My Home

I live in a quiet part of town, near a golf green, a junior boarding school for girls, the Uganda Law Society, and a large wall of tumbling ivy. The roadside is laced with fuschia and tangerine flowers. The neighbors toss used street brooms -- hand-held tufts of rigid straw -- out on their lawn and light them on fire in small, make-shift pits. In Kampala, there is always something burning. As I wrote in my scrappy, free-associating first post, the air always seems to smell like sage with a whiff of garbage and caramelized sugar.

My temporary new home (as of yesterday) is in a gated plot of land, protected by a guard who carries a gun. He has a long, bony frame, high cheek bones, a gummy, gap-toothed smile. I squeeze through a little metal green door to arrive at my flat which has an eerily cavernous, but oddly comforting quality. There are white stucco walls and creaky wooden cabinets. One room breathes into the next through lop-sided open arch-ways. The lights flicker violently and power-outages occur several times a week (not just in my home, but in the entire country). The kitchenette is well-equipped except for dish soap, so last night I washed my dishes with shampoo. Small bugs drunkenly weave in and out of the grooves of the tiled floor. There's a lizard that hangs out on the wall.

I wake up to the sounds of sweeping, peeling, roosters, and frogs. There is an outdoor patio where my flatmate, Yonatan, and I sat this morning to drink tea and eat a small container of plain yogurt with Ugandan honey before heading off to work (which begins at 8am). We have an excellent view of our neighbor’s clothesline. It wears purples, yellows, reds, and greens.

A picture will come soon when the internet is so kind as to allow for a successful upload ...