Bewitched

Someone tried to poison her. One of my girls!

This is not something she told me immediately, but something that came out when all the girls complained that they had nowhere to go-or nowhere they wanted to go during their one month school holiday.

It happened when a neighbor found out that someone was going to sponsor her for school. Such a thing is not uncommon as this woman was jealous since she could not afford to send her son to school. The solution? Poison? She gave Sarah vegetables, to which Sarah did not eat, but kept. The next day, the vegetables had turned charcoaled black. And when she threw them out, a goat was later found dead.

Such a thing is not uncommon, like I said. Neither is witchcraft.

When I was living in Wakiso during training, the neighbor child went missing, and never returned. It was believed, since this kind of thing happens here, that he had been kidnapped; the purpose to use his organs for witchcraft.

Now, without getting myself poisoned for posting this, I will say that I believe in energy, and the power of one’s mind. I also believe that extraordinary things are very possible. What I don’t understand is why using these powers for evil is so common here. Is it that the good spells go unnoticed? Or is hurting each other a direct result of living in a culture whose people have violently suffered since the beginning of humankind?

I have heard stories time and time again of things you and I might find unbelievable, yet things my Ugandan friends have seen-or claim to have seen with their own two eyes. Sitting beside my American friend, both of us bewildered by stories of recent, she reacted with a not so subtle: “are you sure you weren’t dreaming?” Ha.

So who knows what is what and which witch is which. Being here has made me crazier and crazier, and I’m not even so sure which way is up anymore, let alone, what to believe.

Two things I am quite sure of, however:  

I’m glad Sarah decided not to eat her vegetables.


And,

I won’t be accepting food as a gift any time soon…