logia, no dia cinco

Some things I learned today, that Praca da se, is pronounced Pracha da se and that Porte de Barra is Porte de Baha. The Portuguese language does not necessarily fancy Rs. I have also learned that where I live in Pelourinho is where Michael Jackson filmed “They don’t really care about us” and as I sat in the square where he  shot his song, a couple of shops played his song, I hear they play the video all the time. I have also learned that Pelourinho is one of the poorest places in Salvador, the majority of the favelas are here; I do not mind living here, I only hope that my life will be safe. 2 out of 2 nights I have been here, there have been a series of gunshots that have been going off at the midnight hour; last night after a second set went off I went under my bed, hoping no stray would come through my wide open windows. The memory of the 1986 Museveni Coup flooded back. The gunshots have been so close, and I know that  there are gang fights happening outside my building; however first night here a Police man had his pistol out and pointing towards some street children trying to make money in the night from guarding peoples cars.

 As I write, there is some fine Reggae music playing outside my window at the Centro Historico  I am certain that in a few hours there will be silence and more gunshots, apparently I have to get used to this. Salvador and Bahia in general are the center of Music in Brazil, it’s where the ex-slaves from Africa settled, and music is a big thing here. In Pelourinho alone there are Music record stores all over the place, people play and dance samba everywhere. Today I witnessed a Capoeira show at the Terriero de Jesus square, the main player had a fine body that we ladies just stood frozen. He had the right portions of muscles and he knew it.  

Spent the day at Porte de Barra with two ladies one from Trinidad and one from America,  we were called all sorts of things  from Obama to Caribe ( Caribbean).I wonder why people call us Obama, even in Cairo I got called this- at least try calling me Michelle. 
At the beach, we got hit on, a man chased his friend in anger when he tried to talk to us; he was guarding what was his.  For some reason, this hawker who thought he was insulting me when he called me white -( because I had refused to buy anything from him)- pulled a sumbusa for me as my Mother would call it and stormed away. 

Highlight of my day was sitting on the bus back to Pelourinho and this guy asks if I am American. I say no, but I live there. He goes on to tell me he is from New York, an artist  learning Portuguese  and impressed by the edge Art possesses in Bahia. We got talking and he mentioned someone of keen interest to me – His Portuguese teacher who is teaching street children English. Just the kind of person I want to meet for my research.He said he would hook me up for a talk with this teacher. I already love Salvador, it surely is the unbeaten path like a friend said, All the Child rights news I get on my Google alerts is on Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Brasilia. Salvador is raw; maybe it is here that I will find the marrow. Slowly by slowly I am making progress even when I am barely aware of what is happening. Kimberly told me today was Friday, I was floored. Am still logy, half of  it is because I am fatigued, the other half stems from the fact that am  still trying to comprehend my presence in  South America and Brazil for this matter. Maybe tomorrow when I awake, it will all be clear, for now am grateful for baby steps.

A Twist in my Story

I was only sixteen when I first stepped out of the borders of my country, it was to Kenya. Nothing felt different. The trip was for the senior O’ Level class at Tororo Girls School. When I actually did leave to mix with locals I was often asked what tribe I hailed from. Not once did I feel different, of course being from the Teso tribe we are inherently proud for nothing but being Iteso people so I often had that pride that comes from being an Atesot. Am beginning to realize like Joël Té-Léssia that keeping my pride and shame for the acts that I commit might be a better way to live life as I put no effort in hailing from the Teso tribe.

However, I remember the first time I left the African Continent; I went to North America on holiday, as my friend and I drove from Philadelphia to Harrisburg our car broke down. We called a tow truck and when the men came they asked where I was from. When I mentioned that I came from Uganda, one of them said, “oh Africa, I have a friend in Algeria do you know him?” This was my first experience of Africa being termed as a country. 

