August 24, 2010
Iganga Town, Uganda
If I were to map my town, take stock of people and places…really look and not simply let it pass me as I stroll, it would be full of sounds and color and scents. Even on a two dimensional piece of paper it would spring to life because life tends to demand that.
My street, Mzungo Way I’ll call it, where the children sing the moniker they have bestowed. “mzungo hello. Mzungo goodbye. Mzungooooo mzungooooo,” trailing behind me as I take a left. Walking for a little way I stumble upon Goats’ Intersection where 20 plus goats of all colors and sizes gather and dance the spectrum from lethargy to spastic. A little ways past them, a few steps really, and I reach Duck Crossing where a brood? A gaggle? Of ducks and fuzzy yellow ducklings, waddle aimlessly or swim in their sometimes murky puddle sometimes parched indentation of a tire.
After turning right at Blind Bikers’ and Gawkers intersection (a sometimes perilous endeavor given the bicycles that careen around that corner from behind a brick wall with no announcement except the occasional shrill tinkle of a rusting bell and the staring – er – gawking people that distract me as I pass) I make a left at the Jack Fruit junction, the spiny fruit hanging heavy and languorously from the trunk of the tree for which I’ve dubbed that street and I find myself on Stench Street.
Here the refuse from neighboring households and, I assume the church that has commandeered a huge section on the right of that busy dirt road. It is safe to assume that a clinic or the hospital also do at least occasional dumping there as needles have been spotted among the matoke* peelings, the debris of chewed sugar cane, and anything else a house has deemed unnecessary. Adults and children alike scavenge through the piles of decomposing debris and are either immune to or practiced at avoiding the stench that rises like steam from a pot of rice.
At the end of Stench Street there is, what I presume to be a bar of some sort – I only see men there playing some kind of game I can’t quite see, the occasional call in my direction to ask who I am or where I’m going. Across from that bar is Freedom Park, a patch of green grass crisscrossed by countless footsteps into a brown-striped quilt dotted with trees. People nap in the shade, muslims step away from the bustle of town to take a moment to pray when the mosque’s call reaches out to believers, and men gather at the corner to talk. The discussion wafts by me in snatches of lusoga caught on the breeze. The air heavy with traditional drumming and the speaker destroying bass of local music as crowds gather for political rallies, I imagine they are debating the coming elections in the way men on corners all over the world tend to.
And just like that I’m in town. Bank Row, Market Street (in the most literal sense), I don’t know their actual names…the actual names are random and unhelpful. Instead I find myself concentrating on landmarks, some – like the roundabout on the Kampala Highway – obvious to everyone; others, like Salvation Army Way (host to a row of women selling used clothing) that are just for me, small things to help guide my way through the unknown.
*matoke: savory bananas used to make one of the staple foods
Tags: observations, transition, uganda
It was the sound of distress. High pitched, I couldn’t quite figure out what it was or where it was coming from. Two young men looked back to where they’d just passed and, seeing nothing, continued.
I stopped and peered in the pile of refuse perpetually piled on the side of that busy dirt road -children and adults alike, seemingly immune to the stench of decomposition aided by intermittent downpours and heat.
Finally, my eyes trailing greenery to the cinnamon brown road, I spotted a kitten splayed out and helpless. It couldn’t have been more than a few days old. Probably newly dropped or abandoned, its cries hadn’t yet diminished to the feeble sound I would expect. The cries of newborn lambs succumbed to after days of neglect from new mothers.
I was living in South Africa the first time I heard those almost human cries in the unquiet of a village night. I bundled myself against eh cold, opened the kraal door and found the bleating little body, limp and scared. I carried it into the kitchen, searing for something warm against the cold air blasting though every rack in the door, roof and windows. I warmed milk, tried to feed. But in the morning it was dead.
I cried that day – to the amusement of my host family. “silly lekgowa”, but I learned. The next time I heard the cries I tied the wayward mother to the kraal fence and manually attached her lamb until she got used the idea of feeding.
No longer silly.
As I walked past that screaming kitten I knew there was nothing I could do. Against my instinct, I walked on. The yelps recede and were replaced with the sound of traditional drums. Finally, at the mutatu stand, a mostly filled Jinja-bound mutate greeted me. And as we pulled out of Iganga half an hour later, the kitten and drums were lost on the wind escaping through the slightly ajar mutatu windows.
