(Part 1 of 2)
Monday, July 12, 2010
Posing with YCVM after our meeting on Sunday, from left to right:
Pastor Lawrence, Patrick Olupot (the building engineer), ‘uncle’ Emma, Grace Among, Patrick Okore (the tallest one in the back), Me (Aeri), Silver Omakenyi, and Okiria Francis
Dear beloved community,
As you are aware, I took a trip to see our dear YCVM friends in Kumi this past weekend. It was a physically arduous trip, though emotionally and spiritually uplifting one. Now that I am back safe and sound in Kampala, I will describe a little bit of the journey there.
I left RTC on foot at 6am on Saturday, my 2 bags in tow, while it was still pitch dark (Sunrise and Sunset being about at 7am and 7pm respectively, pretty much the whole year around, Uganda is, after all, smack dab on the equator). After a bumpy 45 minute matatu ride (a converted 7 passenger minibus that looks to be at least 30+ years past it’s serviceable age) crowded with 20 passengers (yes, one’s sense of personal space has long gone out the window when your daily commute involves being folded on top of strangers, knees digging into the front passengers), we arrived covered in dust, grit, and sweat into the taxi park in the Kampala city center, already bustling with traffic, pedestrians, bikers, beggars, street peddlers and hawkers, and shop owners criss-crossing one another in daredevil-ish speed and abandon. I then quickly headed for the bus park a couple blocks away, trying to find an opportune moment to dodge the oncoming traffic (which don’t stop for pedestrians, ever) while fending off an onslaught of rather aggressive solicitations from boda-boda drivers and other street vendors, and ignoring the usual cat-calls, “Hey, muzungu(white person or more literally ‘non-person’)!” “Hey, Chinese!” (my non-black-ness readily recognizable even in the semi-dark predawn), guarding my 2 bags with both my elbows against purse-snatchers and pick-pockets, and trying not to get too nauseous at the combined smells of the sewage which surrounds the taxi park, trash piles everywhere, human sweat, really strong BO, and noxious black fumes of carbon monoxide (no smog regulations on any auto vehicles here).
Once I am at the bus park, there are no signs for where to go, except for people calling you to ride their bus headed for various cities in Uganda. I find that the early bus to Soroti or Moroto or Karamoja (Kumi is one of the stops on the way) has left. They tell me that I must now get to the other bus park, another few blocks away, then catch the later bus. At that point, I chicken out of having to walk over there, and flag a boda-boda driver, who mananges with amazing skill, to weave through all the mayhem, sometimes coming within a fraction of an inch of the oncoming traffic, sometimes shoving off adjacent boda-boda drivers. Once at the other bus park, folks accost me to ride their buses, though there is actually only one bus headed for Karamoja (in the far north-east of the country), called the “Karamoja Promise”. I pay my fare, the conductor gives me my ticket receipt, and I take a seat on a window-side seat on a nearly empty bus.
The bus, which looks to me to be in better shape (relatively speaking, of course) than many others I’ve taken in the past, smells already of left-over sweat and vomit from the night’s passengers. I can see on the seats, dark stains of unknown origins, and the floor is littered with left-over food-scraps and animal feathers and feces. I open the window as far as I can, trying not to touch some slimy grime on the windowsill and handle because now the Sun has risen and it is starting to get hot. Passengers file in one by one, and we wait patiently until every seat on the bus is taken. There are no designated departure times. The bus leaves when it is filled. After another hour and 45 minutes, we slowly head out of now completely log-jammed Kampala, and it is truly sweltering in the bus. On its slow, traffic-jammed way out of the city, the bus picks up a few more passengers who flag it down on the road, who think nothing of standing the whole way upcountry. The seats are very cramped, even for my short stature. I don’t have much leg room, and my seat-mate and I are in full body contact on one side. My back is sore and my butt, even more so, and it’s only been about 2 hours. I steel myself for at least another 5 hours because I know it will take some time in Mbale, a big town about an hour before Kumi when there will be a large shift of off-boarding and reloading. I see mothers with nursing babies and small toddlers walk in. Having bought only one ticket, she sits with 2 of her smallest ones on her lap the whole way, and the older one is just floating around the aisle, being jostled around every which way and sitting on the floor when too tired.
Completely at the whim of the driver (I’ve never heard a passenger make a request for a stop), we make the occasional ‘pee’ stop (or not, which was the case on the way up to Kumi), or a ‘slow-down’ for the street food peddlers to run up to the slow moving bus and the quick, frantic purchases through the open windows, but we always stop to pick up an additional passenger no matter how packed the bus is. On the way to Kumi, I bought 3 small ‘gonjas’ (roasted bananas) from a street vendor and ate 1 of it before I started feeling a little sick. I felt worse and worse as the journey wore on, and by the time we got to Kumi, another 5 hours later, after having vomited out the ‘gonja’ I ate out the window, I could not keep my head up because everything seemed to be spinning.
And that was just the journey up to Kumi. As excruciating as the journey was for me, I tell it not in order to tell an ‘adventure story’, but to share a glimpse into the lives of Ugandans, and perhaps for only the minutest fraction of life, ponder what it must be like to be that child, peddling a basket of bananas for maybe a whole dollar for that entire basket, or that mother and 3 children traveling for 7-8 hours in a crowded, sweltering bus, and no diaper changes and no snacks! And those children, not complaining at all, but simply sitting with their mother with curiously blank faces. Or the old lady I sat next to on the way down, who at her age, with a hacking cough, sat by the window breathing in the visible dust (I was chewing grit between my teeth, and when I washed my hair that night, I had brown suds) and exhaust fumes the whole way, with her load of food stuffs she purchased in the up-country (because they are cheaper than in Kampala) to feed her many grand children that she has had to take on raising, her children having died of AIDS and malaria. On my way back to Kampala, when I got on the bus and sat next to her, I smelled something that smelled like rancid meat and really ripe feet combined. Having had nothing to eat for 2 days, I was a little delicate in constitution, and started to feel nauseous again. Knowing I’d have to sit there next to her for the next several hours (it ended up being 8 hours because the bus broke down on the way, but that is another long story), I struck up a conversation with her. I saw that the smell was coming from a brown plastic bag that contained some kind of long brown strips. Upon my asking, she told me they were smoked young bamboo stalks (It seemed fermented also, judging from the smell), and she mixed them with groundnuts (peanuts) to make sauce. She asked whether I’ve ever had them, and told me that they were delicious. I imagined similar things in my food culture like, kimchee or stinky tofu, things that taste great but smell absolutely foul, especially if you don’t eat them. I tried to breathe in the smell of the smoked bamboo as I imagined myself enjoying that sauce she was describing. Amazingly, it worked, and I was not so nauseous! I could have remained nauseated by the unknown and misunderstood smell, and perhaps even a little judgemental and certainly distanced from my neighbor. But a little information, a little imagination, a little effort, and a connection is made, and a chance for my inner transformation happens. Maybe an important lesson is to be learned here in our cross-cultural mission/ partnership.
And so I tell this story in hopes that it will help my community learn a little more of the environment and the life context of our YCVM friends in Kumi, to learn a little of their amazing resilience and fortitude, and that their joyous worship in the Lord is by no means flippant, their faith, one that comes with great testing, and their hope, hard-earned.
Emma, Patrick, and Grace give God thanks in praise for our meeting again
I think this story has already gone on too long. So, I will follow with part 2, the meeting with YCVM.
Until then, to be continued…..
Aeri