Teacher on Two Wheels

Sunday 3/21/10 Gulu, Uganda

Four days.

620 miles

Top speed of 40 mph

One puncture

Three nights in three cheap hotels

One long day in the rain

Lots of thoughts of potential future motorcycle trips

*****

I got a late start, so late I started wondering if the universe, in some sort of subtle manipulation of time (Did it always take me this long to pack?), was sending me one clear message:  Don’t go.  Once I left—after the failed attempt at fixing my rear taillight, after the rain stopped, after I picked up snacks—a familiar exhilaration coursed through me.

Again I found myself time-rich and plan-less, situated neck deep in one of man’s most nourishing and unpredictable realities, the vast sea of the traveler’s unknown.  In this space, both euphoria and crippling fear sneak about; both hope and dread float in the breeze; both the ecstasy of discovery and the horror of disorientation intertwine to marry caution with excitement.  Having never set off on any sort of motorcycle trip before, this departure was laced with more anxiety than usual.  I knew (and still know) nothing about motorcycle maintenance.  I had no planned route; no map.  All I knew was that I wanted to head south, and I knew I only had four days to play with.  I set off on a Saturday morning knowing I had to be back in work on Wednesday.

As I pulled onto Kampala Road, that madhouse stretch of tarmac that connects Gulu and Uganda’s capital, I shifted into fourth—my bike’s highest gear—and pulled hard on the throttle.  I picked up speed and listened as the small engine beneath me raised its cry to a high whine.  Air whizzed by and into my helmet.  The greens of the head-high cassava plants and grasses of sugar cane at the road’s edge began to soften and blur.

Above:  A typical stretch of dirt road in northern Uganda.  This picture was taken as I approached a town, hence the extra pedestrian traffic.

I zigzagged down quiet dirt roads through the Ugandan bush.  I traveled for almost two hours before a motorized vehicle passed.  Everywhere around me, lean Ugandans were slamming hoes down into the rain-softened earth, preparing their land for planting.  Children, shy and giggling, dared one another to call out to me as I passed, or better yet, speak to me in English.  “How are you?!” they’d yell.  The road, a red winding artery through the greens of the land, was dark and puddle-filled from the recent onset of the rainy season.  I putted along on my tiny steed, swerving around potholes as best I could, but crashing the bike twice into the soft berms lining the road.  Fast I learned to fear mud.

When I reached Lira, a quaint town set amidst vast flat plains of swampy farmland, I checked into a hotel by the market.  For $10 US, I got a simple room with a window, fan, TV, and a mattress sheathed in rubber.

*****

Later that night, I took a bicycle taxi to meet a Ugandan friend and co-worker of mine—let’s call him Mark—at a small bar outside of town.  Bicycle taxis are everywhere in Lira, crowding the streets with not the swarms of motorbike drivers ever jockeying for position that we have in Gulu, but somber men and boys slowly gliding their way around town on squeaky bicycles.  When I entered the joint, Mark led me to his table.  A married man, he was sitting with six girls in their mid-twenties.  “These are my friends,” he said, leaning in close to me to be heard over the din of some pop song thumping through large speakers in the corner of the room.  I ordered a soda, and Mark introduced me to the people seated at our table.  A screen that stretched from floor to ceiling projected a Manchester United game to the bar’s patrons.  Dimly lit by the bar’s blue light bulbs, eyes darted around.

Above:  One of hundreds of bicycle taxis in Lira

His tongue already slowed by the night, Mark started explaining tribal differences between the Acholi, the tribe that calls Gulu district home and was famously targeted by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army for decades, and the Langese, the tribe that is found throughout Lira district.  “You see, the Acholi will respect you, but the Langese will be nice to you.  Langese won’t always respect you truly, but they will be kind to you.  That’s the difference,” Mark said authoritatively.  And on it went.

At one point the owner of the place, a stocky woman with braids named Anne, sat down with us.  Anne was kind and chatty, but pushy when it came to advertising the bar’s adjacent guesthouse. (“Many whites have stayed here already.  You’ll like the rooms.  I’ll show you some before you leave tonight.  Very nice.  You’ll like them.”)

Anne did this thing where she would clutch her breasts every time she laughed, as if any good joke could trigger her body to jettison her breasts like a space shuttle ditching used fuel tanks.

