Being Alive

A coworker’s brother killed in a car crash. A friend’s family member dead from a snake bite. A counterpart’s baby who was stillborn. A pupil’s parents taken by AIDS. My headteacher’s child dying in a traffic accident. And just this past week, eight primary school pupils killed instantly by a lightning strike that hit a classroom in a nearby school. 

In Uganda, everyone goes to burials - families, villages, districts. They leave schools, shops, fields, vegetable stands and sewing machines. And they return the next day. 

Death is different here. It’s everywhere, and it's more a part of life than I have ever seen. 

Pupils still attend class and work for a future, a better future, any future. They play football and netball and a game with bricks they invented. They clean and dig and serve their extended families, many of their parents long gone. Teachers wake up early, harvest their subsistence gardens, tell jokes in the staff room, give chalkboard exams, make dinner from maize flour and beans by the light of small solar lamps. Men doze off on benches by storefronts, women shade themselves and their produce from the beating sun by the roadside, children ride on bicycles far too big for them, balancing jerry cans full of water or huge bunches of bananas on the back. Coffin makers sand and smooth in front of their outdoor displays, sunlight glinting off the windows on the caskets. A boda driver coasts silently down a large hill, conserving gas, a new coffin strapped precariously to the back of his motorcycle, and children race by him to school, barefoot and laughing. 

Death is different here. Life is too.

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

― William Saroyan