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Horrendous Wisconsin winter has given way to rapturous spring, which in turn heralds a glorious summer. I'm moving downtown next week, to a sick flat six blocks from the Capitol. Can't wait.
2006 has been a great year so far. In May, I'm going back to Seattle; in June, I'm going to Denver and to Tennessee for Bonnaroo; and I'm hoping to make it to Montreal for the 4th of July (not very patriotic, but whatevs). The highlight of the year thus far was definitely my two-week trip to Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda in March, so I'll just transcribe some of my scribblings from that excursion.
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ON MONDAY I was shuttling frantically between conference calls and meetings for 11 hours. On Tuesday, I was on a plane winging back to East Africa. I took the familiar route, touching down amid the flat, plain countryside of the Benelux, crossing the snowy German heartland into the Alps, skirting the Italian peninsula and then overtaking the Technicolor collision of Sicily and the Mediterranean. Finally, the ceaseless dusty expanse of Sudan as the went down, then the lights of Nairobi, looking like a fire on the savannah.
The taxi driver from the airport told me about his family and the latest from the Kenyan political circus, and I crashed for the night at a campsite on Upper Hill where the Luo staff remembered me from 2004 as 'Jawuoth'. The next morning, I caught the first bus to Arusha to visit my friend Godfrey, who is studying at a forestry institute outside the town. On the bus, I sat next to a shoeless Maasai boy, who asked me at the border to fill out his immigration card. The form asked for occupation, so I asked him what he did, and he replied in English with a big Donald Trump smile, "Biz-e-ness." His goatherder's attire and illiteracy made me skeptical, until later during the ride he busted an insanely gigantic wad of Kenyan 1,000/= notes out of his robe and thumbed absently through them. I was reminded that in East Africa, nothing is what it seems.
I found Godfrey well in Arusha. The institute was located in the foothills of Mt. Meru, at the end of a long, shady dirt road lined with fragrant flowering trees. We toured the area, which is like a microcosm of the state of East African forests - rampant clear-cutting for cultivation and charcoal, serious erosion with gullies forming everywhere, unstoppable spreading of exotic species, commercial tree plantations supplanting wilderness. A few ancient fig trees remained, like sentinels abandoned by the landscape, sheltering garrulous flocks of ibises and hawks.
We had huge slabs of ugali in the institute's mess hall, and I met just about everyone there, including the headmaster, the professors, the cooks and an old drunk who often wandered onto the institute grounds from his neighboring shamba. Eventually, we had to say our goodbyes, but Godfrey was doing well. He has now bought a computer and is using it for his research. Many of the students at the institute were more interested in commercial forestry, and their research principally concerned the search for ever-higher yielding forestry products. Godfrey's interests lie more in ecosystem management and conservation, and when he finishes his studies, he'll go back to Amani, the gorgeous nature reserve adjacent to his village. I envy him.
After parting with Godfrey and his excellent schoolmates, I passed back through Nairobi and headed straight on to Kampala. I had made some arrangements on my first day in Nairobi to secure a gorilla-trekking permit, but in East Africa such things are better done face-to-face. When I called to ask about the availability of permits, the placidly surly bureaucrat on the Ugandan end of the line said that permits had to be purchased in person from the Ugandan Wildlife Authority offices on the outskirts of Kampala. I tried to explain that I didn't want to come to Kampala unless I was certain I'd get a permit, but I was told no promises could me made. Only 24 permits are sold per day, eight permits for each of three groups of gorillas that are sufficiently habituated to human contact as to be reasonably unlikely to kill intrusive tourists. The UGA bureaucrat told me she would do what she could, but I had better come to Kampala on the double. Taking a gamble, I boarded a night-bus to Kampala and arrived the next afternoon.
I love Kampala. Let me not create the impression that it's not filthy, chaotic, congested, polluted, crime-ridden, and crushingly poor. But at the same time, it feels like a giant, perpetually bumpin' neighborhood. Particularly compared to Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the city is lush. Pawpaw trees, banana trees, and - best of all - jackfruit trees abound everywhere, and paint the sevem hills over which the city spreads a rich green hue.
