The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  7

  America’s Game

  In a very real sense, you will be a grass-roots representative of the American people while living and working in Uganda.

  —Peace Corps Uganda Handbook, 1993

  “Agandi, John! John, how are you? HOW ARE YOU, JOHN!”

  “Ndi gye,” I answered. “Fine, fine. How are youuuu?”

  The kids laughed and waved back from their vantage in a field far above the roadside, continuing their chanted greetings as I walked past. In bright yellow T-shirts and folded paper hats, they stood out against the fresh-tilled soil like strange, vibrant crops, and their voices carried clear as bell tones through the morning air. People around Buhoma lived more than ninety miles from the nearest telephone, and had developed an almost uncanny ability to hold long-distance conversations, casually shouting from shamba to hilltop and back, as if the whole valley was wired for sound. They talked about the weather, crops, and the health of their families in a constant dialogue of hoots and calls that echoed across the hills and gave the landscape an intimate feeling, bringing the farthest fields and farms into the web of village life.

  I passed a group of women walking single file down the road, arranged from largest to smallest like a line of Hungarian dolls. They balanced heavy loads on their heads: yams, passion fruit, and sweet potatoes bundled tightly in brilliant swathes of Zairian fabric.

  “Orio, John,” they greeted me.

  “Yes.” I smiled back and kept walking.

  Most people in Buhoma still mistook me for John Dubois, my closest Peace Corps neighbor and the first muzungu to live for an extended time in the village. John arrived in 1991, when the Peace Corps first resumed volunteer activities in Uganda after a nineteen-year lapse. His original assignment involved gorillas and tourism in another national park, Mgahinga, thirty miles south in the Virunga Volcanoes. But when he arrived for his site visit, the civil war in neighboring Rwanda had spilled over the border, and shells were falling on the forested slopes where he was to live and work.

  The Peace Corps quickly transferred John to Bwindi, where he pioneered my job, helping initiate the gorilla habituation process and beginning a program to train park guides. After several months, however, he found himself more interested in community development, and slowly shifted his focus away from the forest. He began working closely with nearby schools, scout troops, and a local women’s group, organizing conservation education programs and fund-raising activities. His enthusiasm motivated community leaders to start a new project: the construction of a campground and several local banda-style huts to accommodate tourists visiting the park. John secured financial assistance from the Peace Corps Small Project Fund and extended his contract for a third year to see the enterprise through.

  I first met John during training, when he visited Kajansi to tell us about his experiences working with Uganda’s national parks. He had just returned from home leave, and at first I mistook his trancelike stare at a concrete wall for the effects of jet lag. Only later did I recognize this daze for what it was: a fine-tuned survival skill, honed to perfection through years of daylong village meetings, where people argued for hours over school fees and goats in a language he couldn’t understand. His patience was famous throughout the county, and villagers loved him for it as much as they appreciated his humor and generosity. John spoke in a loud northeastern accent and had curly black hair with a matching mustache. I wasn’t sure if people actually got us confused or whether they simply assumed that all muzungus were called John. Either way, it didn’t bother me. Liz had been coming to Buhoma for nearly a year, and everyone still called her John too.

  I left the road and descended through a sloping, grassy compound to the park office, a tin-roofed building that housed our visitor check-in desk, two rusty filing cabinets, a shelf full of old National Geographics, and a solar-powered VHF radio, our one connection to the outside world. On sunny days, with the battery fully charged, we could talk to headquarters in Kampala and hear other parks across the country calling out to one another in bursts of static and garbled voices. But when the clouds set in, the airwaves grew quiet, and we had a hard time raising even Ruhija, a ranger station twenty miles away. There are a lot of cloudy days in a rain forest, and at times we felt cut off, like some forgotten frontier town far beyond the range of railroads and telegraph. It came as no real surprise when a television show called The Ends of the Earth inquired about filming an episode in Bwindi.

