“Dave will be home from work soon, so I’ll start dinner and you can keep me company,” Joy says. Kyle settles onto a couch and is soon catnapping while I help Joy slice potatoes. Finn and Reed scurry past the kitchen window; then Joy’s twin boys follow seconds later with Nerf guns. No sound from the girls upstairs.
Half an hour later, Dave walks through the front door, so I wake up Kyle and the four of us head to the wraparound porch. Joy opens a bottle of wine and pours it into glasses.
“From South Africa,” she says. “It’s fabulous.” I sip tart hints of grapes, black cherry, tobacco, the salt of the ocean. The yard shimmers jade and the sky shifts from blue to orange. Boys dog pile on one another, giggling.
“How are you guys adjusting to life here?” I ask. They’ve lived in Uganda less than a year. Previously, Dave’s job as a pilot stationed them five thousand miles southeast, on an island in Indonesia, and they’d lived there for eight years.
“Indonesia still feels like home,” Joy admits. “And it probably will for a while. I mean, we were there a long time. It’s the place our kids know more than anywhere else.”
“It’ll probably take a while to love it here, eh?” I say, nodding. Expats understand that it often takes time to warm up to a new place after the initial honeymoon period.
“Actually,” Joy says, “I already love Uganda.”
The sun shifts below a tree and I squint. Pink stripes paint the sky.
“In these eight months, I’ve simply chosen to love it,” she explains, shrugging. “I don’t think it’s wonderful, and I really miss Indonesia and Oregon. But there’s a lot to love about Uganda, so that’s the stuff I’m choosing to focus on.”
We sip our wine, and I think about how terrible I am at this. I’ve lived in twenty-two houses and five different cities, and I always, always dwell first on the negative. My cynicism broods over what’s missing, why a new home fails to measure up to the one previous. I bellyache about the weather, the traffic, the restaurants; I’m a knee-jerk Eeyore until convinced otherwise.
Joy assures me right away she’s not perfect at this, that there is a laundry list of things that make life hard here. “The eggs here have no nutritional value to them—crack an egg and you’ll see what I mean. The yolks are gray. The roads are terrible. Terrible. Potholes are flat-out canyons in the road. And if you get pulled over, get ready to pay a bribe, since you’re a foreigner. Oh, and mosquitoes—you have to watch out for them like the plague. Literally. Well, malaria at least.”
I make a mental note: Find a pharmacy; buy a malaria kit.
“But man, this red soil . . . it gets under your skin. I promise you, you’ll be hard-pressed to find people as friendly as they are here in this part of Africa. People love people here. Relationships are everything. And avocados are huge; they’re like a dime each.”
The sun falls, and we eat dinner on the porch, fill ourselves with guacamole, and let the kids play in the dark. Then we say good night, and the five of us head to our guesthouse down the street in Joy and Dave’s safari van, tires tumbling over potholes. We shower off red Ugandan dust, double-check that mosquito nets cover the length of our beds to the floor, and crank pedestal fans on high. Early the next morning, I meander through the guesthouse’s garden and find an avocado tree. Its fruit weights down the branches, big as eggplants.
We drive to Jinja, a town eighty miles east of Kampala and known for its status as home of the Nile River’s source. Dave and Joy let us borrow their van for a few days, so Kyle braves gargantuan potholes and muddy-red roads, inching to Jinja at a snail’s pace with throngs of vehicles and pedestrians. Motorbikes weave around traffic with fifty empty plastic jugs piled high and strung together on their backs. Monkeys play Frogger across the road, and we swerve every twenty feet to avoid the road’s crevasses. We’re inching through a traffic jam, and a uniformed man waves us over.
“Hello, sir,” he says as Kyle rolls down the window.
“Hello, Ssebo,” Kyle answers, as Joy taught us to do.
“It seems you were going a little too fast,” the officer says with a smile.
“Really? I didn’t think so.”
“Oh yes, sir,” he answers politely. “It’s okay; it happens sometimes.” I look away from the passenger seat and feel heat rise from my neck.
Kyle nonchalantly shuffles in his seat and digs for his wallet.
“Here in Uganda, this sort of violation only costs you thirty dollars.”
Kyle pilfers through his wallet, pulls out a twenty. “How about this?”
“Okay, sir, that is plenty. I can take that, no problem.” Kyle hands it over, and the officer stuffs it in his breast pocket.
“Have a good day, Ssebo.” Kyle smiles as he rolls up his window.
“Oh yes, you too, sir,” the man says, and waves us onward. I seethe in my seat, wait for the irritation to flow through me before I talk again.
“That sort of stuff makes me crazy,” I say.
“I know it does,” Kyle says graciously. He is unfazed in these situations, almost relaxed. It was one of the first things I noticed when I met him in Kosovo.
The remainder of our drive to Jinja is beautiful. Red soil gives birth to lush trees and fields of swaying crops, and as we cross the Nile, the sun dips, smears the sky in pinks and oranges. Women walk by balancing buckets on their heads, and they wear dresses in flamboyant floral patterns and skirts in vivid reds, greens, purples, corals. Produce stands dot the road’s shoulders next to concrete houses painted in vivid turquoise and yellow. Several houses and storefronts are painted with a sponsored brand’s logo; I see a home brought to us by Pampers and a local bank proudly presented by Mitsubishi. Uganda is a country of colors.
Smaller-town Jinja is more tranquil than the bedlam of Kampala, about a quarter of its size and considerably greener, grassier. Its economy is built on tourism because of the Nile, but it’s also home to several nonprofits, and an acquaintance’s organization, Sole Hope, is one of these. Their headquarters and guesthouse are down a suburban road, which will be our home for the next few days. We ring the bell at the gate, and someone buzzes us in. Kyle parks the van under an awning by the front door.
“Hello, sir. Hello, ma’am! Welcome!” says an elderly gentlemen as we open the van door.
Two younger men greet us and take our bags to our rooms, and the kids squeal at the sight of triple bunk beds. The house is open-air, old-world Mediterranean style with rooms dotted around a central courtyard.
Asher, the American woman who founded Sole Hope with Dru, her husband, gives us a tour of the house. “Here’s the kitchen,” she says, and we enter a small room where two local women are cooking.
“You’re welcome to come in here anytime to make breakfast or lunch—feel free to use any of the groceries. But let these ladies do their magic for dinner. Except for Sundays, we all eat a family meal together.”