Mary Morony's Blog

Much to my delight, the third novel in my Southern Fiction Apron Strings Trilogy If It Ain’t One Thing has earned a place on The 2018 BookViral Award Short List.[image error]

BookViral’s Millennium Book Award entries are initially limited to 1000 books.  Since it is estimated that between 600,000 and a million books are released each year in the US alone, getting n the long list is a pretty big deal too.  In case you’ve never heard of BookViral, they work with both traditionally published and “indie” authors who have self or independently published books with a mission to discover new and talented authors and help them give their work the attention and awareness it deserves. BookViral does this by providing professional and credible reviews which are respected by readers. 

Here is the review they’ve written for If It Ain’t One Thing – in case you haven’t read it:

There are books readers rave about, but there are just a few they really come to love, whether it’s because they read them at certain pivotal times, or because they become enamoured with their sheer brilliance. Mary Morony’s Apron Strings Trilogy is surely amongst the latter. There is a tendency for authors to simplify, to make everything more accessible with a plot and characters distilled into simple-mindedness. In contrast, Mary Morony writes novels that are considerably more demanding and rewarding and on this level If It Ain’t One Thing proves to be her strongest release to date. Readers who have followed her southern saga from the start will know it’s a sweeping epic of familial triumphs and tragedies through which Morony examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and invariably complex connections that bind generations of a family together. In the hands of a less talented writer thematic material such as this might well have become overly didactic, but in the hands of Mary Morony, who has a wonderful eye for nuance, a fine ear for dialogue and genuine empathy for her subject matter the result is a wonderfully written jewel of a book.

Recommended without reservation, If It Ain’t One Thing is an absolute must read and a superb ending to a notable Trilogy. Pick up where book 2 ended or go back to the beginning with Apron Strings, We promise you won’t be disappointed.  —  BookViral  (http://www.bookviral.com/if-it-aint-one-thing/4594225723)

Fingers crossed, on December 14th If It Ain’t One Thing will emerge victorious!  Even if it doesn’t, it is certainly wonderful to be listed with this other wonderful authors.  Thanks to my readers for supporting me the the saga of the Mackey Family.  It was truly my pleasure to write about them and I hope it’s YOUR pleasure to read about them.

The post If It Ain’t One Thing On The 2018 BookViral Award Short List appeared first on Mary Morony.

[image error]The queen’s wave is iconic. Everyone knows it.  The shoulder is set square and flat. All the way to the elbow, the upper arm lies pressed close to the chest. The handheld around shoulder level achieves its loft by a tight angle at the elbow. A pound note would be safely stored between the lower part of the upper arm and the forearm. The hand travels at a forty-five degree, the actual degree may vary, arc starting with the pinkie held toward her adoring subjects. In a clockwise motion, assuming she is using her right hand, she sweeps the jeweled and often gloved appendage around culminating in a full frontal palm.  Here in Rehab’s Corner, the idea of a queen’s wave gets lost in translation.

My wave is a bit more organic. You might even say less formulaic so there is no need to delve into the slight degree changes that occur when I am greeting someone with a hand gesture. Our setups are the same, the queen’s and mine. The engine of our greetings is where the real difference lies. Her’s in the wrist, mine in the big bumps at the end of your hand.

The joints that scrape and make it impossible to get your drivers license out between the seat and the console. Having shot from your quaking hands when the state trooper climbed out of his car, the card is just out of reach thanks to those bumps. As the trooper places his hat on his head and his approach begins, you hold your bleeding one hand in other, unsure of the best course of action. The paramount thought in this situation should be attending to the rehearsal of your excuse for driving so fast. Instead, your brain is calculating. Do you have the time to open the door and climb on to the seat to get a better angle to snatch up the elusive permit? Or waiting, sharing your knuckle dilemma with the officer and hoping he won’t watch as you bend over the seat outside of the car in order to retrieve the aforementioned document.  But I digress.

Those knuckle joints are the power source of my particular brand of to and fro-ness greeting. I guess you could call me a finger waver. It doesn’t make as much difference to me, as it would, say the Queen if my digits are pointed outward or to the side as I flap them in Hello! What is important is the subtle motion of my digits.

