“What do you herd?” asked the barefooted young Ugandan girl, in her best English. Standing among her classmates under shade of a thatched-roofed schoolhouse, she addressed the group of newly arrived mzungo (white) women. Our frozen smiles must have betrayed our confusion. The translator clarified: “She wants to know what animals you keep,” he said.
I didn’t think I herded anything other than my children, who seemed at that moment even farther away than the thousands of miles of desert and ocean separating them from this open-air African schoolhouse. In fact, Uganda is far enough from Connecticut that you have to tilt and twirl a globe in order trace a line between the two. A landlocked country (roughly the size of Great Britain) crossed by the equator, Uganda lies between the two East African Great Rift Valleys.
One of my fellow mzungos stood: “I have a horse,” she said. The translator intervened; the child shrugged her shoulders and spoke quietly. “She wants to know,” said the translator, ‘what is a horse?’” The mzungo was quick with a clarification. “It’s like a zebra, but without the stripes.”
The little girl from the small village in the remote district of Nakasongola in the middle of Uganda, asked the translator a reasonable question in response: “What’s a zebra?”
I stood among these children and their parents and teachers, along with New York-based donors, volunteers and colleagues from an international non-profit relief agency – woozy from the midday African sun. Overwhelmed by the aroma of melting layers of cow dung that coated the dirt floor to keep the dust at bay, I realized my perceptions of Africa had been shaped as much by The Lion King as they had by Isaak Dinesen or National Geographic magazine.
I was almost delirious with fatigue after having flown more than 30 hours from New York to London and then Kampala. Soon after arriving, we loaded into an old Land Cruiser and headed -- on a crowded two-lane road with no markings, lights or discernible traffic rules -- toward Nakasongola District to visit the Organization’s education programs there. I had been vaccinated, sun-blocked, hydrated and DEET-ed. I donned micromesh breathable clothing and all-weather shoes, and a bottle of Cipro pills rested in my bag in case of a bacterial emergency. As overcautious as any sheltered individual could be and protecting myself from everything I didn’t know and was afraid of as a result, I would have thrown in a Hazmat suit for good measure if it had been available in a handy travel size.
Pastoralists (keepers of cattle) fill the communities of the sprawling Nakasongola District, where there are few traditional primary schools. Bonita, one of the Uganda-based staff members accompanying us, was among those who had helped implement education programs there in the late 90s, when she and her colleagues ventured with maps and word-of-mouth directions and drove into the bush seeking parents and village leaders who wanted to help the Organization bring schools to their communities. In Nakasongola, families’ incomes are centered on their livestock and they travel seasonally with herds to follow food and water sources. Children are vital components of sustaining a family’s income and have critical and lengthy chores to accomplish daily. Regardless, they are exuberant about attending school and hungry for knowledge. Using sticks as calculators and dirt floors as workbooks, their joy in learning is palpable as it is unforgettable.
At each community we visited, Bonita was greeted with great reverence by children, teachers and parents, but she waved off the praise with a dismissive hand and continued the business of overseeing her schoolchildren.
Travel to and from the program areas was slow. Bonita pointed to an opening in the dense forest surrounding the main road and told the driver to turn. We traversed the muddy, hole-ridden dirt road, stopping occasionally for herds of long-horned cattle to amble past us. Navigating through the dense woods, the lead caravan driver took a wrong turn onto one of the smaller roads that interwove the one on which we thumped along. The drivers conferred and pointed in opposite directions at the same time; the sun was setting and the malaria-rich mosquitoes were poised, I was certain, to feed on me. I became agitated at the thought of being hopelessly lost.
But Bonita just thumbed through her local newspaper, whose headlines of violence in the north of the country were interspersed with American tabloid phrases such as “Britney Brings it On.” From the front seat she turned and calmly told us not to worry. “We get lost all the time out here especially during the rainy season when the roads wash away,” she said, then continued her reading. I wanted to be like Bonita, who was not barricaded by oral prophylactics and bug repellant. She was an intrepid and unassuming hero.
The world of the young barefooted schoolgirl from Uganda was a few square miles of countryside where her parents grazed cattle and where she was learning to read and write. That she didn’t know what a zebra is should not have surprised me; that I assumed she must know what a zebra is because she lives in Africa was more disturbing. I’d arrived in Uganda shielded from its world by the conveniences of my own and making large assumptions that were based on a small amount of knowledge. I realized that just because I was able to cross the world I was no wiser than anyone who hadn’t ventured farther than her own village.
Besides, the only zebra I’d ever seen was in the Bronx Zoo, which was in the village right next to the one in which I’d grown up.
