The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  I’d been sending his salary home to the village, along with packets of aspirin and vitamins. “He is improving,” Philman announced finally, and two days later Ephraim came back to work. He smiled and shook my hand warmly, but seemed unusually quiet when I invited him in for tea.

  “You are welcome back!” I told him.

  “Mmm,” he mumbled, and the conversation didn’t go much further.

  The next morning he arrived with Philman, who took me aside while Ephraim looked on, earnest and silent.

  “Ephraim is wondering whether he can continue working here,” Philman said seriously.

  “Well, why not?” I asked, a little surprised. “He wants to go?”

  “No. It’s just that he’s forgotten how to talk.”

  “You mean he’s forgotten English?” I clarified, thinking his vocabulary might have grown rusty from a month of disuse.

  “No, no. He can’t even speak Rukiga.” I looked at Ephraim, who shrugged his assent. “He understands,” Philman pointed out, “but he can’t find any words. It’s from the malaria.”

  “Ah.” I paused and glanced at their worried faces, making sure this wasn’t some kind of elaborate joke. “Well, he knows the work here,” I said reassuringly. “Of course he can stay.”

  They grinned and we all shook hands. In the weeks that followed, Ephraim’s speech slowly improved, but he never regained his former fluency. I asked doctors from Kabale, Kampala, and even the States, but no one recognized the symptoms of “language fever.” It made me appreciate the random disease risk of life in Buhoma, and I started saving a few vitamins for myself.

  Phenny led me through a grove of tall eucalyptus behind the hospital. Originally imported to help drain Uganda’s swamps and lowlands for farming, the water-hungry trees were now a popular, fast-growing source of firewood and timber. Their voracious root systems couldn’t drain a river, however, and the path grew muddy as we approached Kisizi Falls. Cool mist surrounded us as the cataract came into view, a torrent of white water plummeting more than a hundred feet from the cliff face into a turbulent, rocky pool. Green moss and ferns clung to the sheer walls of the grotto, and the trail stopped at the water’s edge, under the squat, glistening leaves of a wild banana.

  “Before you whites came, that girl would have died here,” Phenny shouted over the roar of the falls.

  “You mean without the hospital?”

  “No,” he shook his head. “This place. The waterfall. This is where the locals used to judge unmarried mothers. They threw them from the top there.” He pointed to a ledge that jutted out from the top of the cliff, overhanging the waterfall’s precipitous drop. “No one could survive.”

  The practice, I learned, disappeared around the turn of the twentieth century, but inspired Christian missionaries to choose this otherwise out-of-the-way village as the site for a rural hospital.

  When we returned to the maternity ward a disinterested nurse told us that we could go home.

  “She will spend the night here at least,” the woman said, shuffling through some papers. “Maybe two or three.”

  I asked for a diagnosis, and she grew annoyed. “The doctor said she will stay. So she stays.”

  Phenny pulled at my arm and rolled his eyes as if to say, “Don’t waste your time.” He knew from experience that battling Kisizi’s bureaucracy was futile. Hope’s visits had produced little more than a bill and a handful of medicines, with no explanation of her symptoms. We left without seeing the girl and her family again, and stopped in the market for lunch: balls of sweet fried dough and a bundle of kabaragara, the finger-size yellow bananas.

  Driving home, the road climbed along the edge of a steep valley. Phenny peered out of the window and pointed down. “My mother’s people are from this place. Can we stop?” he asked. “I need to get one small cousin.”

  “What?”

  “I need a kid to help with Amanda while Hope is sick,” he explained.

  The ultimate babysitting solution, I thought, and tried to imagine dropping in unannounced on my cousins’ families back home and kidnapping one of their children. “Sure,” I told him as I pulled over. “But be quick, Gongo. I want to get back before dark.”

  He grinned and thrust a bunch of kabaragara toward me. “You take these bananas,” he said as he leaped out of the car. “I will return before you finish them!”

  The sun was sinking toward Zaire, and I sat surrounded by tiny peels when Phenny finally came back, sweating from the steep climb, with his shirt up over his head.

  “Where’s the kid?” I asked, looking behind him on the trail.

  “She will come later,” he replied, and hopped into the car.