One of my friends, has often asked why when Africans are asked where they are from, they say Africa. I have been thinking of this and as I look back, I realize that before I left my country I was always known as an Atesot, I was not Ugandan. None of my grandparents will introduce themselves to anyone as Ugandan. Uganda is a concept that has never really formed in them as a description of who they are. When my parents were born there was no Ugandan state, my father was 17 years old when Uganda became a state. I was never raised to believe in nationalism or be a patriot, not even in school. I was raised to study hard to make a life in an ever changing society. This is what I know to do. So when am asked where I am from by a non- African, Africa is the best description of me. When am asked where am from by an African, Cushite, nomad or Ateso is who I am. 

In thinking about Adichie’s danger of a single story, I know that  my Friends from the Northern hemisphere have been taught if at all that Africa is comprised of nations and because they come from solid structured nation states, it’s what they understand. I on the other hand learned African history for six years, I learned about the Kingdoms all over Africa, of Mali, Asante, Bunyoro Kitara, Buganda, Zulu, and Egypt. I learned about the migrations all over Africa and I learned of the wars, trade, Iron smelting, and the formation of Juridical nationalities under the imperialists. I know that I am African more than I am Ugandan from my education. I also learned European History, Crimean war, napoleon, British Empire and its invasions; I learned the geography of the Americas and Europe and Asia, so I know that Europe and America are not countries. When I moved to work in England, an Englishman once said to me, “You Africans do not have any history, your history begun when we came to your continent.”  I was taken aback; this was my first time to live abroad. I, with all my Teso pride and knowledge of my continent before colonialism; I did not know what to say, mostly because he was much older than I, and where I come from elders should often know better what to and not say. I felt pity for him. I let it slide, with some irritation and shock at his ignorance. 

I remember my friends from England preparing to come visit me in Uganda and asking me whether we had roads, and whether we had cars or wore clothes. There were times I barely had answers, my mind purposely forgot the answers I gave. I know for sure that they most likely did not have ill motives. I agree with Adichie that they have heard a single story of Africa. One where there is barbarism and jungles. One where naked children and adults roam the paths and carry animals for food, one where animals and people live so close together that disease is shared and no remedies are found.  The year was 2006 and yet they appeared to be reading Alexander Crummell’s description of Africans, “The natives are idolaters, superstitious, and live most filthily; they are lazy, drunken rascals, without thought for the future. Insensitive to any happening, happy or sad, which gives pleasure to or afflicts them; they have no sense of modesty of restraint in the pleasures of love, each sex plunging on the other like brute from the earliest age.”

Since leaving my country, I have learned from my own experiences and what I have read never to take the story as I have heard it until I have experienced it. I am in Bahia as I write; I came with the notion that the Brazilian Police are notorious for violating child rights. I had my thesis subject cut out for me, after talking with a few people, am hearing another story. A story where children in Brazil have taken these rights to a level where they can do whatever they want. The Police do not want to get into trouble so they let child thugs do their thing. Juvenile prisons are useless so I hear, children can only stay there for a day at least since it costs to maintain them, the government does not want people in jail. Yes, there is a level of impunity on both sides, children and the Police. The judges favor the children’s story as a way of protecting the much praised ECA and the Police would rather keep their jobs and receive a monthly salary than get into trouble with the courts. So underground, the police have squads that they hire to murder child gang members. My thesis will most likely have a stronger twist to it; however it’s a constant reminder being here that there is certainly peril in buying into a single story. 

As I travel, meet people, and share life experiences I am reminded that we are all searching for the same things in life. As I read Kwame Appiah’s ‘In my Father’s house: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture’ I know that claiming race as a means of differentiating possibilities, opportunities and treating people on the basis of race is buying into concepts that only limit my understanding of the bigger picture. Some people choose not to discuss race matters because then it does not bother them. However I realize that when I discuss race with people just like me, I settle in a cocoon, there is a danger of being comforted and blocking others out. When two of my Caucasian friends and I discussed race in Rio, as we sat under the Cristo Redentor, I felt free. As if we were all acknowledging despite the power politics that race promotes and the hopeless never ending race issues, we are still friends, we love each other and yet somehow we understand the plight of the other. Our stories ceased to be one, instead they meshed into each other’s stories and somehow I realized that in sharing our story and recognizing the other, we plunged into a world where we can co-exist as equals with an understanding.

