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.

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.

i take more pictures now that i have a fancy phone

fancy phones are nice for taking pictures because it doesn't feel like there's as much pressure built into each photo. it's just a little photo. i'm taking it on my phone. so i take pictures of THINGS like people at lakes and in the mountains and towering waterfalls, but also i take pictures of construction areas and leaves on the ground and leaves reflected in my car window. i am lazy when i take pictures with my phone. i pretty much just throw them on isntagram and don't deal with them again. here are some of those pictures complete with classy instagram filters.