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Death Comes to All posted on April 7, 2010 - 7:56am

My first body was that of my best friend. Six years old and stiff in a coffin. They told us to walk past and look respectfully on her face one last time. I saw the cotton blocking her nostrils and stuffing her ears. I remembered her eyes—wide and staring—saw them now closed and solid. White. Everything was white. Her skin was pale like her white Sunday-best dress. The bright sun outside was ridiculous. Could it not see us dressed all in black hovering over a hole in the ground? Did it not hear the old women weeping loudly, and beating at their breasts in despair? We dropped red roses on the coffin when they lowered it into the ground and allowed a handful of dust to trail through our fingers to chase the red petals into that dark resting place. “Dust to dust…ashes to ashes.” The end. Over. Gone. The tears did not come.
Mr. Hungana taught the last class for P.7s that day. Agriculture.

The No. 6 Train posted on March 19, 2010 - 1:40pm

The little blond haired girl stood at the edge of the train platform bending her tippy toes in the pink slippers over the yellow “do-not-stand-here” line. She wore her hair in pigtails and her green and yellow Tinkerbell backpack dangled from her left shoulder. She looked to be about ten or eleven years old. The woman standing a few paces away from her stared at her a while and wondered idly where her mother was, but shrugged eventually, leaned her head against one of the dark metal pillars and shook her iPod to get it to change the playlist. She bobbed her head appreciatively when Akon’s I Promise came on.
A few minutes later the rush-hour crowd flooded down the stairs to wait for the No. 6 train. There was noise and confusion, and the bodies of strangers pushed and shoved against each other as each struggled to find some air or a place to rest their weary feet. Somehow in the crush of humanity, Tinkerbell was knocked from the little girl’s shoulder onto the train tracks.

Cry Uganda posted on March 17, 2010 - 4:44am

I should like to say quite a bit. But I am too overwhelmed.
*Pictures respectfully ripped from the Daily Monitor.

Waves of Nostalgia posted on March 11, 2010 - 8:12am

Outside the supermarket, you will fight with your friend who is like your sister because she wants you to go to cell at her house. It’s Wednesday–your sister always asked you to go to cell on Wednesday. She asked you so many times that one evening you went up the hill past the clustered shops and the cows in the kraal to the house that had a KPC cell sign on its gate.  You went in to watch them sing, and dance and Praise God in the tiny space. You listened to their teary testimonies as you sat in the wonderful sharing circle. You passed around the popcorn and the black tea when it was time to eat afterwards. And you recoiled inside. So you say “No” firmly and watch the same sad look that streaked your sister’s face streak your friend’s. You repeat the “No” as the Q46 bus pulls up behind you, and you mutter your goodbye quickly and walk away without turning back.
Inside the supermarket, you will find things that will take you still further back.

The Real Africa(ns) posted on March 9, 2010 - 9:39pm

We have, most of us at least–while involved in an obscure argument about our continent with outsiders or friends–produced a self-righteous retort such as:
“But Africa is more than starving children in Somalia and child soldiers in the North, why don’t they ever show the world the other side, the good side?”
Two questions come to mind:
“What is this good side?”
“Who represents this nefarious they?”
People will come up with pleasing answers (to their ears) to the first question: ah, we have schools and roads and (teetering) skyscrapers, we speak good English, we follow all those American programs on TV, also us we have iPhone, and the rich ones have Mac, we have Nakumatt, we drive big cars etc.
The other side to the “good side” is this growing class of Uga-elite who speak English with no accent, have fairly well-paying jobs and say smart (not clever) things.

The People Running By posted on March 8, 2010 - 8:48am

A Short Story by Franz Kafka
When we stroll through a street at night, and a man, already visible from far away (for the street rises in front of us and there is a full moon), comes running towards us, we will not grab hold of him, even if he is weak and ragged, even if someone is running after him and yelling; we will simply let him run on.
For it is night, and we cannot help it if the street rises in front of us in the full moon, and besides: perhaps these two people are staging the chase for their own amusement, perhaps the two of them are pursuing a third, perhaps the first man is being pursued through no fault of his own, perhaps the second one wants to murder him, and we will be accomplices to the murder, perhaps the two of them know nothing of each other, and each is simply running home to bed on his own account, perhaps they are sleepwalkers, perhaps the first man is armed.
And anyway, don’t we have a right to be tired, haven’t we drunk a lot of wine?

Bududa posted on March 6, 2010 - 9:26am

I’m a little scared to write about this, I’ll admit. Giant disasters can happen to far off places like Haiti and Chile, and I will feel a brief genuine pain for their loss–fleeting though it might be. At least it is not Uganda, I whisper silently to that part of myself which is not ashamed of its selfish thoughts. When yahoo flashed across at me the other day that there had been a mudslide in Uganda and 50 people were dead, with 300 feared missing, I got chills. Bad things don’t happen to Uganda, they don’t happen, we’re safe, right? Right? I delude myself constantly, of course. I am the same person whose heart flutters every time I get a call from a +256. Please God don’t let anyone be dead. The New Vision had some devastating pictures. I called my friend in Atlanta as soon as I heard and we lamented the loss together, cursing global warming and bad luck and 2012. She read to me about a church that was destroyed in the slide and we remarked, “Aya!

“Faire et se taire.” posted on March 6, 2010 - 8:40am

My French is elementary at best– the confident “Bonjour” and “Au revoir” said at expressly the right time–too simple to fully appreciate Gustave Flaubert’s beautiful Madame Bovary.
Nevertheless I have extracted the one phrase and pasted it liberally all over my desk-top and on little pink, lime-green and yellow sticky notes  suspended over my work-space:
FAIRE ET SE TAIRE
Google tells me it translates to “Do and be silent.”
Some wonderful author whose name I cannot call to mind at the moment translates it for herself as:
“Shut up and get on with it.”
I find her translation more useful.
So I mutter the two phrases under my breath with studied emphasis as I go about my day:
Faire et se taire/ Shut up and get on with it/ Faire et se taire
A useful maxim for a college student, non?

Blood is thicker than Water posted on February 24, 2010 - 8:46pm

This post is not entirely original; I am riffing off of / slightly remixing a story I read some time ago by Jhumpa Lahiri. If you haven’t read her before, please do. She rocks.
Shiva and her brother, Madhu were very close growing up. They had to be in order to survive their oppressive parents. Surely immigrant parents asked too much of children born and raised in America? When Shiva left home for college, she was 17 and Madhu was 14. She returned after the first semester with a case of beer, a pack of cigarettes and several naughty secrets. She slipped the beer into her brother’s room with a finger pressed to her lips as soon as she could get away from the parents, shut the door quickly and asked him to turn his music up.

Rites of Passage posted on February 20, 2010 - 10:53am

My First Holy Communion dress was white, and tantantala and beautiful. I was an odd stranger in it, the flowers in my short hair, and marched up to the church with all the other little boys and girls, a sea of excited white, with our stomachs going grrr grrr because you could not eat for at least an hour before you put God in your mouth. You had to be pure to receive God. You had to be in a state of sanctified grace.
I did not like First Holy Communion class. The Mzee catechist at Christ the King said that girls must not wear boys’ clothing, showed us the verse in the Bible and sent me home the first three Saturdays in a row. How was he to know that I owned only the one maroon dress, and I liked my shorts and trousers better too, shaa, and why should I have to wake up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday to go and recite the Hail Mary and Act of Contri…what was that word?