by James Best
This meant we now had only one day in Sipi Falls. A friendly guide, Alex, took us in the morning for a walking tour of the falls. While they were picturesque, we were becoming hard to impress after the spectacles of Victoria and Murchison.
Sam was having a bad morning. I had forgotten to give him his ADHD medication, for the third time on the trip. Given I am such a muddle-headed wombat, I thought that was pretty good going.
Fifteen minutes into our walk with Alex my mistake became evident as Sam, wired to the max, zipped along on the road in front of us, shooting the small children who greeted us with his finger. He wouldn’t stop talking about ‘Malawi children’. The walking tour was becoming a walking battle. My frustration boiled over. ‘Sam, stop talking about the children!’
‘But they are clones. They are bald clones.’ For some reason he objected to the sparse curls of most of the local children.
‘You’ve already said that five times. You don’t need to keep saying it.’
‘Okay,’ he replied, but then two minutes later, ‘I don’t like the children.’
‘Sam!’ I yelled. And around and around it went.
This obsession had been growing ever since he’d been chased around the preschool on Likomo Island on Lake Malawi. It was now in full flower. Their ‘baldness’, their eagerness to engage with him and the fact he felt they looked too similar were the subjects of his incessant ruminations. This Is Autism.
We cut the tour short and returned to the hostel, where I quickly administered the forgotten medicine.
A few hours later we embarked on our second activity of the day, a tour of a local coffee farm to see how coffee is grown and processed. The farm was mainly a subsistence farm but also grew coffee and bananas as cash crops, with the produce usually exported to South Sudan.
The difference the medication made was stark; Sam was much easier to handle and also much more capable of getting something out of the afternoon. Alex showed us the plantation where the coffee beans were ripening, and then took us through the process of shucking, drying, pounding, roasting, grinding, and then brewing, pouring and tasting. Sam and I had hands-on experience of doing it all; it was a great education. After the morning I’d had, I needed the coffee too.
Sam, once again, was the centre of attention, surrounded by children. The largest of them, two fourteen-year-old boys, looked tough enough to be touting AK-47s if they’d lived in more conflict-riddled parts of Africa, but they were likely half Sam’s weight. Sam’s tolerance of the circle of children following him was now much greater; Gulliver surrounded by the Lilliputians.
On the way back to the hotel, we passed through a grassed schoolyard nestled among the banana trees and coffee bushes. Alex pointed to a boy sitting next to a toilet block on the edge of the yard. ‘See him? He has the same problem as Sam.’
‘He’s autistic?’
Alex nodded. ‘But he doesn’t speak like Sam. He can do everything though. He helps with the farm work, he does some schoolwork. He helps out a lot.’
It brought me back to the contextual nature of disability. In this environment, social and communication deficits in an adolescent didn’t stand out as profoundly as in a world of social media, selfies and texting, a world that was starting to seem a galaxy away. I’d begun to wonder whether it was the developed world that had it wrong. I thought of all the lost potential, of the untapped skills and intelligence that often comes with autism. Lacking the requisite social and communication skills to fit in, people with autism are often dismissed as ‘disabled’ and useless. Here a non-verbal autistic boy had found his place in society.
The language the locals used when referring to Sam’s autism was also illuminating, and at times confronting. When I told them Sam had special needs, frequently the reply would be, ‘Oh, I’m sorry’ or, ‘That’s a shame’. There was no sugar coating. At home, these sorts of utterances would have been considered politically incorrect.
Yet it seemed to me to be more honest. There was a different way of thinking about people with special needs in Africa, one that seemed more accepting and inclusive. It was what it was. In the developed world, we’re at best uncomfortable with disability, at worst intolerant. We’re fed the myth that perfection is possible and disability is an affront to that, one that must be wallpapered over or railed against. Here, while they were ‘sorry’ for me, or said it was a ‘shame’ for Sam, I was also frequently told, especially by the women, that Sam was a ‘lovely boy’ and that he had ‘a good heart’.