Walking through the periurban areas feels less like the Hieronymous Bosch masterpiece of the Nairobi slums, and more like a gigantic village. Like Mombasa, the city has grown into its outlying villages; rather than spawning them, it's just stitched them together into a jovial tumult of humanity. I got to speak a lot of Kiswahili in Uganda, mainly because the people I hung out with had a lot of family and friends from eastern Congo, where Kiswahili is apparently widely spoken. They had a gorgeous, free, French-fried way of speaking, and I miss it painfully.
Kampala is a mishmash of everything. It houses the administrative centre of the Luganda kingdom; it was the terminus of the British East African railway originating in Mombasa; it was home to a large and prosperous South Asian community until their expulsion by Idi Amin in the seventies; they've started to come back now, and the Hindu and Bahai structures that dot the town appear to be in better shape. Muammar Gaddafi is sponsoring the construction of a mammoth 'national mosque' atop one of the city's hills. It's now the push-off point from East Africa to Juba, the booming anchor town of southern Sudan.
My favorite person I met in Kampala was Francis, a woodcarver I met when I first came to town. I'm pretty sure he was gay - he had too many platonic girlfriends, was too touched by the sight of street kittens and baby goats, and was too fond of reminding me that he liked to wear women's pants because they "suited" him better. Being a Ugandan, though, means being gay is pretty much not an option -- although it looks like this is very slowly changing.
Like Godfrey, it wasn't the commercial aspects of his field that interested Francis. Ninety nine percent of the woodcarvings that you see in East Africa are generic schlock churned out for tourist mass consumption. But Francis used woodcarving as a way to comment on the challenges facing Ugandan society. Although the economy is booming and the country is politically stable (albeit under the 20-year reign of a former rebel commander), Uganda still has serious problems. Chief among them is a long-simmering civil war in the north, notorious even among African civil conflicts for the horrific atrocities committed against civilians. Missing limbs, missing ears, and missing noses are not an extraordinary sight in areas of Kampala peopled by migrant northerners. Young boys are kidnapped and forced to fights for the rebels; young girls are kidnapped and forced to serve as wives to older, more senior rebel 'officers.' Francis' carvings highlight the victims of this war, neglected by both prosperous southern Ugandans and by the international community. (The International Court of Justice's recent warrant for th arrest of the northern rebel leader, Joseph Kony, is all bark and no bite. Kony slips between eastern Congo, northern Uganda, and southern Sudan, ever beyond the reach of the meager UN presence in the region.)
Maybe Francis' most devastating piece was a Last Supper-style tableau of marabou storks (huge scavenger birds common in Kampala) and orphaned street children, sharing a dinner table of roadside garbage. Everywhere I went in East Africa, I continued to encounter children discarded by society, orphans of war and of AIDS treated like disposable life, left to beg on the streets and relieve their suffering by holding a bottle of glue in their mouths and continually inhaling all day. We took long walks in the evenings as the sun went down - to a mega-church recently built with donated funds from the USA, to the Kabaka's palace grounds and artificial lake, to the old Catholic basilica atop one of the nearby hills - and whenever we ran into street kids, Francis would pull the glue bottle out of those kids' mouths and plead and pray for them. They usually just shuffled on, their decimated minds incapable of recognizing and valuing sympathy, looking only for an escape from hunger. Their plight indicts us all.
I came to Kenya at a time of heated debated over proposed changes to the country's penal code, including a repeal of the section of which officially criminalizes homosexuality. Keya has extensive and lucrative contacts with conservative evangelical organizations from th US, and coincidentally, you hear the exact same rhetoric denouncing homosexuality that you hear in the US. I wish that organizations like the Kenyan Parents Caucus and their foreign donors would spend as much time, money and energy improving the lot of orphans as they do condemning homosexuality. Just a suggestion - don't invoke your sterling family values if you're willing to walk past scores of homeless glue-sniffing children and do nothing about their situation.
