there was a rut

i am in uganda. i am in karenga. i am studying the nyang'i language. i have a motorbike. i can ride the motorbike. i ride to puda village. i study the language there.

so far, i've spent a lot of time getting ready to do what i'm here to do. but now that most of the logistical issues have been settled, life here is kind of just life as usual. there's a sort of exotic monotony to it. i'm three miles (almost exactly) from the gate of Kidepo National Park, where lions eat zebras, where Rothschild's giraffes (being, like, totally one of the most endangered types of giraffes--they wouldn't dare kill one in Denmark) do elegant things (according to promotional material from Kidepo), where one of the last black rhinos lived only ten or fifteen years ago, and where elephants make you yawn (and where Toposa were grazing their cattle last week, prompting Father Raphael to say "Ah, I have to meet with their leader, because there will be problems for them if they are grazing there without permission. We can find other pastures for their animals, but not in the park. And if they don't voluntarily withdraw, then I think the UPDF (Ugandan People's Defence Force) will come with the helicopter gunships." HELICOPTER GUNSHIPS, MAN. but yeah--all of that, but mostly i wake up, i eat breakfast, i go to work, i hope that the boss and i communicate well, i come home, i feel tired, i go for a jog, i eat dinner, and then i get ready for bed.

i've had a habit of not making it back to Karenga until 330 or so, which is a late hour for lunch--not to mention that i don't exactly want to leap off of my bike and immediately start eating. it's nice to take some time to wash my hands and relax a minute before starting in on the day's first helping of posho and beans. i had an evil (it was actually pretty morally neutral) plan to be back in Karenga by 2 yesterday. i got an early start, i reached Puda village less than 40 minutes after i left the mission (my fastest time yet, woo), and stashed my bike (spoiler: recurring character in this post) under a tree.



working simultaneously in three languages (English, Karamojong, and Nyang'i) can be frustrating. It was particularly so yesterday. sometimes it feels virtually impossible to communicate exactly what i'm asking about--am i trying to figure out the basic meaning of a given word? or how the meaning of the word is relevant to the broader context of the story? or what the role of a whole clause is in the story? i felt like i was spinning my wheels for a lot of the day yesterday. i didn't come out of the meeting with any sort of feeling of discovery. i had put in my time for the day, done what i could, and it was time to clock out.

after paying my consultant and my Kjong translator, i walked out to my bike. my translator followed along--"could you give me a lift? just to the junction--not the one at Pire, but just a bit bit to that side."

i was eager to get going, but i figured that if i was going to exert social energy and time, it might as well be on something that would benefit somebody i'm working with rather than on disappointing them, so i agreed. a mile and a half or two miles outside of Lobalangit trading center, my bike sputtered and died.

i had checked the gas level before i left--i had apparently just misjudged. so my bike and i sat in the shade of a tree (kukuzu had!) while Simon ran back to Lobalangit to get enough gas to get me back to Karenga, where i have plenty stored up.



i was frustrated by a day of work that had felt not particularly profitable, by some miscommunications, and by having had a plan that involved eating lunch at a semi-normal time fall through. but i had a few hours to kill, so i got my camera out and shot everything in sight. bicyclists riding by. lizards on trees. goats in the road. kids walking away. local huts. a few local villagers even excitedly came out to the road to be photographed (i'll mostly save them for humansofkaramoja.tumblr.com, though).









Lobalangit had sold out of petrol the day before, so Simon sent a motorcyclist to Karenga (over 10 miles away) to buy gas there, and bring it back to me. suffice it to say that that ended up being rather expensive gas for me (but it was the only real option, so it's not like Simon did anything wrong or anything). the place i ended up taking Simon ended up being forty minutes out of my way.

finally, at a little after 4:30, i was back on familiar road. i came around a bend to the top of one of the two extremely steep hills on the eastern slope of the Nyangea Mountains. an NGO truck was flying around the curve at the bottom of the hill, about to start up, so i nosed my bike off to the left side of the road. the truck passed, and i tried to ease the bike, still in neutral, back to the middle of the road to begin the rather exhilarating descent. it was in a little bit of a rut. the front tire bit at the wall of the rut, slid back, bit again, and then the weight shifted and i was lying in the dirt with my bike on top of me.

it felt microcosmic. clearly i was stuck in a rut.

i wiggled out from under the bike, stood it up, and started walking it down the hill, one hand firmly on the brake, in search of a better spot to pull it out of the rut. at every effort, it threatened to go over again. i ended up walking it down the middle of the rut for the entire length of the hill.

sometimes there's just a rut. usually i can force my way out of it, but sometimes, there's just no choice but to ride out the rut until the bottom of the hill. maybe my work has been in a bit of a rut in the past week or so, but i made reservations at a hotel in Gulu this weekend. i'm gonna eat Ethiopian food and Indian food and drink fancy coffee. so whether or not i actually make it out of the rut in the next two days of work, the bottom of this hill is in sight and it looks nice.

my life is kids and a motorbike and fire and an old man.

My motorbike arrived last Wednesday. On Thursday i taught myself to ride it, and on Friday i started going to Komol's village, 12ish miles away on rough dirt roads with steep hills and gaping potholes. Perhaps not surprisingly, i love the commute. here's a shot of my motorbike in shade with a brightly lit background--the perfect setting for you to be unable to see detail in the bike or the background at its best.



My life mostly consists of eating basically the same things every day (which is fine since they're decent things to eat), responding to "MZUNGU BYE BYE!" shouted at my by children, driving to and from Puda village just outside of Lobalangit to sit in a dark hut with an old man named Komol and a young man named Simon Billa who does a fine job of translating between English and Kjong for me (perhaps his most noteworthy asset is that he gets a notebook and pen out also, in order to provide a way to feed his own interest in Nyang'i), going for jogs because that is good for your body and mind (and mine too), looking for/at things that are awesome and taking photos of them, and reading allll of the books.

Here are some children staring into the work-hut. And here is Komol looking pensive in said hut.





i went for a long walk with my camera on Saturday. There were some big fires just southwest of town that i ended up walking towards. Many of the fires seem to have been set intentionally--children ran around catching rats that were fleeing from the blaze, and then made small fires wherever they happened to be to roast and eat the rats. Here's a small collection from that excursion:















i stopped on my drive home today to take a few shots of smoke from a fire in the valley next to the road. While i was there, the lorry that i have occasionally ridden to and from Kitgum passed, complete with the man from my first Humans of Karamoja photo. It's been a while since i posted a pan, so i thought i'd take a shot of it as it passed.