Lions and Hippos, Masai! Oh My!

Masai Mara.


The bus lurched to a stop at around 2:30am. Lucky for me, the Mzungu Privilege had landed me a bus upgrade to ‘Royal’ and the front row seat behind the driver. I’d spent the last 6 hours in and out of sleep, listening to Rachel’s and trying not to touch anything. As this was one of two designated potty breaks I decided to venture out into what proved to be a really bad psychedelic trip. The parking lot of this rest stop was infested with the huge passenger buses that litter East Africa; the cheapest companies’ vehicles are painted neon purple or gangsta gold, some even rock a black light interior; their back windshields are tagged with phrases like, “Jesus Saves” or “Cream Team”. I stumbled bleary eyed and sleep deprived out into this reality and stepped in line with fifty other women to wait for the latrine (you think gas station toilets are bad?) There is some cultural defect here that renders lines inconsequential, people literally will just squeeze in front of you, and when you tap them on the shoulder and flash a ‘bitch please’ smile they just nod their head in submission and squeeze in front of the person behind you. I then proceeded to the…cafeteria? The peeling pink linoleum floor was lit by badly chosen orange bulbs that flickered and buzzed with each fist sized flying bug that landed on them. People were frantically stuffing themselves and their children with 20 shilling beef hunks and sausages while the sounds of crying babies and popping oil clung to the sticky walls. This was just the first few hours of my 10-day Kenyan extravaganza! HaHa…uhhhhh.

I spent the next few days in Watamu, a small beach town north of Mombassa that plays host to a strange Italian diaspora. I was able to dive my first day there; a twenty minute boat ride on a crowded little speedster teeming with hairy old Italian men and their young beautiful girlfriends took us to our first dive spot: the Deep Place. Not so deep after all, at 18 meters the slanted reef was home to dozens of live coral, trumpet fish, puffers, lionfish, angelfish, octopi and a 5-foot moray eel named George… I had pleasure of scratching George beneath his gaping dagger-toothed mouth, much like a kitty…the joys and quirks of the marine world. Dive two was a 16-meter reef called Caracas. To be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference between the two dives; in my experience the purpose of doing two dives is to illustrate the variety of sea life…not to emphasize the similarities…alas. In any case it was great to be in that place again, to begin the descent and have all the skills come back like riding a bike. I love the ocean. I was able to play stowaway on a special chartered snorkel trip on day two; the boat crew saw me snorkeling alone just off shore and pulled up. They were smoking a joint and invited me to tag along with them and the British family they were picking up at one of the ritzy all-inclusive resorts…could I say no? We were able to go in to the Watamu Marine Preserve and I spent two hours lazily following parrotfish and looking for shells; the family turned out to be a grown up brother and sister with their partners and parents. They snuck me into the Turtle Bay Resort with them afterwards and I gorged myself on coconut tilapia and ‘chocolate balls’, all washed down with the worst pina colada I’ve ever had. Good ole’ British hospitality.

Watamu.

During my stay in Watamu, I made three or four trips to this unbelievable authentic Gelatoria; hand made gelato, crepes, cappuccinos, juices…it was heaven, it made me second guess my pledge to go on a raw food diet once I get to New Zealand. I spent my last night on the coast in Mombasa at a nice hotel with a king bed, television and a balcony view of the traffic below. Some friends of friends took me out to a club on the outskirts of town where I attempted to get drunk but could really only think raging thoughts of all the gross white men picking up the young Kenyan prostitutes and the stage where black girls in leopard print thongs were workin’ it to the soundtrack of The Lion King…it was all a little too exploitive for me. It highlighted the consequences of a successful tourist industry in a developing country; anything for money money money. See, Uganda doesn’t know all those dirty tricks yet because tourism is still a new industry, I have a sinking feeling I may be in for a rude return to Uganda in a few years.

I took the 10-hour bus ride from Mombassa to Nairobi early Saturday morning and arrived Saturday night with the biggest Nairobi chip on my shoulder, “I know this is Nairobbery. Don’t you take advantage of me! Hey, stop looking at my purse! Oh yeah, is that really how much that chapatti is…you trying to cheat me?!” Everyone probably thought I was crazy, but it didn’t deter me from wearing my passport around my neck even while bunked up in my mzungu hotel for the night.

I left Sunday morning for my obligatory safari adventure.
Myself, Kat, a 25 year old Korean-American from SF trying to find herself, and Jef, our 43 year old chain-smoking Spanish-speaking Kenyan guide, drove the 5 hours through the Great Rift Valley to Masai Mara, one of the most notorious game parks in the world. We had three days of bumping around in our pop-top vanagon through the 2000 sq km reserve, seeking out lions, buffalo, giraffes, elephants, eagles, hippos, crocodiles and every kind of deer-like creature that’s ever roamed the African expanse.

