GULU
“Oh, thank God you’re back safely.” a friend of mine told me after I returned early this week from my first trip ever to Northern Uganda. As I tried to digest what she really meant by this, images of all the written tales of a long shattered world, no tapped water, bush covered paths, no electricity, accommodation or even food started coming back to me, Its amazing how much we live in our cocoons totally oblivious of life outside our circles. May be this would do, if we didn’t go around instilling these wrong bottled mentalities in other people, thank God I knew how much stock I had to put in these “little” stories and finaly for a weekend I was reawakened from my illusion of bullets flying from all directions, decaying corpses leaving the ground with barely any legroom, no water, accommodation and no food. Here I was in Gulu, real life staring me in the face. Like most journalists, writers or whoever cares to travel here, I could have continued the fad, this would be yet another of those “I walked into a disaster area” story. I promised my self that I would carry a true tale back home not of that which I imagined or I was expected to deliver but of a life I had lived, the truth of what I had seen. I longed to tell every one about this. That the potholes I suffered in Kampala were a myth in Gulu town not to mention the dust and pollution. That I didn’t miss Kampala or Jinja road because I interacted with youths clad in the latest outfits full of life littered on the town streets of Gulu .I had a full nightlife to be apart of .At a play ground just a few metres away was a Uganda telecom promotion with most of the top Ugandan artistes presenting, Havana Club and Corner pocket hangout were packed and lively. For a moment I started thinking twice about coming back to Kampala. Of course like any other life when I looked outside my hotel window the next day I saw a town of contradictions like any other, a small seasonal stream divides Gulu town with NGOs quarters standing with Manicured lawns, tall walled compounds and excellent restaurants with piped jazz music, relatively expensive meals and good back lighting. I couldn’t help but marvel at the contradiction of such un-rivaled luxury. However for me this was no shock this image was not as far fetched, I looked no farther than our own slums around Kampala or my neighbourhood down in Makerere Kikoni. Where you drive out of your gate in that luxurious car past the dirty looking woman or man to whom it would take a year to earn your month's pay. And even if you don't have a car, for you the realities of life are simply getting by on what you think is a peanut and grumbling about how hard life is yet you can afford to throw food in the garbage. Here I was in the luxury of Acholi Inn with a swimming pool, sauna and a fully stocked bar rite outside my room and I was still told that this was not the best the town had to offer, a few minutes away, was Boma an even better hotel. Gulu town provided me a normal life I could easily adjust into, markets bustling with buyers and traders full with products. Bars and cafes full of music and dance. Restaurants full and rich with food, what more could I ask? For me this was a life, like any other, “things are now a lot better” one would say, “I wouldn’t know” I would answer, what I know is Gulu is a surely a lovely place.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
AS I GROW....OLD
PART ONE
LAMENT FOR A LOST FRIENDSHIP
One was a guy a little over his 30’s, good thinking, great speaker, great sense of style, a million dollar look, with a career at a speed…. Unbelievable! Another a young girl in her 20’s, good thinking energetic, career driven. She hasn’t seen anything the world has to offer, very optimistic though, trying to put up a smooth Journalism career between the thorns of a legal proffesion to be. But their sensibilities were so in sync; they were convinced they would be friends forever. Then over the course of a year, everything crumbled. replays the tape and figures out what exactly went wrong.
I had a friend once with whom I was certain I would grow old. The reason I was certain was that by the time we were friends over just a year. It felt like we had known each other for a lifetime, and were just arriving at the starting point. When I was in high school, I always imagine he must have been at his first job, A fact I easily accepted each time we passed each other hauntily in the corridors at my first job. Every body noticed him; he was one of the company’s treasures, one of those guys people love to look up to. For me he was a spec in the eye, I was always forced to notice him…some how…en God knows if at that time he even imagined I existed, Until, workmates brought us in wary contact one day. In my 20th year we sparked belligently. What a pair we had been, two of those very intelligent, insecure people whose anxieties make them sharp-tongued, over direct, equipped with voices that, with hardly any effort at all convey scorn and judgement.In no time I alienated just about every one( all the people who existed in my life ), Which did not mean that we our selves drew any closer. To the contrary for a whole bunch of year, when I heard the sound of his voice, I shrank from it thinking thank… God I am nothing like that…
It was only after a year that each of us at last could recognize our selves in each other, where upon there developed almost immediately the kind of connection that made it necessary to meet each week at least four times. The open road of our lives spread out before us.
