Although I seldom venture out at night in an African city, Kampala reputedly had fewer thieves and thugs per capita than most of the continent’s capitals, tempting me to consider walking the kilometer from my hotel to catch Midnight Mass at Christ the King Church to see how it stacked up against St. Pat’s.
“Is it safe to walk around tonight?” I asked my taxi driver, en route to town from the airport.
“No!”
“But don’t the robbers take the night off for Christmas Eve?”
“No. They work extra hard to make a good Christmas for themselves. And YOU will be their Christmas.”
Not me, sports fans. I suddenly remembered I was Jewish, and decided to go to bed early and save my ecumenical efforts for daylight.
Before I turned in I got a call from Andrew, who had not shown up at our hotel. He told me he was at the Sheraton, sick, heading home, abandoning our trip, and that, sorry, I’d have to watch my own back. I took a cab to the Sheraton and found him in bad shape.
I have no idea what he ate or drank after we’d separated, but he’d picked up some bad bug and had painful cramps, hourly diarrhea, and other indicia of GI distress. I usually recommend that, if someone gets the tourist trots, they just let nature take its course, with the result that everything will usually come out all right in the end (so to speak). But Andrew had symptoms of amebic dysentery, and he’d soon be stuck in an airplane for many hours, which mandated more active intervention. I gave him Immodium (with a Kaopectate backup) to curtail the toilet trips and a regimen of metronidazole to kill the bugs.
I also finally understood the cause of his recent odd behavior: He was experiencing severe psychological distress from the mefloquine hydrochloride he’d been taking to prevent malaria. Its side effects can include sharp mood swings, paranoia, insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, depression, confusion, hallucinations, irritability, and other semipsychotic effects in about 70 percent of those who take it. “It causes toxic brain injury,” said a former Army doctor now at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Heath, and CBS News had summed it up in a report: “In plain language, it can make you lose your mind.”
I’d tried it twice, five years before and two years before, and I had to quit each time after just one pill and switch to Malarone. I’d warned Andrew about it a month before we left the States, but he explained that he preferred to use the once-a-week mefloquine to the one-a-day Malarone. Since he was set on using it, I told him to at least test it out for a week or two before he left the States to see if it caused him any psychological problems. I should have realized that Andrew, as an ultra-macho kid, would likely opt to tough it out regardless of the increasing discomfort and disorientation.
Fortunately, the symptoms usually disappear within a few weeks after taking the last pill, so he’d likely be better by New Year’s. But the poor kid had a really crappy Christmas. So to speak.
After Andrew headed home, I toured Kampala and became aware how totally different the street life had been in each of the capitals I’d visited on this swing. Their signature characteristics were:
Riyadh—A lot of overweight and often overbearing men in spotless white robes with red-and-white checked head scarves followed, a diffident pace or two behind, by a woman covered from head to toe with a shapeless black robe, of whom only the eyes could be seen—although you are not supposed to look.
Addis—More than a hundred thousand undernourished, skeletal people—mostly withered old men, or women carrying sickly babies—begging, incessantly and insistently, for something to eat in a poor land where upward of seven million are famished at times.
N’Djamena—A plethora of uniformed police and military strutting about, keeping watch, while the populace shrank away.
Nairobi—Lots of upright guys in dark business suits and shiny ties bustling about in the heat, toting briefcases and looking as if they were rushing to important meetings.
Mogadishu—Heavily armed cars with tinted windows, machine-gun nests at many intersections, no traffic lights, few pedestrians, innumerable ruined buildings.
Juba—The women sitting in the sun of the open-air market hawking their tomatoes, carrots, and cucumbers while several hundred unemployed men, former soldiers, sit in the rare shade beside an unpaved road looking slightly stunned that their long-sought and hard-fought independence has not brought instant prosperity.
Kampala—Dozens of enterprising young dudes hanging out beside motorcycles on the corners politely asking if you need a ride to anywhere in the city, whose seven steep hills make Rome look like a landing field.