For my first few weeks at Rahab’s Corner, I routinely respond thusly to lusty waves from various souls on our ways to and fro. Without exception, the initiator of the greeting would hustle right over to me. I would then hail them with a good fill in the time of day acknowledgment.  We both wait expectantly for the other to say something. When nothing was forthcoming, we’d shrug, smile and continue on our way.

One afternoon, I was headed to the kitchen. With some effort, I had corralled my flip flops on to my feet. The effort had to do with picking my own sandals out of the pile of shoes by the door. Africans take their shoes off outside of the house. Immersed as I was in listening to the flop swish of my tread on the tile walk, a movement out of the corner of my eye distracted my wondering if I could identify the sound of each individual tread.  Glancing over, I saw Jumah in some haste coming down the stairs toward me from his office. He stopped mid-stair and waved. I smiled and waved back. I noticed that he too employed the same finger wag as I. He, again twitched his digits in my direction. I did the same laughing at this odd encounter.

His smile turned upside down as his eyes squinted in puzzlement. He said with the slightest hint of impatience, ”Come here. I want to ask you something.”

“Oh, Okay why didn’t you say so?”

“I did,” he responded as I made my way over to him. He turned back up the stairs and disappeared into his office. I followed.

“I thought you were waving at me.”

“This,” he demonstrated an exact replica of my wave, means, “come here. This,” he lifted his arm up in the air with his hand well over his head and to and fro-ed it boldly with the fulcrum at the elbow, “means Hello”.  Interesting that such a simple gesture could get so lost in translation here in Uganda.

We strive to be the hands and feet of Jesus to a broken world which has roughly

200 million orphans crying out for help. Pure & Faultless connects with those

believers who are already in the country where the needs exist. Through God’s grace

and your assistance, we help those who help them!

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[image error]Seventeen-year-old Justine has beautiful light brown skin, close-cropped hair that looks so good on her, it makes you think you might give it a try, too. Don’t. She’s one of that kind of girl everything looks like a million bucks on her with the perfect shape to wear anything head to toe. You might think that is lucky for her, but all she wanted was to go to school.

Her father died when she was an infant. As far as she can remember her aunts raised her in their village, a suburb of Kampala. Her mother was unable to afford to keep her. The beleaguered mother of six struggled to send a little money to help pay Justine’s school fees. School plays an important part in this bright girl’s life. The inability to keep up with her education defines the traumas she has endured.

Life seemed secure for the young child until Mama Justine and her sisters had a conflict. The nature of the falling out is unknown to Justine. She only knows it necessitated her mother fetching her at around nine-years-old, as she was just starting P4, and taking her to Kampala to live. Despite being happy in the village, she was eager to live with her mother since she never had as far as she knew. After completing the first term of primary four, the rift between the sisters healed. Mom sent her daughter back to the village again. The back and forth in schools made keeping up with her classwork difficult. Justine failed to pass primary four. Because of this, her mother, who now had a new husband, took her daughter back again to the school in Kampala.

The next three years proved a relatively stable time for Justine as she advanced to primary seven. In the interim, her mother gave birth to her sister Miriam. For reasons again unknown to Justine, her mother and Miriam’s father separated leaving the two girls with the mother.

Most teenagers the world over have moments when their mother embarrass them. Most mothers stop at just being an embarrassment to their teenage daughters’. Mama Justine gave her daughter many reasons to feel ashamed. She has a problem with alcohol and is a prostitute. Hard to know which of the afflictions came first. The woman can barely keep food on the table and a roof over her two daughter’s heads.

She has tried her hand at selling food in a hotel in the slum and sold charcoal. At one period when Justine attended school, her mother took her younger sister out at night. Justine was left home. Interested in what transpired on those night outings, she asked her little sister, Miriam. The child said that her mother left her in the street and told her to beg for enough money to pay Justine’s school fee while she went looking for men. When I asked her why she was left behind she started to cry. Fifteen at the time, Justine thinks her mother left her home because she didn’t want to see the disrespect the girl felt for her elder.

Those tears indicated the shame she feels for her mother and the guilt for feeling the shame. In the course of our interview, whenever we touched on the anger, judgment, and hurt she directed at her parent, tears started to flow.

We strive to be the hands and feet of Jesus to a broken world which has roughly

200 million orphans crying out for help. Pure & Faultless connects with those

believers who are already in the country where the needs exist. Through God’s grace

and your assistance, we help those who help them!