Tags: observations, travel, uganda
August 15, 2010
Mabira, Uganda
Tired from the cold night huddled in a bed with three of my colleagues, a disconcerting dream lingering like the early morning dampness under forest cover, we trudged up the muddy incline leading to the road out of Mabira forest.
A truck full of UVP interns and staff slowed to a stop, “iganga iganaga” they called out laughing, impersonating a matatu(minivan taxi). They were already full but the prospect of avoiding the long wait and inevitable mzungo gouging enticed me to squeeze myself in.
The laugher subsided a few miles in, Old Man darting ahead of lumbering trucks and meandering cars. English faded and was replaced by lusoga and laughter while a countdown of music from the entire continent bantered with the wind rushing in from our open windows.
We raced passed people bent over tea plants. The green leaves in bushes low to the ground spreading out like neat tufts of hair. Giving way eventually to sugar cane, lanky stalks crowding each other. Giving way to a cleared cane field burning. The smoke obediently wafting south, rising like volume on a stereo.
Shakira’s “waka waka” catapulted itself out of background status and the whole truck erupted. Hands in the air shaking to the beat, lyrics at the top of lungs catching on the wind and seeming to amplify.
“what language is that?”
“A Cameroonian one. She remade it.”
I didn’t know that. The song ended. Voices offered residual humming.
The forest behind us, the nile, tea, sugar…the weekend just beginning.
Tags: music, observations, travel, uganda
August 14, 2010
Mabira forest, Uganda
The plastic smoldered, drew itself up from clear blue womanly shapes and bright yellow shopping bags to black jewels glistening on ashen logs. The Ugandan interns burned the plastic we’d all collected – the rubbish that has been strewn haphazardly around the party site.
We mzungos* intended to throw it away…where I’m not sure since I still haven’t seen a trash can…but burning wasn’t what we had in mind. Still, it made for a pretty fire. Blue and orange flames between plumes of gray smoke reaching for the clear spot where the canopy of treetops didn’t quite meet.
At this point the night was meandering to an end and the gathering of people who had assembled to say goodbye to my predecessor were nibbling on final bites, voices carrying into final bursts of song, hips wiggling to trailing music.
But it had been moving. People going out of their way to say thank you through song, humor, sentiment, gift. If not intimidating, it was definitely humbling to see the impact- to feel the love- held in trust for her.
Food was central of course. Frederick (of course I named him), the most recent gift from a well commissioning, was skewered on an abundance of sticks and roasted over a makeshift banana tree grill. The pungent sent of goat perfuming the air.
This party was a patchwork of moments. Parts of it made the most familiar pattern. As the night grew cooler and clusters of people drew closer to the warmth of the fire, there were discussions of love and marriage. Of friendship and work. Pieces of the quilt easily recognizable. But there were those moments, because I am a new addition here – foreign and older – where I don’t yet know the cloth, the pattern.
The electricity was out in Mabira leaving the paths to our bandas (sleeping quarters) so dark that the light from my headlamp seemed to uncover only the smattering of rocks in my immediate path. Never mind the muddy water caught in the ruts of cars traveling the same path, stones slick with forest carpet, and mud.
I walked slowly, head careening up from time to time to catch a glimpse of the glittering sky, cocked toward the sound of nocturnal life. The insomniac forest kept vigil while I slept.
*mzungo-foreigner
Tags: transition, travel, uganda, work
August 6, 2010
We angled the car into a space under the dappled shade of a tree. The dust settling along the dirt road we’d traveled. A cluster of women rose to their feet and began ululating and dancing – voices and hips raising and lowering in circuits of joy.
We had arrived.
The village was well off the main road and the path we drove wove us past modest mud brick homes surrounded by cassava and coffee plants, and roving goats and chickens. And of course children singing “mzungo” in our wake.
Today we commissioned a shallow well.
It is the culmination of the Uganda Village Project, Iganga district, and the community. Work done, water successfully flowing, the commissioning is all about celebration. And so we were met by the women singing and dancing. The hypnotic undulation of hips, cloth tied around them to accent the movements, up down around. Isolated movements that never touch the stationary torso, the joy magically skipping from hips to face where they smiled open mouthed with teeth prominently displayed.
The singing and drumming, sans dancing, followed us down the narrow path traversing more coffee and more cassava until it delivered us, downhill, to the new pump. Ceremonial pumping for our benefit, cupped hands beneath the clear stream of water brought water to a waiting mouth. Success, the whole entourage in reverse returned to the 85-family village.
