Beyond the Vapour Trail Read online

  We looked at photos of my family on my mobile phone. Then I pulled out a framed photograph I had taken in 2003, on the day we met, long ago, with the tension in the air with the LRA so close by. This was the only photo in existence of her mother. Clere with her arm around Betty.

  ‘You know, everywhere I’ve gone I’ve told your story, and the story about your mother giving me a chicken, even though she only had two.’

  We were sitting down on makeshift chairs, Betty Alajo and her younger cousin, also called Betty Alajo, sitting together as we looked at the photo.

  ‘Do you know what everyone says? Everyone who hears the story is amazed at what a generous person your mother was.’

  This was the point when Betty cried. So this was the point when I cried.

  She showed us the inside of her home, made up of four separate mud huts – one for cooking, another for … well, I’m not sure, actually, I didn’t go inside them all. But we did enter the one where they slept. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Inside were handmade reed mats which were laid on the earthen floor to protect the bedding. Bedding was hung around, almost like attractive curtains, creating dividers around the hut, and clothes were also hung. There were a ceremonial spear and several drums. Including a rather big drum.

  A big drum?

  Within moments we had the drums out and Gilbert, one of our staff, was banging out a pretty good rhythm and barking instructions to Stella, the child development facilitator, who couldn’t stop laughing at Gilbert’s mock pompous attitude. So, as anyone who visits Africa knows, you gotta show your stuff. Well, I’m a pretty poor version of showing your stuff on any dance floor. I’m just funny. It was all serious fun.

  But there was something missing. We needed something to cap off the day. My wife knows how to create an event, so I tried to summon her … what could we do that would be memorable? My mind was blank, but I was desperate. Girls … what do girls like …?

  ‘Can we go to town and buy a dress?’ I suggested. Well, next thing we were all off in the vehicle to Soroti town, to the best dress shop in the place. Betty had probably never bought a brand-new dress in her life, so forget your arguments about conditioning and gender. She knew exactly what to do. She looked at virtually every dress in the store.

  And didn’t like any of them.

  The driver pointed to a dress impatiently. ‘Just let her buy this one,’ he resolved neatly.

  Betty glanced at me and glanced away. I thought of the ritual as I comprehended it from my wife and daughter. Nothing was going to spoil this moment for her. I shook my head.

  ‘Ah, no. This is women’s business.’ I shrugged. ‘Is there another store that sells dresses?’

  Well, there were several, as it turned out. I know because we visited them all. But none of them stocked anything that measured up to her expectations. Simply not good enough for the only new dress she’d ever had. I loved it. It was the kind of shopping adventure that drove me to distraction at home, but meant everything here.

  ‘Now what?’

  Fortunately we had a woman with us because Stella’s indomitable spirit of shopping came to fore with the news that there was a market – and with it? More choices.

  We’d nearly completed our circumnavigation of the entire market with its numerous stalls before, eventually, a dress materialised. The dress. Not really renowned for my fashion sense, I didn’t really see what was so special about the dress. It looked like a long, pinkish-orange party dress from the 1960s to me. Until I looked at her eyes. That was about as special as you’d ever ask for, the look in her eyes when the dress was hers. And then she ventured to ask me for some school supplies and a drink container for school, before we took her back to the village and said our goodbyes.

  There are literally thousands of stories of children who were affected by the LRA. This is just one. One girl. There are thousands more in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Liberia, affected by other conflicts … Each one an individual who breathes and ponders as you are doing now, with hopes and people who they love.

  And about half of them would probably love the joy of buying a new dress if the opportunity ever presented itself.

  Many of these children have returned. Can you imagine how often they dreamt of returning to their villages? Not every child who returned could shake off the effects of participating in violence – it made them unpredictable – so many village communities became very uncertain. As a consequence many children were never welcomed back into their villages. A double sting for this abduction they never chose.

  CHAPTER 9

  Guatemala in Technicolor

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 02/09/03

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: Re: You

  Guatemala from the air looks like a rugged buffalo pelt roughly thrown down, only really green, and the creases are rivers cutting their way through the mountains. Roni wasn’t here today – she went to Antigua, which is the place everyone raves about. Out to the project tomorrow after meetings.

  So I guess I miss you if that’s all right.

  Love

  me.

  In Guatemala City a very attractive young staff member dropped by the hotel to take me to the office. She mentioned she was working hard at learning English and wanted to practise on me.

  ‘What you think of the womens of Guatemala? Do you want them?’

  I paused. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The womens of Guatemala. Do you want them?’

  When I looked at the absolute pure sincerity in her eyes I realised that her verb selection might have been a little unfortunate. Did I like them, perhaps?

  ‘Yes, the women of Guatemala are very lovely.’

