Shifting Landscapes

Gazing out the window of our taxi van on the way to Mbale, it struck me how much the dirt roads and mud houses outside Kampala looked like those of Mulago and Kyebando - the two Kampalan divisions our project is based on. And it hit me in a very concrete way how much a slum is just an imported village, the migration of rural life into the capital. Except it doesn't work when space is so restricted and migrants are so numerous. There's too many people, too much garbage, too many cars, too many skinny cows.

Our taxi van was crowded and I got to sit between a fat woman with a suitcase and a man with his newspaper. The back bumper of the van had also been stuffed in the trunk, hovering over us eerily. We drove through the different landscapes of this country, leaving Kampala's crowded streets behind and welcoming the green rolling hills of the Windows XP default background (yes, I heard that's where they shot that photo). This is radically different from the Savannah of Southern Africa, but in spite of the contrast, I've noticed one distinct characteristic of the African landscape common to both regions on this vast continent: the occasional lone tree that stands erect, almost defiantly in the landscape. Whether it emerges out of a bed of sand and rocks like it does in northern Botswana or western Namibia, or out of ondulating matoke leaves as in Eastern Uganda, it protrudes awkwardly with twisted, barren branches. It looks like it's dancing.

A four-hour matatu ride and landscapes unfolding before my eyes:

The source of the Nile, where blue meets green the way it does so crisply in the foothills of Northern California's peninsula.

The snack stop where vendors in blue vests - they look like stock exchange brokers - run after our taxi van in hords, swarming around the car, brandishing their Fanta bottles and BBQ chickens on sticks, shoving their goods through the window and in my face. I look up as the car slows down, and see two or three vendors chasing the vehicle, speaking to me and pleading with me in a language I don't understand; in an instant, the car is surrounded by a mob of desperate kids and the corn, chicken, and soda they are begging me to buy.

The light of the sun; I can't get over the light of the setting sun, the way every color bursts at you and a thin veil of haze covers the horizon.

I am cramped up and sweating in a matatu that is as overcrowded as the slums of Uganda's deceiving capital city, and the state of the road only worsens as we head toward Mbale, but none of that seems to matter when I look out the window and realize over and over again, with each passing pothole, each glaring villager, and each cloud of dust rushing through our windows, how many beautiful landscapes this country has to uncover.