My Parents' Visit: Round One

So...I promised to post an update of our trip soon, and here it is. Part one, at least. I need an editor or something to keep me from writing so much. Part two (and perhaps three) will be forthcoming. How's the weather where you are? Here its 75 degrees every day. Ha HA. Without further ado-

My step-father, Bill, and my mom, Terrie, after six months of meticulous planning, arranged to fly into the Entebbe International Airport on February 23. We couldn’t have possibly planned more successfully the dates of their visit, as my one-month vacation began on February 22. The morning of the 23rd, I woke up at 4am to walk into town (on a $6 per day salary, it makes sense to save money where one can, such as on early morning taxis) and catch my bus to Kampala. Having slept poorly the previous night, largely due to my nervousness of receiving my first American visitors, I thought to sleep on the 6-hour ride. However, I found myself sitting next to a young woman who was enrolled at Makarere University (the Oxford of East Africa) in Kampala. She was studying to be a pharmacologist/chemist, and we had a long (roughly 6-hour) conversation about higher education in East Africa, among other things. Unsurprisingly, she had a large number of siblings, mostly older than her. Surprisingly, all of them had graduated from university and we employed as engineers, doctors, lawyers, and so on. This is in an educational system where less than 1% of all students reach university level. How’s that for parenting? It made me wonder about the emphasis that her parents obviously put on education, and whether that same parental motivation would lead to similar successes throughout this area. Sadly, education is often not considered to be of fundamental importance here, especially in more rural areas among farmers and fishermen who rely on the work of their children to live. Slowly, the paradigm is changing (for example, the Maasai, a tribe of semi-nomadic herders and warriors, traditionally resistant to all Western influence such as education and religion, have started allowing their girls to attend school), but it will be at least another generation before most Tanzanians truly believe in the efficacy of education, in its crucial value to life.

As we talked, I occasionally glanced out the window to observe the cultural and landscape gradient passing from Bukoba to Kampala. The most immediately evident sign that I was out of Tanzania was the profusion of English-language signs, English being the national language of Uganda. I looked at the store fronts, one after the other emblazoned with a painted advertisement for a phone company, type of cooking oil, or condom brand, and thought how they resembled a retrograde Tokyo; the neon lights transformed instead into splashes of paint, yet still covering every wall and invading one’s senses. As we neared Kampala itself, that “pearl of Africa” Churchill so praised, I noticed more keenly the difference between Tanzanian and Ugandan culture, specifically in style of women’s dress. In Tanzania, traditional garb still reigns; women wear brightly colored, boldly patterned swaths of fabric that they wrap around themselves like a towel. In Uganda, many women, especially younger ones, wore jeans that must’ve required either a shoehorn or some of that cooking oil to fit into, or both. I didn’t mind so much.

We reached Kampala lagging behind schedule by only an hour, and after a nice lunch with the university student (where she ordered for us what is now my favorite East African food- matoke, or steamed and mashed bananas, and peanut sauce), I hopped on another bus to Entebbe. My parents were scheduled to land at 11pm, and I reached the airport town with a lot of time to spare. I returned to the quaint guest house I’d chanced upon last year, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the proprietor, Mama Clemence, had expanded her humble two-room establishment into an institution with six rooms, a bar(!), and a beautiful outdoor banquet hall. True to East African form, the power was down when I arrived; I could only hope that it would be back in time to provide light for my travel weary parents. I’d brought a Neal Stephenson book, and for most of the remaining time, I lost myself in his world. Around 8pm, I went for dinner at Mama Clemence’s nearby restaurant (this woman is like the Entebbe mafia, a hand in everything; she’s also highly involved with local politics…), enjoying a big fried fish, chips, and Ugandan beer, which is the exact same as Tanzanian beer.

