“Oh, these packages are not here,” he said when I presented him my slips. “You have to go to the post office to get these.”
“But I was just at the post office,” I reported. “And they sent me to you to get my packages.”
“No, no. The packages are in the post office.”
“Then why did the post office send me here?” I asked.
“Because I am the customs officer.” He popped a handful of groundnuts into his mouth.
“How do I get my packages?” I pleaded.
“Oh, you want your packages! Well, then I have to go with you to the post office to look at your packages, assess the customs tax, collect it, and affix my stamp on your receipt. Then you can have your packages.”
“Okay, then,” I said, enthusiastically enough, I hoped, for both of us. “Let's go to the post office.”
“Oh, no,” he said, pointing to his watch. “We cannot go now. The post office is closed.”
“The post office is open,” I said. “I just came from there.”
“Yes … umm … but by the time we get there it will be closed,” he said. I looked at my watch. It was 4:42.
“Look,” I said, “we have eighteen minutes before the post office closes. We can make it.”
“Okay.” He stood up grudgingly. “Where is your vehicle?”
“I don't have a vehicle. We'll have to walk.”
“Oh, no vehicle.” He sat back down. “We will never get there in time.”
“We can easily make it, it's just around the corner and down the street.” And then I remembered all the time I had spent drinking tea and eating groundnuts with the district health educator in his office, never going to schools because he wouldn't walk. Farmers, merchants, and laborers regularly walked for miles and never complained. But once people got into a position of power in Uganda, they refused to walk. So how did things get done with so few vehicles and so many people averse to walking? Well, many times, they didn't. And so I was sure I would never get my packages and began to imagine my once-glorious packages decaying in some forgotten corner of the post office, the cardboard dust blending in with the red dirt of Uganda.
The customs officer drained his teacup. “Well, let us go then.” He stood. As we turned onto the main road, I flagged down a passing CARE vehicle with Adam at the wheel.
“Hello there, Eve. How are you? And where is my little friend Ascienju?”
“Adam! I am fine. The baby is at home. I am just trying to get my packages from the post office. This is the customs officer.”
“Yes, I know this fellow. We went to school together. How are you? How is the family?”
“Oh, Adam. Good to see you. We are all fine. Fine.” We got into Adam's vehicle.
“So I see you have met what?” Adam asked the officer. “You have met my good friend Eve. Adam and Eve! Don't you just love that? I work with Eve's husband, John. A good, good man.”
Adam dropped us at the post office, hurrying home to catch BBC's daily wrap-up of the OJ Simpson trial, Adam's latest American fascination. I presented my slips, fees, and the customs officer to the clerk. He went off to the back room and returned with two huge boxes.
“I'll bet those are my daughter's Christmas presents,” I said, knowing he'd have no idea what Hanukkah was.
The customs officer looked severely at the boxes.
“My husband works with your friend Adam at CARE. Do you know about CARE? They're doing so much to help the people of Uganda. We love Uganda. We've lived here for a year and a half now. Beautiful country. Did you know that CARE is tax-exempt?” I hadn't come all this way to go home empty-handed.
The customs officer read the customs slip pasted onto the outside of each box. Ten pieces of baby clothes it said on one; twelve stuffed animals it said on the other. Holiday presents from my father.
“It's for my daughter. Ascienju,” I stammered.
“Your daughter is a mzungu?” he asked.
Who else but a mzungu baby would get ten pieces of clothing and twelve stuffed animals for Christmas or Hanukkah? “Yes,” I said.
“Where did she get such a beautiful African name?” he asked.
“Oh, my husband—and Adam—did some work in the village of Cilio, and the people there made her a traditional naming ceremony.”
“Ascienju,” he said slowly. “It means peaceful heart.”
“Pissy-full heart” was how the children of Cilio had pronounced it. But who was I to argue?
“I love babies,” the customs officer said. He stamped the slips and handed them back to me.
“So, what do I have to pay?” I asked nervously.
“Nothing,” he said. “Tell Ascienju ‘Happy Christmas’ from me.”
I couldn't help but wonder if he had noticed that it was February.
Dear Dad,
Sierra says thank you for all the goodies you sent her, which just recently arrived. (Of course, it sounds like “baaaa!!!!” when Sierra says it.) I can't believe I never filled you in on your granddaughter's first big holiday adventure in Kenya and Tanzania. It was a great vacation, but traveling with a six-month-old through East Africa is not the carefree getaway you might imagine. But, of course, you haven't really experienced the joy of parenthood until you've schlepped a poopy baby, a car seat, and a porta-crib through the steamy streets of Dar Es Salaam. After the longest day in history—which included three flights, one rental car, and a ferry ride—we arrived in Mombasa, where we relaxed and enjoyed Christmas in a lovely cottage on a beautiful beach. The beach was unspoiled and fairly empty (perhaps the three plane rides, rental car, and ferry ride are keeping tourists away), yet just a twentyminute drive from a town that had everything.
