Uganda – PurplePretoria

We are the World

Nobody speaks English at the play park, almost nobody. As I walk towards the merry-go-round, a modern version of one, I catch a glimpse of the only blonde hair in view and determine that they must be the only ones here whose native language is English. As I get closer to them, I hear their mother call out to them in Arabic. Maybe, they are Lebanese, I think. She speaks more, and I realise that they probably Russian or of some Eastern European descent. We could easily be on a set for the song ‘We are the world’. Besides my own fluffy hair, all else is long black, and flowy when not covered. A secret agent must have landed here last Sunday. His email read, The worker bees behind the Tech World Order are pigmented and gather here. Thanks to this, an hundred thousand dollar block was slapped against more migration.

Transplanted

Brook Street is a picture; static and silent that even the trees that line the smooth grey lane seem to hold their breath. The houses, are symmetrical, in rows directly opposite each other, bushy round shrubs along the designated concrete pathways that lead to the front doors. The roofs are identical in matte black and brick pattern. The hiking trail in the valley behind, is a neon green lean-forest backdrop and the sky above the houses, is high, bright and deep blue, sometimes with not even a cloud in view. The small stack of post office boxes at the top of the slope actually brings the post.

Children do not run outside, naked or screaming, except mine sometimes. I have seen our neighbour to the left, twice the past year. Once I heard the bang of a door and a young woman of approved colour, stealthily climbing out of her house under the cover of dawn, with a big black dog beside her. The second time, I saw the silhouette of her workout clothes disappear behind the car. I have seen the packages brought to her door, Amazon, food but I have not see how they get inside.

The neighbours to the right side are different. Their compound is a riot against the backyard of the house on their right. Overgrown pumpkins, chillis, luffa gourds and colourful Punjabis drying in the sun opposing the cool pool, hanging lights and matching plants of a lounge area. Sometimes I see a small old man at a sewing machine making or repairing clothes. Every time I stand by the window in the children’s room, I see a new adult or child. They are the only people on the street sometimes, in the evenings, carrying children back and forth from their house to another house on the street with a family of people just like them. With this web of true community and their reverent dedication to frugality, it will probably take them five years to own all the houses on the street, including the one with the pool.

Lost

“You mentioned that he is taking a medication called N. I. L??”

I’m at the dentist with three children, the six year old reclining on the patient chair. Getting here took three phone calls, some redirected and connected to another, on hold for minutes, questions about in-network and out of network and finally an appointment. Seven pages of documents to fill and sign online, we were to arrive at least fifteen minutes before to fill more paperwork. If we were late, and they had to cancel, we would be charged a fee.

The nurse asks me more questions about the forms, about this medication called n. i. l. “en i l?” I ask, a laugh stuck in my throat. “No. I meant, no.” I want to explain that nil means no and that we were taught to write nil in formal written documents and I have been doing this for years but I don’t think she’ll understand so I keep quiet. I ask her about x-rays. Does he need four more x-rays just to take out his tooth? She can’t answer. “Oh sorry, the doctor will tell you about that, I’m just the hygienist.”

The dentist says that, the radiation from an x-ray is about the same as a flight from here to New York, or even eating a banana. How many bananas do people from where I come from eat? He has a Southern twang. I tell him that growing up I thought one should have few than three ex-rays in their life. The technology has changed. X-rays are now digital, he adds. I nod and attempt a smile. He turns towards me and stares deeply into my eyes, the way gentlemanly Texans do, the way the Pastor at our church did, and in a firm calming way says, If I ever have questions about x-rays or anything else, I should never be afraid to ask him.

“What did you do for the summer? You guys travel?” He had asked enthusiastically at the beginning of the consultation.

“No.” I try to relax my face.

His beach blonde hair, the brownish tint to his pink skin and the lines on the side of his eyes, he had probably spent summer at the ocean somewhere. He probably came from a long line of dentists and doctors, ones for whom Texas has been home for generations. Domestic flights have been a hot spot for nationalist rules this summer. I’m usually unprepared for small talk. I’m exceptionally unprepared for small talk on domestic migration for international migrants. The media is awash with stories. The laws are changing. He shows me a chart of the bone structure of the child’s teeth. They are fine, developing properly. It will take maybe six months for them to get out. If we would like, he can do a teeth cleaning. Oh no, next time. Thank you so much. It’s been ten minutes.

