Africa Top 10: #1 - Red Clay Roads

One of our group-mates told us over dinner how on Sunday nights as a child she was always anxious about starting a new week of school. Her mother told her, “You have so much to look forward to; you have no reason to be anxious.” And every Sunday night, she and her mother would make a list of ten things to look forward to in the week to come.

On Sunday night of our first week here, when our group of five was getting ready to set off for Anaka and the rest of the teacher crew was preparing for the first week of school, we sat around the dinner table and made our own list of things to look forward to: meeting the kids, working with the teachers, rhinos, etc.

We’ve since made lots of lists: things we’re planning to eat when we get back (who is coming to Chipotle with me?), activities we want to try in our classrooms, things to do around Anaka (including Eric attempting to catch the little gray chicken)… you get the idea.

Last week was difficult for a number of reasons. But to assure you all that I am not depressed or suicidal in a third world country, and that I’m still excited about being here, I’ve compiled a list of my own for you. This will also fill you in on some of the goings on around here without giving you a day by day recount which, I assure you, would get very boring. (Waiting, tea, class, posho, class, Frisbee, reading… lather, rinse, repeat.)

Here are the top ten things I love about Africa as of July 13, 2009 – two weeks into the trip. These are in no particular order other than what pops first into my head. And since we just came in from a walk down the road to Gulu, we’ll start there.

#1 - Walking the Red Clay

The roads here are amazing. The red clay stains our feet and legs, and the dust ends up everywhere – in our hair and clothing, under our fingernails, up our noses (ick). They’re not wide enough for two cars to pass safely (though it certainly happens unsafely), and they look like something you’d see a Jeep or heavy-duty truck charging over in a commercial. Everyone takes the roads – cars, trucks, army vehicles, people riding bicycles, people pushing bicycles with various objects balancing precariously on them (most interesting – a lawn mower), boda-bodas (which will have their own number later in this list). The most wonderful thing to see on any Ugandan road are the people – women in bright colors with babies papoosed to their backs balancing fruits or water or wood on their heads, children in worn uniforms laughing their way to school, men ambling with their grazing herds of cattle or goats, people of all ages carrying yellow jerry cans to the pumps to bring water home for their families.

In Anaka, the cows and people and bikes and children on the roads are nothing out of the ordinary. What is unusual, however, are the muzungus or munus – us, the whiteys, walking to nowhere. The people here in Northern Uganda are generally shy and quiet, but if you make the first move at saying hello, almost everyone you meet will at the very least smile and say hello back. Hello in Lwo, the Acoli language is afoyo. It also means thank you, which is so fitting for the gracious and welcoming personalities of the people here. (Interestingly, with a slightly different intonation of syllables, afoyo also means rabbit. Possible Ugandan conversation: Grace: “Hi, Sarah. Here’s your lunch.” Me: “Rabbit, Grace, rabbit very much.” But I digress.) When you say hello, you are also essentially thanking someone just for being around, and when they say hello back, they are thanking you for acknowledging their presence. It’s really a nice idea, if you take the time to think about it (and time, here in Anaka, is something we are never short of.) “Sorry” is also used more loosely here than at home. I clumsily tripped in the classroom on a broken piece of flooring this morning and my students in the first three rows all gasped and said “sorry, sorry” – you can use it to apologize to someone, or you can simply use it to explain your regret for a situation in which someone has found him or herself.

The looseness of the Lwo language is reflective of so many of the ideas of family and community for the Acolis; as one word can loosely take on many meanings, the ideas of family and community are also less defined and more flexible. Nieces and nephews are called sons and daughters; cousins are referred to as siblings, aunts and uncles are mother and father. (I didn’t know this for two weeks, and I thought everyone was just related to everyone and that families were the size of football teams. Thank you, Father Martin, for the clarification.) Adults (or, frankly, anyone over the age of 7 or 8 of a “clan” or “tribe” take responsibility for the children of the group. It’s nothing for a mother to walk off for the day and leave her child behind for the rest of the village to watch – and gives quite a new meaning to “takes a village to raise a child.” I wonder how much of this attitude is inherent in the culture and how much came as a result of the either the 25+ years of war that has stripped families of fathers and sons and the AIDS epidemic that has plucked too many parents from their children. If the communities weren’t also families, there would be a lot more children sitting in Ugandan orphanages, and it’s quite noble of the Acolis not to let that happen, though they do not see what they do as any kind of a big deal.

Many people along the road will stop for a few minutes for a chat, and the first thing they want to know is where you are going. It never ceases to amaze that we just walk to walk, and we take for granted that for many cultures including this one, the act of walking is part of a day’s work. Just a few years ago, boys would have walked for hours along these roads to sleep in hospital basements and bus stations where government guards would protect them from the LRA. When we walk the roads – for exercise and relaxation and scenery, not for safety or water or medical care or food - we put on our thick cotton socks and arch-supporting, rubber soled sneakers to traipse over the rocks and through the potholes; most people here, regardless of age, walk the roads barefoot. Literally and figuratively, we cannot imagine what it means to walk these roads as natives, what recent history lies in the red clay and how it continues to affect the people trying to rebuild their lives here in Anaka. But we can listen, and try to remember, and try to understand, and we can keep saying afoyo. Hopefully it’s not coming across as rabbit.