by Sophia McGovern
Kampala is a hive. Streets teem with cold, dark
faces that turn to land on me from everywhere—from the backs of motorbikes,
from inside vans bursting with strangers. From police officers wearing
semi-automatic rifles like sashes. These faces stare at my white skin that
reeks of money and a life in an America that more closely resembles the lost
Eden.
Strange hands brush over my skin, and quickly
take hold of my soft hair. The one familiar hand I cling to leads gently. It
wards off propositions and proposals from men who can’t see past my female form
and pale skin.
I am coveted.
My body is all they want because it is wrapped
in a promise of a better life. I am mizungo.
I have no identity besides my lack of color. It is a sign of the poverty
that has passed over me, but clings to this air and sprawls out all around me,
possessing this crazy city.
I am untouched, blessed and desired.
The leisurely days in Lyantonde show me that I
can fly. I grip the back of the motorbike as it grumbles under me, lugging us
up the infinitely orange hills and into the rural villages three hours west of
Kampala where our project lies. Our goal is to provide housing and sanitation
for a family still grieving the loss of a husband and father.
As we continue to climb, my host’s brother
guides the bike around the potholes. His grip on the handlebars, like his
brother’s, protects me. The jungle snakes. Children weave in and out of trees
flashing smiles, waves and shouts of “mizungo!”
The wind that promises rain twists and frees my hair from its elastic. It
pulls hidden music, smells and orange dust—“fufu”—through
my flying hair. I am powerful in our partnership.
The haunted nights in Lyantonde remind me that
I am running. Instead of children flashing waves and smiles, my mother, nearly
a skeleton, breaks into my thoughts. She stares ahead with hollow eyes in a
yellow nightgown that hasn’t been washed in weeks.
I see my sister and me, mere children, hiding
her notes and the kitchen knives. Anything she could cut away her life with so
that the younger ones don’t wake up motherless.
I can barely sleep in this world so far from my
own. I spend the nights living the nightmares and counting the minutes until
morning. I am relieved she finally tried and ended her empty threats, but even
more relieved she failed and that I escaped.
“You should be scared. It is not natural to
jump off a seventy-five-foot drop.”
A man jokes and laughs as he ties my ankles
together, trying to make me smile. Instead, the flashing reflection of the sun
off the water of the Nile below me demands my attention.
I sit on a
tribal throne as he works. Below me is the veranda. The Dutch couple I have
befriended promised to watch. We mizungos
have a bond. I smile and wave to their distant faces knowing they can only see
my gleaming white t-shirt.
I stand at the edge of the drop forcing myself
to look straight ahead.
“The trick is to jump out not down, and at the
count of three you’ll do it.”
Fear is blocking nearly every thought, sound,
and smell, but I trust his voice. I inhale.
One…
My knees weaken as I stare out across the miles of
treetops.
Two…
My lungs contract as my gut clenches.
Three…
My arms pull above my head, and my knees bend
and launch my body over the emptiness. I hang in the air, weightless, and feel
as if I belong there. That second stretches and I am invincible.
My stomach turns as gravity catches up to me,
pulling me by the gut toward the flashing water. I am close to bursting with
fear before it rips out of me in a horrified scream. The water zooms closer until
it is a foot from my fingertips. I can see my dangling form reflected in the
surface. All I need is to hold that bold girl’s hand.
The bungee tugs me back before I break the
surface, bouncing me into the air five or six more times. Each time I am farther
and farther from the water, until I am released by two men bobbing in a raft
below me.
The countdown man meets me at the shore as I
crouch, trying to catch my breath. He scoops me into a hug.
“My dear! What a beautiful jump. You are much
braver than you think.”
My bags dig into my shoulders, and my knees
buckle from exhaustion as I knock on the door in Tempe I’ve missed for the past
month and a half.
“Hey,
you at the door, go away for a second. I don’t want you home yet!”
