They said they would come by my place yesterday afternoon and they did. Out of a small and very used Japanese sedan came a Rasta, a fashion designer, and an entourage.
Our conservative Indian neighbors glared from the protection of their balconies. At my apartment, we prepared for the sudden influx of fashionable-ness by putting peanuts in a bowl, spreading jam on crackers, and breaking out a new box of juice.
The entourage was coming to see us off. After more than two years in Uganda, my boyfriend and I are leaving – we’ll spend a month in the USA and then move onto West Africa. It’s hard to say goodbye to place that’s been home for so long – with all the connotations of comfort and frustration that any place which is truly home necessarily has.
The entourage was a steady part of our experience in Uganda and they had trekked from their side of town to ours to say goodbye. Jaja, whose real name is Peter but is called the word for grandparent out of respect, wore a Gilligan hat with bulbous top to contain his massive and ever expanding dreadlocks. His shirt was a white button down with green, red and yellow trim and patchwork that he carefully hand crafted. He never removed his sunglasses throughout the course of the afternoon and into the evening.
Latif Madoi, the fashion designer, has taught Jaja and scores of others how to sew. He showed up in a forest green smock with red plaid trim and matching shorts and cap. He made his own leather shoes, trainers colored like Jamaica’s flag.
The entourage: a thin, pretty girl wearing a funky silk dress, a student of Latif’s wearing a shirt made from He-Man fabric, and another student wearing a Canada tshirt and a purple and brown cap.
Latif is known for the great caps he makes. When I first met him two years ago, he was filling an order for a Rastafarian shop in Ireland that had requested 500 caps. Except, he pronounced the word like cape and I pictured him and his team working away on foot pedaled sewing machine to make 500 capes, Harry Potter style.
His studio is little more than a room cramped with sewing machines and walls covered with graffiti and an old stereo playing Lucky Dube on repeat. I hung out there on Sunday afternoons, took photos of him and his friends playing dress up, and wrote a few stories about him for the local newspapers in Uganda. Jaja made curtains for our flat and Latif made me a few dresses, and they both gave us caps every time we needed presents to bring back to the USA.
That afternoon at our apartment, I put Johnny Cash on my Ipod (they love him), gave them old magazines to tear out clothing advertisements as fashion fodder, and we all sat around and thought about leaving. Latif told me of an upcoming show in Congo-Brazzaville, Jaja brought us a drum he’d made from ebony wood and goat’s skin.
They all insisted we come back to Uganda soon. It’s hard to tell them – and everyone else we’ve made friends with here – that we probably won’t. We might, but not for a while, and still unlikely. Living abroad means meeting the kind of people you wouldn’t at home: people who make 500 caps at a time and have several pounds of dreadlocks suspended in a cap. And others: a Ugandan journalist friend of mine who has been arrested by suspicious government agents so many times his wife doesn’t even worry much when she gets calls informing her that he’s been locked up; colleagues for development agencies that change countries and even continents annually; neighbors with strange pets and the lady on the corner of our road selling bananas and expats here for cheap beer or job opportunities or a faux sense of adventure; and mainly, scores of people with kind hearts who welcomed us into their homes and lives knowing that, most likely, we would eventually leave. And now we are leaving.
As Latif, Jaja and the entourage wished us well, they requested we send an email from West Africa confirming that Uganda is the best place in the world.
I promised we would.
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