  “By foot? It’s too far.” The distance to Buhoma was more than forty miles.

  “It’s OK. She has these Ugandan vehicles,” Phenny said, and held up one of his bright plastic sandals.

  I shook my head as we rattled away up the road, laughing together in the reddening light.

  Several weeks later, Phenny and I found ourselves on another ambulance run, careening down a rough, little-used track. I gripped the steering wheel like a tracker on his first driving lesson, felt the car slide sideways in the sand, then straightened it out and accelerated toward the bottom of a rocky gulch.

  “Ahh, Tour!” Phenny crowed as we hammered across the gully. “You really know driving!” He laughed as I punched it into first and began climbing a steep wall of bedrock and boulders. We hit a patch of gravel and the front tires spun, pelting the bottom of the car with loose stones. “Kareni could never drive this one. Not even Dr. Liz!”

  “They could, Phenny,” I said, gritting my teeth. “The point is that they wouldn’t.” They’re too smart, I thought. How the hell did I get myself into this? Finally, the “road” leveled out into a dusty footpath, and we bumped along, flattening shrubs and scraping through narrow tunnels of elephant grass.

  “They used this track for smuggling,” Phenny told me. “Mostly in Amin’s time.”

  Apparently, no one had driven here since. We were somewhere north and east of Butagota, descending gradually through a parched landscape of small farms near the Zairian border. Astonished people leaped out of the way as we approached, and children sprinted along behind the car, waving and shouting. Even the goats looked surprised to see us. We passed a tiny churchyard, where two soccer teams chased a ball of tightly wound banana fibers. The players stopped their game and stared after us, shaking their heads as if we were just as crazy and out of place as I felt.

  “Don’t mind,” Phenny said to reassure me. “The house is close.”

  But we rattled on for another hour of hot sun and dust. In a few short weeks, it seemed that my role in Buhoma had switched from Peace Corps volunteer to taxi driver, with constant trips to the market and medical clinics. Where we all used to “suffer together” without a vehicle, I now found myself honor-bound to pick up the rangers’ monthly corn meal supply, or haul sacks of cement for the campground. I began to dread people’s transportation requests, particularly when the results were beyond my control. Soon after my trip to Kisizi Hospital, I learned that Tibesigwa’s granddaughter and her unborn child had died within hours of when Phenny and I dropped them off.

  Today’s journey was for Hope. She and Amanda were staying at the home of a respected local healer, where they’d gone for treatment. Hope’s coughing and weakness had persisted in spite of the medicine from Kisizi, and little Amanda had taken ill as well, with painful sores in her mouth that prevented proper nursing.

  “It is a curse,” Phenny explained to me that morning. “People in the village are jealous of Hope’s success with the restaurant, the park job, an helping at the campground. Someone has cursed her for it.”

  We had stopped along the road to pick oranges, the bitter green variety that Hope liked. “They are too sour,” Phenny said, making a face, “but she always wants them.” He walked under the tree, shaking the branches with a long stick until enough fruit rained down to fill a sa
ck. I asked him about the curse, and he told me how people prayed to their ancestors for help against an enemy. “Local religions are still here,” he said. “A witch doctor can call up spirits from your family to make trouble for the living. The people at Kisizi Hospital can’t help with this. Only local treatments.”

  We came to a fork in the path, and Phenny hopped out to ask directions. He was eager to reach the herbalist and bring his small family back to Buhoma. But we’d brought the oranges and a basket filled with eggs, bread, and tomatoes, just in case Hope needed to stay on for more treatment.

  “It’s just ahead,” he said, and we bumped along the narrow track to a tidy-looking brick house, half-hidden behind a tall evergreen hedge. I pulled into the shade to park and waited by the car while Phenny disappeared into the compound. A group of children appeared, staring at me wide-eyed as I stretched my legs after the long drive. I made faces at them to pass the time, then noticed a skinny old woman shuffling toward the car, smiling broadly as if she knew me.

  Who’s this, I thought briefly, and then recognized her: My God, Hope. She walked as if exhausted by the effort, a faded dress hanging from her gaunt frame like scarecrow’s clothes. Only her eyes were recognizable. Her once-round features had gone thin and ancient, cheekbones protruding like sculpture.