The minutes stretch as I hear my roommate
scurrying around inside, the frantic shadow of a tall woman etched on the
blinds of the kitchen door. Since I have seen her last, a death has crippled
her, and I’ve searched the entire flight for what to say.
When the door flings open, I’m engulfed in her
hug.
“You smell like a hippie.”
On our scavenged kitchen table is a bouquet of
roses and baby’s breath and a casserole dish. The dish, never before used, is
filled with goopy brownies and an entire box of lit candles melting onto them.
In the next few hours, nothing is said about
death or anything we are running from. We devour the brownies on our
hand-me-down futon and watch our favorite show until the sun rises.
It is the second finals week of my college career.
Instead of studying, I have burned through way too many hours of Netflix. The
familiar Facebook ding draws me away from manly biker adventures.
A message from my sister pulses on the screen.
“Mom and the kids are in the hospital.”
My breath catches.
“There was a car crash. I don’t know what
happened. The cops just showed up and took my dad to the hospital. Grandma and
Grandpa are there too.”
“The stories
don’t match up, honey. No one knows exactly what happened.” My grandma’s voice
is tired, careful, and comforting. It’s the voice I always wish my mother had.
“Your mom says there were other cars, your
sister says there weren’t any.”
My dorm room
feels smaller and farther away than it ever has.
We both know what I was really asking.
My youngest
sister fractured a vertebra, my brother’s face was sliced, and my mother’s nose
smashed against the windshield as the car rolled. She wasn’t wearing a
seatbelt, but somehow, she didn’t fly through the glass. A miracle, they said.
The permanent breeze plays with the leaves of
the mango trees, pawpaw trees, and banana plants. The sun beats at a constant eighty
degrees, bouncing off the endless green. Gospel music blares from the speakers,
fenced in by scrap metal. The whole town is mingling in the tiny yard thanking
Jesus for the heaping plates of food and endless love. It is Sunday and a Day
of Thanks. Everyone is full of smiles.
Children
with their hair shaved short bounce and weave in and out of the crowd. For
hours they laugh and sprint and play with one another. They pose for my camera,
sure they will be famous, captured by the rare mizungo. They feel my skin, wondering if the white can be washed
away.
A hand
lightly touches my shoulder, pulling me away from the children. “That one in
the blue dress is a boy. He likes to wear dresses and his stubborn mother lets
him.”
Inside,
the World News constantly plays, showing bright politicians chanting about
shooting gays and bisexuals on the street. International lawyers fight to kill
the law supporting homosexuals’ and bisexuals’ imprisonment and torture.
The
people laugh and words of hate float up behind the Gospel music, mixed in with
words of love from my new family.
“His
mother is stubborn. She is teaching him to defy God.”
The
children continue to bounce and play under the sun, posing for my camera as my
hands shake.
The big Utah backyard bursts with
cousins I hardly see. The green grass combs my long skirt as I mingle, and my
brother tells them about the bags of candy from that week’s parade.
My grandparents sit in the shade,
holding hands. My mother sits next to them. Removed.
At the end of the night I gather my
things from inside my aunt’s home. Shoes of every size clutter the entryway,
and the happy shrieks of childhood games filter through the screen door. The
living room is dark and almost hides them.
I’m watching a secret.
My grandmother holds her daughter.
Tears illuminate her face as the words tumble out. They are too far away for me
to hear, and my mother’s expression is cast in shadows, but I can feel the
words I want to say to her grounded in that embrace.
I slip away not ready to say
them.
Back
in Tempe, my girlfriend holds my hand as we sit in an outdoor loveseat in an
open-air market. The sun reflects off her Ray Bans as it sinks lower into blue
dusk.
We sit for an hour while the
meaningless legs of strangers drift by at eye level. The familiar prick of
stares coats us. A man points.
A family of six walks by, each child
the same bright shade of blonde. The baby smiles at us. My girlfriend’s face
lights up with hope for her own clan of curly-haired little babies.
The second youngest boy stops to look
at us.
