by Thor Hanson
“They have money for petrol,” he said with approval. “One jerrican at least. You can pick it from Butagota.”
“It’s no problem, Gongo,” I told him, and eased the car into gear. The crowd stood back to watch us go, a jumbled knot of bright clothes and dark skin receding in my rearview mirror, with a hundred eyes staring after. We rattled toward Butagota, and I looked down at our young passenger. She was dressed as if going to market, her head wrapped in a blue kerchief and dress arranged neatly over the bulge of her stomach. But she rode in obvious pain, wincing at every bump, with a fine sheen of sweat glistening on her smooth forehead. I stopped the car frequently, and her family raised her up, rearranging the cushions of bundled clothes and making her drink from a calabash of sweet porridge.
“Webale, ssebo,” she whispered once, “thank you,” her round eyes gazing up at me, glazed with pain and resignation. It was an image that would stay with me always. I lay my hand on her head in an attempt at comfort, braking and swerving to avoid the worst of the potholes, as if there were anyplace else to drive.
The sun rose hot in a dry season haze as we sped through Kigezi’s hill country, raising clouds of dust behind us like a cavalry charge. I turned on some music to ease the waves of tension and worry that rose up from the back of the car. Phenny grinned and sorted through the cassettes, but spent most of the ride staring out the window, lost in his own thoughts.
At the village of Kanungu we turned east on a narrow dirt track, climbing again, and then descending toward the broad valley where Kisizi lay tucked in a river bend, just downstream from the waterfall that bears its name. The town stretched along a quarter-mile of dusty roadway, a small collection of shops and stalls that served as a trading center for local farmers supplying the busy hospital and its constant stream of customers.
I drove slowly through the market to the hospital itself, several large brick buildings and a neatly tended lawn that dominated the village center. People milled everywhere—nurses, uniformed orderlies, and throngs of visitors, walking together in small groups, or waiting beneath the huge eucalyptus and jacaranda trees that shaded the compound. I dropped my passengers at the office and went to park, while Phenny bought Hope’s medicine and helped his ailing young relative and her family navigate the check-in process. When I returned, they had already carried her off to the maternity ward.
“Let us go see the waterfall,” Phenny said, glancing at his wristwatch. “Afterward they should know if she needs to stay on.”
“Did they say what is wrong?”
“It’s probably nothing,” he said dismissively. “People in the village don’t know anything, so they get excited.”
He turned away and I followed him toward the sound of the waterfall, but I wasn’t so quick to disregard the girl’s problem. People in Buhoma couldn’t always put a recognizable name to their illness, but they knew when they were sick.
After I had learned to bandage the trackers’ occasional panga wounds, they began sending me their friends and neighbors with more complicated ailments. Any sickness accompanied by a fever was called malaria, while head colds and congestion were known collectively as flu. “I am weak,” my patients would complain, pointing to the afflicted region. Sometimes, their foreheads or aching joints would be crosshatched with tiny scars, where they’d cut the skin repeatedly with a sharp knife or razor blade. A nurse in Kabale explained this method to me as “letting the millet out,” an attempt to bleed away painful symptoms. She told me that it helped some people but was dangerous in infants, whose parents often inflicted deep chest wounds to rid them of croup cough, or cut out unformed baby teeth as a cure for diarrhea. But many local remedies worked far better than their pharmaceutical counterparts: tree bark teas for stomach worms, an herbal poultice for snake bites, or certain crushed leaves that instantly stanched the flow of blood. In my small “practice,” I relied heavily on the placebo effect, doling out aspirin, Band-Aids, and vitamin C, and referring everyone to the nearest clinic.
Sometimes, a malady came along that baffled local and Western traditions alike. Ephraim Akampurira had recently missed over a month of work, sick in bed with a terrible case of “malaria.” Philman told me he’d never seen an affliction quite like it, but this really came as no surprise. If anyone would catch a strange illness, it would be Ephraim, who proved himself time and again as the most hapless, accident-prone person in the village. He injured himself constantly—sprained ankles and a snapped collarbone from playing soccer, skinned knees and gravel-road abrasions from bicycle wrecks, tumbling out of moving vehicles, or simply tripping and falling over. “I have broken my face,” he announced after one such mishap, arriving at work with swollen cheeks and a wildly bloodshot eye.
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 wa
ste 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 sack. 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.
17
The Toughest Job
As a visitor in another country and culture, you may be tacitly extended privileges exempting you from certain obligations, and some of your foibles and fumbles may be looked upon with amused tolerance. On the other hand, bear in mind that your behavior will be observed and noted whether you are on the job, travelling on a train or bus, or just walking down the street....
—U. S. Peace Corps Volunteer Handbook, 1994
Mishana wiped his panga with a handful of leaves and began slicing the pineapple, peeling back its rough skin with quick, practiced motions. I crouched next to Charles and rinsed my hands from the canteen, watching while he se
t out the rest of our lunch: a pail of cold beans and two heavy lumps of purple dough.
“Oburo,” Prunari observed with satisfaction.
This gritty, boiled millet bread was a staple in southwest Uganda, along with matoke bananas, beans, cabbages, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, fresh fruit, and on special occasions, beef, goat or chicken.
When Africans visit America, they’re amazed by the lack of texture in our cuisine. Breads, meats, vegetables, starches—everything is cooked until soft, prized for its tenderness. “My teeth became weak,” one businessman told me after traveling to California. “There was nothing to chew!” For Americans in rural Uganda, the lack of spice was our chief complaint. Though Swahili peoples on the East African coast exchanged cloves, nutmeg, and recipes with India and the Middle East, and West African nations incorporated French touches into their local fare, Uganda had the misfortune to be colonized primarily by nineteenth-century British bachelors, whose culinary influence—boil, add salt—only added bland to the blandness.
I tore off a ball of oburo and scooped out some beans, then stopped in surprise after chewing twice. Something was different. A strange, exotic flavor permeated the food, spicy and pungent, overpowering the familiar tastes of salt and wood smoke.
“Ebihimba briungi!” I exclaimed, praising the cook and taking another mouthful. The beans tasted fantastic, better than anything I’d had in months. What was in them, I wondered, what secret ingredient had transformed our everyday lunch? I struggled to form the question in Rukiga: “BaSsebo, ekimu ‘bihimba?”
The trackers looked at me strangely, and stopped eating. After an awkward silence, Charles answered in English, using the careful tones reserved for explaining something to young children or a mad person. “Pepper,” he said simply.