  Next day there were demonstrations everywhere. We were attempting to leave Guatemala City to head north but many of the routes we needed were blocked. My colleague was attempting different roads in her little car and then making quick U-turns before we got blocked in, searching for a way out of the city while avoiding a riot. Eventually one of these options failed and we were trapped in a long line of traffic, going nowhere. Stuck. Someone from the bus in front of us jumped out and stood by our car. He then directed as the bus backed up within centimetres of us. The bus was jammed in traffic with everyone else, but attempting to move back and forth, back and forth to turn – which encouraged us to back up the little space we had. It seemed preposterous at first, but the bus eventually manoeuvred with sufficient room to climb over the rather high median strip, made a U-turn across the grass with a heavy thump-thump down the other side, and successfully headed off in the other direction. So we followed. Thump-thump. It took several attempts, but we eventually found a road out of town and headed north-west towards Huehuetenango, in the mountainous country that borders Mexico.

  Finally out in the countryside, I was able to drink in the unique landscape. It seemed to me that Guatemala was being crushed by the collision of the North and South American continents.

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 06/09/03

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: Re: You

  Guatemala

  It’s like the landscape has been completely scrambled to form huge mountains, volcanoes and deep valleys, and then all coated in green.

  Driving north the flora is a slow-motion wrestling match where the South American jungle plants attempt to strangle the unlikely conifers of North America. They meet here – two worlds colliding. In between the tiny farmers etch out little maize patches, houses appear wherever it felt good to build the damn things, sometimes only the barrel-piped tiled roofs appear above the swaying maize.

  But there is nothing darker in the landscape than the soft hair of the women, unless perhaps it’s their eyes. The women are walking, breathing embroideries. The bright colours are defiant against their harsh lives. And the little girls are so, so little – like practice embroideries that stare back at you. A man walks from the fields, hoe over his bent back. Four small boys wa
lk bentbacked behind him, their own hoes over their shoulders.

  Towns – the buildings seem compressed, but often bright with Spanish pastels.

  Huehuetenango is home to the Mam, an indigenous people who are the descendants of the great Mayan civilisation. Our program evaluation was not in the small city of Huehuetenango. It was locked away high up in the mountains, a collection of tiny Mam villages nestled precariously like bird’s nests atop the ridiculously steep inclines. So often poverty bites deepest in isolated places like these.

  We still had another long drive from Huehuetenango city to reach them. Along the way, a series of police vehicles suddenly sped past in the opposite direction. They were definitely in a hurry. About twenty minutes further on we approached a bridge that was completely blocked by a large crowd. The people didn’t look happy. In fact it looked a little nasty. They weren’t going to let any vehicles through.

  My colleague Jeremías wound down the window and asked what was happening.

  ‘It’s Ríos Montt. He’s coming. If I were you I would turn around and get the hell out of here. There’s going to be trouble.’

  Ríos Montt was a general who took the presidency by coup d’état, and from 1982 to 1983 conducted one of the bloodiest dictatorships in Latin America. The old man was running for president again, years after his brutal regime. And, oddly, he was coming back via helicopter to campaign in one of the places he had committed genocide.

  El presidente

  He must be senile. As president he presided over the massacres of 60,000 people. How do you stop rebels? You burn their villages, kill everyone in them and so the rebels have nowhere to go. Now the ex-president is running for office again. Against advice, he stubbornly wanted to come to the Mam area during the campaign.

  So we couldn’t reach the project – the Mam had blocked the bridge. There was a big crowd – nobody smiled. ‘You better get out of here,’ a man told us. ‘There’s going to be trouble’. And there was. Many were later injured. We passed the police who had already given up and left. El Presidente came via helicopter, but they wouldn’t let him land. Apparently they are still finding mass graves. It was only 20 years ago.

  You could see the hostility in the eyes of the people at the bridge. No wonder the police had already fled. During the massacre, Montt’s regime brought bulldozers up to bury entire village populations, not far from here. Did he really think they wouldn’t remember?

  This now meant we had to find another way into the community. I was losing my sense of direction, but Jeremías told us we would try to approach from the other side of the mountain.

  But this was also problematic. To reach the other path meant we had to pass through another largish town nestled atop a high hill. There was some kind of local electioneering underway, and the people were out in Technicolor (and I do mean Technicolor; it’s worth the trip to Guatemala just to experience their traditional dress). This made it difficult to get our vehicle through, as so many people had gathered for the rally that the roads were blocked. We stopped to grab some food anyway. The local market was twisted around to accommodate the shape of the terrain. Tiny laneways ran up and down slopes, accessible by awkwardly steep steps. The street vendors and pastel-coloured shops perched like birds along the lane edges. The movement of colourful shoppers passing both ways was like the twisting of a kaleidoscope lens.

  We wandered up to a big area with bleachers where the crowds were gathering to listen to election speeches. It looked like a stage show. In Guatemala, each community wears a different cloth with a unique pattern and a unique story. Around the rest of the town the clothing from various villages was jumbled up, because people were shopping. However, at the rally people sat with their own community, so they were arrayed in rows and grouped together in their uniforms. They were like opera choruses in a complex choreography. Groups of people with the same pattern would thread through the crowd like a needle and thread before my eyes. No, they weren’t dressed for the occasion. This was everyday wear, the colour of Guatemala.

