You know the most important thing to do if you want to be a writer? Practice. And yet, you get home from a long day at work and you know the last thing you want to do is sit down and write. Me too. Until I signed up for Writing 101 – WordPress will sent a prompt every weekday for the next month.
Day Two: “Today, choose a place to which you’d like to be transported if you could — and tell us the back story. How does this specific location affect you? Is it somewhere you’ve been, luring you with the power of nostalgia, or a place you’re aching to explore for the first time?”
When you miss somewhere enough, you start to feel pieces of it in the other places you go. After being out of Africa for two years, I started to feel parts of the continent everywhere I went; in the smiles of kids living on remote aboriginal communities dotted across North America and in the red sands of the Northern Territory in Australia.
Unfortunately, as with most addictions, a small sample does nothing to quell the urge, but rather deepens it and increasing the sense of longing.
So like a smoker who is determined to kick the habit, I push a continent from my mind. I don’t look at the photos, I avoid my journals and I turn off the radio when a song comes on that takes me back. But sometimes, something slips through and I am taken back not just to a place, but a time.
At noon the sun was always oppressively hot, even when it has rained it always seems that the sun was shining at noon. In fact if it has rained, it is not really a help, because instead of a cooling effect it just turns the world steamy. But unlike those ones that you slip into after a day of skiing to relax tired bodies, this sauna is inescapable.
And when it rains the red dust, which clings to the sides of the roads, paints the backs of the white and blue taxi buses, and fills the air, turns into a sticky, red mud. I could never make it through without getting dirty, but the locals, the Ugandans that make Kampala their home have no problem. They show up to everything from church and offices to a night out, clean pressed, despite the best effort of their environment.
Wandering down the street, carefully picking my way between the cars jammed up so tightly at intersections that you often have to go back and follow another route simply to cross the street, I loved the rhythmic clap-clapping sound.
The first time I heard it, it was maddening, it wasn’t music, but the tempo upbeat enough that it couldn’t be workers or equipment. Finally I had to detour from my route to find the source. A tall man wearing a stripped soccer jersey and poorly fitting black track pants was standing at the edge of a bright orange tarp. He was set up on the edge of the street, not quite in traffic, but not quite blocking the masses of people streaming past him on the sidewalks. The centre of the tarp was piled high with shoes; fake-leather men’s business shoes, athletic sandals, and rubber flip flops (known there as slippers). He had a pair of the latter and was slapping them together – slap-slap, pause, slap-slap – in an effort to catch people’s attention and bring them closer to inspect his product and haggle over a price.
That scene plays over and over, and in many variations. So quickly what at the beginning seemed as an assault to the senses, the heat, the dust, the smell, the colour, becomes the normal. My real world faded away and became strange, but eventually I had to return home (or at least my definition of it at the time). And now I am stuck, like the shunned addict, getting small tastes of what I desire, where I can. It’s all while I wait for the opportunity to return again.
Rules for living 