At the market that morning, there was nothing special for sale. It was Goodwill in the shape of a shoe horn along the lake. Fourth-hand dresses and Old Navy sweatshirts and shiny department store shoes minus the box on blankets. Frowning vendors sold tough-skinned tomatoes. Very occasionally a car would roll by entirely too fast and send dust into everyone’s eyes and nostrils. At the waterside were uneven rows–dozens of faded blue, green and magenta dug out canoes atop Lake Bunyonyi. It was part of everyone’s commute. They sat parked, empty, humming to themselves between the reeds and up against the shore. The rafia once wound tightly around their owner’s goods had now fallen away creating an accidental crow’s nest in each cradled space.
Monthly Archive for September, 2008
Gotta love this shot of Michael up top–a satisfied smirk on his face as a Boticelli-like chic dreamweaves into the air and a drunk Londoner gives a giggle. They almost look superimposed.
There they were. A barn full of Ugandan twelve year olds in thin white shirts and bright purple bottoms, staring at me, the teacher, the white, the female extra terrestrial at the blackboard. Sunlight slipped through the rafters playing hopscotch on sixty five furry heads.
We had come to Lake Nkuruba spontaneously at the suggestion of a fellow mzungu at the Internet café in Fort Portal. I don’t even know his name. It’s amazing how comfortable I’d become in a thatch-roof hut that smelled like hay. With the pit latrine at the bottom of the hill and a bucket shower with four walls of bamboo. But I guess the bright blue, wooden barn windows made me feel a little like Gretel. There was something blurry and soft about the air an hour before daybreak when I always had to pee. Marijuana grew just down the hill at the foot of the trail, a dark and dense forest where trees were covered in a medussa-like bramble and vines created a monkey wonderland. There were ants as big as your fingernail. Birds most often seen in a book. When black and white colobus monkeys are using your house as a jungle gym, how can you complain?
Do you like the dark?
I’m not really a fan. I prefer a light switch, even if I don’t need one. Africa doesn’t have a switch. Often, its only teeth enamel and eye-whites which light the way along the lane as they sell fish, walk home, feed a baby or haul their harvest.
We’ve had no choice but to do the same. In Nairobi, which is infamous for crime, we walked in our own kind of dark into a scary slum, searching for a hostel which turned out to be more of a rooming house. In the village, it was along the red, grooved roads with faint stars overhead, lowing cattle at our sides and pinching ants underfoot. At Lake Naivasha, along the shoulders of a national park the half-kilometer back to camp. In Kisumu, it was around the Jomo Market where kerosene flames exposed our ruffled feathers and their dry fish heads.
But still. I wasn’t exactly comfortable yet. In fact, I’d been stockpiling escape routes as if a twister was on the way, taking refuge in cyber cafes, Western-style restaurants and ATM kiosks since we’d landed in Africa. The darkness. The blended expressions of wonder, desperation and apathy. The eyebrow arches of acknowledgement. We were a minority all through the Middle East, too. But something was different.
We started this trip with two cameras. We now have none.
Yes, the whole stolen thing really sucked. So did the day-long police report experience. There was disbelief, devastation and denial. But there was, eventually, a solemn belief in the idea that this didn’t mean the world was bad, just that two people were bad. We had to move on. To do that, we engaged in a little exercise.
Why do we take travel photos anyway?
Answer One: To show others what adventurous, well-traveled individuals we are. To decorate our home with our excellent photography (so we can show others what adventurous, well-traveled individuals we are.) To color our blogs, (so we can show others what adventurous, well-traveled individuals we are.)
But this preoccupation with proof for others is no good. Who are you living for? You or your dinner party guests?
Answer Two: It’s about us! We want to be reminded later in life about all the exotic places we’ve been. Every action-packed moment. Each tri-textured vista.
I understand. But think about it.
We’re in a kitchen again. The most basic of African diners. Her name is Miriam. It was eggs and avocados by Grace in Lake Naivasha. Chapatti and beans by the team at the YWCA in Kisumu. Cabbage, potatoes and blue lantern-light at Mamma Joyce’s in Bujagali Falls. Their food leaves us content, regular and calm. We sit facing outward. The man in front of us–I can’t see his hands—I can barely make out his face. He could be massaging someone’s back, making a pie or gutting fish. But I know he is rolling our chapatti—a kind of homemade tortilla-pancake. The whole cow’s milk has become a soft silk bedspread above my tin cup of tea. A breeze I cannot feel threatens the candle, which is stuck to the white plastic patio table with wax. On the other side of the metal cage window, fluorescent strips light the space between sunset and dark in this ghetto enclave of local chores. Women pick tiny rocks from sacks of rice and fry fish in oil. Men carry gas-gallon containers of water on their heads across the plywood-bridged sewer canals. A black cat slides into a wheelbarrow of scraps. Around them is a mishmash of sticks, poles, two-by-fours, sheets of wavy tin, cement blocks and plywood bridges across sewer canals.
Michael says, there is an inverse relationship between the amount of money you spend and the richness of your experience.
The Pacific Hotel was sort of in the ghetto. I mean, it was.
Continue reading ‘Pringles, Ghetto Kitchens and Bittersweet Red Chilis’
The soft spongey skin beneath my nails are rimmed with blue paint and there is a spot above my breast, too. It’s from today. We painted a pit latrine at a school for orphans as volunteers for SoftPower Education. It will not be the last bit of blue to stain my body. I felt brighter. Like I belonged a little more to this continent.
Ah, this continent. It’s probably like having a baby. When it happens to you, no matter how much you’ve read, it feels like its never happened quite like this to anyone else on the planet. These people embody the nostalgia of nursery rhymes as they head up the hill to fetch a pail of water. They move like a prayer, soft and slowly down the most natural lanes of life.
Do you have Coke in America? They ask.
What about cows? Stars?
And with these questions, my understanding of their edges gets a little deeper. The turtle dove is coo-cooing and the women are laboring and the men are idle. The babies are naked and the toddlers are snotty (literally) and the children’s faces are filled with bits of sugarcane. Their pleated skirts and pointy collars and school-issue sweaters try so hard to be proper, but it’s no use. Missing zippers, frayed at their edges. . .
