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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Travel has, for some time now, been a sacred practice with me. Not necessarily escapist backpacking, but the willful breaking of ties to the places, people and rules-of-the world in which I am enmeshed. It is, I suppose, pilgrimage of a kind. Traveling has meant testing myself. In heart, in mind, in spirit. That’s why the stuff I write about is often not all that physically far from where I sleep at night, but always a thousand miles from the world of the familiar, the safe, and the known. I think I’ve grown a little from pushing each year, and I’ve not died yet. Which brings me to May.

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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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It’s late and my eyes burn a little. My clock says its sometime after midnight. It feels like it’s always sometime past midnight, but there are journal articles to be read. Things to learn. It’s the third week into my Masters in Media Studies at Rhodes. I’m almost halfway through the readings for the semester so far. One journal article at a time. In the background of the otherwise quiet room, Satellite by BT is playing softly.
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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 »

Last year’s Christmas miracle was not being left in the desert in northern Sudan. This year’s Christmas miracle is nevertheless a contender for the throne of strangest annual experience. Every time I think I might have peaked at the oddest possible thing I could have done or been involved in, the world seems to find something new.

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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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