Coffee is sacred in Ethiopia. An invitation to attend a coffee ceremony is considered a mark of friendship, and we have known each other for several years now, even though we just met today. A bowl of popcorn is passed—the mainstay always accompanying the national drink—and Tigist and I raise our tiny cups of brew, nod to each other from across the room, and sip. We toast to a friendship that spans miles, languages, and our different lots in life. We are mothers; we belong to each other. This coffee brings us together.
Two weeks ago, I worked from a coffee shop in a Sydney suburb. A year ago, I worked at a coffee shop tucked in the mountains of central Oregon. On this day, I am in a minuscule village in the Ethiopian Highlands, not far from the origins of my favorite drink, sipping coffee brewed from beans just picked from the tree. I am with friends. I’m not sure what I expected from Africa when I boarded that plane to Uganda one week ago, but it was not this.
Africa is a stranger to me, I think as I sit in my airplane seat. I’ve never been here before, and have little knowledge of the continent’s fifty-four countries. We won’t be here long, either—we’re meeting friends in Europe next month, so this African stint feels sandwiched, crammed between two longer stays in other continents. I regret this not long after boarding this flight from Doha, Qatar, to Entebbe, Uganda, where the fellow passengers and flight attendants are the most hospitable we’ve yet encountered.
Now we have landed in Uganda. We join the back of the lengthy visa line in the muggy Entebbe airport, and not two minutes later, a genial woman in an airport uniform sidles next to me and links my arm with hers. “You’ve got small children! Come with me, ma’am—you can come to the front of the line.” The people in line smile and nod at us, as though to say, Of course! Move to the front. This is how our African experience starts, with such familial hospitality. This bodes well for our month here.
We will visit five distinctly different countries: six, if you count the days we’ll wait in South African hotels for flights. Due to budget constraints, our line on the map takes zigzagging to a new level; we’ll touch tarmac in Dubai between both Johannesburg and Nairobi, then again between Nairobi and Casablanca. After this week in Uganda, we will head to Ethiopia, but then we’ll fly from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe also via South Africa, then via South Africa again back up to Kenya. None of this makes any sense on a map. I’m nervous about the wear and tear these extra, fairly needless seven thousand miles will wage on our bodies.
From what I’ve read, Africa is layered, volatile, ancient, misunderstood, huge. It is rife with unfair stereotypes. It’s home to 15 percent of the world’s population and holds the most countries of any other continent. Multicultural is an understatement. To be in a continent of this size, age, and diversity for less than a month isn’t even scratching the surface. Not even skimming it, really. I merely hope Africa’s relationship to us will move from stranger to acquaintance.
We get our passports stamped, then head out of the Uganda airport and find Joy and her kids waiting for us.
“Hello!” Joy says. “How was your flight? I bet you’re exhausted.”
“It was actually not too bad,” I say, giving her a hug.
“Um, Mom?” I hear. Reed taps me on the shoulder. “I think I left my blanket on the plane.” My heart stops.
“Are you sure?” I ask. He nods.
Kyle takes off his backpack. “I’ll be back,” he says, and dashes back in the airport.
Before we left Oregon, we debated what to do about prized possessions, the birth-treasures of our kids. It’d be heartbreaking to lose them, but a year is a long time to go without their beloved blankets, especially when the comforts of home are in short supply. We decided to let the kids take them and risk their potential loss.
Thirty minutes pass, and Kyle reemerges from the airport. “The blanket’s on its way to Rwanda,” he says, catching his breath. “The plane eventually comes back to Uganda, so they’ll do their best to get it. The guy was really nice; he said he’d shoot me an e-mail when he finds it.” And just like that, Reed’s birth-blanket has been lost in Africa.
This isn’t Reed’s first missing-object incident on our trip. He left this same blanket on an airport shuttle in Hong Kong, and Kyle bolted down an upward escalator to save it then. Reed also left a cherished stuffed penguin in New Zealand, which was then sent to the McAlarys’ house in Australia, but only after we departed for Sri Lanka. (The penguin finally arrived in Texas, miraculously unharmed, five months after our travels.)
