grass fire: immanent and transcendent

when i step outside at night, i stand on a paved porch at the comfortable mission i'm living in. when i look up, i can clearly see a band representing the rest of my galaxy stretched across the sky above me.

a week and a half ago i sat on the porch drinking tea with some NGO representatives passing through. a shooting star nearly blinded us. i was tempted to go look for smoldering extraterrestrial ordnance.

two nights ago i couldn't find my remote control. i wanted to take a few photos of the stars, maybe with a moderately interesting foreground element. i went to bed instead.

yesterday i found my remote control. so i went to take photos of the stars.

confession: standing alone in the dark gets kind of creepy after a while out here. i stayed close to home.

as i approached the main road, a faint glow began to penetrate the trees in front of me. by the time i reached the road, i could hear the low rumble of the fire.

here are three interpretations of the fire. to me, they vary along the parameter of immanence/transcendence. on one extreme, the scene is transitory. a temporary flame soars into the sky. it can't last long, but it is liable to burn you while it does. on a different extreme, the scene is timeless. fire is a soft glow, unaffected by the passage of time as the stars carve their courses into the night sky.

i think i like the harsher scene best.

mobility

i've been moving around a bit lately, despite not having acquired a motorbike yet.

i made a quick run to Kitgum over the weekend to pick up some cash. i left Karenga at 9am and arrived back at 7pm. That's 10 hours: it's about four hours each way and i spent an hour and a half waiting for a ride back to Karenga. So...

A boy stared at me as the lorry i was riding pulled out of Karenga. On the way back, the passengers walked down a few hills with reassuring effects in hand.







(Shameless plug moment--i'm also posting some photos at humansofkaramoja.tumblr.com, the contents of which are repeated on a facebook page called Humans of Karamoja. There are a few stories up there that aren't here, also.)

Speaking of HoK, i wrote about the Mercycorps group that stayed at the mission a few nights ago there. Here is a repeat of that photo (without the text), as well as two more--one of which would have been a better HoK photo than the one that i posted.







At breakfast yesterday, i asked what Father David's program for today is (that's the type of question that people here ask each other.) He said "Ah, I'm just here! Do you want to go somewhere? To see that old man in Lobalangit?" His eyes were desperate. He seemed to be anticipating a boring day.

We rode on his bike to Lobalangit. A trip that took up to four and a half hours last trip was 30 minutes. After an hour and a half of waiting for people to track down Komol (a time during which i was kept company by a cat--the top photo), he came running up the trail from one of his gardens.

His health is fine

We worked for about two hours on a recording he gave me last year about how to make the local brew. The phrase /èprènàè ˈká ŋɛ̀ð/ had given me trouble when trying to work on this text on my own, but he patiently demonstrated the different types of stirring that are needed for different types of food preparation, and gave me the verbs associated with each action and the nouns for the different types of stirring sticks associated with each action. i found it prudent to take video of his explanation, but i'm not gonna post that from here. In this photo he has a /ŋɛ̀ð/, with which he could /èprènàè/.





Finally, i went for a little hike after an abortive meeting with Ilukol Isaiah today; i ended up on top of a hillmountainthing and all i brought you was these stinking photos.

in karenga there are people and things

i met with ilukol isaiah again today.

it's interesting how different speakers have different skills. it seems from the first data that i've collected that ilukol has a lot of trouble recalling vocabulary items. however, it seems like he is a lot more sensitive to the internal structure of words than komol is. my hope is that the combination of the two of them will provide far more insight into what the language was like than work with just one of them would. additionally, i hope that they work together well, as getting them to work together will be one of my main goals. that said, it seems like a desirable outcome from this project will be, in effect, two language descriptions--one for the variety of the language produced by komol, and one for the variety produced by ilukol. generalizations across the two varieties will surely be possible, but i think that it will be impossible to be true to the data without presenting them separately.