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader. And what I read were British and American children's books.

I was also an early writer. And when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. (Laughter) And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available. And they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.

I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.

Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit. And his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket, made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them is how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals.

I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S. whenever Africa came up people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity. And in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country. The most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries." (Laughter)

So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved, by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family.

This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to West Africa in 1561, and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."

Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West. A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet, Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child."

And so I began to realize that my American roommate must have, throughout her life, seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel that it had failed in a number of places. But I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African.

But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense. And there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans and not with the arrival of the British, and you have and entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.

I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" -- (Laughter) -- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter)

I would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. And now, this is not because I am a better person than that student, but, because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.

When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. (Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.

But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.

All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes. There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo. And depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe. And it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.

I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

So what if before my Mexican trip I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories."

What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Mukta Bakaray, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people, who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.

Shortly after he published my first novel I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview. And a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..." (Laughter) and she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. Now I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.

Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music? Talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds? Films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce. What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition?

Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government. But also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer. And it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.

My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust. And we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist, and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her southern relatives who had moved to the north. She introduced them to a book about the southern life that they had left behind. "They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained." I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you

To Efe

So am left with a few days to leave for Rio de Janeiro – a place filled with unbounded and unlimited passion so I’ve read. This time am not thinking of love, am already in love so am going to see more of the world and get work done.

The plan is this, Kelsy & Annie meet me at 9pm at Rio de Janiero airport we are renting a car and starting a long drive to Salvador which Kelsy believes is a two days drive, my gut tells me we shall be on that road for three days but whatever it is we shall be in Brazil!!!! The Angola of South America-whatever this means? This is the first country that I have done thorough reading about before I get there. One of my discoveries is that you can’t mention Brazil without recognizing the immense African influence, am looking forward to experiencing a place where several different people have come together and made home. As people jubilate over the formation of the state of South Sudan, am saddened that it could not be like Brazil; that people failed to make peace with one another and that separation became a solution, one of the happenings in this millennium I can’t blame on the President with only one vowel in his name - as Euginedes calls him. 

Am hoping to get plenty of perspective, the voice inside me says I will find myself in Brazil, as Voltaire once said that when we travel what we discover is always ourselves. 

The last several months in the US have been hectic, from being homeless, living with a schizophrenic pothead, finding a job, then an apartment, getting my first Credit Card in my life, losing my hair, living alone in a town with only one friend, then living on Skype to NOT doing Sister locks after planning for months to have them done, Everything strange to someone raised in Uganda. I just moved from my room to write in the loo, there is something about the loo that calms me. My father always reads and drinks his morning lemon in the loo, a kind of ritual that caught on me. Now I find myself reading and writing in the loo with no inhibitions. Needless to say the bowels agree with it too!

Since I have been working as if my life depends on it ( am sure it does to an extent) I will tell you a bit about  how I have met some of the most wonderful people at my workplace, people I would probably have never met anywhere else who give their lives to helping others. I have a weakness for the clients though, I know that am most often too compassionate that it works on my boundaries; however am learning, learning that it’s okay to feel and it’s okay to let go. So this client PR- he can be the craziest person in the world when his wires flip, yet he is my greatest delight at work. He smiles when he sees me and calls me beautiful every day. He smiles and tells me what he wants to do for the day, since I introduced him to the Library he can’t get over borrowing books, and movies. A few weeks ago we borrowed the Sound of Music; he said it was the greatest movie of all time. He watched the musical every day for 7days, sometimes three times a day, singing along and literary weeping. I must admit that it got boring after several hours. He loves to sing and do artwork; he has a set medley comprised of Ball game songs (he is an ardent fan of the Minnesota Twins), the American national anthem, Christmas carols and church hymns. PR has a fetish for signatures, whenever he meets anyone he wants to take their signature. 

