Swamp
Confessions of an Academic Pseudo-Giraffe
8.11.04
Adaptation
It’s not very cheap for most Europeans to live in this place. Because of your pale skin and the consequent air of foreignness, the thickness of your wallet is expected to have no limit whatsoever. In the Kololo area, where most rich foreigners living in Kampala (and those whose employer pays their rent) reside, monthly rents can reach dizzying figures. In other areas, however, you can find a decent three-bedroom house for less than what you pay for a one-bedroom flat back home in Tampere. And down the block from a fancy well-protected residence you may see the kind of “houses” whose construction costs must have been a tiny fraction of the monthly living expenses of their neighbour.
I’ve spent around ten hours in the past week looking for our future house. I think I know most available options in the city by now. Fortunately, it now looks like we’ve found what we need. On Saturday, we were caught by the hardest rain so far in the middle of our house tour: within half an hour, the streets were flooding. Great volumes of reddish brown water gushed out of ditches and across roads. The surface of the landscape was kind of shifting in front of our eyes, driven by the sheer amount of moving water. For a moment, cars turned into boats, gardens into ponds, and holes in the ground into little swimming pools for bare-bodied children. Once the rain subsided, however, the earth absorbed the extra liquid quickly. The only visible sign of the downpour was that the water-carved holes on the streets had again grown a bit. We’re approaching the peak of the rainy season, I’m told, and some serious floods are expected in low areas in November. Not bad for the energy production in this country, which runs almost solely on water and suffers from a cronic shortage of power. Water levels in Lake Victoria are at record low, and planned and controlled power cuts occur every two or three days; though I’m not sure about the extent to which these two facts are connected.
In the neighbourhood, next to the rail tracks, there is a well, or a water hole really, of the kind that you always see on the news in reports from Africa. Locals, often little children, drag the water in bright yellow canisters up the hill to their families. Legs wobbling under the heavy burden, but determined to finish the job.
It puzzles me why I have to listen to people yelping “American”, or the local equivalent, after me so often when I walk the streets here. Why should that be the default option for white nationality? For centuries, the Americas have been filled by massive flows of people of all imaginable colours, whereas a vast majority of European skins still carry a close resemblance to the basic Caucasian hue. Why don’t these people expect me to be German or Polish? I’m sure a few of the biggest European countries put together easily contain more whites than the USA (to which, I assume, “American” here refers). So far I’ve felt content with answering something to the effect of “far from it”, but from now on I intend to yell back “Asian!”
15:37
I’ve spent around ten hours in the past week looking for our future house. I think I know most available options in the city by now. Fortunately, it now looks like we’ve found what we need. On Saturday, we were caught by the hardest rain so far in the middle of our house tour: within half an hour, the streets were flooding. Great volumes of reddish brown water gushed out of ditches and across roads. The surface of the landscape was kind of shifting in front of our eyes, driven by the sheer amount of moving water. For a moment, cars turned into boats, gardens into ponds, and holes in the ground into little swimming pools for bare-bodied children. Once the rain subsided, however, the earth absorbed the extra liquid quickly. The only visible sign of the downpour was that the water-carved holes on the streets had again grown a bit. We’re approaching the peak of the rainy season, I’m told, and some serious floods are expected in low areas in November. Not bad for the energy production in this country, which runs almost solely on water and suffers from a cronic shortage of power. Water levels in Lake Victoria are at record low, and planned and controlled power cuts occur every two or three days; though I’m not sure about the extent to which these two facts are connected.
In the neighbourhood, next to the rail tracks, there is a well, or a water hole really, of the kind that you always see on the news in reports from Africa. Locals, often little children, drag the water in bright yellow canisters up the hill to their families. Legs wobbling under the heavy burden, but determined to finish the job.
It puzzles me why I have to listen to people yelping “American”, or the local equivalent, after me so often when I walk the streets here. Why should that be the default option for white nationality? For centuries, the Americas have been filled by massive flows of people of all imaginable colours, whereas a vast majority of European skins still carry a close resemblance to the basic Caucasian hue. Why don’t these people expect me to be German or Polish? I’m sure a few of the biggest European countries put together easily contain more whites than the USA (to which, I assume, “American” here refers). So far I’ve felt content with answering something to the effect of “far from it”, but from now on I intend to yell back “Asian!”
15:37