The night wound down and sleep came for me.  Mark, Lira born and raised, was proud of his hometown and gave me a driving tour of the town before dropping me off at the hotel. Here’s our courthouse.  It’s actually larger than the one in Gulu Town.  And here’s our…

*****

I hit the road early the next day, only to be handed a two-hour delay after heading out of town.  The culprit?  A two-inch nail wedged into my rear tire.  Mark helped me track down a mechanic that came out to meet me by the roadside.  With the puncture patched, I traveled down flat, near-empty roads to Soroti, a tiny one-street town.  The afternoon sun cast long shadows on the ground around me, so I had a quick lunch before pushing on.

Above:  A taxi driver with two customers in Lira

Flat plains peppered with beautiful cylindrical huts and foraging goats and cattle gave way to rolling hills with a backdrop of jagged, shadowy mountains on the horizon.  The range that is home to the glaciered Mt. Elgon sits on the Uganda / Kenya border and gives the area an Ecuadorian vibe.

In Mbale, after checking into a cheap hotel, I made my way to a restaurant a taxi driver recommended.  All tables were full when I entered the place, and just as I was about to turn to walk out to find another restaurant, a young man waved me to his table.  Richard was a university student at Makerere University, Uganda’s most famous and competitive post-secondary institution.  Intoxicated with a mix of hope, knowledge, and greed, Richard talked incessantly about what his future held for him in Uganda.  He was studying Tourism at school so he could one day run his own business and get rich.  He talked about how Ugandans need to learn to help themselves, how people must stop relying on foreigners and NGOs to come in and save the day.

Above:  Soccer is huge in Uganda.  Most Champion’s League matches draw large crowds in all of the local bars.

“What type of business are you interested in starting?” I asked.

“Anything.  I want to start a business that attracts whites,” Richard said.

Minutes later, Richard was asking me if I’d be interested in working with him to start a hiking business in southwestern Uganda.  I told him I knew nothing about hiking in southwestern Uganda.  He protested, saying that I knew enough to help him.  I asked him to elaborate.  He explained that I most likely knew enough white people to make our business float, with the logic being that all my white friends would frequent the business enough to keep it profitable until word spread throughout the White Universe about Richard and Andrew’s Hiking Spot in southwestern Uganda.

Pause.

“So what do you do up in Gulu?” Richard eventually asked.

I told him, explaining what Invisible Children was all about and the types of programs we run.

“How can a guy like me get a scholarship with your organization?” he asked frankly.

“I’m sorry.  We don’t give scholarships to students who aren’t from the North.  We’re trying to help students who have been affected by the LRA conflict.”

Richard said nothing at first.  His eyes, steely and still, carried a new tension that wasn’t there before.  He looked at me and then picked up the scrawny chicken leg floating in a bowl of broth in front of him.  In between messy bites, he said, “So wait, I want to understand:  Do you give scholarships to students who are HIV positive?”

I told him we did, although the total number of HIV positive students in our scholarship program was small in relation to groups of students that represented other indicators for vulnerability; 90% of our students are orphans in some capacity, for example, whereas less than 10% are HIV positive.

“See I don’t like that,” Richard said, shaking his head.  “I don’t think you help Ugandans much by investing in people who are just going to die in a few years.”

Silence.

I didn’t know what to say.  I was saddened by the fact that someone so young had already managed to harbor such a raw callousness.

*****

When we parted ways later that night, I said good-bye to Richard in the way people say good-bye to one another when they think they’ll never see each other again; no empty let’s-keep-in-touch promises, just a firm handshake.  The next morning, as I was headed out of town, my cell phone rang.  It was Richard.  “I lost my bus money and don’t have enough to buy another ticket.  Where are you?”

I didn’t tell him where I was.  Instead I told him I was insulted.  “How dare you call me and ask for money after the conversation we had last night?” I asked, incredulous.

Silence.

After a few seconds, Richard said, “It is not like that.”  The call went dead.

