evening walk

Veronica mentioned that we wouldn’t have enough milk for the morning.  We were sitting on the front porch it was seven in the evening and the sun was setting.  I said that they might sell milk at the bar up the street.  I’d go and see.

I walked through the door in the heavy steel gate at the end of the driveway and headed up a slight hill.  The sky had turned ultramarine and was moving toward dark purple causing the flowering weeds along the roadside to appear a deeper green than they did during the day.  The shorter plants had yellow blossoms in the noontime light, now they looked orange.

Boda bodas passed me.  A bicycle boda passed with his passenger, a fat man in clean white button down shirt, seated impassively on cushion mounted on the rack above the rear wheel. Two teenagers in school uniforms talked at a tall open gate.

For weeks I’d mistaken the bar, which is located along the residential stretch of Sokulu Road very close to our house, for just another well-kept white-washed house. I walked up its driveway. A couple sat at one of four blue plastic tables laid out with oilcloths in the generous front yard next to simple flower beds and beneath large old trees.  The bar’s three goats each stood atop a separate barrel in the rear of the yard.

“We don’t sell milk,” The woman who runs the till said with her Ugandan accent that sounds to me like most other African accents, a slowed down and richer British accent. A man sat with his kids inside the bar drinking Cokes.  A Kung Fu movie with English sub-titles played on a small TV in the corner.  Speakers on the window sills broadcast the Mandarin dialogue and the sounds of the kicks and punches out into the yard. I exchanged some empty beer bottles I had brought with me in a black plastic bag and bought a few bottles to bring home.

I walked home down the slight hill. Mohammed, the 18-year-old cook who lives in our house, came running up the hill. We met at the gate. Using his few English words and with his accent, completely different and much stranger to ears than that of woman in the bar, he said “Food time! Food time! Food time!”  He was smiling.  It is Ramadan and the sun had completely set.  He could eat now.

Fixing the Bike

Pastor had just finished fixing Veronica’s motorbike, I’d driven it to the hospital with Pastor riding on the back, Veronica had paid him there, and I’d driven him back to his shop. After arriving, Pastor insisted on buying me a liter of coke and a loaf of white bread.  Then he insisted I sit in his shop, which was warm inside, and drink the bottle and eat the loaf while the sun set and the evening cooled.

I drank and ate. He joked with his assistants and divided out the money Veronica had paid him.  I asked what language they were speaking.

“That’s Jap.  We are Japadola.”  Pastor said, but he wasn’t interested in talking about Japadola and he changed the subject. “So tell me.  Vampires.  They are not real?  I’m always telling this one,” he pointed at one of his assistants, “about the Vampires in Europe.”  Pastor had asked Veronica and me about this before while we watched him work on the bike. I had joked that vampires were real and he laughed. Veronica told him the truth and he laughed at that too.

“It’s just a story,” I said and took another slice of bread and tried to convince his assistant to take one as well.

“It’s just a story? Why am I always seeing in the films?”  Pastor asked.

“It’s a popular story.”

“Okay,” Pastor said laughing,  “what about those white men who just eat the people?”

“White men who eat people?”

“Yes. Are those real or just a story?”

“Just a story, too.  You must have stories.  What’s a Japadola story?”

“There was a man from Southern Sudan.  He was walking through here to Kenya.  He got wounded.  His people left him and he had children.  That’s the Japadola story.”

Veronica buys a Yahmaha Mate

How to buy a Mate in in Uganda:

Wander around Tororo, and Kampala and asking who sells Mates

Take a cramped matatu to Mbarara

Wander around Mabarara asking about motorbiker dealerships

Find a dealership where they tell you that Mates are only sold in Kampala

Find a guy driving a Mate in Mbarara and ask him where he got it

Follow his directions through a street full of metal fabricators

Find an alcove of Mechanics and ask where you can buy a Mate 

First Days at Work

I came to the The Aubey School, where everything is covered in a fine white dust because it is located across the road from the cement factory.  I had spent the previous day walking through the village next to the school with Stella Maris, who at 21 has spent the last year organizing a collective of ten of the village’s most impoverished and marginalized women. Both of her parents died of AIDS. Stella was raised by her Uncle in this village, but won scholarships and attended boarding school until she completed the equivalent of high school.  She is now attending a certificate course part time and volunteering to train the women’s collective in nutrition and health care counseling.  She raps and sings as well. She loves Beyonce.

When I showed up at the school I expected, as I had been told, that I would take a tour of one of the gardens the School’s outreach arm had started in a local village.  Peter, who had been working for the organization for 10 years, Joseph, who teaches in the morning and does outreach in the afternoons, Stella and myself piled on to two motorbikes that wove between semitrucks headed in and out of the cement factory. Then we turned onto a dirt road lined with run down shops.  The shops quickly disappeared and we were on a long red dirt road that cut between deep green hills and was  populated by only our two bikes and the occasional child or pair of children, who come to the road from who-knows-where and were headed some place equally as remote.

We drove for a 1/2  hour, then we passed some goats and a stream where women were bathing and two boys were fishing.  We drove and we passed some children who just about lost their minds screaming, “Mzungu!” (white person) when they saw me.  We kept driving. 

Then we turned on to a smaller dirt road and huts began to appear. We drove another mile and I began to hear clapping, then women ululating. There were 20 or so of them seated beneath a tree with 40 or so children.  One woman stood as our bikes entered the village proper and began jumping as she started a call and response song.  The organization’s chairwoman shook my hand and inexplicably rubbed her face on my chest.  I was lead into a structure where I sat in the cool dark on a bench next to Stella for a bit, then I was told to come outside.  We were going to attend a meeting.

The woman and children were reassembled in the shade of the structure.  Six simple chairs, one of which I was directed to, formed a row in front of the assembly.  However, before I could sit, the simple chair was removed and replaced with a what, in comparison to the other chairs, looked like a throne – albeit made of unevenly cut and roughly sanded wood.  That was were I was to sit.

Peter, the Chairwoman, Joseph, the Village Treasurer, the Secretary all conducted a formal meeting, which I will refrain from describing in too much detail because I find it a bit hard to recount.  It was one of those experience which when you go through it you do what’s asked of you, and recalling it you either blush or shake your head and laugh or shake your head and sigh. 

Here are the highlights.  After introductions I was told to give a speech – a speech about what? I knew and still know next to nothing about the organization. Give a speech, something inspirational.  Okay.  I gave a speech.  Then villagers spoke.  Three women, as translated by the chairwoman, gave the same basic information.  Their husbands had died of AIDS, they didn’t have the resources to feed their children let alone the orphans of their brothers and sisters whom they were also raising, and whatsmore they were sick too.  The women asked, “What are you going to do about it?” 

As I later learned the outreach workers have a plan to help introduce poultry farming into the village and the villagers had submitted a budget, but the capital to start the project is non-existent. Peter’s answer to the women was long on words like unity and patience and short on details.  It did include this statement, “We have brought visitors to help. We have brought this white man.”  The meeting ended and the chair woman rubbed her face on my chest again.

First days at work are confusing. We loaded back on to our motorbikes and headed back out onto the long red dirt road.  Where was the garden I was supposed to see?  It’s hard to say.