Carol and the community of TUSC – Transport for Ugandan Sick Children

An article to raise awareness of a fantastic charity which deserves the publicity. TUSC is a small charity working at a community level in Uganda to provide transport to those who essentially need it . It is on further reading about the charity that it can be realised that the focus is not just transport, not at all, but helping people move forward - not only from illness and injury, but also away from a lack of self-belief and towards a much brighter outlook. It is in contributing to a local charity which is how this brightness can continue outwards and inspire. Thank you.

http://www.tusc.btck.co.uk/News

@TUSC3

Carol with children and 'Billy Bus'

In her  day job, Carol Mitchell is a nurse,  continuing care for the ill and infirm across Lancashire. Yet it seems that her generosity is not only within local limits. A  keen traveller, Carol   has paid a number of visits to the Jinja region of Uganda, Africa – where, as a mother of three children herself, she was deeply moved by the plight of sick children and their despairing families.  Uganda is the second-most densely populated landlocked country in the Africa, and has faced a number of humanitarian crises in recent years including civil war, resulting in wide-spread poverty.

The poverty faced by people on a daily basis is truly shocking. Carol alludes to her dismay ‘that sick children were not able to get to healthcare because there was no money to get them there ..... families often have to choose between eating or treatment .’ Whilst we have the NHS to turn to in moments of crisis, some Ugandan families have no one. Why open an article with such a personal anecdote? Because charity CAN be and is importantly personal – involving compassion and care. For example, Carol was determined to  get the wheels turning to ensure that families in this region of Uganda were not alone in times of trouble – literally.

Things in motion for the families of Uganda

It was with the help and guidance of local man Weere Yakub and cooperation with local hospitals that Carol came up with the idea of providing a vehicle to visit villages on a planned basis so  that  vulnerable people unable to make the journey themselves, such as  sick children and pregnant women,  can be transported to healthcare facilities. Unlike Carol’s freedom to travel and administer care in Rossendale, the people of Uganda face highly limited mobile healthcare services and transport links which are often inadequate to take them to hospital in the case of emergency. This is especially dangerous for children. It was with this in mind that Carol continued forward with the establishment  of what is now called TUSC – Transport for Ugandan Sick Children. They can ve visited at  http://www.tusc.btck.co.uk/

Weere Yakub, The TUSC project manager based in Uganda and 'Billy Bus'

TUSC not only seeks to provide transport to and from hospital for vulnerable people, but is also a free service, therefore making healthcare much more accessible for those who would have once been daunted by the financial implications of going to hospital. This accessibility is furthered in that TUSC also aims to provide ‘outreach’ support – teaching communities in Uganda basic health care, potentially empowering families.  This can involve helping the  disabled in the community and increasing awareness rather than ostracising. Such care and power began under the inspiration of one woman from Bacup, Lancashire and now, although based in the UK, TUSC has a permanent presence in Uganda also.

Best time with Billy Bus

This presence is perhaps best seen in the smiling faces of the children and the TUSC ‘Billy Bus’  - the transport vehicle for the charity which was bought in 2012 through public support. TUSC is a small but extremely hard-working charity, and Carol pledges ‘We are totally dependent upon the good will of our supporters and every penny we receive is used to run our vehicle and provide mosquito nets.’ It is in contributing to TUSC, even by the smallest amount,  people potential, like Carol, to make a really significant difference. It is a case of families here supporting families there – a brilliant network. And this support really can be seen and felt – you can follow TUSC on Facebook, or "Givingabit", where your online shopping can benefit us without it costing you extra... and as we face growing fuel costs a regular donation of any amount would be amazingly valued."

 You can be part of this and in supporting such an active charity  acting first-hand with the Ugandan

community.  After all, small charities can still address critical issues as well as being potentially flexible to changing circumstances. What is so crucial about the work of TUSC is that it seeks to  actively better the lives of Ugandan people, encouraging and enabling them to make the most of the resources they have, as far as possible. This may be from allowing a mother the security of giving birth in a hospital, to the prospect of families having access to treatments for a vulnerable or disabled relative. That people might be otherwise left alone in such circumstances is deeply upsetting.

 By supporting  a small, locally-based charity like TUSC this year, you are avoiding big draining corporate measures and instead contributing to the people as directly as possible. In light of recent American figures, as well  as the statistics that Uganda is rated among countries perceived as very corrupt by Transparency International, at a scale of 29 – with  0 being most corrupt and 100 clean) – this may  well be an important way for charity to develop; directly connecting with the people, just as it works to connect people with the right health care. TUSC provides attentive, honest and compassionate care for those communities who need it. 