After Mombasa, we headed to Zanzibar, which really has its own distinct flavor (lobster, shrimp, and coconut), language (Swahili), and customs (literally—as in having to have your passport stamped when you arrive on the island from the mainland). We thought, like the rest of the world, that Zanzibar is part of Tanzania and so didn't get our passports stamped when we got to the island and were actually there illegally for two days! We rang in the New Year by staying with the Marums in a luxurious U.S. Embassy house (complete with AC, private beach, and marvelous cook).
So of course it was a bit of a letdown to come home to landlocked, lobsterless Arua. But what we lack in sea life, we more than make up for in insect life. I came home to find that my kitchen has been overrun by more species of ants than I ever knew existed and just one species of roach—HUGE.
I'm glad you're enjoying Sierra's latest video. “Sierra on the Road” is actually her second feature film. Unfortunately, her first—“A Very Clean Girl,” noted for its many bath scenes—seems to have gotten lost in the intercontinental mail. We are now working on Sierra's third film, “Screeching and Babbling with Baby,” which is due out next month.
I'll keep you posted,
Eve
Can You Hear Me Now?
To the uninitiated, it could look like Arua was stuck in the world of yesterday. Sure, most of our neighbors cooked over open fires and, clearly, no one had ever heard of the recent prohibition against wearing plaids with stripes. But if you looked closely you could see signs of the modern era encroaching. For the past few months we'd been getting an extra hour of electricity every night, with the town generator working from 7:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m. A brand-new bank had been built for John's project. A building, I might add, that had not only all-day electricity (thanks to its own generator) but also a flush toilet. Progress was not as obvious with the Anti-AIDS Club that I had started at the local secondary school. After training every Friday afternoon for nearly a year, the students had gone out to share their newly acquired knowledge about AIDS.
“So how did it go?” I asked when the trainees convened the next week.
“Oh, madam,” said one of the students, raising his hand. “I was talking with a neighbor and I could not answer this person's question.”
“Well, what was the question?” I as
ked.
“Well, this person asked me if HIV could be transmitted through an infected tomato. And I did not know the answer to that.”
“You didn't know if HIV could be transmitted by a tomato?”
“Well, it's true, madam,” another student piped up. “You never told us the answer to that one!”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “Let's review again. Someone tell me the three ways that HIV can be transmitted.”
“By sex,” one girl said.
“By sharing needles or blood,” another said.
“And from mother to baby,” a boy said.
“And those are the only three ways, right?” I asked. I should have known better.
“Yes,” said the most promising student in the class. “Except, of course, for voodoo hex.” So progress was not exactly being made in leaps and bounds on the educational front. But modernity was coming to Arua in the form of the telephone. Until now there had only been one telephone in the whole town. It was housed at the post office and if you wanted to make a phone call, you'd have to go down there, fill out a form, and then wait outside on a bench in the hot sun while the operator attempted to connect your call.
If your call did connect, you got to go into the small, airless room where the telephone was housed. But you usually didn't go alone. Everyone else on the bench—whether you knew them or not—would come with you. After all, yours might be the only successful call of the day and everyone wanted to get in on it. The operator listened in on his own extension, having little else to do once the only line in town was engaged.
“Are you finished yet?” he'd ask every few minutes. He'd disconnect you whenever he felt you were done.
So we were among the first to apply when the Uganda Post and Telephone (UPT) announced that we could get home telephones. The three-page application required two passport-sized photos, the signature and stamp of our local government representative, and a personal reference from a present UPT customer, which was a slight problem since no one in town had a phone yet. But we got Mark to vouch for our good character, the fact that we knew how to use a telephone, and that—so far as he knew—we had never intentionally damaged one. He added the official CARE stamp and his signature with a flourish, for good measure.
“A technician will come out to your place soon to see if it is an appropriate site for a telephone,” said the man who took my application. I felt more anxious than I'd expected. Was my home, indeed, appropriate for the care and feeding of a telephone?
And then, of course, nothing happened for weeks, and I had almost forgotten about the whole thing when three technicians showed up in our compound to inspect the place as promised. This inspection consisted of a tall, fat man looking from my house to the road and grunting. To strengthen our case, however, I showed him the ancient black telephone that I had found in a closet. I had no idea how or why it had gotten into our house. But discovering it had given me hope that a highly advanced civilization had once lived in Arua and might come again.
“Ah, yes. There was talk of telephone in Arua during Idi Amin's time,” the big man said when I showed him our rodent-nibbled relict.
Two other men jumped out of the UPT truck and joined the big man in my house. A man in a garage mechanic's jumpsuit rummaged around in his toolbox and then asked me for a tape measure so that they could figure out how much wire they'd need when they actually did get around to installing the phone. The third member of their team smiled and sat down on my couch. I wondered if I was supposed to offer him tea.
A week later the three of them showed up again, this time with a new telephone. The fat man gave the instructions, the man in the jumpsuit installed the phone, and the third guy sat on my couch and smiled. Within a half hour, an impressively modern-looking phone was hung on our dining room wall.
The guy in the orange jumpsuit picked up the receiver and pressed “0.” “Your telephone is working, madam.” He handed me the phone.
“This is Arua,” I could hear the operator say. “Hello?”
