I’ve always thought it would be
cool to have some type of superpower – you know, the ability to fly or make
myself invisible or teleport myself from one place to another. I’ve heard some people wish for the ability
to time travel, but I’ve already got that one covered. In fact, I travel through time every day.
I start off every morning in
2014. I wake up in my comfy T-shirt and
gym shorts that I bought at Burlington Coat Factory in Connecticut. I roll out of bed and get dressed for the
day. As I wrap a sarong around my waist
and remind myself to cover my oh-so-provocative knees before going outside, I
start to go back in time to a period when women had not yet fought the good
fight to wear jeans.
I get ready for school and walk
down the street, going back hundreds of years in time. In my village, no roads are paved, so there’s
nothing but dust. I slowly saunter down
the dirty streets, attempting to keep my sandals away from any mud
puddles. Along the way, I hear a chorus
of “Mzungu! Mzungu! Mzungu!” (White person! White person!
White person!) All the little
voices of the village children chime in, and it sounds like they are singing me
my very own special song. Just before
reaching the school compound, I am ambushed by a gang of three and four-year-olds. Instead of singing “mzungu,” they scream the
word and come running into my arms, attacking me with hugs, grabbing my hands,
and laughing. Every day, their eyes
widen with the same genuine interest, and they greet me with the same
enthusiasm. The presence of a white girl
never gets old for them. My favorite
girl from the street, Queenie, holds on extra long until I finally have to peel
her off of me so that I can reach the school.
I walk through the gate, and I’ve now entered the 1800s.
I help teach Primary Five and Primary
Six English, and it feels like I am “playing school.” Our schoolhouse is like something from Little House on the Prairie, a makeshift
building made from wooden slabs. The
classrooms are separated by thin walls that don’t reach the ceiling. While teaching, I can hear everything going
on in the classrooms to my right and left; and oftentimes, the children in my
classroom can’t hear me, and I can’t hear them.
The students sit on wooden benches with wooden tables attached. My Primary Five class is bursting at the
seams, with almost fifty children, so they squeeze three or four people onto
each tiny bench. I have no supplies, no
books, no markers, no workbooks – nothing aside from the blank notebooks some
children have purchased and a bunch of pens that get passed around among the
students. We use a chalkboard that is
not a real chalkboard but actually a piece of wood that’s been painted
black. I try to write on the board, but the
chalk only makes legible marks about half of the time. The middle of the blackboard has a large hole
in it where it looks like someone punched a fist through it. Children from the village pass by our
classroom and throw things into the windows while students from my class pass
them pencils. I ask the students what
the heck they are doing, but I never really understand what’s going on with
their friends in the village. I do the best
I can to teach English to fifty children who speak Luganda and don’t have
books, but I sure wish I had the resources I used when I taught ESL at Cal
State Fullerton. It’s a slightly
different experience teaching English here…
On my way out of school, a
student chases after me and begs, “Teacher, please help me. I am an orphan; both of my parents died of
AIDS. I don’t have money for
shoes.” I look down at her feet and see
flip-flops in place of proper shoes and notice that this particular student
doesn’t have a school uniform on either.
I don’t know what time period I’m in now; all I know is that no one
should live in such a period.
I walk home and hear more chants
of “mzungu!” until I finally arrive back at my house. I spend the evening battling the unrelenting
music being blared across the street and enter whatever time period is playing.
Sometimes I visit the nineties and enjoy
classic Celine Dion songs…or cruise back to the eighties with a stream of love
ballads…or travel to the early 2000s with a variety of profane rap. Every once and a while, I am zapped back to
2014, and I hear something that’s current.
My personal favorite is the Justin Beiber marathon days. Hey, at least I’m in the right decade.
I eat dinner with my roommate
Ashley, the five boys we live with, and Auntie Tendo (our house
cook/auntie/friend). We generally
consume heaping portions of carbs with a tiny bit of protein – sometimes meat,
sometimes beans, and sometimes silverfish (tiny whole fish that are eaten with
scales, eyes, and all). Ashley and I do
our evening chore, washing everyone’s dishes.
We plug our disgusting sink by jamming a plastic bag into the hole and
then fill the sink with questionably clean water. We fill a large bucket with water in the
boys’ bathroom, a room I never look forward to entering. After the bucket is half full, we drag it
across our cement floor into the “kitchen.”
We wash the dishes and rinse them in the bucket. Our dishwashing method has taken us back
several decades, maybe even centuries – and we’ve also taken several steps
backwards in the sanitation department.
I help the boys with their
homework and eventually retire to my room and check my email (if the network is
working). I am in 2014 again, seeing
updates on Facebook and the current affairs of the world. As I read what’s happening in the lives of my
friends, I can even forget I am in Africa altogether. But then the power goes out, or the water
cuts off, or I hear our guard, Baby Lion (yes, that’s his name), yelling
something weird outside…and suddenly I am back in Africa.
I go to bed, ready to pass out
and start another strange day, and I fall asleep to whatever decade is playing
outside my window.
On days off, I go into the city
center to explore or meet with friends.
I pass through the infamous taxi park and flash back to 2007. When I lived in Kampala in 2006/7, I often
traveled through the city alone on public transportation, which often required
switching taxis at a place called the taxi park. This
is an area located near the city center filled with hundreds of mini-buses all
headed to different villages and parts of Kampala. In 2007, I lived in a village called Mengo,
and every man who worked in the taxi park knew it. Seeing a white girl in the park is extremely
rare, so it’s no surprise that everyone quickly noticed my regular presence there
and learned my normal travel pattern.
Seven years ago, all I had to do was enter the park, and random men
would direct me towards the correct taxi, push me the correct way, and
eventually shove me inside the Mengo mini-bus.
Bizarrely enough, when entering the taxi park a few weeks ago, a man immediately
approached me and asked, “Mengo?” After
seven years, the men working in the park still remembered my village! I didn’t know whether to think that was
awesome, creepy, or just plain weird. There
are moments like that when it feels as if no time has passed – like life has
bizarrely stood still – and I am back in 2007.
But then when I actually do go to Mengo and visit the kids I used to
live with, I see that most of them aren’t kids anymore. The boys who were once short, gangly thirteen-year-olds
are now huge, strong men. One of these
boys used to reach my shoulder, and now I reach his chest. Maybe life hasn’t actually stood still after
all.
I travel into the city and pick
my choice of a variety of modern cafés.
There are frappachinos and mixed coffee drinks on the menu. There is wifi and good music and a stylish
ambiance. I realize that a lot has
actually changed in seven years, as places like this were scarce even just a
few years ago. I live in a new Kampala
now, with a newly emerging middle class.
And now, I am back to 2014.
So for anyone who says it’s
impossible to time travel – well, I say that I do it every day. It may not be as glamorous as a real superpower, but at least it keeps
my life interesting. :P
