The Black Nile

Chapter THREE
A chainsaw,” the bartender was telling Schon. “This is a weapon of mass destruction.”
He swabbed the dark wooden counter with a rag, pulled open the clouded glass door of the refrigerator behind him, grabbed two Nile Specials and set them down in front of us. He’d popped the caps along the way, with the speed and invisibility of a cardsharp; a cool mist rose from the sweating bottles, just like in beer commercials the world over. “And I’ll tell you this,” he said. “A net isn’t much better.”
“What’s that?” I asked, looking up from my map and notebook. “Chainsaws?” We’d been in Uganda for weeks; my initial burst of confident activity had curdled to boredom and dread as we waited for the boat to be built. My mountain of Ugandan shillings was eroding, and my fancy digital Nikon had dropped dead, fried by a bad battery. Its replacement, a small Canon point-and-shoot, had cost $700, twice the going rate in America. Told our craft would be finished in a matter of days, we left the comfort of Claire’s rooming house and Kampala’s hilly suburbs for a campsite on the Nile’s eastern bank a few miles north of Jinja. But the boat refused to be ready, and our stay at the campsite had stretched to nearly a week.
The bartender poured drinks for a tattooed couple from Wales and turned back to Schon. “Nobody had a chainsaw when I was a boy. The forest had always been there, it was vast compared to a little village, and nobody thought a forest could ever run out of trees. My father sent me to university in Kenya, and my eyes were really opened. When I came back to Uganda—my father took sick and I am the eldest—I tried to tell people that the forest isn’t forever, that there is an end to it, that others have seen this end and now they are suffering. But the village didn’t hear me. My family didn’t hear me.”
A white movie screen hung from the ceiling, and a heavy-metal soundtrack accompanied clips of helmeted thrillseekers crashing over the Nile rapids in big orange rafts, as lifeguards paddled around them in fleet kayaks. Like Uganda’s forests, the rapids too would soon disappear. A new hydroelectric dam was slated to be built on the Bujagali Falls, just north of Jinja, altering—or erasing—the whitewater. The adventure operators suspected new rapids would appear farther downriver once the new dam was raised, but no one knew for sure if this would happen. It was a small price, the authorities said, for beefing up Uganda’s power grid; the country was still producing the same amount of electricity that it had in the early 1960s.
But the bartender’s mind was on more weighty matters than the possible demise of recreational rafting. “It’s the same on the lake,” he said. “Fishermen just won’t believe that Victoria can be overfished, even when the evidence is in their nets. My brother is a fisherman. He waved me off when I tried to tell him. In the early eighties my father and another man were the only people in the village with money. Only their boats had motors and they could go deeper into the lake and catch more fish. The others all rowed. Today, almost everybody has a motor. And the fish are nearly gone. Mass destruction. They cleared the forests on the Ssese Islands for palm plantations. Now Museveni has given the Mabira Forest to Asians so they can farm sugarcane. And they wonder why we are in drought.”


Late next morning, Schon and I took bodas into Jinja in search of paddles for our still unfinished boat. The driver slowed as we approached a group of small boys—the oldest was maybe eight—gathered on either side of the dirt road. They were using their hands to pack soil into some of the deeper ruts, and they raised a thin, knotted clothesline across our path—a symbolic roadblock—and called out for tips. The boda drivers roared over the string and kept going, as Schon turned back in his seat for a last look.
“I guess those kids we saw back there don’t go to school,” he said as we settled into a table at a café on the sleepy town’s main street. “They’re just starting universal primary education here,” I replied. “It’s going to be a while before it reaches the whole country.”
I ordered “river chips,” slices of fried liver, while Schon went with the more conservative eggs and hash browns. “This coffee,” he said, looking at his mug with raised eyebrows, “is strong as lye. You could clean an engine block with it.” My chips came promptly, still sizzling in their basket, but Schon’s eggs appeared to have been lost. We read old copies of the Monitor and New Vision and watched the bicycles and bodas churn up dust on the nearly vacant sunny street.
“I’ve got a lead on where we can get our paddles,” I said. “The night watchman at the campsite says there’s a fishing village on the lakeshore, just a couple miles south of here. It’ll make a nice walk.”
Schon set down his crossword. “A nice walk. You know I have the hip sockets of a seventy-year-old. Anyway, I’m not going to be in any shape to go anywhere if I don’t get my eggs. Miss?” He waved to the waitress. “Do you happen to know where my eggs are?” She looked at him without speaking, and Schon said, “Eggs? Breakfast?” The waitress turned and pointed without speaking to the counter inside the restaurant, on which sat a large white plate. “Are those mine?” Schon said. “Can I have them, please?” She left and returned with the plate, which held two now cold fried eggs and a pile of cold oily potatoes. Schon looked at her with dull anger, shook some salt onto the eggs and cleaned the plate without speaking, daubing the last bits of ketchup with crusts of thin white toast.
“You all right?” I said. “We’ll find a good lunch someplace. Don’t worry about it.”
Schon wiped the corners of his mouth, tossed the paper napkin onto his plate and tapped out a Camel, lips pursed like he’d eaten a lemon. “I came here in part to figure out why things are like they are. I mean, you invited me and I came, and maybe I’ll actually get to fish one time. But I wanted to know why things are different.” He lit the cigarette and looked at the street. “It’s because of the people. Things are different here because the people are different. Not the environment, or the weather, or the geography or anything. The people. If things are going to be better, you have to want them to be better. I’m not sure I see that. They seem to be fine with the way things are. And so, I guess, they’re fine. Why do foreign people try to come in and impose on them to advance technologically, economically, medically, morally, whatever, when they just want to be peasants? Or maybe the way to put it is: They are peasants, and they don’t have a burning desire to be anything more, or anything else. Maybe ‘more’ is the wrong word.”
I squirmed in my chair. “That’s quite an assessment to come out of one plate of cold eggs,” I said. “This place has had more war than countries ten times its size. Wars tend to set you back.”
“Come on, Morrison. People should live how they want, not how other people—richer people, well-intentioned people—want them to. I just think, from what I’ve seen, that Ugandans seem to like how they’re living. And yes, it’s a way that results in me getting cold eggs in a restaurant where the total number of customers is you and me.”
We walked through Jinja. The colonial city of factories, mills and breweries had become all but a ghost town after Amin expelled the Indians. Leaving town we passed a dead railroad spur and descended into a rough and dirty fishing village, a more advanced and prosperous version of the one we’d visited on Nsazi Island. There were more stores, more toddy shops, more restaurants. It appeared to traffic not only in fish but in five-foot-long burlap sacks of charcoal, presumably a product of Victoria’s myriad and rapidly deforesting islands. The shops sold netting, hooks, line, floats, big and bulky life preservers that would be far too hot to wear on the river, wood caulk and small-gauge nails, but they didn’t sell paddles. After half an hour of walking up and down the forty-yard main drag, we found an old woman with three hand-carved paddles, each different from the other. They were about five feet long, hewn out of planks and cut down to teardrop-shaped blades with long rounded handles. She would part with them, a young boy said, for 15,000 shillings.
“Fifteen seems high,” I said. “What about seven?”
The old woman was under five feet tall and was built like a fireplug, with a blue kerchief on her head, an ankle-length brown dress and plastic flip-flops worn thin as leaves. The corner of her wide mouth held a stubby unlit corncob pipe. She stood fast.
“She says she want fifteen thousand. That’s all she take.”
“Eight?”
A few words flew in Luganda. “Fifteen.”
I was impressed. Schon and I each lit a cigarette, and we looked at the paddles and looked at the ground and looked at the ground some more and we didn’t speak. I examined my Sportsman cigarette; they burned quickly. As the ash raced toward the filter I looked at the old woman, then at the paddles and back at the cigarette, and a few more words of Luganda were exchanged. “She will agree to eleven thousand,” the boy said.
“Marvelous.” We carried the three heavy paddles back up the hill and walked again into Jinja, collecting stares along the way. “Well done,” Schon said. “Your hardball tactics have saved the mission a dollar and a half.”
That evening at the campsite, during a meal of pepper steak, rice and beer, I received a call from Richard Landy, one of Cam McLeay’s lieutenants. The boat at last was ready. We toasted our turning luck and I left the table to gather our laundry from the campsite’s clothesline in the mosquitoed evening light. Schon was gone, probably in the washroom, when I returned. Next to the overfull ashtray and four empty beer bottles, his notebook lay open. I promise and swear that I don’t think it’s a stupid thing to do, he had written. But I can’t stave off a sense of foreboding. Please don’t let us turn that goddam boat over. Please don’t let us turn that goddam boat over. Please don’t let us turn that goddam boat over. Please.
At eight the next morning, Landy picked us up in a yellow Isuzu flatbed truck. We sat with him in the cab and drove north to the work site at Kalagala, where our boat lay on its side in a puddle. Our handsome craft was made of double layers of one-inch plank board and it was about twenty feet long, three feet at its widest. The wet planks were horizontal bands of light brown and yellow. Strips of tin and rubber were glued and hammered over some of the wider seams. The keel was a length of hand-hewn four-by-four, and the prow had been carved into the rough shape of a keystone, the better for tying up. Nearby lay the ruined craft Cam McLeay had first offered us and another new boat, this one covered in a blue tarpaulin.
A crew of men arrived in another truck and a dozen of them lifted our boat and slid it onto the flatbed, stern first. I doled out cash to each of the hands while Schon smoked a cigarette, and then we got back into the cab with Landy and set out for our launch site, downriver of the cruelest rapids. Landy was talking about how he got his name (he drove the company Land Rover), about the time Prince William had come with a few friends to shoot the rapids (“A very fine man; he treats everyone equally), and about possible repercussions of the Bujagali Dam (“Frankly, we may be screwed”), when Schon looked at his watch and said, “Damn. We’re even ahead of schedule.” I smiled, content. The Nile waited to carry us north from its source, off the grid and into freedom. A heartbeat later the Isuzu started sputtering and knocking, and Landy cut the engine and pulled over. He pulled a lever and tipped the cab forward to reveal the engine underneath. We had broken an injector bolt. Our ride was over.
