Once I climbed a mountain with the karamojong

I was on my way back from a mission in northeastern Uganda. All the radio installations were succesful and the staff in the suboffices were happy. they had though one request and that was to get them all connected together by radio.. Thus so they would be able to use their handsets to talk from office to office. I had seen the landscape and figured out that it should be no problem to achieve that final goal also. I had found that the perfect location would be Mount Napak or Napak hills as they referred to it. Asking around everyone told me it was an easy climb and that it would be easy to secure a location for a repeater on the top.



The plan was to head back to Kampala but as it was very early in the morning we figured that we could make it to the top and back and still make it to Kampala before sunset. The guys had told me it would take less than an hour to get to the top. We met with the local village council who was all to happy to appoint one of his deputies help us get on the way. We drove to the foot of the mountain were we met up with some Karamojong guys who would guide us up the mountain. The karamojong guys said it was an easy 30 minute walk to the top. Perfect we concluded as that would give us even more time to get back and on our way home.

the karamojong are tribe that roam around in Uganda and into Kenya with their cattle. They rarely build anything permanant. They rather just follow the seasons and the grazing patterns for their cattle. They are a very tall tribe and almost always dressed in a tradition chequered skirt. they dont carry any belongings with them except for the 3 essential things they have. A toothbrush, A walking stick and a woooden T shaped piece that can serve either as a stool or a pillow. that is it.. just the bare essentials. In some cases you will find them with a gun also. the gun is mainly for protection. Since they dont like to shoot their animals they sometimes do targetpractice on passing cars. The intent is not necessarily to kill but on a number of occasion ofcourse this has been the end result !?

The guides we got for the mountain was though not the gun carrying ones which made me more at ease.

We started to walk. As usual I carried a bottle of coke but as the walk was supposed to be like a walk in the park I only had a small bottle. We started of in a good pace withthe karimojong leading the way. I think it took about 10 minutes then all us rookies were tired.. these guys were not walking.. they were running!!! We requested them to take it slower and we managed another 10 minutes then we stopped again and said that maybe it is better we lead the way and they follow our pace.



Slowly we started to realize that this 30 minute walk was probably going to take a bit longer or shall we say much longer! As we felt we were already high up we decided that to eturn without reaching the peak would just be achieving nothing we all agreed that we would continue all the way even if it would take a bit longer time. 3 hours and 45 minutes later we finally reached the peak. The mountain is stnading about 1000 meter above the surrounding areas. On reaching the top we were told that we had passed several villages?! We had not seen any but they had seen us. As the karimojong living on the mountain are very suspicious to visitors they hide and only make themselves known if they know your intent.

The view from the top was spectacular. We could see almost 150 km towards the north or as far as we wanted the radiosignal to reach. We talked to the guys in the Kotido office just on our small radio and they could not believe we were on the mountain top so far away. We located a good site for a repeater and then it was time to head down again. By this time we were exhausted but the local guys had barely even raised the pulse one beat. I found out that it wss not uncommon that they ran up the mountain all the way, or ran between the different villages even if they were as far away as a marathon or two! At the same time I also realized that they actually had no concept of what 30 minutes would be. 30 minutes or 4 hours did not make a difference. You reach when you reach and that was it.

Continuing down we stopped at one of the villages and suddenly we were greated by the villagers. As we had run out of anything to drink they offered us water. Infact they even offered to slaughter a goat for a barbeque. We kindly said not to the goat but drank some very fresh water from the mountain. As they have a serious problem of guinea worm in most of the areas we had to sift the water through a napkin.

After a 20 minutes rest we continued down the mountain. It took almost as much time as going up and we were exhausted. We had though found a good site for our systems so I was happy with the climb.

852,231,021 the number is ... not 852 Million!

At work I am quite often requested to hold presentations or press conferences with dignitaries of various sorts. Since WFP is completely dependant on donations for any work every day we are becoming quite good salesmen but we are still not catching up it seems.

In all the presentations and conferences there is certain amount of numbers that probably any staff in the organisation can rattle on his five fingers. One of them is 852 Million. That is how many hungry poor there are in the world, or is it? Well first of all the numbers is so huge that we normally only see it in relation to how many millions a company is making in profit for their shareholders, or how much a new movie cashed in at the box office... There simply is no one who can relate to how many people that actually is. But the number is not 852 Million. I know, because it is 852,231,021. The difference is enormous.

I know it is 852,231,021 because I met number 852,231,020. It was a mother in Northern Democratic Republic of Congo in a small village outside Mbandaka. She was so frail that she could barely keep her body to sit upright. She tried her best as she was holding number 852,231,021 in her arms. Her little son who was probably anything between 3 to 12 months. I was not able to tell because the baby boy was so small and exhausted that he could not even let out a sound while crying.

I remember the situation as if it was happening right in front of me even today, 8 years later. On that mission I was the only white man on the whole place. The woman sitting there on the floor, barely able to hold herself up, trying to make herself dignified in front of me while her hollow eyes told a story that I can never forget. She did not utter a word, she didn't have to. Her eyes looked right into my soul with such a presence, I will never forget. I had brought my camera, but I couldn't bring myself to take a picture.

I knew the story already. - Are you the one who can save my baby????? Please help my baby, please give him a chance to live and grow up. She never uttered a word. But from that single moment I knew. There is nothing else that I want to spend my life working with, what could be more important.....

This is why I know the number is 852,231,021 and not 852 million, I have seen it with my own eyes. I have also seen about 329,094 other ones. Yes about!! Because I can simply not get the numbers straight, but I know that the number does not end with one two or even up to 6 zeroes!

Yet every day when I turn on the news I see 2 more dead American soldiers in Iraq, 3 more , 6 more and totals of what 3215 soldiers since the war ended, I dont even recall the number anymore. How come it is not rounded of to "just" about 3000. How come these numbers can be reported day in and day out for several years, as if it was big news. To tell you the truth I have stopped watching the news, I got fed up with the incredibly twisted reporting. I am sure it is important but in the scope of things it really is insignificant. I feel for the families of the dead soldiers. But it can never compare to what I feel for number 852,231,020 and her son 852,231,021.

Every 5 second a child dies. Tomorrow when I hold my 15 minute presentation another 181 children, yes 181 as even the "every 5 second" is rounded of, will have died. Yet it will not be on the news because the slot is taken by a story of someone killed in THE war, as school shooting killing 3 people somewhere or a bridge collapsing with 40 dead..a car crash killing 10 the list goes on. How extremely horrible that it happened, we hear. Hours on end the live broadcasts are going on even if it was "just" one person dead. I say "just" because somehow that this life was worth atleast as much as 5,000 or 10,000 in another Country or Continent. Oh, it was an American or Eurpoean!!! Then it must be news. To show the live coverage of the 25,059 people that die from hunger every day of our life, would be able to cover any news channel 24 hours a day, even if they showed each and every one of them for 3 seconds and just listed a name. Yet that is lumped together as another remote statistic. Just imagine it, a TV channel that every 3 seconds showed a new picture of another dead person. day in, day out, month in month out, year in year out..... the TV channel would have to continue for 93 years doing nothing else to reach the 852,231,021st picture.

I can only hope that 852,231,020 and 852,231,021 is still alive. That they were in the hospital atleast gave them both a head start compared to all the others who are still not able to make it even to such a place. I can only hope as I don't know, never will. What I do know is that this moment changed my life.. forever..