I live in a country where the most popular form of transportation is the boda boda. A boda boda is a man on a motorcycle who will take you where you need to go in exchange for some cash. The term was coined during the civil war in the north of the country, when a radical military organization with a cultish religious doctrine raided towns to inspire fear in the name of power and to capture child soldiers to groom and integrate into their ranks. Those who flee would often go up to men with motorcycles and say something along the lines or “border, border.” If they could make it to the Kenyan, they could find safety. In their dialect, it sounded like “boda, boda”.
Fifteen years later, the war and the horror exists only in quiet echoes, like hidden scars and the unspoken names of those lost. The name and concept of the boda boda, however, has lived on in language across the country and in the infrastructure for goods and transportation spreading between towns cities and villages. Few people own cars, and while buses and taxis are often used for spanning longer distance, a boda is always just a call away. And, for the daylight and the more trusting, a boda is often just a wave and shout away.
“Boda boda!” You may call to a man on a motocycle. “We go?” he’ll say once you are seated. “We go,” you respond. Or perhaps you simply reach blindly for something to hang on to as he accelerates without checking to see if you’re ready.
On one particular night, I could be sorted into the second category of boda boda riders. I almost fell off as he kicked the yamaha into gear and scooted us off onto the bumpy red dirt road.
I was really in a category all my own that night, if I’m being honest. I’d gotten in a fight with one of my best friends at the time, Jimmy Hudson. It had been his birthday, but I was having a bad night and I’d said some things I shouldn’t have. I’d come into this country as a missionary, to share the word of god with people who hadn’t had the priveledge of hearing it before. The thing was, when I arrived, I had to find out on my own that nobody had told me that Uganda was one of the most universally devout christian countries in the world. There wasn’t much to share. Me and the other volunteers on the mission quickly became self righteous. We found things about the local denominations that didn’t line up with our own so that we had something to correct. Something to preach.
I did it too. But after many months of this, it became exhausting. And in the exhaustion, my heart and mind began to feel that not only was it difficult, it was wrong. In fact, it was difficult BECAUSE it was wrong.
My friends and fellow missionaries didn’t take very warmly to this idea. I tried to be gentle with it, but honestly I didn’t know what to do with these thoughts and feelings that we didn’t belong in this country to look down on people, which seemed more and more like the hidden objective that had lurked underneath the mission from the very beginning, before we even boarded a plane.
I became isolated. I started to drink a lot. I don’t champion alcoholism, and that’s what it was, but getting drunk alone was too difficult when the local drunks were always so welcoming, and pretty soon drinking alone in my house turned into drinking at the local duka, or store, near my house. And I really started to talk to the people near me for the first time in five months. Not only talk, but listen. Listen! It sounds crazy now, but for five months, I didn’t do any listening at all.
Now the crowd that drank at this particularly duka was just old men with nothing better to do. All sorts of people came through. The owner, Jimmy Hidson, was a special guy. He never volunteered a full life story from, but it didn’t take long to get the sense that he’d been around. He had this community around him. People from the city and the villages and sometimes from neighboring countries coming to visit him, different ones every friday and saturday and even on some mondays.
It was hard to say exacftly how old Hudson was. Somewhere between his late twenties or early fourties. I know that range sounds implausible, but if you had talked to him, you’d instantly know what I meant.
Early on, we didn’t talk much. I would buy the little nottles of clear liquor distilled from cassava a few nights a week, say thank you in the local language, or maybe some garbled attempt at it, and then shufle back down the road to my little concrete house. Although, when I say little, the rent money given to me by the church — to ME, a VOLUNTEER — was still enough to pay for a much nicer pad than most of my neighbors, save the headmaster of the local school. Such were the thoughts I stewed in until I asked Jimmy Hudson my first real question. I barely managed to peak out of my depressed little alcoholic shell long enough to even ask it, but that little question was all it took. All it took to make a friend.
“Hudson. That is a local name.” know, I know, it may not sound like a question. You have to understand, it is. Maybe not in Acron Ohio, where I’m from, but in northern Uganda, what an american with a neat little upwards inflection to signifiy a squiggle with a dot below it is a rare thing. Most questions are asked in the form of statements, especially in shouting form by flocks of boda men at the intersecton, or spoken matter-of-factly by women selling fruit at the side of the road.
“You are going to the market.”
“No no, I’m just going to the duka right here.”
“You are married, with a wife.”
“No no, I have a girlfriend at home, back in the states.” And that hadn’t even been true. We’d broken up in just a month — one month! That’s all it took! — after I left. But don’t let me get into that.
“You have many children.”
“Nope, no children.”
It never ends. A muzungu like me — that’s the word for foreigner — it’s a once a week sighting for people in town, but easily a twice-a-year thing for people in the village. Curiosity naturally finds it’s outlets.
At first, I found these, grammataically speaking, STATEMENTS, infuriating, but after I while I understood how effective they were at goading me into offering information as a reflexive way of correcting completely and annoyingly false statements. Four months in, that’s how I spoke, too.
“Hudson. That is a local name.” That’s what I said one day to the man behind the counter, surrounded by warm beer and liquor brewed from things that mostly grew underground. I almost didn’t ask. What’s the point, I thought, he won’t really understand, and it will be a whole thing. Yup, there it is. That was my problem. I’d left behind the church community, but I was still looking down, down, all the time. And it was lonely up there way up, especially when in reality I was underneath the ground like the cassava roots. Like I said, not listening. Until this day. I almost turned away to make the return into my lonely kingdom of drunken numbness, but instead a part of me turned around, and I asked this question that wasn’t a question. And the response was beyond anything I had expected or was prepared for.
