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.