Idi Amin. He was the first thought that came to mind when I heard the word Uganda. I mean, I’d seen The Last King of Scotland and it had a McDonald’s, but I didn’t really know much more about the place. I hadn’t read up on it because I hadn’t known we’d be going there; until our dramas at the Mozambique border forced an abrupt itinerary change there had been only an outside chance we’d go.
As we flew into Kampala, it immediately became apparent that Uganda was significantly more sophisticated than what we’d become used to over the previous month or so. There were well-maintained gutters, and road signs, heaps of them. Sam noticed the new font on the road signs as we headed for an overnight stay at the local backpacker hostel. Not much gets past this guy.
Entebbe, a small, neat and wealthy city, was an hour on a minibus from the thumping, pumping capital, Kampala. As we got off the surprisingly clean and uncrowded minibus, we were besieged by drivers of the machine that rules Kampala, the boda boda, or motorbike taxi.
The name boda boda hails from a time when smuggling into Uganda was mostly by motorbikes, which were able to avoid the border crossings more easily than larger vehicles. The bikes soon became known as boda, a mutation of border, which evolved into boda boda. Tens of thousands of them swarm the city’s streets or cluster on footpaths as their drivers languidly wait for customers. A couple of wazungu like us, looking like Tintin and the Captain, were juicy fruit waiting to be plucked.
What the heck, it was a lot cheaper than a taxi trip to our accommodation. We were staying at Red Chilli Hideaway, a large backpacker hostel on the edge of the city, some twenty minutes’ drive away. The large packs balanced between the driver and the handle bar, while the two of us rode pillion, small packs on our backs, clinging tightly to the drivers’ waists as we swerved and weaved, dodging trucks, minibuses and cars in the maelstrom.
As we approached Red Chilli, Sam yelled across to me, ‘Where is the DS?’
Oh no! I’d asked him to put it into his pocket as we’d boarded the minibus. I knew straightaway it must have fallen out of his pocket on the bus, made even more likely because he often had his feet up on the seat to support his poor core muscle tone. There was no way we were going to get it back.
After a frantic search through pockets and bags, it was confirmed as MIA. I’d have thought Sam’s head would have exploded, but he was remarkably calm. I agreed to make the futile trip back to the bus station to look for it but it was more to show Sam that I realised this was a big deal rather than from any hope we’d retrieve it. I felt partly culpable; I should have been more careful with his ‘Precious’.
We caught a cab to the central bus station, which was around the corner from where we’d been dropped an hour or so earlier. From an elevated road beside the bus station, we could see around five hundred minibuses crammed into the square, honking and inching along.
Sam’s face dropped. Moses, our cab driver, who was based at Red Chilli, led us through the maze of buses to the central ‘office’: a collection of eateries and squatteries and do-nothing-eries that looked like an island village in the sea of minibuses.
It seemed it was not the sort of place you’d normally see a tall white guy with a gangly long-haired teenager because we soon attracted a crowd, all talking in the local language, Luganda. Women and girls smirked, giggled and gossiped behind their hands, and the men peered at us with curiosity.
As Moses translated, I let the administrators of the bus station know that a reward of 100,000 shillings, about fifty US dollars, was being offered for the return of the DS. The mood changed from idle curiosity to excitement. A buzz rippled through the crowd; at least the word was getting out. It was likely the mislaid DS had been picked up by a passenger, but if a conductor or driver found it, well, you never knew. We left a contact number, just in case.
Moses led his people back to the cab, parting the minibus sea, and we returned to Red Chilli. I watched Sam closely. He seemed calm, too calm. Did he hold out false hope? Did he not fully understand the DS was in all probability gone? He had a smaller version in reserve, but it didn’t have all the hours and hours of games he had played over recent months stored on it. I don’t really understand Nintendo DSs, but I think that’s how it works.
I took it easy on Sam that day. The Red Chilli facilities and wi-fi were impressive; Mike and Lenneke had told us that this was the place to make our base in Uganda. I let Sam binge on the internet while I spent most of the afternoon at the reception desk organising accommodation and trips into the countryside over the next few weeks. I’d been thinking that I should be getting Sam more involved in this sort of activity, but not today, not on DS Day.
As sunset approached, I found Sam hovering around the entrance to the hostel. ‘Are they still looking?’ he asked me.
‘Yes, Sam, they probably are, but remember there is only a small chance of them finding it.’