For more information on this brilliant charity, visit - http://www.tusc.btck.co.uk/ and follow them on Twitter 

 @TUSC3

Picnic in Bohemia

‘It is absence which commands us to exist’

Mina took a long slow drag on her cigarette as if it was the necessary apparatus to sift through the artificial air of the oft-frequented club – it was the usual accolade of 1950’s London, she could not complain. The lights pulsed dully, intended for atmosphere, like uncertain breaths brushing over the traffic of socialites at the bar, their enhanced hair and painted faces glowing like the human façade in the animal kingdom. She felt sick. Her slot was in 15 minutes, and she attempted composure.

For everything in the room wavered, as if possessed by a kind of sewn-in insecurity. Posters boasting of the freedom to drink and dance were accompanied with the curtail of handing over coinage – so many pounds for a drink, so many for a dance. Life’s pleasures always have a price, Mina thought abstractedly. We have to lose some of ourselves - otherwise they are pleasures no longer. She glanced at the wild smile of some nearby society woman – so happy in that she no longer knew herself – a part of her at the bar, part in bed with a man, another part courted, another part married. It was a glorious human dissection at every social gathering. Mina mused that it was the cheap pot-pourri which attempted to mask the bits of blood, or at least a lust for it.

It was a lust she felt concentrated upon her, every time she stepped onto the stage, all assembled like some extravagant act, and strangely – not  towards her body. Her body just suspended itself – the uneven tone of her legs, her torso nervous and overly-rounded in anticipation of childbearing or a certain tender touch which had never occurred, a waist which caved in with no definition like a blunt knife, all empty. But her voice was somehow infused, almost enchanting.

 She ran her fingers through the crudely cropped blonde hair, and smoothed the strange strands on her dress which stood up pink and obvious like guilt – all the fashion in America, hopefully empty at home. It was not attention she wanted – no, she wished immensely to be back in the room she singularly called ‘home’ and yet was a simple expanse of space owned by someone she did not know and had never met, to whom she paid the rent, and just to stare through the window and let the moment be lost. Not that it was difficult to lose oneself in the club – people were always rapturously, desperately, giving themselves to others – but everything stank of age and experience, the coffee stains resplendent on the tables told of past lies, and lips, and deceit. Old ash glimmered in the cut-glass trays beneath artificial light and stagnant heat.

A masculine voice somewhere to her left announced in the stretched drawl of a synthetic American accent, prompting her forward ‘Mrs Mina True!’

It was the management’s insistence that they would announce her as a married woman, when her actual circumstances were quite the opposite – she had never been married. It was more ‘presentable’ to appear as such, they told her – oh couldn’t she quickly find someone, they asked of her. They told her that audience loved nothing more than a married woman singing about lost love – perhaps they would presume she was a widow and enjoy the absence even more. The awful absence of truth, like the absence she saw in every open eye, the cut, cut, cutting of the clock face in the corner, every dripping night -

As Mina stumbled up to the stage, she wondered what in the room was real –  so many necessities ultimately unnecessary and extravagantly unreal. Humans covering up humanity – sex was taboo, and sweat masked with a scent close to collapse. Of course, humanity happened in private, but in public – these were people, models of excellence. Instigators of quality, who liked wine and cards and pretended to appreciate art.

At a table just next to the arc of the stage sat a middle-aged man with a wizened face fashionable at the time – indicating experience and the expectation of sincerity. His table was ornamented with a dish of empty oyster shells and several blank sheets of paper – one fast between his fingers as if he was inspecting the thickness. He breathed loudly beneath an age-old moustache.

‘’It would be the rocks which would kill her in the end…’ He mused, marking the motions of the words in the air with his free hand, somehow aiming his speech towards Mina with flickering fingers which fell through the air as if imitating a broken body, his words peculiarly spaced. They were resonant in her ears, as if individuals.

‘Excuse me?’ She managed, for she was shy in the social sense, sheepish and inelegant as she stood in front of him.

‘Aw, nothing, nothing,’ He continued, still apparently engaged in thought ‘Just an idea for my new work. I come here to write you know. I like the – ‘

He paused with an outstretched palm in the air.

‘Exhibitionism.’ He finished, almost triumphantly ‘Yes, that’s it. The exhibitionism. Nothing’s too real here, you could picture anything – '

‘Perhaps you should paint then,’ Mina managed by way of departure as she ascended the stage steps hurriedly, avoiding him – just another attempt at another failure, to create something, to make something. Whatever ‘something’ was, she was sure it existed by itself and that moment she was acutely aware that the management – whatever kind of conglomerate that was -  which enjoyed the particulars of it’s times, giving the audience a certain act at a certain minute. She hurried.