Another point of difference I was becoming aware of was the response of Westerners and Africans to what Sam and I were attempting to achieve on our trip. People from developed countries, both at home and those we met on the road in Africa, would regard our adventure as a great undertaking by Benison and me. ‘Wow, that’s amazing! Good on you guys,’ was the invariable response. Africans were more focused on Sam: ‘How is he going? What can he do? What can’t he do? Would he like to come with me and do something together?’
It wasn’t that the Westerners were not appreciative or supportive of Sam; it was just a different focus. I’m not sure why. Was it because disability seems so much more common, so much more in your face in Africa? And where there was disability, usually there wasn’t much one could do about it but just get on with things.
The next day we transferred to the fancypants hotel in Kapchorwa. After walking down the driveway at Sipi Falls, we waited on the side of the quiet road with our packs. As usual, a group of people gathered around us. A fellow with a blinded eye asked us where we were going. ‘Kapchorwa is a big town,’ he said, when I told him. He scanned us as we sat on our packs. ‘Are you happy to go in a truck?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘You may have trouble getting a lift today. It is market day and the road is quiet,’ he explained in his lilting Ugandan accent. I would’ve thought market day would make the road busier, but there you go.
He held up a bulging plastic bag. ‘Do you want to buy some coffee beans?’
‘No, thanks. I don’t want to carry more stuff in my backpack.’
A big grin crossed his face. ‘No problem, ayee.’ Eventually they flagged down a truck for us and waved goodbye. Sam and I flung our packs and ourselves on top of a pile of grain sacks and held onto the open frame with the other six African farm workers in the back as we barrelled up the road. The Africans sang in perfect harmony as we ascended the winding pot-holed road. The trip cost us a dollar.
Kapchorwa was a typical provincial African city of about twenty thousand people but with over a hundred thousand in the surrounding district. It boasted three sister hotels: the upmarket VIP one we were booked into, one that was middle of the range, and a motel on the main road where a sign proudly proclaimed NOAH’S ARK MOTEL—AVERAGE ACCOMODATION AND MEALS.
The tallest buildings were two stories high, and small business was the only business in town. The shops were cement-rendered recesses, mostly empty except for drowsy shop attendants and a scattering of whatever produce the owner had been able to muster. On the large cement stairs off the deep roadside gutters, young men clutched mobile phones held together with sticky tape, and the elderly and the dishevelled lolligagged with nothing to do and all day to do it. Concrete and clay; loiter and pray. Telcos and banks monopolised the hand-painted advertising, boda bodas and pushbike taxis dominated the roads, and machine-gun toting guards were an intimidating presence outside bank branches.
In the suburbs, the roads were dirt and the buildings mud brick, both with the same dusty maroon pigmentation. Some boys teased a frog near the reed-filled creek that dissected the town, while girls in ragtag clothing washed hessian sacks of carrots next to a small bridge over the dirty stream.
I got my hair cut and beard trimmed at Alice’s Hair Salon, where they specialised in ‘styling, cutting and sanity’. While I did indeed feel and look much saner after the haircut, I think they meant sanitisation. The hairdressers weren’t used to cutting mzungu hair, so they sent out a request
for a ‘specialist’, a fellow from another salon up the road. As he wielded his scissors, the other hairdressers stood around me and watched. Sam, of course, refused to get his hair cut.
The next day we went for a walk around town and Nancy, the manager of the hotel we were staying in, tagged along to show us around. I think she thought we shouldn’t be walking unescorted, not because it was unsafe—in fact, Kapchorwa seemed very safe to me—but because we were so much of a novelty we might attract a crowd. Or maybe she just suspected we’d get lost. Sam scooted ahead as we walked along the road.
‘Hey-ah, why does he walk so fast?’
‘That’s just the way he walks.’
‘He should slow down. He will hurt himself, ai-ai.’
