Bududa

I’m a little scared to write about this, I’ll admit. Giant disasters can happen to far off places like Haiti and Chile, and I will feel a brief genuine pain for their loss–fleeting though it might be. At least it is not Uganda, I whisper silently to that part of myself which is not ashamed of its selfish thoughts. When yahoo flashed across at me the other day that there had been a mudslide in Uganda and 50 people were dead, with 300 feared missing, I got chills. Bad things don’t happen to Uganda, they don’t happen, we’re safe, right? Right? I delude myself constantly, of course. I am the same person whose heart flutters every time I get a call from a +256. Please God don’t let anyone be dead. The New Vision had some devastating pictures. I called my friend in Atlanta as soon as I heard and we lamented the loss together, cursing global warming and bad luck and 2012. She read to me about a church that was destroyed in the slide and we remarked, “Aya! Me I would have gone to hell straight, I never pay attention in church…” Trivial issues, such trivial concerns when people are dead! I hang up the phone and I went to class and…I forgot. Like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand, “Well, if I don’t think about it, it didn’t happen.” But it did. There are families missing one and ones missing families. There are whole families buried completely forever. Remember. We have to remember. That is the one tribute we have to offer the dead and their loved ones, when we are too far away to lend a physical hand to help, or do more than pray. Remember. Grieve with them, for them, for us. Ai! We can forget tragedies that take place far from home, but let us at the very least remember our own.
God, please be with the survivors of Bududa. Give them strength and comfort to get from this day to the next, to find somehow a reason to continue to live, to find their footing in the world again.
And please God…no more of these disastrous disasters?
Amen.