Anyway, when I remember Kampala, I remember people like Francis. He introduced me to his incredible family - his newly married brother Barnabas, who is an evangelical preacher; his strong, wise and hilarious sister, a single mother and a computer sales representative; his quick-to-laugh Congolese parents and fellow carvers. The main mode of transportation in Kampala is the motorcycle taxi, and I met dozens of Kampalans riding on the back of their motorcycles, making easy conversation as we ducked in and out of matatu traffic, breaking every traffic law on the Ugandan books and defying the better judgment of any half-sober observer but getting around quickly with all-natural air-conditioning and an incredible view of the city. I had no guile in Kampala, and I didn't really need it. Everyone was so friendly, so accommodating, and so curious, it was a breeze having a good time.
So I went to the UWA offices, got my permit, and took the 14-hour bus trip to southwestern Uganda, right by the Congolese and Rwandan borders. The next morning, I went to submit my papers to the main registration office at about 7AM as directed, then I went to a second registration banda. Then I waited. Around 9:30, I set out with a guide, an Australian couple, a German couple, and about a half-dozen piece-toting Ugandan troops into the mountainous Afromontane forest. We started by hiking through the banana farms that border the park, but soon we were negotiating the heavy foliage of the justly named Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. After about an hour, it was evident (mostly by smell) that we were following a path recently cleared by a large group of gorillas. As we got closer to them, we left everything but our cameras in a clearing with the guards, and proceeded further. I caught a glimpse of a silverback ambling through the foliage, and I don't think anything I've ever experienced rivals that sense of wonder. We kept tracking them into the forest and soon caught up with the whole group - gregarious youth playing in the trees, adolescents chewing on twigs and wild custard apples, and the huge, 250kg alpha male reclining majestically against a tree. Here, in this ecosystem largely wiped out by human activity, where senseless conflict has unnecessarily claimed so many lives, these peaceful and beautiful creatures with whom we share so much are still there, subsisting on the bounty of the earth, playing with their young, testifying to the fall of man.
But the gorillas' company was expensive. The management of the park is trying to strike a balance between harnessing the tourism potential of the forest to generate revenue, and minimizing the disruptions to the gorillas and their habitat. So they charge $360 per person for a gorilla trekking permit, which entitles you to one hour of contact with the gorillas once you've met up with them in the forest. I tried to justify the expense by reminding myself that the money goes back to conservation, but I've been around too long to think that giving money to an East African government agency is anything but a total wank.
The trip back to Kampala was truly a chapter from the devil's manuscript of ultimate torture. Almost immediately after returning from the gorilla trek, it began pouring rain. It rained so hard that the main road connecting Buhoma to Butogota, where I could catch a bus to Kampala, was washed out. The detour was about 30km longer, and the rocky, muddy, winding mountain road on the back of a motorcycle at dusk was one of my less relaxing vacation experiences.
I got to Butogota, which must mean hellhole in the local language, late in the evening, so I randomly picked one of the two guesthouses on the town's dusty main strip. Naturally, my pick turned out to be a brothel. I deadbolted my door, but that didn't keep the sound out. All night long, knock knock, door creaks open, animated discussion, door creaks closed, bam! bam! bam!, shudders, argument, heated argument, door creaks open, door creaks closed. Repeat all night.
The bus died the next morning, and there was no other vehicle leaving Botogota that morning except a truck. So I climbed into the truckbed with about twenty-five other passengers, and we all clung to each other for dear life as we bumped down those winding mountain roads. At several points in this journey I was certain that death was imminent, but somehow our squirming tangle of passengers managed to hold together, clinging to the truck. That truck took me about a tenth of the way back to Kampala, and from there it was an excruciating hop-job from matatu to bus to matutu to bus again. I got into Kampala around midnight and passed out immediately, and left for Kisumu the next morning.