Upon returning to my room, I found that a generator had been installed at the guest house, but that it was going to power some giant speakers at the outdoor banquet hall, where a graduation ceremony would be taking place until the early morning. Oh, that’s nice… Mama Clemence eventually found me, knowing that I’m “from” Tanzania, and demanded that I meet her other Tanzanian guests. She led me to a table at the back of the celebration area, and I was presented to two young Tanzanian fellows who turned out to be pilots from Arusha and Dar. Apparently they weren’t flying that night (or so I hope), as their table was littered with empty whiskey packets and beer bottles. After throwing out some Swahili, I was heartily taken in by these gregarious pilots, who “encouraged” me to go out drinking with them. I still had a few hours left, and no electricity in my room, so I figured a beer or two would be nice. We went to a local bar, where I realized these men were already pretty far gone, and beer was not in fact on the menu. They went straight for whiskey shots. Cool…been there before. After three or four in a half hour’s time, we backed off a bit and relaxed, and my first in-depth conversation about the sexual mores of typical Tanzanians began. These pilots were all too eager to share all their “insider knowledge”, despite the fact that I never asked. It was a hilarious conversation, made all the more ridiculous for the fact that we were speaking in Swahili and all the Ugandans around us were in the dark as to what they were vividly and vehemently explaining to me (or so I assume; this one old fella chuckled a few times, he might’ve been in the know). At 10pm, I told them it was time I went to pick up my parents. Their protestations (“the plane will be four hours late, let’s just go to a dance club instead!”) were well-received, and I managed to leave them in good humor.

I arrived at the airport with half an hour to spare, but sadly the plane’s arrival had been delayed. Apparently a passenger decided to disembark at the stopover in Nairobi without telling anyone, and substantial time was lost as the officials tried figuring out just where this missing passenger went. So what to do at an airport at 11 at night? Yeah…I went to the lounge to relax. As soon as I entered, an elderly Belgian man grabbed my arm and asked what kind of beer I would like. Seems that it was my night for free drinks. He was waiting for his family, and must’ve been pretty stressed out, judging by the alacrity with which he was putting the beers down. In a drunkenness contest, I’m not sure if the pilots or the Belgian would’ve won; a match for the ages. Not wanting to be a wreck when I greeted my parents who’d flown thousands of miles to see me, I nursed the beer, but to no avail. Each time the Belgian re-upped, he made sure not to forget me. Three beers later, I was woozy and the plane was due in ten minutes. I decided to make my exit, against the Belgian’s yells, oddly similar to those from the pilots, “that plane won’t land for another hour, have a beer!” Luckily, it did land, and quickly.

My pleasant, if disorienting, buzz made the arrival of my parents all the more surreal. Surreal…that’s a good word to describe seeing such familiar faces in such an alien environment, and it was a feeling that returned to me more than once during their stay. However, the joy I felt at seeing them arrive safely easily outweighed that oddness, and our initial hugs and greetings were like coming home. The first thing my mom said to me? “You sound different.” Yeah, I guess living in a developing country where the English is so poorly understood, my speech patterns would be altered. I’m sure that was just one of many changes my parents saw in me during their visit.

We caught a cab to the guest house, and I was disheartened to find that not only was the music from ceremony still blasting, but that the electricity was still out as well. Welcome to East Africa, weary travelers! It was nearing midnight by the time we got all the luggage into the room, and knowing that the jet lag could be fierce if they didn’t get some sleep, we allowed ourselves only a brief conversation before heading to bed. I was still awake, spurred on by the strangeness and the brilliance of knowing my parents had arrived, so I went out to the ceremony area, where Mama Clemence met me with a giant smile and requested I have a beer with her. Wow…it really was my night. It was nice to tell her and her husband that everything was fine, that they’d landed safely and were now peacefully (I hoped) asleep in bed. After the beer (final count- 2.5 litres of beer and 200ml of whiskey; it felt like I was back in university), I felt ready for sleep and the upcoming two weeks of adventure and tour-guiding.

