by Thor Hanson
We finished the meal quickly, and I made a mental note to visit the spice market on my upcoming trip to Kampala. It was definitely time to revitalize the taste buds.
After lunch, the trackers led us quickly down Muzabajiro Creek to a well-trodden forest path, the quickest route back to the village. On a rare day without tourists, we had left Katendegyere group feeding peacefully in a clearing on Rukubira Hill, where they often paused to forage in the lush herbaceous growth. Tension within the group had diminished markedly after the departure of Makale and Mutesi, and our visits often passed without so much as a pig grunt from the remaining members. This day had gone smoothly, with Nyabutono, Kasigazi, Karema, and even shy old Mugurusi in full view for nearly an hour. “Feeding on Ipomoea. No aggression . . . routine visit,” I’d written in my notes and then stopped myself, startled to think that a day with mountain gorillas could ever seem routine.
As we passed the creek I heard a faint human voice, barely audible over the white rushing of the water. The trackers paused, listening, and there it was again, drifting down from somewhere high on the opposite ridge. In the village, distant shouts were a part of the landscape as people called out to one another from the fields and pathways, but I’d never heard it so deep in the forest. Perhaps someone was climbing the trail to Zaire, or “poaching” firewood from the slopes of Rushura.
The trackers looked at me with questioning half-smiles, and we all shrugged. At the time I thought it was a gesture of mutual bafflement. Only later did I realize that while I was thinking, “Where could that voice be coming from?” the trackers had probably been wondering, “Why is somebody yelling ‘fart!’?”
In Rukiga, only one letter separates the verb yamba, “to help,” from yampa, a euphemism for passing gas. Telling the difference is usually a matter of context rather than inflection. Half an hour after I got home, I saw Karen walking wearily up the path, her red-blonde hair in disarray, with scratches on her arms. She stomped into my house and collapsed down on a chair.
“Don’t ask.” Her voice was a blend of irritation and relief.
“What happened?” I asked immediately. “You didn’t get lost, did you?”
“Stop laughing,” she said, laughing. “I was up there for hours.”
She’d taken a wrong turn on the Muzabajiro loop trail, following a faint poachers’ path until it faded out, leaving her stranded in the forest, high on a trackless hillside. After bushwhacking for over an hour, she lost all sense of direction. “I sat down on a log and actually started yelling for help in Rukiga.”
“Oh, we heard you,” I admitted, realizing suddenly the source of the strange shouting we’d heard in the forest. “But we thought you were saying ‘fart.’ ”
“I said yamba!”
Eventually, she had begun a random descent and found the trail again where it crossed the creek. We’d missed each other by only a few minutes. I told her not to worry about it. I remembered quite a few lost afternoons in the forest myself, crashing around with a panga, trying to scout new trail routes. “I even saw the trackers blow it once,” I added. “Of course, it was Christmas eve, and they were pretty drunk at the time.”
I started boiling water for tea and found some chocolate to celebrate Karen’s safe return. “You don’t have to tell anyone about this,” she said, eyeing me warily. I was heading for Kampala the following morning for a meeting at the Peace Corps office. I passed her the chocolate and smiled.
“Mum’s the word.”
In the Peace Corps, there are no secrets. Though scattered widely across the country, volunteers transmitted news and gossip from village to village far quicker than any postal service. In Karen’s yampa story I saw the chance for a little payback: on her last trip to town she’d fabricated rumors that my paltry rain forest diet had led to drastic weight loss and an unsightly goiter. I was still receiving anonymous gifts of iodized salt.
From Kennedy’s vision of “helping poor nations help themselves,” the Peace Corps has evolved into something like a giant job placement agency—international temp work on a grand scale. Every year, foreign governments applied for American volunteers to fill gaps in their own professional ranks: schoolteachers, park managers, health workers, community foresters, water engineers. Though it operates at a village scale, the Peace Corps is part of the U.S. diplomatic mission to a country and still feels the impact of high-end political decisions. In Uganda, the national parks, the Department of Forestry, and other government bureaus competed hotly for a limited number of volunteers, bringing political leverage into the assignment of certain positions. It was no coincidence that the vast majority of us lived and worked in the southwestern part of the country, President Musevini’s homeland and the center of power for his ruling NRM party. As representatives of the U.S. government, we all agreed to avoid involvement in local politics, business ventures, amateur radio clubs, or other “potentially subversive” activities. When our volunteer newsletter featured articles about Uganda’s upcoming constitutional assembly, the ambassador himself shut down the presses.
