With open-backed trucks spilling over business-clad, shirtless and screaming men; my slow breathing takes in a smell of street-fried pork and dust to find some gospel to preach. The current anxiety in finding the words to encourage your audience is not due to a shortage of power or the locally-foreign eyes cast upon me, but rather my own decision to pleasure my morning breakfast-desire with an all too sweet cup of dry tea and a Cup of Noodles. I only mention this because it has begun to give me a feeling that a daily routine of the unmentionable sort could soon become irregular therefore the mind tends to focus more on the potential disaster than expressing my life’s events; and with that the situation will be recessed.
Aside from the opening statement, my current sights focus on six construction men approximately 50 metres away and matching me being two-stories up. They seem to be struggling to get the small metal support rods (those ones that eventually are encased in cement) to be in place. As the skeleton of a structure—supported on all sides by scalfolding made from sticks that one might find covered in moss in a riparian zone—supports these six men the streets below are a collective mess of pedestrians, cyclists carrying 100 kilograms of maize, street vendors selling ‘quarter-machine’ novelty items and all too many types of motorized vehicles all with a mob mentality to get to their destination first whether it be 1 metre away or 100 kilometres. The thought of this parade of maniacs is reminiscent of today’s, and nearly every drive to Iganga. Whether the mode of transportation is your standard mid-90s sedan or a Japanese-made van/bus authorized to carry 14 passengers, I would give the opportunity a 95% chance of carrying nearly double the number of persons as the vehicle properly should. As the peke-pekes (motorcycles) zip by on all sides and every motor-vehicle honks their horn to command the road, our motor-car swerves to avoid a slow-moving vehicle while at the same time coming within inches of head-on colliding furniture set being pulled on a wheeled cart by a nearly life-depleted man. In finally arriving at my destination I too was part of the scene in descriptive development above; only soon I left to sit where I am now, finding my spirits high as my world-flipped-upside-down is one helluva story…
Although English is the official spoken language of this country, it is to my experience as far away from my dialect as any other dialect, therefore often a conversation in my mother-tongue and a Ugandan in their state of speaking from a collected of learned words turns in to a storm of confusion and frustration. So yes, I am fortunate to have the luxury of power (when it is on) and water in this country, that is by no means where my development of this story is intending to play its cards. The other day power had been out for some 36 hours or so, therefore the expectation existed that it would return soon. To my happiness I peer out the window to see neighbors across the street with their front light on and eagerly dash to the light-switch. To my ultimate sadness I find no light filling every tiny crevice in my front room. After a ten-minute manic state of trying every light switch and combination of light switches to see if I have missed something the past 3 months I have lived at my home, I call the neighbor to enquire if power was truly there or if he had purchased a generator…indeed power was there, but of course mine was not. So the evening ended with torches in hand, and yes spirits were still high and mighty; who needs electricity?!?! So the next morning I speak to the Estates Manager of the college, and he comes by to check on things. He brings me around my front, to the neighbor’s side of the cement wall dividing our houses, and shows me that my power had been disconnected from the wires—it had become disconnected when they neighbor hooked up their own wires to tap in to my power. Case solved, power was there, just a wire disconnected, not big deal. It is not even any big deal that the neighbor was tapping in to my power; I could care less that they do. In fact I was happy that they could do that and not be in any sort of trouble. ZOOM TO 3 DAYS LATER…Arriving home from a weekend away, as I am checking the outside of my house for any abnormalities, my neighbor (the one tapping in to my power) approaches me and begins to lecture me about leaving the lights on in the house. Not only is it a waste and a potential fire hazard, but with the power on there is more potential that future-burglars could look in to my house for items to take, etc. I proceed to explain in my slow-transformed Ugandan English that the reason the lights were on was due to the fact that when the power was out, there was confusion in to which direction some of the switches should be to determine power on/off, since some of switches are reversed. Also I pleaded to her the fact that she was tapping in to my power and she was the one who accidentally separated my power wires, that in reality it was partially the fault of her own because while power was everywhere else, it was not at my home. Again a lecture to me after I spill my case and one more time I explain myself to avoid defeat. To no avail I lost the Battle of Englishes (American West Coast English vs. Ugandan English) as neighbor (still friendly…she could never hate me!) left her post to take care of matters at home. The feeling of defeat in a position when the fault was lesser my own than neighbor’s was frustrating, but the post-thoughts on the evolution of language create all the more appealing feeling of a future post…
To all of you back home I hope that things are well, and hopefully going as well as things are for me, but until then Peace and Love.