In the centuries behind our own, when most marriages were contracted out of economic and social consideration, friendships were written about with the kind of emotional extravagance that we in our time have reserved for an ideal passionate attachment.
Each day I laid a brick on a friend ship that now to me appeared like one soul in two bodies. This shared soul pulled us together in such unison, each half regarding the other with such ardent passion. I could have trusted my well being to him more readily to his own inadequate self. The biggest priviledge of al to me l was this relationship of no service delivery, a genuine “friendship….”Our attachment developed not out of sensual need or worldly obligation but simply because it fed our spirits.
My friendship with him was one I could never have described. Now that I a thinking about it I see it in every important way. It was an attachment that if it did not refine the soul, certainly nourished the spirit so well that in each other’s presence we bore witness to our lives more usefully than we probably ever did in a lifetime. To the un-initiated eye, this vitality of connection might have been puzzling. No dating service would have matched us up. In none of the ways that gross social profiles accumulate would we have been imagined compatible. He had been in and out of 6 or more relationship, each of these girl’s names never left his lips, I had not even been in one though surprisingly I seemed to carry a better idea of what this world was about.He longed for sexual adventure ,I wasn’t even sure what it was about. I thought carefully and slowly (I know my friend phoebe would heavily disagree with this) he spoke each word with such emphasis and truth that the consequences of what he said were never a worry to him. He lived a perpetual struggle as a guy at 35 with no woman in his life at a time when society would have expected him to have one…. who on earth imagined that a guy like him would last a day with out a girl up his sleeves??? Now that’s the irony of life! And me with my emotional bewilderment of my increasingly solitary state…
Beneath these separating realities however was a deeper, more compelling influence that drew us to each other. Together we seemed always to be puzzling out of the exhaustion of a love un-found and the anguish of work, a search for self confusion that came with the mere construction of that phrase-what was the self? Where was it?
How did one persue, abandon or betray it?
A growing awareness began to take a hold in us, through out our lives we both responded to the same set of anxieities. Albeit in diametrically opposite style
. Consciousness about everything was first value in our relationship...it was actually everything…
The absorption grew in us day by day, fed by excitement of abstract thought detached from the concreteness of ordinary life. The more we explored the trivial and un –real world, the more we seemed to feel our selves. The more we felt our selves the larger the world grew.sitting in the living room, eating in a restaurant, walking in the streets, taking long un necessary rides. Our conversation made it seem that we had grasped things whole without ever having to leave “home”
We went on like this for half a year and then one day the bond between us started to un-ravel. We were not so different, and just like any like poles we were soon on the predictable way... When I looked at his friends it killed me to imagine he was like them.
Slowly but inexorably the enterprise of mind to which our friendship had been devoted began to loose strength before the growing encroachment of the complicated and opposing sympathies out of which our lives were actually fashioned…his ego, his accusations, his temper ,the way he treated the people who did him absolutely no good, his flexibility with the truth.
Like an un-controllable growth that over takes a clearing in the forest, the differences started to move in on us. I remembered that once long ago I had thought brashly that time would stand still for him and me as we were using it well. I hadn’t understood that what I called using it well really meant paying absolutely no attention to what we were becoming. It struck me now that it was the sheer hubris of the conceit that we allowed our selves to live through that was now doing us in!
Over night, actually the day before I get down to start putting this together. It felt like our friendship had run its course. Just like sexual infatuation. I thought idly as I lay in bed one morning with a sore throat, staring at the ceiling. And then somewhat dazedly I realized that’s right. This is what this is like sexual infatuation!
In the end my friendship with him seemed to bear a striking resemblance to romantic love. The passion of mind and spirit that had flared between us now seemed an equivalent of the kind of erotic feeling that dies of its own intensity.
