Absorbing, mysterious; of infinite richness, this life - Virginia Woolf


Thursday, May 27, 2010

Jinja

View from the campsite

I spent last weekend in Jinja, known internationally as the source of the Nile, and known locally as backpacker central. I've come to the conclusion that Jinja – specifically its whitewater rafting – is probably the single most popular tourist attraction in Uganda. Not that many tourists in the traditional sense of the word flock there (the upmarket safari types probably aren't interested in staying in campsites as opposed to eco-lodges, for example) but I have yet to meet a single volunteer, intern or backpacker who hasn't been there, or didn't recommend it. For most of them, Jinja seems to be on the agenda for their very first weekend in Uganda. And now I am one of them too. It was wonderful!

It's not every day that you get to say you've spent the weekend on (and in!) the River Nile, particularly crashing over its youthful rapids and waterfalls, taking frequent dips (or being violently thrown) in its green waters, eating pineapple while floating along and admiring the view of papyrus, fish eagles, fruit bats, women washing clothes, boys paddling wooden canoes, and of course, the massive new concrete damn that will flood the whole of this stretch of river within the next year or so. I'm usually not the adventure junkie type (my idea of watersports on school trips was a run on the banana boat in Castlegregory) but when in Rome, one must assimilate with the other muzungus somehow. It was good clean fun (bar one good fright on the last run, and some terrible sunburn which I'm still tending five days later) and truly superb exercise - I expected sore shoulders from the paddling but my whole body ached the next day. Taking up canoeing when I get back home would be such an appealing option if it didn't involve mucky grey Irish mornings on mucky wet rivers.

Jinja itself is a lovely spot. It's small, it's quiet, and the only real nightspot is the bar at the campsite full of your fellow muzungu rafters. But what a campsite – on a cliff overlooking the river, with decent food, cheap drinks, secluded safari tents, the nicest dorms I've yet seen in Uganda and an up-market sister next door who rents out her pool to poor backpackers like myself. One (hungover) Sunday of chilling out and enjoying the place wasn't enough, and I wished I could have stayed a few days more with nothing but a good book, swimsuit and possibly a bicycle to keep me occupied.

The campsite was in fact a small island of the West in a sea of Ugandan countryside. A small village selling chapati and crafts for the muzungus had grown up outside the gate, but a short walk beyond that was “the village” itself. Maize, huts, dirt paths, chickens, children and nothing else. Belgian Anke, Australian Elsie and I went for a walk on Sunday afternoon, just listening to the quiet of the countryside and looking around.





Backpackers from the hostel must walk down that same road every single day, in search for “Uganda” or “Africa”, just like ourselves. Did the people living there resent or distrust the three white girls who, no matter how well-intended, must have looked at them like a tourist attraction, like a cultural exhibit? Did they feel invaded by what must be an inevitable, daily stream of girls just like us? Do they never get tired of white folk in their four wheel drives and trucks and quad bikes, tearing up the dirt roads and raising clouds of dust?

Do the villagers have any comprehension of why so many people would pay so much money just to throw themselves down the river on little rafts? It must seem like the most pointless – and unnecessarily dangerous – exercise imaginable to people preoccupied with feeding themselves, caring for flocks of children, washing clothes in the river, continuously patching up their wattle-and-daub clay huts. But did any of them look at us with anything like the irritation that I will honestly admit to frequently experiencing while living in touristy Kerry? Not in the slightest. Women waved to us, children followed us, men made jokes and teased us but in a good natured way so that when we joked back, everyone just laughed.


"Muzung food" mmm...

Nathan outside his mother's craft shop, pretending to paint the pictures in the background

At the end of the rafting course, everyone piles into an open-sided truck to be driven back to the campsite, perhaps 10 kilometres away. The bumpy dirt road runs through villages, past shops and schools and churches as well as through farm land. There were at least 20 people in our truck, all of us exhausted after a day of exertion which in a typically western way achieved precisely nothing (except to make money for the English-owned rafting company). There must have been a minimum of three or four trucks passing along that evening. All these trucks bump past every single day of the year, possibly twice a day, so although the villages are not exactly on the main road or even relatively near Jinja town, the villagers aren't exactly unused to seeing white folk passing through.

Yet the excitement as the trucks bumped past was electric. Children lined the road almost the whole length of the journey, waving and cheering, wagging both their arms vigorously in the air, while their mothers and teenaged compatriots, less visibly enthusiastic (as if not to look uncool!) but as if they couldn't help themselves, joined in. For a brief moment the circus had come to town, and the clowns, the jokers, the jesters were on parade with their cast of local guides – harlequin interlopers - stacks of red rafts, curious kayaks and court robes of life jacket and helmet.

It made me feel ashamed and humbled, all at once.

Why the hell shouldn't someone come over here with a good commercial idea, run a wildly successful business and make money from it in a way which harms no one? Why the hell shouldn't I decided to spend my hard-earned (and being honest, meagre) allowance enjoying myself? To think otherwise – that only aid workers and teachers and other categories of saints have the moral right to go to the villages, that making a profit on something in Africa poses a moral challenge, that tourism here is insensitive – is simply patronising.

The moral complexity arises from the lack of cyncism and the lack of resentment. I feel sometimes crushed by the inequality of living standards and wealth and privilege, so I am upset and bewildered by the fact that many Ugandans do not. This says more about me than it does about them: about liberal guilt and the Western concept of life.

I don't mean at all to suggest that the villagers are saints, living out peaceful sustainable lives with the same innocence as their children. You only have to look to the anxiety about next year's elections or deal with civil society as we do at work, to see that Ugandans very much want more and demand better, and can blame politicians and society and other people for their woes, and are well capable of anger and frustration.

But within the microcosm of the village, on a Sunday afternoon walk, that fades away. It's not even the poverty itself that shocks me: it is the attitudes surrounding it. We see poverty as something to be corrected. They don't see it at all - it just is. I realise that I am shocked and surprised when I don't see cynicism, jealousy, resentment or blame. Really, this tells me little about the villagers.

What instead does it tell me about me??


Some pictures of Jinja town itself...







1 comment:

  1. you getting really good at bloging...best piece so far, very deep almost revolutionary thoughts. Love it!

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