I hopped aboard one of these rigs for a trip to the Kasubi Tombs of the Buganda Kings, a neglected UNESCO World Heritage site high on a grassy hill at the edge of town, where four of the last kings are buried, the symbol of the political, social, and spiritual state of the ancient tribal nation. I soon feared I was about to join those entombed elders, because it turned out to be the scariest motorcycle ride of my life. The driver plunged through the traffic-clogged streets and hills at full throttle, as if this were a motocross competition rather than a means of transportation. He jumped curbs and cut corners, drove atop raised median strips, scattered pedestrians, dared oncoming traffic to hit us, refused to stop for anything or anyone—and pretended not to hear me repeatedly screaming “Slow down!” And all his colleagues were performing the same stupid stunts in what I later learned was a regular ritual of boredom-breaking, fender-bending, fear-inducing bravado.
For the ride back on his bike—the unacceptable alternative was to walk for two hours down winding hill roads in the heat with his reckless colleagues zooming at me—I reminded myself that I enjoyed a little adventure. When that didn’t soothe me, I buried my face in the driver’s back, shut my eyes, and pretended I was elsewhere. After that ride, I did my Kampala sightseeing by foot—not out of cowardice, of course, but because I remembered I needed to get in shape for hiking up the volcanoes to the gorillas in the Virunga a couple of weeks down the road.
But first, it was time to buy Amiina the goat I’d promised her.
The drive to her village in southeastern Uganda was completely different than the drive to visit Dinkneh in Ethiopia. That had been a wan concolorous landscape as drab as unbleached linen, where even its main crop of the grain known as teff was the color of sand. But the Uganda through which we passed was 30 shades of green, with every square inch of the lowlands from Kampala to the Nile sprouting sugar cane, rice, bananas, cassava, palms, plantains, and pineapples. Though the rainy season didn’t resume until March, I was refreshed by a two-hour tropical downpour, the first drops of rain I’d felt in more than 40 days.
Amiina turned out to be a real charmer, shy and sweet and gentle. Her English was limited to “Thank you very much,” but she’d start studying it in school the next year. She wanted to become a doctor, which Uganda can certainly use more of. I’d become aware of her, and had started to support her on an annual basis, through ChildFund International. I decided, after meeting her, to support her until she is 18, to at least give her a fair shot at getting into college instead of being forced to abandon school to make charcoal or bag groceries.
I met her mother and father, who had framed the photo I’d mailed them of me, and who gave me woven mats, and a straw hat, and a small purse made from bark cloth, all of which embarrassed me because I did not want these poor people spending money to get me presents. I also met her aunt and baby brother and took the whole family, and three of the NGO workers, to lunch in Buwenge at an eatery dubiously named the Hunger Clinic. We had a typical, tasteless, super-starchy, Ugandan meal of boiled potatoes, white rice, mounds of mashed plantains, chicken, some bony mystery meat, collard greens, and Orange Fanta. It was Amiina’s first meal in a restaurant and she loved it.
I bought Amiina a healthy female goat, which she named Kitabo (“gift”). The price was up to $42 because of the holiday season. I also gave her a bottle of 500 Vitamin Power capsules I’d brought with me, and bought her a pretty dress and a crafts
necklace in Jinja, the second largest city in Uganda. I gave her dad several packs of “Camel” cigarettes made in Germany. We then drove in the aid agency 4 × 4 to the source of the Victoria Nile, where it issues forth from Lake Victoria on its journey across Uganda to merge into the White Nile. Amiina had never seen the Nile before—had never seen any river before—and she just stood there for half an hour with her eyes wide and her mouth open.
I was disappointed by my inability to show her Bujagali Falls. We drove there after lunch, 13 km from town, but it no longer existed. Uganda had completed a 750-megawatt power dam on the Victoria Nile two months before, and the once-fearsome series of rapids was now a placid lake. This passes the glory of the world.
I loved playing daddy for a day, but that’s probably all the childcare time I’m good for.
I was impressed with how ChildFund allocated the donations it received from the 3,000 of us who sponsor children in Amiina’s area. Instead of using the funds to build schools, as did its counterpart in Ethiopia, it sends their kids to the public schools, which it assured me were quite good, and uses the funds for community development. The aid workers showed me a deep water well ChildFund had drilled, and for which it had supplied the pump, saving the villagers hours of walking to fetch safe water. They also showed me a piggery project that taught women how to care for, breed, and sell pigs; and a vocational training facility where adolescents who have little academic ability or inclination learn to be tailors, shoemakers, or beauticians, and become self-supporting.