“Yes, after the river. Between new york and jersey. I’ve never seen it, but my dad loved the city.”
And that was it. I didn’t leave all night. And I didn’t even drink that much. I wanted to remain lucid to remember all the stories. Hudson hadn’t been to the states, but he’d been to london, to Quatar. His dad had been an epidemiologist. He’d been the lead scientist on the team that had developed the first vaccine to yellow fever, and he’d been one of the first scientists to identify the monkey and bat populations that were primary hosts from ebola. He had died in the congo, on the same plane as Lumumba, a congolese politican and revolutionary who ultimately became a martyr, as the plan crash had been a setup. Hudson’s dad had been best friends with Lumumba.
Hudson’s life was sad yet also beautiful. He’d lost his wife and three children to the LRA, the lord’s resistance movement, the one that had ravaged Northern Uganda in what was called a civil war but was really an insurgence of a violently militant cult, as I described earlier.
Yet he had responded by adapting orphans created by that same horrible time. Now that the orphans had grown up, they worked together in a company that scrutinized foreignnorphanages coming in and selling children which, he told me was an epidemic.
“They took the model of people like me and saw a profit in it. Or maybe they just saw themselves in the mirror as heroes,” he said to me once in a low voice, admittedly in a straightforwardly accusatory tone I rarely heard from Ugandans, who often preffered to beat around the bush. “Last week I met a boy who had been taken from his parents because he had been taken by the LRA when he was five to become a child soldier. They had gotten him back, unhurt, but the orphanage convinced them they were too poor to ‘rehabilitate’ him. They told his parents that he could do much more good at the orphanage by telling his story so that foster parents could see the challenges the children have been through. I am trying to get the parents to take them to court.”
The things he told me turned my world upside down. But mostly, he opened my eyes to the people around me. Soon I had many friends. I went on bike rides with his two sisters, Florence and Olivia, and his friend Okello taught me how to ride a motorcycle. Calvin would also get me pirated, cheesy action movies and we would laugh at them together and saw snarky things when soone got beat-up in a particularly implauble way. “Sorry,” Calvin would say, understated and casual, as Keanu Reeves assassinated a hit-man by slapping a horse so that the horse kicked the man in the face in the movie John Wick 3 (aside: I have to mention that literally three people get snuffed out this way in the same scene). I really can’t go into it, but he was my neighbort to a whole new community.
In northern Uganda, the hospitality and sense of community is incredible. It’s so wholesome. Look, it didn’t fix me. But I am so happy that Jimmy Hudson opened my eyes to it. That’s not to say there’s no crime, no prejudice, no I’m not saying that. But there are more welcome arms than you could ever embrace back.
Maybe that’s why I was in such a bad mood on Jimmy’s birthday. It was October 8th, and kids had woken me up that morning. I had taught them how to jump rope and they wouldn’t leave me alone. That’s how I felt all day. I just wanted to be left alone, but everyone came knocking, everyone came asking their statement-questions. You are sick, you are going to town, you are not eating enough, you are depressed.
Hell yeah I was depressed. What was I doing here? Everyone in my village was wonderful to me and all I had down in return was suppress my own bigotry. Maybe it was just that Helen had called that morning. She was one of the other missionaries, and she said she was worried about me. It was fucked up. She isn’t a bad person. Honestly, all of the other volunteers were really good people. But it wasn’t because they were volunteering. That was what I hated about them and myself. This need to prove yourself by raising people up in such a way that you are blind to the fact that it is yourself who is spiritually impoverished.
That was the wall that stood between us. The wall that made it difficult for me to talk to people back home. I was in transition, and it made me ‘stubborn’, as the locals said.
This thing happened that night that’s pretty common. There were people asking me for money. I don’t know why, but while northern Ugandans DO have hospitality down like floors, the naunces of ‘being polite’ simply seem to be missing for many of those living in more rural settings. Or maybe it was just with me. Who cares if you piss off the muzungu?
No, the truth is, I don’t know what worse, hearing “You give me two thousand, you give me your bicycle”, or a carefully engineered sob story from Calvin about how he was the only one who had paid his sister’s school’s fees and now he wasn’t doing very well.
The part that got to me is the mental calculas. On the one hand, just giving out my money to anyone who asks wasn’t going to work. On the other hand, I had the money and they didn’t. So sometimes I would give it out in large quantities, other times small ones, but more frequently I would just get stuck inside my head feeling powerless, feeling selfish,
Calvin DID ask me that night, and I DID feel powerless and selfish. He pulled me aside, and I started to tell him off, but he really seeed guileless and sincere. So I went back home in a sort of malaise, got my wallet, and gave him all the money I had. It was more than he asked for, and more than he needed. Realizing I would be forced to ask for some back later, I pocketed what I hoped would be enough for food for myself.
Notes I still need to review this more, but it is clearly a short fictional story inspired by my real time as a peace corps volunteer in Uganda, where Boda Bodas were quite commonly used by locals and a large part of the local culture, although Peace Corps volunteers were forbidden to use them, and so I did not.