by Maggie Downs
If I try hard to summon her and dive deep in my memories, I emerge with senses instead of scenes: the sound of her crooning along with Elvis in the car, the scalp-tickling sensation of her playing with my hair, the scent of her citrusy 4711 cologne. These are the memories that have been stored in the body, the animal-like relationship between a mother and daughter. It takes real work for me to conjure anything more precise. The longer she is sick, the more she slips away.
Inventor Thomas Edison believed that memory was a factory, and there were tiny workers who stashed information away into the Broca’s area, part of the frontal-lobe region of the brain. When a person had trouble recalling something, it simply meant the worker responsible for that particular memory was on break and couldn’t retrieve it. Conversely, to remember something is to get in touch with the shift that was on duty at the time the memory was recorded. I know Edison’s theory isn’t true, but I think about it a lot. Sometimes I imagine my factory workers are out to lunch or tipsy. My mom’s factory, though, has been gutted.
From the wildlife blind, I watch an adult giraffe stretch for leaves on a tree. Suddenly a baby giraffe trots out from behind it and runs to his mother. He nudges beneath her knobby legs and stands in her shadow.
Although baby giraffes hit the ground feetfirst and walk almost immediately, I know mama giraffes care for their young as long as necessary—sometimes as long as sixteen months—to teach them survival skills. The mature males leave the group they were born into and can spend their entire lives alone. But the females tend to stay together in small groups. They bond.
Now the top of the young one’s head grazes the pale, fine fur of his mother’s belly. Together the giraffes almost seem to be an eight-legged figure, two shapes combined into one. I yearn for that. I am just an animal, after all. I want to run to my mom, seek the protection of her body. But I am motherless now, even while she still breathes.
Does the fact that my mother can no longer care for me mean that I’m equipped to navigate this world on my own? If that’s the law of nature, why does it feel so unnatural?
OUR FINAL NIGHT IN KRUGER, THE WIND HAS FANGS.
We pitch our tents under the shelter of a few trees, near a chain-link fence with a sign that warns against feeding the hyenas.
The spotted animals patrol the length of the fence anyway. Though they are still wild, these hyenas have grown accustomed to humans here and seem unafraid.
Our neighbors are boisterous and drunk Afrikaners. They set up a pop-up tent on top of a hulking Land Rover. They drag patio furniture onto the grass, pull out a grill, light the charcoal. They cook boerewors sausage coils and thick steaks, foil-wrapped potatoes and a pot of soupy beans, then toss their meat scraps over the fence. The hyenas fight for the gristle and skin.
My friends and I want to celebrate Halloween, even though the holiday isn’t known here.
I learned this earlier in the day, when we checked into the campsite. I asked the ranger if there were any Halloween activities for the park’s international guests. He said he has never heard of Halloween before.
“It’s a holiday,” I said. “In America, we celebrate it by dressing up in costumes, knocking on neighbors’ doors, and asking for candy.”
“And they give it to you?”
“Yes. Because if they don’t, you can play a mean trick on them.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why would you do that?”
I hadn’t thought about it before, and I didn’t know how to respond. After a long pause I explained, “Because Halloween is all about being scary. A lot of people dress up like vampires, witches, zombies, mummies—anything dead. And then they frighten other people.”
“Dead things?”
My explanation wasn’t adequate, and he didn’t get it. We dropped the Halloween talk and focused on the registration process instead. When that was finished, I turned to walk away. The ranger yelled cheerfully after me, “Have a nice Halloween! I hope you drown in a swimming pool tonight!”
For our own festivities, Pete and I decide to be our Afrikaner neighbors, quietly and out of earshot. We hike our pants up to our ribs, hoist our beers in the air, and try on South African accents, bragging about our fat boerewors and how we’re going to cook it on the braai. Then Barbara pretends to be a lion and chases us around our tents.
“Happy Halloween!” Pete hands me a piece of candy from our food supplies.