When finally upon the stage she was always confronted with the same simmering nausea which tripped the end of her nerves, almost familial with an agonizing regularity, as she gazed down from her elevation into a sea of painted faces beneath painted lights – ladies in their brocade finery, men  assembled as if peeled from packaging with pins and ties and buttons to press them together.  Indeed, the whole room seemed suddenly tense with the need to retain composure. It was the same every time she stood onto the stage, staring down at those cold, hard faces, ugly, almost abstractedly formed heads, bringing time back to her, back to her… . Memories suddenly flooding of how, once, she had stood on a stage of her very own, eerily distant like a half-set dream, and how she had stared and stared at the tongues of water below. She thought so strongly that that was what ‘something’ was – it was ‘something’ to die when to live was empty. Absurd – how people searched life for it! She remembered standing, the wind slicing her sides as she knew it would be the rocks which would kill her in the end.

Not herself. No, she was not even permitted the identity of her own death, suicide– to ‘commit’ anything or even ‘commit to’ anything still had the connotations of crime. It had not ended, just as the singing never ended, and the dancing, and the made-up human assembly – they all dragged on as her feet had dragged her away from the cliff and back to the ‘home’ which meant nothing, and the layers of old love letters and the immediacy of cold water and all the other things people believe it necessary to live. For everyone says life must be composed of ‘something’…

It was with these thoughts, of the past, that she began to sing. She sang of heartbreak, of lost love. For she had lost love before, that was why it was so significant. Everyone wants to see the gaping wound, stand with staring eyes upon the still smarting flesh, the thickened rawness  of the treble notes which everyone applauded as if eager to aggravate the injury. Her body was insignificant, her voice went on, a voice pierced with desire, how she yearned for the solace of human touch, how she had lost, how her thoughts became wild and time increasingly distinct, and drilled and drained her. Her heart coursed beneath her ribs, her mind looked on blankly, stared into the voice so rich and bloody. She shrilled the last few lines of the world not letting her love, or something like that, and stumbled quickly from the stage. The women in the audience sitting at the little glass tables inevitably with a dry Martini and a man’s hand firmly round their waist clapped ravenously– for how they loved to see someone without! It was a treat for them, the high-fliers, the lucky audience in the unfair trial. Flurry after flurry of hands in the awful velvet of the air, little lights of cut-diamond rings glinted sickly in the half-darkness.

‘She even cried!’ One of the ladies declared confidentially, affably to another, over the long steel finger of her cigarette holder.

But Mina could hardly recall what she had done – all she wanted was the horrible cold confirmation of money in her hand and the absence so many waited for – sleep. Her feet seemed to unfurl with every step like a thick human weight between the hardened rain of female glances and bodies passing each other non-committal and cold in the night. Just as she was down from the stage, rustling and dragging like a bird caught with a bullet – a young man approached her, emerging from somewhere on the left with an excited step.

‘You were really swell!’ He gushed, though the flush of amiability in that young face and the composure of his neat hands hurt her. A touch she would never know, a voice she may hear in one singular  instant and then only ever in memory – for she was used to people becoming immaterial before her, coming, going, no true meaning. Dark hair and piercing eyes framed her.

He leaned closer, as if in confidence – always and ever-assumed -  so she felt the dry heat of his breath against her cool neck like the pressure of fine jewellery on an open throat. His hands were moving closer.

‘Let me buy you a drink. You know, you were really something.’

She knew herself as nothing. She shook her head with the precision of an oft-performed action.

‘No,’ she replied, quickly, deliberately ‘If I was something, they wouldn’t applaud like that.’

He looked at her questioningly.

‘People would rather see someone with nothing than with something, otherwise they don’t see someone anymore.’ She hurried, adjusting the shoulders of her dress as she spoke ‘Audiences like absence – it’s humanity they don’t have.’

She glanced round emphatically at the piles of coloured crêpe and napkins and balloons - their torturous hues glowering as if attempting to make up for their emptiness. Mouths open and empty, and in an attempt to fill them – bowls empty, glass empty, a horrid human emptiness shrieking over and over…

‘I’ve got to go,’ She muttered, by way of departure. Every explanation was accompanied with departure.

She felt the clammy fingers of exhaustion around each wrist, easing deliberately behind the lid of each eye, her whole head. For she was heavy, as if swollen with monotony and inevitably of another day, pulling the stones of attempt for human contentment, jagged, desperate -

The rocks which would kill her in the end.