Richard Stupart

I finally finished transcribing the last days of my journal from Uganda somewhere around half past one this morning. One last push to get the last precious, straggling words off their handwritten pages. Loving each one, keystroke by keystroke – trying to remember when I wrote it. How I felt. In light of how the post that came after this diary blew up on Matador, here are the last three days of the diary. A prologue of sorts for the curious.

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South Africans I have traveled with – and people visiting South Africa from abroad that I have met – often remark on the sheer number of contrasts in the country. On the fact that it really feels like many countries in one. Some of the time, these comments are adressed to our unequal (shamefully the most in the world now), still highly raced, human landscape.  But in happier times, I’ve heard folk say this of the country’s physcial landscape too.

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It’s December 10 and Tom, Saskia and I have come to the half-completed Karin Children’s Clinic to watch a local women’s group hold a weekly meeting to discuss administrative matters. They manage projects from beadmaking to raising livestock on a pay-it-forward scheme amongst various families in the group. A man from the Heifer Foundation – who will confess on the drive home that their project in Gulu has largely been a disaster (more on this in another post) – is busy reporting on the status of the cow breeding program. Nobody seems particularly impressed. I feel hot, having decided to stand outside to take pictures of the proceedings. We have arrived in time for what appears to be the last item on the day’s agenda. The opening of a large cardboard box with a Samaritan’s Purse logo on the side. I sigh.

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Everena Okott (67) finishes speaking in the partial indoor light. Geoffrey translates politely, “She says, as you can see, the small lights here (he points to the ceiling) these were bullets and they were firing… that’s what she says… There is no one to get up there and fix it. And when it starts raining there’s actually no defence… But she is now old, and when she looks at her children, yeah, she doesn’t know what their future is.”

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In five hours it will be time to get up for introductory lectures, but every late night hour working on editing pictures has been worth it. Most of the pictures have stories, and many of those stories will be told in coming posts – just as soon as Telkom (that’s the company that controls phone lines in South Africa for overseas readers) deigns to visit internet connectivity upon my house. For now though, days of adjusting exposure, black point and god-alone-remembers-what-else means that there is a lot to start looking at. Here is an overview.
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It’s late, and I’m tired, and I can’t get back to sleep. So I am up and writing again. Sifting through thoughts that come in the nights, when the day and all of its distractions have passed.  I’m back in South Africa again. At last. I arrived somewhere around 04h30, having said goodbye to Katherine on the other side of the world. Long distance relationships are a bitch sometimes.

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When we arrived in Gulu, we spent only one night in the place we had booked to stay in. A serendipitous confusion of a lost booking and an entire house becoming cheaply available near the Kabero Opong district meant that we would relocate lock, stock and sleeping bag to this new home for the duration of our stay in Gulu. Looking back on the photographs I took of us there, nearly all are in the back garden. I don’t think we used the front door once after we entered the house on the first day. Read the rest of this entry »

Light and dark are a simple analogy for so many things. Waiting at the baggage counter for my pack and pondering the miles of home beyond the exit gate, I think I would have done well to consider how light and dark interact. How they manage, in a way, to make each other. Allow you to see what it is you have left and what it is you are moving into. Your eyes adjust until someone opens a bright door and you hurt. I didn’t think any of these things at the time. Instead, I wondered why, for the first time returning from a journey, I felt panicked.

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Kitgum lies about three hours east of Gulu, and is the largest town in the Kitgum district of Northern Uganda. It is a place where, as I stepped out of the front door of the Sunshine Modern Guest House (singles from 16,000 shillings), I was privileged to witness the entertaining spectacle of a resistant pig being lashed to the back of a motorbike. Read the rest of this entry »

Arriving in Uganda three days ago, I am now in Gulu. The fact that I am blogging this, from an airconditioned coffee shop in safety should immediately give you a hint that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.

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Today was my last proper day of class and the lucky beans are back on the sidewalks. There is one more assignment to be handed in – a whale-esque 5,000 word nonfiction piece – but barring some intervention from the gods of unanticipated disasters, I can get to call myself a journalist in a couple of months and a graduation ceremony. If there are two things that the course has taught me in the last year it’s that I deeply, absolutely do not want to be a reporter, and that I really do love finding and telling stories about things. With the journey to Gulu around 32 days away, I have been gearing up to get the most out of the visit.

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