  “Agandi, Tour,” she said, and thanked me for coming. “I can’t believe you drove all the way here.”

  I took her hand and greeted her automatically, hoping a smile and familiar words would hide my shock. All I could think of was Tom Ntale, the last person I’d seen so wrecked by disease.

  “The baby is fine now,” she told me as Phenny came out of the house with Amanda. “You can take her home, but I think I’ll remain here another week. I’m still improving.”

  “Of course,” I said, turning to unload food from the car. “We’ll come back for you, Hope.”

  I walked her back to the house and met the herbalist, a huge, regal woman who laughed and laughed when she saw me. “Muzungu,” she muttered, shaking her head in disbelief as she ushered Hope back inside. A curtain of beads rattled across the doorway behind them, and I could still hear her chuckling as I walked away.

  The drive home was long and quiet. Phenny sat with Amanda cradled in his lap, and I stared numbly ahead, sure that I would never see Hope alive again. But ten days later the old herbal healer proved me wrong, and Hope came back to Buhoma, feeling stronger than she had in months. Her appetite returned, and she put on weight and even came back to work part-time, her calm presence in the office a brief but reassuring sign that the curse had been lifted.

  16

  Lessons

  Four thousand feet above my inn, between two mountain peaks, I always felt as if I were on another planet….The automobiles, racing with arrogant importance over the roads of Africa, looked like flimsy toys through my binoculars. Their speed seemed futile, their eagerness absurd. “Why all this hurry?” I wondered.

  —Walter Baumgärtel

  from Up Among the Mountain Gorillas, 1976

  “OK, Barigye, take it easy,” I counseled, but the car continued to pick up speed, racing along the road edge in first gear. “Mpora, mpora, ssebo,” I tried calmly, remembering that his English wasn’t strong. But one glance at my pupil told me that Barigye wasn’t hearing anything. He clenched the wheel in a death grip, eyes wide and glazed, teeth bared in a paralyzed leer.

  Suddenly, we veered off the roadway, flattening a wide swath of shrubs before us. “Jesus! Philman, tell him to stop!” I yelled, but Philman and Ephraim were just trying to hold on in the backseat as we bounced and jarred across the field, tall elephant grass beating frantically against the windshield. Barigye swerved again and we recrossed the road at an angle, speeding toward the spring where a group of kids were lined up for water. I saw their mouths open to scream as they darted out of the way, seconds before we finally lurched to a halt.

  In the sudden calm, Ephraim and Philman started laughing hysterically, and I breathed a sigh of relief, but Barigye remained silent. He looked dazed, still gripping the steering wheel and slowly blinking the sweat from his eyes. I reached over and turned off the engine. “I think we’ve had enough driving lessons for today.”

  Barigye nodded mutely and hopped out of the car. On his first day with the park’s tourism staff, he’d already been charged by Makale, and now his driving lesson had turned into a ride of terror. The following week, he gratefully accepted a transfer back to ranger duty and the relative peace of armed antipoaching patrols.

  With Liz away for two months on home leave, I had use of IGCP’s Maruti, a cheap two-door Suzuki made in India. “I call it P.O.S.,” she told me, handing over the keys: “piece of shit.”

  The car rattled like a cookie tin filled with nails, but it had lasted through years of backcountry use—overloaded market runs, rough roads, watery gasoline, and now Buhoma’s first official driving school.

  “One lesson, Tour,” Ephraim pleaded as I drove back to the house, but I shook my head no. Everyone longed for a turn at the wheel, but I wasn’t sure the Maruti or the teacher would survive another trip like Barigye’s.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I told him.

  “Then at least we should wash it,” Philman put in. “You see the vehicle is very dirty from driving off the road.”

  I gave in, and we stopped by the creek, drawing our usual crowd of spectators. Although tourism had made vehicles a common sight in Buhoma, people still regarded them with wary fascination. Other foreign technologies, like a Walkman or short-wave radio, aroused the same response: a sense of wonder that Western observers would describe as childlike. I never got over the unease of watching my friends marvel at things that I took for granted. But at the same time I felt saddened that my own culture equated amazement with immaturity. Where Africans view wonder as a natural reaction to the unfamiliar, we seem to consider it shameful and without value—a response of inexperience.