I have just received a call from Guinea Bissau- who knew I would ever know people from way across the west of Africa; It’s in Cairo that I have met people from all backgrounds and states, Cairo being that place that you sometimes detest and yet can never quite let go of. It seems as if only the loveliest people go to Cairo, I have only met a few people who were just weird yet after a few months, they seemed normal like they needed that dose, the Egyptian dose that makes one live from the heart.  Some of the most amazing people in my life, I met in Cairo. People that taught me what it means to honestly love and care for others; I think of Edefe, next to my parents Edefe has inspired me to go out of my way to help those who need the help, to fight for what you believe in with everything you can and to never, never make money control you. Am sure God does know that He is supreme in my life, however there are days I find myself doing things inspired by Efe (hold it, Efe is on the phone I have to answer and tell her am writing about her)  So I did and all she said in the calmest and humblest tone that only Efe can pull off “oh Amoding am glad that you are helping people, it’s such a good thing”).I know for sure that God allowed me to meet her because then I have an earthly example of what someone who is just like me can do with the same resources I have. 

So this friend MD I met in Cairo, he has just  been released from the Gambia where he was detained by Gambian officials on charges of spreading terrorist & revolutionary ideas based on the #25jan Egyptian revolution that ousted President Mubarak from power. Now this episode will make me go into details I would rather avoid, I can only tell you patient reader that My Human Rights activist instincts and training came out like a flood; it seemed as if the moment I heard he was arrested I started to look for the keys to his handcuffs. I am often wary of vouching for people without details, yet this case brimmed falsehood all over it and so with all the resources I could master I went head on to face the African Giants in the Gambia that could turn knobs that no one else could with so much help from another friend of mine. Growing up I experienced my parents help so many people as a result of Papa’s Senior Government position; He often had contacts in high places yet never had I grasped how important it was to have such contacts until this time. Am learning that the world is so political, it may peradventure be thought that there is never such a thing as being outside the political-no matter where and how anyone chooses to live life. 

There was a parcel at my door when I came in this afternoon, it’s my passport without a visa for Brazil, its only five days to leave and I have no visa, I have a ticket, I have an apartment in Salvador, I am packed – well almost, I have put in my notice to vacate the apartment and stop work on Wednesday. I panicked for the first ten minutes then I realized that I had nothing to do about it but wait till Monday when the post office will be open and I can send the express mail with whatever they want and I realize that God is much more in control than I am at this point.

Now I really do have to rent a car for Monday, it’s more expensive to rent during the week but alas it has to be done. So much for living on the edge and doing things last minute- actually I did not intend to do this, I just found the whole application process confusing. So  here I am writing against my wish, only doing it as my internet – not mine really I have been using some internet called “Mr. Superb James” since I moved in here, am officially a free loader and you should see me when it goes off, you would think that the internet bill reads my name all over it. So anyway I was watching a movie, again free online- and ‘my’ internet flipped so to avoid packing and saving it for the last moments- I am here writing. Maybe I should try to make myself start doing some paper sorting, why do I accumulate so much paper in such a short time? 

Am back, no packing or sorting done. By the time I signed off writing it was time to shower and get ready to return to work. Only reason am back here am sure you can guess, my internet is still off, and I am waiting for my cab ride to work. You have to applaud me for at least packing some stuff in my head, I have a plan for how am going to go about traveling with everything I possess in this world. Oh, I forgot to mention that this time am packing with the idea that I may not have a permanent stead for a while. Since I turned 12 I have constantly been in transition. From packing for boarding school every three months in a year for six years( I get that unsettling feeling in my belly when I think of those times. I will come back to this later on), to moving to University and then finding my own place then moving to England and now I can’t seem to stop country hopping. I can’t say I do not like it, it comes to me as though my nomadic ancestors are paving the course of my life; as though my blood will only sustain me if I move and as though my feet itch with direction on how to scratch. So this time the plan is to get rid of everything I often store up, and then packing one or two bags that have everything I own to wherever I am heading to. After Brazil, Cairo beckons; and as I told you it’s an irresistible call the kind that you experience at the point of no return and then boom it’s done. 