It’s hard to believe this is one of our final nights together. Barbara is headed to Madagascar, where she’ll be working on a lemur census. Erin and Pete are on a fast track through East Africa, zipping through Uganda and Rwanda before heading to Egypt. And I’m also going to Uganda, but I am in for a longer stay—I’m still in the process of making plans, but I’ll likely volunteer on a farm in exchange for a place to sleep.
After dinner, we are too cold to stay outside, even though we want to prolong our time together. We crawl into our tents, and the drunk neighbors wander into our campsite and jeer. “It’s too cold for your tents!” they yell, as if we have a choice of accommodations for the night. “You need a strong one like ours.”
The wind howls through the duct-taped seams of the tent, and my summer sleeping bag does little to keep me warm. I pull on a hat and some gloves. The frame of our tent buckles and sways with every gust.
“I feel like the wind is talking to us,” Barbara says. It does almost sound like whistles and chirps. I strain to listen to what it’s saying but I can’t make out the words. Eventually I fall into the kind of unsettled sleep that feels like slipping on cobblestones; every time I’m about to tumble, I wake with a jolt.
I don’t know what time it is when I hear the crack. It shatters the blackness of night. Then a boom. A crash. I have no idea what’s happening. Uncertainty grips me.
I hear Barbara’s breath quicken. We are both still with fear. My eyes water as they always do when my body is tight with terror, and I wipe the tears away.
“Should we go outside?” Barbara says.
“I don’t know,” I say. The wind moans; then it’s joined by animal chatter. From my tent, I see a flashlight. The light is yellow, but the canvas walls filter it into a delicate green. I hear another tent unzip.
A moment later, our tent shakes.
“Guys,” Pete says. “Come out and see.”
I strap my headlamp around my forehead and flick on the light before I crawl out of the tent. Outside, everything looks different than it did earlier, and I flounder to make sense of the scene.
The campground looks like a dense jungle. Leaves rattle. The sky is streaked with the first bluish lines of morning light, and wind rushes across my face. There are fallen branches everywhere. Where the neighbors’ grill and patio furniture used to be, there is now a tree.
On closer inspection with our flashlight beams, my friends and I see that an entire tree didn’t fall against the Land Rover. However, a sizable portion of it did, as though the wind cracked the tree right in half.
The neighbors carefully step out of their pop-up tent on the car roof and climb down the ladder attached to the vehicle’s side, the metal now tangled with branches. The Afrikaners are dazed, but safe. We help them find a place to sit, away from the mess of sticks and leaves. Erin brings them water.
The fallen tree only narrowly missed crashing through their tent. After it hit the roof, the thick limbs rolled off the vehicle and onto the patio furniture, shattering it all. The tree came close to crushing the chain-link fence—the one thing that separates us from the scavengers.
The animals are here now, summoned by the clatter and the light. The hyenas stand in a line, watching us beasts with unblinking, round eyes. I stare back, and I wonder if I am as strange to them as they are to me. The fence looks more delicate than it ever did before, almost like filigree. The line that separates us from wildness is so thin, it’s almost not there at all.
Honor Your Tribe
IT’S LATE AFTERNOON IN KAMPALA, UGANDA, WHEN I CALL my dad’s ce
ll phone. It is 8 a.m. in Ohio, and my mom is being fed powdered eggs.
“I’m trying to decide where to go next,” I tell my dad.
“That’s nice,” he says.
My laptop rests on top of my knees while I sit cross-legged on a hostel’s red-painted porch, which opens out into a large plot of land. From my perch I see a pig almost as big as a loveseat, groups of cartwheeling monkeys, and lines of laundry strung up but sagging from the humidity.
“I want to do something that helps people,” I say to my dad. “I found this farm …”
“That sounds like a good idea,” he says.
He is distracted, possibly resentful. The last time he showed interest in my travels was a month ago, when he asked if Africa was pretty.
