“Lugbara is not a written language,” our tutor told me whenever I asked how to write something so I could review it later. It apparently was not a language that had rules or bothersome syntax either.
In addition to learning how to handle the ubiquitous demands for money, I had managed to learn enough to make my way through the market. And John managed to learn how to say “hello.”
What John lacked in language-acquisition skills he more than made up for with his ability to assimilate. With more than six feet of pale skin and a bright red beard, John was easily the whitest man in Africa. Yet, he believed that no one actually noticed this. Wherever he went, he behaved as if he belonged and people treated him as if he did. Not me. I knew I was the short, white center of attention wherever I went. But being the limelight-loving Leo that I was (and harboring the secret belief that I was Marilyn Monroe's reincarnation since I was born the day after she died), I usually didn't mind the attention.
Still, I was afraid that I'd be a distraction at the nutrition class in the village of Nicu, where I was headed with two of John's colleagues. Our safari down south had taught me that you could not be a mzungu fly on the wall. Wherever we went, John and I had received a gracious welcome, an obvious seat of honor up front, and a request to say a few words on the topic at hand. This was kind of fun at first, making us feel appreciated. But it got pretty tiresome once we figured out that they weren't asking us to speak because they thought we had something intelligent to say. It was simply about the color of our skin.
But since this was a health presentation to a women's club, I thought that maybe I could add something useful to the discussion. At least I hoped that I wouldn't be too disruptive. Besides, now that Aisha was cleaning my house, sort of, in between coughing jags and intense fatigue, I needed something to do.
The women's club meeting was scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m. But John's colleagues, Susan and Patience, assured me that these things never begin on time. I had already noticed that in Uganda, nothing begins on time. At 10:00 a.m., we got into the CARE Land Cruiser and began the eleven-kilometer drive. The distance was short but the condition of the dirt road, even on this clear and dry morning, ensured at least a half-hour trip. Looking through the window at the anthills and acacia trees, I wouldn't have been surprised to see a giraffe or a lioness grazing in the distance.
I was amazed that my fellow travelers seemed to be carrying on a conversation. I was hard-pressed to make out anything with the jolting and banging of the vehicle over the holes, dips, and rocks in the road. Over the road noises, I couldn't tell if they were speaking heavily accented English—which they might have spoken for my benefit—or their native Lugbara. So I concentrated on the view: compounds of thatched-roofed huts, called paillotes, rimmed with brilliant flowers. A barefoot and bare-breasted procession of women wearing brightly colored skirts, carrying enormous loads of wood, charcoal, and fruit on their heads, most with babies wrapped tightly to their backs. Young girls with bright yellow plastic jerry cans or clay bowls on their heads and water splashing onto their shoulders. I looked ahead at the goats, chickens, and cows that wandered onto the road—like they wandered everywhere in Arua—hoping my unerring watchfulness would somehow keep them out of our path.
At 10:40 a.m. we rolled into the center of Nicu, which was basically a well-worn intersection of two dirt roads with a few covered stalls selling sugarcane. We passed the village meeting place, an arching ficus tree whose broad leafy branches provided a cool, shaded area in the surrounding grass. It was empty except for two grazing goats and the playful squeals of the young girls filling their jerry cans at the nearby hand-pumped well, or borehole. We parked our vehicle and got out.
“Now, how will everyone know it's time for class?” I asked Susan and Patience.
“We will just wait here. They will notice us.” And sure enough, within minutes it seemed like the entire village stopped what they were doing and began to gather under the ficus tree.
Someone brought a small wooden bench out of a market stall for Susan, Patience, and me to sit on. The villagers began to seat themselves on the ground, forming a circle around us—women and infants on one side, men on the other side. While the adults slowly assembled, a small group of children gathered quickly behind our bench. They jostled and pushed each other to get close to us.
“How are you?” a small, high-pitched voice chirped in the very formal, stilted English that Ugandans used.
“I am fine,” I answered. “How are you?” The entire group of children fell into a mass of giggles.