It is a look of curiosity,
unthreatening. I wave to him, and he smiles, looking over his shoulder as he
catches up with his family, waving goodbye to the two women in love, sitting in
the setting sun.
This room is my space. My new family added a
lock to the door and bars to the window to keep unwanted people out. To keep my
American skin and valuables safe. Sometimes it is a sanctuary, other times it
is a hiding place for my other self.
I have made it across the world on my own. At
times I feel utterly alone. My body has come to crave the touch of those I
cannot have. I have loved men, but it is she I crave in the darkness thousands
of miles away. Her fingers slide into me; her hair falls to my chest as she
kisses my neck.
A carnal moan rips from my mouth.
The house is silent.
I hear someone shift in his bed.
No one moves, and I start to breathe again.
Piles of freshly printed photographs of Uganda overtake
my bed in Tempe. I add these pictures to the twine that zigzags across my walls
and documents milestones. My girlfriend watches me work, lying at my feet. She
listens as the stories seep from me. Ugandan children caked in dirt stare back.
Theirs are some of the voices muted by poverty in Lyantonde, the town I grew to
love. I stand on my bed, arranging the photos so the colors flow, but those
eyes, pinned back by clothespins, cannot blend in with the rest of my American
life. I have made these children decorations.
My guilt haunts me as I tell her their stories,
and about my group’s goal to provide them with water tanks so they can strive
for more than basic survival. I tell her how beautiful those children are, but
how little one water tank can do. So much more needs to be done; so many more
families need clean water in that green land. I wish I could show her that
beautiful country. I wish that I had not taken these photos, but I keep them as
a reminder of my power.
Ugliness and danger would await our love on those
green hills and orange roads. But we are mizungos.
We have cameras and the power to turn a nation into wall hangings as
children serenade us.
It is midnight, and my plane sits in the
Entebbe Airport. There is nothing but blackness outside, and only the
double-paned glass keeping it out. I feel submerged. I am exhausted, and the
cabin’s fluorescent lighting is offensive.
The screen on the back of the seat in front of
me flashes, tracking my location. The plane straddles the Equator, resting
after the ten-hour flight from Schiphol.
My ears are numb from straining to hear the
outside world.
Everything I know fits into two small backpacks
that cling to my sides and throw me off balance. I step out of the plane. Every
part of me, every exhausted pore feels that small step.
The linoleum is scuffed and gray. Ads wrap
around everything in sight, reminding travelers that this is the Pearl of
Africa. The fluorescent lighting flickers. Bulbs, like so many things need
replacing.
I can’t bring myself to make eye contact with
the woman who stamps my passport.
I’m supposed to meet my host outside.
The doors slide open and noise envelops me,
rushing in after ten hours of absence. The night air is chilly, commandeering
my lungs, which are almost used to the recycled junk.
Men crowd together, dressed in plaid
button-downs, jeans, and leather shoes. Some sit on motorbikes, most wave, all
call out to me.
I am ashamed.
The faces blend and meld together. I only know
his from photographs, but I cannot find him.
The car with slashed leather seats weaves in
and out of the others. None are new, and none adhere to the sloppily painted lanes
lit up only by dim headlights.
My bags fill the seat next to me.
No streetlights give meaning to the looming
shapes in the darkness. With concentration, my eyes begin to adjust as the cool
night air rushes in and around me.
We speed to an abrupt halt behind a pickup
riding low to the ground. “POLICE” is spray painted on the side, barely visible
in the headlights. Men with rifles slung across their chests stand in the bed,
their eyes scanning the landscape in all directions.
Ramshackle steel structures, decorated with
Christmas lights instead of neon, blast music that whips through the car as we
zoom past the policemen. The silhouettes of dancing people are etched behind my
eyelids. A few of the policemen see my face, their eyes following mine before
distance robs them of me.
The buildings get closer and closer together. I
have not missed a single tree, smell, or woman in a long skirt walking on the
side of the road.
