At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  A few minutes pass, and a man walks up to our window. He’s in his midthirties, about our age, and wears a smartly pressed blue-and-white checked oxford shirt with red pants. His hems are rolled up to avoid mud.

  “Hello. I am Joel,” he says and shakes Kyle’s hand. “I hear that you are looking for me?”

  Kyle explains we are friends of Dru and that we’ve heard he gives the best tour of the Nile River in Jinja.

  “Oh yes, of course! I do. Would you like one?” Joel asks. We nod eagerly.

  “Let me get my boat ready. Five minutes. I will meet you down there, by the water.” He points, then rushes off to make preparations.

  We tiptoe around the chickens and head to the riverbank, where Joel is now waiting with life jackets. “Welcome to the Nile!” he says with grandeur. “I hope you enjoy your tour.” His skipper, Nate, revs up the motor and we wobble into his low, narrow fishing boat with a plastic tarp canopy. Tate white-knuckles the sides while her brothers sway back and forth on purpose.

  Official Nile tours cost a family our size about two hundred dollars, but Joel says he’ll tell us everything he knows for forty. “I don’t know anyone who knows the history and biology of the Nile more than Joel,” Dru assured us before we left.

  We scud along Nile waves in the ramshackle fishing boat while Joel points at different birds, gives us their names: white-breasted cormorant, little egret, great pelican, ibis. He knows the name and story of every bird that perches in passing riverbank trees. He knows why currents sway this way and that, and he knows why farmers with cleared fields along the river grow their particular crops in this particular time of year.

  Tate asks, “What kind of tiny bird is that? Some sort of woodpecker?”

  “No, that’s a giant kingfisher,” Joel answers. The bird’s black head and beak look oversized on top of his brown breast and spotted body. “They mostly eat crab, but they use their beaks to remove the carapace first. They like fish, too, and they eat them headfirst.”

  Nate slows the motor, and the boat quiets to a hum. We’ve stopped at a spot where water bubbles to the surface from below, where there’s a convergence of ripples collecting at a bent metal sign, waving with the water flow. A group of East Asian men in suits have left their boat and are huddled together on a small grassy island next to the sign for a photo.

  “Source of the Nile,” Joel explains. “It’s where Lake Victoria flows out and begins the Nile.” Our boat skims to the sign. It reads:

  THE SOURCE OF R. NILE

  JINJA

  WORLD’S LONGEST RIVER.1

  While we wait our turn for a photo, I imagine this same water emptying in the Mediterranean, 4,258 miles north of us in Egypt.

  Two hours later, Joel’s boat returns us to shore sunburned, exhausted, and euphoric. “Thank you so much for taking your children to the Nile,” Joel says to me, giving me a hand as I step out. “They ask good questions, and I am glad they’re here to see it.”

  The next morning, the five of us drive back to Kampala to visit Dave’s work, join Joy and the kids at their local pool, and let the kids romp one more time in their yard. I go to the nearby American embassy to refill more pages in my passport. Kyle drives to the airport to retrieve Reed’s blanket, which has now enjoyed a side trip to Rwanda. We sit on our friends’ wraparound porch and graze on avocados sprinkled with pepper and lemon juice. The kids beg for a sleepover with their new friends; Joy happily agrees and shoos the two of us out for a date.

  Tonight, Kyle and I dine on pizza and wine on red-checkered tablecloths under mango trees. I do mental math and realize we’ll be in Italy in less than two months, probably eating this same type of food under a different type of tree. We whisper to each other the languages spoken around us: French. Mandarin. Some sort of Indian language, maybe Tamil. Swahili. The restaurant’s patrons are an assembly of united nations. Uganda has gathered quite the global crowd.

  “I think I really love it here,” Kyle says.

  I nod. “Wait—the restaurant? Or Uganda?”

  “Both. But I mean Uganda.”

  The next morning, the kids are thrilled to have had a sleepover with friends, a first on our travels. Joy returns us to the airport, and we hug farewell with our arms dusty red and our eyes wet, promising to stay in touch. We were barely in Uganda. I hardly opened my laptop. The pack on my back seems lighter as I walk down the airplane aisle; my shoulders feel stronger. The plane hasn’t departed, and I already want to return here, continue my conversations with all the folks we met, meet even more people who call Uganda home. We touched the red dirt, but we didn’t scratch the surface.

