Great hills of garbage tower over the road, piles of trash smolder in the back alleys. Kids with cracked, ashy feet beg for change, their eyes lost in a narcotic dance that suggests long hours of huffing glue and swilling cheap bottles of waragi. Derelict colonials flank the main road through town, their cheery pastels smudged with dirt and weather stains. There are shuttered shops and battered apartment blocks and an abandoned building next to my hostel that reminds me of the bombed-out shells I’d seen in southern Lebanon. Men with hammers and crowbars perch on what’s left of the roof; all day you hear them working away, the clink-clink of their tools ringing on the steel and concrete in a sad, discordant song. I later learn that they’ve been slowly, painstakingly demolishing the building for more than three months, pulling it apart one brick and steel girder at a time.
It’s some consolation, though, that I shared the bus into town with Mai and Ben, who I last saw nursing hangovers on a mild Sunday afternoon in Kampala. They’ve been volunteering in Kabale for close to six months, and they take a strange, sadistic sort of pride in showing off their town to me – the madman shouting Bible verses in the middle of the road, the husky sow nosing through heaps of trash, the infamous Match ‘n’ Mix nightclub, which they promise to take me to on the weekend, and to which they inevitably allude with arched eyebrows and sharp, cryptic laughter.
That the two have toughed it out in this town for so long is testament to a sort of sick perseverance I’ll never fully understand. Power cuts are a daily occurrence; water is sporadic. From the roof of Edirisa – a guest house and restaurant run by a local NGO – what unfolds around you is a bleak panorama of a forgotten town in a forgotten corner of Uganda. Felix, a local tour operator, nursing a Nile on the roof beside me, sweeps his arm across the landscape.
“There are many, many mad people here,” he says. “You can see in the trees there?” He gestures toward the hill. “There are two mad people who live there. Do you see that red sweater?
“That is a mad woman.”
Below us, in a vacant, weeded lot, a fat sow and three little piglets muscle their noses through a pile of trash. So do a handful of kids, picking out fruit rinds and scraps of meat still clinging to the bone. Later I’ll see three of them – filthy, squatting, wearing oversized trousers and frayed sport jackets – roasting meat over a heap of burning newspapers. They spring to attention as a wheelbarrow comes bumping down the road. Someone is wheeling their garbage to the pile, and the kids go chasing after him, eager to get their hands on the first choice scraps.
This is no way to say goodbye; Uganda has, after all, been awfully good to me. So later in the week I make plans to visit Lake Bunyoni with Mai and Ben – a two-hour hike from the outskirts of Kabale, but feeling, with its wooded islets and lakeside resorts, like a different planet altogether.
It’s a warm, sunny day when we set out. We take bicycle bodas to the edge of town; the boys push the pedals slowly, wiping their foreheads and straining with the effort. This is, I suspect, as tough a way to make 15 cents as any, and even as barefoot kids come scampering after us and the old men smile and wave and shake their heads in good-natured bemusement, I hate myself for every minute of it. When we get off at the foot of a long, dusty road weaving into the valley, we give each of the boys Ush400 – a hundred more than we’d agreed upon, for which they thank us with effusive gestures and broad, ingratiating grins.
We hitch up our backpacks and start trudging uphill. The sun is high and fierce, and I’m already huffing away and wondering just how I got so out of shape. Too much chapati, too many hours on the laptop: I’m in for a long afternoon. We pass tall, shady groves of eucalyptus trees and leafy banana plants wagging on the hillside. Every few minutes we come to a small village of tin-roof shacks with half-naked kids racing from the doorways.
“Mzungu, how are you?” they ask sweetly. And then, seconds later, “You give me money!”
They follow behind us, clapping and squealing and beating frayed tires up the road with sticks. A group of men and women sit on the grass, drinking some rough local brew from a communal cup. Behind us a boy does a handstand and follows us upside-down, his gray, ashy behind poking out of a pair of sweatpants. There are cows and goats everywhere. Rough granite bluffs rise stark and majestic over the road, villagers working busily in the quarries. We hear the ping of hammers echoing across the valley, broken by the chirp of children shouting, “How are you?” Young boys and old women and muscular, bare-chested men carry buckets and sacks of rocks on their heads. A man in a weather-beaten hat sits cross-legged in the sun, thwacking at a pile of rubble between his legs, pausing to watch us pass.
It’s late in the afternoon when we finally reach Bunyoni. I’m sore and breathless and terribly happy to be here. We’re camped at a lodge perched high above the lake, and there’s a flat, hazy light striking the terraced hillsides as we settle into our drinks. Little islands, green and forested, dot the still, glassy water; the whole place has an air of manicured, picture-perfect prettiness. A family carrying hoes and bundles of banana leaves crosses a distant field, the young girls arching their necks in our direction. We watch a canoe gliding across the water, small waves rippling in its wake. My legs and feet ache with that good, worked-for burn. It’s a beautiful afternoon.