‘But they might find it.’ I could hear the pain in his voice. He looked longingly up the driveway, hoping to see a bus approaching with his DS, a bus I knew was not going to show up. I ached on his behalf. He was like the dog listening to the gramophone in His Master’s Voice, hoping and not understanding. Guilt, guilt, guilt. Shit, shit, shit.
Losing the DS was a setback for Sam, but also for myself. The next few days we didn’t have much to do, and I attempted to focus on school and neuroplasticity exercises, but my motivation was waning. My carelessness had crushed my boy, and I was feeling dreadful about it. Nonetheless we pushed through. Chess was the neuroplasticity exercise I enjoyed most, and I think Sam too. Sometimes we would play several games a day, and I also enlisted other people staying at the hostel to play against him. I also took the opportunity to challenge him with some crossword puzzles from a book left behind at the hostel book exchange. We recorded more video interviews with some of our fellow travellers and staff at the hostel.
On the way into the city on the Red Chilli shuttle one day, the amiable driver struck up a conversation. I told him I was surprised how developed Uganda was compared to other African countries.
‘Yes, Uganda is very organised,’ he said.
The toilet seats and the door handles weren’t loose, the shower heads had a smooth stream, the door frames were squared, the electrical outlets were actually attached to the walls and the mosquito nets generally didn’t have holes in them. If they did, they were repaired with needle and thread, not an elastic band or a bandaid.
It was hard work talking to the driver. He and other Ugandans were having trouble with our Australian accents as we were with theirs, perhaps surprising given both Uganda and Australian are former British colonies.
As we drove, marabou storks circled above. With wingspans of two and a half metres, they expertly surfed the thermals, a posse of hang-gliders everpresent over the city.
The heat and humidity hit us as we exited the minibus to visit a shopping centre. While elevated, Uganda is still on the equator. I tried to explain this to Sam. I was surprised he didn’t know what the equator was; obviously he hadn’t been paying attention in that geography lesson. I gave a brief explanation.
‘So it’s like the x axis of the world?’ he suggested.
We had been doing linear equation graphs in maths. The way that boy’s brain works is so fascinating sometimes.
The shopping centre security was intense. Over thirty armed guards patrolled the centre, many of them with machine guns. All cars were searched, and many people were asked to step out of their vehicles to be frisked. All glove boxes, boots and bags were checked, and under-vehicle search mirrors were used to check under chassis. I assumed this was in response to the Westgate shopping mall terrorist attack in Nairobi in 2013. I realised we weren’t far from places where some locals would love to put a few Westerners to the sword, AK-47 or grenade, and an upmarket shopping mall was an obvious target. I appreciated the machine guns.
The loss of the DS seemed to have knocked me around even more than Sam. I was having a crisis of confidence, and of momentum. I was having a lot of trouble getting going each day. Was I just being a sook?
A Skype with Benison went a long way to setting me right. She started organising to send a DS replacement from Australia, and I realised there were some game cards we could buy locally. Sam slowly came around to the idea that his Precious was not coming back. I gave him some space.
Over the breakfast table, Sam looked at me keenly. ‘Maybe it will be found, Dad.’
‘Maybe, but it’s not very likely now, Sam,’ I said, gently.
‘But you might be wrong, Dad.’
‘I might, but we’re also organising a replacement.’
‘But I might not need a replacement.’
I tried to frame it in a way that was more positive. ‘If we get a replacement, and the old one does turn up, then you’ll have two.’
Sam paused, and then smiled. ‘Yeah.’
Our hostel boasted a rare luxury: hot showers in a spacious shower recess. Sam had got out of the habit of having regular showers and had started to just wash instead. And his hair, which he’d chosen not to cut while we’d been away, was now long and hanging over his eyes. Because he wasn’t in school he didn’t have to keep his hair short about his ears and eyebrows, a De La Salle College regulation.
Unfortunately, his newly long hair was also getting very greasy. I was determined to get him to use some shampoo but this posed a sensory challenge for him and he really kicked up a stink. I pushed back. There was a lot of shouting and threatening from me—way too much actually—and a lot of screaming and yelling from Sam.
‘You are not coming out of there until you have washed your hair!’
‘No, I don’t want to wash my hair,’ he whined. ‘It gets in my eyes!’
‘I’ll help you and make sure it doesn’t get in your eyes.’