  This morning, however, the radio had a good charge, squawking away unnoticed in a corner as the guides and trackers gathered for another day in the forest. “Oriaregye,” they called, and “Agandi, Tour!”—using the distinctive Rukiga pronunciation of my name. But at least they knew who I was, and I paused to greet everyone before circling around the back of the building to find John.

  He lived in a single room separated from the office by a thin wall that stopped four feet shy of the ceiling. When other volunteers reminisced about the scary depths of Peace Corps housing, they talked about John’s place, a shadowy realm of overheard office chatter and radio static, cluttered with laundry, moldy food, half-painted campground signs, and oddly, baseball equipment.

  In 1992, the Little League of America began a campaign to spread the gospel of baseball around the world. They contacted hundreds of Peace Corps volunteers and began shipping equipment to remote villages and communities.

  “I thought they might send me some balls and a couple of bats,” John told me. But several months after he signed on as southwest Uganda’s Little League chairman, the crates started arriving. And they kept coming. Box after box of top-quality gloves, balls, and bats, with plates, catcher’s masks, helmets, run counters, and batting tees—enough gear for an entire league of well-supplied teams. It took up half the room and left John living in a cramped corner of open space near the door.

  “It must be fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of stuff,” he said, laughing at the heaps of moldering boxes. There was more equipment waiting in Kampala too, stockpiled for the day that baseball supplanted soccer as Uganda’s national sport. If John’s experience was any indication, however, that day was a long way off.

  “I have to make everyone wear batting helmets all the time,” he explained. “It’s just too dangerous otherwise.” For most soccer-bred Ugandans, the concept of throwing and catching a ball with your hands was completely foreign. I watched John trying to teach the basics at a Boy Scout meeting: thirty barefoot kids in ill-fitting helmets with baseballs flying all over the yard, whapping off people’s heads and bouncing out of sight into the shrubs. “This may be hopeless,” John confessed.

  Luckily, coaching baseball played a relatively insignificant role in John’s overall agenda. His work took him to villages and community groups throughout the area, and today I was joining him for a trip to Butagota, the largest nearby town, and the site of a weekly market. John needed to visit several primary schools and deliver newsletters to their fledgling wildlife clubs. I had a more fundamental goal: food.

  My first weeks in Buhoma had flown by in a blur of apes and rain and long days in the forest. The bread, rice, tomatoes, and other exotics I’d brought from Kajansi had been quickly devoured or gone moldy in the damp forest air. It was time to stock up on local staples: beans, bananas, and the small, yellow-skinned potatoes known as “Irish.” My Norwegian relatives were willing to overlook this geographical slight, and took great comfort in the fact that I’d been stationed in Uganda’s main spud-growing region.

  “Do they have potatoes?” my aging great-uncle had asked, voicing his one concern on the day of my departure. “Yes? Then you’ll be just fine.”

  John and I split a pineapple for breakfast and set off down the road to Butagota, following a labyrinth of footpath shortcuts through the village* hills. The three-hour hike stretched into four as we stopped to chat with people along the trail. They asked about the weather in Buhoma, the state of the park, and what news we heard from America. Our stops grew more frequent as
we neared the town, where pedestrian traffic swelled to a steady stream.

  Market day in rural Uganda highlights an otherwise unchanging week. In Butagota, merchants gathered from around the region, and people flooded the town to socialize, drink, or trade the extra produce from their shambas. We arrived with a lively throng of people from Kanyashande, everyone but us bringing something to sell: peanuts and papaya, chickens, clay pots, and a herd of young goats, braying and pulling at their bark-rope tethers.

  With the town lying less than a mile from the Zairian border, Butagota’s prosperity depended largely on illegal trade and the smuggling of coffee and gold. There was a tea factory and shops lining both sides of the road, but the wealthiest merchants all had ties to the border trade. John and I stopped for tea with one of the town’s leading citizens, a heavy, confident-looking man named John Nkunda.

  “He’s involved in just about everything around here,” John whispered as we walked through a courtyard piled high with sacks of dried coffee.

  Nkunda owned the only lorry in the area and charged a steep fee to transport goods or building materials. I waited in the sitting room, chatting about coffee with one of his sons while he and John negotiated over a load of cement for the Buhoma Community Campground.