To be continued --
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Tuesday, April 18th, 2006
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| Subject: | Dusty pen |
| Time: | 7:36 pm. |
| Music: | A fantasy (as in D&D) metal rock band from Italy, bleccgggh. |
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I won't try to excuse my negligent behavior. In the last few months, I often considered blogging. I sometimes think in prose, and I itch to transcribe the pages turning in my head. But time passes, I get distracted, and those pages in my head turn yellow and musty, and they disintegrate, lost forever to the world. It's okay, though; they're usually pretty derivative.
I wanted to post some pictures from my trip to East Africa last month, and make a note that, like so many shameless twenty-somethings electronically clutching onto their fleeting youth, I have migrated to MySpace. I'll write more soon - so much has happened, and keeps happening, and the future holds a strange but exciting constellation of possibilities.
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Wednesday, December 14th, 2005
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So this is life in the Snow Belt. I take the bus to and from work, and trudging to the bus stop has become an increasingly daunting task. About four inches of snow fell on Madison today. The fire alarm went off in my building at work this afternoon, and we all dutifully plodded outside into the snowstorm while the overworked firemen of our tiny hamlet wended their way through the snowpacked state highways to our remote corporate campus and determined that someone had burnt their popcorn in the microwave. While we milled outside, a snowball fight broke out and I raced after one of my co-workers and whitewashed him in retaliation for the snowballs he landed on the back of my neck. We're all overgrown kids at this company.
I'm going back to Kenya in March. I can't wait. Luckily I don't have to wait too long to get a taste of the tropics - I'm going to Hawaii for work in January. When I was a kid in Seattle, the slightest semblance of snow made me giddy with thoughts of snow forts and school cancellation. Now it's mid-December and I'm already sick of the white stuff. Unless it's on the peak of Kilimanjaro, I'm done with it. I can't wait to breathe in seasalt and listen to the wind in the palms. Carry me home, KLM.
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Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005
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The trees are bare, the temperature has dropped dozens of degrees, and the sun disappears before 5pm. The sweet smell of rotting leaves is no more. I woke up this morning and saw snow on the ground, and now I finally must acknowledge that I live in Wisconsin. I guess I need to buy a coat after all. Some highlights from the fall:
Gay Street – it’s a one-way street.
Dignity is a small price to pay for holding the Statue of Liberty in your hand
My jack o’lantern, or an unreleased Megadeth album cover?
Back when there were still leaves
The Windy City
New York: I finally made it to the Big Apple. It felt like I’d been there before, because the place was so omnipresent in my imagination – in books, movies, and C-SPAN footage of sundry nebbishy festivalia. I stayed with a good friend who lives in Brooklyn, and rode the subway each day into Manhattan to take in the sights: the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, Ground Zero, the reservoir in Central Park named after Jackie O. I also went to the Guggenheim, which was holding one of the most incredible exhibits I’ve ever seen, Russia!. The highlight for me was a portrait of my personal Jesus, Fyodor Dostoevsky. The painter captured the burden he seemed to carry, the keen awareness he had of the human spirit’s fragile capacity for saintly good and omnipresent vulnerability to wickedness. To stand before a canvas that Dostoevsky must have keenly inspected himself was almost as thrilling as going to the So-Ho café where Brangelina had their first spat. Later, I went to Broadway and saw Avenue Q, a show that weaves together muppets, full-frontal nudity, Gary Coleman, and a meditation on the psychological phenomenon of schadenfraude to tell an inspiring story of triumphing over adversity. It rocked.
Madison: Halloween in Madison, sometimes referred to as the Mardi Gras of the Midwest, is the kind of event that brings joy to the hearts of destructive alcoholics. Basically, the downtown is deluged with drunken college students in outrageous costumes, and everyone has a good time, until riot police decide to break up the festivities around 2AM and State Street is enveloped in a cloud of tear gas. My costume was just a hollowed-out pumpkin that I wore on my head, with little eyeholes for to see with. It was fun, but I had no peripheral vision, and there were a lot of cops on horseback all around, so there were many close calls with the feet and the horse manure. Some calls were more than close. I knew that if things got too rowdy, somebody was certain to snatch my pumpkin off my head and hurl it at a storefront, so I ducked out around midnight, thereby evading the tear gas and the likely criminal charges. Good times.