  11

  ETHIOPIA

  Geographically, Ethiopia isn’t far from Uganda, but the differences are palpable before we even leave the airport. It’s much colder here; despite our proximity to the equator, we’re far removed from the tropics because of the high elevation. Guidebooks say it’s hotter in the southern part of the country, in the Great Rift Valley, but we’ll be north for the duration of our short visit, from here in Addis Ababa and onward into the Highlands. We dig to the bottom of our packs for layers. Seven hundred miles northeast doesn’t seem too far on the map, but just a few hours ago we were sweating in Kampala.

  We check in to our hotel room and pray the heat works, take quick showers to warm up. They gave us a different room from the one we booked, but we are desperate for sleep, so Tate joins Kyle and me on the one king-size bed and the boys share the twin, feet to feet. In eight hours, just after sunrise, we’ll meet our new driver and host, who’ll take us into the Highlands, to an obscure village even he has never visited. Kyle pulls shut the blackout shades, turns off the light, and I burrow into the blankets. Sleep comes in two minutes, dreamless.

  My alarm sings far too soon, and I drag my body into clothes, then wake the kids. Finn’s mouth is hanging open and Reed is drooling, deep in slumber. The room is still freezing. We trawl our wasted bodies down to a hotel lobby breakfast of cold pastries, sugared cereal, and instant coffee, which seems a travesty here, origin of Yirgacheffe, one of the world’s favorite coffee beans.

  It’s seven o’clock: time to meet our host for Ethiopia.

  Atkeltsion is waiting out front with a local driver and his companion. “Salam, and welcome to Ethiopia,” he says. “Ready to head out?” The driver grabs our bags and tosses them in the van.

  Our host is in his late twenties and speaks English with a flawless American accent. We climb in a van that is the same size as Dave and Joy’s, but with more rows of benches and considerably older; it reminds me of our van in Sri Lanka. Atkelt—as our host asks us to call him—has rented this entire van for the weekend; it normally functions as a taxi. The three narrow rows of passenger seats provide scarcely enough room for us to put our legs down. The three kids climb into the back row, and Kyle, who’s over six foot two, claims the extra inches of legroom in the front. I’m left in the middle row with our pile of packs.

  The van heads north out of Addis with windows open, and I breathe in the dryness of desert air. It is nosebleed dry here, and I’m already parched. The kids ask for water, and I realize we haven’t yet bought any. Wind slaps dust from the road into our eyes, and I slide the van windows closed. We immediately start to sweat.

  “Atkelt, can we stop and buy water sometime soon?” I ask.

  “Oh sure, sure,” he says. “Our first town is soon.”

  I hear a small voice behind me. “Mom?” Reed squeaks. “I’m gonna barf.”

  I turn around and his limp body sways; his white face drips with sweat. I scramble for a plastic bag, and I pass it back with seconds to spare. Reed vomits what little breakfast he has eaten. The driver tells Atkelt he knows of a place right up the hill, and in a minute pulls over to a natural spring on the side of the road. A pipe juts out of a rock at the base, a provisional public faucet dribbling spring water. Kyle jumps out and holds his hands under the pipe, then splashes cold water over Reed’s head and shirt. They climb back in the van. Fi
ve minutes later, Finn pukes.

  My mothering brain has been devoted these five months to basic tasks: feeding our children, advancing their education, timing the drying of their clothes before packing for the next destination. Even the hunting and gathering of food seems to consume hours of my day. Check in advance the altitude of our next destination? Determine the upcoming climate’s effect on our need for plentiful water? Calculate our ability to procure water from the road? Consider whether these roads will prove so dusty that it makes schooling impossible? I don’t have remaining brain cells for advanced preparation.

  These are rookie traveler mistakes. Addis Ababa, our starting point, was already above seventy-five hundred feet in elevation. We’re three hours into an eight-hour trek heading into mountains at a ten-thousand-foot-elevation, we’re in a van with bad shocks and no air conditioning with the outdoors too dusty to open windows, the van is uproariously loud, and we have no drinking water. These narrow roads are sinuous, coiling into the sides of hills. We’ve been in the country twelve hours, most of which were spent sleeping, and we’ve had no time to get our act together.