My dad didn’t encourage me to take this trip—he wanted me to stay at my job until I earned my retirement and a gold watch from the company. He is a man who doesn’t believe in quests, quitting jobs, or movement without a safety net. He does believe in rules, structure, and a guaranteed paycheck. He also believes loyalty is still rewarded with gold watches. But once I made my decision, he accepted it, even though it meant slapping another layer of worry onto his life.
Some of the travelers camp here on the scraggly lawn, but I’ve been sleeping on a bunk bed in a sweaty room. A three-legged black-and-white kitten has befriended me and clambers into my bed every night. I think he knows I’m lonely.
My dad is obviously distracted with caring for my mom, so I sign off.
“Well, I’m probably headed to this place called Freddie’s Farm. I’ll call when I get there,” I say. “Tell mom I love her, okay?”
I found Freddie on the internet when I searched for nonprofits in East Africa that need volunteers—his farm was described as a social-development project, ensuring food security for people in Eastern Uganda. Though his organization had good reviews from former workers, it was the photos of people laughing in rice fields that really attracted me.
Freddie asks for just twenty-five dollars a week to pay for lodging, which is less expensive than staying in a guesthouse. Not only will I be saving money, I’m looking forward to camaraderie and to feeling like part of a community again. While it was terrific to zip through South Africa in just one month, now I want to slow down, make friends, and become acquainted with one place for longer than a few days.
Freddie and I trade several emails before I arrive. I tell him I’ve never worked a field before, and Freddie reassures me. You don’t need to be the best farmer or the quickest one, he writes. You just need to be present.
“Anything you can do will help,” he insists. “We just need you.”
He says if I don’t like the field work, I can always teach children a new, sustainable method of planting banana trees.
“I don’t know how to plant banana trees,” I clarify.
“You will learn,” he responds. “Please come.”
I feel necessary in a way I haven’t for months, which is enough to get me on the next bus from the capital city to rural Mbale, located on the eastern side of the country, near the border of Kenya. This is my first real excursion in Africa alone, and already I’m taking a bus across the country to meet a stranger on the other end. I’m pretty sure I know what awaits me in Mbale, but I can’t be certain.
A man sits next to me on the bus, and he verbalizes some of my lingering doubts. “Why are you going to Mbale? There’s nothing there. Who are you staying with? Do you even know what you’re doing?”
My response sounds like an entry in Lonely Planet—and that’s because everything I know about Mbale came from a guidebook.
“Well, it’s the agricultural hub of Uganda, so I hear the markets are big and nice,” I say. “It’s a thriving provincial city with a superb setting at the bottom of Mount Elgon. And the terrain is beautiful. There are waterfalls and coffee plantations …”
“Sure?” the man says. It’s a Ugandan vocal tick, administered in the same tone that an incredulous Californian might say, “Seriously?”
The man says that if it weren’t for his family, he would never visit Mbale again. I try to change the subject.
“What’s the best restaurant in town?” I ask.
“There is food.”
“No. The best,” I say. “What restaurant has the best meal?”
“The restaurants have food,” he says. “There is no best.”
Maybe we have a failure to communicate. Or maybe this man is telling me the truth. Maybe I’m in store for a bleak place. I rest my head on the scratched glass of the bus window and watch Kampala’s smog and congestion slither away, replaced by the swaying grasses and red clay of the countryside.
The trees are tall enough to form a canopy over the road, their trunks hairy with vines. It reminds me of one particular gravel road that leads to my aunt’s farm in southern Indiana, even though I’m sure the species of trees differ.
My husband once told me that the brain is always seeking patterns, because it doesn’t like what it doesn’t already know. That’s why people see faces and animals and shapes in clouds—because our brains are trying to create something familiar out of the senseless and unknown. This is what I’m doing through the smeary bus window, imprinting a road I’ve traveled many times onto a foreign landscape.
It’s beautiful enough that I should be at ease, but my stomach clenches anyway. What’s going to happen to me in this place? I talk myself down by reminding myself of all the people I love back home—the reason why I’m taking this journey in the first place.