"Geelaughs" -Jef
It was all good fun and if it weren’t for the ever-looming Masai tribesmen trying to cajole us into paying for a traditional dance or a traditional meal or a traditional hike or a traditional cell-phone cover…than it would have been the most relaxed I’ve been for months. On the way back Jef made us stop at the hotel we’d had lunch at on the way to the park, everyone who ate the meat that day (everyone but me) had had heinous diarrhea for days. He wanted to set them straight and demand a refund, telling them, “You know, we all been shitting like this (explosive hand motion). You see? I’m bringin a blanket to the damn toilet, I can’t sleep. Just shit, fuck, just shit.” Jef was a great guide, in the safari business for 17 years, two teenage daughters and a wife who ran off to Canada and hasn’t contacted him for three years; he wants to marry a new Christian and live in the stone house he’s going to build. Go Jef!
I decided to forgo a second night in Nairobi and upon return from Masai Mara I immediately hopped on the overnight bus back to Jinja. That was a terrible decision. Cold, smelly, sticky, crowded, loud and roads that seem to have just been craggy rock plains that were moderately worn down by the heavy traffic, but would still throw you into the seat back in front every 15 seconds if you weren’t properly braced with abdominal muscles engaged. Not to mention crossing the Kenyan-Ugandan border alone, on foot at 3:30 in the morning is probably not so advisable. But, eenyhoo…here I am. Alive, well; once again being overfed and under lockdown… back ‘home’ from my vacation from a vacation.

“I need you to disorganize your bones from this place!”

-Prefect at Lubani SS to disobedient hordes of students


‘The time has come,’ the walrus said.
‘To speak of many things.
Of children dressed in threadbare robes, of chai and tribal kings.
Of Nile ebbs and borehole flows, of cassava and maize.
Of Muslim women’s shrouded souls, of thick twelve hour days.’

Those who know my father know him as a character of many colors. An Irish-(ex)Catholic anchor dressed in tie-dye, ever accompanied by Conyers, Labradors, children and the like. He wears flowers, sausage-finger-stuffed between his Giants cap and his slowly salting bear-hair. A ball player to the death, he gardens obsessively, curses like a sailor and has a metal knee. Woven within the snags and stitches of his being is a turbulent heart, unconditional, uncontainable and unavoidable; his love is like an electric storm. That heart sent two boxes and forty pounds of fun to Uganda…I got to be the messenger.

Don’t think small-scale here. My dad doesn’t send things like pocket encyclopedias or scrabble. A P.E. teacher, it appears he broke into his own office and robbed himself. Soccer, football, baseball (balls, mitt and bat): check. Frisbee, tennis, volleyball: check. Squishies, bouncies, twirlies, stickies, floaties, squares and circles, pinks and blues, the classic and the inconceivable. In addition, he took the liberty of funding a small Bay Area school construction project by single-handedly buying out an elementary school’s “Cheap Foam Shit Craft Fair”; I also received the orange and beaded fruits of that labor.

The last two evenings at sowa ikumi (4 o’clock), tuzana mu (we played at) Kyabirwa Primary School. With a turn out of about one hundred beaming pre-teens (and shady older thuggish characters) each round, I can safely say…well, it’s been quite a trip. Beautiful and carefree, violent and indulgent, chaotic and peaceful, tears, laughter, nausea and vomiting…we accommodate the whole gamut of the human sensory experience over here. As the only playthings (well, playthings designed expressly for the purpose of play) for miles, the distribution of these priceless goods has been a harrowing trial, a testament to the patience and durability I’ve acquired these last few months.


Teaching how to pump the balls.

I spent last night wrapping the craft fair goods, a few finger boards, hackey sacs, bracelets, purses and one plastic giraffe, pony, lion, dinosaur (an animal family not taught in Ugandan schools, they think it’s a chameleon), tiger and elephant. I secured the gifts between pages of the outdated Daily Monitor and New Vision news bulletins and tied them off with green clothesline. Scrolled across the front were the names of the kids in my compound, the creatures who have taken me in regardless of how my skin sits and whose hearts I’ve taken to like sunsets on the African horizon. Becca, Laticia, Joel, Paulo, Emma, Sharif, Magda, Ronald, Nomatovu, Julie, Hanifah, Ashrof, Zaki, Milly, Aliza and of course, my one and only, my Jamali.

I tiptoed out through the front door around dawn, carefully dislodging the nails that keep the door closed. Unloading my backpack stuffed with newsprint colored treasures, I arranged them at the base of a jackfruit tree, Christmas tree…jackfruit tree…whatever. It made me feel like how my dad must feel every time he and my mom did stuff like this for Tyler and I. Ceaselessly surprising us, a bicycle hanging precariously half-way out our chimney (Santa couldn’t fit it down), a geodesic explosion ball secured secretly above our sleeping heads, scavenger hunts, rhymes, half eaten Christmas cookies at the fireplace…them always playing dumb till the end. It feels great.



Word spreads fast in the village, by mid-morning the crowd around the gifts was in full force, curiously observing, sounding out names, holding the gifts to the sun and trying to get a closer look at their innards. I told them, ‘No, I don’t know where they came from, but we can open them at sowa musanvu…one o’clock.’ I spent the morning packing, consolidating, trashing, donating. A few curious kids peered through my window, the same way they had the day I’d arrived. Unpacking and packing both lend themselves nicely to kids looking to look at my things. A gave one boy some post-its, a handful of zip ties to Casseva, a neighbor girl.