When in goodness of time we realize that much in us is not being addressed by this attraction.
“There no permanent friends…only permanent interests…”for me this statement was not new, one of those quotes every one uses when they mean to describe an issue of personal loyalties clashing with worldly interest for me now made a whole new meaning for me. As I and him began to rather disintegrate saw this provocative statement in a new light. what I now thought was the idea of being true to myself, a fate most people cannot tolerate, which is why the world has never been well lost in love….I now see in this month that we are growing apart. The hunger for inner coherence is strong enough to subdue desires of every sort, for the simple reason that in its absence the ability to believe in one’s self evaporates and without self belief, one cannot achieve trust, express affection or act reliably with concern all of which make life worth living.
In the same moment I noticed that people had rather operate in a small, safe sphere than in a larger more un certain one if they can be assured that they will never be cut adrift.
him and I had made each other a small safe world. one that our friendship had at first promised to enlarge but now promised to shatter .The adventure of knowing each other had metamorphosised into the anxiety of feeling exposed.
For a while I have been thinking about the astonishing antagonism between the drive towards self protection and the need for a soul mate .For myself, I can only say that the failure of shared sensibility to revail over all other shocks. from which I dnt think I will recover let it all down to a count down, however I have come to value my hard earned understanding that fellowship of the spirit alone can no more carry the day than can be a passion of the senses.I will mourn our friendship for as long as I live.
LAMENT FOR A LOST FRIENDSHIP
One was a guy a little over his 30’s, good thinking, great speaker, great sense of style, a million dollar look, with a career at a speed…. Unbelievable! Another a young girl in her 20’s, good thinking energetic, career driven. She hasn’t seen anything the world has to offer, very optimistic though, trying to put up a smooth Journalism career between the thorns of a legal proffesion to be. But their sensibilities were so in sync; they were convinced they would be friends forever. Then over the course of a year, everything crumbled. replays the tape and figures out what exactly went wrong.
I had a friend once with whom I was certain I would grow old. The reason I was certain was that by the time we were friends over just a year. It felt like we had known each other for a lifetime, and were just arriving at the starting point. When I was in high school, I always imagine he must have been at his first job, A fact I easily accepted each time we passed each other hauntily in the corridors at my first job. Every body noticed him; he was one of the company’s treasures, one of those guys people love to look up to. For me he was a spec in the eye, I was always forced to notice him…some how…en God knows if at that time he even imagined I existed, Until, workmates brought us in wary contact one day. In my 20th year we sparked belligently. What a pair we had been, two of those very intelligent, insecure people whose anxieties make them sharp-tongued, over direct, equipped with voices that, with hardly any effort at all convey scorn and judgement.In no time I alienated just about every one( all the people who existed in my life ), Which did not mean that we our selves drew any closer. To the contrary for a whole bunch of year, when I heard the sound of his voice, I shrank from it thinking thank… God I am nothing like that…
It was only after a year that each of us at last could recognize our selves in each other, where upon there developed almost immediately the kind of connection that made it necessary to meet each week at least four times. The open road of our lives spread out before us.
In the centuries behind our own, when most marriages were contracted out of economic and social consideration, friendships were written about with the kind of emotional extravagance that we in our time have reserved for an ideal passionate attachment.
Each day I laid a brick on a friend ship that now to me appeared like one soul in two bodies. This shared soul pulled us together in such unison, each half regarding the other with such ardent passion. I could have trusted my well being to him more readily to his own inadequate self. The biggest priviledge of al to me l was this relationship of no service delivery, a genuine “friendship….”Our attachment developed not out of sensual need or worldly obligation but simply because it fed our spirits.
