Nomad's Pub

Travel & the Measuring of Life

We are on our way to Rwanda now; left the park and have already passed the Rift Valley. Uganda is such a beautiful country. In this region, there are banana plantations everywhere, and tea plantations as well. They sprawl in all their teal and gentle green coloured splendor on the slopes of the rolling hills. Everywhere you look you find this soft lushness.

Occassionally a mud hut will pop into view; sometimes round with grass or banana roofing, still other times rectangular with tin roofing. Always built with a wooden frame holding together the mud brickwork. We pass through villages much like the one I stayed in on my rural visit outside of Mbarara, with the shoe-box style concrete houses. Each has a cool cement slab of a patio in front of it, and if coloured, usually either mustard yellow or bright turquoise.

I love all the tin roofs; the men cutting grass at the road’s edge with their machetes. School children walk along the way in their uniforms—sometimes green and gold, or all blue, or blue with red knit sweaters, and even pink gingham on occasion! Women with their babies tied on their backs, carrying enormous woven mats rolled up or baskets of bananas on their heads. Young girls lugging the yellow jugs of water through the reeds, trudging back from some water source far beyond eyesight—jugs which may contain even up to ten litres of water.

I love the bright colours and prints of the clothing, worn proud and elegantly even when well worn and dirt covered. Love the beautiful head scarves, and the cement buildings with their slab of wall painted that bright turquoise or mustard yellow—bursts of radiance in an already vibrant scene.

Here in Uganda, they drive as they do in England, on the left side of the road. It is, after all, a country colonized by the British, and though colonialism per se has ended, it is a period of neo-colonialism now. Remnants of the colonial years are everywhere; the influence of it still strong. Queen Elizabeth National Park. School uniforms for children. Driving on the left side. None of these bother me, but that the Ugandan Constitution is written in English…this does prick something.

While true, Uganda has so many languages that choosing one for the legal concerns would prove quite difficult, still at least if one must choose an international language not native to the country, perhaps Swahili at least would be a more pertinent option? This at least is a language of East Africa, and many people across the country understand it if they do not also speak it. This language they could own and use with confidence. Try arguing legal matters before an international audience in a borrowed language and you will likely loose the dispute; you do not have control over the language. Those who own a language have the ability to manipulate it.

It will be interesting to compare and contrast the experiences of Uganda and Rwanda.

On our way to Safari, we passed through a police check—a road block, really. They had down on the road (still paved at that point) boards with long metal spikes rising from them; metal hands flagging you to stop and ready to tear you apart should you ignore their warning. Our driver, happily, knew one of the police—a woman—and we were able to pass through without trouble. She had apparently just received a transfer from the city to that location. Moses (our driver) was not sure why the block was up, but said that the road we were on had many problems with burglars. We assumed that, then, was the reason, but who can really say?

Who can ever really say?

Everywhere we drive, people wave to us from the fields they work by hand under the burning sun. I have decided that the smiles which light up their faces and spread to our own are among the most beautiful sights in the whole world. Certainly they are an actual experience I would loathe to miss.

Papyrus and Eucalyptus plants line the roadside today as we travel down towards the border, and the earth runs a rich red beneath us. Indescribably beautiful. We are weaving our way through the hills, and occasionally they open up and we see beneath us deep, long stretching valleys. Occasionally a truck passes by, loaded under the weight of bananas and the twenty plus people clinging to the metal framework in the back, over which a tarp might ordinarily be draped.

And I wonder at the things we seek after, which we claim give us the quality of life, or the purpose of it. Because here, little of the things we seek after exist, and yet the richness found here runs deep, and cannot be measured on the scales we construct.

posted by Lada @ 12:58 AM