Mother of Pearl

In the Kyotera village of Rakai district, Uganda, known as the “Pearl of Africa,” I met Nakanyike Agenina, a 36-year-old widow, and her four children Joshua, Molly, Penina, and Fiyona. Agenina’s husband had recently died of malaria, his immune system compromised by HIV/AIDS. At first, my Western eyes filled with tears when I saw her family’s tattered clothes, meager food, and lack of access to schools. As the cost of my camera gear alone could probably have supported her family and the entire village for years, I deeply lamented thinking I could ever help in any way with my images.

After much soul-searching, I decided it was important not to judge the quality of their lives by the standards I had learned in my own. I
shifted my perspective, tried to separate my values and euro-centric ideas and opened myself to the spirit, wisdom, and love Agenina and her children offered me. Although it took a few days to recognize, I learned the family was actually relatively affluent in the village. They live in a brick house, instead of the more common mud abodes, and grow beans and bananas on their land that they sell from a small roadside store near their home. I discovered that Agenina was a proud, regal woman who worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk—sweeping the dirt that defined their “front yard,” hoeing beans in the fields, and preparing matoke, a mashed form of green bananas eaten as a staple in most of the region—while her four effervescent kids loved nothing more than to sing, dance, play, and laugh.

The longer I stayed, the more I felt embraced by the Nakanyike family’s open arms and glowing smiles, the more I understood how their lives are as rich as any life I’d ever known. I began to wonder how I had come to accumulate so many things back home that seem so trivial now, what had made them all seem useful in the first place, and why anything might actually matter in this world besides real human connections. When it came time to leave Agenina and her children, I felt an unbearable hurt in my heart to say weraba—goodbye.

images by Leslie Alsheimer
narrative by Khyber Oser and Leslie Alsheimer