And yet. First impression of Uganda, on a Wednesday evening in April at 7.30pm, was amusement at the sight of the Orange Mobile advertisements plastered all over the entrance of the airport. The second impression was of the outdoor evening, which seeped into the hallways through open windows; soft, draped tropical warmth, like the palm of a moist hand pressed against the skin, and even through the airport bustle the rich living sound of crickets seeped in like a fog. It was a bizarre sensation for an airport, going by Western standards, where crickets and fresh air have no place amidst the concrete and gasoline, but I had seen on descent that the airport in Entebbe is seemingly built in the middle of the countryside; none of the usual motorways or concrete car parks or corrugated warehouses. To emerge from the plane was to walk unannounced into a still summer evening, rich with a warm day past and lush with the greenery frilling around the edges of the runway.
This was Entebbe, the scene of events so convoluted it would be implausibly hypothetical if it hadn't actually happened; setting of one of the Israeli army's most outstanding feat of derring-do, if that's how you saw it. Entebbe, so beloved of the Law of Use of Force exam papers and subject of endless classroom debates at LSE. I strained my eyes in the dark trying to make out the wreck of the plane which I'd heard had been left here for the world to see, but if it's still there I couldn't see it. All I could make out were the first UN planes I had ever seen, sitting in a far corner like extras from a film set. It was the exact moment of twilight; dusky, musky, draped over the evening and fading rapidly. “Welcome to the Pearl of Africa”, the airport said.
I had noticed, while flying in, the darkness of the ground beneath. Unable to see Kampala or Entebbe, which lay ahead of us, we might as well have been flying over uninhabited emptiness; only a single, weak speck of light here and there, no stronger than an isolated star in the night sky, marked life. If there were villages, they did not have street lights nor any great number of lighted windows.
My third impression of Uganda: Margaret Sekaggya, who was waiting for me almost on the ramp leading from the plane, long before security or the baggage hall. A matronly, quiet woman stood beside her; Margaret mentioned something about her being a security guard accompanying her into the arrivals area, but the woman – whose name I never learned – did not wear a uniform, arranged my visa for me and carried my bags. We proceeded calmly past long, unmoving queues of passengers at passport control, all at least 20 deep, each composed distinctly of either black or white people but rarely a mix of both. At the top of a line an officer immediately produced an entry visa. “How long is it for?” Margaret inquired. “90 days”, he replied. “We might have to take you to get an extension if you're staying for longer than that”, she said to me. Later I noticed that the officer had neglected to fill in the space marked “Expiry Date”. How convenient.
This bizarre sweep through airport formalities was my first indication that Margaret might be more famous than we realise up in Dublin. When we were in the car on the way to Kampala she told me that she knew the queues at security were terrible; I could have been waiting for upwards of an hour, and by extension so would she. So she had decided not to bother with all that by going in to bring me out.
My new aspiration in life is a diplomatic passport.
The second indication that Margaret was well-known came today, when Sharon at the office called the Irish embassy at about 11.00am to inquire as to what kind of office hours they kept so that I could go to register. She kindly mentioned Margaret's name and I had an appointment to meet with the Ambassador himself at 2.00. He's very nice; we had a cup of coffee and he introduced me to their intern, who is about my own age I think. We being Irish, of course, we're practically related; he has family in Killarney. He also knows Fr. Donie Connor, a friend of the family who until last year had worked as a missionary priest in Uganda. He description of Donie made me smile; invariably on his bicycle on his way to the local coffee shop whenever they met, an eccentric with an infectious enthusiasm.
Kampala is quite beautiful, in parts as much a park as a city, full of empty spaces which are full of trees and bush. The greenery is extravagantly alive and bursting with the movements and sounds of life and living creatures. I think it is the texture of the greenery that makes it different; it is frothy, frilly, bulky, tough-ribbed, coarse. It bursts, drapes, droops, bustles, sprouts and climbs, layer upon overlapping layer.
There is a vividness brought on by the knowledge – incredible to my northern-hemisphere habits yet obvious when you think about it – that it is always this green. Not just for a month, or a season, or until September or until the end of the rainy season. It is always this green, because it is always this warm.
The permanence of the weather, for an Irish girl, is mind-boggling. I am truly awestruck by this underlying fact of life. The concept that it will be this warm and beautiful tomorrow, and the day after that, and next month, and next year, is breath taking – even the Mediterranean, for example, gets a winter, and Asia has a rainy season, and the Caribbean has hurricanes. In Kampala, 60km from the equator, they have a mildly wetter season (which is at the moment, April and May), and then the rest of the year is perfect. The thought that there is no end to this is immense; the thought that the good weather is, literally, eternal, makes me slightly light-headed. It is humid but not uncomfortably so, warm enough that a cardigan is unnecessary even in the evenings, but not so hot that I'm regretting my enthusiasm for the weather. It feels like there's not much different in temperature between evening and daytime, so that I lie on my bed under my cocooned drapes of netting with the sounds of crickets and lizards living through the night, and the t-shirt and shorts which I sleep in I might as well wear during the day.
I arrived at the guest house in the dark last night, trying to decipher the rich living noises of tropical night. When I woke this morning the sounds of dogs barking and roosters crowing, splashing from the yard outside, the crock-ing of dishes from the kitchen and the giggling of a small child did not sound like a large city. I swept aside the mosquito net and stumbled blinking out to the small sitting room which is attached to my room, and looked out on a large, square, solid garden, full of good thick rough grass and shaded by tall leafy fronded trees (I won't say what kind; I have no idea). We were surrounded by a thick wall over which I could see the raised red roofs and long outlines of other houses, red-brick and set upon high foundations just like the guest house. Behind the house beside us to the left I could see the roof of Margaret's office; its almost exactly next door. Beyond that more roofs, and beyond that the gentle hills on the other side of the valley. The hills are so heavily-greened that it looks as though there is very little built on them. From behind the red roofs you cannot see into the valley below, where the city is most dense, so that with the quiet country sounds and the woods all around you would doubt there was a city here at all.
I could get used to this...
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