Samstag, August 11, 2007

I picked up my chair and retreated from the legion of pre-schoolers

After a ten-day tour of Gulu (during which I saw a lot of my hotel room and various bars in Gulu), I'm back in Kampala.

While in Gulu, we took an overnight trip to Opit, one of the displaced camps south of Gulu town. It was a pretty depressing expanse of huts, crowded with people trying to survive, but it's better there now than I've heard about in the past. People were moving around the camp, going to nearby gardens, buying and selling things. The school was filled, and everybody seemed to have firewood.

From my diary:

Breakfast at Eric's [house]. Nobody saved me any coffee[, but that's what I get for sleeping in]. We spent the morning waiting for the roads to dry out from the rains during the night. I sat on the porch, watching the world go by, watching the clouds [billow up to the east, pile up on top of each other and crowd away to the south], and being watched in turn by the roving bands of [Acholi] children.

A group gathered around and asked me questions in Luo. I asked them questions in English and Luganda. That went nowhere, but they didn't leave. So I taught them how to make various noises, increasingly vulgar ones. I whistled, popped my cheek, made the water-dripping-from-the-faucet noise by flicking my cheek, and we made faces at each other. [I crossed my eyes and did my wall-eye. They rolled their eyes back in their heads and made pig-noses back at me.] Things [cooled off] with the tongue-clicking though. So I tried to make armpit [farts].

[For the first time in years,] I couldn't make any noise. Thinking this was because my armpit was too dry, I spat on my hand and tried again. Still nothing; I gave up. But then[, in horror,] I realized that this was less a give-and-take cultural exchange of rude noises than a game of follow-the-Muno.


Suddenly I was faced with sixteen young Acholi children spitting in their hands, rubbing them in their armpits, and making chicken-dance motions with their arms. [Feeling] incredibly exposed [there on the porch, on the street, in front of everyone, and confronted with this monstrous mimicry of what I had considered one of my erstwhile talents], I [considered being] around when one of [their] parents or elders walked by. I picked up my chair and retreated from the legion of pre-schoolers pantomiming their silent armpit farts, back into the courtyard. "Bye, Muno!" they called, still spitting into their hands and flapping their arms.