“I am fine. How are you?” chimed a second, bolder voice.
“I am fine,” I dutifully replied. “How are you?”
“I am fine. How are you?” a third voice followed.
Getting a little bored with your game is what I wanted to say. “I am fine. How are you?” is what I did say. And in this way, the game continued until each child had gotten to ask the question and had received an answer.
When Susan and Patience felt that enough adults had gathered, they began the session. I was still struck by the irony of a man standing up and introducing himself as the chair of the women's group, although I'd already seen that kind of thing several times. But it was common for men to hold most of the positions of authority in rural Uganda, even though, from what I could tell, women did the bulk of the work.
The assembled group stood and sang the national anthem and bowed their heads while an elder intoned a prayer. The formality of the whole thing struck me as odd, seeing as how I was sitting among bare-breasted women under a tree in the dirt. Susan, Patience, and I duly rose as the chairman introduced each of us. Finally, Susan began, in seamless Lugbara, to explain the basic concepts of nutrition.
Despite Patience's translation into English, I quickly became bored. Susan talked about the different food groups and I checked my watch. Since the topic was food, I thought about what I would make for lunch. Even with my comparatively luxurious kitchen, meal preparation was still a major preoccupation for me. I could have asked Aisha to prepare our food, I suppose. After all, I knew I didn't have to worry about contracting HIV in this way. But I was starting to get concerned about catching tuberculosis, which I was now pretty sure she also had.
In addition to John and me, I was now making lunch for Aisha and anyone else who was working in our compound at lunchtime. I usually made supper for the two of us, and often, Adam, who was still staying in the guesthouse, still waiting for his family to arrive from Gulu. He had been waiting for close to two months, but waiting seemed to be a way of life for Ugandans. And it seemed fairly common for a husband to be off working in one part of the country, while the wife stayed with the children elsewhere. With his great sense of humor and wealth of stories about Uganda, I never minded having Adam over for dinner. Plus, he was always willing to try everything I cooked—even if it wasn't the Ugandan staple dish, matoke. “You had better take a photo of this, Eve,” he told me one night when he was helping John clean up after supper. “I do not think you will see many Ugandan men washing dishes.”
So I was doing a lot of cooking and shopping. Because we were so far from any major towns and because there was no refrigeration in any of the shops in Arua, our diet was pretty much made up of what was grown locally. So far that had meant a lot of tomatoes. On any given day, at least a dozen women hawked improbably high piles of bright red tomatoes. I'd asked around for green ones so I could experiment with making fried green tomatoes (someone had sent us the movie) and word spread. Now several of the tomato ladies proudly kept aside a pile of green ones just for me and I felt compelled to buy them all, and thus we also ate a lot of green tomato experiments.
When we had first arrived I'd been thrilled to see all the mangoes. They were piled high in the market stalls and dripping from trees in our yard. We greedily ate them tart and green early in the season, and sweet and soft later on. We also cooked them into sauces, made mango mousse and ice cream with a hand-cranked ice-cream churner that go
t passed among the expats. Then we made huge vats of mango chutney and ate that on everything. Then we got bored with mangoes.
Of course, there were the old reliable potatoes, rice (without stones, now that I had Aisha to clean it), okra, and the ubiquitous, starchy matoke, which looked like a large, dark banana. It was deceivingly difficult to prepare. You had to score and then peel the tough skin in an arduous operation guaranteed to turn your fingers black. Then you had to boil it, mash it, and serve it covered in sauce to give it flavor. Its main appeal, as far as I could tell, was that it expanded to fill your stomach. It certainly didn't have much taste.
As Susan continued her lecture, I perked up when I heard Lugbara words that I recognized: au gbe: egg; nyanya: tomato; osu: beans; lesu: milk. But I was relieved when Susan finally finished her lecture. I was hungry and anxious to get home to lunch. But we wouldn't be leaving just yet. After the lecture came time for questions and answers, and as I had already learned in Uganda, there were always lots of questions.
