the greatest saints?

"Some of the people we met had nothing, absolutely nothing, but they were so happy," Kimberly said. She extracted a photograph from the crowded back of the piano, of her daughter with two Indian women, their skin dark and weathered, their smiles showing missing teeth. "These women were so wonderful," she said. 

Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty, because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.

-- Americanah by Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie

I just finished Americanah, probably the longest book I've read for quite some time. I had shown my grade 8 class the Ted Talk by Chimamanda Adichie called "The Danger of the Single Story." (Take 20 minutes and watch it! The best quote: "The trouble with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.") One of my students told her mother about it, who is a big Adichie fan, and since then they've been feeding me Adichie novels one at a time.

I have to say that I enjoyed Purple Hibiscus more  than Americanah. Americanah is the story of a Nigerian woman who moves to America and then back to Nigeria, with a love story woven the whole way through. Americanah was too long for my taste (477 pages!) and I felt that it started to get repetitive after awhile. I also didn't like the fact that the guy in the book leaves his wife to get back together with his one true love when she returns to Nigeria. There were some funny parts in the book when the character Ifemelu first moves to America and experiences culture shock, which I found interesting since it's the flip side of what I've experienced here in Uganda.

One thing Adichie is really good at -- in both of the novels I've read -- is complicating things. In the scene quoted above, when Ifemelu is working in America as a nanny for the wealthy, soft-hearted Kimberly, Adichie complicates the view that many people in the West have of "the greatest saints ... the foreign poor."

The greatest saints.

I have to admit I've been guilty of that. My sister works at an addictions centre in Canada, and I recently said to her, "That kind of urban poverty scares me. It's so complicated. Here in Uganda, it seems more black-and-white: this hardworking woman needs $100 for a sewing machine to start her own small business."

But the longer I'm here, the less I know. Everything gets so complicated, so gray. Sometimes it seems that every way to "help" is analyzed, criticized, and somewhere, someone has a reason why such practices are actually doing harm.

And whether I'm negative or positive about Ugandan culture, up or down, "the Ugandan poor" refuse to fit into the mental boxes I build for them.

There's the woman who tends her shop all day, every day, and makes around $3 profit on a good day. There's the kids who will smile and grab your hand. There's also the kids who swarmed a friend of mine, holding her hands and smiling at her while one kid dipped his hand into her purse. There's the woman who does your laundry, who you know lives in basically a shack the size of a walk-in closet, and she returns the 5000 shillings ($2) she found in your pocket. There's the people who must have watched my neighbour's house, robbing them in broad daylight when the house was left unattended for less than an hour. There's a shopkeeper who takes a microloan and invests it. There's a shopkeeper who takes a microloan and wastes it.There's the Congolese ladies learning English at a nearby shelter who don't know where their families are or whether or not they're alive, and yet they are bright and cheerful and somehow find optimism.

There's the hordes of young men who are jobless and who insist that, if given the chance, they would work hard. There's the night guards who sleep on the job. There's the Ugandan church lady who slips a wrinkled 1000 shilling note (40 cents) into the hand of hospital patient she is praying with. There's the alcoholic sucking waragi out a plastic bag, reeking of alcohol and leering at you. There's the stranger who will take you to the store you're looking for downtown, even if it's far out of his way. There's the person who will unzip the top pocket on your backpack to rob you as you are walking downtown (which happened to Isaac this past week). But then there's also the guy who hissed protectively to Isaac, "Mzungu! You need to take care! You were almost robbed."

Everything's complicated, and why am I surprised? Isn't painting an entire group of people in a positive light still painting them with the same brush? Isn't endowing someone with virtues simply because of their class or skin colour the same as pegging them with negative assumptions (ex: the stereotype of the "noble savage" in Canada).

People are not projects. People are not objects of pity. People are not perfect. People are not predictable. People are people, and people are complicated. (Even poor people in Africa!)