I suppressed the urge to ask if he had Prince Albert in a can. Instead, I giggled and hung up the phone. Who knows, maybe soon they'll invent talking pictures. “So now,” I asked, “can I call America from my house?”
“No,” the technician chuckled. “But you can call the operator at the post office and he can call America for you.”
“But I can call Kampala from my house, right?” I asked.
“Uh, no,” said the technician. “But you can call the operator from your house and he can call Kampala for you.”
“Okay, but I can call Coby from my house. Right?”
“Well, no. But you can call the operator and he will call her for you.” Okay, it was a whole new world, but it came complete with the same old glitches.
We wrote home and told everyone. “It's like a game of telephone,” we told them. “You call the international operator and ask him to connect you to the Kampala operator, who can connect you to the Arua operator, and then ask for Arua 71.” And in a few weeks, we got our first phone call. Unfortunately, it was my mom calling to tell me that my grandfather had died.
Reginas husband, Steven, was waiting on my verandah the next morning. “I have come to express my condolences.” He took my hand in his. “May our Lord Jesus Christ welcome your grandfather into the kingdom of heaven.” I thought it best not to tell Steven that my grandfather, an observant Jew, had probably been hoping for a seat on the Jesus-free side of heaven.
“May our Lord Jesus Christ ease your pain.” Steven crossed himself. Then he crossed me. Then he crossed the entire house. I think he was trying to show off what he was learning in his Christian correspondence course, since John and I were subsidizing much of it.
“You cannot know how sorry I am that now you will be leaving,” he said. He had tears in his eyes. “And who is to know if you will ever return.”
“We're not leaving,” I told him. Steven, who was never at a loss for words, was actually silent. “The United States is too far and costs too much money just to go back for a short visit,” I explained.
“But won't you go home for any of the funerals?” The Lugbara traditionally had a series of funerals when someone died. It began with the first one in which the deceased was actually buried—usually right in the family compound—and culminated a year later with the raucous, booze-soaked last funeral rites.
“I've already missed the funeral,” I told him.
“How could you miss the funeral?” he asked. “Didn't they wait for you?”
“In my culture funerals are over very quickly In my religion, we have to bury the dead within twenty-four hours. We can't always wait until all the relatives arrive.”
“You mean there is such a rush over there that the dead can't wait for the living? Here, even our dead are not in a hurry!”
After the phone call from my mother, the phone went dead. A few weeks later, I walked down to the post office to report the problem. The operator dialed up my number, got a ring, and declared that my phone was indeed working.
“Then how come you don't answer when I dial ‘0’ so I can make a call?” I asked.
“Your phone works fine, madam,” he said. “It's just that there is no electricity to light up the switchboard to inform me that you are trying to reach me.” A small problem. “Why don't you just send your askari down to the post office when you want to make a phone call and I will ring you?”
Before we leapt into the modern age, Coby and I sent messages back and forth several times a day with our askaris. Now, apparently, we were supposed to send our askaris to the post office, which meant that Coby's askari had to pass my house on his way to the post office. Pretty soon we were bypassing the post office and sending messages the old-fashioned way.
While jogging up Arua Hill one day, the guard in charge of the telephone transmitter showed John around. “This,” the guard said, pointing to a big lever, “turns the whole phone system on and off. I must shut it down when rain is coming. You se
e now it is on and these little lights mean that someone is talking.” Then, pulling the lever down, he proudly announced, “Now it's off!”
The whole phone system seemed pretty useless, but we were assured that everything would change once Arua got its own exchange.
“The exchange,” the folks at UPT said, looking kind of glassy-eyed, “will connect our system to all the other telephone systems.” The exchange was going to grant us all real telephone numbers, too, so that we would no longer be merely “Arua 71.” No. When the exchange came, we would be “200-71.”
“The exchange,” the operator sighed, “will allow us to phone direct, from our own telephones, to anywhere else in the world. Even Kampala!”
“Well, when is this exchange gonna get here?” I asked.
“We were actually due to get it last month,” the operator said. “But someone took it to Fort Portal instead.”
Other than the first three digits of a telephone number, I had no idea what an exchange actually consisted of. But I had visions of a huge switchboard, complete with an operator, loaded onto a flatbed and hijacked to Fort Portal, a town northwest of Kampala that had electricity, water, and even a pizzeria. How unfair! Certainly we in Arua—with barely any electricity or water and only fantasies of pizza—are far more deserving.
“But don't worry,” he said. “The next one is ours.”
The telephone that had once been such a promising sign of development quickly became a wall decoration. Sure, it gave my heart a little flutter just to look at it, but it was no more useful than the Zairian masks that were hung on the walls. (Somehow word got out after we bought the first one and now masks were showing up regularly on the Home Shopping Network.) I gave up all hope that my fancy new telephone would ever be more than a conversation piece.
Dear Jean,
Wow, what a thrill to get your phone call last week, even if we did get cut off after a minute. Oh, well, thanks for trying. My mom also got through a few weeks ago. Long enough to tell me my grandfather had died, and then we were cut off. No luck getting through to her since. But maybe when the long-awaited exchange gets to Arua, we'll actually be able to talk. But don't hold your breath!
First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria Page 25
