XVI. Uganda, Take Two

When I returned to Uganda in 1984, it was to a different set of experiences. I had graduated from my doctoral program; so, there was a kind of earnestness that I had not had previously. Still, it very much had the feel of the “Year of Living Dangerously” and I can only marvel at my recklessness and naïve sense of adventure. Although I returned to Karamoja, and had the more frightening experiences on this second trip than the first; I spent significant (including in terms of my own development) time in the West Nile, the native region from which Idi Amin hailed and that had been totally off limits the year before.

Though situated at the same latitude as Karamoja, but in the northwest corner of the country, the West Nile was in many ways, but not all ways, its opposite – very lush, green, and humid – sort of the picture that I had of the tropics before 8 years of living off and on at these latitudes disabused me of that misconception. In many, but far from all, ways it was paradise on earth.

It was Cole’s idea that I would weigh and measure every child I could find in the region; ostensibly as a way to document the need for aid and to assess what could be done to reconstruct the region. Once again, James was my partner.

Roughly the size of Connecticut, the West Nile had a population of about a half million in the mid- to late 1970s. The nearly 10,000 children we measured on our excursion through the region were too young to remember having seen a European, as the last one had departed before the “War of Liberation” (wars are always given such nice names). So, I was quite a novelty. The only “crop” that we saw growing was cassava (yucca), as that requires little tending; so, it is ideal for people who need to leave on short notice with no guarantee of return. At that time, we estimated that the entire population of the region was no more that 1/10th that of the mid-1970s.

We were there in May, which is high mango season. I love the taste and smell of ripe mango; and it was eerie to drive for long stretches through mango forests (these were big trees, not the short cultivars of modern mango farms) without seeing people and the Land Rover’s wheel wells and undercarriage literally dripping and drooling with gloriously fragrant, deep yellow-orange mango juice. Many of the children had schistosomiasis, but were generally a bit better off nutritionally than their Karamajong counterparts.

On our last day on the West side of the Nile we engaged a ferry to cross the river. It was not terribly wide at that point – maybe a few hundred meters at the most. I recall our “guards” – there were 14 “soldiers” armed with AK47s and rocket-propelled grenades, had an average age of about 14 years, and eyes redder than any of my fellow travelers in Afghanistan 8 years earlier. When we started being shelled from several hundred meters upstream (perhaps even a kilometer, as we were in the very north of Moyo District in Ugandan territory and the fire probably was coming from Sudan) I really regretted that we had a petrol, rather than diesel, vehicle (as we were carrying an extra 200-liter barrel of the more explosive liquid in the back of the Land Rover). Swimming with the other creatures in the river while be shot was about as unappealing as finding ourselves in the center of a raging inferno. We made it out of there physically unscathed and decided to continue on to Kampala; even though we had lost radio contact (the UN radio was constantly on) along the way. Driving through the infamous “Luwero Triangle,” we entered the city in the evening a couple of days later. It was pitch black and, with the exception of small arms fire, very quiet.

The fog of 25 years is not heavy enough to remove the stark images of those days, but with the exception of trips through geographic space, the temporal ordering gets a bit confused. Perhaps just before that trip (but I think it was afterward) I got a call from Bjorn saying that Satya had suffered a stroke and might not live. Until then, the fear and excitement associated with trying to survive while helping others kept me numb. I now know that this is not an uncommon occurrence for soldiers and others living in war zones. The news of Satya stung deeply and very personally. I went home and cried myself to sleep.