uganda, january 09

January 29, 2009 in the first domino

“Time and bad conditions do not favour beauty,’ wrote Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in ‘Weep Not, Child’.

Perhaps the Kenyan author was right. When you’re a thirty five year old mother of seven living in a remote, rural village without electricity, running water, flushable toilets or anything more than the basic crops your hillside strips of land can offer, there’s a good chance that life will have engraved its journeys upon your face. Lines carved deep into skin, eyes too used to blocking out sun or rain, back moving slow under invisible weight, hands and feet leathered and laced by groove and crease.

Bollocks to beauty. These lines and wrinkles and aches and this poverty and hardship and potential have captured my interest on a far deeper level than the cosmetic. This place – Kigazi – in the mountains that flow between Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo is captivating. 8,000 feet up where that last 10% of air seems almost impossible to inhale, the urge to drink it in and absorb the views and smells and essence is just as strong. I feel alive here – alive like the days around a funeral.

If you don’t count a seven nights half board in Port el Kantaoui in Tunisia some time way back in the early eighties, this was my first time in Africa. My companions were telling me how lucky I was to have ended up in so beautiful a part of the continent, and my internal narrator spent much of the 12 day trip wondering about whether I would do what so many of my other friends appear to have done and fall in love with what they all call ‘the real Africa’. What did they mean by that? Would I know it if I found it? And if I did, would breaking up be hard to do?

It was on the seven hour drive back to Kampala that things finally started to make sense. Our decision to miss the usual trip to a game reserve was taken on the back of the feeling that we had been privileged enough to have already seen far more than any tourist hike could offer. We’d danced with the Chiga – their feet welded to the rhythm of the oil-can drum, their arms and eyes reaching up for the setting sun. We’d walked the couple of miles to fetch water and carry it back up the mountainside in 20 litre jerrycans, exhausted and staggering while the 12 year old girls out-paced us ahead. We’d spent hours and hours in church, half smiles wiped over our faces as we witnessed at first hand the most real service any of us had ever encountered. Who wants to stare at zebra from a minibus when your clothes still offer up the scent of those early morning fires?

There’s plenty more to say, and I guess that it’ll all filter its way through over the coming weeks. But, for now, I’ll leave it here; time and bad conditions may not favour the sort of beauty that we chase round here, but they can be the brew for other things. Like massive contentment, aching poverty, incredible potential.