DONATE NOW!

The post All She Wanted Was to Go To School appeared first on Mary Morony.

[image error]Beautiful, dark-skinned, tiny in stature but mighty in every other way; Diana has a story so complicated to understand that I was forced to resort to an outline. Outlining a story, for me who takes an organic approach to writing, is as far from a creative endeavor as having my teeth cleaned. With so many threads to follow, a spider would get confused in this tale. I had little choice. What a family Diana has.

This kid has packed more drama, trauma and flat out familial malfeasance in ten years than the soap opera Days of Our Lives managed to grind out in the last forty. One fortunate thing for Diana is that she is endowed with a great sense of self-preservation. Seemingly every one of her aunts on the paternal side of her family is out to get whatever they can from whoever happens to be in their way. Avarice and greed are traits all three aunties have in common. The concept of sharing is so alien to these women, it quite possibly is the only thing they share.

From Diana’s point of view, considering that most of her early memories are supplied by the greedy aunts, it is remarkable that the story she tells is so even-handed. Some of the girls I have spoken with are natural-born storytellers. Consequently, their stories are easy to write, fun to hear and informative. Though I don’t think this child has a farcical bone in her body most of her history comes across as farce. Who could believe this story?  What a family.

Her mother died giving birth to her brother, who she understands is named Ivan.  A year old at the time of his birth, Diana has never seen the boy. Her father died a year later. Being an orphan in Uganda is no laughing matter, though our interrupter Sarah Namara cracked up numerous times in the telling of the death of the child’s father while Diana kept a straight face. I asked twice if she was being funny. She assured me that she was not, yet Sarah found parts of her tale hilarious.

“What happened to your baby brother after your mother died,” I asked, assuming that the baby and Diana would end up together with a granny.

She answered in the same dispassionate way she told her whole the sordid tale of family disfunction, “They stole the baby.”

I didn’t know, until I heard myself take one, that it was possible to HEAR a double take. As I was about to ask the next question, I had to stop  to process what the girl said.  The wheels in my head creak as I attempted to make sense of what I had heard. It was almost possible to hear them.

“They did what?” Had I interviewed with a video camera and let me assure you I wish I had I would have seen my face contort as I processed the answer.

The answer, “They stole the baby from the hospital.”

I asked “Who stole the baby? Is that normal?” It seemed Diana’s mother’s family stole the baby. I was assured by Sarah that it was not a normal thing to do. These aunts did not want their sister’s child raised by the father’s family. I can understand why, as will you later on.

We strive to be the hands and feet of Jesus to a broken world which has roughly

200 million orphans crying out for help. Pure & Faultless connects with those

believers who are already in the country where the needs exist. Through God’s grace

and your assistance, we help those who help them!

DONATE NOW!

The post What a Family appeared first on Mary Morony.

[image error]The girl is tall and lanky like a basketball player though I don’t think she has ever been inclined toward athletics. Linette looms large over the other girls at Rahab’s Corner. Despite not even close to being chubby, she is the exemplar of fat for her mates.  When a body that isn’t exactly proportioned in a typical Ugandan teenage shape begs a description like Linette comes next.  That she doesn’t quite fit in might be the story of lanky Linette.

Our first interview took place the day before the summer school term started. The two of us sat in the kitchen as Lynette told me the story of her life in one sentence that lasted thirty-five minutes. Punctuation is important, I now know, for more than just clear writing. At some point in a narrative, written or spoken, you have to breathe and possibly take stock before forging ahead to the next thought. My head spun as the girl lead me through hairpin emotions and rounded stumbling blocks that would bring lessers to their knees.

Kivulu slum is Linette’s birthplace. She is the second generation born in this slum. Though she has never seen her father, she’s heard a story that the father of her three older siblings chased her dad away when he discovered that the daughter purported to be his was the other man’s.

In the midst of a quarrel, the mother shouted that her latest baby was another man’s. The father took his first two children away immediately, leaving the third, now that the boy’s parentage was in question. So incensed, he wouldn’t allow these two children of his to visit their mother. Since their father was a thug who hung out in the slums with gun-toting friends, they only occasionally were able to slip away to visit.

