Things That Come to Mind When I Try to Sit Down and Blog About Our Two Week Excursion to Uganda:
- The psychological and physical stages of being on a bus for hours on end, which break down into the following:
- -initial socializing, then silent contemplation
- -music listening/ reading
- -then breaking of silence with socializing and a pee break
- -then more quiet time
- -and then utter stir-crazy chaos, during which Clara makes a jingle for a popular Rwandan water bottle brand (Inyange [en-yawn-gay]) and everyone is standing and singing songs from varied musicals
- -finally, we reach our destination and Nastia sheds literal tears of relief
- Feeling disoriented and irrationally angry for the first few days of the trip, given that everything felt like it was occurring in a non-existing time-space continuum
- Visiting a refugee camp for Rwandans who denied the genocide, telling us, “You white people believe everything you hear, but today, we will tell you the truth,” and learning there are many different truths, sides, perspectives, and stories
- Peeing in many holes, which then became a sport for the group: giving a critique and review of how the holes compared to other ones (“We have a luxury hole this time guys. Soap, too” or “Rough one today. Prepare to angle yourself in ways you never have before”)
- Gulu, the town we stayed in for the majority of the trip, for a week, which could produce a whole other list of things that come to mind, but a few of them are: spirits, Acholi culture, darkness, ghosts, children taken in the night, Joseph Kony, “Northern Ugandan Conflict”, Invisible Children, vivid dreams and nightmares, pasta with meat sauce, drug-store lollipops, vandalized village schools, psychology, a sun that left me blonder and tanner and in constant need of sunglasses, treacherous roads, thievery, and a general vibe of disturbia
- Safaris, giraffes, elephants, boat ride on the Nile, warthogs sneezing on Nastia and getting quite aggressive when trying to steal our veggie sandwiches, hippos at a campsite, said hippos almost charging and attacking us
- Chapatti, chapatti, chapatti (which is like a tortilla Ugandans serve with everything and on its own, being made at random chapatti stands)
But I think what stands out to me the most when reflecting upon the two weeks we spent there, it has to be Gulu. Because I have never in my life been anywhere like Gulu before, and I doubt I will ever be somewhere like that again, unless I am revisiting Gulu itself. Gulu was where we were for the majority of the time. The focus of going was in comparing the post-conflict resolution style there to that of Rwanda. And the conflict, had been a very famous one. It was that of Joseph Kony. It was the Kony 2012. The Invisible Children. I remember senior year of high school my friend and I had printed out Kony 2012 signs and spread them among the school: slipped under bathroom stalls, pinned on cork boards, and slapped on car windshields, thinking we were some kind of vigilantes. Three years later, I stood in the very town where children were snatched from their homes and forced to join the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
Gulu is a small gridded town with no paved roads and no street lights and generally, no electricity after 8pm. When walking in the dark to go to one of our staple restaurants, (The Ethiopian Restaurant, which served spaghetti I had a strange obsession with, or The Indian Restaurant, that took three hours to get your food ready, or The Coffee Hut, which was the decided white-people hang out), everyone who passed by looked like a Harry Potter death eater. Dark, sauntering figures, only able to detect our own or fellow muzungu figures by identifying who was tripping over all the potholes. It was creepy. But what was creepier, what was sinister, was knowing what had happened there and seeing the aftermath. Children taken in the dark. Children told to commit unfathomable atrocities. We were told that the suicide rate was exceedingly high in Gulu: people tied with weights found in the river, people with obvious mental disorders rambling and flinching in the street. Even after the many cultural traditions of forgiveness and reconciliation after children were returned home, the Acholi people couldn't get the war out of their psyches. The LRA was built from a disturbing religion, one which is still practiced in a church that is located across from the hotel we stayed in. Two people from our group went and told us of the spirits, exorcisms, and other troubling things. The challenging part came in trying to understand Acholi culture without your western-tinted glasses on. We discussed very much how the culture may impede on development, given that Gulu is very poor. And it was hard to ignore the sense of unease, the growing unsettlement of this belief in spirits. Spirits that led to something like the LRA.
Learning about these things and being where they had happened had been like a slow-moving nightmare, terrifying with its undercurrent of sinister unease. I can’t say that I would have been able to stay in Gulu any longer than I had. It truly felt like something out of “American Horror Story”, like I might have gone insane, truly lost it, had I been there much longer. However, I am so grateful we had gone. There were important lessons demanded to be learned, and between some of the more scary stuff, we had a lot of fun and met very kind people. It’s a confusing jumble of the good things, the culture, and past tragedy and spirits and haunted-ness, all composing one surreal nightmare that makes no sense. Even when we were miles away, all going through the stages of being on the bus, even when we found our way to a safari and camera-flashing boat ride, I could think about our time there and feel it again, the kind of unease so similar to a chill: unshakable.
