Teacher on Two Wheels

Above:  Main road near my house

Friday 4/3/09  Gulu, Uganda

A boda driver makes eye contact with me when I reach the main road.  He looks for a nod or a wave–anything that says I need a ride.  I give him a sign.  He reaches me before the others do, pulling a quick U-turn into oncoming traffic, swerving around cyclists and other boda drivers.  He asks me where I’m headed.  I tell him and jump on the back of his seat.  We pull away from my street on his beat-up motorcycle and slip into the streams of commuters whizzing down the red dusty road in the morning chill.

On my way to work, I pass vendors downtown.  They hunch over and sweep the pavement in front of their storefronts with short, wicker brooms.  Clouds of orange dust peel away from them and drift down into the gutters.  Dust blows in each night to blanket the verandas, but each morning it rises with the jabs of a broom.

On my way to work, I pass colorful lines of students in bright uniforms walking to school.  Boys and girls alike have shaved heads.  Some wear shoes or sandals; others walk barefoot with hardened feet.  The younger kids seem shocked to see me, to see white skin.  They scream out “White person!” or “Foreigner!” in Acholi, a dialect of Luo.

On my way to work, I pass the market.  Sellers set up their stalls, arranging a myriad of functional things–used shoes, boxes of toothpaste and soap, old radios and electric cords, nails and bolts, and plastic chairs.  Each morning the vacant stalls fill with goods; each night they empty.

On my way to work, I pass cyclists of every variety.  One man rides with a cavernous wooden box lashed to a rack above his back wheel.  The box is filled to the brim with different types of animal legs–cow, goat, lamb.  The meat is red and sinewy, bright against the white of the box.  Another man stops at the market with a few dozen live chickens tied to his bike.  In pairs and with their feet bound, the birds hang upside down from his handlebars and watch the pavement zoom by below them.  I pass fathers cycling their children to school, bicycle taxis taking people to work, and soda delivery men clinking along over the bumpy dirt road with a crate of soda bottles.

On my way to work, I pass the bicycle repair shops that keep the cyclists moving.  Squatting in a puddle of scattered tools, repairmen with ever-greasy hands replace spokes and fix flats by the roadside.

On my way to work, I pass mothers.  Some have babies tied to their backs, a small pair of child’s legs straddling their waists.  Some, on their way to the water pump, carry yellow water cans in their hands.  Others balance a basket of clothes or a tray of bananas on their heads.

On my way to work, I pass the reed hut that houses a small generator.  Inside, people pay an old man with stringy arms 500 shillings [$0.25 US] to charge their cell phones.

On my way to work, I pass hordes of bats hanging high up in the tall trees that line the road.  The bats squawk and cry, answering the whines and groans that the old motorbikes make as they dart about on the street below.

On my way to work, I pass smoking stacks of mud bricks, some three or four meters tall.  Next to the stacks, invariably, are pits in the ground–holes where the brick makers gathered their mud.  Long logs, fuel for the fires, are fed into ovens at the bases of the stacks.  Smoke floats above the stacks like wispy gray hair caught in the wind.

On my way to work, I pass dense mango trees sagging under the weight of their swelling fruit.

On my way to work, I pass a world that bleeds new-ness.  It sweats it from the cracks in the road and the holes in the trees.  Like a low hum, like some deep steady buzz, new-ness provides the soundtrack of my days.  Even the white-green stream of mystery liquid that trickles through the trash-clogged gutters in the morning seems alive, vibrant.

I know, though, that as time passes, the new-ness will fade like colored paper left in the sun–nothing will happen quickly; nothing will alert me to its shifting.  I’ll simply arrive at the office one morning and have no recollection of the things I passed on the way there.  The boda ride will morph into a seven-minute haze, a dusty, bouncy, bleary-eyed morning commute.  For now though, thankfully, things are fresh.