  We finally arrive in a small town, and Atkelt hops out at a convenience store to buy a case of bottled water. I clean up Finn’s face, and we declare a sick day, ban the kids from their lessons on the iPad while we’re driving. Tate huddles in the corner, avoiding her brothers’ touch. I think of her regurgitative retching fiasco on the Beijing metro, now over five months ago. Four hours down in a suffocating van on serpentine roads, four to go.

  We pull back onto the road. “Since we’re sitting here, now is a good time for me to tell you a little bit about Ethiopia!” Atkelt shouts. The van rattles upward, and the sound of its loose parts jiggling, wind smacking the windows, and potholed terrain is earsplitting.

  “The first thing to know is that we’re one of only two African countries that have never been colonized by a European power,” he bellows. “The second is that we use a different calendar than the rest of the world. These two things alone will make Ethiopia feel like a completely different place from anywhere on earth.”

  Atkelt is married to an American, and his understanding of a Western worldview helped him land this job as a translator and guide for Americans who come to visit. Even though his family has firmly settled in Addis, they travel to the States every few years to visit his wife’s family.

  “Some say Italy colonized us during World War II, but it’s just not true,” Atkelt yells. “They occupied us here for a few years, but we kicked them out.”

  Ethiopia remains the oldest still-thriving civilization in Africa, and one of the oldest on earth. Addis has its fair share of strip malls, but a few miles out of town feels otherworldly. Outside the windows, grasslands are dotted with stick huts, elderly shepherds draped in rough brown cloth traipse through fields with walking sticks, and camels—so many camels. Camels are at every intersection, poking along the shoulders of the main road with their unwieldy, knobby-kneed gait. We are so close geographically to Uganda and Kenya, to the African Great Lakes landscape of wild animals in pastureland, but Ethiopia sits as a crown in the Horn of Africa, soaked in Middle Eastern sensibilities. Because of its history of not (or barely) being colonized, it has a culture of its own, its own geography, its own climate.

  The Ethiopian calendar is connected to Orthodox Christian history: Ethiopia uses the Julian calendar instead of the more conventional Gregorian one. This year, 2015, is 2008 here, and the Ethiopian day begins at sunrise, whenever that is, not 12:01 a.m. The first hour is around our six or seven in the morning.

  I ask Atkelt if this adds confusion in his family’s life. He shrugs his shoulders. “Nah, not really. It’s mostly confusing for the visitors.” I wonder about specific opening and closing times of shops, how to know when your favorite show airs on TV, or when to arrive at the airport. There are no proper Western answers for these questions.

  We’re here in Ethiopia for one specific reason. Actually, a specific little boy. Our family began sponsoring a few children after I traveled to the Philippines to write on behalf of Compassion International, and Abubeker is one of these kids. We figured this trip was the best chance we’d have at meeting him together, as a family.

  Atkelt has worked with Compassion for years as a translator and guide, but he’s never been to Abubeker’s microscopic village, where Compassion runs a children’s center. There the village kids play after school, receive help with their homework, and find physical and spiritual nurturing. The center is a conduit through which sponsors can support local children, which ultimately results in supporting the child’s entire family. It is his family we are making the effort to visit.

  Eight bruising hours later, we stop for the night at a hotel still an hour away (Abubeker’s village has no sleeping space for guests). There are three twin beds in our room for the five of us, and dinner in the hotel restaurant includes some sort of meat (chicken? goat?) and injera, Ethiopia’s national sourdough bread made of teff flour. Its spongy texture is moist, and it is fermented, tart. I nibble at it politely. We’re also slightly parched nutritionally from a lack of vegetables, since Atkelt has warned us not to eat any while we’re in Ethiopia (he says it takes a while to acclimate to the natural bacteria found on produce, and we aren’t going to be here long enough to bother). The next morning, we take cold showers in our rusty bathroom, eat cereal in the hotel restaurant, and hop back in the van.