We waited by the side of the road while Landy hitched a ride back to Jinja on a passing motorcycle. There were four or five houses nearby, enough to provide a dozen children who gawked and asked for money and posed and shone for Schon’s camera. An older girl, maybe fourteen, bald and in a yellow dress, stopped in front of us and asked, “Can you give me money? I am an orphan.” I gave her a few shillings. “Nice,” Schon said. “Now we’re gonna have a whole village of orphans coming to us for your bleeding-heart money.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re probably right.” But no one else approached.
We split a pineapple and drank from our water bottles and three hours later Landy reappeared in another Isuzu truck, with more men. They backed the new Isuzu up to the old and transferred the boat and we set off again and made five minutes of progress before Schon realized we’d forgotten the paddles. He and another man went on bodas to collect them and we all met an hour later at the launch point, a mud flat descended from dense scrub where the water was wide and shallow and calm. Landy drove part of the way down and we carried the boat to the water like pallbearers. We loaded our bags, stepped inside, and they pushed us onto the river before an audience of children in threadbare clothes, Schon in the rear seat piloting, me near the middle, water at my feet. Why was there water at my feet? Maybe the seams needed to swell. That was it—the timbers would swell, and that would seal off the water. I was still in my boots; there hadn’t been time to change to sandals.
I gripped my paddle, left hand at the top, right hand near the middle, and dipped the blade into the water, just like when I was a boy at Camp Berry in the eighties. And so we slid away. Very soon, we were alone on the silent river, paddling down the middle of the Nile, arcing toward one bank and then the other. Dense scrub ran to the shore, interrupted sometimes by plots of maize and other crops. Hyacinth clung like plaque to the riverbank and forests of papyrus began to appear as well, tall green stalks, each topped with a thick pom of fine green threads that shimmered with rainbow hues.
It was nearly four in the afternoon in late September. I was wearing what would become my basic uniform for the rest of the journey: green work pants and a dirty camp shirt with too many pockets. A Leatherman tool and a nylon camera case hung from the right side of my black leather money belt, with three hundred dollars inside the hidden compartment. On my head sat, embarrassingly, a flaccid-brimmed bush cap that a tailor in Kampala had made for me after we’d found none in the markets. My boots—my boots were wet. “We’re sinking,” I said. It wasn’t true, but water was filling the floor at a steady rate. I could actually see it rushing in through several seams and cracks. “Take it easy,” Schon said. “Every boat takes on a little water. Lean up there and open my pack. I got a present for ya.” Squeezed under the top flap of his rucksack was a yellow plastic cooking oil container. “God, that’s great thinking,” I said. “You’ve saved us.”
“Thanks,” Schon said. “Picked it up when we went back for the paddles. Better’n using our hats. So don’t just sit there. Bitch seat gets to bail.” I cut the top off the bottle, scooped out two inches of water and resumed paddling. The boat felt solid, steady. The river itself was slow; the clear water offered no help. We moved with the illusion of speed under long tufted clouds and light blue sky. Fish jumped and preened and splashed at every turn, mocking Schon and his arsenal of rods and lures. “You wanna skip lunch?” I asked. “Make up for lost time?”
“Fine by me. I’m just glad to finally be on the water.” He sang Willie Nelson, tweaking the lyrics:
On the road again,
Drinking Miller, smoking killer
With my friends . . .
Within forty-five minutes we reached the first set of rapids, shards of white cascading down what appeared to be a shallow descent. We pulled the boat over to the eastern bank and evaluated. “It doesn’t look like much,” I said.
“I know,” Schon said, squinting. “I think we shoot for the middle there. The water looks faster on the sides. Whatever you do, just keep paddling. You don’t want to fight the current, just keep some control when it takes you. Keep paddling. You’ve been on boats before, you know what to do.”
“Well, in the Boy Scouts.”
“That’s the last time you paddled a boat? The Boy Scouts?”
“Wait,” I said, searching my memory as we bobbed in the hyacinth. “There was another time. Yeah, my honeymoon. We went out on the lake in Central Park. There were turtles basking in the sun. And a stork.”
“A stork. Really? Can we do this now?”
We did, shooting the rapid with much splash and paddle, dodging half-submerged rocks, cutting through the rough waters and reaching the calm with hardly a drop of doubt.
“Now that was fun.” I laughed. “For all the leaking, this boat is rock steady. I want to do that again.”
“And we will,” Schon said, not laughing at all. “According to Cam, there’s another set ahead of us. If you’ll recall, he also told us to drag this monster overland.” I had forgotten that. Still, we’d easily passed the first test.
We soon reached the next set of rapids and even in the distance it looked another species. We paddled to the western bank and drove the boat onto a sandbar. Schon got out, waded through the hyacinth and climbed some boulders for a better look. Ten long minutes later he was back. “What do you think?” I said. He frowned and ran both hands up over his forehead and down his scalp. “Let’s go out a little so you can see what I’m talking about.” We paddled a few yards into the river and stopped.
“You see that shit right there?” Schon said over my shoulder. “We don’t want anything to do with that.”
“What shit?”
He raised his paddle out of the water and jabbed it in at a band of livid white that stretched nearly from bank to bank forty yards downriver. “You don’t see that white sploshy mess, right there? We gotta go around it. So we’re gonna cut across to the other side and go into that roundabout there, that eddy, and hopefully the current will let us past the worst of it. There’s a gap, about twenty feet, that looks calmer, and that’s what we’re aiming for. The main thing is, we don’t want the boat to get turned sideways. Whatever happens, keep the boat straight.”
We drove hard across the river, aiming for the gentle pool that would ease us around the angry rocks and broken current, a polite evasion of the riot next door. We hacked at the water, digging deep, and the quiet Nile became loud and then deafening as the river at first nudged and then hurled us off course and dead into the whitewater. The boat started to spin and rock in the three-foot chop, soaking us and the gear. I paddled in reverse to try to point the nose forward, to no effect, and within seconds the boat was thrown sideways down the rapid, a five-foot drop, landing beneath the rocks with a tooth-rattling thump. Water poured into the boat as we spun counterclockwise and glanced first off one boulder and then another. The water, surprisingly cold, bit at my calves and still more crashed in as we ricocheted through the foam and roar.
I thought, We’re going to lose our stuff.
I thought, My wife will be angry when I’m dead.
I paddled harder, looking for calm. “Hit the bail,” Schon said. “Hit the bail!” We were riding low; the water inside now approached my knees. I grabbed the plastic bail and started flinging water overboard while Schon straightened the boat and piloted us past a last boulder and into mellower waters. We paddled hard for a minute and then let the becalmed river take over. Schon stretched out his legs and pulled out a pack of Camels. He plucked out four in a row and dropped them overboard until he reached a dry one, and then felt around for matches. I took a lighter from my shirt pocket, shook the water out and flicked the wheel. We drifted like that for a while, Schon dropping a stroke here and there to keep us in the middle of the river, while I flicked and flicked the lighter until the flint dried and it finally produced flame.


At dusk we came upon puzzling signs of modernity: a clearing on the right, cement pylons rising like stairs from the muddy shallows, and, suspended across the river a hundred feet in the air, two steel cables. “What do you suppose that is?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Schon said from behind me. “Looks like a ski lift, almost.” We beached the boat and I walked up a rocky embankment to a grassy hillside in search of someone of authority. I found him in Pamba Luca, the local watchman. “Of course you can sleep here,” he said. “You have nothing to worry about. I am just leaving, but you are welcome.” The site, he said, was a Nile measuring station operated by the Ugandan government. The stairlike pylons we had seen were marked at centimeter intervals, but the water level was lower than the lowest hash mark. The steel lines supported a capsule-shaped cable car that was presently moored to a metal tower fifty yards back from the river’s edge. “That,” said Luca, “has not been used for some time.”
We pitched the tent in the grass and changed out of our wet clothes. As a light rain drummed on the nylon roof, I devoured a can of sardines in oil with some Ritz-like crackers manufactured in the United Arab Emirates, saltines being all but unknown in Uganda. Schon ate half a can of processed chicken that recalled nothing so much as dog food. “You know, I’m tempted to celebrate our survival with one of those Johnnie Walkers,” I said. While a full-length mirror was not around to confirm it, I was sure my body was rippling with newly defined muscles. I felt lean and strong. “At this rate,” I said, “I don’t see why we couldn’t paddle this thing all the way to Karuma Falls. We might not even need an engine.”
“Riiiight,” Schon said, bending the metal lid back over the uneaten portion of his canned chicken. “We’ll see how you feel in the morning, when your body’s had time to consider the day’s abuse.”
I lay down, passed out instantly, and dreamed I was editing news stories on an old Atex machine, rewriting crime briefs on a tiny green screen, before the dawn of the Internet.
The dream ended abruptly: There was someone outside the tent. Many voices, several lights bobbing in the darkness through the wall of the tent. “Hello?” I called out.
“We are the LC.”
The LC? Local Council? Last Chance? “Just a moment.” I dressed, grabbed a flashlight, unzipped the oval nylon door and stepped out. Seven people, including the deputy district chairman, were gathered around the tent. Two held dim old flashlights; one carried what appeared to be a rectangular paraffin lantern that glowed like an anemic firefly. “We are from the LC,” the only woman said. “Luca has told us of a visitor. We must give the approval. We must register you.” They had all, including a club-footed man named Ibrahim, walked miles in the rain to fulfill their civic duty and vet the strangers on their shore. I shook hands with each, and showed them my Ugandan press card and my old New York press card and my old Indian press card, and then found my Egyptian press card, and at this critical mass of identification they were satisfied. Someone pulled a guestbook out of a plastic shopping bag and I signed for myself and for Schon as a storm of moths and other insects, drawn by the intense white beam of my flashlight’s LED bulb, blocked my vision and filled my mouth and nostrils and ears. “So very good to meet you all,” I coughed. “Thanks so much. Thank you.”