I don’t think Uganda was ever on my mom’s list, but her spirit is here. She wanted to live a more adventurous life and explore places she had never been before. And aren’t I doing just that?
Hours later we reach the bus depot, a small stop on a dirt street. The structures vary in size, constructed of brick and bright paint. A few of them just look like skeletons, skinny boards and beams, the bones of a building. Motorcycles scream down the street, and cars kick up red dust. Vendors sell bottles of soda, and a lean man on the corner slices long stalks of sugarcane into bite-sized pieces to bag and sell. Children huddle at his feet, waiting for castoffs.
While I wait for my backpack to be unloaded from the undercarriage of the bus, my seatmate stands next to me, even though he isn’t waiting for any luggage. He offers a final piece of unsolicited advice.
“You should know the bus leaves for Kampala many times a day,” he says. “This afternoon, in fact.”
“Thank you, but I don’t think I’ll be going so soon,” I say. “I’m here for a purpose.”
“Sure?”
I am not, but I nod anyway.
TO GET TO FREDDIE’S HOUSE, I TAKE A SHORT RIDE IN A matatu minivan taxi, followed by a ride on a motorcycle taxi called a boda-boda, and then I walk a mile down a dirt road cluttered with goats and women balancing sacks of grain on their heads. His house is at the end of the road, a simple stone-and-brick ranch-style structure.
I knock, and Freddie comes to the screen door. He looks exactly like the photos online, tall and skinny, about thirty years old. His hair is closely cropped, and he wears crisp black pants and a long-sleeve shirt even though the weather is steamy.
He’s so warm and welcoming, I don’t hesitate to walk inside his house when he opens the door.
The living room is painted bright green. On one side of the room is a floral-pattered couch and a small TV, propped up on a plastic stool. On the other side of the room are rain barrels filled with rice.
Down the hallway, two bedrooms are lined with bunk beds and mosquito nets for volunteers. Freddie sleeps in the back of the house, a third bedroom. The kitchen is small and holds sacks of grain, a small, campfire-sized paraffin stove, and a dorm room–sized mini refrigerator. The bathroom has a toilet, but it doesn’t flush, and there’s a cold-water faucet for taking bucket showers.
I ask about the farm. Freddie says it’s somewhere off-site. I guzzle purified water from my bottle while we talk, and I feel sweat beadi
ng on my upper back and rolling down my spine.
“We can go there another day,” he says.
Only one other volunteer is staying with Freddie at the moment. Katie is a Canadian who has been living in Rwanda for six months, building websites for small businesses to fund travels throughout Africa. She says she’s here for research—she’s writing a guide to volunteer opportunities in East Africa.
I ask when I can start picking rice. It’s so hot, and I’m already tired from the long day of travel, so I secretly hope Freddie won’t say my volunteer work begins today.
“No, no rice,” he says. “Harvest is done.”
“No rice?”
“Next year,” he says. “We’ll have more.”
“Oh. So I’ll be teaching kids about planting banana trees then?” I say.
“The kids are on holiday,” he says. “They have time away to help parents with the crops that have been harvested.”
“No students?”
“No students,” he confirms.
If there’s no rice to harvest and no students to teach, why am I here? I told the man on the bus that I have a purpose, and now I guess that’s a lie.
Freddie uses a paraffin stove on the floor to heat a pot of milk tea. He pours some into a chipped blue mug and hands it to me. It’s too hot to drink, so I just hold it while I pace the floor.
“Relax,” he says. “What else can you do?”
“I have no idea.”
When it comes right down to it, what can I do? The skills of a journalist are about as useless in Mbale as a screen door on a submarine. I can’t build a house or tend the sick. I can’t help anyone with their crops or teach a new skill. All I can do is research stories and write articles for daily deadlines—which doesn’t seem useful when I say it to Freddie in his living room.
“You are journalist?” he says. “Have you been on radio?”