With over six thousand positions in more than ninety countries, the Peace Corps maintains a complex bureaucracy that to volunteers can seem like a distant relative you rarely see. They are kindly and mean well, but can’t necessarily remember your name or just how it is you’re related in the first place. In Bwindi, cooperating closely with IGCP gave me all the field support I needed, but many volunteers end up frustrated by a lack of materials, and the Peace Corps’ hands-off attitude. Thirty percent of all recruits quit before the end of their two-year contract, an attrition rate refered to with the ominous phrase “early termination.”
During training, we learned the three goals of Peace Corps service: to transfer technical skills and knowledge to your host-country nationals; to help them gain insight into American culture; and to learn about their way of life, bringing that knowledge back to the States. Using this equation, we served two-thirds of our purpose by simply being there, living in the village and interacting with locals. With such realistic objectives, the Peace Corps flourishes at a grassroots level where other, larger-scale development programs often fail. Successful volunteers accept the limits of their role, but we all hoped to make more tangible contributions as well. While my friendships in the community may have been my most important achievement in Uganda, I took satisfaction in cutting a trail, building a bridge, or writing a manual for guide training—hands-on activities with observable results. In many projects, however, this “transfer of technical skills” failed to materialize, and I saw several volunteers grow disenchanted. One friend dismissed his whole two years as little more than “a tropical gardening vacation,” and at our close-of-service conference, someone suggested printing T-shirts with a twist on the familiar “toughest job you’ll ever love” slogan: “The Peace Corps: It’s Tough to Love Your Job.”
My assignment with the gorillas inspired a certain amount of envy. “Who did you sleep with to get that job?” wrote one friend, a volunteer in Nigeria. She worked in the public health sector, helping villagers extract foot-long guinea worms from their legs and arms. “Dumb luck,” I told her, the same response I gave to curious tourists or to the jealous primatology students who sometimes wrote to me from the States.
I hunched forward in my seat and struggled to read, ignoring the young girl next to me while she spit up wads of half-chewed banana and dropped them carefully into my lap. On the floor, her baby brother sat wedged between my backpack and a tightly bound chicken, sucking on a piece of hard candy and calmly wetting himself. I inched my foot away from the spreading puddle as the bus careened around another corner, tires rubbing noisily against the top of the wheel wells. Stretching my leg into the crowded aisle, I nodded toward the urine and raised my eyebrows at the children’s mother, a steatopygous woman who took up most of our narrow bench. She smiled back and continued chatting with the man squashed between her and the window. Suddenly, the brakes howled and we swerved into the gravel, shuddering to a sto
p by the side of the road.
More passengers, I thought, and shifted uncomfortably, preparing to squeeze in closer. Although Ugandan laws strictly forbade overcrowding on public transportation, enforcement was almost nonexistent. Taxi van matatus licensed to carry fourteen often traveled with twenty-five or more, and buses weren’t considered full until people stood shoulder to shoulder in the aisles, packed like yams in a wagon bound for market. With fewer than sixty thousand motorized vehicles in a country of more than eighteen million people, the masses on the move always outnumbered the seats available. Typically, Ugandans faced this trial with stoic cheerfulness, but sometimes the sheer discomfort forced people to let their frustration show.
“You see we are suffering,” a man shouted at me once, clinging to the running board of an overflowing matatu. “You tell your Japanese to send us more vehicles!”
I sensed a ripple of interest passing through the crowded bus and realized that this wasn’t an ordinary stop. People leaned toward the dusty windows, peering outside and murmuring to one another in disbelief. What now, I wondered. A wreck? A detour? I’d once seen a major route blocked for hours by an abandoned bulldozer after a swarm of angry bees chased away the road crew. The men retired to a nearby tonto bar for the rest of the day, letting traffic build up and refusing to move their equipment until the insects dispersed at sunset.
