Foot Achin' Blues: Peace School

I’m only seeing one small slice of this continent, but it’s a good ‘un—Uganda is worthy of its “Pearl of Africa” nickname.

So many firsts the last few weeks. One is teaching kids for the first time—I had a 17-year-old in my Inle Lake class in Myanmar two summers ago, but never had I faced a class of 6, 7, 10, 12 and 13-year-olds until last Sunday.

The mind does what it does so well—worry. When I found out that as part of my volunteer duties at the Uganda Buddhist Center I would be asked to teach Sunday Peace School, the mind spent the week fretting. How am I going to deal with such a wide age range, and such a wide range of English ability? What do I do if the older ones cop attitudes? How do I keep their attention? What if what if what if?

Here’s a picture of the class with Bhante Buddhakkhrita. You can see why the mind was so terrorized—pretty mean looking bunch, eh?

Piece of cake. We did 15 minutes of yoga, then played Concentration with the Buddhist words that I’ll try to teach to them over the next few months. The Concentration game lasted almost 45 minutes, about 30 minutes longer than I planned for. In American bureaucratic education-speak, “the SS were engaged for 45 minutes,” which any teacher or parent knows is gold.

I did one more activity: I taught nine children between the ages of 6 and 13, one of them mildly autistic, how to meditate. I kid you not.

It was easier than expected. I’d forgotten that four of the kids were nieces and nephews of the head monk and two of them lived at UBC full-time, parented by the monk’s mother (an ordained nun!), so they were all used to watching adults sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed. They actually kept quiet and stopped squirming for almost three minutes. Then I said the three words that most children live to hear—“Class is over”—and they started bouncing off the walls.

I found that Peace School, which is for both children and adults, has many similarities with churches in rural Mississippi. It’s one of many parallels that I’ve noticed between village life in Uganda and small-town life in Mississippi (and I’m sure in other Deep South states), a glimpse of which I got when I lived in New Orleans and took lots of trips to Clarksdale, MS for my country blues guitar education. In rural MS, Sunday church is often an all-day affair, with Sunday school followed by a service that can last two hours or longer and a big church feed.

The Peace School schedule was different—the kids’ part didn’t begin ‘til 1 and lunch started at 3—but the quantity of food was the same: manioc, cassava, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, rice, beans, peas, oxtail meat piled high on every plate. Somehow a leafy vegetable got in there, maybe by mistake.

I knew that Bhante’s plan was for the adults to listen to a 60-minute CD of Dhamma taught by an American teacher. I’d already listened to it, and I knew that the talk had a lot of cultural stuff that non-native English speakers might not understand. After the stomach bombardment of complex starches, I wondered how anyone was going to stay awake for a 45-minute meditation, let alone the Dhamma talk.

We never made it that far. I didn’t know it, but one of the visitors that I had chatted with earlier was a princess—not the type that I’ve dated several times in my life, but an actual member of the Ugandan Royal Family (which one I don’t know—if I understand rightly, there are several in different parts of the country). She carried her regal bearing very well. Her bodyguard carried an AK-47 automatic rifle.

The CD teaching was postponed for another day so that Bhante could make a speech, mostly about me as the new volunteer and her as visiting Royalty. Then the sangha left the meditation hall and surrounded the princess as she planted a tree before everyone got in their cars to fight the eternal traffic jam in the nearby capital city of Kampala. I went to my room to spray on my nightly dose of 30% DEET to ward off the battalions of mosquitoes who descend on my juicy white skin every evening at dusk.

First day of Peace School, Lindemann Reign, was a success.

So much more to tell, but I want to get this message off while I’m in the vicinity of decent wi-fi here in Entebbe, where I spent Christmas Eve and Day. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to y’all, I hope that the solstice parties and Jews-and-orphans turkey dinners and family visits all went well.

Some more pics:

The view from the front of the meditation hall.

Peace School, day 1.

The Princess plants a tree. See the guy on the right with the dreds? His legal name is Elvis, he's from Tanzania. He and I met at an Entebbe guesthouse and became guitar-pickin' buds. He very interested in meditation and Buddhism.