As we drove back to Kampala, I worried about what kind of a future Amiina would have. Although more prosperous and stable than most African nations, Uganda is still a land of limited economic opportunity. Ugandan girls traditionally marry young, and Ugandan men are notoriously promiscuous. The nation had more than a million people living with AIDS, and more than 1.2 million young children who were AIDS orphans, although a recent educational initiative had curtailed the infection rate. How can I help Amiina avoid this fate when I live 8,000 miles away? Will her education in Uganda public schools be sufficient to enable her to pass the college entrance exams? Will she manage to become a doctor? Or a nurse? Will I still be alive to find out? Do the rest of you who are fathers and mothers worry about your kids every day? Is this what parenthood is like?
(Within a year, Kitabo gave birth to Babiwe, Wayiswa, and four additional kids, and Amiina’s family was prospering. As this book went to press, Babiwe also gave birth—to what I think of as my grand-kids.)
When I pack for these trips, I strive to exclude anything I will not definitely use, except antibiotics and pepper spray. I leave home self-sufficient for all but food, water, and detergent so that I’m never required to look for other essentials while traveling. It’s sort of a game for me, an entertaining challenge to estimate beforehand exactly how many water purification pills or packets of iced-tea mix I’ll consume during the length of the trip. The one exception for this trip was books: I knew I’d need more than the four I’d started with, but I didn’t want to lug ten pounds of literature, so I waited until I reached English-speaking Kampala to restock on used paperbacks.
They turned out to be invaluable the next day when our 4 × 4 got a flat tire on the rocky road to Murchison Falls National Park. The jack the driver found in the back was three inches too short to lift the vehicle high enough to change the tire. Under the jack quickly went two thick books, The Constant Gardener and City of Light. Up came the car, and off came the tire. (The vehicle also lacked seat belts, working AC, working radio, working windshield washers, and interior lights but, hey, TIA.) The spare tire was, of course, the wrong size, but we managed to limp in to the Red Chili Campsite by dusk on New Year’s Eve.
The Eve started out auspiciously from my perspective. I was erecting my tent when two wild warthogs, each the size of a wheelbarrow, ambled through the camp abreast, passed four feet from me, and disappeared into a dense thicket of vines and briars where, I later learned, they’d been making their den for the past year. They can sniff out a biscuit buried in the bottom of a backpack and tear up a tent to get to it, but I’d long ago learned my lesson from the bears at Yellowstone, so all my edibles were hung in plastic bags high in a tree. They didn’t attack or threaten anyone, as warthogs are prone to do, but their fearless swagger through the camp revealed they knew that no mere mortal would mess with them and they could be relaxed and (almost) friendly. Just don’t try to put a party hat on them.
I turned in after watching ten mated pairs of large marabou storks return to their chick-filled nests in a sprawling ironwood tree thirty yards away, and I fell asleep to the flapping of their wings and the musky scent of the hogs. For me a most Happy New Year.
The high point of New Year’s Day was my visit to Murchison Falls, an hour’s drive from the camp. These falls are a spectacular sight on the Nile’s 6700 km journey to the Mediterranean and are, in the rainy season, our planet’s most powerful surge of water, as the mile-wide Nile is compressed into a rock chasm only 23 feet across.
The rest of the holiday was a brutal, bone-jarring, nine-hour ride on rough dirt and rock road out of Murchison, past the shores of Lake Albert, through Queen Elizabeth National Park and the start of the Albertine Rift Valley, and on to Fort Portal, the entry point to some of the earth’s most spectacular scenery and wildlife.
I pitched my tent for several days at Lake Nkuruba Community Camp, a charming retreat of monkeys and jacaranda trees set atop a grassy, tree-shaded hill several hundred feet above a photogenic volcanic lake, one of the few bodies of still water in Africa where it’s safe to swim because it’s not infested with crocs or with snails carrying schistosomiasis, a debilitating parasitic disease that is just behind malaria in its impact on tropical societies and economies.
A troop of a hundred black-faced vervets, who favored the tree on one side of my tent, and a barrel of 25 black-and-white colobus, who favored the other side, cavorted much of the day, playing tag, Capture the Flag, and let’s-see-if-Albert-will-give-us-a-banana-as-ransom for his lens cap or his glasses or his baseball hat.