i also have a few photos. this boy is walking up to a shop a few hundred yards from the mission. the main road through "town" is behind me. i took this photo while holding my camera at hip-level and without looking--i feel like it came out alright.



these guys are the nyangea mountains on the western edge of town. lobalangit, where komol lives, is on the other side of them. there's a 10 or 11 mile road that goes through a pass to the right of this photo that i walked back and forth on ad infinitum last time i was here. i should have a motorcycle by the end of the week, and komol and i are gonna cruise. it'll be way better than last time, except for no stephen buerger. this was taken from the main road pretty close to the town center--a stretch of road at a junction that has a slightly higher density of shops than the rest of the town. it's probably about half a mile from the mission where i am staying.



i played a half of soccer last night. it was pretty fun, but a little disappointing after the games that i played in last time. it seems like they've gotten more serious about pageantry, but haven't made the games more fun or with a higher quality of play. i miss the really big guy who just liked running everybody over. do you remember his name, stephen?





a funny thing is happening with my lens selection. i've had a perfectly good 50mm f/. 1.8 lens for six and a half years that i occasionally use in way low light situations or in other specialty-type spots. buttt i couldn't find it when i was packing for this trip, so i threw an old fully manual 50mm lens in just in case. that thing has hardly come off of my camera. apparently i just needed something with no autoexposure or autofocus to get me to use it. sigh. (but thanks, mom and dad, for buying me the bag of loot that the lens was included in!)

now i am back in Karenga

maybe someday i'll have Something To Say about being back in Uganda, but for now, I'll just state the bare minimum and get a few pictures up.

from january 3-january 7 i was in the kampala/entebbe area getting things that i will need for my time upcountry--a generator, cell phone airtime, internet things, etc. i didn't take many camera photos there because i'm not super comfortable flashing around expensive camera equipment while walking alone through nakasero market; however, there are a few instagram shots (yeah, as my last post indicates, i'm a square, so i'm on instagram where everything else is square, too). soooo samuel_beer if you're interested in those.

i caught an overnight bus to Kitgum where i spent the day with my friend Ryan McCabe, who also welcomed Stephen and i the last time we were in Uganda. it was great to see him again, and i'll likely be passing his way a time or two per month.

it's dry season up here, so there are a lot of grassfires/wildfires around. at night you can sometimes see them glow in the distance. if you highlight the foreground with a headlamp while taking a photo of said glow, you end up with a photo like this:



on thursday i took a lorry from kitgum to karenga. i've presented a few short vignettes of the journey at humansofkaramoja.tumblr.com (it lives!). The opening photo from this post is from the trip--that's one of the guys who works on the lorry. he loads bags and stuff like that. i took the photo while going about 30 or 40 miles per hour over a bad dirt road with a fully manual lens. i feel alright about that. In any case, the country that we drive through looks like this:



on my first evening in karenga, i went out for a short walk and was caught in a sudden rainstorm (yay dry season!). i took a HoK portrait of this little guy, and then shot a bicyclist getting wet in what is, in my opinion, a rather nice pan.





within 48 hours of arriving here, i had met with both Komol and Ilukol, the two remaining speakers of Nyang'i that i had known of coming into the trip. i also met a son of Komol's who knows some, although he is not as fluent as the other two. a crowd of around 30 people listened in on an hour long conversation between Komol and me that was conducted entirely in Nyang'i. none of them understood more than a word or two of it. feedback that i got included things like "we don't speak our language, but then you come, a foreigner, and you are speaking it! that is a challenge for us, we need to try to speak some bit of it." the conversation ended with komol telling them that the way to learn is to just start using some small words, and if he hears them using them, he will help them use them right and will teach them more. it's exactly the right way to bring about the best-case scenario for long-term survival of nyang'i, in my opinion--a community of people deciding to re-incorporate some core vocabulary into their language practices. there's not really a chance that it will ever be a language that people actually use to get things done going forward, but this is a way that they can maintain it as a symbol of their identity, and that's more than i thought they would be interested in when i started this project.