From West Chester to Western Uganda…
The first in a series of monthly travel dispatches by Jonathan JonesBy JONATHAN JONES
Special to the Local News
KAMPALA, UGANDA — During the 10 years or so I lived in Chester County, I spent most of my time trying to get away.
After my freshman year at West Chester University, I spent a semester traveling across the United States. I
spent my summers following rock bands, working odd jobs on the West Coast, and backpacking across Europe. And I quit my job at the Daily Local News not once but twice, first to move to Portland, Ore., and then to attend graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley.
So, here I am again, this time more than 7,000 miles away from home, in the heart of East Africa, wondering why anyone from Chester County would want to come to Uganda.
No Yuengling Lager or Victory Hop Devil. No West Chester Restaurant Festival. No Chadds ford Winery. Just diesel fumes and dust. Or at least that’s the way it seems when I land at the Entebbe Airport early in the
morning in April 2007.
As snow blankets the northeastern U.S., I’ve arrived in a tropical country along the equator, a place where you wake up with strange bug bites and you’re almost guaranteed to experience abdominal pains and diarrhea.
I have come to Uganda with my smarter and savvier sidekick, Anna Sussman, as part of an around-the-world trek that will take us to 18 countries in 18 months, from central Africa to Southeast Asia. Also, as part our journey, we’ve agreed to file a series of dispatches for PBS Frontline World and several other news outlets (including the Daily Local News).
But, as I tried to figure out how much to pay the taxi cab driver for a ride from the airport to the hotel — calculating the exchange of $1 U.S.to $1,750 Ugandan Shillings, it began to sink in how far away from home I was. I could be back in West Chester, playing Xbox, pretending that
Allen Iverson was still on the Sixers. Instead I was in Africa where the man wearing a used Sixers T-shirt probably has no idea where Philadelphia is.
***
As an observer, I try to understand all that is new and different by comparing it with what I know, the county I have left behind. Public transportation here makes SEPTA look luxurious, and the bumpy, congested roads make I-95 seem almost efficient.
The most popular mode of public transportation here is the boda-boda, a motorcycle equipped with a padded seat, driven by a young man usually talking on his cell phone.
We flagged down two young boda drivers. As soon I hopped on, my driver headed directly to a gas station to put in 50 cents worth of gas and pump up his tires, which I, of course, had to pay since he did not have any money.
Then, quickly, my driver sped off trying to catch up with Anna, who was long gone by now. He zipped between cars and buses over potholes and occasionally riding on the sidewalk. As I ducked the side-view mirrors of passing vehicles, I made a firm decision never to take a motorcycle taxi again.
A few days later, I decided to try a matatu, the taxi minibuses that most people use to travel longer distances around Uganda.The matatu is a white minivan with four rows of seats, no seatbelts, and usually a broken windshield. One man, the conductor, sits in the back to take money and find more passengers. The matatu is supposed to seat only14 passengers, but on some uncomfortable occasions, can squeeze up to 30 people. If you’re lucky, the minibus will not have a radio, thereby saving you from listening to a political diatribe in a language you can’t understand on blown-out speakers. The first challenge for a non-African is figuring out how to get on the right of the minibus. At first, we tried to find one by standing on the roadside. But a local woman advised against such a maneuver. “They
will hit you,” she said. The taxi park contains hundreds of white matatus. Once we located a sign with our desired destination, I clutched onto Anna and tried to find a
bus that was relatively full of passengers; this is a delicate balance, buses do not leave until they are full, but you do not want a bus so full that you are forced to sit on someone’s lap.
After settling on a minibus, I nestled in beside two men carrying a massive metal engine on their lap. It appeared to be something from the early 20th century. The driver pulled forward, into a sea of minibuses all trying to exit
the park at the same time. Drivers and conductors yelled at each other to get out of the way. The driver to our right slammed our side-view window, so he could inch in front of us.
Strangely, I felt a sense of solidarity with the others in the bus, as if we were all trying to catch the last ride out of the city. We weaved our way through the taxi park, starting and stopping several times, and cut across a Shell gas station only to find ourselves at the back of a lengthy traffic jam that disappeared into the horizon.
I watched as a woman walked along the sidewalk with a load of goods balanced on her head, wondering how much sooner she would make it to her destination than I would get to mine. I longed for SEPTA — and I never thought I’d say that.
***
After a few nights in Kampala, we decided to get out of the city and explore the countryside.
We headed to Kibale National Forest in Southwestern Uganda. Although the park has one of the highest densities of chimpanzees in the world, we were more interested in the people who lived there. Our driver, Geoffrey, drove us deep into the bush, through banana trees, cornfields and tea plantations. At times, the dirt roads disappeared under thick elephant grass. We passed families of baboons, goats tied to fences, and stray dogs that looked at us with the same sort of wonderment that we’d seen on the faces of most of
the villagers, as if our white skin made us look like ghosts.
We met a village elder. Through our driver, who served as a
translator, we spoke for little more than an hour. He said most of the people here worked as subsistence farmers, earning little more than $1 dollar a day. Others
don’t earn anything at all and cannot afford the fees to send their children to school. Everyone, he said, is worried about feeding his or her family.
“What do you do for fun?” I said at one point, hoping to lighten the mood.
The village elder seemed puzzled. I could sense I had asked a question he did not know how to answer.
“It’s a very Western question,” said our translator. “African
priorities vary. What makes him happy is if he has food for his family, animals are not trampling on his land, and his kids are going to school.”
If the people here earned what low-income people earned in
Coatesville, Chester, or Kensington, they’d be well off. Still, the struggle to feed one’s family and to provide an adequate education for one’s children is as much a burden to the poor people in wealthy countries as it is to the poor people in developing ones.
***Uganda is one of the safest countries in Africa. Yet, as we’re
returning from the gentle countryside, we are reminded what a volatile place this can be. We hear on the radio that riots broke out in Kampala over the government’s decision to hand over a forest to an Asian-owned sugarcane company.
The riots ignited, we heard, when people began indiscriminately attacking Asians because they control a large portion of the businesses and industries in Uganda. At least three people were killed, including one Indian man who was dragged off his motorcycle and stoned to death.
I slump back into my seat, shocked by the violence.
But of course, as perhaps only an American would, I found it easy to express horror at the violence in Africa while turning a blind eye to the violence in my own country. Only a few days later, I learn of the tragedy that has taken place at Virginia Tech.
Later, when I introduce myself as an American to a Ugandan real estate agent, he smiles and says, “Ah, an American,” and then adds, “Where are your guns?”
His statement speaks to how narrow our perceptions of a place can be.
Just like many Africans believe America is a place where people are all super-rich and obsessed with guns, we, in America, perceive Africa as a land of war, AIDS and refugees, dismissing other aspects of this rich and diverse
continent.
A few days later, more trouble comes to the city. The police use teargas to disperse crowds of protestors. My eyes stung and my throat became clogged. Word spread that a group of young men were running around the city with long canes beating up anyone who failed to leave the area.
We left the area.
Within two weeks, it had become very clear to me that I was not in Chester County anymore — that is until I turn on the television and discover Bam Margera tramping around West Chester in an episode of “Viva La Bam” via
satellite. It was time to leave Uganda and head to Rwanda. Maybe MTV wouldn’t follow me there.
(This article first appeared in the Daily Local News. For more information, go to www.dailylocal.com)
anna @ May 8, 2007