  In an hour, we pull up to the center. A crowd of children has gathered, holding signs and chanting a local welcome song. No sponsor has yet visited their village or center, so this entire community has come out and sees us not as Abubeker’s visitors, but as theirs. Young boys in soccer jerseys and dress shirts, teenage girls in their best dresses of vibrant yellows, pinks, and greens, all chant in unison and wait for us to open the van door. I see him there, in the middle of the crowd—I recognize him from years of photos sent to us. A pint-sized Abubeker holds a sign as big as him, shy smile and big brown eyes. He is seven, Reed’s age, yet he’s the size of Finn, our four-year-old.

  The five of us are pulled by assorted hands through the courtyard and into a side office, where local volunteers wait, ready to serve us a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony with popcorn, the favorite local snack. Children’s photos are plastered on the concrete walls like wallpaper, with names, ages, and religions scribbled underneath. More than two hundred kids are part of this sponsor-driven community effort. I sip my coffee and visualize a map covered with thumbtacks scattered worldwide, pinned strings gathered at this village so small it doesn’t make local maps—Australians, Europeans, South Americans, North Americans, Asians, fellow Africans, all giving so that families in this little village have more to help their kids thrive. The concept is not foreign to me, but it blows my mind standing here. How many roads converge here?

  “This center supplements food staples so families have enough food. Women also learn trades here so they can sell goods,” the center director explains as we munch popcorn. “We’ve got a fantastic algebra teacher in town, so he holds weekly math tutoring here. We’re growing quite a lot of math scholars.” The staff members laugh at this inside joke.

  Tate, Reed, and Finn are summoned to play schoolyard games outside, so we swallow the last of our coffee and head outside. Abubeker plays on the swing set with Finn as if it’s after school and they’re having a play date. Reed plays duck-duck-goose with other boys, and Tate is surrounded by girls touching her hair and giggling at the sight of it. The English-Amharic barrier is unpassable, but everyone laughs, shouts, plays.

  We say good-bye to the crowd of children, leave the community center, and give Abubeker a ride to his house. He sits next to Finn, and I admonish them both to stay seated, to stop horseplaying with each other in a moving vehicle. If there were seat belts, I’d tell them to buckle up. These boys are so much alike.

  On the way to Abubeker’s house, we stop at a grain warehouse to buy his family a gunnysack of teff, the crop from which inje
ra is made. A sixty-dollar sack will provide Abubeker’s family of six enough food for three months. Kyle hops out and negotiates the sale with Atkelt as translator, as camels and droves of local men circle around to oversee the process. Four men heave the sack into the back of the vehicle, and the van lowers by two inches with a thud. Our van’s tires bump to his house as seven-year-old Abubeker navigates us to his nameless street.

  His four older siblings, two brothers and two sisters, are waiting at the front gate of their shared compound, ready to welcome us with kisses on both cheeks. They lead the way through the dusty courtyard to their two-room home, cramped between several homes identical in size. Abubeker is the youngest in his family by quite a bit; his brothers and sisters seem to be teenagers at least.

  Atkelt speaks with the two older brothers, then explains. “They could have chosen to leave home to make their way on their own by now, but they’ve chosen to stay back for their mother’s sake.” Their dad is nowhere to be found. Having birthed her first when she was fifteen, Abubeker’s mother, Tigist, is remarkably young for having a twenty-year-old. She’s younger than I, in fact.

  Tigist and I smile at each other as Atkelt prods Abubeker to introduce us. I’m at a loss for words. I shake her hand, then hug her. I marvel at how she wakes up daily wondering whether her five children will eat, and I fret over whether my kids log enough reading time.

  The family killed the fatted calf, so to speak, to celebrate our arrival. We sit on covered cushions and faded blankets on the dirt floor in one of their rooms, and a daughter walks around to each of us, pours a pitcher of water over our hands with a bucket below to catch the overflow. It’s a ritual I did a thousand times in Kosovo, some twenty-six hundred miles north of here. Another daughter brings out a large round platter and places it in the center, piled high with chicken, various purees of yellow and orange, chili-red sauces, and a sunburst of rolled injera around the edge.