Kampala As Usual

I open my eyes to the darkness, always taking a few minutes to remember where I am. In between the malaria med-induced dreams and frequent trips outside of Kampala, I always need a few seconds of consciousness to recognize where I am. I pull away my mosquito-net canopy and hit the concrete floor with my bare feet. Across the room, I reach for my phone/alarm clock, which is obnoxiously playing some ridiculous American show tune, though it is no longer playing the default, Dixieland as I found it too ironic for an African phone.

5:45 am - Got to get up early to make it over the potholes and through the traffic jams to school. Being both the Muzungu and the only female besides my mom and Naka, the house help, I get to walk just a few steps over to the indoor bathroom, complete with flushing toilet and shower - quite the luxury. I am always thankful that I don’t have to walk through the house and courtyard, out to the pit latrine: a ceramic hole in the concrete floor of a long narrow room. I have recently learned that this is actually called and “Indian toilet” as it differs from a pit latrine in its ceramic exterior and flushing apparatus.

Brushing my teeth in the mirror, I take account of how I have already changed. Tan lines outline my tanktops and are highlighted by the pink of yesterday’s sun. My face is completely devoid of makeup; not even a solitary speck of mascara clings to my lashes. I haven’t been this natural since grade school. It’s sad that I’ve had to go a week of looking at myself without tar outlining my eyes to accept my natural face. Mostly, I just don’t see the point of makeup here. More-so than even my all-girls-Catholic high school, no one cares. Besides, I already get more than enough attention from my light skin and gender alone.

Other changes are the small hairs growing back on my scalp from my stint with narcolepsy medicine. Lucky for me, the perfect, equatorial climate is so conducive to sleeping that my afternoon lecture naps seem to be understood as perfectly acceptable. I can also see where all the matooke has been stored; my stomach already developing a convex curve I have resorted to one meal a day in order to try and suppress.

Grabbing my khakis and shirt, I walk further down the hall to the bunker where my two younger brothers still lie in their bunk beds, trying to see how much longer they can extend their slumber without consequence. I flip on the switch under the ironing table to turn the current onto the iron. There are two reasons to iron one’s close in Uganda. The first, to make you look “sharp.” Image is very important here, and how you look reflects upon your family. Maybe it’s because many people cannot afford a lot of clothes, or even new clothes, making it all the more important to have what clothes you do have always looking as nice as possible. The second reason, and my primary motivation, is to kill the eggs of a certain fly which sounds like it’s straight out of an Alien film. Usually, one only has to be concerned with these flesh-burrowing bugs if clothes are laid out to dry on the grass. Even though mine are dried on a line outside, I would rather not experience the sensation of having eggs germinate under my skin, later to emerge through a growing sore said to resemble a large pimple. (I have already had some intense Malaroid dreams on that which involved me pulling out larva with tweezers from a sore on my cheek.)

6:10am - I’m ready. We’re supposed to leave at 6:30, but know 7:00 is our earliest departure time. I spend the next fifty minutes sipping my ginger tea, sweetened with sugar and listen to the pounding of rain outside: rainy season is upon us. I ignore the two slices of bread before me, feeling that my body is still handling the matooke and posho carbs of the night before.

My 12 year-old brother, Isaac, is also finished getting ready early and sips his tea at the head of the table, his eyes still heavy with sleep, but looking smart in his grey and white school uniform. We sit and chat for half an hour while the rest of the house is awake and in a hurry to make up for the past thirty lethargic minutes. Isaac “remembers” he has not gotten his homework signed and drops the stack of four subject notebooks in front of me with five minutes to go. But I don’t fall for his trick so easily: “It’s Alice’s absenteeism not absentee, which gets her into trouble,”
“But we don’t have time!” Isaac whines, making sure to emphasize this fact with the stomping of feet while covering his face. He had altered his original plan of giving me his homework to sign the night before to five minutes before, but I still refused to sign the papers without proper review.
“You should have given this to me yesterday then!” Reluctantly, Isaac makes the corrections just in time to pile into the station wagon along with Kim, Eric, Adam, and Elizabeth, the neighbor who is about Kim’s age (six). The four cram together in the back seat, while I get shotgun, with mom at the wheel. We’re jostled from side to side on the uneven dirt and rock path to the neighborhood road. It’s a little smoother, but scarred by periodic speed hills (not bumps), which cause our car to bottom out every time, despite going over the humps at a diagonal. When we reach the paved road, our pace picks up, but now we are too concerned with avoiding potholes to stick to the designated left side.

We merge into the traffic at a main road and immediately begin the tedious stop and go of Kampala traffic. Pulling into a gas station, we pay the man 10,000 Uganda shillings (about $5) for an eighth of a tank, maybe less, seems like the gas gauge is always hovering at empty. Not sure why this is. I’ve heard some pumps are rigged to pump slower than what the meter says. There may also be a fear of siphoning or car theft.

Bottoming out again, we’re back on the road to drop Isaac and Kimu at their grade school. In another 30 minutes and 6 miles, my mother pulls over to drop me at my taxi stop for a 25 cent ride to the Resource Center, about 2 miles away.