The indecisive sun alternated between bright brutal heat and soothing shade, the breeze blowing the tarp we sat under into cresting waves of blue.
These occasions call for lots of ceremonies. Guests come. Musicians play. Dancers dance. Politicians talk. And so speech after speech extolled the virtues of the partnerships that made the well possible and the well itself- in Lusoga. Eventually, it was my turn. And so with nothing to say I opened with a laugh.
“Oly otiya.” Good day.
Racous laughter, because mzungos, even brown ones, speaking Lusoga is funny.
We finished with a meal of matoke (boiled mashed bananas), rice, goat, and chicken. A meal redundant to the contents of our car, which held a chicken and goat as tokens of appreciation.
People waved as the car wound back the way we’d come. Women ululating and dancing, our goat shrieking protest, and children screaming mzungo (just in case we missed it the first time). The tires kicked up red dust and we headed for home.
The air is thick and chewy like old gum. Trucks belch black smoke and trash burns in invisible fires in the distance. Bodas (motorcycles), immune to laws of traffic and good sense, weave between cars and -when time and lack of space dictates- speed along sidewalks narrowly missing pedestrians.
Kampala isn’t quiet. Colorful buildings in various stages of completion line slightly sloping streets. Traffic lights swing uselessly in the breeze as police in white starched uniforms- albino girl scouts- wave some speeding cars through and narrow their eyes at others.
This was my first real expedition into the capital. My initial trip to the city was my first full day in Uganda. My colleagues shepherded me gently around as they completed errands and we capped off the day with a trip to the supermarket. Still dazed and unsure of what lay ahead, it was all lost in a kind of fog.
This trip had more dedicated purpose. After insuring our summer interns were delivered safely to airport and backpackers, Aussie and I began jumping through the hoops necessary to apply for our work permits. Oddly, after so many countries, this was my first time on such and excursion; but what an introduction to this world.
It had begun months before with an attempt to renew our NGO certification. That required several visits to kampala (a 3 hour drive) and a number of random signatures. We couldn’t apply for the permits without the certificate and so when that proved successful we were cautiously optimistic.
Aussie assured me that was the easy part, the true battle of power came at the permit office. We retreated to an internet café to ready ourselves. She directed me what to write and how, “you can’t write Dear Sir/Madame, you have to write Dear Immigration Officer or they’ll send it back.” Pages hole punched and in order, I even purchased a folder, like Aussie’s to present it in.
The folder was wrong.
I was immediately sent to a side door to buy a new one. Then I needed a signature, I wasn’t clear whose. So I wandered back to where we’d gotten the certification and was met by a complete stranger who, once I smiled seemed friendly enough. Maybe too friendly, all said and done he looked down at the copy of the paperwork he insisted I must bring back to him for “his records” and he said, “I drive through Iganga all the time, next time I’ll give you a call, what is your number.’
Now it could have been harmless hospitality but my gut and previous experiences as a mzungo in town lead me to believe differently so I feigned phoneless-ness and headed back to the window.
Apparently I needed to apply for a special permit. “how could you not know that?”
Mostly because no one told me.
And so I filled out the form for that. Then there was the need for a photocopy of a different part of my passport.
I was starting to worry that I’d be making another trip when the man behind the counter finally wrote out a little scrap of paper and told me I could come back on Wednesday for the special permit. He was less sure about the work permit but maybe on Wednesday they’ll give me back my passport.
Tags: transition, uganda, work
August 3, 2010
Iganaga Town, Iganga
Only one Mzungo.
After a day wandering around in a cluster of foreignness (a short orientation to town: bank, grocery story, market, café, taxi rank) I finally found a reason and the motivation to wander about a little on my own.
I set out for the little market; hoping to familiarize myself a little with both this place and the people who live here. Still struggling to learn even the most basics of lasoga (one of the local languages) I walked down the wide street dirt road in front of my house. I passed people on foot, leaving puzzled expressions in my wake. A woman, on in an ill-fitting red shin-length dress and thin and abused flip flops, pedaled by unsmiling. Small children playing in a cluster of grass, women staring absently while holding small brown babies, makeshift shops selling eggs or eggplants, dotted the way to the mini market just off the main road.
The sky, heavy and gray as lead, warned rain and the sun lazed toward the horizon as I made the final turn toward the market. immediately I began to see more makeshift stalls. A man squatting beside a segiree (coal pot) roasting a corn, several small wooden shacks with hanging beads and no obvious (at least to me) indication of what they sold, slabs of unrefrigerated meat spread out for perusal and sale.