I woke up slowly to rainfall and the voices of two men talking in the distance, followed by the now familiar sound of bailing, the scrape of plastic against wood, followed by weak splash—scrape, pour, scrape, pour. I squinted, as if that would improve my hearing. “Are they bailing our boat?”
“I hope so,” Schon said.
I pulled on my green rain poncho and went out for a look. Two men had just finished bailing a fifteen-foot dugout canoe. I called good morning to them and to a small girl who stood at the water’s edge in a too-big canvas mackintosh, the cuffs turned back to her elbows, the hem at her ankles. She held a yellow jerrican in one hand and a plastic soda bottle in the other. Sent to fetch water, she lingered now by the river’s edge watching the drizzle. The fishermen apparently were waiting for the rain to stop. A few minutes later it did, and they were on their way. Our departure would take a bit longer. I changed back into my soaked pants, put on a dry shirt and bagged the rest of the wet items.
Luca appeared with a few boys while I was bailing rainwater out of the boat. They helped me load the gear while Schon struck the tent. “Luca,” I said. “Have you ever seen the river this low?”
He pushed back his straw hat and folded his arms over his sweat-shirt, a purple number that showed the silhouettes of three men on snowmobiles under the slogan “Snow Fun.” “I have worked for the water ministry since 1982. I have been on measuring expeditions all over Uganda—Masindi, Karuma, Nimule, Arua. It was a privilege to be taken on these journeys with the engineers. But I missed my village and my family. So I asked my boss and he made me measurement officer here at Mbulamuti. Now I am happy.”
“And the water level?”
“The river has never been this low.”
We were standing beside the bow of the now packed boat. Schon tapped out a Camel, his first of the day. “Do you smoke?” I asked Luca, and he said no, just as Schon let out a burst of hacking coughs. “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. We shook hands again, bade goodbye to the crowd of boys and pushed off. Soon after, I pumped and sterilized some river water, bailed the leaky bottom and started paddling. We pushed for several hours, slowing when we saw fishermen in their dugout canoes, twice reversing the boat after we were snagged in their net lines.
“Man, I would kill for a country ham and egg biscuit from Biscuitville,” Schon said. “I get that with hash browns and a Mountain Dew, because I’ve already had my coffee at that point.”
Late that morning I saw a six-foot fan of ripples emerge from the water’s ice-smooth surface far ahead of us. For a moment it appeared the ripple was advancing on the boat like some kind of river beast. It was, for a second, unbearably peaceful, transportingly strange. Only at the last moment, as the pace of the river suddenly quickened, did the trap become visible in the clear water. “Rock!” With an awful crunching sound and a lateral shake we were pinned sideways by the river against a barely submerged yellow boulder embedded with tiny pocks of green algae.
“Are we whole?” Schon said. “Did it crack?”
I looked down and felt around the floor and the right side. “Everything’s smooth,” I said.
“Well thank God for that.” We started to pry, or try to pry, the boat off of the rock, but it was no use. The paddles would have splintered—they were no match for the cumulative weight of the river. “I’m going to get out and push it,” I said.
“No-You-Are-Not,” Schon replied.
“Fine.” I wedged my paddle between the boulder and the boat and tried again, putting as much of my weight on it as I dared while Schon churned the water with his paddle.
“I’m getting out,” he said.
“What’s the difference?”
“What?”
“Between you and me,” I said. “Why are you getting out?”
“First of all, I’m stronger. And my seat’s in the back, so I can push her off and still have time to get back in once she’s free.”
Yeah, I wanted to say. But it’s my boat and my trip, and if one of us is going to drown it probably should be me.
Instead, I said, “Do it.”
Schon eased himself out of the boat and crouched on the rock, water racing over his ankles. He gripped the right side with both hands and started to push. I sat on the left side of my bench and flayed the water while Schon rocked and pushed the gunwale for ten minutes until the boat abruptly slipped away from its snag and glided off the boulder. Staring forward, afraid of striking another rock, I heard a thump as Schon jumped in behind. We were away.
“God as my witness,” I said. “I’ll never make fun of beer muscle again.”
005
Over time it seemed we were wasting effort. Two people paddling seemed only slightly faster than one. We were looping down the river, wide arcs that were, I felt, adding miles to our journey. I paddled at a nearly regular pace on the right side while Schon hit the left. He would switch to the right to compensate when we went off course, but it seemed it was always two or three strokes later than it should have been. There were enough clouds to keep the sun from being oppressive, but already there was a sense of sameness, a sort of visual tinnitus: flat water, hyacinth and papyrus—forevermore.
Around eleven-thirty, just as Schon started making noises about lunch, we spotted a landing site on the western bank of a wide curve in the river. We drove for it, and what appeared to be the roofs of at least half a dozen huts. It seemed to take a long time, but soon I could make out a line of women doing laundry on the beach. To their immediate left, men were clearing a twenty-yard stretch of land, whacking away the papyrus with pangas and burning the plot’s two trees. We nosed into the landing site to a chorus of laughter from the women as they bent at the waist, slapping laundry against the water. I walked up the bank and bought five orange-sized fried dough balls and a couple of Cokes. The man who’d escorted me into the village then asked if I would buy him a generator. Back at the boat, Schon was buying two pineapples from a boy. He paid 1,000 shillings, about fifty cents, and the kid’s face lit up.
I was in the pilot’s seat now. “I actually prefer riding bitch,” Schon said. “Less thinking involved. You can actually let your mind wander.” We pushed off and the boat immediately started looping across the water. “I resign my commission,” I cried, but soon enough I got the hang of it, aiming the key at a distant point and holding to it with two or three strokes on the right and then one or two on the left. We never once had the wind at our back—only dead water and headwinds bearing down for hours and hours, as Schon bailed the boat and pumped drinking water. It was actually easier to pilot alone, but it wasn’t nearly as fast. The front seat was the muscle, the rear provided direction.
Around four o’clock, Schon suggested we find a place to make camp. “It gets dark so fast out here—I don’t want to be caught on the water when it happens,” he said. We’d been paddling slow through extremely shallow water, two feet deep and dead still. On the eastern bank eight hundred yards away, we spied what appeared to be a tall cement pier or bulkhead, and behind that houses, proper houses with a distinctly industrial look. “I think that’s Namasagali,” Schon said.
I disagreed. It was an old commercial farm of some kind, I said, not a town. We would waste an hour getting there that we could spend driving for the real Namasagali. “It’s the only example of man-made anything we’ve seen since lunch,” he said. “Now, I love our little boat, but I don’t want to have to sleep in it.”
We paddled slow and careful through the shallow water and beached the boat just north of the concrete bulkhead, a ten-foot-high wall rising from the banks of the Nile. I walked up a weedy slope, past a rusted steam-powered crane sitting on grass-choked double rails, toward a small cinderblock house that in America might be found inside a state park—a seasonal residence for rangers, or a bunkhouse for scouts or teenage cadets. I knocked on a green wooden door and waited. It opened just enough to reveal an inch of pale face, punctuated by a faded blue-gray eye. “Oh, good afternoon,” the sliver said. The door opened wider to reveal Simon Downie, warden of Namasagali College. He pushed up his bifocals. “You’d better come inside.”
He was a left-behinder, a British teacher who had refused to escape even during the worst of the Idi Amin years. “I don’t have a good answer as to why I remained. I suppose I was curious as to how things would turn out,” Simon said after serving us tea inside his book-filled living room, the coffee table covered with old magazines and yellowed correspondence. “Darling,” he called over his shoulder, past the kitchen into what I assumed was the bedroom. He got up and went into the room. “They’re journalists, from America.” His muffled voice had the tone of a parent to a recalcitrant child or, as I surmised in Simon’s case, a husband to an annoyed wife. “They’ve come down from Jinja in a canoe.”
Simon returned. “She’s just finishing her meditation. In time I came to see there was more for me here than in England. I’ve got a sister, and that’s about it. I’ve been here at Namasagali more than thirty years, been deputy headmaster, headmaster, vice chancellor and now I’m the warden.” He pushed his bifocals up the bridge of his nose and pulled a guestbook from the drawer of a maroon credenza. “Our enrollment was once quite high. We were away from most of the fighting during the difficult years and the campus was seen as something of a haven. We’re mainly a teachers’ college these days. Now that the country has stabilized we have many fewer students and fewer resources. Jon Snow, surely you’ve heard of him, from Channel Four, used to teach here. He’s a real friend of the school, he came last year for a report on malaria and in January with a load of donated bed nets for the villagers. I want to show this campus is still important, that it is of interest to important people like Jon Snow, like yourselves.” He opened the book and held it out, and I dutifully filled in the blanks and passed it back after tucking two of my business cards inside.
“I remember other Nile travelers,” Simon said. “There was a group that came up from Egypt; they had run into trouble in Murchison Park. And, years ago, in 1987, a Swiss kayaker came here, out of his mind from the sun, really far gone. He stayed a few days and went on. They found his traveler’s checks in Arua and his clothes in Nimule, but he wasn’t seen again.”
We tied up the boat and carried our bags down the campus’s neat dirt paths to an empty dormitory building, tipping the grounds-keeper on the way. While Simon was a high-ranking administrator, he needed the groundskeeper’s cooperation to shelter us in the dusty abandoned dormitory, where scavengers had made off with the drainpipes and the flagpole had to be kept under lock and key.
Simon led us on a tour of the peaceful campus—apparently we had arrived between terms. The small windowpanes of the chemistry lab were broken; the supply shelves had been cleared of whatever the thieves could reach through the bars. Elsewhere, the corrugated roofs were rusting; the whitewashed concrete-block walls were peeling and turning brown from the rain and humidity.