The three children born after Linette says, “have their own fathers.”Although none of them know who they are. After her mother’s death, the children’s father took them away so she rarely sees these siblings. Only hearsay connects her to a tribe – another tragedy of poverty.

She punctuated her story with a Ugandan habit of asking what? for emphasis, then answering the what in the same sentence (in Lynette’s case, everything was in the same sentence). As a way of an example, It did what? — it rained. For my first few days in Africa, I  blurted out the answer, unaware of the trope. Every so often, she did punctuate her history with a high pitched eeeeh for emphasis, sounding as if she was commenting on her own narrative. But, I believe it is a Ugandan exclamation point.

During my stay with the girls, the rare times I saw anything close to disagreeable behavior, Linette appeared smack dab in the middle. I’m surprised that she elicited such responses from her fellows. She was perfectly delightful to me despite her punctuational indifference.

We strive to be the hands and feet of Jesus to a broken world which has roughly

200 million orphans crying out for help. Pure & Faultless connects with those

believers who are already in the country where the needs exist. Through God’s grace

and your assistance, we help those who help them!

DONATE NOW!

The post The Story Of Lanky Linette appeared first on Mary Morony.

Before I left home I thought long and hard about how I was going to bond with these young girls who have suffered in ways I couldn’t imagine. When I pitched the idea of this project to the Pure and Faultless’ American Board of Trustees I gave a brief litany of my “traumas.” Suffering might show up differently over the world is still painful so the same, I posited. That was what I thought then in the comfort of my own home writing to an American audience enjoying similar circumstances.

The second day in Kampala, I visited a slum. This was not my first time experiencing the squalor, the remarkable lack of sanitation, or the sense of overwhelm from so much concentrated human suffering. Relating is impossible. There is no correlating to my life. Nothing comes close to the despair, I witnessed. A baby’s legs so swollen from lack of proper nutrition that they look as if they might burst. To alleviate some of the anguish –begging the question whose–someone put their hands on the legs. The gesture is so painful. He screams.

With most of my interviews, I started off trying to relate by my telling a bit of my history like flashing my suffering badge to gain entrance into their club. At first. I tried to mitigate my pathetic attempts at connection by prefacing it with, “The worst thing that happens to you is the worst thing that happens. You can’t compare worsts.”

And then as each story unfolded, I weighed my lollipops-and-roses worst with these horrors unfathomed and felt like a complete fraud. First, for doing exactly what I suggested my interviewees not do, compare my hardship to theirs. Comparing is a useless endeavor. But my so blessed, so extreme in how fortune has smiled upon me drama came across as insignificant in the ocean of hurt the girls survived.

It wasn’t until I talked with Natasha, that I all together gave up attempting to flash my trauma badge to gain entrance into this club of human suffering. The reflection in her eye stopped me cold. I was just winding up to ask if she would like to hear a little of my story. It chills me now to recall the depth of misery her soft brown eyes cast back at me. There was no judgment, no recrimination not from her. Nothing comes across as rude or short about Natasha. In her quiet way, she parses out the importance and ignores the superfluous. The first thirteen years of her life is full of so much hatefulness, It is hard to imagine what might have happened to this girl had Moreen not found when she did.

As the second girl to come to Rahab’s Corner only three years ago, Natasha’s transformation from an untrusting child to a brilliant student looking forward to going to medical school gives testimony to the importance of the work Pure and Faultless is doing in Uganda.

The post I Thought Long and Hard About How I was Going to Bond appeared first on Mary Morony.

[image error]Living with a grumpy old granny trying to do the right thing can’t be easy. A well muscled and athletic girl Nalwnaga R sat perpendicular to me at the kitchen table.  Fiddling with her fingers she refused to make eye contact. The sound of her voice shocked me when she mumbled her answer to my question, “How old are you?” Up until that time when she sat with a translator and me I had never heard her speak anything other than, “Yes” —a joke we shared whenever I asked if she was ready to tell her story.  The timbre of her speech was that of a much older woman. Poverty and the absence of sanitation, health care and education make life in a village on the outskirts of Kampala difficult at best. The lack of these basic necessities accelerates the aging process; Trauma stomps the pedal to the floor.