“Eh, eh, eh.” The woman next to me shook her head with matronly concern. “They will be arrested for sure.”
Following her gaze, I looked out and saw two uniformed officers haranguing our driver and turn boy.* We were stopped at a police checkpoint on a deserted stretch of roadway, dry scrub country stretching off in all directions. The temperature on the bus began to climb as the officers continued their inspection, pointing up at the mass of passengers and berating the driver. I watched in amazement as they tied his hands and sat him on the back of a bicycle. They arrested the turn boy too, and all four disappeared down the highway, pedaling slowly toward the nearest town with a courthouse.
“Hah!” The man by the window nodded with satisfaction, and I noticed smiles all around me. Finally, the police had cracked down on overcrowding and given the bus company its due. I grinned with them for a moment, but our triumph faded quickly with a new realization: who was going to drive the bus?
With resigned shrugs and a collective sigh, everyone began filing out into the sunshine. I joined a growing throng by the side of the road and elbowed my way onto a passing matatu, the sixth person on a seat designed for three. As we raced off, I saw people swarming over the roof of the bus, tossing down bundles of luggage to the waiting crowd below. Traffic was sparse, but they’d all find rides eventually, cramming into the walkways, truck beds, and backseats of any available vehicle and silently cursing the police, the bus companies, and those stingy Japanese automakers.
I had finished my business in Kampala and was now making my way west again, passing through Queen Elizabeth Park to visit Peace Corps friends before turning south to Bwindi. After a long series of stops and starts, the taxi dropped me at Ndekye, a small roadside town near the park’s edge. It was market day, and I passed hundreds of people as I climbed the low hill to Dave Snedecker’s house. He worked in a nearby forest reserve, but I expected to find him home. Every week, Rob Rothe drove up from his site in nearby Maramagambo Forest to shop for groceries, and he and Dave always met for a cup of tonto afterward. I’d been promising to join them for months.
“Peace Corps!” someone shouted. “How are you?” I turned to find a young man weaving toward me from the doorway of a nearby drinking house. He wore the shirt from a national parks uniform and introduced himself as Godfrey, a ranger-guide who worked with Rob.
“You have just missed them,” he said, bobbing his head with inebriated emphasis. “They left just now for Maramagambo. But it’s no problem.” He smiled proudly and put his hand on his chest. “I will take you there. On the bicycle.”
“Oh, I don’t—”
“You wait,” he commanded, and disappeared into the alley behind the bar, emerging moments later with one of Africa’s ubiquitous Chinese-made bicycles—black, wobbly, and tall, like something an English gentleman might ride down a level country lane. Godfrey lurched into the seat and motioned for me to climb on behind. Riding double with a drunken ranger didn’t strike me as any more dangerous than taking the bus, and I knew it was my only chance to reach Maramagambo today. Rob’s site lay miles from the main road, too far to walk without risking a buffalo or lion encounter after dark.
“OK. Godfrey, tugyende!” I said with enthusiasm, and hopped onto the metal frame behind him. He pointed the front tire downhill, and we hurtled away from the village, bouncing along a footpath worn deep into the hillside. Our shortcut wound through dozens of tiny farms as the Rift Valley opened up before us, a sweeping vista of plains, forest, and lakeshore, golden in the evening sunlight. But after I took one quick glance at the view, the trail turned sharply downward, and I saw nothing more than Godfrey’s sweaty back, blurred by dust and wind. He let out an occasional whoop as we rocketed down the escarpment, and I clung on behind, wishing I’d thought to brace myself for the journey with some tonto or a quick shot of waragi. The descent left me bruised and winded, like spending an hour strapped into a homemade carnival ride, but it was by far the quickest trip I took all day: we beat Rob and Dave to camp by more than ten minutes.
