This White Girl Can Time Travel!

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