A Far Off Real Place
My
five favorite movies for forever and all-time are: The Lion King, A Far Off
Place, Second-Hand Lions, Blood Diamond and The Emperor’s New Groove (The
Goofy Movie comes in close sixth). Movies that make my top-ten list might
reflect more favorably upon my maturity level, but no matter. Of my top five,
all involve traveling to an exotic place—‘exotic’ according to your point of
reference—and four of the five take you to Africa. When I was younger, I read
adventure novels about explorers, different African cultures, African
colonialism and Joseph Conrad’s literary classic Heart of Darkness and other A-listers. Inevitably, ‘Africa’ would work its way into my studies. As I got older I jumped across the
continent with Dave Eggers’ What is the
What, The Innocent Anthropologist:
Notes from a Mud Hut (Nigel Barley), War
Child (Emmanuel Jal) with topics that got increasing serious. My room is
now littered with books and articles with titles like, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, The
Congo Wars: Conflict Myth and Reality, The
African Great Lakes Region: An End to Conflict?, and The Political Economy of
the Resource Curse. From arm-chair explorer to sitting with peers and
professors barreling down the road to Sudan, I have come to develop a love-hate
relationship with my chosen field of study: Anthropology. I love it because it
has brought me in contact with and, importantly, contextualized the peoples,
places and cultures that colored the chapters of my childhood. I hate it
because it has illuminated some of the darkest chambers in the real heart of
humanity. I am growing into it because it offers me a space to become a
realistic, effective and culturally sensitive change agent in a world of socio-cultural,
economic and political strife; but at the undergraduate stage I am overwhelmed
by the enormity of compounded problems in this “developing” part of the world.
This
is my first time traveling to a nation labeled by the global north as “developing.”
I expected traveling to certain parts of the country to feel like taking a step
back from the high speed connections and consumerism of the Western world. As
we drove the stretch from Kampala to Gulu, past unruly tall grasses and gnarly
trees that I have never seen before, I (when not deliberating over the
logistics of being car-sick) was entertaining the idea of falling into Maurice
Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. As
night-time set in I expected to see the eye shine of animals that only exist in
captivity in other parts of the world. I did not expect to see cell phones
lighting up the darkness in the grass-thatched hut village compounds. Welcome
to Africa, each day a step closer to becoming “one of the most mobile-connected
places on the planet.”
The
parameters of a photograph cannot capture the richness of the place, nor its
culture awash with paradoxes. Since arriving in Gulu I have felt constantly
over-stimulated, on sensory overload...
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| "Fire in the Trees" |
TOUCH:
The Acholi are a warm people. Whenever you greet someone you give them a firm,
quick handshake, followed by a thumb hug, followed by a handshake. As you walk
through the markets, the austerity that you see in peoples’ faces melts in a
heartbeat into a friendly smile, if only you smile first.
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| Gomesi |
SIGHTS: If you venture off of the main roads in Gulu you find lots of compounds with flowers—orange, red, yellow, purple—planted alongside rows of maize, sweet potatoes, okra, etc. At the IPSS compound, there is a tree with some of the brightest
orange flowers I have ever seen. They have a broad, tubular shape and their
name, Kifabakazi, means “Fire in the Trees.” The clothing reflects the vibrancy
of the environment. Many of the older women wear Gomesis- traditional, heavy, bright
colored fabric with tall pointed shoulders and a large bow tied around the
front- to church and to weddings.
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[Left to Right: Dodo, Bor, Malakwan]
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TASTE: The staple and/or traditional food items include Kal (millet), posho (mashed
corn), corn, potatoes, g-nuts, peas, okra, dodo and bor (both small leafy
greens), cassava, malakwan (another root), tomatoes, eggs, rice, pineapples,
mangos, bananas, matoke (boiled bananas), chicken, pork and goat. G-nuts come
in a variety of ways: fresh out of the ground, boiled, dried, fried or otherwise
turned into g-nut sauce. Last week I went out to the field with my internship. Lunch was a bowl of posho with chunks of questionable-looking
hippopotamus meat. I will try anything once and “share in the spice of life,” but, truly, this was a one-time affair.
SMELLS:
The smell of diesel fumes can be oppressive. The air is heavy and visibility,
like in Kampala, is low in the mornings and in the evenings— courtesy of
exhaust fumes, dirt, burning trash and no emissions laws. When you walk through
the market, the smell of drying (or decaying—I think there is a fine line here)
piles of Tilapia and little Silver Fish is over-powering.
SOUNDS:
One quickly becomes accustomed to the constant hum of generators. Uganda signed
an electricity power scheme with Kenya in the ‘50’s. For the last few decades,
however, demand far out strips supply. This energy scheme combined with Gulu’s
rapid and ad hoc development yields a scourge of electricity splicing, weak currents
and frequent power outages. I was unaware of my attachment to word documents and
the internet until I found myself unconsciously pricking my ears in the
mornings, hoping to hear the generators. Another sound peculiarity involves
people introductions. I expected to hear a lot of names that I could not
pronounce. Instead, I have met a lot of “Martins,” “Dennises,” “Isaacs” and
“Newtons.” I even met an “Isaac Newton” who, I kid you not, accidentally burned my arm with
a bare light bulb. This is a predominantly Christian country and almost
everyone has a Christian name. Of my internship co-workers, one is named “Moses,”
another is named “Sunday,” and another named her daughter “Favor,” short
for “Favor of God.” Around here, you hear a lot of gospel; you also hear a lot
of “America’s Top 40” pop songs. To bring it all together, on my way back from
my internship I passed an elderly woman in a Gomesi eating dodo on the sidewalk
in front of a tailoring shop; Travie McCoy’s “I wanna be a billionaire” was
booming in the background.
The
time spent here has no parallel. The problem with going home and arriving at
some clarity for everything seen and experienced rests, in large part, in the
limitations of description. I can describe the food and the people and the
weather; I cannot do enough justice with description to explain what it is like
to watch tears roll down the cheeks of a former child soldier who is crying
not because of lost time in the bush, or over his years spent struggling to get
an education, but because he is lonely; he is finally about to earn his degree,
but the war took all of the people he would have like to have shared his
success with. I cannot capture their burdens of mass unemployment, or their
energy when they are dancing, or the unrivaled sweetness of their fruits, or the
genuineness in their prayers, or the brightness of the Milky Way at night. There are no words for that.