Nalwnaga R possesses a quick smile and an enchanting twinkle in her eye when something strikes her as funny. She was never a big talker around me even after our interview. Since we didn’t speak the same language, I rarely understood the joke. However, when I observed the teen with her cohorts she appears to have a well-developed sense of humor. She made me look like a great knitting teacher as she took to the new skill like she had done it her entire life. Before I left Rahab’s Corner, she made me a mustard-colored scarf that I will cherish always and thanked me for teaching her how to knit.

A year and a half ago, a child welfare probation officer recommended this then fifteen-year-old to Pure and Faultless in order to remove her from an abusive home life. Nalwnaga R called Joyce the woman who raised her, grandmother, in reality, she was the father’s aunt. More than likely fueled by frustration rather than animus, Joyce regularly informed her great-niece that she would never be anything but a prostitute. Sometimes saying things like, “You are a dog who eats from the rubbish pits.” Despite living with this hostile relative and her abusive ways since 2003, this intrepid teenager managed the presence of mind to leave and choose a more positive life.

Hardly a direct route, toddler Nalwnaga R, her older sister, and half-brother came to live with Joyce after the girls’ parents quarreled. The fight ensued when the father, a soldier, returned home with another woman. He demanded the mother of his children leave his house but refused to let her take her babies.

Never wavering from the stepmother stereotype, the new wife displayed no interest in her husband’s offspring. Mistreatment came to the little ones in heinous ways from withholding food and shelter to forcing them to sleep outdoors at night. The half-brother, Dick Allan, felt a need to plead for leniency on behalf of his younger sisters. The boy’s intercession drove the put-upon-new wife to the end of her very short maternal rope. She demanded all three go away and find their mothers casting the children out of the house for good. The boy took the little girls to live with their paternal grandmother where they stayed for two months before the old lady died leaving the children homeless again.

At this point, Joyce took the three children to live with her. With four of her own, I suspect the offer to care for her nephews’ offspring came from a sense of beleaguered obligation rather than an act of charitable compassion. Taking on another’s brood without enough money to care for your own would stretch the charity of even the kindest of intentions to breaking.

Joyce must have tried to do the right thing by her sister’s grandchildren. Nalwnaga R started school at three and went to primary four before dropping out for lack of school fees. Even though she loved school, the ever-present lack of school fees and subsequent embarrassment of being chased away from school when the fees weren’t paid took a heavy toll on the child. It didn’t help that Joyce would carp when she did have enough money. The sharped tongued old lady would say, “When you grow older you will have to refund my money because your father doesn’t take care of me.”

At around the time, Nalwnaga R turned thirteen the relationship between the older woman and her niece settled into a mutually loving one. The girl has no idea what precipitated the change of heart but she was relieved. From her perspective, Joyce was the only parent she had ever known and she loved the old woman for it. 

We strive to be the hands and feet of Jesus to a broken world which has roughly

200 million orphans crying out for help. Pure & Faultless connects with those

believers who are already in the country where the needs exist. Through God’s grace

and your assistance, we help those who help them!

DONATE NOW!

The post Living With A Grumpy Old Granny appeared first on Mary Morony.

Little W says she’s 13. I doubt it. She’s so imp-like. It’s hard to believe that a person can be on this planet for 13 years and be as small as she. [image error] Thirteen barely seems old enough to be as stubborn as this girl can be when she digs in.  If that bottom of her lips sticks, count on needing patience in industrial quantities to move this one off her position. When Little W was around four-years-old, her mother abandoned her and her slightly younger brother.  She left them in the village where her father lived. Not at the father’s doorstep, mind you, just in the village. It seems she’s a Ugandan Twist on Oliver, but Dickens’ character Fagen actually might come closer to a parallel to Little W’s acquired nature. 

Street-wise from too early an age, she is unrepentantly enamored of lucre. She sold herself at nine to an old man without the least bit of consciousness. She was certainly too young to understand the implication of her actions. Then aren’t I the person beating the drum about how unfair it is that woman have to bear the shame and degradation of having to sell themselves to eat? Good for Little W that she’s shameless. I hope she remains that way. 

One thing I know about the girl is she is desperate for an affectionate human touch. That, I am quite sure, she didn’t receive in her transactions with the old pedophile who used her. In knitting class, I kept bumping up against Little W until I realized she put herself in my way. She wanted to touch. After that, I hugged her whenever I saw her. She never wanted to let go. Considering how her parents used her like a ping-pong ball, bouncing her from one house to the other whenever her presence proved an inconvenience, human affection was hardly abundant.