Reed’s face contorts; he holds back tears. “Bud, we’ll do our best to get it back,” Kyle says, ruffling his hair. Reed buries his face in my side in embarrassment, and my stomach twists in knots. Losing an irreplaceable item is high on my list of travel concerns.
Uganda is the second most populous landlocked country in the world, and it’s also the second-youngest country in the world, with a median age of fifteen. The total dependency ratio—meaning, the percentage of dependents to the working-age population—is 102 percent. I don’t understand how that’s possible. Uganda is a very young, very crowded country. It’s also quite hot.
I sit next to Joy in the passenger seat and watch her weave the van like an expert through lanes swollen with vehicles. Traffic is slow. People walk along either side of the road, men in trousers and dress shirts on their cell phones, women draped in fabrics of cantaloupe and lime colors balancing on their heads giant baskets with bananas for sale. Young men in T-shirts walk with their friends, and stores crowd the road’s shoulder with samples of what’s for sale inside: living room furniture, women’s dresses, auto parts, avocados. The movement of wheels and feet summon a shaggy carpet of red dust. Every other billboard is an ad from the government’s health department: “Cheating? Use a condom. Cheated on? Get tested.” “Everybody has a role to play—say no to sugar daddies.” “Would you let this man be with your teenage daughter? So why are you with his? Cross-generational sex stops with you.”
Joy pulls the van through a rusted metal gate and into her driveway. The kids spill out of the van like a clown car, then all dissipate to various corners of the yard, porch, and house. Bodies disappear in seconds, eager to play with new friends.
I know Joy as a fellow writer, but our families have never met. Is it coincidental that the majority of the children we’ve encountered on our trip have been boys? Ashley’s family in China has four boys, and the itinerant family we met in Thailand, traveling to all seven continents—they have one boy. Our friends in Melbourne, Australia, have three boys, and in Sydney, Adriel and Ryan have two young boys.
I have a hunch this unplanned phenomenon isn’t without a cosmic purpose for Tate. She’s in a volatile, awkward age with one foot in childhood and one in adolescence, and she’s growing into a new phase when roots need to reach, burrow deeper into rich, stationary soil. We decided to take this trip now—during her tenth year—because we sense that soon, it’ll be much more difficult to uproot her. This is an age of magic for our oldest, but she’s been lonely since we left.
It’s been five long months since we first touched Beijing concrete, and Tate has blossomed on these travels. Her fertilizer has been carting all her belongings on her back, sharing bedrooms with her brothers, standing on long metro rides, and the loneliness that goes with being the only girl. She is growing into the adult tasks of rolling up her sleeves and taking slow breaths when things don’t go as planned. A lack of girlfriends has sprouted adaptability, resolve, mettle.
Joy has five boys and one girl—Hanna—who is around Tate’s age. Half a year with no companionship, and my girl is given a girlfriend. They head upstairs and into Hannah’s bedroom full of dolls, then close the door.
“Dave will be home from work soon, so I’ll start dinner and you can keep me company,” Joy says. Kyle settles onto a couch and is soon catnapping while I help Joy slice potatoes. Finn and Reed scurry past the kitchen window; then Joy’s twin boys follow seconds later with Nerf guns. No sound from the girls upstairs.
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p; Half an hour later, Dave walks through the front door, so I wake up Kyle and the four of us head to the wraparound porch. Joy opens a bottle of wine and pours it into glasses.
“From South Africa,” she says. “It’s fabulous.” I sip tart hints of grapes, black cherry, tobacco, the salt of the ocean. The yard shimmers jade and the sky shifts from blue to orange. Boys dog pile on one another, giggling.
“How are you guys adjusting to life here?” I ask. They’ve lived in Uganda less than a year. Previously, Dave’s job as a pilot stationed them five thousand miles southeast, on an island in Indonesia, and they’d lived there for eight years.
“Indonesia still feels like home,” Joy admits. “And it probably will for a while. I mean, we were there a long time. It’s the place our kids know more than anywhere else.”
“It’ll probably take a while to love it here, eh?” I say, nodding. Expats understand that it often takes time to warm up to a new place after the initial honeymoon period.