I hiked for several hard hours up a nearby mountain for a view of seven other crater lakes and to start getting in shape for the climb to visit the gorillas a week later.
The following days were a blur of Bigodi Wetland Sanctuary (127 bird species), Semuliki National Park (Pygmies and hot springs), the snowcapped Rwenzori Mountains (aka The Mountains of the Moon—the highest chain in Africa), Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (home to the only mountain gorillas left in Uganda), the Kibale Forest (famous for chimps), the town of Kabale (“The Switzerland of Africa”), where I had booked lodging in the Edirisa Museum, and beauteous Lake Bunyonyi (to which I hiked down and back up a thousand feet, hoping to whip myself into condition).
The future of this paradise, and the entire 920 miles of the Albertine, the western prong of Africa’s Great Rift Valley that straddles Uganda, is in doubt. It contains some of the most desirable land on the continent—fecund soil rich in volcanic fertilizer, the highest biodiversity in Africa, sufficient altitude to be pleasantly cool and above the zone of malarial mosquitoes, good rainfall, and valuable mineral deposits—which has made it the target and destination of militias, farmers, cattlemen, and refugees, all grasping and competing for a piece of land, all pushing hard up against the boundaries of the reserves and parks, all at the expense of the wildlife.
When I’d commented favorably that every inch of arable land on my drive to Amiina was filled with crops, I’d failed to consider how that blessing can become a curse where the only remaining land not yet being farmed was in nature sanctuaries. The lack of cultivatable land is so acute in southwestern Uganda and northern Rwanda that families were terracing even the steepest hillsides to grow what they call “Irish” potatoes, often making terraces no more than a foot wide, backbreaking, inefficient labor, but preferable to starvation. (At lower elevations, they grow, in ascending altitude order, bananas, plantains, cassava, corn, sweet potatoes, and tea.)
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Eons ago, the Nubian Plate moved westward as the Somalian Plate pulled eastward, rending the earth between them to create one of nature’s deepest canyons and several of its fathomless lakes, including most of Africa’s Great Lakes—Edward, Albert, George, Tanganyika, and Malawi. This is the region where Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC meet in mist-covered mountains; where Tutsi, Hutu, and Hunde murdered more than a million in the 1973–1974 genocide; where the Great African War (1992–1999) and the still-simmering Second Congo War claimed another five million lives, mostly from starvation and disease; where Ebola and other fatal diseases establish germ reservoirs in the wildlife; where the unsustainable birthrates range from 4.5 to 6.4 children per woman; where the population will triple by 2050; where an average family of six lives on and farms half an acre; and where the LRA, FDLR, CNDP, RCD, AFDC, and MLC have raped, pillaged, and killed for more than two decades.
Add to this volatile mix the recent discovery of three major oil fields east of Lake Albert, enough oil to soon move Uganda into the big leagues as a producer, and you have a dire situation where Nature loses out. Forty percent of the lions in Queen Elizabeth National Park had been slaughtered by farmers in the past decade to avenge the depredations on their cattle. In DRC’s Virunga NP, the first (1925) national park established in Africa, 120 rangers have been killed trying to protect its mountain gorillas from poachers and from timber cutters making charcoal. People who live nearby have petitioned the DRC government to reduce the size of that park by 90 percent. The president of Uganda, ever mindful of the voters, had steadfastly refused to evict any of the thousands of illegal squatters who are living in and burning and farming in Uganda’s national parks. And the future is as misty as the tops of those towering volcanoes in the haze of an Equatorial afternoon.
I bused to visit the gorillas at the Parc des Volcans in northern Rwanda, home to 480 of the 786 mountain gorillas remaining on our planet, according to a thorough census in 2010. I joined a burgeoning coterie of ecotourists that had grown from 7,500 in 2003 to 26,500, putting more than $12 million a year of trekking fees into the park treasury, ten percent of which is shared with the locals or spent on such projects as trenches and buffalo walls to protect the crops from destruction by the wildlife. For now, the system is working because the villagers have accepted the notion that the animals have real value. The villagers in the hamlet of Kinigi, where I stayed, abutting the gateway to the park, have so taken the primates to their bosoms that they hold a festive annual ceremony to name the baby gorillas born the previous year, and boast how the park’s gorilla population has increased 26 percent in ten years.
Around the World in 50 Years Page 35