The Man Who Ate His Own Eye

For the past three weeks or so, I’ve been working in the school’s “book store”—a tiny room filled to the brim with filthy, disorganized, leaning towers of termite-infested textbooks. One of my responsibilities as a literacy specialist is to create or enhance a school library, and the unfortunate first step is taking inventory of what the school already has. What this means is that I show up to school every day dressed like a homeless cowboy, complete with a bright pink kickball t-shirt I picked up from the local good will shop, paint-stained gauchos, multi-colored sunglasses (worn indoors), green gardening gloves on my hands, and an army green bandana covering my mouth and nose. (Sexy!) The dust in that room! Good gravy, the dust!!! Imagine the Dust Bowl of the 1930s…

    

Now add the excrement of a thousand geckos, the sticky webs of a thousand spiders, and the wiggling bodies of 10 thousand silverfish and you’ve got my working environment. (Okay, okay, subtract maybe 5 grains of sand that I added for dramatic effect.) Charming, eh? On the days when I’m really in the thick of things, I spend the following day with a hacking cough and persistent dizzy spells (dust allergy?). Most of the books are circa 1960 rejects from the U.S., eaten through by little gobblers and caked with mud. But, after weeks of digging, I came across these two gems! I actually hugged them to my chest and nearly wept with joy.

What I Normally Find

The Insidious Work of Gobblers

  

Jackpot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is some fiction, besides my two little diamonds in the rough. They are published here and have titles like The Great Temptation and The Bad Friends and Don’t Play With Fire. They are poorly written cautionary tales about kids who gets AIDS from tattooing their arms with cool names like “Mr. Bad,” and men who die of AIDS shortly after emitting smells “like a mixture of rotten eggs and raw grasshoppers” out of their buttocks. (I couldn’t make this stuff up.)

They aren’t all about dying of AIDS, though it’s a common theme. Some are cautionary tales of a different nature. For example, the (should be) classic The Man Who Ate His Own Eye. This beauty of a tale is about a sassy young man named Nyantagambirwa (Tagambirwa for short) who always thought he was soooooooo smart. One day, an eagle came to visit and invited everyone to Heaven for a party. Tag wanted to go, but his dad was being a total downer and told him, “No.” Well, Tag decided to go anyway! Everything was going along swimmingly at the party (Tag eats and eats, then makes himself vomit so he can eat some more), until they realize they haven’t had soup yet and they’re out of food to make it. (Oh, no?) So, they get this great idea in which they each pop out one of their own eyeballs so they can make soup. The eyes, by the way, they will get back later—because really, why start making sense now? Anywho, the eyeballs are cooking and that darn Tag gets greedy and eats one before the soup is ready. And (shocker), everyone puts their eyeball back in but they are short one eye because Tag ALREADY ATE HIS OWN EYE!!! He returns to Earth and his parents cry because he is now a one-eyed monster of a son.

This, my friends, is the “literature” these children have access to. Are you ready to eat your own eyeball in disgust? Or, have you already run to your bookshelf and hugged your copy of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , stroked it gently, and vowed never to take it for granted again?!?

I know that art reflects life or life reflects art (or something), and I also know that life here is, well, sucky. People are poor and life is a daily struggle and HIV/AIDS is a huge problem. But come on! If there was ever a group of people who needed solid, escapism literature, it is the Ugandans. Eventually I hope to help them build a library here filled to the brim with high quality children’s books. Eventually, too, I hope to help bring the children’s ability to read up enough that they can enjoy that quality literature (or at least decode some of the words). But, for now, I’ll have to be content with daydreaming about my own children’s library back at home, overflowing with Sharon Creech books and Shannon Hale books and Kate DiCamillo books, all while my head spins from the mountains of dust around me.