I try again

Sorry for the delay. No electricity, no internet, plenty of frustration. Hike out to internet cafes only to get timed out or no connection. Anyway, after going about 60 hours without sleep (sorry, can’t sleep on a plane), landing in Entebbe, driving to Kampala (there’s a city you don’t need to visit), we finally make it to a hostel. Of course that‘s not to sleep. The director of the operation has determined that both we and the program will be better served if we stay awake until night, an attempt to jump start our sleep rhythms to Gulu time. I struggle to stay awake as we head out to dinner to an Indian restaurant. While at the table I fall out at least 20 times, only for a second or two. I am pretty confident no one catches my short--all too short--catnaps.

We place our order and wait…and wait…and wait…. Even though we are the only table, it takes 2 hours for the food to arrive. When I ask when we might be able to expect it to land on the table, I am told in a phrase I will learn to dread, “Welcome to Africa,” a catch-all for anything that doesn’t work. We don’t finish the meal until 11:00, at which point I am not sure I’ll survive my first day, let alone 7 weeks.
Next day, up at 8:00, and it’s 14 of us piled into a bus off to Gulu-—a 6 hour drive.

Every where I go I am met with the same question, “How do you find Africa.” I have no answer. I fell like I have not been in Africa; I have been traveling. I’ve been in buses, airports, planes, but this thing called Africa is still out there waiting for me. (Check that. There are some things that I’ve noticed: the birds are huge, exotic--not blue jays, the noise-makers in the trees are monkeys and baboons not squirrels.)

One thing I must mention is the traffic. I am convinced that very few NYC cabbies could survive here. The streets, mostly dirt, are populated with boda-bodas, little 100cc motorcycles. The equivalent of taxis, you hop on the back and they take off ignoring lanes, cars, buses, other boda-bodas. They drive up on the edge, into the gutter, the wrong way, they bob and weave like motorized versions of Barry Sanders. I see some of these little vehicles with 4 full grown men on them. Women wearing skirts must, because of modesty, ride side saddle. Forget traffic lights or stop signs: No such animals. The rule of the road is, “The bigger vehicle has the right of way.” So, get off or get dumped. The other difference re traffic, a positive one, is the complete lack of road rage. For some reason this chaos all seems to work. It makes me incredible uneasy, the thought that I will have to ride on the back of one of these every day, to and from school, is unsettling, but I have to admit, it works.

The long ride to Gulu takes us past the Nile, swollen from the recent rains, tumbling rapids—rapids that I will soon try. Along the side of the road are baboons. The males are huge, equipped with long teeth and lion’s manes they are very imposing. As we approach a family, the driver feigns running them over. The male steps out challenging the bus to a game of chicken, the driver laughs and pulls off and the baboon, triumphant, chases us down the road screeching his victory.
There follows the tale from the driver about his most recent trip, in a mutate, a smaller bus, with 8 passengers….he hit a hippo. The hippo walked away. I imagine some metaphor to what has taken place recently here can be drawn, to the ability of these people to survive the every day turmoil that makes up their lives, but I’ll leave that up to you