Reporters Notebook: BLUE GOAT ON THE ROAD

 By Austin Bailey, World Ark senior editor

Tiredness weighed heavily on our shoulders as we bumped down a rutted dirt road on our way back to Kampala. That morning we spent visiting farmers working together to sell their milk in bulk in hopes of getting better prices. The afternoon went to tramping through the tall grass of farmer Peter Arangwa’s pasture, angling for photographs of his magnificent longhorned Ankole cattle and trying to imagine what his life must be like, his days spent with the herd out in the bush, his evenings back home with his two wives and six children in grassthatched huts.

Worn out and woozy from too much sunshine, we didn’t quite understand what we were seeing when a blueish speck materialized on the road ahead. Drawing closer, we saw the floppy ears and wiggling tail of a goat. But its fur, the color of a hazy blue sky, was too bright and too unlikely, surely not real. Our speeding Land Cruiser sent the goat scampering across the road, and then skipping through a field and into the bush.

The photographer in the backseat pulled off his sunglasses for a better look. “Was that a blue goat?” he asked. Surely it must have been painted, he said, like in India where people paint their animals to tell them apart.

A breed of goat from the west, crossed with a local breed, sometimes produces a silvery coloring that looks blue in the late afternoon light, our driver Richard Nuwagaba explained. We trusted Nuwagaba to tote us safely through the bicycle-and-taxi-choked roads of Kampala and the dirt paths here in the Kiboga region to the north. We trusted him on this, too. A blue goat; go figure. We decided it must be a good omen.

It was our second day in Uganda, and I was only just getting over the urge to tug at shirtsleeves and point out all the beautiful, exotic things that I could scarcely believe but that constitute just another day here in this brilliant green country wrapped by the equator and washed by the Nile. Women with parcels of firewood as big as porch swings balanced on their heads, babies tied to their backs and yellow jerry cans for water in each hand. Brawny but docile Ankole cattle wearing shiny horns that span 12 feet from point to point. Chickens and goats perched on the backs of bicycles, calmly riding toward the market and their fate. Trees tall and flat on the top like a pedestal table, or short and rounded, with yellow and purple flowers.

It turned out the trip would be filled with these magical little gems. Uganda is all color and momentum, a country happy to be doing its own thing after more than a century of foreign intervention followed by crushing civil wars and paralyzing poverty. But alongside the beauty of this country and the inspiring hope and hard work of its people are the obstacles that give poverty and disease their stronghold. With hardly any money, scant health care and not enough education to go around, life here can be very hard. Gray hair is almost as rare in Uganda as blue goats: the average life expectancy is 49.

Unlike other developing nations I’ve visited, Uganda is distinctly nonwestern. There aren’t all the fast food restaurants like you’ll find in Guatemala City, no giant shopping malls like in Manila. Kampala boasts its share of skyscrapers and taxis, but they’re far outnumbered by wooden roadside shacks and bicycles smeared in the ubiquitous orange dust. Drivers steer their trucks into gaping pits by the road to wash them in puddles of rainwater. Marabou storks swoop over the capital city, as big and unsettling as pterodactyls. With their dim gray feathers and naked gullets, these storks seem more likely to snatch babies away than deliver them. “They eat the dead things,” a friend explained.

The shadowy storks gliding overhead weren’t the only thing that gave me pause as I explored Kampala and the countryside around it. It didn’t take long to notice that men were in command of all the bicycles, vans and motorbikes crowding the roads. Women rode on the back of the bicycles and motorbikes, patiently and with ankles crossed. This backseat status for women extends to many parts of Ugandan culture, especially in the rural areas where girls are sometimes still denied schooling when family finances are tight. I bristled to see women and girls sitting on the ground while the men took the chairs, and I was always surprised when, arriving at a new hotel, the staff would snatch up the bags of the male photographer traveling with me, leaving me to haul my own luggage. It was sometimes hard to decide where gender discrimination ended and mere cultural differences began. I decided I wouldn’t last long in a country where I couldn’t pedal myself around, but I supposed that if I couldn’t carry my own suitcase then I’d probably packed too much, anyway.

What got to me most about Uganda, more than the bright beauty of the landscape or the gender barriers that are changing far more slowly than seems right, was the idea that despite their impossibly hard work, the people of Uganda don’t get their due. So many people I met hacked through a seemingly insurmountable load of work every day, then got up the next morning to do it again. They did all this knowing their days would always be filled with work, but hoping that their children might someday have it a bit easier. Widowed grandmothers cared for a handful of their own family, plus three or four AIDS orphans who had nowhere else to land. These women milked their cows, tended the pigs, hoed the garden and trekked to the market to sell the surplus, all for the money they needed for school uniforms, notebooks and pens. Mothers toted their babies to literacy classes held in the early afternoon underneath shady trees. With the morning chores done and the older children off to school, these women could finally dedicate an hour or two to learning to read so that they would no longer be cheated at the market or embarrassed when they couldn’t understand their children’s textbooks.

The children know what’s expected of them in return for all this sacrifice. If they can make it through secondary school and maybe even pay for university, they can give up the hoeing and milking, or at least find a job that lets them afford oxen to plow the fields and a better breed of cow that produces enough milk to turn a profit. Progress is excruciatingly slow and hard-won, and I marvel at such patience and perseverance.

On our last day in Uganda, we saw a row of impossibly broad and tall mvule trees lining the road that leads from the city of Mbale in the direction of the Elgon mountains on Kenya’s border. Ssemei Kakungulu, a governor of eastern Uganda, planted those trees more than 100 years ago, knowing they would someday be his legacy. It took decades for their roots to take a firm enough hold for the trees to shoot up to their full height, but today they’re taller than any building in sight. My hope is that the seeds Ugandans are planting today won’t take quite so long to grow.