Storytelling: God of Rain

***I am going to start posting a series of stories. Some stories are mine, and some stories belong to others. I leave it up to all of you to decide which ones are which. And no, judging whether the story is written in 1st or 3rd person will not help you!***

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22 kilometers off the main road from the town of Kapoeta in the South East of Southern Sudan a charity organization based in this small village was very excited at the prospect of setting up their new generator. It had been 1 year of operations without electricity in that location, with the mainly Kenyan staff driving the 1 hour each way it takes down the bumpy road to Kapoeta several times a week to check and send emails.

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As a side note, and completely unrelated to this story (or maybe not???), this is a region where use of clothing is alternative at best and optional to say the least. Unmarried women are bare-chested and married women tie a piece of cloth over one shoulder, exposing only their right breast. It is completely common for men to wear no clothing at all, and if they do wear anything, it is only a shirt. This village Chief, for example, favors wearing nothing but a suit jacket. In meetings with him you have to sit and manage to have a serious conversation about the future of your program all the while looking him in the eye and keeping a straight face and trying not to visibly react when his 1 year old grandson crawls under his legs, looks up, and STARTS PLAYING WITH THE CHIEF'S ROD AND TACKLE with no reaction whatsoever from the Chief himself. Not even a glance in the direction of the grandson. If that is not a trial in self control I don't know what is.

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Finally the anticipated day arrived and the generator was installed, hooked up, and turned on. BRRRRRRRRRUP BRRRRRUP BRRRRUP BRRUP BRRUP BRRUP BRRUP BRRUP went the generator, and after the cheers of job from the staff all hell broke loose. Villagers came running in from every direction totally freaking out, shouting "Shut it off! Shut it off!" very visibly distressed. Two things were the matter. One, no one in that village had ever heard the sound of a generator before and did not know what it was. Second, all the shouting villagers were gathering around one tree in the compound. It turns out that the piece of land given to the organization by the village Chief to build the compound happened to be the location of the one sacred tree where the village's God of Rain lived. Coincidentally the generator house was located right next to the God of Rain's Tree and when turned on, all the people were convinced the noise would anger the God of Rain and bring death and destruction to the village. Why was this organization never told they were the protectors of the God of Rain? No way to tell.

Three months later the solar panels arrived, and weeds had begun growing around the generator.

Badminton and Mental Health

This weekend found us once again on the island in the middle of the Nile - this time for a colleague's birthday. Much more chill than other occasions, and lovely for it. In the course of the conversation the topic of badminton came up. Which turned into a discussion on the practices in different cultures of treating mental illness. More about how those two are related later.

A friend said he was reminded of an African Storytelling event at one of the cafes in his home town where a man got up in front of the audience and detailed his experience in Senegal. He was American, and had been battling depression for many years. This community had their own way of addressing depression, and they invited him to take part.

The whole town turned up for the effort, which included setting up a huge bed in the middle of the town square, and having the man sit on the bed with a goat. Dozens of blankets were piled over the man and the goat making the temperature rise (Senegal is basically on the equator, y'all) making the smell and fear from the terrified goat almost unbearable. The people then started shaking the bed and the blankets, hooting and hollering, drums beating in the background. This went on for about 20 mins after which the man was invited to get down from the bed and have a Coke. "This is the end of Phase I" the village elder informed him.

Phase II included getting back in the bed, under the blankets, with the goat, the same shaking and shouting and drum beating, except now he was expected to kill the goat. Once done, he was taken out, stripped naked, and smeared with the goat's blood. Chickens were also killed and the blood smeared on the man.

And that was it.

To these people, depression was a result not of a chemical imbalance in the brain, but of spirits being pissed off at you for some reason and tormenting you because of it. In order to cure the depression, you had to figure out why the spirits were mad at you, make peace with them, and then ask them to leave. The goat's death represented the spirits leaving the man alone.

After the event, my friend chatted with another one of the storytellers who was from Rwanda, and talked about the efforts of the Western medical system to help the people recover from the genocide in 1994.

"In Rwanda, these Western doctors arrived, and they tried to treat people one by one and in small groups. They brought people inside buildings, bare rooms, harsh lighting, inside away from the sun which makes you feel good, alone and isolated from people they care about, and made them talk about the worst thing that happened to them in their entire life in front of a strange person they did not even know. The Senegalese method makes sense. Think about it. The whole town took off work that day, and came to support this one man, who they did not even know, in order to help him. It was a community event, and everyone was rooting for him. It was outside, and connected to the earth and tangible things to help this man"

Put like that, the storyteller has a point.

Everyone battles their own demons, so to speak, but is a cure dependent on your personality, the specific affliction you have, or your own set of beliefs and values? Do we in developed countries value modern medicine, so it works? Would the same thing work for a genocide survivor in Rwanda? What about people in Southern Sudan who for the past 3 generations have known nothing but war? What do you think?

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And what was it that connected the conversation about badminton with the mental illness stories? It was the unfortunate name of the rubber-tipped item that gets whacked around in badminton: the Shuttlecock.



Apparently my friend heard the word "shuttlecock" which reminded him of the chickens who played a part in the depression-battling session of the storyteller. The meaning of the chickens? He never found out.

Go figure :)