That night a deep darkness settles over the lake. Tiny cooking fires burn in the distance, and the sky is hung with stars, and we sit and drink and listen to the small commotions of village life. Mothers call out to their kids; dogs bark; night critters fill the air with their croaks and chirps. In the morning the mist unspools over the islands, parting to show the far-off silhouette of a volcano. The sun spreads across the hills and strikes the water; somewhere we hear drums beating. It’s a lush, bright, hopeful morning. Soon I’ll be packing my bags and heading for the border, but for now, with the sun warm on my face and the insects buzzing over the grass, I feel an absolute contentment. I finish my coffee while the sound of music carries from a village church. And I linger for just a few more minutes, happy and at peace, as a flock of birds lift from the grass with startled grace, beating their wings over the treetops.
On my last full day in Kampala I head to Oweno Market, hoping to pick up a few second-hand shirts that have nothing – nothing at all – to do with any weight I may or may not have put on in the past two months. Oweno is East Africa’s largest market, and it’s stirred a vague sense of dread in me since I visited during my first week in Kampala. The place is endless, a maze of narrow lanes winding between stalls of second-hand jeans and clunky shoes and pastel pantsuits and pleather handbags and cast-off t-shirts and duffel bags with the plastic letters peeling off their logos. Shafts of sunlight punch through the tarps overhead, and there’s a muddy scum on the floor that I’ve decided – despite the interests of science – to not spend too much time dwelling on. In some stalls, where rows of jeans and shirts climb twenty feet into the air, young guys call out to the crowd and briskly change money and keep a wary eye on the dozens of hands rifling through piles of t-shirts; in others, where business is slow, guys nap on bundles of skirts and blouses, and barefoot women stretch out their legs and stare wistfully at the traffic passing by.
Oweno is the stuff of nightmares, a bazaar of dreams as worn and frayed as the seams of its knock-off soccer jerseys. Rumor has it there’s a method to the market’s madness, much like the organized chaos of the Moroccan medina or the souqs of the Middle East. But I haven’t penetrated far enough into Oweno’s dark heart to make it out of Textile World, and if this is just the outer crust of the market’s many layers, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find Brutus and Judas Iscariot sitting over a card table in the center, playing rummy and sighing at fate and welcoming you to their own private hell.
Everyone wants a piece of the action when they see me heading their way. “Mzungu! Mzungu!” ripples through the market around me, and people push me toward their shirts and their boxer shorts, their leather belts and their pleated pants. It took no less than three cups of coffee for me to steel my nerves this morning, but I’m wilting under the barrage of calls and stares, and the day’s rising heat, and the hands reaching out to pull me every which way. I try on shirts that are too big or too small; I wrinkle my nose at styles that haven’t been in since Obote; I’m reassured that certain tears on a collar or sleeve were absolutely, positively meant to be there.
In the end I pick up three shirts that are, if not stylish, at least straining in that direction. I stop for a breather at a stall owned by a kind, smiling old couple. The wife pushes a pile of button-down shirts my way and urges me to take a seat. We start to chat, and before long a crowd has gathered to give the couple’s wares a second-look. A mzungu, it turns out, is very good for business. Guys are holding shirts to their chests and rubbing the fabric between their fingertips. I tug on my own collar and say that a real, authentic, made-in-the-USA mzungu can be had for just Ush50,000. “I cook, I clean, I do dishes” I offer.
One man shakes his head bitterly and says “Fifty thousand is too much.” We haggle but can’t agree on a fair price; it seems there will be no takers on this day in Oweno.
On my way out a young guy pulls at my sleeve and calls me over to his stall. He’s sitting on a tall stack of denim and holding a dozen leather belts across his lap. A pretty, plump girl stands beside him with a hip cocked his way. He wants to know where I’m from.
“How is New York?” he asks.
“Busy,” I say. “Cold.”
“Not hot like Uganda,” he says.
“No,” I say. “Except in the summer. Then it’s even hotter.”
“Do you know what I like in New York?” he says. “Sluts. I see them on TV. I want to bonk them one by one.”
I nod to show my appreciation. “Yeah,” I say with great sympathy. “Sluts are nice.”
The boy shifts in his seat and stares wistfully into the middle distance. The girl makes a sour face and turns away from him. I gesture to her and ask why he wants New York sluts when he has so many nice, pretty girls right here in Uganda. He gives me a look.
“I don’t like these Ugandan girls,” he says. “They are too arrogant and they don’t know what they’re doing in bed.”
The girl tosses her head back and snorts, at which point it’s pretty clear that whatever she does or doesn’t know in bed, she won’t be sharing it with my young friend. He takes my hand and holds it firmly, longingly, as if something great and meaningful might pass between us. Then he lies back on his pile of jeans and looks up to the chutes of light slanting through the market’s canopy, dreaming of New York, its temperate climes, and its long processional of sluts bonking their way down Broadway.