The car leaves us, and we walk for a few
minutes weaving through identical turns, and a few staring men. The hotel
surprises me. In the midst of crumbling cement, the marble floors of the lobby
gleam.
He checks me in and tours the room, examining
every corner, every drawer with his hands.
The bed looks like someone just left it, and I
try not to wonder what secrets it keeps.
He pulls the curtain shut and makes sure I can
lock the door. I am warned not to answer for anyone.
We will meet at eleven in the morning.
I turn the lock and it echoes through the
floor.
The bus from Kampala to Lyantonde bounces and
screeches across three hours of green. Vendors with baskets balanced on their
heads shove chunks of meat and bright fruit through my open window at each
stop, hoping to pierce my American wallet and feed their families. I am told
not to buy anything; my stomach was not made to handle these things.
The bus is overcrowded. It’s the only way to
get to rural Uganda from crazy Kampala. People spill into the aisle. His tight
grip never slides off of my bags as exhaustion pulls me under.
Lyantonde emerges. As we clamber off, all eyes
stick to me, and the fact that this is home for the next six weeks begins to
settle on my rumpled clothes along with the dust.
His worn expression dissolves into a huge grin
as I reposition my things into a thief-proof hold. “Drop your bags, and
stretch, sister. This is your new home. We are so happy to have you.”
The air here is calm. Music and scents of
roasting meat lazily make their way to me as huge trucks bumble by on one of
the only paved roads outside of Kampala. They lug goods from Kenya or Tanzania,
places I never thought could be closer than a news story. The people walk
slowly. Time gets stuck somewhere on the way to town and doesn’t translate
well. Their looks, instead of dissecting me from my skin and valuables, are
curious and friendly. “Hello, my mizungo friend” a man in a tattered suit
jacket beams while strolling by.
We weave in and out of tiny shops and houses.
Nearly everyone greets me. We duck through a gate, and a lovely house with
carefully kept flowers and grass jumps into view. I enter the front door, and
an old man whose smile is bigger than any I’ve seen, stands up from the couch.
“Welcome to your new home. I am your new father!” My breath catches as he hugs
me, and I realize he means everything he says. I am now a part of this family.
The Internet café’s roof is an unfinished, cool
private space where the town of Lyantonde sprawls below me. Dusk casts a light
blue tint on the buildings with their scrap metal roofs, some of which are
decorated with worn bike tires and warped from the rain.
As the sun sinks lower, brightly dressed women
crop up in the corners of streets and blossom in the entrances to winding
alleys. Truck drivers stuck for the night slink after them into the shadows.
I watch the town’s nightlife bloom, and revel
in our work. That day, I was actually of use. We talked for hours with past
beneficiaries and designed programs meant to foster opportunity. After a week
in the tropical sun, the mother of last year’s project’s family had cleared an
entire hectare of jungle, ready to harvest potatoes. On her own she had
reclaimed land from the green, slashing and burning hope. She only needed the
seed.
With our funding, she could yield seven times
what we would invest in her. Her children wouldn’t be forced to leave school
because she couldn’t afford uniforms. She could be independent and teach them
to thrive instead of struggling to survive. I am satisfied instead of aching
from my uselessness in the face of the intense poverty that grips so many.
I see death. They see life, and we are worlds
apart.
The screams pierce my mind, and my thoughts go
numb. My head is filled only with the cries of the goat as the butcher hacks at
its throat. The cries turn into huffs as the blunt knife hacks the vocal chords
into shreds. Its kicks turn from desperate to hopeless as it sags, its life
deflating in the red pool surrounding it, filling the jagged cement of the
courtyard.
I’ve been snapping pictures. My friends here
wanted me to see the slaughter. This is the first meat they’ve eaten in weeks.
Family members from all over the country have come to celebrate Eid.
Here, the Muslim and Christian populations flow
seamlessly. “We worship the same God, what is there to hate?”
