Elephant Graceland and Skippy the Stray Dog

Our arrival in Gulu was surreal – after a 6 hour bus trip with only one stop to “use the local restroom” behind a bush in the bush, we arrived at our hotel, Elephant Graceland. We were originally to stay at a hotel closer to the IC Volunteer House, but they had apparently overbooked, and the Elephant’s manager Alphonso took us in at the last minute. After our night at the Euro-fab hostel Backpackers, our two-person room with en-suite temperamental bathrooms and hole-free mosquito netting had us literally jumping around. Seriously. There was jumping.

It was not until we were tucked neatly into our netting the first night of our stay that we met two of our newest neighbors at the Elephant Graceland: Skippy the Stray Dog and the Enrique Iglasias Discotheque. (We’ll find the real Acholi name when we sneak over to short circuit their generator.)

Maybe there needs to be some introduction here. Gulu is significantly larger than I had expected. In my head, I pictured the Internally Displaced Persons Camps about which I had read – thatched roofed huts with free-roaming children and chickens. Gulu is much more urban and is in the process of rapid growth and development. There is a market area that takes up a whole block, a number of hotels and restaurants, and – though the service is slow and the computers circa 1990 – several internet cafés. There are some displaced schools still in town as well, as well as a prison where guards take prisoners for walks on the streets at night, and a number of NGO’s. The streets are nothing fancy – red clay slightly less wide than the back roads by the cottage, and cratered with potholes – but they are traveled 24/7 by schoolchildren in their uniforms, people carrying jerry cans to the wells for water, women with babies strapped to their backs balancing goods to sell on their heads, bicycles, boda bodas (small motorcycles used here as taxis) and the occasional car or 4WD vehicle. But more on Gulu later…

The key architectural wonder in Gulu town that I would like to focus on is the bar across the street from our hotel. It blasts a wide selection of musical joy to all of Northern Uganda and possibly parts of Sudan until 4:30 am. Literally. Last night I showered to “Where is the Love” and was told as I fell asleep that I could run, I could hide, but I could not escape the love of that Latin dreamsicle of 1998. We have come to the realization that in addition to decades old kiddie-pop, the rest of the world enjoys techno music significantly more than Americans. It’s cool. At least they can dance to it with more style and rhythm than we muzungus.

The Enrique isn’t so bad; it’s kind of like falling asleep to a mix tape made by an old boyfriend. But the disco employs an additional piece of nighttime entertainment – Skippy the Stray Dog. Starting almost religiously at 12:30 and continuing until well after last call, Skippy accompanies the music with howls, barks, and a moan that makes us think he is being water-boarded in the yard next door. (Personally, I think he knows where Kony is hiding in the Congo and someone is trying to make him talk.) If he is in fact dying, it’s a slow, repetitive nightly process that follows a strict time schedule. At first, we thought he was a wolf, and Brit’s malaria-induced dream the first night at E.G. (during the three hour period between Skippy’s bedtime and our 7:30 alarm) involved a drooling, fanged creature chasing her down a red clay road.

Rewind to last night’s shower: I attempted this seemingly simple hygienic procedure at Elephant Graceland and ended up not getting very clean but impressing myself with the level of acrobatic-ness my body was able to muster up in situations of need. We have a “real shower” with a showerhead and a very unpredictable running water situation. I got in wearing only my shower shoes (ahhh, undergrad…) and did the water-conserving shower dance: put basin under faucet, douse self in freezing cold water, turn freezing cold water off, lather hair with shampoo, turn water on, try to rinse hair while touching as little of freezing cold water as possible, turn water off, repeat procedure using conditioner and soap. Made it halfway through the process: shampooing was completed, hair was soaking in some 99 cent VO5 conditioner, and my body was lathered with a Dove bar of soap that is now red from the clay of the roads. When I went to turn on the water for the final rinse, a few drops pittered into the basin at the shower and then nothing. I twisted the knobs again thinking perhaps in the past 2.5 minutes they had adopted a new usage procedure. No. We were simply out of water. So, with the half-full gallon sized basin that had collected the sort-of dirty water from the first part of the shower, I was able to pseudo-rinse the soap off my body and face, but I still had a hair full of conditioner and a body sort of slimed with soap and clay residue. Long story short, I ended up bracing myself on the walls, turning my head upside down, and dunking my hair into the basin of leftover shower water to try to get some of the conditioner out. After a few dunks (is this what it would have been as a nerdy high school freshman to get dunked in the toilet by a football playing bully?) I figured it was as good as it was going to be, pulled it up into a bun, and set off. I realized halfway through the day when I let my hair down to keep the bugs off my neck that I missed a conditioner-slathered chunk of hair near my left ear that had turned into a greasy, sticky, dusty mess.

Needless to say, I was pretty excited for a shower tonight. But alas, no water again. So Brit and I wiped down with my selection of baby wipes and Stridex face wipes, and – at 1:33 AM, are enjoying Skippy the Stray Dog’s rendition of “Sorry Miss Jackson” and coming to terms with the fact that the quest for sleep is futile while Gulu parties it up with Skippy across the street. I am for reeeeeeeaaaaaal…