Leavings never get easier… In the insane cacophony of this particular Sunday morning – which started off nicely enough with a slow rain, the soft patter having been rudely replaced by a trio of workers descending onto my front porch with all the gear to “slash” the grass – my good friend Karla has left Gulu. The scene is played out amidst a back drop of slashing gone “high tech” and is cast with an impossibly loud gas driven weed-eater.
Karla, the nearest PC friend of my rough age group (not twenty something) is leaving. I mean LEAVING! She has been re-located to another area (beautiful in fact) as far from here as-the-crow flies as Kampala, but twice as far when you consider that to get there you have to go through Kampala and then to Ft. Portal. So she is almost in another country. It’s not an exaggeration to say we have been each others link to sanity for the past 9 months. So I will miss her and her WalMart pancake mix. The feelings it evoked were not unlike those experienced when you send your child off to college, the Navy, Portland – knowing you will only see them when the rare necessity of their return home dictates.
She, however, is literally going to a “far-far better place.” Fort Portal (right) has trees, tea plantations, and hills and a clean town and when traveling through, looks from the roadside like Napa Valley, the hills studded with tea plantations instead of vineyards. Up close and personal, it is of course still Uganda, but it’s the town I visualized when – having been assigned to Gulu – some demented person said, “Oh, you’ll love Gulu, it’s a beautiful town.” Get a rope!
But yesterday was lovely in a Gulu sort-of-way. After hiking around the town to do errands, me fighting some stomach malady, we ultimately landed at the Acholi Inn, the only garden-spot in Gulu and had fish and chips. One of the good foods here is fish: fresh talapia that usually comes from the Nile. How can you not like fish that comes from the NILE RIVER? Then there was the bacon and avacado sandwich that was delivered without bacon, but with multiple slices of bread held together with Blue-Band (local version of margarine) because bacon “is not there.” There was however, what passes for cheese (Chedda) here, which we scraped off. Well – the fish was good.
Coming back we made an unscheduled stop by the auto-parts (it would be a mistake to visualize something like an ACE hardware store here) store to get onions… Aah – the rich smell of old grease and melting rubber. Warms the soul and apparently the onions, some of which we rotten. Somewhere around 4:30 some jack-ass on the other side of the fence a few feet from my front door, started a gas-leaking generator and the fumes wafted over carried on the same breeze that delivered sounds resembling a jack-hammer. This is no doubt the same evolved individual who chopped down perfectly good trees at the 6 foot height and let them topple into my front yard – leaving them there to rot and hide snakes. A live band with an announcer with a voice like Cruella de Vil tuned up in the middle of this and thudding bass combined with distant crowds watching a sporting event finished off the evening leaving an after taste of wine gone bad. Somewhere around 9:30 it all mysteriously stopped, like someone has pulled the plug. We wondered if the world had ended and we’d been left to turn out the lights, but alas, we awoke to find the world still here and delivering another round of church music and yes, the weed-eater crew. We have come full circle.
We had gone to one of the local pork joints (yes – called Pork Joint) to get meat for a stir fry. On the way we were hailed by my friendly Boda Driver fan club and we asked directions, garnering – in the process – a request for pork. We actually did get extra and gave them an order to share, met by great rejoicing, since they hadn’t really expected us to get them any. My stock just went up. This hopefully will offset that fact that I turned away (politely) the nine-year-old girl who followed me home night before last asking me if she could stay here for just the night. I explained that her mother/auntie would be sad if she didn’t come home, hoping that that would be the truth. She gave me a somewhat pitiful look, so I gave her the only thing I could come up with – a granola bar. My Acholi friend said “she’ll be baaaack,” and she was. She returned yesterday with a friend in tow, telling me now that she lives next door. I don’t want to be rude, but I’m really not fond of being followed home and asked for food, money or lodging – all of which has happened. It’s creepy.
Preparing today to go to the swamp: packing my insect-treated sleep sac in case there are bed bugs, mosquito repellant, anti-itch lotion, sun-screen and three power point presentations on a flash drive, because the connector from my Mac to a projector was stolen in the burglary. But we may not have power ANYWAY…. One learns to roll with the punches because there is no choice.