The goat is strung up in an outside doorway. A
bucket below its head fills with its draining blood. Its tongue lolls to the
side looking no different than it did before the slaughter. The knife slides in
and out of the creature mechanically. The butcher’s face does not change. A
barefoot toddler dressed in tiny jeans waddles by sucking his fingers, and
staring at the carved goat, not blinking as its fur is separated from the meat,
and the meat from the bones.
The camera shutter continues to click. I try to
capture the moment when this creature morphs from a living thing to chunks of
lifeless meat, but all I can hear is its screams.
The flesh is passed to another man. He has laid
out banana leaves and is surrounded by sliced fruit, vegetables and huge pots
boiling and bubbling with bits of chicken and sauces. He is armed with a
machete, and sits cross-legged staring blankly at the meat before him. With no
signal he starts hacking at the tough goat meat. He keeps on for ten minutes,
looking like a perverse wind up toy.
The family around me sings and celebrates. The
courtyard, usually filled with gray, is bursting with the brightness of the
chopped fruit and vegetables, the headscarves of the women, the white tunics of
the men, and the brightly printed clothes of the children.
Later in the evening of Eid, I sit in the
courtyard.
The sky opens and it pours. The colors of Eid
are stripped from outside and stuffed into the many rooms of the complex.
The celebration remains vibrant, but becomes
more subdued with the filling of bellies. Earlier that morning, my new family
offered well wishes to their friends. “We have no bad blood, they worship the
same God. If He is happy with them, it will rain.”
It rains for hours. God is happy.
I am still shaken from the slaughtering.
Apparently, worlds cannot be left behind with travel, no matter how far or for how
long. We carry them with us from place to place.
For the first time in over a month, I am not
the only mizungo.
The river churns and attempts to swallow
everything. Our raft bounces and wriggles shooting along the Nile’s rapids. My
host is in the front and the rest of our crew paddles in sync with him. With
one last tug at the water, we fly forward into calmer water, the adrenaline
still numbing everything but the pounding of blood and pride in our ears.
A couple from Amsterdam speaks Dutch then slips
into English to include me in the conversation. We share sunscreen and laugh at
our burning skin and oily white noses.
That night we stay in a lodge in Jinja
overlooking the Nile squeezed in between miles of trees filled with monkeys and
wildlife I have only ever seen caged. My host goes to sleep, but I choose to
stay with the other mizungos. We talk
until we are the only ones left on the veranda hanging over the dark jungle
night.
They too are haunted by the intense poverty
that warps the children’s stomachs, swelling their starving bellies, and by the
hate that lies behind the most genuine smiles. They too are shocked by the love
that passes between Muslims and Christians in Uganda, yet has caused thousands
of years of war and misunderstanding in the Western world and the Middle East.
They too are enchanted yet horrified by this wonderful world.
When I
first arrived in Lyantonde, it seemed to be a place of the past. Power wasn’t
guaranteed, I bathed from a bucket, and flush-toilets were an unattainable
luxury. But looking again, I see the future developing alongside tradition. I
see culture translating opportunity. Women in their seventies swathed in bright
traditional dress talk on cellphones, even though running water is scarce. Teenagers
constantly update Facebook at the Internet café. Children head back from school
in immaculate uniforms speaking near perfect English with dreams of becoming
world leaders and doctors.
The days are filled with hope for the future
while the nights are filled with power play. They are an escape from the past
and present where women bloom in the alleyways, and children complete their
homework in candlelight with strength that my hands never needed to know.
It rains, earlier and harder than ever before,
and the farmers worry about the fate of their crops, and ultimately their
families. The roads are too dangerous to travel by motorbike. We have no
connection to our project or the beneficiaries.
Instead we wait.
It rains for three days. The smell of rain is
different here. It is stitched with worry and destruction instead of hope and
life. The sky churns into a formidable indigo instead of the deep purple coated
with pink clouds that usher green change into my beautiful desert.
When the sky clears, the real world is beckoned
back with the flip of a switch. The workers have fixed the power line somewhere
between here and Tanzania. “One break in the line and the whole countryside
goes dark.”