The typical way of teaching in Uganda is pretty standard. Teachers lecture and students listen. The strict hierarchy of Ugandan society and its almost cloying politeness rule out the possibility of open exchange in a classroom setting. So the question-and-answer period, which provides the only opportunity for discussion, tends to go on forever.
“To which food group do grasshoppers belong?” asked one woman. I scratched my head but couldn't remember learning that in public health school.
“Grasshoppers are protein,” Susan explained. “But you must be careful not to eat the poisonous ones that leave the holes in your laundry.” And right then and there, I vowed never to eat those Darth Vader–looking grasshoppers that swirled around and then landed on my clothesline.
“Why do fried termites upset my stomach?” asked an old woman. Now I was pretty sure I could hazard a guess, but I let Susan answer.
“Even too much of a good thing can give you an upset stomach,” Susan warned. And everyone nodded as if they had all had more than their fill of the treat they called “African Buffalo.” Everyone but me, it seemed.
Then, when it seemed that all questions had been answered, came one from an ancient gentleman on my left. I was quite surprised when he stood up and addressed me.
“Madam,” it was translated by the chairman, “you have been kind enough to come here today to join us. All this time you have listened to us. But we have yet to hear your voice. Would you be so kind as to let us hear the voice of the mzungu?”
All of his neighbors enthusiastically began nodding their heads and clapping their hands as if he had finally asked the one question that had been burning inside all of them. It was the grown-ups' version of the game the children had been playing with me earlier. They just wanted to hear the voice of the mzungu.
“Mingoni,” I said in greeting as I stood up, slightly embarrassed. Great white smiles and warm laughter spread among the group. They clapped and all started talking at once.
“They are happy to know that you speak Lugbara,” Patience translated. “They want to know what else you can say in their language.”
“Ife mani sende?” I ventured, not knowing if it was appropriate. But let's face it, it was the sentence I knew the best.
The group erupted in great waves of laughter and clapping. Not knowing much more, I continued with the only other words that I knew. “Au gbe, nyanya,” I told them, thinking hungrily of what I would have for lunch. “Osu, lesu!”
The cheering and clapping continued as I quickly exhausted my shopping list—and my vocabulary. But I smiled as I stood there speechless.
“Well,” said the old man who had asked the question. “It is good to know that even for mzungus, food is the universal language!”
Dear Mom,
Well, I'm still not working—unless you consider baking bread and shelling peas and that sort of thing working.
Yesterday I was out in the garden with James. (I know, it's autumn where you are. But here it's eternally summer.) And as if it's not weird enough having someone to help me in the garden, I also have someone to fetch me tea! Aisha sets up a lovely table on the verandah and I invite James to join me for a cup of tea. Well, if his skin weren't brown, I'm sure he'd be blushing twelve shades of red. Apparently, mzungu are not supposed to invite the “help” for tea! James made himself a cup of tea but wouldn't sit down to drink it. Finally, he asked, “May I go somewhere to sit and drink my tea, madam?” (“Madam” is my new name.) I told him he could sit wherever he liked and offered him the empty chair next to mine. “Oh, no, I couldn't sit there, madam,” he says. “That is Mr. John's chair!”
Did I tell you about all the expats in the neighborhood? I'm making friends! In addition to Pauline (who has taken me under her wing and is determined to help me survive here), I now have a Dutch friend named Coby. She also followed her husband here (he works for a Dutch organization) and she's also desperately looking for a job. And they have a two-year-old son. In fact, there are four expatriate families with kids here. And the three Italian M.D.'s—one is an OB/GYN—who live on our road. And the consensus is that it is perfectly safe to be pregnant here, and even to deliver in a pinch. In fact, they all say it's the best place to raise kids. So, I just wanted to let you know that John and I are thinking about it.
I'll keep you posted,
Eve
Scaredy Cat
The blast made us all drop our forks and made the needle on the Johnny Mathis album skip. Good food; old music: We were having dinner at Pauline and Terry's house.