Still, that which could be achieved through labor, like landscaping and other basic maintenance, seemed to have been accomplished. Money was missing, not industry. The buildings needed paint; broken windowpanes went unrepaired or were replaced by scraps of wood. As we walked through the campus, past the dingy library and the orchards and the parade ground, I could almost see Simon’s old students leaving the morning assembly for class, the girls in red dresses, the boys in their white shirts and khaki shorts, good kids sent to this oasis for a structured and humane education away from the brigandage and gunfire. The school’s motto was “Strive Regardless.”
A notice from the headmaster posted to a bulletin board a month earlier addressed “GRAZING OF ANIMALS (CATTLE, SHEEP, GOATS) ON SCHOOL COMPOUND.”
I wish to bring it to your attention that Village community neighbouring Namasagali College have made it a habit to bring their animals, especially cattle, to graze on the school compound and the orchard garden. The animals are doing a lot of danger to the school in the following ways:
—they make the compound dirty with cowdung
—they destroy newly planted trees and flowers
—they eat clothes, soap etc in students dormitories and teachers quarters
Let this letter act as a warning to those who bring animals in the school compound.
Animals arrested will be tagged with the school farm yellow tag and kept on the school farm.
Please let the village community be informed always in local council meetings.
The college was founded in 1965, three years after Uganda’s independence, by the Mill Hill Missionaries, a British Roman Catholic order. The campus was the former headquarters of the Busoga Railway. “The steamers from Masindi would land here and the freight would go down to Jinja on rolling stock,” Simon told us. “There was a chain of ports and railroads connecting Mombasa with the Congo and Sudan. But it all disintegrated quite quickly with the floods of 1962, and then of course the years of fighting.”
Simon led us through the campus into a nearby village for a beer, and back down to the steam crane on the shore. “We used to hold student regattas here, the different houses racing each other,” he said. “All kinds of competitions. The boys would swim across the river and back.”
Clouds the color of steel pressed down on us. I could see thunderheads across the river and, behind them, small panes of orange sunset. Three boys were wading in the river to the left of the bulkhead, where they pushed yellow jerricans beneath the surface and then lugged the heavy containers home.
When we stopped at Simon’s the next morning before setting out, his wife came out of the bedroom to greet us. She was a Ugandan academic, attractive, much younger than Simon and barely friendly. She held in her lap a copy of Els de Temmerman’s Aboke Girls, about the mass kidnapping of 139 girls from a Catholic boarding school by the Lord’s Resistance Army, and thrust it at me soon after we sat down. “Do you know about the abductions of the LRA?” she said. “If you are going to the north, you should educate yourself and pursue this subject. I suggest you read this book.”
“I’m familiar with the subject,” I said. The LRA, led by the enigmatic Joseph Kony, had turned much of Uganda’s north, traditionally the country’s breadbasket, into a wasteland of refugee camps, fallow fields and army checkpoints.
“Have you read Aboke Girls?”
“I haven’t. I was in Gulu and Kitgum last spring, and I visited a couple camps. I even met some of Kony’s wives.”
“Victims,” she shot back. Most girls in LRA custody became forced concubines.
“Victims, absolutely, unquestionably,” I replied. “Though they do refer to themselves as his wives.” So too did members of their community, often without pity for the horrors these girls had been through.
“Would you like some more tea?” Simon interrupted. “Darling, perhaps you’ll put on more water while I show them the medallions from the old Egyptian Irrigation Department.”
For decades in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Britain had controlled the White Nile through its colonial rule over East Africa and its de facto control of Egypt. Egyptian engineers like the hyacinth-slayers Schon and I met outside Kampala had been preceded by Britons who’d set up more than a dozen measuring stations along the river. Mbulamuti, where we’d spent our first night on the Nile, was one such station. Britain’s interest was more than scientific: The Nile fed Egypt’s cotton crop, much of which found its way to British textile mills. The medallion Simon produced had been pried off a dead piece of port machinery. It was an iron oval cast with the letters “EID” at its center and a serial number, 800, stamped below, a tiny relic of empire.
We made a cool getaway from our genial host and hauled our bags to the boat. It was exactly where we had left it, looking good, with a few inches of rainwater on the floor. Something was different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Schon came down the hill with his backpack and fishing case. “Shit,” he said. “Somebody stole our rope.”
“Who were those wives you were talking about? This the same guys that shot up Cam’s group?” Schon asked, pumping and zapping fresh drinking water while I paddled the boat.
“Same outfit,” I said. “The Lord’s Resistance Army. They’ve been fighting since Museveni took power. A lot of the northern tribes had backed the losing side—Museveni is a southerner. Near the end of the war in 1986, some of Museveni’s allies raided the northern tribes, stealing tons of cattle, basically taking their collective savings. So the northerners lost power and they lost their wealth and they were petrified of being wiped out in revenge for earlier massacres.”
“Payback’s a bitch,” Schon said.
“Exactly. So out of this panic comes these spiritual movements that combine local religion with some warped ideas of Christianity and the one that survived was Joseph Kony’s group, the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA said they were fighting for the Acholi tribe, but when the Acholis didn’t support them, they started going after their own people—mutilations, looting, that kind of thing. But their signature is kidnapping children, mostly children, and turning them into fighters and slaves. The girls become sex captives. We’re talking more than twenty thousand people abducted.”
“And then those kids kidnap other kids? Is that it?” Schon said.
“Worse,” I said. “Some are forced to kill their parents, or to kill their brothers or sisters. The LRA owns them after that. And get this: They think Kony has superpowers. I talked to some guys—adults—who’d been kidnapped and escaped and they believed Kony was still watching them. Even talking about it made them nervous. They thought he could kill them long-distance.”
Kony had taken dozens of girls as his concubines and forced the “marriage” of thousands more to his officers and soldiers. I was on an assignment for an American newsmagazine when I met a few escapees at St. Monica’s, a church-run boarding school in Gulu, a depressed northern city located fifty miles off the Nile. Evelyn Amony had been kidnapped at twelve and became a nanny in Kony’s household. Three years later, he informed her she would be his next wife. She was beaten by cadres with long bamboo poles when she refused, and soon enough she agreed. Evelyn bore Kony three daughters before she escaped with them in 2004.
Evelyn’s story contained within it echoes of the centuries-old conflict over the identity of the people of the Nile Valley. She lived with Kony in Juba, in southern Sudan, where the Islamist regime provided the LRA with protection and weapons, a reprisal against Museveni for his support of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Evelyn’s oldest child was born in an army garrison in Juba during a visit to the city by Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Bashir, she said, stopped in to congratulate Kony and was given the honor of naming the baby. He called her Fatima, for the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter. After Evelyn escaped, the nuns at St. Monica’s renamed the girl, christening her Bakhita, for the patron saint of Sudan, a slave from Darfur whose story has sharp resonance for Sudan’s black Christians. Captured by Arab raiders in the late 1870s at the age of eight, Josephine Bakhita was sold into bondage, forced to convert to Islam and was resold four times at slave markets in El Obeid and Khartoum before finding refuge with the family of an Italian diplomat. In 1896, she joined the Canossian Sisters, an order of nuns in Venice, and she was canonized in 2000.
Before her death, Josephine Bakhita said that, given the chance, she would thank her captors and tormenters because their actions had led her to Christ. I doubted the girls I’d met at St. Monica’s would ever say the same thing.
“So this LRA business has been going on for twenty years and nobody’s stopped it?” Schon asked. “That, in my book, says somebody in charge just doesn’t care enough.”


On this, our third day on the Nile, the river grew wider and deeper, but the current remained just as slow, the wind just as relentless. The receding shoreline made me uneasy. The river wasn’t just broadening; there were floating islands of papyrus and hyacinth to paddle around, and inlets that dead-ended into backwaters indistinguishable from the river’s free-flowing channels. There was a fat one on the map I had taken to calling “the Abscess,” a three- or four-mile eddy that I feared getting lost in, though I couldn’t tell how far downriver it lay. At noon we paddled to the side of the Nile, nudging the boat against the papyrus that choked the shore, and shared a can of tuna and some crackers. “You know where we are?” Schon asked.
“Nope.”
“Any way of finding out?”
We took a GPS point off the satellite phone and tried comparing the reading with the faint lines on my tourist map. “I think we’re at the first ‘I’ in the Victoria Nile,” I said, about forty miles south of Lake Kyoga. “No way we’re reaching Kyoga today.”
“Where are we gonna bunk tonight, then?” Schon said. “We’d have to hack through this papyrus just to get to land—that’s a day’s work right there. And god knows what’s in the water waiting for us while we do it.”
“We could tie up to the papyrus and sleep in the boat.”
“You know my feelings on that,” he said tersely.
“Let’s just keep pushing and see what we find.”
I smeared more sun cream onto my cheeks and forearms and feet, splashed water onto my pants to keep my legs cool and cleaned my eyeglasses with a lens cloth from my shirt pocket. We drove on for hours, singing Warren Zevon songs to break the boredom. I talked about my hero, the writer Murray Kempton. Schon talked about his, the horror director Rob Zombie, and all the while my paddle grew heavier, and my muscles, which had felt like coiled pythons the day before, revealed themselves as useless sleeves of cement.
With dusk approaching we found ourselves a lonesome mile from either shore when Schon spied something moving in the distance. “Get the binoculars,” I said.
He pulled a small pair of field glasses from my raid pack. “It’s a boat,” Schon said. “Bigger than ours, maybe twice as big. It’s got people in it. And a bicycle. It’s ferrying people across.” He lowered the binocs. “That means there’s something on each side.” We aimed for that spot and then looked to each shore. To the west we could make out what appeared to be a small settlement—a handful of small corrugated steel roofs. I squinted through the binoculars to the east and saw real buildings, smaller than those at Namasagali, sitting above a crowded landing site. “Maybe it’s an old way station,” Schon said, “an old cotton port or something.”