The World News flickers on. I am more informed
here in rural Africa than in the developed world. Here, there is no option to
look the other way. I watch with my host family as people continue to die by
the hundreds. Palestinians and Israelis. Children in Syria. Hospitals and
schools bombed. Each night the death count rises. The whole globe gripped by
the same rain. A village in India completely reclaimed. Buried. Loved ones beg
for help and more search parties.
“God has a plan and reason. We are His people
and His instruments, and God is good.”
I can’t see a God or a power to call upon, and
I can’t see a reason. Especially not a good one. I am isolated from the people
I live with who have opened up their home, and welcomed me into their family.
The loss and death all seems so distant, held
back by the secure electricity and plumbing of my world—until it isn’t.
The desert I miss is worlds away and filled
with those I love. Our apartment seems even farther, and I want nothing more
right now than to hold my roommate’s hand. To have her know that I was there
for her, really, and that her friend’s death was not her fault. People break.
Some pull others down with them, and some pick up the fallen. She was stronger,
and for that she must suffer. I just need her to know that she has a right—no
matter how far off it seems—to be happy. She can and will carry pain, but she
has chosen, unlike him, to live, and
she must do that. She has a right to move forward, which is not moving on or
forgetting. It is accepting.
This is life. This is our world. Like
Lyantonde, it’s beautiful, it’s ugly, and it’s honest.
Each night the death count rises everywhere in
the world, but death only holds the fringes of my life. I hurt from my
roommate’s grief, but it is borrowed pain.
“Everyone here has lost a child, a brother, a
sister, an aunt. People here know death well, so we understand your loss, and
we pray for you and your friend.”
I am hardly unpacked, and my roommate is in a
world warped by the horrors of an acid trip. She pleads with me to join her,
but sleep is a higher priority, something that won’t happen tonight.
“I’m in Hell.”
She stands on the bed that’s pushed against the
wall, arms outstretched, her tongue twisting so only her demons can understand.
Her eyes roll back. For a moment, she is serene.
She falls back, shattering the window above the
bed and the silence of three AM.
I yank her away from the shards as she screams,
clinging to me. Somehow there is no blood. I pull her to her room, needing her
to feel safe.
Her body is taken by the trip. She flings
herself into every sharp corner, finally convulsing on the floor. I hold her
shoulders down as she claws at me, and her teeth break my skin.
When her body grows limp, a cry fills the
room—her lost love’s name.
The darkest hours of the night are filled with
her grief until her demons release her, and she slips into sleep.
Clapping hands, harmonized voices, and swaying
bodies in their best clothes fill my host family’s church. A young woman next
to me holds a worn bible, which has been pieced back together with newspaper.
In the row of uncomfortable wooden benches in front of me, a child is squeezed
in between her parents, yet stands facing me, the mizungo, and stares without blinking. The hymns bounce off the
walls and all around me, filling what little space isn’t taken by bodies too
close to understand the concept of Western space.
The hymns and sermon are in Luganda. The broken
windows behind the pastor take my attention, while the child and some grown men
continue to stare at me. From my seat I can see directly into somebody’s room
in the house next to the church. This person skulks back and forth in front of
the window, yet never faces us.
My host sister hands me her bible and tells me
which passages to flip to. I read, holding it between us as she scribbles notes
in what little space is left in the margins. The words I’m supposed to be
absorbing are squeezed out by the feeling of the eyes boring into my skin.
The service ends, and my host mother steps up
to the center of the aisle. She is dressed in bright orange and holds the
basket out for the tithing. People pile into the aisle. They sing as they drop
money into the basket. Each offering is at least ten percent of what they’ve
made that week. Some give more than the bill that is crinkled in my hand. All
are proud. The money piles higher, and as I step up to the basket, she locks
eyes with me, beaming.
Those who could not offer cash leave the
building and wait outside. They march in with bushels of bananas, stocks of
sugar cane, live hens, eggs, grain, and seeds. One man drags a bleating
stubborn goat.
