Munyo’s Penfriend

I’m friendly with one of the security guards at my office, Munyo, who I always share cigarettes with when I go down to smoke. He asked me if I could set up an email account for him so he could send a letter to a Ugandan friend of his serving in the army in Iraq. He also wanted an American penfriend. I said I’d seen what I could do.

Munyo1234@yahoo.com, an account created with my birthday. I typed out and sent a few emails for him that he handwrote in shaky capital letters on pages torn from a ledger book. My friend’s short perky letter spoke of New York and told him the word for mushrooms in another language, requesting the translation of the word in Luganda.

Munyo wrote back a list of the plagues of Uganda: war, famine, drought, AIDS, and more. But he also wrote of how he looked forward to corresponding with her, how I was a good friend to him. “A friend in need is a friend in deed, and a friend is better than a relative.” Munyo is from the North, an area ravaged by war for the past twenty years, so I'm guessing he doesn't have too many relatives left.

He wrote out other emails for me to send as well – one to an NGO asking for aid, another to a mzungu he met while working at a hotel party who gave him her email address but she never replied.

With his friend from Uganda in Iraq, he soon requested money, but when his friend replied that he couldn’t send any money, Munyo angrily declared he would not write him again.

My friend’s interest in the exchange waned, but Munyo asked every day, every time I went down to smoke a cigarette.

“Is there any good news?” he would say.

I called my friend one night to the states to ask her if she would write him an email, but she was having a stressful day and didn’t sound quite right so we just chatted for a bit and got caught off before I could ask.

Finally, I sent Munyo an from my account and signed my friends name.

“Well, that’s where you went wrong,” said my roommate when I told him about this. But Munyo just looking at me expectantly every day was bad, and letting him down was worse.

The email was brief – it said hello, asked about the weather. The anticipation, and the final result, spurred Munyo’s next letter. It started nicely, like all the others, but then angrily asked why she hadn’t written in so long and why she hadn’t sent any money or presents and if she didn’t then fine, he would never write again.

Munyo’s second draft, at my prompting, was toned down. It still says, if you don’t want to write me, I will never write again, sans requests for money and presents.

Friend, I honestly don’t know whether it’s better to write back or not.

Comments and opinions welcome.

The Road to Jinja

The view from two wheels.

Food to be.

The heat percolates.

Spilt Milk

Milk here is sold in little plastic bag pouches, sealed, cold. The kitchen in our office, a good size place calm with salmon textured tiles, has plenty of mugs, sugar, milk, the occasional coffee shortage that can last up to three weeks, and never enough utensils.

The bags of milk are best open with scissors (never handy – who has scissors around?), a sharp knife (not to be found in this kitchen), your teeth (when you’re at home), or, upon last resort, a butter knife.

After watching me futilely struggle with the knife, Robert, the guy who takes care of our office, took care of my hatchet job with a big swoop. I put the milk back in the fridge, and the next time it was open just a minute later, the floor was covered in milk.

I wanted to just grab some paper towels and wipe it up, but paper towels are too wasteful for a place with so little to waste.

“You may have plenty of something, but someone else doesn’t,” Shai, my new roommate, said to me when we were putting up my mosquito net with string and I said we had plenty so not to worry. I bought a mosquito net that was supposedly new, really big, Made in Thailand. When I got it home, the other side of the Made in Thailand tag, it said “Celebrate 100 Years: Thai Rotary Club.”

I felt connected to scores of Thai campers who had slept under the net nights before and oceans away. I felt strangely tied to the article I was writing about the second hand clothing trade.

But in the end, I’m not going to walk around giving people string, nor would it be socially accepted at my office for me to mop the floor.

Conflict resolution through photography

I pulled out my camera and everyone laughed. Two bayaye, street urchins, which isn't really an adequate translation but will have to do, were about to duke it out. But there I was. I'd been there before, once or twice, when this was happening. But this time I was feeling braver. I had my camera all prepped and ready to shoot, so I did it. I started taking pictures of them fighting, and everyone started laughing.

And they stopped fighting.

Shapes

The shape of my story for the Monitor or the East African dominates the shape of my week. This past week, I’ve been working on a story about the interconnections between the used clothing donations from the USA that end up in Africa, Ugandan textiles and cotton, and how Chinese imports and investments affect the situation.

I spent a few afternoons at a 25 acre market called Owino in the Nakasaro district of Kampala, one of the biggest of its kind, that mainly deals in second hand clothing. In search of how Ugandans track global cool, I talked with some guys who managed to find nothing but Adidas track pants, cool sports jerseys and American logo Tshirts worn by only the incrowd, among the barrels of imports from the USA the mostly consists of stuff that goes for much lower prices.

I talked to them about jazz and hip hopp, music videos and clubs. One of the dealers had just gotten a tattoo.

I have a tattoo too, I told them.

Really? Can you get us a tattoo machine?

I’m not really in the business of importing that kind of machinery… I disappointed them.

Later, my story took me to Phenix Logistics, where Mr. Kashiwada, a Japanese man who has spent his life in Uganda, leads one of the only textile firms with high tech machinery and a slew of 16,000 organic cotton farmers. He showed me a spread about him in a Japanese airline magazine where he was scolding an African worker.

Here are some pictures from Owino and from on the way to Owino.

Ambiguity Explicated

You can buy anything at Nakasaro market: live chickens, mops, vanilla beans, pineapples, electrical wires and the Ugandan popcorn, grasshoppers. It's also the kind of place where two bayaye, street urchins, can beat each other bloody in the piles of discarded grasshopper shells that surround the massive trash bins. They overflow with excess leaves, rotten vegetables and fruits and a thick layer of shit cementing it all together. The dirt plot rattles during most hours, settling to a din at night. It never reaches silence even during the latest hours of the day and the earliest hours of the morning. Ranks of women selling produce sit on cloth or cardboard, filling the space like the pieces of a spread out jigsaw puzzle. Men surround the outskirts in the stores and booths selling kitchen utensils and Chinese imports.

Obi and Mawe, my good friends, work at Nakasaro market. They took me to the roof of a an apartment building where a friend of theirs lives, an artist, and that’s where, among the detritus of Nakasaro, the treasure of the Scarlett Lion emerged.

In a rusted bin filled with discarded items like a bicycle pump and jug for water, on a day when I was looking for an anchor, I found the hollowed out red and black plastic lion that would soon become my mascot. Uganda’s colors are red, black and yellow, and while the lion isn’t native to Uganda, it seemed appropriate for me, claiming my space in Uganda and creating a life and work for myself.

Obi, Mawe and I had a lot of fun with the lion and the wooden elephant that was also in the bin (I know, the elephant is getting the short shrift, but what can I say, I love the lion), as you can see from the pictures. But from here on out, the lion is for me to remember always be scarlett, with two tts.

Nakasaro Treasures...The Scarlett Lion is Born

Plastic beats wood every time

This things is better than Ghostbusters. And that's right, I'm wearing a fanny pack.



That's right, I'm wearing a fanny pack too.



Whisper sweet nothings to me...

Lions and elephants, oh my...

Like many attacks, this one was homoerotic...


And Obi knows it...