Squinting further, I could make out two-story brick buildings. “Dude,” I said, “this could be a real town. Maybe they’ve got Indians. Indian food, a real hotel.” I hooked us to the right and we pushed for an hour against the wind. But as we got closer the proper brick buildings disappeared from view. The town’s landing site looked different from all the others we’d seen. It was wet. No dry red earth or pebble beach, no stores or shops, just a collection of boats nosed into black mud and deep green vegetation. We slid onto shore, but the keel never scraped land. I stepped out of the boat, and onto nothing solid; my foot sank into muck.
The women here were laughing, wailing, at our arrival, in a tone different from what I’d heard in other villages. It sounded like they were watching a cow escape slaughter, only to be run down, tied and butchered. We sloshed through the muck onto land and asked where we could find the village chairman. No one seemed to speak English. The spongy ground gently rocked with the pace of the river, and I felt a hint of vertigo. “This is wrong,” I said. “What’s wrong with this place?”
“We’re standing on pad,” Schon said.
“Pad?”
“We’re floating.”
A large fishing boat landed and six crew members got out. They ignored us and started down a path through a jungle of papyrus and hyacinth. I followed them into the village across a hundred yards of sponge, stepping where possible on solid papyrus roots, some of them arm-thick. The track appeared to have been cleared by machete and trampled flat by use. My village of two-story hotels had been a mirage. This village, Ksike, was made up of a few one-room brick shops, a pair of tired wooden restaurants and a welter of mud shacks and driftwood homes.
The local chairman, whose name was Hazrat, showed me a patch of dirt where we could pitch our tent. I asked for two boys to help with the baggage. “How much will you pay them?” Hazrat asked. I offered two hundred shillings each and then reoffered at five hundred, mindful of the growing darkness. He agreed and passed me to the care of Yusuf, a local man who lived nearby. I gathered the two helpers and we walked back to the boat in pitch darkness. The boys, eager and utterly familiar with the route, got far ahead of me and I lost track of their footsteps. Twice on the way I broke through the pad up to my ankles, each time pulling my feet free against a giant wet suction.
Twenty feet from the boat I really broke through, a solid stomp that plunged my right leg past the knee into warm and gritty protosoil. I pulled back, clenching my foot to keep my sandal on as a passing local took my arm and pulled. I knew I could escape if I left the sandal behind but I was unwilling to surrender it and so kept my toes and foot flexed. He pulled and pulled and finally my foot came free, bringing with it a splash of black slime that hit my Good Samaritan square in the eyes.
“Sorry, thank you, sorry,” I said, and offered my arm in a stupid gesture. He made a disgusted noise and was rid of me. Schon and I loaded our two helpers with baggage. I leaned down to check the floor of the boat for loose gear and when I looked up again the boys were already away. I grabbed my raid pack, the food bag and my boots. Another boy, one we hadn’t seen before, strapped on Schon’s backpack. Schon grabbed the paddles and his own black bag. “Is that everything?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Schon said, walking gingerly, with speed, to keep up with the last boy. We left behind a bag of bananas that had been floating in bilge, and the last of our pineapples, tucked into the bow, dry. Twenty-five steps later I was again thigh-deep in pad. I pulled out, got onto my knees, and reached back into the hole down to my shoulder to recover my sandal. The soil was wet, warm, scratchy, filthy, alive—the quick of creation. We got to the village and I tried in the dark to pick our two helpers out of the gathering crowd. I found them and gave them a thousand-shilling note to split. “Where’s the other guy? I asked. “Where’s the other guy who helped us?”
“That’s me,” said a man in his forties.
“No it isn’t,” I said, a little too seriously. “Where’s the third guy?”
“It’s this guy,” Yusuf said with a laugh. “He just made himself young for the job.” I never saw the kid again, and if we did and didn’t recognize him, he never asked for a dime even though two of his neighbors had been paid a swamp king’s ransom.
“You got the water bottles?” Schon asked.
“I’ve got my bottle in the food bag. I thought you said we had everything.”
“I thought you had both our bottles,” he said. “You know it’s not going to be there in the morning.”
I went back for the bottle while Schon pitched the tent, passing two groups of people cautiously making their way from the landing site while carrying bags, babies and two bicycles. One man broke through to his green khaki hip and pulled himself out with barely a hint of annoyance. I crashed through twice more and entered the village cursing and hating. My legs and arms were covered in black granular slime. Schon stood outside the tent, handing out Marlboros to the congregation. “Can I get one of those?” I said, and quietly smoked, a filthy scarecrow pitched outside an orange-domed tent.
We asked Yusuf where we could buy a jerrican of water. “I will give you,” he said. Schon went inside to change his clothes while I smoked and tried to relax, gently pushing aside children so they wouldn’t be burned as they crowded the tent four deep trying for a look inside. Yusuf returned with a jerrican and asked, “Do you have drinking water?”
“I have a filter. We’ll pump it straight from the can.”
“This water is not fit to drink,” he said. “Although some do.” He disappeared again and returned with a cold sixteen-ounce bottle of boiled water. I passed it to Schon through the zippered door and he filtered it out of caution and handed me my bottle of peppermint soap. Yusuf led me to a bathing spot thirty yards away, behind a hut. “You can step here,” he said, pointing to a white flat stone. I took off my tan nylon shirt and laid it on the ground, squirted soap into an orange basin and tried washing my feet. Impossible. I took off the undershirt and washed my arms and face, put the undershirt back on, and carried my camp shirt back to the tent. “We need more water,” Schon said.
“I don’t think it will be forthcoming,” I said.
“We need more water,” he repeated.
“Yusuf,” I said, “can we have more water?” He paused, took the empty bottle away and came back with it half full.
Schon left to wash while I went inside the tent and, staying near the doorway, emptied my pockets, tossing the squeeze bottle of Purell and a wad of Ugandan cash toward the back, then changed into shorts. Surveying myself in the torchlight, I saw my feet were still black. I did the best I could with Handi-Wipes, slipped on a pair of dirty socks to keep from fouling my sleeping bag and promptly passed out.
“Where are your sandals?” Schon asked.
“Outside,” I said, asleep.
“Not for long.”
I sat up and pulled them inside. “You know,” I said in the quiet, “when I kept falling through, all I could think was, ‘How can people live like this?’ And then I realized, they can live like this because they have to. They have no choice. They live as they must.”
“They do so have a choice,” Schon said, suddenly angry. “Of course they have a choice. Bunch of guys could get together and dig up a bunch of dirt and fill that f*cking bog. Stone Age tools. You cut that shit down, you get everybody together and you carry dirt from the town and you fill it in. Human beings been doing it for thousands of years. They’d rather come home and f*ck off.”
I woke up to rain followed by bright sunlight, radio, roosters, children singing, the silhouettes of children clumping around the tent like gnats on a lantern. I slept some more, stirred and changed into clean underwear, khaki shorts and a cotton long-sleeved shirt—no point in fouling two sets of pants in this hell-swamp. After a Luna bar breakfast (“Nutrition for Women”), I left Schon to strike the tent and found Yusuf rolling chapatis in one of the restaurants. “Yusuf,” I said. “May we give you a gift?”
“Yes,” he said, avoiding my eyes. I handed him one of the crank-charged flashlights, which also, I learned, could be used to charge mobile phones. He suppressed a grin and said a demure thank-you and went back to his work.
We walked in safety back to the boat. In the daylight the route was nearly free of hazard. The bananas, the pineapple and—curses—the bail were all gone. Schon went back to ask Yusuf for a new one and returned with a sixteen-ounce container. I said good morning to a group of young men sitting on the side of a large boat to our left, two of them wearing brilliant white-collared dress shirts. It was a paradox that would endure over the next thousand miles: People were cleanest in the dirtiest of places. I handed out three Sportsman cigarettes; the boy first in line tried to pocket them all until I made him share.


We paddled our asses off, past exhaustion. I made a wrong turn out of Mudville, and we became snared in the Abscess, wasting an hour of time and undernourished effort. My contribution was all but limited to maintaining our course while Schon kept us moving, scraping his paddle’s long wooden handle along the side of the boat in a steady labored rhythm. The heat came, and the sun. I never changed into my long pants and collared shirt—the boat was too unstable. By the time we broke for lunch, the map said we had paddled twenty-five miles, but it felt like fifty.
The Nile opens wide at Lake Kyoga, wide enough for us to waste hours on another wrong turn, paddling through two-foot waves, zigzagging around floating islands of hyacinth, wildgrass and even shrubbery, on which white herons sat like jealous monarchs.
The only consolation for the painful monotony of chopping against the elements was the sight of others doing the same thing, though the local craft seemed lighter than ours. These were lake boats, uniformly painted a weathered green, with registration numbers on their sides. When at last we rounded the final point and officially entered the lake, we came upon groups of naked men hanging off their boats as they bathed in the shade of the woods running to the water’s edge. Two canoes approached and passed us, paddled by strong men who stared at our piles of gear.
Closer to the landing site, women and girls stood in the lake, dresses tied around their thighs, as they fetched water and washed clothes. My gaze lit upon a small girl, maybe ten or eleven, struggling to submerge a jerrican half her size; she covered her pubis with her hand as we passed. Then came the landing site. We sliced through shallow dark water, ignoring the hoots from the shore, and nosed between two canoes. “Not here. It’s not safe,” a man in a mauve shirt called out. “Put the boat over there,” he said, pointing farther down the eighty-yard beach. Schon got out without speaking and, waist deep, pushed the boat away and pulled it by the prow to the appointed spot. He looked like a refugee. As I stepped out of the boat, the man said, “I am the police. I am the OC in this village. Identify yourself and state your business here.”
The OC, or officer in charge, was tall and strapping. To his right, shorter and with a fuller belly, was Ronald, the village chairman. They engaged in a brief skirmish for possession of the two mzungus. “It is not safe to camp here,” the OC said. “You can put your tent at our barracks.”