Walking this maze of sights and people, I greeted tentatively. One woman responded and then continued to speak. I turned smiling, “that’s all I know. I’m sorry that is all I know.” She looked at me quizzically and clasped my hand in something more than a shake but less than a hug, my café au lait hand nestled against the roasted coffee been complexion of hers.
“Fatima,” she pointed at herself and I responded in kind. She beamed a friendly smile at me as we walked our separate ways.
Not quite the spectacle I was in Sri Lanka or China (no one trailed me screaming bob marley or handed me their children or wives for a photo op) I listened to the wake of chatter scattered behind me. Three older women, closely cropped hair and a slightly askew wig, chatted among themselves until I neared them. Their conversation suspended, they watched me approach with confusion. I greeted, “ohsibiotiya” and their confusion broke into, “bulongee” the proper response and a melody of laughter that was the soundtrack to my language attempts.
Eggplant, onion, and cabbage in my bag I headed home, unsure if I’d taken a wrong turn as the waning light had shifted and a gaggle of young boys, who hadn’t been on the street earlier, tumbled about in a ditch I hadn’t seen on my way to market, a young child -head piled with white suds -bathed in a plastic basin. but I was right, the demographics of the street simply shifted, as they do.
My metal gate in sight, I was triumphant in my journey. Giddy that I heard only one “mzungo” tossed lightly in my direction.
August 1, 2010
Iganga Town, Uganda
It could be malaria. It could be an idiosyncratic thyroid. or I might just be cold. The thing is, living in a world of malaria makes every chill or fever infinitely more noticeable – more epic – than it deserves. Just as spotting Neil Patick Harris on the streets of new york doesn’t mean a red carpet affair is just around the corner, neither does my night’s Sybil like temperature tantrums mean I’m sick.
Mostly I’m just settling in. and settling in here, as it was in Liberia, is going to be a process stretched over a number of weeks. For now I have squatting rights to the office’s dorm. For at least a week it will be a little snug with two of our field officers moving in as well. The temporary digs mean I’m not exactly at home yet, so much as getting a lay of the land and trying to figure out how to build on all the hard work that has already been done at my organization – while also introducing myself to this community as more than the children’s chant of mazungo.
Mazungo…again. I’m holding out hope against futile hope that the moniker hurled in my direction, from smiling mouths accompanied by small eager mahogany hands waving from yards and packed dirt streets, was actually directed at my counterparts. But I’ve been here before. I am not mislead by my own café au lait skin and long kinky hair. Here, I presume, as the children do, I am mazungo; just as I was lakugwa in south Africa and white woman in Liberia
And so my days are unfolding one by one. Iganga Town is far bigger than what I expected, than what I am used to for my international home. While anonymity is probably impossible for me here – it is possible everyone might not know my name or form an opinion about who I am, or am not, dating because we have been spotted together more than once, might not care. Not Monrovia big, Iganga isn’t Phebe (Liberia) small either.
Other things strike me here. The 5:30 am call to prayer sounding from our backyard – the mosque peeking out from behind our fence. Chipati, samosa, and spring roll vendors lined up along the streets – steam and smoke rising from gray coals. Yesterday I ate my first rolex – a fried egg with vegetables mixed in set atop a chipati and rolled into something akin to a burrito, better, cinnamon rolls before they have been cut for baking. A delicious, if greasy, treat.
Only two days here, I haven’t made my way through the rest of the street food. I’ve been told that the fried cassava is delicious. I’ve also eyed little misshapen balls of golden fried dough that I presume are the Ugandan incarnation of South African fat cakes and Liberian donuts. other long rolled, and presumably fried, dough-like substances sit in a heap and I wonder what savory secrets they harbor.
My sleep, unquiet prayer call aside, though not cacophonous is not yet rhythmic. I find myself waking periodically throughout the night and then permanently (for the day anyway) before 7am. At that time, the moist cold has not yielded to the Ugandan sun and I huddle against the chill that is not – most assuredly – malaria.
Tags: health, transition, travel
July 31, 2010
Iganga Town, Uganda
Side saddle on a bike seemingly transported from 1955, legs neither straddling or to the right of the cushioned seat, my bike chariot wove its way through the crowded, sometimes paved, streets. The cool humid air chilled me through my skirt – through the thin gray sweater meant to guard against the cold.
