another wakiso weekend
on Random Uganda (Uganda), 05/Dec/2009 11:44, 34 days ago
November 29thWakiso for the weekend.Jo and Liam are finishing up their placement and getting ready to launch on the travel portion of their year off. The Kavumba recreation center, the venue for the ill-fated Peace corps-VSO soccer game in October and the infamous Dr. Jose Chameleon concert in August, was hosting the grand gala opening of their swimming center (even though we have been swimming there for 4 months), and it seemed a good excuse to see Jo and Liam before they disappear.On Friday, I had arranged a ride out to Wakiso with Alan and Alison, but on Saturday morning I got a text from Alison saying that Zoe was‘squitty.’ I guess I wasn’t curious enough as to what squitty means in the UK medical vernacular to spend 50 shillings on a return text. I’ll leave it to your imagination. I took matatus out to Wakiso.The head of the Ugandan National Swimming certification body was on hand to cut the ribbon and, as a treat, some members of the Ugandan National Team in Swimming were on hand for some exhibition races. Godfrey, the ribbon cutter, wanted to have his swimmers race our‘team’ in a 200m medley relay. We joked that we’d be disqualified for using performance altering substances (the even was scheduled to kickoff at noon, but didn’t get underway until close to 4p, at which time we had already cracked a nile special or two). Then we realized he was serious.We politely begged off. But, I will say after watching them swim, it would not have been as big blow out as you might think (not, of course, because of my aqua-skills which focus primarily on staying alive in the water, but Jo and Liam actually can swim).As an additional draw to the swim gala, Moses, the center’s director, offered dinner and a show. Dinner was a sharp stick with 3 or 4 large hunks of meat on it to roast on one of the several large fires out behind the pool. The show was Uganda’s own BeBe (pronounced baby) le Cool, who is either the most famous or second most famous pop singer in Uganda. I know, it sounds like you’ve heard this before.The secret to searing your meat over an open flame (and making sure all the encysted tapeworms are fully sizzled), as we were shown the our highly amused hosts, is to get a good charred crust going and then remove it from the flames and nibble away the crust. And then return the meat to the fire and repeat the process.The concert was much the same process. Stick with the crusty layer on top. At least now we understood the format: 4-5 hours of‘warm up’ acts followed by a few songs by the headliner. And then end of show. No encores. As opposed to the Dr. Jose show where everybody mimed, however, last night, most of the opening acts actually sang into the microphone. Some of them shouldn’t have, but at least they tried. And thecomedy act actually seemed funny (maybe my lugandan vocabulary is getting a little better—having picked up some gems like cabina kalungi, big fat ass (in a complimentary way), and banangay, which, I think, loosely translates as WTF?) even if they didn’t have dwarf.So with a little help from the new official VSO Wakiso cocktail (mountain dew and waragi) we generally enjoyed the show. I particularly enjoyed the gluteal muscle control of the girl groups (I swear, this one woman could have done calligraphy with the pen clenched behind her back), but the crowd seemed to go more for the guys in askew yankee caps and large sunglasses doing tired hip hop renditions. Who is to explain taste? Certainly it was in short supply all around.Bebe le cool made a brief appearance after the rain, much to the crowd’s delight. His anthem (be cool. Bebe cool is cool… blah blah. ) was a particular crowd favorite. I did not feel cheated when he cut his performance short.I spent the night at the guest house on the recreation center property and was lulled off into waragi-aided slumber by the thudding bass of the all-night disco, also on the property. In the morning I wandered through the detritus and out to the gate. There were no botas to be had for the 2 miles of dirt road separating Kavumba from Wakiso, so I walked in a strangely Seattle-like mist falling from a cement colored sky.I walked by traditional mud and stick huts with thatch roofs and brick houses with tin roofs. I walked by towers of mud bricks stacked into and fired as on-site kilns, ready for new construction. I walked by shells of huts overgrown with Spanish yellow oleander, the words‘not for sale’ slowly