“I will help you find a hotel,” Ronald said.
Schon looked from the cop to the politician and said to me, quietly, wearily, “I don’t want to sleep at the police station. I’m just not comfortable with that. Go with the other dude. We don’t need the police.”
I thanked the OC for his offer and said to Ronald, “Let’s take a walk.”
He led me to his office, a bare shack on a cement foundation at the far end of the landing site. “Sit down,” he said, presenting the guestbook. I squatted on a tiny bench, low and narrow as if made for small children, the only furniture in the room besides his wooden desk and chair. “I would like very much to help you so that your visit is a pleasant and safe one,” Ronald said. “As you can see, we are a very poor village. Do you want to make a contribution?”
I said I would, once our arrangements were set, and this satisfied him.
We walked down the dirt main street of this town of seven hundred people, past a sign announcing a Ugandan-German roads project, past a gray disintegrating colonial-era cinema hall and down a tight alley into a splay of bandas and wooden shacks. We reached two gray stucco buildings, each with eight doors facing a narrow courtyard: Ronald’s chosen hotel. “It is the best in Bukungu,” he said.
The proprietress, Zenya, was sitting in the dirt while a man and a woman on stools wove red extensions into her hair. Ronald said something to her in Lusoga, and she got up without a smile and opened the padlock on a room. It was an unpainted cell, seven by seven feet, with a single barred window, wooden shutters and a corrugated steel roof. With her hair half in tight braids, the other half a chaos of black-and-red frizz, she reluctantly agreed to add a second bed as long as I paid for two rooms.
Schon had pressed two boys into service, and they arrived pushing our gear in wooden wheelbarrows the locals used to porter jerricans of water into town from the lake. “Good man,” I said. “What are we paying these guys?”
“Three hundred each,” he said, about fifteen cents apiece.
I emptied my pockets and found nothing but a sweaty fold of 10,000- and 20,000-shilling notes and two coins, a 500 and a 100. At the sight of the bankroll, the older boy decided to renegotiate, and there followed a bitter, mutually incomprehensible argument, during which his younger colleague kept a hopeful silence.
Ronald intervened and ordered the boy to give me four hundred. “Now,” the chairman said. “Give him five hundred and you’ll be finished.”
“But that’s only a hundred,” I said. I pointed to the smaller kid, barefoot and in tattered slacks, whose eyes moved from me to the chairman. “And what about him?”
“He doesn’t matter. He is satisfied.”
“But it should be equal.”
“He is satisfied. Don’t worry about him.”
I tried to make it work, and failed. Ronald ordered the boys back to the lake. We gave him his “contribution,” 10,000 shillings, and I locked up our room.
We left our unsmiling innkeeper for one of the town’s three restaurants and had an exhausted meal of chicken, yellow sweet potatoes, beans, rice and two Cokes each. Prepared food had never tasted so good. Back at the hotel, we piled our gear against the door (it had no latch) and slept like dead people.
We would linger in Bukungu for three days of recovery. Schon was in especially bad shape. His hands trembled when he lit his cigarettes. His pen trembled when he scribbled in his notebook. He moved like a sloth to breakfast our first morning and, unrefreshed, moved like a sloth back to our lodgings to sleep until evening. While he snored on his foam mattress and surprisingly clean sheets, I took the room’s water jug, a towel and my shaving kit and walked past the scattered condom wrappers and empty waragi bags to the hotel’s backyard for some overdue ablutions. “Good morning,” I said to Zenya, who sat on a stool in the shade of the courtyard peeling a bucket of potatoes. She didn’t answer. I unhooked the wire latch on the outhouse door, pulled it shut behind me, unbuckled my belt and squatted over the fragrant pit. As I balanced there, trying to keep my Handi-Wipes from falling in, I watched through the flies and the gaps in the plank wall as Zenya came out the hotel’s back fence door, stepped over a trash-filled puddle and entered the bathing enclosure next door to the latrine. There she hiked her skirt, sank to her haunches and pissed like a racehorse. The stream gathered between her feet and ran under the door and into the trash puddle outside. She stood up, let down her skirt and walked back to the potatoes. I decided to hold off on bathing for another day or so.
We had seen, standing out among the fleet of wooden crescents at the landing site, a fiberglass boat with a big Evinrude engine. It belonged, Ronald said, to the marine police who patrolled Lake Kyoga. After a full day of torpor Schon and I mustered the strength to investigate. The corporal from the marine police was reading a five-month-old copy of the New Vision when we knocked on his open door. His unit was unconnected to the police camp where Schon and I had been offered camping space, and he dropped the newspaper in surprise as we walked in. I explained that we were looking for passage to Lwampanga, forty miles away, across the Nile on the western corner of Lake Kyoga. “Our boat is too small for these waters, but we’re thinking you could tow it.” The corporal squinted and pored over my map in his darkened office. He nearly sniffed it as if he were, for the first time, face-to-face with a graphical representation of his navigable world.
“Lwampanga is another district,” he said. “It will cost two hundred thousand. Fuel charges are very expensive.” He took the map to the back door to examine in the sunlight. “No Kayago, no Tomba,” he said, frowning. “This is not a very good map.” I had feared this: Our map was decades old. Sites that had been important in the 1960s were no longer notable. New towns had risen or had taken prominence.
Teasingly, I asked, “Can I see yours?”
“I don’t have a map,” he said, ignoring the bait, “but I know where everything is. I am the OC at this station. Acting OC. The OC has gone to the Darfur.”
“Gone to the what?”
“He has gone to Darfur, in Sudan.”
“Ah, I was in Darfur in February,” I said. “I saw many Ugandan police and soldiers there with the African Union.” He wasn’t interested, and was probably cursing the OC’s luck in scoring a good international stipend.
“I just can’t pay two hundred thousand,” I said.
“Good luck to you,” he replied, watching his lottery ticket blow away.
We found passage across the lake to Kayago, thirty miles away, on the northwestern shore, on a forty-five-foot vessel commanded by the owner’s fourteen-year-old son, Ashraf. The boat was painted Islamic green and declared in foot-high white letters, written across the hull, “CALL ME WHAT YOU WANT—ALLAH KNOWS MY NAME.” Instead of towing our craft, Ashraf ordered it raised out of the water and set astride his ferry’s eight-foot beam. Younger than the other crewmen, he called the shots and counted the money.
Some of the other passengers made camp in the shade of our boat as we crossed the water under open blue skies. I used the occasion to inspect the bottom and sides for cracks and found many, circling the bigger ones with a pen, including a nail hole that went clean through both layers of plank. “Hey,” I said quietly as I dug through my bag for a tube of Shoe Goo. “You notice how many Muslims we’re meeting on the water?”
“Nope.”
“I’m telling you, compared with Kampala, compared with Jinja, it seems like every other person we meet here is Muslim. What’s up with that?” I squeezed adhesive into the nail hole and moved on to some of the bigger gashes.
“Well, why do people take on one religion or another?” Schon said. “It’s usually because someone tells ’em to.”
It made sense. The Philippines didn’t become Catholic through the gentle persuasion of the Word. And most African Americans were Protestants because it was the religion of the people who’d enslaved their ancestors. But while Arabs had conducted slave raids in eastern Africa for much of the nineteenth century, they didn’t conquer Uganda. Perhaps these Ugandan Muslims’ forebears had converted in the late 1800s, when expeditionary forces from Egypt came up the Nile to claim the region for Cairo. An Egyptian soldier garrisoned in a heathen land thousands of miles from home would likely take a local wife. Even if she didn’t adopt Islam, their children would be born Muslims; it was a patrilineal religion.
Ashraf, our lanky young captain, sat reclined on a crossbeam in a red Sean Jean jersey, wide-legged blue jeans and a worn straw hat held tight to his head by a black chinstrap. He watched the horizon in laconic satisfaction. Someday, all this would be his.


From Kayago we made a short hop by ferry to Lwampanga, the last major village before Lake Kyoga and its smaller northern neighbor, Lake Kwania, tapered off and the Nile resumed. Our boat was lashed alongside for this journey and loaded with sugarcane and a foot-pedal sewing machine.
In Lwampanga we established a base near what passed for the center of town and went looking for a man and a motor. One hundred and fifty kilometers downriver was Karuma Falls, where the Nile made a steep descent into Murchison Falls National Park, a 23,600-square-mile preserve of elephants, buffalo, hippos, crocs and lions reclaiming their territory after three decades of rampant poaching. We hoped to take our boat, with a hired motor and pilot, north to Karuma and then travel southwest by bus to the city of Masindi, the sole launching point for expeditions into Murchison Park. Once there, I would rent a boat from the Wildlife Authority to take us downriver from the spectacular Murchison Falls to Wanseko on the shore of Lake Albert.
This plan was contingent on a lot of things, the first being the notion that we could find someone willing to slap their Yamaha onto our boat. We’d met a pleasant, circumspect man named Surolou Bosco on the trip from Kayago who thought he could help. “I am a pilot,” Bosco said. “I will speak with my employer.”
We were staying in a two-room suite with metal spring beds located next to a small general store and a pair of toddy shops. Schon’s room opened into our landlady’s dirt yard and the shacks where she and her extended family lived. Mine opened onto an unpainted porch where, each day, a barber set up shop with a straight razor, a mildewed shaving brush, a small gasoline generator and a pair of electric clippers.
At three minutes to six on our first morning there I woke to pounding on Schon’s door. “I am Bosco. Alo! Alo!” It didn’t sound like Bosco. Confused, I opened my own door, found no one there, and lay back down. I got up again, walked to Schon’s door, realized I was still in my underpants and went back to dress. Schon meanwhile extricated himself from the tangle of his mosquito net and answered the summons. Towering over the doorway was a man I didn’t know, and standing behind him was Bosco. I pulled a swallow from my water bottle and dragged three stools into Schon’s room.