Berkeley: Last month I returned to Berkeley for the first time since my graduation. I was on a business trip to Santa Rosa, which is about 60 miles north of San Francisco. I had a rental car, so each day after work I blazed down the 101 to revisit my old stomping grounds. The drive was beautiful, through the farmland and rolling hills of Sonoma to the flinty blood-red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Driving in San Francisco was a little harrowing after all this time; I’d forgotten just how precipitously hilly the place is. Intersections resemble cliffs, dropping off into abysses in every direction.
The Cal campus was much the same, with grubby mendicants and Frisbees fluttering everywhere. It was fun seeing old friends, who had moved onto jobs, fellowships, law school, or prepping for Peace Corps. I subsisted for almost the entire trip on pizza from the Cheese Board, which stands as a lonely example of the successful application of radical left-wing ideas to the real world. This worker-owned collective produces pizza of a matchless caliber, and the line of customers always trails out the door. Ancient hippies jam away on drums, piano, and strings in the foyer, heads beating and gray dreadlocks swaying while the immaculate children of Merlot Democrats dance around and devour their dinner down to the artisinal crusts. The place is like a little Shangri-La, a hidden paradise tucked in a gritty, dysfunctional city where liberal good intentions have failed to make much of a dent in crime, poverty, racial division, and those fucking wrong boba drinks.
Chicago: I went to Chicago for the Foreign Service oral assessment. Chicago is about three hours from Madison, and I had to be at the interview site at 7AM; so I woke up that day at about 3AM, left at 3:30, and pulled into the city at about 6:45. I was riding high on ungodly amounts of coffee and adrenaline, and I was a little nervous. There were 11 of us interviewing that day, and the process included group exercises. I was afraid that the atmosphere would be tense – 11 type-A personalities all vying for the attention of the examiners, each trying to present themselves as the perfect cog in the State Department bureaucracy. But the group of applicants could not have been cooler. They all had interesting backgrounds – one was a lobbyist for a children’s health nonprofit in Denver; one was the head of information-sharing for a Houston cancer research institute; one was the director of an international disabled sports association, etc. In the interim between exercises, we talked about our experiences bumming around the neglected corners of the globe, bitched about the Bush administration, and even discussed K-Fed’s trashy new hairstyle. During our lunch break, we caught the White Sox’ tickertape victory parade, and saw Ozzie Guillen perched atop a streetcar, waving the V-sign at all those long-suffering fans and looking like a baseball messiah.
At the end of the day, we were each individually called in and informed of our results. I honestly expected most of us to pass, but in the end only one person had made the cut – and it wasn’t me. I was mystified, not so much by my own failure, but by the examiners’ willingness to let all these incredibly talented applicants go, especially since the Foreign Service Officers I’d met in Kenya and Tanzania didn’t measure up in my mind to my fellow non-passers. Later, we non-passers gathered at a sports bar downtown to get some drinks, release tension from the long day, and talk a little bit more. I had a great time, and when I finally got in the car for the drive back to Madison, I felt good about my day in Chi-Town. I left without a job offer, but with a memory of a strange, exciting and totally unique day.
Verona: My company relocated its offices from the west side of Madison to Verona, a tiny hamlet southwest of town with only one traffic light. We’ve built a huge new campus out in the middle of nowhere, and although I got a nice office with a nice view of some dairy farms, it kind of sucks commuting every day to peri-suburbia. Each building in the new campus has its own theme, and all the conference rooms are named and decorated in accordance with that theme. My building’s theme is Scandinavia, and I lobbied hard for an ABBA conference room. After weeks of uncertainty, I was finally vindicated when I noticed that the conference room just down the hall from my office had been outfitted with a new nameplate. My faith in this company was completely restored: not only was it ABBA, but the first ‘B’ had been engraved backwards. It’s the little things that make all the difference.