Maramagambo Forest stretches from the bottom of the valley eastward to Lake Edward, a rolling, lowland wood much drier in climate than Bwindi. I noticed the difference immediately as I walked through Rob’s camp. Dry leaves and grasses grated underfoot, and the ground lacked Bwindi’s thick layer of damp humus. Trees stood more evenly spaced, without the same chaos of undergrowth, vines, and mosses that gave the Impenetrable Forest its name. Maramagambo boasted its own challenge to hikers: confusing, uniform topography that led to an ominous saying in the local tongue: “You go in, but you don’t come out.”
Rob’s small brick house sat in the midst of a growing compound, tidy new buildings that would eventually house Queen Elizabeth Park’s center for forest-oriented tourism and research. The site lay on a sloping wooded plateau, tucked into the woods between two beautiful crater lakes, Kyasanduka and Nyamusingiri. Rob worked in a position similar to my own, training ranger-guides and developing trails for tourism. With its level terrain and a large population of chimpanzees, Maramagambo had great potential for primate viewing.
I heard a clattering roar as Rob and Dave pulled up, driving the “Millennium Falcon,” a battered old national parks Land Rover that Rob used for market runs. They hopped out of the car and did a comical double take when they saw me. With Bwindi in such a hard-to-reach corner of Uganda, I rarely made it to volunteer gatherings, and the three of us had seen one another only a few times since training. We commemorated our reunion with a case of Nile Special beer, the painkiller Rob was using to recover from a recent dental appointment. He told the harrowing story of visiting “Dr. Lule” in Kampala, who removed one of his wisdom teeth the old-fashioned way, prying inside his mouth with a pair of long pliers while two burly nurses held him down. After more than ten minutes of cutting and wrenching, the tooth had finally popped free, and everyone laughed as it clattered across the clinic’s white-tiled floor.
“It still doesn’t feel right,” he told me mushily, pulling at his swollen lip. “Can you take a look at this?”
I peered inside his mouth and turned away quickly, trying not to laugh.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “What is it?”
There was no room for bedside manner. “They sewed your cheek to your gum,” I said simply, and went to get him another beer.
Somehow, an errant suture had strayed up the inside of Rob’s mouth, firmly fastening his cheek to the wound left by his missing tooth. When I came back, he and Dave had solved the problem with a Swiss Army knife. We laughed long and hard, and the celebration lasted late into the night.
Camaraderie among Peace
Corps volunteers stems from intense shared experience and the bonds of a common culture. Though infrequent, my visits with Dave and Rob were always a great release where the strains of life in a foreign world fell briefly away. We cooked grilled cheese sandwiches; we listened to classic rock and roll; we talked of our lives back home; we understood one another’s two-dollar American jokes.
The next day, Rob and I bid farewell to Dave as he started the long hike back to Ndekye under a blistering sun. My own journey to Buhoma, only forty miles distant as the crow flies, could take two full days on public transportation so I stayed on a bit longer to postpone the discomfort. Rob offered me a full tour of the area, and I accepted immediately, eager to get a look at this new landscape. He took me around Lake Kyasanduka, a symmetrical green pond ringed by forest where one lone hippo held court, lurking along the shoreline and climbing up to Rob’s camp to graze at night. We swam in the limpid, spring-fed waters of nearby Kamaranjojo, “the place that swallows elephants,” a shallow pool named by local hunters who once watched their prey sink out of sight in its silty, log-strewn bottom.
Less than an hour’s walk from his back door, Rob led me to the highlight of Maramagambo’s forest trail system. We approached slowly through a shady, even-aged stand of timber, young trees with silvery trunks like scaly fluted columns. I heard a strange chittering noise, and the air grew redolent with the birdcage stench of guano. We followed the path up a slight, uneven rise and then the ground dropped away before us. Rob pointed over the rim of the gulch, and I peered down into the black maw of a lava cave, product of the same Rift Valley volcanism that formed the local crater lakes. Suddenly, a huge palm-nut vulture swooped out of the opening, beating a path upward into the leafy canopy of the forest. As my eyes adjusted, I saw smaller wings dancing through the dim light of the cave, thousands of rousette fruit bats clinging to the walls and ceiling with the seething vitality of bees.