The big man sat. “I am going to Kampala now,” he said. “I need money, two hundred thousand.” It was the same fee the marine corporal had asked in Bukungu.
“You’re going to Kampala?” I said, groggy.
“Kampala, yes. I need two hundred thousand.”
“What is your name, sir?”
“I am Lutalo Joseph. I am the owner of the boat.”
“So you want two hundred thousand. That takes us where?”
“Two hundred thousand. Bosco will take you.”
I pulled my document bag out of the raid pack. “Let’s go in here,” I said, and spread the map on my bed. I pointed out a possible route. “Lwampanga to Maiyuge. That’s two hundred thousand? It seems like a lot.”
Lutalo Joseph stared at the map in the same way the marine police corporal had, nostrils flaring at the sight of it. He held firm on two hundred thousand. I said to Schon, “So a deuce will get us to Maiyuge, near Masindi Port,” the Nile crossing where steamers had once dropped goods and people bound for the city of Masindi, twenty miles inland.
“Ah!” Joseph said. “It is near Masindi Port!”
“How much to get us to Atura, here,” I said, holding the flashlight with one hand and pointing my pen with the other. It was twice the distance to Atura, located just south of Karuma Falls, as it was to Maiyuge.
“Three hundred thousand.”
“So Bosco will take us and our canoe to Atura for three hundred thousand.”
“Yes, three hundred thousand.”
“What if I give you my boat? A trade. An exchange.”
“No change. Three hundred thousand.”
“But what if I leave my boat with you, to keep? It’s a new boat, built just last week.” There followed a long conversation between Bosco and Lutalo.
“I don’t want a boat,” he said. Was that beer on his breath? “I want money.”
“But it’s a beautiful boat,” I said. “Bosco will tell you.”
He laughed. “I need money, three hundred thousand.” He left to make a phone call and then poked his head through the door. “I have to leave and will return at nine tonight.” And then he and Bosco were gone.
“What do you think are the chances?” Schon asked.
“I don’t know.” I yawned. “Pretty slim. We’d have to pay him with a hundred-dollar bill, with the balance in local cash. I don’t even have the sense he understands where we want to go. And there’s no guarantee he won’t come back here asking for a million dollars, or for a house in Hollywood. I’ll tell you something else. All those meat dinners and Cokes are catching up with us. We’re probably down to sixty thousand shillings, maybe less. Nobody’s going to be able to change dollars in this burg. It looks like we’ll be getting by on beans and chapatis until we can find some more shillings.” I yawned again. Talking about money made me sleepy.
We never saw Lutalu again. Over the next four days we wandered over and back through Lwampanga looking for a way to continue our journey on the river. I went to see the local Beach Management Unit—each village on the water had one to regulate the fishing trade—and explained our plan to its chairman, Hassan Keto. “Find Bosco,” he said. “There are many motors in the village, but very few skilled mariners.”
“We met him,” I said. “Bosco is good. Bosco is serious.”
“He is more than serious,” Keto said.
“His employer appears to be serious about different things,” I said, and Keto nodded.
We were sitting on lawn chairs under a big shade tree drinking black sweet tea. Keto and his colleagues gathered for a sidebar and then he turned back to us. “You can leave your boat here and we will take care of it for you. You can take it when you come back.”
“But we’re not coming back.”
“We will care for it while you’re gone.”
Schon and I walked glumly back into town, past the village square—an intersection of dirt roads—past our hotel and the gas station with its two hand-cranked pumps, to our favorite restaurant. “The thing is,” Schon said, “I like those guys. It’s too bad they’re trying to take our boat.”
That night I got a call on my cell phone from Lutalo Joseph. The price to Maiyuge was now 400,000 shillings, he said, about $170. “Joseph,” I said, “I’ll walk to Maiyuge before I pay four hundred thousand.” Every dime counted: There wasn’t an ATM or a credit card machine for the next two thousand miles; our purse was finite. There would be no motor excursion down the river. It was time to cut our dear boat loose.
The next day Schon and I walked the length of Lwampanga town looking for a buyer, ignoring the children as they screamed “mzungu!” at the sight of us. “You know, I can’t help but feel a little miffed when they shout that,” Schon said. For lunch we sat at the crossroads drinking Fantas and smoking and watched big trucks rumble into town to pick up loads of iced fish for market. The village was a collection point for fresh tilapia. Ice came up from Kampala in giant plastic containers. Fish were caught in the lake, packed and shipped out. But the trucks, I noticed, were heading west out of the village, toward the relatively poor Masindi, not south to Kampala, the country’s biggest city and its biggest market for food and produce.
This detail vexed me nearly as much as the problem of the boat. As Schon and I watched another lorry drive into town from the landing site and turn onto the western road, I grabbed a thin gray-haired man as he walked past in three-quarter pants, an oversized Milwaukee Brewers T-shirt and flip-flops. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. He stopped and looked up from me to Schon with curiosity and maybe a pinch of fear in his watery eyes, the dark brown irises waning to blue. “I’m sorry to bother you, but do you know where those trucks are going?”
“They go to Sudan,” he said, and added, “They take fish.”
“To Sudan?”
“To Gulu, and then to Sudan, to Juba,” he answered. “You are here to buy fish?”
“God, no,” I said. “Sudan. That’s odd.”
“There is money in the Sudan now. That is what people say. They buy fish. And vegetables.” I had heard complaints in Kampala that food prices had more than doubled. Juba, newly infused with foreign aid dollars, appeared to be vacuuming up Uganda’s produce.
“Are you a fisherman?” I asked our informant.
He lowered his eyes, bashful. “I am a painter. A housepainter. I am Albino.” Albino was nearing fifty and looked past sixty. I didn’t imagine there was much work for a housepainter in Lwampanga, or any other village in rural Uganda. We invited him for tea and he declined and carried on to the east side of town.


There wasn’t much in the way of consumer goods in Lwampanga, or in any of the other tiny towns we lit upon. The little wood-and-brick shops sold two varieties of dried beans, cassava flour, maize flour, strips of rubber and tin for sealing boat joints, nylon rope and sometimes some monofilament netting. Also soda, and candy bars, and lots of laundry detergent, as well as shoe polish, toothpaste and hair extensions. There were two sizes of paraffin lamps, both fashioned from tin oil cans, that used clothesline for a wick. One of these, a tiny lamp the size of an inkwell, was blown from my windowsill onto the porch early one morning as I slept. It was gone by eight when I went to retrieve it.
Over four eternal days in Lwampanga we were repeatedly mistaken for missionaries (“because most of your tribe, when they come here, it is to preach God’s word”) and for fish buyers (“because most whites, when they come here, it is to buy fish”), but no one seemed to take us seriously as boat sellers. There was no mystery why: The banks of the lake were crowded with boats, many of them rotting in the muck. Our craft, a twenty-foot river canoe, was insufficient to its location. The local boats were bigger, more seaworthy, and could hold larger crews and more fish. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to abandon our trusty launch. “I paid nearly three hundred dollars. The wood is worth at least a hundred. Not that I want her cannibalized.”
“Seems wrong to ditch it,” Schon said. “Feels like we’d be losing and someone else would be winning. I don’t know who that is, that’s just how it feels. So I’ve been thinking: Why don’t we give it to the poorest f*cker in town, who we both just happen to know?” That night, by flashlight and candle, Schon wrote out in block letters a fake bill of sale that transferred ownership of our boat to Albino for the princely sum of 1,000 shillings and we both signed it.
We walked in dusk and light rain to the “nice” section of town, stopping to chat with Hassan and the others at the Beach Management Unit. Fifty yards later we were on the outskirts. I asked a man walking by for help, and he led us two hundred yards farther outside town and then down a path to a settlement of twig huts. Clouds were moving in, dark clouds that blotted out the moonlight. “Wait,” he said. The man pulled a wooden chair over and ran to a nearby hut to bring another. “Sit.” He then spoke through the door of the nearest hut and Albino came out blinking in the dark.
“Albino,” I said. “Schon and I are leaving early tomorrow, and we can’t bring our boat with us. Would you like to have it? It’s smaller than the lake boats, but I’m sure you can use it somehow. It would be our pleasure for you to have it.”
He said the clearest words of our short acquaintanceship: “Yes, please.”
Schon presented the bill of sale. “It says a thousand but that’s fake.” Albino nodded and smiled. We told him where the boat was beached and he nodded as if he already knew.
Pats of heavy rain started cratering the dirt. We took a few photos and did a round of handshakes and made a quick exit. As Schon and I fumbled down the dirt path, Albino and our guide broke into happy congratulatory laughter. Schon smiled. “Let’s hope this one goes unpunished, at least for the next twelve hours.”
We packed and after a fitful sleep I got up at four-thirty and walked out the back door, past the chicken coops and the padlocked latrine, to piss against a tree bracketed by two snoring black hogs. I tiptoed back through the mud, mindful of waking the swine, and went to the crossroads to secure us seats on the morning taxi out of town, the first in a chain of minibuses that would take us to Karuma. Two Hiace taxis were parked against a shop at the edge of the square, but there was no sign of life. I smoked a couple cigarettes and watched the overbearing congregation of stars and the light of a high-flying jet. It must be making for Nairobi, I thought, or maybe Johannesburg. But the blinking plane didn’t seem to advance. It moved but it did not progress. Was I misseeing? I tried to measure the aircraft’s progress against another star, and another, and another. It was, I realized, a satellite in geostationary orbit, forever falling behind and catching up to its assigned position in the heavens.


