Mzungu Circles

This post is also up at Liz's blog about her trip to Uganda:
www.kvachinuganda.blogspot.com
 
We have just returned from Lake Bunyonyi, a lake in the southwest
corner of Uganda formed by volcanic eruption only 10,000 years ago.
Free from crocodiles, hippos, and schistosomiasis, it’s safe for
swimming, both for us and for the otters that hunt crayfish. Along the
shores live a variety of birds, including weavers and the crested
crane, Uganda’s national bird. Over twenty islands dot the lake, and
in the early morning they are interspersed with clouds of mist rising
from the water. Because of its high altitude, the area is cooler than
Kampala.
 
Liz and I spent three nights and two days at two different locations
around the lake. The first, the Bunyonyi Overland Resort, is a popular
stopover for enormous overland buses, on their way to or from gorilla
trekking. Each evening, tourists spill out and fill the restaurant and
bar, cheering football and rugby matches beamed in by satellite. The
incompetent, mustachioed restaurant manager hovers near tables,
berating the waiters when service seemed to slack. Not exactly a
peaceful scene.
 
On our first morning on Bunyonyi we decided to escape the other
tourists and take one of the dugout canoes out onto the lake, with the
goal of paddling to Punishment Island. A desolate piece of local
history, Punishment Island is a small flotilla of reeds with a single
tree where women impregnated outside of wedlock were brought to either
starve, or be picked up by any opportunistic man who could not afford
to pay a bride price. (Many Ugandans, even those who live on the lake,
have never learned to swim and the pregnant women would flounder in
the few hundred meters from Punishment Island to the shore.)
 
As it turned out, paddling the dugout canoe was much more difficult
than it appeared from the shore, where we had watched locals
crisscrossing the lake with ease. Heavy, long and wider at the front
than at the back, they were very different from the aluminum canoes we
were used to. Paddle on the left, and the canoe would, as expected,
turn to the right. However, gain too much rightward momentum and
paddling on the right to straighten the canoe would only accelerate
its rightward turn. Savage backpaddling could, eventually, straighten
the boat out – and bring it to a halt. So we meandered our way happily
enough, tracing a curlicue course out into the lake
 
But then the rain came up. It appeared over the hills behind us,
wrapping the lake in grey curtains with the sound of a waterfall. Liz
and I looked at each other, each without a raincoat, and suddenly, our
inability to chart a straight path wasn’t so funny. We made for the
nearest shore to beach the boat and get under a tree out of the rain.
Liz, piloting, did her best to keep us on course, but we couldn’t
avoid a thorough soaking.
 
While we waited out the rain under a eucalyptus tree, I decided I
would try my hand at piloting on the return trip, confident I had
learned from watching (criticizing) Liz’s technique. Not so. We didn’t
make it to Punishment Island that day but we did, eventually, make it
back to the restaurant. Eating lunch, we laughed as two canoes left
the dock, filled with American tourists, to make wide, unintentional
circles in the bay. Our waiter told us that these were “Mzungu
circles” – the expected outcome when white tourists paddle the dugout
canoes.
 
One of the surprises I’ve had here in Uganda is how infinitely
forgiving Ugandans are of foreign tourists. While so much of getting
around Uganda is completely unintuitive to me, Ugandans are always
happy to help point in the right direction, or explain the way things
work. (Luckily, I have Liz as a guide, so I don’t have to ask very
often.) Mzungu tourists can be loud, arrogant, demanding, and
oblivious. But as we make Mzungu circles around the country, Ugandans
seem ever willing to straighten us out with a helping hand and a
smile.
 
That afternoon, we walked to the Heart of Eridrisa, a commune where
foreign volunteers and local employees run a nursery, a primary
school, and a rudimentary, three-room clinic. The manager, who
repeatedly invited Liz, the soon-to-be-doctor, to come back and
volunteer, gave us a tour of the facilities. The seven-classroom
primary school hosted nearly 600 pupils, and the nursery another few
hundred. Like most Ugandans, the manager was mostly nonplussed with
the beauty of the lake; unlike tourists who can see the countryside
while sheltered from want, for the locals, the beauty of the region is
of a piece with its remoteness, its poverty, its lacks. Tourists value
remoteness while the locals curse it, and our compliments must seem
deeply ironic.
 
The next morning, we planned to transfer to a camp on Bushara Island,
more secluded and quiet than Overland Camp. But before leaving, we
wanted to hike one of the hills along the shore to get a better view
of the lake. While ascending on a local footpath, we ran into 14-year
old Lucky and his younger brother, Christophe. Lucky immediately
demonstrated his very skilled English, and asked if we wanted a guide
up the hill. When we told him we were only on a short walk, he offered
to paddle us out to Bushara in a dugout canoe. We negotiated a price,
and he ran the few hundred yards to his house to collect his paddles.
 
Liz and I, meanwhile, returned to Overland to checkout. Lucky and his
friend Moses paddled up a half-hour later, helped us into the canoe,
and provided me a paddle. As we made our way to Bushara, a trip that
took about 45-minutes with Moses piloting an arrow-straight course,
Lucky told us about himself. He is a Manchester United supporter, and
a fan of Christiano Ronaldo. He attends the primary school at
Eridrisa, which we had visited the day before. His father died before
he was old enough to remember him, and his mother farms to support
him, his younger brother, and three older sisters. Two of his sisters
were in secondary school, their school fees paid by sponsors, and he
was currently working to save the 100,000 shillings ($50) he would
need to take his tests for the term. So far, he had saved 65,000, and
would need the balance by early April. Upon reaching Bushara, we paid
Lucky and made arrangements to have him pick us up the next morning
before school to paddle us to Rutinda village for transport back to
Kabale to catch a bus to Kampala. Lucky asked us to give him our email
addresses, and we said we would have them for him the next day.
 
Our stay on Bushara was very restful. We read, watched the rain, and
made the trip to nearby Punishment Island late that afternoon,
catching a glimpse of two pairs of otters. Liz demonstrated what she
had learned from watching Moses; I still couldn’t paddle straight.
 
The next morning, it was 45-minutes back to Rutinda. Liz and I decided
to pay Lucky double what we had given him the day before, and throw in
the rest of what he would need to pay his school fees that term. When
we reached Rutinda, Liz handed him the money and our email addresses,
and we waved goodbye.
 
Our ten-hour bus ride back to Kampala featured mid-journey repairs and
a live chicken in the overhead luggage rack. Along the way, we passed
stores in every village selling mobile phone credits, painted pink
(Zain), turquoise (Uganda Mobile), yellow (MTN), or white (Warid). As
a student of economics and business, I found myself thinking about
development – why it had moved so quickly in some directions (mobile
phones), and so slowly in others (absence of free secondary
education).
 
And so it seemed to me that the story of African economic development
is a massive Mzungu circle. Western governments gave large loans to
newly independent countries for development in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and
then forgive the debt, sometimes, thirty years later. American policy
propped up brutal dictators during the Cold War, and today the World
Bank punishes countries for corruption and bad governance. The World
Bank spends billions digging tube wells and building dams with dreams
of development at a grand scale decades ago, and then the Nobel
committee awards the Peace Prize for the development of microfinance.
Western policy-makers still don’t really know how to guide
development, and we have just taken another turn in our great Mzungu
circle to try and fix our own broken economies. Hopefully we’ll find
someone who can paddle this thing straight ahead.

Posted via email from Aught he has to know it with.