“What the bloody hell was that?” yelled John Hatchard. I thought he sounded more like a Liverpool docker than a project manager. But with his Ugandan wife and his years of living in Africa, he was as much African as British now. “That nearly blew my bloody arse off!”
We all looked out the window toward where the blast had come from and saw nothing unusual.
“I'll see if I can raise anyone on the radio,” Terry said, heading outside to his Land Rover. All CARE vehicles had two-way radios, our main means of communication since we had no telephones. Shortly after we'd arrived, we'd each chosen a radio handle. John was “Burkinabe”—a native of Burkina Faso—and I was “Scaredy Cat,” because, well, that's how I felt much of the time.
A few minutes later he came back. “The guards at the office think it sounded like a hand grenade somewhere near the roundabout. Best for us to just stay close to home for the night.”
“Got any more beer?” Hatchard asked as he continued eating.
“Hatch! You think you should drink beer if the town is being attacked?” his wife, Anna, asked.
“What else should we do? Could get bloody killed. This is Africa, my dear. Might as well have a good time.”
“Shouldn't we try to find out what's going on?” John asked.
“Nothing we can do now,” Terry said. “We'll sort it all out in the morning.”
“How do we find out what's going on around here? Read about it in The New Vision?” I asked.
Hatchard snorted. “That rag comes out of Kampala. They don't give a rat's arse about what's going on up here. The only thing that newspaper's good for is wrapping fish in.”
The newspaper did seem to be more interested in reporting giant rodent sightings than the instability in our region. But we had the local grapevine, which was already abuzz by the time we returned to our compound that evening.
“It seems like something happened at the White Rhino Hotel,” Busiya said, putting out his cigarette and jabbing his finger in the direction of the hotel compound just a few hundred yards from our own. At least that's what I thought he said. Busiya didn't speak much English, which never stopped me from lecturing him about the hazards of smoking.
“What kind of something? Terry and Pauline's whole house shook and they're even farther from the White Rhino than we are.”
“Maybe it was a bomb,” Adam said.
“A bomb?” I was stunned.
“Probably just a small bomb,
” he added. “Probably Kony rebels. These things happen all the time where I am from.” The Gulu region to the east of us was under nearly constant attack from a band of guerrillas under the leadership of rebel fighter Joseph Kony. In addition to bombings and hijackings, these rebels generally terrorized communities by reportedly hacking off the ears, noses, and lips of their victims.
“Oh, I'm sure it wasn't a bomb,” John said. “Let's just go inside. I'm sure we'll find out in the morning that it was nothing.”
“Yes, probably not a bomb at all,” Adam said. He was smiling as he always was. “Maybe just a hand grenade.”
“Adam! It's not a coincidence that my radio name is ‘Scaredy Cat,’” I told him. “I worry!”
“Well, there is no point in worrying. Things happen here. That is what? That is life here. Just get on with it.” It was one of Adam's favorite sayings.
The rest of the night was quiet, although that didn't stop me from tossing and turning. I tried to convince myself that it was good that Busiya was filling in for Nasser. He knew how to use his spear for more than just banging it ceremoniously on the ground to announce visitors; one night he presented me with a giant bush rat skewered cleanly on the end of it. I declined his offering and he took it home for his wife to cook for supper.
“Someone threw a hand grenade over the fence into the White Rhino Hotel,” James told us the next morning.
“A mzungu was killed and many others were taken to hospital,” James's wife added.
“Was it anyone we know?” I asked.
“No, there was a group of European tourists staying at the hotel.”
I didn't know which was more shocking: A bombing around the corner from my house or the fact that there were actual tourists in Arua.
“People are saying it is the Kony rebels. That they are now attacking tourists,” James said. Up until then they tended to attack villages that refused to cooperate with their campaign to destabilize the government or, inexplicably, women who rode bicycles. “And they are saying that there will be more violence to come in Arua.”
First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria Page 14
