Mzungu, bye!

by Ioana Mihaela Vancea (Romania)

Making a local connection Uganda

After many days spent with the Ugandan children at the school, I realized they were the real teachers, as they were teaching me life. "A real friend shares food with you." "Our throats hurt without water." "Barefoot is easier." "Enjala enuma (I am hungry)" – one of the very first phrases they wanted to teach me. There is something about traveling that nobody tells you. Not all you see brings you tears of joy or enchants your heart. Sometimes, your experiences come as a wake-up call. There, my name was mzungu (white person). In Kawempe, a poor district near Kampala, the other volunteers and I were the only foreigners, so the entire neighborhood knew us from day one. Situated on a hill, the school we collaborated with was mainly a ruin settled in the middle of a large yard that got anyone tired just from walking it from one side to another. The ground was bumpy, with rocks and leftovers, with parts where grass grew chaotically and others were it didn’t grow at all. A winding and unpaved road was daily leading us to this place. On one part of it, street vendors improvised banana stalls, with small sugar cane taste-like bananas or matoke, the green bananas with potato flavor (that needed to be cooked accordingly). Goats were always wandering around them, constantly looking for food through the rubbish dumps, before the debris would be piled up and burned. One day, while slowly going up the road, one boy was standing in the way, leaning over a pond that formed during the last night’s rain. He had an old plastic bottle that he was chewing on, so old that the plastic turned yellow. Two meters away, other children were looking for bottles around the garbage dump place, so they can take their caps off and use them as small shots, filled with water. The boy in front of us, poured the liquid in his mouth like it was the most delicious drink he had ever tasted. Then, as there are always one or two drops that stay stick to the bottle’s cap, the boy started chewing it, in a way that seemed to temper both hunger and thirst, causing saliva to slowly leak on his naked belly, living behind a small moisture trail as the one a snail creates when moving. Later on, before reaching our school, the path was suddenly crowded with other half-naked kids running barefoot after some old bicycle tires they were pushing down the hill. They didn’t stop, as they had to catch their toys, but called the name: A mzungu! Bye mzungu!. When you hear it, you must return as if you just heard someone familiar calling you. If you choose not to answer or even look at them, children will start running after you, to grab your clothes, to make sure you heard their hello. As soon as we would enter the school gate, this nickname would cease to exist. After months spent there, we (volunteers, teachers, children, any staff member) were all family, just human beings, each of us behaving in our particular way, but laughing together, eating together, playing football with balls made out of banana leaves, sharing passion fruit juice, sharing knowledge. The day I said goodbye to them, I was crying my heart out. Children were waving, calling my name, my real name. They had no tears, but deep breaths that kept their nostrils dilating, while trying to control their emotions. Their everyday challenges are bigger than that, yet they wake up every morning with the best attitude towards life. And they’re dancing and chasing dreams with the same agility the kids were chasing the bicycle tires. "Please take this so you won’t forget us." Meddy, one of my students, came running to me right before leaving. It was a Polaroid picture with his classmates and me, he had received from another volunteer. There was a small hole on top of my head. It looked as the photography was hanged on a wall for a while. I had so many pictures with them on my phone, yet they were offering me the only one they had with me.