Dear Mother Aketcha

This reading is a monographic appetizer for the upcoming Happy Hour event (and podcast) with author of "Secrecy and Responsibility in an Era of an Epidemic, Letters from Uganda" Hanne Mogensen and discussant Adrienne Mannov. The book is structured around the life and death of primarily one woman, Kate, and the letters that Kate wrote to the author over the course of 10 years. Kate grew up in Uganda while the country was haunted by violence and war and later also devastated by the AIDS epidemic. The manuscript draws on these letters as well as conversations and fieldnotes from fieldwork in Uganda and offers a fine-grained ethnography of existence under extremely challenging conditions and the ways in which global phenomena contribute to changing life in Uganda. Dear Mother Aketcha is a reading of one of these letters from Kate to the author - who Kate called Mother Aketcha. Reading by Adrienne Mannov.