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"Africa is always hard work, but to do Africa the way Lucy did it is really hard," says ex-foreign correspondent Paul Henry, about his 14-year-old daughter's World Vision-supported trip to Uganda and Tanzania.
It wasn't just that she
was meeting more AIDS patients, child prostitutes and circumcised
women than a celebrity in search of a photo opportunity, or
sleeping in huts with dirt floors and walls that she describes as
"looking like they would have been OK walls about 100 years
ago".
Paul was also filming her for most of the four week trip for a documentary to be screened on TV One, so Lucy was having to explain to the camera how she felt at every juncture as well. The idea was to show the reactions of a mansion-dwelling Epsom schoolgirl to the poverty and difficulty of African life. And those reactions proved to be an interesting mix.
"Horrible" is a word Lucy uses a lot to describe what she experienced: the dead people on the side of the road, the constant begging, the shabby classrooms she saw, the female genital mutilation she was told about, the hornets nest inside one of the "hotel" units. But she would like to go back some time, because some places were "magical".
The first thing the Henrys saw after flying into Uganda was "the old Entebbe Airport surrounded by troops and guns and armour and the tents going up on the tarmac," says Paul. Lucy had never seen anyone hold a gun before. The troops were peacekeepers, headed for the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Henrys basically followed them across Uganda to the Congolese border.
And then over it.
"We went through what was at the time one of the most dangerous borders and it's impossible to describe the experience, when none of the people around you think of tomorrow because theyve seen so much bloodshed, where if you disappear no one will be surprised," says Paul. "We were told the Congolese rebels were just over a row of bushes."
"I was just so scared about going in," says Lucy. "We walked into no man's land, and went to the Congo side and saw troops running past, whistling with their guns and little shacks with all the bullet holes. The trees had no branches because they'd all been blown off."
They were only there a matter of minutes their guide got suspicious that the situation was turning more risky than theyd been told. They slowly made their way back to Uganda, taking care not to draw any more attention to themselves than they already were by being white.
Most of Lucy's experiences
involved meeting amazing people, some of whom had never seen a
white person before. There was 16-year-old Happiness who walked two
and a half hours each way and risked being attacked by hyenas and
hippos to get to school.
There was 15-year-old Philbert, who at age 10 had buried his parents when they died of AIDS and since then had been bringing up his twin sisters who were five years younger than him. He sold his labour to pay for the girls to go to school.
Then there was 17-year-old Sophia, whose plight surprisingly affected Lucy even more than that of many of the AIDS victims she met. Sophia had been sold into marriage at 15 instead of going to secondary school and was now living in isolation with her husbands family and her baby.
"It looks quite romantic -- a little house in the cotton fields," says Lucy of Sophia's home. "But when I talked to her she was so miserable -- she was one of the few who knew her life could have been better because she was quite well educated when she was younger. But she knows shell probably be in the cotton field for the rest of her life with people who arent really her family. She said it was like being in prison."
Education emerges as a high priority in these stories. Yet in one instance, Lucy wasn't sure that it was a good idea -- in the case of the rural Masai. Because the culture is semi-nomadic, any education puts it under threat. Children can't be in school and roam with their grazing animals at the same time.
"I really enjoyed my time with the Masai," says Lucy. "They didnt even have mud huts --- they had dung huts, and some donkeys and cows and goats, and some sticks and that was it. I got fed up with flies during the day because of the dung huts, but at night I just sat around the fire with the chief and they were so welcoming. They were such lovely people. They performed jumping dances for me. It's a very sexist culture but I was allowed to sit in the chief's chair."
Paul explains why, with a bit of a grin: "The chief clearly wanted Lucy and wanted to know how many goats for her."
Lucy's delight in the
Masai was interesting for Paul to watch because, before the visit,
she had been adamant that they would be "the meanest people". Their
custom of female circumcision (also known as female genital
mutilation FGM) was to blame for her pre-visit opinion.
Paul had arranged for someone to tell Lucy about the process, which involves removing part -- and in some cases all -- of the female genitalia including the clitoris and labia, and then stitching the raw surfaces back together, to form a cover over the vagina. It is a very painful and sometimes fatal operation and the consequences are, as Paul says, that "childbirth will be horrendous, sex almost meaningless".
Lucy met a 12-year-old who had undergone the operation just two months before, whose wounds were still fresh and who had lain bleeding in a dung hut for three days. And yet, after just a day with the Masai, when Lucy was talking to the camera "she was just saying how wonderful the Masai was," remembers Paul, "and then she threw in: 'the only bad thing is FGM', which is extraordinary because at the beginning of the day, that had been the overwhelming thing, at night it was just a slight aside in their incredible culture."
In part, her change of heart was because the girls themselves look forward to the operation as their initiation into adulthood. Lucy is now ambivalent about what should be done about the practice, as it is such an important part of the Masai culture and she says it would be cruel to educate the women who have already had it done about how life would be less painful without it.
The second most dangerous place after the Congolese border was the city slum, where Paul took Lucy to meet two child prostitutes. While most of her experiences in Africa had at least a ray of hope in them, this was totally bleak. On the way, the Henrys passed another prepubescent prostitute being beaten up on the street. They couldn't go to help because it would have caused a riot. They met the street girls in a shipping container, while there was brawling going on in the street outside.
"Because they'd shut down all their feelings, because they had the most horrible lives being raped so many times, they weren't very nice," says Lucy quietly. "One of them had children. A two-year-old girl, the sweetest little thing, and she wandered out of the shipping container and just walked through the most dangerous part and I wouldn't have been allowed to put one foot out without my Dad and this little baby by herself and you just think whats her future going to be?"
It's heavy stuff to expose
a loved Kiwi teenager too. But Paul constantly monitored Lucy
throughout their trip and they had nightly debriefings about what
theyd done each day. While he says that he put her under
"extraordinary pressure", he also says that he pushed her only to
her limits and not over them. And she passed with flying
colours.
The Henrys believe it's important to know just how lucky you are. Happiness, excited to be able to try out her English on Lucy and proud to show off her family mud hut decorated with newspaper clippings and tin lids, was well named. When your car gets scraped, at least it's not scraped by a man-eating hippo.