  Jeremías explained that this colourful expression of identity was actually forced on them by the Spanish hundreds of years before, as a form of social control. How does a small group of Spanish rulers control a big population? By forcing everyone from each district to wear its own clothing, the Spanish could easily identify someone who had gone to another area – potentially to plot violence and revolution. Yet these people brought meaning to each unique local pattern. Each colour formed part of their story.

  We collected our supplies and headed out of town, making our way towards the back door of the community of San Juan Atitán across a track that the driver had heard of but never taken, because the town is near the top of a mountain.

  It’s hard to comprehend how isolated it was. It was barely a goat track of a road. As we drove, the drops were unthinkable. Twice the driver asked us to leave the vehicle and walk ahead so that he could negotiate a semi-collapsed piece of track without risking us. On one occasion the car skidded awkwardly, the rear of the vehicle sliding towards the drop, but it managed to hold its grip without sliding over. Yeah, definitely the back road.

  So, hours late, we reached the village like Lawrence of Arabia crossing the Nefud – arriving from the side no-one expected.

  The small houses in the village with their Spanish pastel walls and largish, terracotta-coloured half-pipe tiles had been tossed like a throw of the dice on the slopes, and stuck wherever they could. There were three children playing who stopped to watch us arrive, obviously bored with proceedings at the other end of town. They quickly ran across town to tell everyone we had arrived; our vehicles followed and we pulled in behind them. The whole community was waiting at the only real road into the village with banners and colour and welcome, and we had arrived seemingly backstage. They had to flip everything around with some semblance of dignified and organised welcome.

  Three little girls, maybe six years old, miniature dolls in the full-coloured dress of their small village, led the procession. They all held little baskets filled with rose petals. I think the idea was to throw them gracefully into the air to scatter them as they walked towards us, but instead they grabbed handfuls of petals and dumped them on the ground unceremoniously like they were unwanted globs of porridge. It didn’t matter. The ceremony of welcome, speeches, food and music that unfolded into the night was simply dreamlike.

  Huehuetenango

  Beyond description. A welcome in food, music, dance, tradition and respect. These are the Mam, true descendants of the lost Mayan empire. Each village represented wears a unique costume of colours and patterns. Three children play an eight-foot marimba – like the branch of the glockenspiel family that evolved into a dinosaur. The notes sound flat at first – until the night helps them penetrate your ears and adjust to a scale that rang forth centuries before Spanish voices were first spoken on the continent. Tiny boys and girls dance an ancient dance, in a rhythm they don’t have to think about but that I can’t understand, and as their eyes look back I feel like 1000 years stare back at me.

  One village wear bright red tops (& the folded cloth upon their head) to signify the blood of their hero – but embroidered in rich colours and patterns. The skirts are black to signify sorrow for their ancestors. The boys in light straw ‘cowboy’ hats, light clothing but a cummerbund around their waist and over their shoulder in village colours.

  A woman pulls me up to dance. The steps didn’t follow the 6/8 of the marimba, so I followed her instead. It felt mystical. I don’t know why. Like two rivers of distinct cultures and ancestors met tonight in a dance.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Fast Boat and Learning to Love the Journey

  Arriving in Kampala one Friday night, I bumped into two Australian colleagues, Keren and Anna, who had been put up at the same hotel.

  ‘We’re going out on Lake Victoria tomorrow to visit Jane Goodall’s chimp sanctuary on the island. Wanna come?’

  ‘I can’t. I have to deliver the program
ming budget by Monday.’

  I felt a contradictory twinge of disappointment. After I went to my room I realised my answer was really driven by introversion, a lifetime habit of wanting to withdraw into my inner world. Yet I had been reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and was struck by this line: ‘On the human imagination events produce the effects of time. Thus he who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has lived long’.

  If events produce our perception of time, then routine is the fairytale where the kingdom fell asleep. The years go past and you don’t notice. Your children grow up and you don’t notice. Your life rattles past and you just keep saying, ‘Is it Christmas already? How time flies!’

  So break the spell! Subvert the routine. Punctuate the long sentences of life. Create events as a family. Choose a different path home. Follow that half opportunity in front of you that opens up. Tread the path less travelled. Climb out the window instead of walking out the door. Any damn thing. However you want to put it, force happenings in your life. Take hold of life and live it …

  It was quite late when it hit me. When would I ever start if I didn’t begin tonight? I had let the invitation slip past. I then fought my next inclination – to not disturb Keren – and dialled her room.

  ‘Sorry – didn’t wake you, did I? Changed my mind – can I still come?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Early next morning Keren, Anna and I made our way down to the meeting point on the shore of Lake Victoria in Entebbe. We wandered out on the pier. Two young guys were there to meet us.

  ‘You’re here for the boat tour?’

  ‘Yes, to the chimp sanctuary.’

  ‘Good. Are you wanting to take the slow boat or the fast boat?’

  We looked at each other.

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘The fast boat is just fifteen dollars more. But you get to spend more time on the island before everyone arrives. And you can leave whenever you want.’