  John was still shaking his head over the deal on our way to the market. “I can’t believe he’s charging us so much. The transportation costs more than the cement.”

  Near the center of town, construction was well under way on the brick-and-mortar building that would house Butagota’s new tourist lodge. It was the town’s first effort to capitalize on Bwindi’s growing tourism market and could provide stiff competition with the Buhoma campground. When we passed, a man was balanced high up on the rickety scaffolding, painting something over the entryway in large red letters: “Nkunda & Sons.” Ah. John didn’t say another word about the price of cement.

  We followed the crowds down a slippery side trail to the market itself and quickly became separated in the shuffle. I found myself suddenly alone with my shopping list in a sloping, muddy field cluttered with lean-to stalls, where bustling mobs of people argued and haggled over a chaotic array of baskets and fruit, green tomatoes, used clothes, buckets, spoons, goats, tin plates, bicycles, hardware, fabric, cabbages, kerosene, sugarcane, chickens, cassava, matoke bananas, and black rubber sandals. I entered the melee and immediately drew a crowd that followed me for over an hour, hooting with laughter and crying, “Muzungu arumanya!” (“He knows Rukiga!”) as I struggled to remember my market survival phrases: ebihimba—“beans”; akavera—“plastic bag”; and nooseera—“You’re ripping me off.”

  I found John rooting through the piles of used clothes.

  “You can get some great shirts here,” he said, holding up a zippered jersey in burgundy velour. Fashion gems from every decade since the 1950s are still available at rural Ugandan markets. When charities in the States and Europe send loads of cast-off clothing to Africa they fuel a burgeoning and lucrative second-hand industry. I once saw a shipment of shoes arrive at Kampala’s Owino market, a major distribution center. Wholesalers lunged forward in a rush, shouting and grabbing pumps and loafers like desperate traders in a stock market crash.

  Durable, brightly colored clothes were always in high demand, regardless of their strange foreign logos. This system led to a number of eye-turning combinations, like the old woman in Mbarara wearing a tie-dyed shirt emblazoned with marijuana leaves, or the burly Kampala street thug in a pink “Sexy Grandma” hat. Butagota’s selection offered everything from Levi’s and Reebok sweatpants to polyester suits, a Denver Broncos parka, and two Dukes of Hazzard T-shirts.

  The sky was dark with coming rain when John and I finished our shopping and headed for the first school. Two hundred shouting children raced across the yard to meet us, and we joined in a mass soccer game, running over the lumpy field and kicking a makeshift ball of tightly bound banana fibers. The teachers had all gone home for lunch, and John sent someone to find them as the first heavy raindrops pelted down. We crowded into a tiny, brick-walled schoolroom, and the sky opened up, thundering a staccato deluge onto the thin metal roof.

  The school had a wooden blackboard but no chalk. There were no books in the room, no desks, and no pencils, and most of the kids had nothing to write on. Although the government listed education as a top priority, few small towns were better off than Butagota, and village schools were worse. Parents struggled to pay tuition and fund improvements, but rural children, particularly girls, seldom made it beyond the primary level.

  The kids danced and sang local songs to pass the time, clapping and chanting in high, piping voices over the storm’s deafening rhythm. Gathered close to us in the shadowy room, their faces mingled into a shifting tumult of wide brown eyes, bright with smiles and music. The rain continued and the teachers never came back, but there was something potent, even hopeful, in that simple chorus, and it was impossible not to sing along.

  John led a round of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and then we tried to teach them “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” without much success. When the storm passed, we moved outside, and the kids followed us back across the playfield, shouting and waving as we made our way down the road. They needed far more than songs and soccer, but the best community development is subtle work. John and I accomplished two-thirds of the Peace Corps mission by simply being there, sharing something of our own culture and learning something from theirs. To do more is often to presume too much, I reminded myself, like catcher’s mitts and batting helmets for a town that has no textbooks.