“Actually,” Joy says, “I already love Uganda.”
The sun shifts below a tree and I squint. Pink stripes paint the sky.
“In these eight months, I’ve simply chosen to love it,” she explains, shrugging. “I don’t think it’s wonderful, and I really miss Indonesia and Oregon. But there’s a lot to love about Uganda, so that’s the stuff I’m choosing to focus on.”
We sip our wine, and I think about how terrible I am at this. I’ve lived in twenty-two houses and five different cities, and I always, always dwell first on the negative. My cynicism broods over what’s missing, why a new home fails to measure up to the one previous. I bellyache about the weather, the traffic, the restaurants; I’m a knee-jerk Eeyore until convinced otherwise.
Joy assures me right away she’s not perfect at this, that there is a laundry list of things that make life hard here. “The eggs here have no nutritional value to them—crack an egg and you’ll see what I mean. The yolks are gray. The roads are terrible. Terrible. Potholes are flat-out canyons in the road. And if you get pulled over, get ready to pay a bribe, since you’re a foreigner. Oh, and mosquitoes—you have to watch out for them like the plague. Literally. Well, malaria at least.”
I make a mental note: Find a pharmacy; buy a malaria kit.
“But man, this red soil . . . it gets under your skin. I promise you, you’ll be hard-pressed to find people as friendly as they are here in this part of Africa. People love people here. Relationships are everything. And avocados are huge; they’re like a dime each.”
The sun falls, and we eat dinner on the porch, fill ourselves with guacamole, and let the kids play in the dark. Then we say good night, and the five of us head to our guesthouse down the street in Joy and Dave’s safari van, tires tumbling over potholes. We shower off red Ugandan dust, double-check that mosquito nets cover the length of our beds to the floor, and crank pedestal fans on high. Early the next morning, I meander through the guesthouse’s garden and find an avocado tree. Its fruit weights down the branches, big as eggplants.
We drive to Jinja, a town eighty miles east of Kampala and known for its status as home of the Nile River’s source. Dave and Joy let us borrow their van for a few days, so Kyle braves gargantuan potholes and muddy-red roads, inching to Jinja at a snail’s pace with throngs of vehicles and pedestrians. Motorbikes weave around traffic with fifty empty plastic jugs piled high and strung together on their backs. Monkeys play Frogger across the road, and we swerve every twenty feet to avoid the road’s crevasses. We’re inching through a traffic jam, and a uniformed man waves us over.
“Hello, sir,” he says as Kyle rolls down the window.
“Hello, Ssebo,” Kyle answers, as Joy taught us to do.
“It seems you were going a little too fast,” the officer says with a smile.
“Really? I didn’t think so.”
“Oh yes, sir,” he answers politely. “It’s okay; it happens sometimes.” I look away from the passenger seat and feel heat rise from my neck.
Kyle nonchalantly shuffles in his seat and digs for his wallet.
“Here in Uganda, this sort of violation only costs you thirty dollars.”
Kyle pilfers through his wallet, pulls out a twenty. “How about this?”
“Okay, sir, that is plenty. I can take that, no problem.” Kyle hands it over, and the officer stuffs it in his breast pocket.
“Have a good day, Ssebo.” Kyle smiles as he rolls up his window.
“Oh yes, you too, sir,” the man says, and waves us onward. I seethe in my seat, wait for the irritation to flow through me before I talk again.
“That sort of stuff makes me crazy,” I say.
“I know it does,” Kyle says graciously. He is unfazed in these situations, almost relaxed. It was one of the first things I noticed when I met him in Kosovo.
The remainder of our drive to Jinja is beautiful. Red soil gives birth to lush trees and fields of swaying crops, and as we cross the Nile, the sun dips, smears the sky in pinks and oranges. Women walk by balancing buckets on their heads, and they wear dresses in flamboyant floral patterns and skirts in vivid reds, greens, purples, corals. Produce stands dot the road’s shoulders next to concrete houses painted in vivid turquoise and yellow. Several houses and storefronts are painted with a sponsored brand’s logo; I see a home brought to us by Pampers and a local bank proudly presented by Mitsubishi. Uganda is a country of colors.