Being here somehow reminded me of the series LOST. So at first, I asked everyone their background story. What did they do before they came here? I wanted to know how they got here. The real equation I wanted to answer was, who they were. One plus one equals two, two plus two equals who. I asked less and less over time and now, I know not to.

Yet somehow, I have found the answers to my intrusive inquiries, not because of the vague, loose adventurous stories of how we escaped the previous world, but in the way appear at gatherings and disappear in between and the exceptionally unsophisticated way, the symbols of power and longstanding, the OGs isolate, destroying by tongue or by craft, those who uncover the veil, those whose vulnerabilities cause them to seek anything other than an abstract idea of friendship.

Power

Is love stronger than power? Is love stronger than pride – Sade? I find myself, once again in a chaotic pattern of confusing dissonance and open doors with questions that have no conclusions, an ever changing battle between true and false. There are giants behind the doors. I have not taken my offerings to the gods of this place. They are never enough.

There used to be a line drawn between those who stayed and those who left. Each one the antagonist in the other one’s story. One, a partaker of the fallen system, a beneficiary of the fallen meritocracy and therefore corrupt, the other an escapist, a coward, an overworked pilgrim of underground work with felled dignity. My background disqualifies me to many, of pride and waning allegiance to a past where old wounds would rather be forgotten by those who came. Now there are green cards, mortgages and electric cars- level ground and, most of all, there are no tribal montages here, here we all are the same.

************

My almost one year old demands that I actually spend time with her these days and not hide in virtual spaces. Nothing I give her is enough to keep her attention- not my milk, not smiles, not kisses, not clapping. She noticed that I hold something in my hand most of the time, so she cries for it, eats it and holds it and looks at it the same way I do. Sometimes she grunts as she stares at me staring at the phone when I’m feeding her and I turn to her and wonder how long she’s been there. She demands that we sleep at the same, next to each other, effortlessly, my scent on her nose her hand on my ear or her head on my head.

Happy Birthday Zaza.

******

I turned a year older too.

His mercies are new every morning, His faithfulness every night.

Love never fails.

A big tourist-lodge operator recently shared a list of questions he is most commonly asked by tourists about the country. One of them was an inquiry into why there are so many people standing or sitting idle by the roadside. I have an answer to this, I think. It is because standing or sitting by the roadside is just an African thing. People love to be in community most of the time. I see it in the early morning when men gather at trading centres to drink tea and eat chapati and sumbusas from the woman who passes by the same place at the same time daily with a bucket and a packet of thin see through kaveera. I see it in the camaraderie at wedding launches and every and any cause for a celebration. Also, everyday, is market day. Someone is always selling something to eat and the street or roadside is the perfect place to find customers.

I began my 31st year with sleep-laden eyes, many kilogrammes less in weight, [the same old] abstract thoughts of running away and equipped with a new breast gadget to extract a milk supply that had already started to dwindle within four months. I went to the only place I could think of, a spa. I had been taking care of a new born and a three and a half year old, with no hands or voice besides mine for hours and sometimes, it seems, days at a time. I needed someone to take care of me.

When I finally sat down, my ears were sharply attuned to the sound of flowing bubbling water in the small fountain nearby. I was a fugitive. Nobody was going to hand me a crying child, nobody was coming to ask mummy-mummy-mummy for anything. I was just any other human being on the outside. On the inside, I was the woman who had burst out of a hospital door, 4cm dilated with contractions, with my suitcase, ready to fight, for the first time in a long time, for who I know myself to truly be. I had been a victim once, at the first hospital, after the first birth. I was not ready to be one again. I hoped the nurse would try and push me around this time, call a security guard to come hold me down.