‘No! You are a hateful father!’
Eventually a compromise was reached. Sam had a (very) short shower and we shampooed his hair over a basin.
It had been a backward step for Sam and I was upset that I hadn’t controlled my temper. I couldn’t help but let Sam know my disappointment at his resistance. Then after breakfast I had to break the news to him that Red Chilli had no private rooms or dorm beds available the next night. We would have to sleep on mattresses in a tent. I braced myself for his reaction.
Straight up, he replied. ‘I don’t want to sleep in a tent.’ Memories of Etosha came flooding back.
‘Neither do I, Sam,’ I replied, ‘but there’s no other option.’
I could have moved us to another hotel, I suppose, but it would have been very difficult to organise. I pushed and in the end he acquiesced with remarkable grace.
‘You can stay in the reception area in the evening and play your DS,’ I said. He still had the smaller DS.
He thought about it for a while. ‘Hmm, oh, all right. But I will stay in the reception and play my DS.’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said. ‘Well done, Sam, I’m proud of you.’
Shampoo and tents; swings and roundabouts.
On a day of leaden skies and heavy air, we visited a large local mosque with two young Australian NGO workers staying at Red Chilli, Emma and Whitney. I thought the excursion would be beneficial for Sam, some hands-on religious education.
The National Mosque of Uganda is the largest mosque in sub-Saharan Africa and can hold twenty thousand faithful. Construction started under the Amin regime but the money dried up when the economy collapsed and it remained half-finished until 2004 when Colonel Gaddafi granted funding for its completion. Before we entered, Emma and Whitney had to don a headdress and long skirt over their pants; the necessary cloth wraps were provided at the entrance.
Sam watched them garb up. ‘We don’t have to wear sheets.’
‘No, Sam, it’s only ladies,’ I clarified.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Because it’s their culture,’ I explained.
Sam wasn’t happy. ‘I don’t want to wear a sheet.’
‘Do you understand what a culture is?’ I asked. ‘It’s what a group of people, like a country or a religion, set up as their rules.’
‘Oh.’ He pondered this and looked out the corner of his eyes. ‘I don’t want to wear a sheet. I don’t want it to be my culture.’ I presumed this was part of his aversion to long sleeves again.
We were shown around by a very nice guide, Ali, a father of three. The mosque itself was beautiful. A giant concrete arch spanned across the broad steps up to the mosque, while a towering minaret with three hundred and four steps up to its gallery stood to the side of the arch, like a sentry at a gate. The arch was a symbol of Uganda, and reflected the shape of the traditional thatched huts of the Bugandan nation. As we ascended the stairs the speakers suddenly crackled into life and the mullah’s morning prayers boomed around us.
We ventured inside the cool and delicately lit main chamber, gazing up at vast domes covered in intricate carvings of Islamic motifs. Italian-designed stained-glass windows emitted rays of light onto a vast Libyan-made carpet, a pleasure to walk across in our socks. Over the windows were arches made of Ugandan hardwoods while the arch across the pulpit was encased in small tiles of compressed copper dust, nods to the natural resources of this central African nation.
Flecks of dust hovered in light shafts, as though time itself was held in the grasp of the mosque. It was a place where you felt compelled to whisper.
Ali sat us down in a circle on the soft carpet and told us about the formation of the Ugandan nation and the story behind the mosque. In centuries past, current day Uganda was dominated by Buganda, a sophisticated nation that had its own king, parliament and ministers. The first visitors were early Arabic slave traders from the east, either trading their goods for slaves and ivory or simply stealing them. The Arabs also brought Islam. In the late nineteenth-century British explorers also began to enter eastern and then central Africa in search of the source of the Nile, adventure, fame and fortune. As part of the ‘grab for Africa’ the British established Buganda and some surrounding tribal lands as a British colony under the name Uganda.
Sam liked the carpet. As he stimmed by dragging his fingertips across the tightly woven pile and the patterns contained within, he tilted his head, looked out the corner of his eye seemingly into space and seemed to ignore what Ali was saying. I wondered how much was sinking in. I tried to reinforce the principal points to Sam as Ali continued.
Sam suddenly stood up. ‘I’m bored. I want to go.’
‘Sam! Shh!’ I hissed. I pulled him back down and explained to Ali. ‘He has special needs.’