I once saw a statistic on Livejournal which grouped the site’s active users into age ranges. Unsurprisingly, there was a huge spike of users in the 16-20 age range, and then a precipitous drop-off among post-collegiate age groups. Those avid diarists who document their musings and aspirations during their youth tend to fall silent as they leave school, settle down, and confront the tedium and fiduciary burdens of adult life. This seems to have happened to me as well; I find that I have less and less inclination to write about my comings and goings and doings as my life settles ever more rigidly into a workaday routine. But I’m determined to keep scribbling. I resolve to continue to be overcome by irrational apprehensions of the sublime, violent visions of the imminent doom of mankind, flickerings of religiosity and fuzzy-headed hopes for a utopian future. And as long as I do so, my wonder-racked mind will find an outlet in the overwrought prose of this journal. Es muss sein!
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Saturday, September 17th, 2005
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Some pictures from the recent past.
In the woods at Devil's Lake, eating cheese curds (they squeak in your mouth)
Balancing Rock, Devil's Lake
Me, dwarfed by the Devil's Doorway at Devil's Lake
Surely the world's greatest log ride, the Flash Flood at Noah's Ark in Wisconsin Dells. This is a picture of the cloud of spray created when your log nosedives to ground-level.
Labor Day weekend in Seattle was sublime. I floated around Bumbershoot, Seattle's big annual music festival, and my cup didst runneth over with sonic pleasure. The terrible reality in New Orleans was still unfolding on the TV; the artists dedicated their sets to the hard-hit people of the Gulf, and their beautiful music opened people's wallets to the starving Red Cross barrels that abounded everywhere. The musical highlight was definitely Common, who works in overdrive to put on the best show possible even though he could probably dazzle the crowd while he's still half-asleep. Not only did he perform almost all the songs from Be, he also pulled out Talib Kweli to perform "Respiration" from the BlackStar album. John Butler was great, too; at one moment his guitar could produce a foaming river of sound, and the next moment each note was like a drop of holy water. Meanwhile, at a fundraiser for the new 826 Seattle youth writing center, Dave Eggers read a letter written by an Irish setter to the CEO of Texaco, and Sarah Vowell presented a treatise on the history of the Battle Hymn of the Republic with musical accompaniment by Death Cab for Cutie. The whole Bumbershoot experience concluded at twilight on Sunday with the obligatory reggae roots jam session, and everyone went home with peaceful hearts and a prosecutably odiferous second-hand weed buzz.
Bumbershoot merely whetted my appetite for exotic food carts and outdoor zydeco, so I was excited to check out the Madison World Music Festival this weekend. Unfortunately, most of the people I wanted to see had to cancel because they couldn't get visas. This situation irks me for several reasons. First, doesn't Homeland Security realize that world musicians are one of the wimpiest breeds of hippy-dippy liberals on the face of the earth? If you gave them a bomb, they'd probably turn it into a gourd and paint moons and dolphins on it, and then write a song about it. The only threat these people could pose is boring me to death with their interminable sitar solos, or maybe taking someone out with their swinging braids while they dance feverishly. Second, aren't world musicians really ambassadors, using their music to build bridges of understanding across disparate cultures? They seem to be much more deserving of diplomatic passports than the crooked bureaucrat who sits in a Washington embassy and negotiates how many helicopters his uncle will need in exchange for granting America the right to dump its radioactive waste on his country's pristine atolls. Michael Chertoff, hear my song of protest: let the dred-headed, the bongo-beating, and the flamenco-dancing artists enter our ports and share their passably entertaining talents. At least their music will soothe some of the liberal minds that have been horribly wracked with guilt and loathing by your administration's ceaseless blunders. Please. Thank you.
Anyway, I'm mega-psyched for my trip to New York City next weekend. As a liberal elitist aficionado of urban spaces who thinks Woody Allen was kind of hot as a young man, I am constantly puzzled by the fact that I've never actually been to NYC. But soon, I too will frolick among the world-weary poseurs of Manhattan and the surly Teamsters of Brooklyn, and I will fulfill my lifelong dream of being in a Broadway audience. And apparently I'll be going to Red Lobster. I'm guessing it will be awesome.
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wakakhan's journal