disappearing with the disintegration of the bricks. I walked by children playing in yards—a baby being pushed over uneven ground in a wash basin, a boy pulling a toy car fashioned entirely from bits of trash, an urchin throwing rocks and twigs at the chickens and goats eating the vegetation in drainage ditch (invariably, the children see me a wave and shout, ‘Hi Mzungu, or Bye Mzungu.’) I walk by families on their way to church—the mothers with a baby or two in one arm and the other hand bunching the brightly printed floral fabric of her skirt to keep it outof the mud, the fathers similarly grasp a wad of dark cloth at their crotch in an attempt to keep their cuffs clean. (Do you ever wonder where that suit went? A little too shiny? The lapels too big? Maybe Ralph or Pierre decided that the ventless back was passé? Well. Some guy in Africa has your suit. It doesn’t fit him very well either. Remind me to go off on a tangent at some point and talk about how clothes donated to goodwill in America wind up for sale in Africa and have resulted in the demise of the African clothing industry…)I walk by the Real Life church—a few walls, no roof, but a congregation already filling the floor. I walk past the True Life Church. ‘Worship God. Do not worship money.’ (just leave a little in the collection plate, please)At the Wakiso taxi park I pick up a matatu back to Kampala. The minivan is nearly full, so we are underway in a few minutes. The windows have all been shut against the mist, so within a few minutes it is stifling within the vehicle. I dig deep for my travel zen as I watch the baby in the next seat regurgitate breast milk onto the church frock of the unsuspecting woman in front of me. Ugandan matatus are licensed for up to 14 passengers (its 18 in Rwanda with the same seat configuration), and the passengers tend to self-enforce the rules if the conductor tries to pick up a 15th, but children ride for free on their mother’s lap, so it is not unusual to see 3-4 infants in a matatu or even 16 year old boys sitting on their mother’s lap. Giles Foden, in The Last King of Scotland, describes a ride from Kampala to Mbarara in a matatu with ‘goats, chickens and what must have been nearly thirty human bodies—in a space meant for ten…’ Most matatu rides feel like this. (Foden unfortunately muddied the picture when 3 soldiers ‘climbed in’ to the matatu and ‘walked down the aisle’—matatus don’t have aisles… no one walks on a matatu, certainly not a fully packed one, you slide on your butt orcrawl, and only with the assistance of several of your neighbors, and no one climbs in to a fully loaded matatu.)The matatu from Wakiso eventually arrives and deposits me at the new taxi park. The persistent rains and the continual Brownian motion of the hundreds of minvans jockeying for position have churned the park to a muddy milk chocolate froth. Walking ankle deep in diarrheal soup, I try not to lose my shoes or my toes as I negotiate the tiny gaps between vehicles heading to the southeast end of the park (there is an unsignposted rule that vans parked to the southeast will be heading to the southeast part of town).‘Ogende wa?’ I ask the conductors. ‘tugende mengo… tugende nsambya… tugende ggaba.’ Close enough, I can walk up the hill from kabalagala. I pick a seat in a nearly full bus. As we wait, we can take advantage of the commerce going on in the taxi park’s interstitial spaces—I couldhave my shoes resoled (or buy new ones), buy a new watch or one of several Obama tee shirts, or purchase meat on a stick or a rolex or a bag of groundnuts or a chunk of jack-fruit. A man approaches who appears to have slept in the taxi park (kind of like sleeping on the benches in the bus station,except for the part where there aren’t any benches). The right side of this body is covered in clotted mud. Naturally he’s headed in my direction. Either I can hold my seat (as is considered proper matatu etiquette) and let him crawl over me, or I can slide over so he can rest his muddy sideagainst me. I brace for the worst. At the last moment, the conductor says something that I don’t quite catch that must have been the lugandan equivalent of show me the money. The mud man digs in his trousers but fails to find even a 100 shilling coin for the shortest ride possible. I feel relief. Then shame at my relief. For a second I think about handing him a 500 coin. But a woman in orange and brown print and a large shopping bag quickly grabs the seat and the conductor slams the door and we’re off. Tugende.