‘Not a problem,’ Ali said, with a gentle smile. ‘He is one of God’s children.’ Ali was very good with Sam, not in the least fussed by his quirkiness. We continued our tour around the carpet and columns, under the domes, past the giant encased Koran.
Not only was it Sam’s first experience of a mosque but his first exposure to any religion other than Christianity, as far as I knew. Maybe he had been taught about other religions at school? I peered at the Koran in its glass case. ‘Sam, this is the holy book of Islam. It’s like the bible of Christianity.’
‘But you don’t have to be an Islam,’ he clarified.
‘No, Sam, you don’t have to,’ I reassured him.
Ali led us up the long corkscrewing staircase inside the minaret. Sam thought the staircase up the minaret was like the tower at Hogwarts. We emerged, puffing and sweating, onto the gallery, buffeted by the wind coming off an inky cloud front heading our way. Sweeping views of the chaotic city rippled below us. The name Kampala is Lugandan for ‘small hills with impala’. Looking at the vista stretched out before us, this made complete sense to me. There were no impala, but the city’s bustling markets, crammed roads and suburbs carpeted the undulating mounds of the landscape.
Ali revealed that his youngest child was disabled. When his son was a few months old, he had developed hydrocephalus, a condition where there is build up of cerebrospinal fluid around the brain, which Ali described as a ‘big head’.
Now aged eight, Ali’s son could not stand or walk unaided, had impaired speech and memory and didn’t go to school. A shunt to ease the pressure of the fluid in his brain had been placed just two months ago. I wondered why it had taken so long. Perhaps Uganda’s health system had improved a lot in the last eight years. Ali told me they’d tried local herbal approaches early on, but his family had run out of money.
While not privy to the details of the boy’s history, I wondered whether this disability might have been preventable if the clinical scenario had presented in the developed world. When he discovered I was a doctor, Ali was pleased to hear my brief assessment that there may still be hope of significant improvement, given the recent placement of the shunt. It was the best I could offer. I looked at Sam after he described his son’s impairments. ‘We all have our challenges to face,’ I said to Ali.
‘Yes, Dr James.’
As we filed out of the bottom of the minaret the storm finally arrived. Large splats of rain landed here and there before raining hard as we ran helter-skelter for shelter. The deluge of fat drops made a thundering racket on the concrete. The humidity broke, it became easier to breathe. It was the first time Sam and I had seen rain in months. As the cloudburst ran its course and faded out, we hailed some boda bodas and zipped through the afternoon peak hour back to Red Chilli.
The air was charged after the rainstorm. Large marabou storks swooped low over the traffic, then through the jacarandas between the low-rise buildings, their broad dirty wingspans flashing over us. As our bike drivers ducked and weaved through a hive of bikes, minibuses and cars, I looked across to see Sam’s smiling face, hair swirling in the cool wind, as he gripped the driver’s waist and looked around his leather-clad shoulder to the road ahead. At one stage, our bikes mounted the curb to bypass a traffic snarl, the pedestrians annoyed but not surprised as they jumped out of the way.
Over the next few days at Red Chilli we focused back on schoolwork, neuroplasticity exercises and video interviews for the university. It was also a period of consolidation and rehabilitation. We tended to our bodies, our gear and our spirits in an attempt to repair and rejuvenate.
Threadbare shoelaces that were about to snap were replaced with string. Sam’s stretched and chewed t-shirts were chucked and new ones purchased. Cameras and screens and other electrical equipment were all thoroughly cleaned. I bought yet another pair of back-up reading glasses and replaced Sam’s lost pencil case.
The magnetic chess board was badly scratched but, amazingly, we had managed to hold on to thirty-one of the pieces. We were only missing a single ‘Slytherin’ bishop. Sam postulated it was Severus Snape who’d gone walkabout.
To top things off, I’d managed to lacerate my scalp on the underside of a metal window frame while climbing some stairs. It didn’t need stitching, and an Australian vet nurse conveniently staying at Red Chilli kindly irrigated the wound with some iodine antiseptic. When I was talking to Benison on Skype later that morning she was taken aback to see my hair covered in blood and iodine.
Sam’s hair looked a lot better after the shampoo, but with long curls hanging over his eyes and ears, multiplying freckles and the lanky-limbed body of a teenager, he was looking rougher and tougher. My youngest child was no longer a child; an adult body was emerging, with all of the challenges that entailed. Batten down the hatches.