On Uganda

Week 1

 

Vanki and I walk from the bus stop to the Congolese embassy. I walk quickly to keep up with his pace, even though he’s almost a meter shorter than me. It’s the second day. My head is pounding from missing caffeine, and my pulse is a constant, ticking reminder.

 

The woman behind the counter doesn’t care to see a notarized invitation letter, a yellow fever vaccination, an airline ticket reservation. But she remarks “don’t mess it up” about the visa payment form in triplicate. Vanki takes it and 5,000 shillings from me to take a motorcycle to the bank to do it quicker. I invite him to leave his briefcase on the chair, but he prefers to port the battered thing close to him the whole time. By the time he returns, it’s lunchtime and the window attendant is long gone. When she comes back, it’s long past a late entrance to work for Vanki. He says farewell to me at the bus stop with specific directions to the mate on where the house is[1].

 

Liliane, Charlene and I take Liliane’s driver back to the embassy the next day, as we’ve been instructed. The embassy is swarming with Congolese university students. The hill next to the embassy is covered in sitting people, mostly men. We wait for the visa and Liliane’s temporary visiting papers (so she can travel without a passport), while Charlene peeks through the lace curtains at the commotion in the embassy courtyard[2]. One tall, bearded man seems particularly agitated, running from TV presenter to bystander and occasionally shouting. Charlene points to him and explains that she has a crush on him from school.

 

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[1] Vanki, being the brother in-law of my colleague John, was in fact directing me to the house of John’s mother-in-law, which was empty at the time other than a 22 year old Congolese girl named Charlene who was occupying the house and learning English at the local, free school.

[2] During the time the week that I was in Uganda, the Congolese diaspora in Uganda voted for a representative of the diaspora by simple paper ballots. The scene I witnessed was during the counting of the ballots, where several observers noted down tallies as the results of ballots were called one by one, and a TV crew filmed the official whiteboard where the tally was being completed with dry-erase markers. None of the Congolese I knew in Uganda had registered as living in Uganda, however, and could only watch the voting process.