Iganga whizzed by me at human pedaled speed. A blur of faces and bodies engaged in early morning haits. Making chipaits – the dough in neat rows, pale mounds like nipple-less breasts plucked from some anime “love scene”. Boda bodas, a metallic row of motorcycles complete with thick jacked drives – waited patiently for fares. A woman, one of only three I saw on the main drag from my left-sided perch, sweeping out her shop front.
A few looked up, a passing glance as I rode past, but I was gone in a bicycles blink.
It is so easy to be a narcissist in another country. All the more so when visitors aren’t the norm. in such situations the presumption that everyone is staring at you often proves true. And so I find myself reading into the expressions people flash in my direction.
The danger, of course, is I’m building my Ugandan context from scratch. Right now my assumptions of expression and explanations are through a foreign filter…china vs South Africa vs Guatemala. And none of them are here. So when the director of the guest house smiled broadly at our introduction– a tooth filled kool-aid smile much like my own – I assumed it was my brownness, my not quite black but oh so closeness she was responding to. It could just as easily be general friendliness, or that I looked funny.
It was only my first full day; life will continue to unfold in pieces and I’ll figure out the puzzle.
Tags: transition, travel, uganda
colonial me
August 21, 2010
Iganga Town, Uganda
I haven’t mastered this pseudo post-colonial era in africa. In truth, this is my first true interaction with the way things probably were. I have a high fence with broken bottles glittering in the sunlight to deter unwanted visitors. And if that fence fails I have an armed guard circling the premises.
At least in theory. In truth the guards are often blaring music from a radio they aren’t supposed to have but we have allowed, sleeping curled up on the side of the house (or on a mat on the front porch for the less concerned), chatting with friends, or shirtlessly sunning themselves. And I’m irritated.
My first instinct when I showed up at the office/house was to make friends with our guard. Assuming we had a few that rotated in on a regular basis. They don’t. instead every 12 hours a veritable stranger walks in with a huge gun dangling nonchalantly from his/her shoulder.
The gig must be mind numbingly boring. We aren’t in any real danger from anything except theft (which is how we ended up with a guard in the first place). During the day we have visitors but the guard is truly only forced to move if a car honks to be let in.
At any rate, my first instinct went by the wayside when I realized I couldn’t keep up with all the changing faces and the way our interactions shifted. it was further forgotten when one of the guards asked me if I wanted to play cards…harmless, I know, except it doesn’t feel that way. I’m at work, and frankly, so is he.
The problem I’m having is reconciling what is a professional working relationship- employer/employee, against a colonial history that claimed the same thing.
Why can’t we be friends…at least friendly?
Only it gets twisted into history and power and expectation.
The other day one of the guards gave me money and asked me to buy her some menstrual pads. Woman to woman I had no issue. But that same day she asked one of our students to buy her a drink. Then she asked me if she could run out to get tea. And today she was stretched out sleeping on a mat on the front porch. Aussie, my colleague and roommate, found another guard with his short open to his navel, rubbing his belly and my first weeks here I woke up to a blaring radio at roughly 6am every day.
Then there is the food. It is Ugandan custom to feed people who work for you, be it special hire taxis, bodas you ask to wait for you, or security. So we give lunch and dinner each day. At first the staff gave out a full container of salt and oil, only it would come back empty each day, so those provisions were rationed. Same with sugar. Most recently it is the batteries that power the radio (we supply those as well and someone walked off with them – which explains the relative quiet of the last few days).
It all seems to have spiraled out of control and it makes me uncomfortable.
Aussie was telling me how much she loves jinja (about an hour from iganga at the mouth of the nile), the palatial homes – currently in disrepair but their former grandeur still evident all these years later- that line the canopied streets. And I cringe a little at the thought. At the policies and protocols that built those houses and who they built them for.
Maybe this has nothing to do with my fears of being a colonial presence constantly trying to make Uganda something it isn’t and didn’t ask to be. Maybe this would be uncomfortable no matter where I was, after all I have never had occasion to have security anywhere else. In south Africa I had the same short wire fence as my neighbors, Liberia didn’t even grant that (which was unfortunate give we lived behind a school and the kids were obnoxious on a good day). In oakland my dad thought I needed protection but I managed fine without it and so I really have no point of comparison.
All I have is this nagging desire to have a mutually respectful working relationship on all fronts. Maybe I’ll figure out a way to do that without cultural differences and history getting in the way.
Tags: observations, politics, race, socialcommentary, transition, travel, uganda, work