Nancy had a thick accent and I had to concentrate to understand her. It occurred to me that Africans talk the way they walk: slowly and methodically. Their speech has an even beat, each word and syllable expressed in a steady slow rhythm and followed by an exhaled exclamation that varied between agreement and recognition, such as ‘ai’, ‘eh’ or ‘ayee’. Once I learnt to listen with the slow chronometer in mind their speech became easier to follow for me. You didn’t hear raised voices; no one pressed a point. Their speech was calm and easygoing, for the most part like the people who spoke it.
We walked through the small market, children peering at us from behind windows and doors, past the second-hand clothes laid out on mats; past stalls selling pineapples, avocados, passionfruit and dodo—not the bird, but a spinach-like indigenous African vegetable.
On the way back to the hotel, it occurred to me that not only were we the only mzungu in the hotel, as far as I could tell we were the only white people in the city. No wonder everybody stared at us. Later I heard a rumour there was another mzungu staying in the mid-range sister hotel. Really? It almost seemed surprising.
On the back streets, hens and chicks flitted through the doorways of tin-roofed houses while goats and cows gnawed the roadside grass within the radius of their rope tether. I told Nancy that you didn’t see these animals in the streets of a town in Australia.
She was surprised. ‘Why not?’
‘They’re on farms, not in the towns and cities,’ I explained.
She cocked her head in a typically Ugandan way and looked at me. ‘But where do you get a chicken if you need to cook one?’
‘You go to the supermarket.’
‘The big ones with all the bright lights?’
‘Yes.’ It occurred to me she probably hadn’t been in one, or possibly even seen one.
She looked confused. ‘They have chickens in there?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Dead chickens, not live.’
‘Ai-ai,’ she said, as she pondered this strange revelation.
I smiled to myself as I imagined my local Woolworths with live chickens running around.
The next day I had organised a trip up to the nearby 4,300-metre Mount Elgon. Simba, the ebullient owner of our hotel who was both pleased and proud that we were staying in his establishment, offered to personally drive us up to the mountain. It was a crisp Sunday morning and church bells and hymns drifted over the city. Nancy and some of the other staff watched me talking to Benison on Skype, fascinated with the technology and that it was evening in Australia. However, nothing was as perplexing as the fact Sam and I were not going to church.
‘So you are not going to prayers?’ Nancy asked.
Another woman joined in the conversation. ‘You are not going to church?’
‘Ah, no.’ I felt a little awkward.
‘The mosque?’ Nancy suggested.
I shook my head.
‘Then you are a pagan?’ the other woman asked.
‘No, pagans have gods. I am not very religious.’
Nancy was curious. ‘Do you know how to pray?’
‘I think I could do it if I wanted to. I prayed when I was young.’
‘But not since then.’
‘Correct.’
‘Ai-ai…’ Nancy clicked her tongue, smiled and half tilted her braid-covered head as she walked away.
Perhaps we should have gone to church, as the gods were not kind to us that day. As Simba drove us up the hills in his schmick people mover, of which he was immensely proud, weather closed in. He reluctantly closed the sunroof.
The sodden and verdant countryside was prime farmland. The rich red loam soil of the declivitous fields supported a treasure trove of crops. Laterite brick huts spotted the hills. The vehicle bounced along the potholed road, dodging apathetic cows.
Adults and children alike waved to us as we passed. Simba was clearly a local celebrity and his car easily recognised, and added to that, wazungu were clearly just not seen in these parts. Their smiles on recognising the vehicle were replaced by expressions of surprise as they spied our two white faces inside. As we reached the gates to the national park surrounding the mighty mountain, the heavens opened up. A walk was out of the question.
Simba invoked plan B. He drove us down to another of his hotels—it was becoming apparent he owned half of the district—and we ordered lunch. Back home in Sydney, if restaurant food took a particularly long time to come, we’d often wryly comment that they must have had to slaughter the cow/chicken/fish before they cooked it.
Well, in Uganda this was true. Two hours after we arrived we were feasting on a poor chicken that had been running around the garden when we’d arrived. I’m not generally used to making eye contact with my lunch, as she was carried into the kitchen past us, wearing a deservedly nervous expression. She did taste good though.