  I helped Philman heave basins of water over the car, while Ephraim carefully scrubbed mud from the hubcaps. It was futile, of course. A fresh layer of dust and grime would splatter up the sides of the vehicle before we’d driven a hundred yards, but that was a part of their plan. After all, a perpetually dirty vehicle always needed a trip to the car wash, and maybe there would be time for a lesson along the way.

  The next morning, I woke to a quiet knock at the door.

  “Tour…” someone called softly. “Kodi, kodi.”

  Dim predawn light crept in around the shutters as I stumbled out of bed and looked for a pair of pants. My house ran on an open-door policy, and visitors stopped by periodically throughout the day, but they usually waited for the damn sun to rise.

  “Agandi, Gongo,” I said to the trim, gray-haired man on the lawn as I stepped out into the half-light. It was Phenny’s father, Tibesigwa, a respected elder in the village and the newly appointed manager of the community campground. He returned my greeting, shifting his weight from foot to foot and digging one toe into the ground, as if reluctant to disturb me so early. Etiquette required a pause before coming to the point, and I watched his intelligent, bearded face as we chatted, trying to discern some hint of the morning’s problem. Tibesigwa shared Phenny’s impish sense of humor, but there was nothing funny behind today’s visit.

  “I hope you can help my granddaughter with transport,” he said finally. He told me her name, but it wasn’t someone I knew. As an elder, however, Tibesigwa might refer to any young woman in the village as “granddaughter.”

  “What’s wrong, Gongo?”

  “She is producing too soon,” he explained with an earnest look, and I saw the worry in his dark eyes. His granddaughter was pregnant and near term but had entered labor prematurely. “There is a problem with the pregnancy.”

  “What about Proscovia?” I asked, referring to the nurse from Buhoma’s tiny health clinic. “Is she there?”

  “Yes, yes. She says the girl needs Kisizi.”

  Kisizi Hospital, the nearest medical fac
ility of any size, lay over three hours away on bad roads. There were no telephones or ambulances, of course, and P.O.S. was the only vehicle in Buhoma. “I’m coming, Gongo,” I told him. “Let me get ready and stop by the office first.”

  “Webale, ssebo.” He shook my hand and turned to hurry home, calling over his shoulder: “You can pick her from the path by Buhoma church. Phenny will show you.”

  Early sunlight brushed against the hilltops as I drove toward the office, brightening the stark line where forest greens gave way to the cultivated shades of millet and young cassava. I found Phenny waiting by the roadside. He gave me a mock salute as I pulled up, and jumped into the passenger seat.

  “Tugyende hamwe, ssebo,” he offered: “We will go together.” I noticed that his uniform shirt looked neat and freshly pressed. With cheap laundry soap and a charcoal iron provided by the park, the guides always managed to dress sharply, while my own clothes—stained khakis and a T-shirt—looked like, well, like I lived in a jungle.

  “All the way to Kisizi?” I asked him. The sick girl was probably his niece or cousin, but I hadn’t expected to have a guide.

  “Sure. I need to pick up more medicines for Hope,” he said, sudden concern sweeping the smile from his face. Phenny knew the route to Kisizi well. Ever since giving birth to Amanda, Hope had suffered from stomach problems and chronic fatigue. Two trips to the hospital had failed to provide a cure, and her one-month maternity break had turned into an indefinite leave of absence. She remained cheerful, staying home and managing the growing restaurant business at the H & P Canteen. But any lingering illness was cause for concern, and Phenny’s usual good humor had given way lately to frequent periods of brooding depression.

  “How is Hope?” I asked.

  It was a question that had become as familiar as his inevitable answer: “She is improving somehow, but still weak.”

  We drove in silence to the church, where a large crowd had gathered, surrounding the pregnant young woman and her family. They lifted her gently into the back of the vehicle, tilting up one of the bench seats so she could lie flat, with her head resting forward. Her mother and three brothers crowded in beside her, burdened with bundles of food for a long hospital stay. I waved to Tibesigwa, who came to the window, frowning, every inch the solemn patriarch. He exchanged words with the people in back, then turned to me.