My friendship with him was one I could never have described. Now that I a thinking about it I see it in every important way. It was an attachment that if it did not refine the soul, certainly nourished the spirit so well that in each other’s presence we bore witness to our lives more usefully than we probably ever did in a lifetime. To the un-initiated eye, this vitality of connection might have been puzzling. No dating service would have matched us up. In none of the ways that gross social profiles accumulate would we have been imagined compatible. He had been in and out of 6 or more relationship, each of these girl’s names never left his lips, I had not even been in one though surprisingly I seemed to carry a better idea of what this world was about.He longed for sexual adventure ,I wasn’t even sure what it was about. I thought carefully and slowly (I know my friend phoebe would heavily disagree with this) he spoke each word with such emphasis and truth that the consequences of what he said were never a worry to him. He lived a perpetual struggle as a guy at 35 with no woman in his life at a time when society would have expected him to have one…. who on earth imagined that a guy like him would last a day with out a girl up his sleeves??? Now that’s the irony of life! And me with my emotional bewilderment of my increasingly solitary state…
Beneath these separating realities however was a deeper, more compelling influence that drew us to each other. Together we seemed always to be puzzling out of the exhaustion of a love un-found and the anguish of work, a search for self confusion that came with the mere construction of that phrase-what was the self? Where was it?
How did one persue, abandon or betray it?
A growing awareness began to take a hold in us, through out our lives we both responded to the same set of anxieities. Albeit in diametrically opposite style
. Consciousness about everything was first value in our relationship...it was actually everything…
The absorption grew in us day by day, fed by excitement of abstract thought detached from the concreteness of ordinary life. The more we explored the trivial and un –real world, the more we seemed to feel our selves. The more we felt our selves the larger the world grew.sitting in the living room, eating in a restaurant, walking in the streets, taking long un necessary rides. Our conversation made it seem that we had grasped things whole without ever having to leave “home”
We went on like this for half a year and then one day the bond between us started to un-ravel. We were not so different, and just like any like poles we were soon on the predictable way... When I looked at his friends it killed me to imagine he was like them.
Slowly but inexorably the enterprise of mind to which our friendship had been devoted began to loose strength before the growing encroachment of the complicated and opposing sympathies out of which our lives were actually fashioned…his ego, his accusations, his temper ,the way he treated the people who did him absolutely no good, his flexibility with the truth.
Like an un-controllable growth that over takes a clearing in the forest, the differences started to move in on us. I remembered that once long ago I had thought brashly that time would stand still for him and me as we were using it well. I hadn’t understood that what I called using it well really meant paying absolutely no attention to what we were becoming. It struck me now that it was the sheer hubris of the conceit that we allowed our selves to live through that was now doing us in!
Over night, actually the day before I get down to start putting this together. It felt like our friendship had run its course. Just like sexual infatuation. I thought idly as I lay in bed one morning with a sore throat, staring at the ceiling. And then somewhat dazedly I realized that’s right. This is what this is like sexual infatuation!
In the end my friendship with him seemed to bear a striking resemblance to romantic love. The passion of mind and spirit that had flared between us now seemed an equivalent of the kind of erotic feeling that dies of its own intensity.
When in goodness of time we realize that much in us is not being addressed by this attraction.
“There no permanent friends…only permanent interests…”for me this statement was not new, one of those quotes every one uses when they mean to describe an issue of personal loyalties clashing with worldly interest for me now made a whole new meaning for me. As I and him began to rather disintegrate saw this provocative statement in a new light. what I now thought was the idea of being true to myself, a fate most people cannot tolerate, which is why the world has never been well lost in love….I now see in this month that we are growing apart. The hunger for inner coherence is strong enough to subdue desires of every sort, for the simple reason that in its absence the ability to believe in one’s self evaporates and without self belief, one cannot achieve trust, express affection or act reliably with concern all of which make life worth living.
In the same moment I noticed that people had rather operate in a small, safe sphere than in a larger more un certain one if they can be assured that they will never be cut adrift.
him and I had made each other a small safe world. one that our friendship had at first promised to enlarge but now promised to shatter .The adventure of knowing each other had metamorphosised into the anxiety of feeling exposed.
For a while I have been thinking about the astonishing antagonism between the drive towards self protection and the need for a soul mate .For myself, I can only say that the failure of shared sensibility to revail over all other shocks. from which I dnt think I will recover let it all down to a count down, however I have come to value my hard earned understanding that fellowship of the spirit alone can no more carry the day than can be a passion of the senses.I will mourn our friendship for as long as I live.
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