Smaller-town Jinja is more tranquil than the bedlam of Kampala, about a quarter of its size and considerably greener, grassier. Its economy is built on tourism because of the Nile, but it’s also home to several nonprofits, and an acquaintance’s organization, Sole Hope, is one of these. Their headquarters and guesthouse are down a suburban road, which will be our home for the next few days. We ring the bell at the gate, and someone buzzes us in. Kyle parks the van under an awning by the front door.
“Hello, sir. Hello, ma’am! Welcome!” says an elderly gentlemen as we open the van door.
Two younger men greet us and take our bags to our rooms, and the kids squeal at the sight of triple bunk beds. The house is open-air, old-world Mediterranean style with rooms dotted around a central courtyard.
Asher, the American woman who founded Sole Hope with Dru, her husband, gives us a tour of the house. “Here’s the kitchen,” she says, and we enter a small room where two local women are cooking.
“You’re welcome to come in here anytime to make breakfast or lunch—feel free to use any of the groceries. But let these ladies do their magic for dinner. Except for Sundays, we all eat a family meal together.”
“Hello, ma’am! Hello, sir. Hello, children,” they say to us, smiling. The affable women return to their food and continue singing as they chop.
People come and go; cross breezes waft through open windows. Children wave at ours, then run freely through the front and backyards. A man works from his laptop on a couch; a woman carries in a laundry basket and starts folding clothes at the dining table; a few twentysomethings chat on cushioned swinging settees in the courtyard. A young guy is asleep on a patio chair, book open on his chest. People seem as if they’re home.
Dru finds us. “Hey, would you guys like a tour of the work?”
Their organization works to eradicate the relatively simple health problem of jiggers, a sand flea that burrows in rural dwellers’ feet. Sterilized safety pins help dig fleas out of skin, and shoes made from old tires and jeans protect them afterward.
We’re introduced to the local men who cut soles from discarded tires, the men and women who sew cuts of denim donated by North Americans and Europeans to make the tops of shoes. Machines whir; power tools clatter; voices laugh and chatter. We say hello, and their work stops for a minute so they can shake our hands, welcome us to Jinja, thank us for visiting. We meet the house handyman, and I notice he’s wearing a T-shirt from an organization run by friends of ours in Iraq. A teenage boy is showing our kids the ramshackle wooden play structure in the front yard while two monkeys swing from trees above
them. The house dog runs laps around the house, backyard to front. We’re asked our impression of Uganda. We tell them we’re in love.
Dinner is ready, and we come in for a communal dinner around the table. This house is headquarters for making thousands of shoes, but it’s also a waiting room for parents in queue for Ugandan adoptions. Three families are here with their new children, waiting for their date when a judge will give them an official okay to head back to the States as the new parents of Ugandan babies. The young foreigners here are interns, college students spending a semester to learn, help, grow. We toast, break bread.
After dinner, our kids dig out board games in the living room. We sip tea with other adults in the courtyard and watch the pink sky fade to navy. We listen to stories about adoption and trips to the Ugandan countryside to remove jiggers from feet. We share our stories of travel mishaps and working from the road. We all talk about raising kids.
We’re strangers, but this is community.
The next morning, the five of us take Joy and Dave’s van to a Jinja neighborhood that sits on muddy banks, a slum along the Nile where people live in cobbled-together houses on muddy streets and work mostly as fishermen. We tumble through the marshy roads and roll down our windows. Pop music blares out of blown speakers, chickens scurry through boggy pothole-lakes as we pass, and vendors sell eggs on overturned milk crates. No one pays us notice. We are here at Dru’s recommendation.
Kyle slows down by a young man. “Hello—I’m looking for Joel. Do you know him?”
The guy nods, points ahead. “He should be up over there, by the water. Would you like me to run ahead and tell him you’re looking for him?”
“Well—sure, thanks,” Kyle replies. The young man runs ahead while we finish plodding through the mud and find a spot to park.
At Home in the World Page 12