They stand in front and face everyone. These
are the poorest of the poor, yet they give all that they can.
The pastor begins to auction off the items.
“What good is a hen to a church?” he asks. “Do we not care enough for our God?”
People then offer more money. The pastor’s
smile widens and his accusations get sharper until everything is sold.
My host mother neatly counts and packs the
money into an envelope and hands it to the pastor.
A young girl in the choir cleans up the goat
shit.
My legs are grateful for the walk home, happy
to shed the eyes of the clergy, and replace them with orange dust. It clings to
my toes and the white hem of my skirt.
My host sister walks beside me and asks
questions about my strange world.
They all lead back to divorce.
“In our
country it is unacceptable. It doesn’t happen. How can it be so common in
yours?”
There was a
time when I asked why, but eventually I understood, even if I wished I didn’t.
Here in Lyantonde, life without poverty is a
blessing, and marriage is the only way to live. It is a way of combatting
hardships. Back home we have options. We have the choice to marry unhappily,
and we have the option to end it.
“When you
say your parents had ‘problems’ I assumed you meant hunger, disease, poverty.
Real problems. Depression isn’t reason enough.”
The Utah sun beats down, contending with the
infamous sun of the Sonoran. My siblings and I are lined up on the driveway in
four foldable chairs, waiting for the parade, while our mother stays inside,
hiding from my questions. I count the browning weeds cropping up in the cracks,
as my brother, the youngest, bounces in and out of his chair. He is armed with
a grocery bag and the impatience of an eight-year-old, and demands to know
where the parade and his candy are. Hoping to tire him out and shut him up, I
tell him the faster he dances, the faster the parade will come.
My sisters and I laugh as he bounces and
smiles, his mouth pulling at the jagged scar running down his cheek.
It has been one year since my mother’s
hospitalization. The parade continues, and they jump and race for the fallen
pieces, snatching them up before I can.
The scar on his face tugs at the moment, adding
an aching for the mother we almost lost, now inside, missing another memory.
“I think she tried to kill herself. No one will
tell me what happened.”
I read the message from my sister again and
again as the phone rings to depletion.
No one answers, and the line grows cold.
Days go by. Mother fills the silence haunting
every mirror. Every step seems lost and packed with lines, phrases, lyrics.
They pour out of me onto every surface and thought.
How
long before her fall?
My grandpa’s calm voice ends the silence as the
sun slips underground, pulling the campus into blue.
“She said she was calling to say goodbye.”
He kept her on the line. She told him with
slurred words about the pills she took and the liquor she drank. He kept her
talking. He kept her conscious. My grandma phoned the police on the other line.
He heard them break through the door. She cursed him.
We beg to know the woman who was free.
It is dark. My legs begin to ache from the huge
boulder I’m sitting on with no recollection of the numb steps they took to get
there. Fellow students’ laughter and chatter slowly start to filter back into
my consciousness.
“That call was a cry for help. There’s a chance
this is not the end of her tries. Hope for the best, and prepare for the
worst.”
How do
we make this woman stay?
No visible disease or virus threatens my
family. But there are still threats.
My brother
and sisters jab at the car windows, ecstatic about the desert’s red rock, which
is so new to them. Our mother jumps in, begging my stepdad to pull over so that
we can explore the red sand dunes of Snow Canyon.
When the car
slows, we fling off our seatbelts and run into the desert. Our laughter fills
the empty canyon, fading into the towering sandstone.
Our mother pulls off her combat boots and peels
off her socks, tumbling into the sand with my youngest siblings. She makes a
sand angel beside my brother, the scar still pulling at his face. Her dancer’s
body is graceful against the red sand. Floating in the colors of the desert,
she is filled with life.
The police chief’s uniform is so white it
almost hurts my eyes. His beret has the perfect tilt, and his manners are
impeccable, though hardened. We walk through the station past the lower ranking
officers who salute him with their shiny rifles swept across their chests.
