I’m Glenna Gordon, an American photographer and journalist, presently commuting between West Africa and Brooklyn. Previously, I lived in Liberia. And before that, I lived in Uganda. I’ve traveled and worked in over a dozen countries in Africa.
This blog is named after a found object — a plastic lion that was in a crate of discarded items a friend and a few other artists had gathered. I sat on their roof in Nakasero, Kampala sorting through the crate. On that day, I was looking for something. “You are lost!” a Uganda might say. But, I’d found this discarded kid’s toy, made in China on the cheap, that somehow ended up in East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint-chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this place: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
... on Why Invisible Children can’t explain away this photo 
What better to do on a Saturday afternoon than a photo shoot with none other than Scarlett Lion? There’s also no better way to convince the askari that I am crazy than hunching down in the grassy area of our compound with my bulky camera and a plastic lion.
Peter from the Road to the Horizon tagged me in a meme:
“On your blog, publish a picture of what you see through the window when you wake up. Forward the meme to five of your favorite blogs.”
This is my bedroom window around 8:30 this morning, the sun streaming in through our gold and teal curtains. My dad frequently asks me about the weather in Kampala. The first year I lived here, about once a week I’d have to remind him that it isn’t actually that hot where I live, since it’s hard for him to not automatically do the equation Africa = hot. But Kampala is quite temperate. Almost every day is sunny and lovely, and not too hot. When it does rain, we complain as if we lived in London.
It stormed a bit last night, but today is just another lovely day.
Five more people to participate in the meme:
Ugandan Insomniac
Nairobi Notes
Sara Without the What?
One Degree North (Appfrica)
Bianaoh (Tristan in Sierra Leone)
And you, I miss you, and I would tag you, but I don’t think you have a permanent window yet. If the N-Y-C housing scene is too brutal, there’s a room for you in K-L-A.
This book wasn’t on my original African Reading Challenge list, and I wrote this review for PlusNews, but, there was one thing I wanted to discuss here that didn’t really fit with that review.
First, a bit from my review:
In a new book, Genocide by Denial: How Profiteering from HIV/AIDS Killed Millions, Dr Peter Mugyenyi tells the story of the AIDS epidemic in Uganda from its frontlines: hospitals, orphanages, graveyards, witch doctors’ homes – everywhere but from a drug supply cupboard.
Mugyenyi was one of the founders of Uganda’s Joint Clinical Research Centre for HIV/AIDS (JCRC), which pioneered the provision of life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) drug treatment in Uganda in the mid-1990s.
The book is a personal account of “throw[ing] a bucket of water into the towering inferno” of Uganda’s HIV epidemic at a time when the country could do little more than look on as its people died slow and preventable deaths.
After doing his medical training in the United Kingdom, Mugyenyi returned to Uganda to find a mounting death toll from AIDS. Every day he watched parents burying their children and children burying parents. The drugs that could save his patients’ lives were available, if they could only afford them. “The vast majority of my patients died not just of AIDS but of poverty,” he writes.
 The vast majority of my patients died not just of AIDS but of poverty |
In the early 1990s the first generation of protease inhibitors [anti-HIV drugs designed to suppress virus replication] cost US$14,000 per year per patient, at a time when most Ugandans earned less than a dollar a day.
Mugyenyi had to turn away thousands of patients, including some of his own relatives, because the life-saving medication was so prohibitively expensive; neither his relatives nor his many other patients could understand why, if there were drugs for their condition, they could not get them.
In his narrative about Uganda’s battle for affordable AIDS drugs, Mugyenyi recalls details that are almost unimaginable in today’s world of $10-a-month ARVs: how at the height of the epidemic people started planning funerals as soon as their relatives began coughing; and how Kampala’s ubiquitous pork eateries gained popularity as people sought to avoid the weight loss associated with ‘slim’ disease [a local euphemism for HIV/AIDS].
MORE…..
What I wanted to add, I will quote directly from the book, about the combination of two topics I write about too often: orphans and misguided attempts at aid.
Setup: well meaning aid workers trawl the slums looking for AIDS orphans to help, many of whom are staying with relatives and extended family members. The aid workers provide blankets, school fees, and other assistance to the orphans – just the orphans.
What these well meaning benefactors did not immediately realize were the dire circumstances endured by all children in the home. They all lived and shared the same miserable conditions. The added burden of orphans in their destitute family had made their dire situation much more miserable. All the children spent nights huddled together trying without success to keep warm in the dilapidated dwelling as they all had no blankets. Reportedly only two of the children were now going to school… It does not take much imagination to visualize what the atmosphere in the shanty home must have been like after the departure of the naive donors.
See more of my PlusNews reporting:
Using mobile phones to fight AIDS
Marriage, the new frontier in HIV prevention
Dating is so hectic, I put a personal ad in the paper
Overcrowded Prisons heighten TB risk
The government is only looking after straight people
Change brings new risk for the Karamojong
(The list goes on and on – a good portion of the PlusNews reporting from Uganda comes from the Scarlett Lion laptop.)
(And yes, the red background behind the book cover pictured above is indeed my dining room table.)
No matter what’s wrong, there’s always Kingo there to cheer me up. I’m not sure if the two cartoons above represent two different messages or two reiterations of essentially the same thing.
If anyone knows where I can find out more information on Kingo, please let me know.
Copyright Glenna Gordon. A shop near the Old Taxi Park sells Chinese imports alongside used clothing. I was so tired of my old routine in Kampala – I just wanted to find something new, feel lost again in a city I felt I knew too well. A new photo opportunity is helping me do just that. I’m doing more shooting, more of the time now. And I’m really, really enjoying it.
Can’t get enough of my back-lit photos or never-ending snarkiness?
Now, find my photos on this blog and on Demotix. Strange thoughts about Ugandan hotels on HotelChattered. And of course, more about safaris on the Walrus.
And now, some gratuitous animal photos, since despite my recent claims that I’d never been on a safari, I finally went on one a few weeks ago. It was fun, but at one point I asked our guide if the animals do anything. He didn’t really get what I was asking, since I guess what animals do is stand there and chew grass for 95 percent of the day.
Copyright Glenna GordonFrom friend’s kwanjula I attended over the weekend. Almost makes me want to be a kwanjula-wedding photographer, except that a) it is very hard to take photos in heels, and b) I got all emotional and teary, which made it hard to see through my view finder.
