A quick catcher-upper

A NOTE TO MY READERS: I’m afraid this first posting will be longer than intended because I lost my internet connection back on 16 July and now my access has become consistently unpredictable. So read as you wish and post me a note when you can. I’d love to hear from you! In future, I hope to post more regularly and pithily. Though I make no promises as this is Africa!

Getting to Uganda from Alaska took days for Don and me. We flew from Kodiak to Anchorage to Seattle to New York to Dubai to Addis Ababa to Entebbe. Whew! But a night in Seattle, a night in New York, and a night in Dubai kept us rested, and it was so hot in New York and Dubai that the air in Uganda, when we finally arrived, felt mild. We were a group of about twenty Americans traveling from JFK together, the first bunch to arrive, and it was wonderful being met at the airport by Marie and Christian and Uncle Jim and others who we’ve come to know.

A geography primer: Uganda is the interior country just west of Kenya, south of Sudan, east of Congo, and north of Rwanda and Tanzania. The heart of east Africa! The whole southeastern chunk of Uganda is filled with Lake Victoria, the huge freshwater lake that Uganda shares with Kenya and Tanzania. Though crossed by the equator, Uganda is blessed with temperatures that are easy on a northerner. Thanks to the high elevation – 3,500 feet and more – most days in southcentral Uganda reach barely 80 degrees (I’m still thinking in Fahrenheit temps).

We have been an eclectic group since Marie and Christian have well-wishers from all over the world. My brother and his family from Nebraska. Friends and tutors from St. John’s College and others from Santa Fe. Colleagues from Geneva and friends from Olney school in Ohio. Friends from Georgetown and Columbia, Britain and Germany. Three lovely Greek women. Aunties from New York and Nebraska. Don and me from Kodiak. Paul and Barbara from Anchorage. H & H. And Lisa! I wish I could name everyone, but that’s the group in brief. By the morning of 7-7-07, more than forty of us had flown in from JFK on the flights Marie had arranged, and others came independently from North America and Europe. Sixty-four of us, according to Christian’s brother Ted, have come from abroad for the wedding.

My mom and dad too! The presence of Marie’s grandparents was a blessing for Marie and Christian and for the rest of us as well. Showered with affection and respect, they became Grama and Grampa to everyone. At the kasiki party, Marie’s 81-year-old Grampie danced with her like an energetic kid. At the bridal shower given by Lisa and Ashley at Agnes’ home in Kampala, the African aunties chimed in with Grammie, word for word, when she read from Ruth 1:16 (“Wherever you go, I shall go…”).

Joining up with Christian’s clan, we’ve become a really big family. We’ve met so many Ugandans I’m having difficulty sorting them out. Charlotte has tried to explain. “We have no cousins, just brothers and sisters,” she told us on one of our bus rides. “We have no aunts and uncles, just mothers and fathers.” Of course, they really do have aunts. We’ve met Auntie Cissy and Auntie Lillian and a zillion other aunts. But I’ve witnessed what Charlotte was describing with other people I’ve met here. Aunts and uncles look after everyone, and Charlotte herself has been both sister and mother to Christian since their mother died.

Ted and Charlotte started planning the wedding last year. Way back in January, when I was staying in a little house near Chiniak on Kodiak island, Marie emailed the minutes taken at the first wedding meetings being held by the family in Kampala. That was my first inkling of the seriousness with which Ugandans prepare for a wedding. Ted became chairman for his brother’s wedding organizing committee, and relatives were signed up for sub-committees to start making arrangements for the cake, decorations, dinner, music, video coverage, accommodations, tours. Everyone was asked to donate as much money as they could afford. Ted’s wife Brenda and Charlotte’s boyfriend Malko and Aunt Lydia and Aunt Agnes and a bunch of other aunties and some uncles were all involved in a formidable number of details. Because Marie and Christian had chosen to marry at Paraa Safari Lodge in Murchison Falls National Park, the planning also required transport for a day’s road trip to the northwest part of Uganda. So buses and park entrance fees and ferry crossings became part of the challenge.

Our part was simply to get here.

In the week before the wedding, Christian’s friends John and Don and Nooman and a bunch of others introduced us to life in Kampala. They took us to eating spots and the American Embassy and fabric shops and All Saints cathedral. Malko helped Rose and me pick out cell phones to use while in Africa. On our first night in Kampala, Uncle Jim led a bunch of us down Lumumba Ave. to African Pot for dinner – our first experience eating posho and matoke and ground nut sauce and peas and beans and chicken Uganda style.

On the fourth of July, Charlotte and Ted took us all on a day trip to their ancestral farm in Jinja district, where the children at Kivubuka came running to greet us when our buses and vans pulled in. On the drive there, we passed the road that would lead to the burial place of Christian’s mother and through the Mabira Forest, where we stopped at a rainforest lodge for late lunch (or early dinner or whatever) on the drive back to Kampala at the end of the day. Nothing like salads and grilled chicken and a cold Nile Special after a day bumping along in a bus and walking through oozes of red mud. Oh! The mud was part of the fun earlier in the day, when we took a side trip to Bujagali Falls near the source of the Nile. Our coaster (a bus that seats about twenty people) slid right off the slippery road and had to be pushed out. Twice. Or was it three times? We all got off the bus and on the bus and attracted about a dozen guys to join us in pushing our coaster back onto the road each time. The red soil of Uganda is like magic clay. So dusty when it’s dry. So oozy after a rain.