GaaGaa: Into the Night
To my mother, my apologies for not updating the blog in over a week. If anyone else is reading this still, I'm a little surprised. Thanks. I left Arua for the long Easter weekend, which in Uganda is a fairly serious holiday, and that despite the large number of Muslims here. Nearly everyone in the country had a four-day weekend in celebration of Jesus Christ's being risen, so nearly everyone was either off to the village to see the family or across the country for a little God-given vacation. I enjoyed the latter. On the Thursday before the long weekend, on a last-minute whim, I ran down to town to catch the GaaGaa bus (the Ugandan version of the dirty dog, or greyhound) overnight into Kampala. According to almost every person I've talked to in Arua, the finest transport in the land is this overnight bus, which if you are able to sleep soundly for the 7 to 8 hours the bus takes to Kampala (or back to Arua), deposits you at your destination without a minute wasted. Or something. One of the curious twists to the GaaGaa overnight bus is that it arrives in Kampala (or Arua) at about 5:30am, and because it's pitch black out, and therefore full of criminals, everyone sits on the bus for another two hours until the sun comes up and it's safe to disembark. Last Thursday's GaaGaa night bus did not go according to this plan. I happily got a ride from Kafu and Akuma, my co-worker's boyfriend and his brother, into town at about 9pm. Four or five buses were lined up along the dirt street, each departing at a slightly different time, and maybe, not all of them going to Kampala. For any passenger with questions, an announcer turned on a megaphone (this is standard) and began barking in alternating Swahili and Lugbara (possibly English and Buganda, too, but I couldn't tell) the destinations, departure times and other instructions. It was dark out, a few hundred people and their luggage - tubs of food, boxes of all sorts of things, bags, etc. - and this man was shouting with all the ferocity of an announcer at a dog fight or a cage match to the death. I couldn't make out the syllables in his screams, but he would pause to give a drawn-out "haaaaaaaaa.....aaah!" or an "......aha!" as if he had just told a joke, or a wise lesson that was lost on us. I have heard few things quite so strange. There are times here when the world comes to me like a dream in a fever; this was one of those times. And so, the buses loaded. As the bus pulled away, the Sudanese man reeking of alcohol next to me turned my way and began speaking very lucidly about the upcoming elections in Sudan. I nodded as he spoke, and did not mention the smell. Both of us soon fell asleep, heads bobbing up and down. I woke up several hours later as the bus driver began shouting to the on-board mechanic. We slowed to a stop and light smoke began filtering into the bus as everybody hurried off onto the shoulder. A radiator leak had crippled our bus, and we sat on our luggage on the shoulder in the middle of a grand game reserve national park waiting for the next two hours for a replacement bus. The moon was high in the sky, the breeze was cool, and aside from the inconvenience of getting off the bus, it was not an altogether bad place to be at 1am. I talked a bit with a couple of Kenyan men who make a living out of driving Toyota Land Cruisers from Kenya to the southern Sudanese city of Juba for sale, then riding the bus back to Kenya. The older of the two men wore small spectacles and a safari shirt, smoking as he talked. He seemed very worldly. The younger Kenyan asked, "Is our predicament here in celebration of Good Friday?" The older one responded, "No, it is for April Fool's." Our replacement bus arrived and we continued on in the night over the speed bumps, rumble strips and potholes of the Ugandan highway. The bus pulled into the waking, Kampala under pink-dawn skies at 7:30.