  8

  They’re Everywhere

  The pismire, known to the people as the “chungufundo,” is a horse-ant, about an inch in length, whose bull-dog-like head and powerful mandibles enable it to destroy rats and mice, lizards and snakes. It loves damp places…. It knows neither fear nor sense of fatigue; it rushes to annihilation without hesitating, and it cannot be expelled from a hut except by fire or boiling water. Its bite…burns like the pinch of a red hot needle…and it may be pulled in two without relaxing its hold.

  —Sir Richard Francis Burton meets safari ants,

  from The Lake Regions of Central Africa, 1860

  The bride wept, rocking back and forth in her chair and moaning rhythmically in abject misery. Occasionally, an aunt or one of her sisters leaned over to console her with soothing whispers or a pat on the arm. But everyone else at the party seemed to ignore her sorrow, particularly the groom, who stood outside with his brothers and friends, joking and drinking liberally from a calabash of sour banana beer. It was a perfect wedding.

  Dominico rushed about the compound, greeting guests and helping the women serve up steaming platters of boiled goat, cabbage, matoke, and “Irish.” He swept past me, stopping to refill my mug from a brimming vat of tonto.

  “Webale kwija, ssebo,” he crowed happily, thanking me again for coming. When he first mentioned his son’s wedding, I envisioned stopping by for an hour or so after work, but the celebration had been raging all afternoon, and now, after several cups of tonto, the slippery trail downhill to my house was looking less and less appealing, perhaps impossible. I took another sip of the smoky, bitter brew and couldn’t help thinking of Tom, a true aficionado of local hooch.

  The Ntales had thrown a huge going-away party on my final night in Kajansi, complete with speeches, feasting, and endless gallons of pineapple wine. Tom invited every Peace Corps volunteer he’d met, and we danced for hours on the lawn, swaying to disco, Elvis, and Dolly Parton. All of Annette’s regulars were there, and I said my goodbyes to most of the neighborhood on the dance floor, a fitting close to the social frenzy of my months with Tom. The next morning he packed a small jerrican of leftover munanasi into my luggage as a parting gift.

  “You will need it there,” he told me, adding in near-disbelief, “Those Bakiga don’t make any wine. All those pineapples they grow—for nothing!”

  Tribes in Uganda relish teasing one another over food preferences, and
a proud Baganda will scornfully dismiss the entire western half of the country as “millet eaters.” But in the case of munanasi vs. tonto, Tom definitely had a point. I learned how to make munanasi at Annette’s place, with a big pineapple grater and a series of shiny aluminum pots. After three days of fermentation, the final product resembled a thick, tart cider. Brewing tonto, on the other hand, involved a bunch of barefoot men stomping around in a hollow log full of bananas. In the end, it was tough to say whether it tasted more like the bananas or the feet.

  The evening stretched toward darkness and thunder rumbled overhead, mingling in subtle counterpoint with the frantic cadence of Dominico’s two musicians. They stood together in the downpour, hammering with mallets on a large wooden drum stretched tight with cowhide. Water sprayed up from the wet leather with every beat, surrounding them in their own uprisings of tiny rain, like a pulsating, syncopated fountain.

  An informal chorus of women sang along, but dancing had been postponed until after the storm. We all crowded together under a makeshift shelter of reed poles and banana leaves, talking, eating, or just sitting back to watch the celebration unfold. Rain leaked steadily through the scant roofing, and soon the compound was a morass of mud, trampled into pools by hundreds of sandaled and barefoot revelers.

  During lulls in the conversation, I could hear the neglected bride chanting something through her sobs. The words were indistinct, but it must have been her variation of the traditional nuptial lament:

  I go to distant countries,

  to other people’s homes where people never visit

  I will see you no longer: good-bye, good night;

  bid farewell to my mother.

  Bakiga custom requires every newlywed woman to mourn publicly over leaving her family. The tears and misery should last throughout the ceremony, and sometimes for days afterward. Even Western-style city marriages follow this ritual; to appear excited about the marriage, or even marginally cheerful, would be a great affront to one’s parents.