During our long wait for the recently deceased to be plucked, prepared and roasted, I talked history with Sam, given there was nothing else to do. History, geography and art are my go-to school subjects when we have no access to resources other than my own education. We discussed ancient Rome, the Dark Ages (ruled, according to Sam, by Lord Voldemort), the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire.
When we got back I ran into the other mzungu in the city, a Dutchman who was conducting research in sports science and talent identification here. He told me the Kalenjin tribe, whose homelands straddle the Uganda–Kenya border, have a genetic makeup that makes them incredibly good long-distance runners. An Olympic and world champion marathon runner, Stephen Kiprotich, lived just up the hill and knew Simba well, and another runner just outside of the city was a junior world 10,000-metre champion. The genetics combined with the altitude, which allows the body to produce extra red blood cells, bred champions.
That evening, as Sam and I played cards on the verandah, the sounds of the city echoed across the shadowy streets. Bovine groans gave way to shrill insect static, an aural curtain over the chatter and laughter of the shanty-lined lanes. Music and singing soothed the suburbs. I spied Sam drifting off from time to time, sensing the sprinkle of magic emanating from the town. Such a perfect evening.
The next day was our last in Kapchorwa but we were still awaiting our package. An email arrived from FedEx informing me it had reached Entebbe airport but Ugandan customs were demanding to see my passport as proof I had been in Uganda long enough and wasn’t using FedEx to smuggle expensive electronic equipment to myself, or something like that; I didn’t really understand. I suspected it was about money; that is, they wanted a bribe. Anyway, if I wanted it I had to go all the way back to Entebbe to show customs my passport—and probably slip them twenty US dollars. This would entail three days of hard travel. I told FedEx to send the parcel back to Australia; we would have to do without it.
It was a frustrating day. There was a fourteen-hour-long blackout at the hotel so I had to make four boda boda trips to the shops to read my emails at the post office; four because the internet wasn’t working there the first three times. We even lost the trusty rubber ball we used for throw and catch when Sam threw it over my head into some thorny bushes.
Worst of all, though, was the drama at the ATM. I’d left Australia with two travel cards and one Visa c
ard. Over the months a travel card and the Visa card had gone missing in action. The stash of US dollars I’d hidden in various places had been depleted. I was down to my last card, with no other way to get money. This was serious.
And then, like a malevolent monster, the ATM in Kapchorwa swallowed my last remaining card. Panic swept over me as I rushed inside to the bank. The bank tellers refused to take me seriously.
This called for drastic action.
I stood in front of the only open teller with my back to the counter and arms out wide, and shouted, ‘Nobody gets served until I get my card back!’
The locals looked at me dumbfounded. One of the customers in the queue decided he’d had enough of the crazy mzungu and tried to get around me. I blocked his path and yelled, ‘I mean it! This is my life we’re talking about here. I have to get that card back.’
The guard, him with the gun, looked at the teller and then to another staff member nearby, trying to figure out what to do. After a protracted discussion in Lugandan, they powered down the machine, and finally my precious card was regurgitated.
We had now spent four days in an obscure provincial city for no reason. Yet for me, and also I suspect for Sam, Kapchorwa became a real and entirely unexpected highlight, an unpretentious place with folks who greeted you with open arms and took you for who and what you were and were just, well, genuinely nice.
Still, the shenanigans over the parcel had further diminished my attenuated emotional reserves. It was becoming harder to resist Sam’s pleas to return to Australia earlier. We’d also spent a lot more money on the trip than I’d thought we would, and discovered that airfares home to Australia were a lot more expensive in October than September. Benison and I talked it over on Skype and we decided: she booked us to fly out of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania on 30 September, in seven weeks’ time, six months to the day since we’d left Sydney. Sam would like that, I knew: six was much more rounded.
I didn’t let him know the departure was definite just yet, but hinted it was possible if he tried really hard. He promised he would. You could see his spirits lift, and mine too, I suspect. The revised finishing date now put us over three-quarters of the way through the trip. The flip side was that I had to make the most of the diminishing opportunity for intensive intervention.