First on the following day’s agenda were the botanical gardens, which I’d visited last year and whose tranquility was highly welcomed. Our encyclopedic guide, who knowledge made me feel as though I forgot to should be taking notes, escorted us throughout the diverse gardens over four hour’s time, during which my parents received their first taste of African wildlife- hordes of colobus monkeys littered the area, showing almost no fear of man (in fact, we had some extra bread which they intrepidly came and plucked from my hand; greedy buggers). The gardens were as impressive and varied as I remembered, with such unusual specimens as the “cannon-ball tree” and the “sausage tree”, both aptly named for the shapes of their inedible fruits. All in all, it was a peaceful way to spend their morning in such a foreign land (despite the fact that my mom forgot that we were less than a degree from the equator, not wearing any sunscreen and getting a nice little burn for her efforts).

Following the gardens, we got a local lunch at Mama Clemence’s restaurant. One of my continual fears during their visit was that some particularly feisty bacteria would attack their fragile stomachs just as we boarded a bus heading somewhere (thankfully, this fear was never realized). Their first true local meal was that same matoke and peanut sauce that the university student had shown me, and they loved it, going as far as to ask how it was made in order to try replicating it back home. Bellies full, we called the taxi which would take us from the somewhat secluded Entebbe to the scrappy, bustling city that is Kampala. Bill later said that this one-hour drive was the time he experienced the strongest feelings of culture shock, perhaps from seeing the poverty embodied in the multitude of workers and tiny businesses, equally as attached to the road and its traffic as are the yellow and white painted lines. The drive was an opportunity to gaze out at the sea of foreign people and their constructs, to take in life in Uganda in one fell swoop. The driver got lost (after professing to know “exactly” where the hotel was), and when we arrived at the hotel, it seemed a paradise with its expansive lawns and comforting simplicity, calm in the eye of the chaotic mercantile storm that encompasses Kampala. Shortly after our arrival, the heat of the afternoon was displaced by a torrent of rain, a foreshadowing of what was to be the following day’s journey to Bukoba.

The bus heading back to my home left early enough that we only had time to enjoy breakfast (the same as the previous day’s- bread, banana, and an egg) and some rest before heading to the terminal. By this point, I can well imagine that my parents were still reeling from the cultural and societal differences. While life here is truly the same as life anywhere else, once you adjust, on the surface the incongruities can be overwhelming at first. One of the major areas of dissonance between East African and American societies is that of proper infrastructure- the States have it, Africa doesn’t. This is reflected by the continual power outages, lack of running water, and poor roads. The latter is what my parents were now facing, as we hurtled down the narrow, worn road in our Greyhound-size bus. Interestingly, most people here consider the strip from Kampala to Bukoba to be one of the best in the area. Coming from America, my parents did not share that opinion. Between the driver’s outrageous speed, the potholed, pedestrian-crowded road, and the exhaust smell emanating from right under our feet, the trip was pretty miserable, and that was before it started pouring rain. It rained, and hard, for at least two hours of our ride. During this time, the driver slowly down only nominally, and I became worried when I saw that even the Tanzanian passengers wanted him to slow down. If this wasn’t frightening enough, the wiper on the driver’s side wasn’t working, so the bus would occasionally stop so that they could apply powdered soap to the windshield. Our lives were in the hand of Foma Gold, number one East African powdered soap. As we turned south and neared the border, the rain lessened. We’d escaped unscathed, despite a couple white-knuckle close calls with other cars and people; just another day here…

The rest of the trip was smooth, and we rejoiced when we finally reached fabled Bukoba. As a bonus, not a single piece of the extensive amounts of luggage (more on this later) was damaged or missing. A short taxi ride later, and we had finally arrived at my school and my home- Ihungo. If you are to ask my parents what their favorite place in Tanzania is, my guess is that they will answer “Ihungo”. Although the hotel of the previous night was tranquil in its own right, it wasn’t home. After the harrowing bus ride, compiled with the 30-odd other hours of travel they’d done to get to Africa, reaching the destination spelled better relief than Rolaids. My house is situated several kilometers outside of Bukoba, on a crest overlooking a lush stream valley on one side and the tremendous Lake Victoria on the other. Being part of the school grounds, it is removed enough to feel idyllic and serene, even when the school kids are pounding on my door asking for candy.