“Hello, ma’am! Hello, sir. Hello, children,” they say to us, smiling. The affable women return to their food and continue singing as they chop.
People come and go; cross breezes waft through open windows. Children wave at ours, then run freely through the front and backyards. A man works from his laptop on a couch; a woman carries in a laundry basket and starts folding clothes at the dining table; a few twentysomethings chat on cushioned swinging settees in the courtyard. A young guy is asleep on a patio chair, book open on his chest. People seem as if they’re home.
Dru finds us. “Hey, would you guys like a tour of the work?”
Their organization works to eradicate the relatively simple health problem of jiggers, a sand flea that burrows in rural dwellers’ feet. Sterilized safety pins help dig fleas out of skin, and shoes made from old tires and jeans protect them afterward.
We’re introduced to the local men who cut soles from discarded tires, the men and women who sew cuts of denim donated by North Americans and Europeans to make the tops of shoes. Machines whir; power tools clatter; voices laugh and chatter. We say hello, and their work stops for a minute so they can shake our hands, welcome us to Jinja, thank us for visiting. We meet the house handyman, and I notice he’s wearing a T-shirt from an organization run by friends of ours in Iraq. A teenage boy is showing our kids the ramshackle wooden play structure in the front yard while two monkeys swing from trees above them. The house dog runs laps around the house, backyard to front. We’re asked our impression of Uganda. We tell them we’re in love.
Dinner is ready, and we come in for a communal dinner around the table. This house is headquarters for making thousands of shoes, but it’s also a waiting room for parents in queue for Ugandan adoptions. Three families are here with their new children, waiting for their date when a judge will give them an official okay to head back to the States as the new parents of Ugandan babies. The young foreigners here are interns, college students spending a semester to learn, help, grow. We toast, break bread.
After dinner, our kids dig out board games in the living room. We sip tea with other adults in the courtyard and watch the pink sky fade to navy. We listen to stories about adoption and trips to the Ugandan countryside to remove jiggers from feet. We share our stories of travel mishaps and working from the road. We all talk about raising kids.
We’re strangers, but this is community.
The next morning, the five of us take Joy and Dave’s van to a Jinja neighborhood that sits on muddy banks, a slum along the Nile where people live in cobbled-together houses on muddy streets and work mostly as fishermen. We tumble through the marshy roads and roll down our windows. Pop music blares out of blown speakers, chickens scurry through boggy pothole-lakes as we pass, and vendors sell eggs on overturned milk crates. No one pays us notice. We are here at Dru’s recommendation.
Kyle slows down by a young man. “Hello—I’m looking for Joel. Do you know him?”
The guy nods, points ahead. “He should be up over there, by the water. Would you like me to run ahead and tell him you’re looking for him?”
“Well—sure, thanks,” Kyle replies. The young man runs ahead while we finish plodding through the mud and find a spot to park.
A few minutes pass, and a man walks up to our window. He’s in his midthirties, about our age, and wears a smartly pressed blue-and-white checked oxford shirt with red pants. His hems are rolled up to avoid mud.
“Hello. I am Joel,” he says and shakes Kyle’s hand. “I hear that you are looking for me?”
Kyle explains we are friends of Dru and that we’ve heard he gives the best tour of the Nile River in Jinja.
“Oh yes, of course! I do. Would you like one?” Joel asks. We nod eagerly.
“Let me get my boat ready. Five minutes. I will meet you down there, by the water.” He points, then rushes off to make preparations.
We tiptoe around the chickens and head to the riverbank, where Joel is now waiting with life jackets. “Welcome to the Nile!” he says with grandeur. “I hope you enjoy your tour.” His skipper, Nate, revs up the motor and we wobble into his low, narrow fishing boat with a plastic tarp canopy. Tate white-knuckles the sides while her brothers sway back and forth on purpose.
Official Nile tours cost a family our size about two hundred dollars, but Joel says he’ll tell us everything he knows for forty. “I don’t know anyone who knows the history and biology of the Nile more than Joel,” Dru assured us before we left.
We scud along Nile waves in the ramshackle fishing boat while Joel points at different birds, gives us their names: white-breasted cormorant, little egret, great pelican, ibis. He knows the name and story of every bird that perches in passing riverbank trees. He knows why currents sway this way and that, and he knows why farmers with cleared fields along the river grow their particular crops in this particular time of year.
Tate asks, “What kind of tiny bird is that? Some sort of woodpecker?”
“No, that’s a giant kingfisher,” Joel answers. The bird’s black head and beak look oversized on top of his brown breast and spotted body. “They mostly eat crab, but they use their beaks to remove the carapace first. They like fish, too, and they eat them headfirst.”
Nate slows the motor, and the boat quiets to a hum. We’ve stopped at a spot where water bubbles to the surface from below, where there’s a convergence of ripples collecting at a bent metal sign, waving with the water flow. A group of East Asian men in suits have left their boat and are huddled together on a small grassy island next to the sign for a photo.
“Source of the Nile,” Joel explains. “It’s where Lake Victoria flows out and begins the Nile.” Our boat skims to the sign. It reads:
THE SOURCE OF R. NILE
JINJA
WORLD’S LONGEST RIVER.1
While we wait our turn for a photo, I imagine this same water emptying in the Mediterranean, 4,258 miles north of us in Egypt.
Two hours later, Joel’s boat returns us to shore sunburned, exhausted, and euphoric. “Thank you so much for taking your children to the Nile,” Joel says to me, giving me a hand as I step out. “They ask good questions, and I am glad they’re here to see it.”