night, ate Skittles, walked around to all the big memorials you can walk to in D.C., saw and heard a guest reprimanded loudly by the guard of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, got mango smoothies at Union Station, laughed at a PETA display about chickens on The Mall, ate hot dogs on a bench next to a guy eating raw oysters on a bench in front of the FBI Building, pulling into a parking spot for a Bob Evans brunch, Grace told me she didn’t know how to express how thankful she was that I was with her when she went places.
She said I was like an angel. I told her she was an angel.
Between the movies and meals and little events, Grace allowed God to speak through her to Amnesty International volunteers and partners in all 4 cities, to high school and college students and teachers in all 4 cities, to Oprah (show airs July 15), to a group of NGO representatives all working for Northern Uganda in D.C., to folks on both sides of Capitol Hill who work for people who are concerned about Northern Uganda and who at least say they really want to help. All of these people were visibly altered after listening to Grace. It became common to see a woman come and stand in front of Grace with wet eyes and say something like “I don’t know what to say, can I hug you?” Grace smiles and opens her arms and the woman opens her arms and steps to Grace and collapses--stays on her feet but still collapses--sinks--into Grace’s arms, and Grace’s arms keep the woman from sinking further. For every woman who hugged Grace, I’m sure there were twenty men and women who wanted and needed to hug her even more.
Grace helped people like God. Grace helped me.