I spent most of that night awake, watching a woman and motherhood talk show after washing my hair with the full wrath of beautiful smelling golden-orange coloured sodium sulphate in singular use bottles. I had been meaning to wash it a month or so before, but time had been a luxury too great to afford. So I looked up at the ceiling, wondered if baby would manage to sleep, if someone had found the duvet I had left on top of the car. Two hours beyond the time I had planned on leaving, I had run out of the house hurriedly without looking back, just in case my main support system at the time, suddenly had something more urgent to do- something about turbines, discussions and meeting bosses and friends. A few kilometres away, I turned back. Stealthily running back inside the gate, I threw the duvet which I had in the moment decided to pick up, on top of the car. I contemplated taking it to the door and quickly changed my mind. It was hanging in one direction so I straightened it, took a glimpse at the balcony, looking for a sign of upheaval, then, willing myself to walk away, I walked back outside unnoticed and drove away.

…

Church street, Pretoria, is silent, lined by trees and the sidewalk is paved by white sand and stones. I could walk for three minutes or more and not see anybody. Any scampering in the trees meant that I was about to be robbed on knife or gun point. Every now and then, a car with loud shouts of menacing white superiority occasionally grazed the road at super speed.

There are no people selling Kabalagala or boiled maize on the streets or the roadside. The roadside is for hobos and other unemployed people with cardboard boxes asking for any kind of job. Nobody sells pineapples or mangoes from a wheelbarrow. Nobody talks to you. You seem to disappear unseen in the dry windless air, the scalding sweat-lessness in the summer, which is when I usually walked, from my residence to the only African salon that side of town.

…

I slowly lunge backwards onto my pillow and stare at the ceiling behind the mosquito net. I think about the child I once was. The child who was terrified of the dark, who could not sleep alone in a bed by myself. That was even long before the soundless footsteps in the dark, the door I thought I had shut swinging eerily from side to side, long before it became a part of my subconscious; the memory of me following them with a faint smile and humour, thinking it was one of the children, a funny story I would tell later, only to come face to face with the black night, opened up by the empty space where the back door should have stood closed.

There is a smell about new beginnings in new places that is etched in every memory of that place. Our first apartment was like that. It was solely ours, new and novel. It was home, because it was ours and it was ours even though, I spent most of our time there, a lone soul staring through the glass balcony doors where most of the sunlight came through, centering the rustic wooden table in the kitchen where two more beings would eventually sit. They were the same glass doors through which they would enter, those who work while others sleep and sleep while others work. A small cough here and there, breathless, there was something in the air. One child was in his room, door closed but not locked, the child who had wailed all day, red faced, was in the room opposite ours, door wide open so that we could hear him when he awoke. The television was, large and black and still, the laptop lay shut on top of the armrest, the tea in the cup left half drunk in the cup, next to the phone next to the book I was attempting to read. They left empty spaces and a souvenir of cement-grey fingerprints and an array of knives on the chair where we had once sat and talked and smiled and laughed. … My four year old recently told me that he was afraid of the dark. Attempting to logicize his fears, I promptly asked him what he feared about the dark, and he said, “The dark”.

I wake up most days feeling tired. I don’t know if it is because of the red light of the night lamp next to me. Sometimes I wake up just in time for the lingering presence of hands upon my neck to disappear. Sleep paralysis it is called. The power has been off every few days. Just like many things here at home, you must know somebody or be a somebody before someone performs a job that they are paid monthly to provide. Most times, you must be a someone from the same tribal grouping, otherwise you are too proud and need humbling. You are to consider yourself lucky if you receive anything on time or up to a standard of any level.

I lay still and wait for sleep to whisk me away. Sometimes I turn to the side and glare at the residential unit of the big commercial complex they built next to us. Sometimes I see the glow of the TV. Most times I just stare at the still indoor plant in the glass windowed corridor. The glass is a light reflecting glass so I can only see through it with the light of the moon. My ears lay at the foot of my babies’ beds and I whisper constant incoherent prayers hoping God is close enough to hear me. Many times I have turned to the emptiness expecting lifelessness and loneliness to consume me, and I have instead found power, love and sound mind.

Pickled an avocado by mistake, and true to form, in an hour, it looked like it had aged at least 20 years

God, my source.

Tag: Uganda

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