The Karuma Falls sent the Nile crashing over fifteen feet of rock, a noisy if humdrum descent compared with the great falls of Africa, so unspectacular that the British explorer Hannington Speke—the first to declare Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile—didn’t even bother to name it for one of his illustrious countrymen. Still, the eternal turbulence of the water sluicing through its ravine had a hypnotic quality and the memory of our fearful dousing that first day on the Nile was still fresh. From here, the river flowed into Murchison Falls National Park, where Cam McLeay’s team had been ambushed by the Lord’s Resistance Army the previous year. The power of that moving water hadn’t escaped the government’s notice. There were plans to build another hydroelectric dam at Karuma now that security had returned. We watched the Nile rumble for half an hour and then picked up our bags and hiked the two-mile trail back through fields and bush to the road.
Karuma town was nothing more than a strip of shops and vendors where buses and mutatus traded passengers. The falls still roaring in our ears, we walked to a restaurant and fell into conversation with Ali, the proprietor, over a lean piece of chicken, a chapati and black tea served in deep red melmac mugs that read in familiar white script, “Coca-Cola, Vladivostok Bottling Co.”
Ali said he was from Arua near the Congo border. Arua had boomed during the 1990s, when Uganda’s army invaded its chaotic western neighbor and looted untold millions in timber and diamonds—this while the LRA was wreaking havoc on Uganda’s north. “I came here fifteen years ago,” Ali said. “Karuma was nothing then.” Schon raised his eyebrows at “then.” Ali had had four wives and sixteen children, not counting the six who died as youngsters. “I’m so sorry,” I said, wincing at the magnitude of his loss.
“It was a long time ago,” he said, puzzled by my concern. “Are you married?” he asked. “How long?”
Six years, no children, I told him, adding, “But that will probably change next year.”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
“How do you know it will change? It is on God’s hands.”
“Well, some practices will start and others will stop,” I said.
He gasped. “It’s wrong. You are killing the eggs, the sperm.”
“You know,” I said, “the female body ejects its egg every month.”
“Yes,” he said, gripping the table’s edge, “but the sperm! They must move freely. You mustn’t hold them back. It’s murder!”


We crept our way west in a series of minibus taxis. At Masindi I received a depressing call from the Wildlife Authority: The Nile was low inside Murchison Park; their boat was grounded. Transport into Murchison would cost two hundred dollars, with no guarantee we could leave by water. I scratched the park off my itinerary, and we kept moving overland through Biso, Bulisa, Wanseko. These rides ranged from cramped to apocalyptically, dangerously uncomfortable. During one six-hour segment, Schon and I were packed with twenty-nine other people in a minivan with a maximum capacity of sixteen. “We are human beings!” an aggrieved man shouted as passengers twenty-six and twenty-seven were stuffed aboard by the driver and his two helpers. We banged along the road, the sweltering van’s sliding windows—closed for the dust—rattling in their tracks. Schon and I were seated over the rear axle, packs on our laps, a howling infant to my left, her mother using one arm to brace against the seat in front of her while the hungry baby tried to nurse and was thrown off the breast with each new impact.
Still, the countryside was beautiful. “All the landlocked amenities,” Schon marveled. “Mountains, hills, plains, savanna, rivers, forest. Real nice. The bigger farms are pretty too, pretty as any I’ve seen. Even the villages are cute—from a distance.”
Two days after leaving Karuma, riding almost comfortably in the front of a Hiace van, we left the plateau of central Uganda and descended into the Western Rift Valley. Here the sun felt kinder, the air smelled cooler and soon the steely surface of Lake Albert came into view with the Blue Mountains of the Congo rising up on the other side.
We crossed Lake Albert in a wooden boat—the government-operated diesel ferry was grounded in its berth due to the low water level—and were stopped by Michael, an officer from the police Special Branch, when we stepped onto the beach at Panyimur. The village was just miles from the Congo border, and Ugandan and Congolese troops had recently skirmished in a growing dispute over who owned the oil that had recently been discovered under the lake. The secret policeman, satisfied that we were neither geologists nor mercenaries in the pay of Kinshasa, found us a hotel and agreed to look for boats that might be heading north toward Sudan. “It is unlikely,” Michael said, “extremely unlikely that I will succeed.”
We spent the night at the Marine Boys guesthouse in Panyimur, sweating on spent foam mattresses while a crowd of more than a hundred gathered on rows of benches in the hotel courtyard. The front half of the courtyard watched Congolese music videos on a generator-powered television. The other half of the audience watched a qualifying match for the European Cup. Both groups cheered with gusto for most of the night. Sometime around eleven our door opened and Michael entered without knocking, joined by Apolo and Henry, two officers from Uganda’s Internal Security Organization. These domestic spies couldn’t find us a boat—“No one is traveling as you wish to travel,” Michael said—but they had a solution. “Henry here will drive you tomorrow to Pakwach,” Apolo said. “There you will take a bus to Moyo.”
“At Moyo you will take a mutatu to Panjala,” Henry said. “From Panjala boats go to Nimule and Sudan.” We chatted for a few minutes and then they all left. No one asked for a dime.
“Those guys are a big help,” Schon said as he pulled his waistband away from his belly and poured a healthy dose of Gold Bond powder into his shorts. “Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I still felt like they were checking us out, waiting for one of us to screw up and reveal our secret plan.” The night went on forever, mosquitoes buzzing my ears, impervious to my slaps. At five in the morning the staff started cleaning up. They bellowed at one another and noisily stacked the wooden benches. Cocks were crowing, dogs were barking and somewhere in the courtyard a baby coughed and coughed and wailed in discomfort and fear and never was a soothing voice heard.
A couple hours later we loaded our gear into Henry’s Toyota station wagon and made the drive north to Pakwach. “I monitor everything,” Henry said, “everything related to internal security—economic, political, criminal. If local officials are not doing their job, if there is corruption, I report that too. Whatever can lead to instability or revolt.” The Lord’s Resistance Army wasn’t a factor in northwest Uganda, but the region was home to an alphabet soup of tiny rebel groups based in the Congo.
“Do you read the Red Pepper?” I asked. The papers that week had been aflame with the story of a prominent evangelical pastor who had divorced his wife after a public tribunal in which she confessed to carrying on an affair with a lowly street vendor. “I would have thought twice if she had committed adultery with tycoons in Kampala,” the pastor had told Uganda’s press corps, “but not a chapati baker. I would have appreciated that maybe she was tempted by money.”
“The Red Pepper?” Henry said, swerving around a motorbike. “Not frequently.”
“Because I was just wondering—what’s their batting average? What percentage of their intel stories are actually accurate?”
“In my opinion, forty percent,” he said. “It is best not to take the Ugandan newspapers too seriously.” That was easy for him to say. The Internal Security Organization, the military and the police and spy agencies had worked closely with the president’s campaign to ensure the boss’s reelection. They ran secret jails inside Kampala stocked with dozens of political prisoners. Of course he wasn’t fond of newspapers.


Delivered to Pakwach by the friendly spy, we bused to Arua and spent the night in a hotel where we washed our clothes in the sink, ate omelets in a proper restaurant and were awakened at three in the morning by amplified chanting and drums banging outside our window. A parade was wending its way through the city’s red mud streets. We walked onto our balcony and tried to track the group as it snaked through Arua’s small colonial-era downtown. Fattened by the war in the Congo, the city of twenty-nine thousand was now booming as a base for aid agencies working in eastern Congo and the remote southeast of Sudan—though here, as in the rest of Uganda, food prices were on the rise. “A wedding?” Schon said of the racket. “Isn’t it kind of early?”
We smoked in the morning air and listened to the happy clamor and in time I was able to make out that the leader, a gray-bearded black man wearing a short black fez and carrying a bullhorn, was shouting in Arabic. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan had begun. The parade was meant to wake stragglers so they might have a last meal before the sun rose.
In the morning, unrested, we caught a minivan to Moyo, thirty-six hours of hard driving and two breakdowns that left us at a sleepy administrative center just a few miles from the Sudanese border. Moyo’s taxis congregated outside a circular park, gone now to dirt and a single defiant tree. It was the first planned attempt at civic beauty we had seen since leaving Jinja. Schon, slouched and puffy-eyed, looked like a vagabond. But I had a surprise waiting. “Take care of the bags, I gotta do something,” I said, and stepped away from the throngs to make a phone call. When I returned, Schon was fending off taxi offers, trying to keep would-be porters from grabbing our baggage.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Just hold on,” I said.
Ten minutes later a clean, white and comparably massive Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up to the park, its polished chrome bumper and door handles shining like parts of an alien machine. I waved to the driver and he got out with a broad smile. “See that?” I told Schon. “That’s our ride.”
“You are shitting me.”
Away from the taxi stand the town, a former link in Uganda’s chain of cotton-growing centers, was broad and pretty, the most kept I’d seen in Uganda. Tall old trees—some crowned by swarms of tiny bats—shaded dozens of stately administrative buildings, including a 150-bed public hospital. The driver turned from the hard clay road onto a paved drive and dropped us at the door of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, where we met our benefactor.
Tarek Muftic, the local UNHCR representative, had agreed through the organization’s spokesman in Kampala to put us up. Tens of thousands of Sudanese had taken refuge in Uganda during the civil war. Now the agency was slowly moving them back—some after more than a decade away—to villages that lacked many of the conveniences of a well-run, internationally funded camp. Once the muddy tracks of southern Sudan dried out, trucks would again be transporting refugees to their villages of distant memory. “The first thing we do is take the community leaders back to see the location—a ‘go-see,’ we call it,” Tarek said. “They tell the camp what they’ve seen, what it’s lacking, and then they decide whether to return.”
A career UNHCR man from Bosnia, Tarek was a former refugee himself, though he now lived in relative splendor in a two-bedroom house with a big yard, a diesel generator and satellite television. He had a slightly distracted air, with a buildup of hard wax in his ears that caused him to miss half of what was said in conversation and to keep his television and car radio on at blistering volumes. Olive oil—doctor’s orders—seeped from his ears and down his jawline. Tarek’s guestroom was clean and quiet, and his housekeeper washed and pressed our laundry, while his cook prepared us pleasant meals. Two days of such luxury and we were strong again.