Meanwhile, outside, tension was mounting. This one doesn’t have a package with his name, Becca has two gifts, where was the football, why Zaki and not me? It was disappointing, a little heart wrenching, but most of the whiners I’d never seen before so the guilt factor was kept to a minimum. At one I headed outside. I asked Becca to play Santa and distribute the gifts. I knew something was off-kilter the second I started walking towards our make-shift Christmas tree… I just bit my lips, pressed my palms together, “I’m not crying in front of them, I wont.” Half the gifts were gone, stolen; whisked away in broad daylight and stifling heat. Most of the girls received their purses and pencils, but the boys’ pot had been raided. Jamali started to cry and took off towards the plantains. I walked inside slowly, couldn’t bring myself to take any photographs of this, couldn’t bring myself to struggle through my peanut-brittle Lusoga and attempt to communicate the injustice that had been done. Fingers were pointed, names were insinuated; I pulled down my curtain and cried. I should add also that this follows a series of dishonest events surrounding these packages. The day they arrived, my host family stole some of the balls from my room while I was out, I caught my host mother attempting to smuggle the purses away in her pockets, kids were putting the tennis balls in their trousers, rolling balls into bushes to come claim later…As everyone at home continuously reminds me, ‘You can’t blame them.” I guess not.

I caught up with Jamali later. He was wiping snot on his shirtsleeve and b-lining it to Casseva’s place, he knew it was her. We reached her compound. She was frying potatoes in a mud hut and her two younger siblings were peeling cassava inwards, knife blades facing towards their toddler soft bellies. I lost a little a bit, ‘Was it you? Did you steal them? Where are they?’ She almost cried, looked down, ‘Ah-ah, no.’ She looked towards Jamali like he could help her, he just stared towards her with his dark charcoal eyes. She ruffled through the cooking things in the corner of the hut and guiltily removed something. She held out her small coffee colored hand and revealed the six yellow zip ties I’d handed her earlier. ‘Bambi,’ she said, ‘Sorry.’ My very rare motherly instinct lurched, what am I?
I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to go, so I got gone. And now I’m here. Sitting by the Nile. Thinking cloudy thoughts of a flight in 16 hours.

Being here, you’re constantly faced with the dichotomy of the third world. Her endless generosity and overwhelming expectations for heightened reciprocation. Her poverty and riches. Her dismissal of the haves and her distaste towards being a have-not. The innocence of Uganda’s children will always be shrouded by their upheaval into adulthood; its babies raising babies around here and it makes me weary. At times it’s battered me down into apathy, at times it’s lifted my soul to a state of unconditional compassion and nurturing; both are feelings that circulate in me now.
I don’t feel capable of sizing up this experience. Of tacking it with numbers and calculated conclusions. Uganda is messy beautiful, a bit like me sometimes. There is a purity here, a silent undercurrent of love and resilience that penetrates the dishonest business, the corrupt authorities and the poor education, that drills through the rubbish lined avenues and reverberates in the bellies and mouths of these children.
All I have right now is that I am unspeakably grateful for this experience. I am unspeakably hopeful about Uganda’s future.

Thanks and love to those who have given me so much support; those who have kept away tears and brought on fits of familiar laughter, I am forever indebted.

Gettin' Gone

The green expanse back dropped by the cement-feathered sky made me cry today. Or at least I think it did. It could have been the wind, the dust maybe, or perhaps it’s that I’m leaving soon. The latter is a thought I’ve failed to give much attention. Being here has demanded so much of me I haven’t had a lot of time to dwell on not being here. But ‘not being here’ it comes.
It’s coming like winter in California. A sneaky sort of occasion marked by slowly bared sycamores and the end of pomegranates. By a homogenization of domes dinners (you begin to notice when every night is ‘butternut squash and potato soup night’) and by the charcoaling of the western sky from the four pm flight of the crows. It’s slow and quiet, terribly tragic and hopelessly romantic all at once. I guess leaving Uganda feels something like this, if it has to feel like something, this’ll do.

My story has laid itself out in a way that makes me feel simultaneously like I’ve been here for bloodlines and like I’ve just arrived. One of the clichéd ironies of moving to a new place is that just as one’s getting settled, just as I’m feeling home and comfortable and ready to throw my cares to the wind and explore…its time to go. Time to board a plane and eat mini pretzels and force myself not to think of what I’ve left. The landscape that could stop hearts, my village made of sticks, bricks and mud and containing nothing but molten gold open arms and smiles beaming equatorial sunshine, and the kids…these damn kids. When I leave, who’s gonna take on the role of 100 children screaming, “Shanoni! Shanoni! How are yoo? I em fyne. Byee! Byee!” everyday on my walk to and from the clinic…who?


I’m not gonna worry myself over it too bad yet. After all I still have 17 days and 3 hours left on the continent. That’s a fair piece of time to enjoy, to listen, to learn, to love. And …I can always comfort myself in knowing I only have 30 more months of university before I can come back.