I have to tell you about boarding school, I was excited to go to boarding school only when I thought I was going to attend Buddo Kings college and then missed it by one point! Buddo was and still is one the best schools in Uganda. My elder brother was there when I wanted to attend it but then I had to go to Tororo Girl’s School which was my second choice. So packing for first day of school was a sad sick feeling, eight hours away from my family and then I was so young and spoiled that being a way from my Papa was the saddest thing ever. After the first term I knew I had to bear the trips and the whole prison experience. Being a large family we always had to make our own grub, my mother had this figured out way before we even left home, so we had to book turns to use the oven to bake our cookies, and the charcoal stove to roast ground nuts and the list of booking goes on to Ironing and washing clothes. How to get to school was often my dad’s duty to sort out, am glad we used up a lot of government fuel to get to school because I do not think my Papa was paid as much as he should have been paid- these are not my woes so I will leave them to my Papa. Back to that sick feeling, it started a week or three days before school begun, most times it was strongest when I said goodbye to all my friends on Sunday after church, and then it intensified when I would hug Ida-Marie, goodbye trust me I feel it, I still feel it when I say bye to her these days, I remember feeling it last in 2009 when we met in Uganda at Christmas time and she had to return to Zimbabwe and I Cairo. It just felt like I was being sent away to the Island of aloneness. However when I got to school and saw all my school friends, that sick feeling slowly faded and life was bliss.  Am not even sure how I diverted......oh, it had to do with the sick feeling and how I am avoiding to get packing done. Good thing is I only have the Machettas to hug goodbye and am sure I will see them again!

33 Weeks

Today, you are 33 weeks. I have a thing for the number 3 I will not drag you into how divine and biblical I think t it is because your mother will probably tell me to cut the jargon out. However, I long for the day you will not just be weeks, but a month and then a year and then you will 3 and 13 and then 23- then you will stop growing. You should stay 23 then just one year older every year like Simon Webbe's "Seventeen".

You will find life to be funny, some days it will annoy you, but most of all depending on how you allow yourself to look at things, life will make you laugh. You may find people strange - we are a strange species, yet we are also very special. We have the capacity to do anything and everything; it starts with  having confidence in self, that being inside you that is more than the body you walk around in. You are more spirit than you are body -this does not mean you should not take care of your body. I want to say that you should keep that waist line and the butt like your mother, but she reminds me that you are not a girl or boy you are her child. So I will say remember to take care of your body, fat is an evil thing - so easy to gain and hard to lose. Ask me, I know this too well. So do not listen when Grandmother fills your plate three times a day, or when at 13 you think 'Nandos' "I feel like chicken tonight'  "blue Mango' and all the fast food places around you are cool hangout zones.

Your mother and I love Indian food and wherever you end up with her  taking you all over the world, remember that Uganda has some of the best Indian restaurants. We also love Traditional Ugandan food and have many a time eaten ourselves silly at restaurants in Kampala- this food my dear you can eat to your hearts content; the secret is in the Banana Leaves. Do not forget the passion fruit juice!I like to think its what makes Ugandans passionate beings.

I hope that you will be a resilient child, like your mother. This woman has not lost zeal or lost her insomnia during pregnancy, she just keeps going. Remember there is method in it, you have to master and maximize your strengths too. As I write this, it is late I have worked all week and still have no sleep- trust me am not on drugs nor have I had more than one red-bull this week. Its the time of my life, when I do not want to miss out on my story so am living every moment of it and not allowing sleep to take it away from me  ( now I sound strange, huh?) So I might as well just head to bed and hope that you will be here in a few weeks!