*****

On the way back home, three hours or so from Gulu, I stopped at a small cluster of mud-brick stores by the side of the road.  I wanted to let the bike’s engine cool.  I approached one dusty general store with an arc of benches in front of it.  A few men were lounging on the benches, passing around a yellow plastic container to one another and talking.  I walked up and sat down, sore and sweaty from the hours I had logged on the bike in the past few days.  The men greeted me and smiled.  I opened up a bottle of water and stared out at the haze of heat rising in waves from the tarmac.

“How are you?  Hello, how are you?”  A tall man with his shirt unbuttoned to his belly button stepped into my line of sight.

“I’m fine, thanks.  How are you?” I asked.

He launched into a monologue of compliments, telling me how nice my motorbike was, how I looked like a skilled rider when I parked the bike, how shiny my motorbike helmet was.  I knew what was coming.  Finished with his flattery, he waited for my response.  I said nothing.  I instead gave him a deadpan, stone-cold look of indifference.  I was tired enough to be annoyed by what was about to happen, but also too tired to defend myself or scold him.

He leaned in close to me, propping his hand on his knee.  His breath was stale and spoiled with alcohol.  “Five hundred shillings for me, for some nuts or crisps,” he whispered.  “Just five hundred.”  He raised his eyebrows at me, as if to say, That’s not too much for a white person, is it?

I looked at the other men sitting around me.  They were consumed in their own conversations and didn’t take notice of the man and his proposition.

“Why?” I said, turning back to him.  “Why should I give you money?  Why?”

“We’re friends.”

“No we’re not.  You don’t even know my name.  We can’t be friends yet—we just met each other,” I objected.

The man smiled and shook his head in disbelief.  “No we’re friends.  We talked much before.  We’re friends.  Only five hundred.  Please.” he said.

“You give me something, then I’ll give you something,” I said.  “Give me five hundred shillings and then I’ll give you five hundred shillings.  Friends should help each other out,” I said, annoyed.

The man turned and walked away.

Above:  A family I met at the side of the road.  They called me over to talk and asked me to take a few pictures of them.  The kids and adults started shrieking when they saw their faces on my camera’s screen.

Not but five minutes later, an even more intoxicated man approached me, and without any introduction or conversation of any kind, simply said, “Some small money.  Small money?”  The man held onto a bench to keep from falling down and extended one shaky open palm to me.  His eyes, watery and tired, were the color of plaque.

Without a second of thought, I said “No.  Why?  Who are you?”

The man just smiled.  It was clear he couldn’t speak English.

His drunken smile, for some reason, made me both furious and perplexed.  I turned to the other men relaxing in the shade on the benches across from me.  “Excuse me, can you please ask this man why he’s asking me for money?  I don’t know him.  Ask him what he’s doing.”

The men laughed.  They said something to the drunken man that made him recoil, made the smile dissipate from his face.  He barked something to the group.

“He thinks you should help him because you’re white.  White people have money, so you should give him some.  That’s what he said,” one of the men explained.  “But don’t worry, he is just drunk.  It’s OK.”

“No, wait,” I said.  “I want you to ask him something more.  There are lots of big Ugandan men in Uganda, lots of men with big fancy cars and nice clothes.  Why doesn’t he ever ask the big Ugandan men for money?  They have a lot more money than I do.”

The man translated for the drunk.

The instant he grasped the meaning of my retort, he again recoiled and snapped.

“He says that with you it’s different.  Surely those men would never give him money.  With you, the chances are good.”

*****

Before I came to Uganda, I was foolish with my idealism.  I naively thought all types of giving were good.  I saw nothing wrong with dropping a buck in a homeless person’s hat, or sending a container of clothes to a developing country. Those who have should give to those who don’t, I used to think.  Since spending time in an environment steeped in the effects of international charity, a place patched and painted with the goodwill of foreigners, with the agendas of missionaries and aid organizations, I feel completely different about giving now.

Above:  The altar of a Catholic church I passed

Before I go on and explain this shift that has taken place within me in regards to this issue, I want to know what you, Reader, think:  How do you justify dropping money in a homeless person’s hat?  What goes through your mind when you make a small donation to a charity?  Why do we feel the urge to give people a new school or a new religion?  How should we give people things and who should do the giving?

I know that these are very different questions, but the same feelings underpin the different situations they speak to.

Leave your response in the comments section of this post.

Done!  Me with the bike just after making it safely home