When the man heard about his abandoned children, he didn’t race to pick them up. He sent an older woman friend. This woman took them in, rather than take them to their father. In the long story, W. told me this person gave them quite possibly the only human kindness these two ever received. Little W and her brother separated about a year and a half later and have lost all touch with each other since.

We strive to be the hands and feet of Jesus to a broken world which has roughly

200 million orphans crying out for help. Pure & Faultless connects with those

believers who are already in the country where the needs exist. Through God’s grace

and your assistance, we help those who help them!

DONATE NOW!

The post Ugandan Twist on Oliver appeared first on Mary Morony.

[image error]Who is related to whom, and how they are related, in Uganda from an outsider’s perspective, can boggle the mind. The English language has yet to catch up with the practice of polygamy. The practice makes describing members of a Ugandan family a challenge. Descriptors of family relationships between parents, children, steps, halves, exes, and currents go way beyond the modern equivalent of an American family of his, hers and theirs.

Multiple wives also create vast extended families. In my interviews, I often asked the question, how many siblings do you have? The answer could be was a huge number. When I appear taken aback or asked for clarification the explanation goes something like this. My father has ten children with three different wives and my mother has five from two different fathers. I have a sister/brother from with the same mother and father.

It is not uncommon for some wives to live under the same roof. In most of these stories either the mothers or fathers if not both are absent. To add to the confusion for me, if cousins are brought up in the same home it is considered bad form to make a distinction. All children raised in the household are considered siblings.

Furthering confusing the issue of familial ties, titles such as grandmother, jjajja, aunt as well as grandfather, jja, and uncle are used as honorifics but can also describe blood ties. The rearing of a grandchild or sibling’s grandchild is a common practice. Stepmothers —whether married to or living with the father or not—often step into the void if a maternal figure is missing. As is true in all human interactions some are more harmonious than others.

The distinctions are probably superfluous for everyone but me who is attempting to make sense out of the stories I’m told. Certainly, the Ugandans get along fine without them.

We strive to be the hands and feet of Jesus to a broken world which has roughly

200 million orphans crying out for help. Pure & Faultless connects with those

believers who are already in the country where the needs exist. Through God’s grace

and your assistance, we help those who help them!

DONATE NOW!

The post Who is Related to Whom and How appeared first on Mary Morony.

[image error]Children are rarely impressed with their parent’s knowledge. Or at least if my children were, they kept it to themselves. Not one asked me to share any skillset I might have acquired along my long and winding path to now. Teaching girls to knit had never crossed my mind. Perhaps the novelty caused by my children’s lack of interest is why teaching twenty girls in Uganda to knit was such an honor. But I suspect it had more to do with the following:

They were hungry for any knowledge and knowledge that would enable them to help support themselves even more. When faced with the choice of eating or not, and your body is the only commodity you have the choice is a no-brainer.

Learning a skill as inherently creative as knitting spoke to a human need we take for granted. A need one quashed by poverty—the need to create. Life in the slums is too focused on mere survival to leave much room for any creative endeavors. Since not one of my students could read a pattern, I gave just a few parameters as to how one goes about making a bag and they had only just learned knit and purl. Of the twenty or so bags created not one was like another. Each girl created a distinctively their own bag with only the rudiments of knit-purl skills. Even before we got to bags and the only stitch anyone knew was knit scarves poured forth from the creative girls as different as the knitters themselves.

Knitting relieved boredom. There is only so much television a person can watch. When there wasn’t anything else to do teenage girls could get into trouble. You know an idle mind is the devil’s workshop so with so much yarn there suddenly was lots to do.

To be fair to my children they have never had as much incentive to knit and that is quite okay with me. If they had as much incentive as my Ugandan buddies I believe they too would have appreciated someone sharing their knowledge of the skill.

We strive to be the hands and feet of Jesus to a broken world which has roughly

200 million orphans crying out for help. Pure & Faultless connects with those

believers who are already in the country where the needs exist. Through God’s grace

and your assistance, we help those who help them!

DONATE NOW!

The post Teaching Girls to Knit appeared first on Mary Morony.