The women’s cell is pitch black at midday. It
is an eighty-square-foot metal shanty with a padlock. The door stands wide
open. One empty bucket for bathing sits in the center of the cell with a dirty
rag slopped over the side. There is no latrine. The tropical sun beats at the
cell and I can only imagine how stifling it must be behind that locked door.
I know
nothing about the criminal justice system here, only that there is no record
system across districts and towns. There are hardly any roads to transport
people, let alone information. I wonder how national law finds its way or if it
gets tangled up in all of the green.
Laughing voices drift to me from inside a brick
structure slightly bigger than the women’s cell. It has pane-less barred
windows and a bulb swings lightly in the breeze, illuminating the brick.
“These are
the men’s quarters.”
We make our way to his office where a worn fan
lazily disrupts piles of paperwork that crowd his desk. He tells me Lyantonde
is “blessed” to have me, and he will answer any of my questions.
I wonder what crimes the chatting men inside
have committed. I wonder how long they have had to sit in that tiny cell, and
how much more time they have in that block. I wonder if anyone’s crimes involve
a love their beautiful country cannot understand.
Every meal is stitched with the World News. I
yearn for one story in particular, rationing out my meal so that it will last
until it airs, the challenging of Uganda’s homophobic law.
The colorful heaps of food pile before me as
the stories unfold. I wait and swallow. Mashed and steamed banana known as matoke; fish; Irish potatoes; steamed
pumpkin; rice with my favorite purple ground nut sauce; greens, including a
sour eggplant; and a plate of the most sensuous pineapple and watermelon. This
feast of a lunch would fill the barren fridge in my college apartment and last
me a week.
Outside, next to the goat’s pen, where the
stories are mere murmurs, sits a garbage heap. Anything I don’t consume is left
to rot.
The story flashes, my ears strain, my chewing
stops. International lawyers joined forces to strike down the homophobic law
designed to imprison gays, bisexuals, and “accomplices,” those who do not turn
them in, for life. A pastor becomes a national hero, denouncing and damning
anyone who pardons such crimes against God.
It is time for Parliament to make their
decision.
The tiny
screen sits across the room, yet is all I see and hear.
Someone has
entered the house and sits beside me. He leans toward the T.V. too. I chew
again, forcing back the nerves.
The lawyers
have found a loophole. I exhale.
Members of Parliament were not present when the
law was voted in.
It is invalid.
My fist clenches with the celebration I must
keep hidden. Against the waves of hate coursing through the region, with the
whole world watching, the law is struck down.
My host’s
protective hands clasp mine, and my fist relaxes. “My dear sister,” he says,
“this is a great victory.”
We sit on
our raft letting the water of the Nile drift by. I talk about the sun and the
Mexican food that I miss, and the Dutch couple asks which parts of my beautiful
desert they must see. Wildflowers bloom in my mind’s eye, and my skin aches,
missing the sun’s blast.
The shore is a bouncing wave of children
shouting “Mizungo bye!” They run
after our raft as we smile and wave back until they fade from sight, their
cries lingering on the surface of the river. The lazy water laps at the raft
and the breeze alleviates the slow burn of the sun.
“What does mizungo actually mean?” my new friend
asks our guide.
At the back
of the raft he looks up from the river he knows so well. His dreadlocks frame
his face perfectly and he folds his toned arms across his chest and smiles.
“It is an
old word from the time of colonization. It means ‘explorer.’”
Sophia
McGovern
has Bachelor’s degrees in Creative writing and Global Studies from Arizona
State University. After global health internships in Uganda and India through
GlobeMed and the International Alliance for the Prevention of AIDS, she found
the advocacy and literary communities in Phoenix, Arizona. She splits her time
between editing for rinky dink press, assisting in a high school classroom, and
running the ESL program for the Immigration Center at CASE. Her work has been
published by Four Chambers Press, Write on, Downtown, and Lux: The
Undergraduate Creative Writing Review.
