The trip up

After surviving minor flooding in Karamoja, I decided to hire Aron to drive me to Gulu. He’s a friendly man, I talked with his wife on the phone once, and I like the couple. The rate was reasonable – 150.000 /= to hire the car for the day, plus fuel. The total price would have been about $300, the same as Onyango would pay.

A few days after I made the arrangements, Joyce from the Human Rights Network of Uganda comes by and tells me to cancel my driver. I’m not sure why, but after a while I discover that her mother lives in a village near Gulu and Joyce wants to visit. She has her own car and can locate a driver, but she doesn’t have money for fuel. That’s where I would come in. I pay the fuel, I save the 150.000 /= hiring fee, and life is beautiful all the time.

Only I don’t know Joyce’s car, and I don’t know Joyce’s driver, and I already have these arrangements. So in an act of extreme caution, I explain to Joyce that I won’t change my plans. I invite Joyce to ride with me in the car that I’ve hired, and we’ll detour to her village. This infuriates her. She spends the entire day making increasing efforts to pressure me into ditching my driver. First she offers to call and cancel the arrangements herself. Then she slips me a note that says “please think of my son as your own. Do not disappoint me,” as if her boy might die if we arrive in a different car. Finally she walked into the room and just stared. This had the opposite effect than she intended. Instead of acquiescing to hire her driver, I got very, very angry. I mean, I am a human being entitled to my own volition. I am not an ATM. I do not dispense cash on command. And I don’t bend my plans to travel with a strange driver who, it turns out, has not even been formally hired yet. Certainly not two days before the trip with a woman who previously got me lost in Kampala. I rarely put my foot down, but I did this time. No. I will not be manipulated into changing carefully laid plans.

Ha ha.

Joyce pouts because she really wants to spend the night at her mother’s house, and I can only hire the car for one day. But when she discovers I won’t flex, she apologizes for being pushy and agrees to ride with me. Aron has told me he would pick me up at 7 a.m. on Saturday morning, so I tell her to meet me at K.K. Health Club at that time.

Saturday morning rolls around. 6:30, 6:45, 7 a.m. I get a call from Joyce saying she’s coming right over. 7:15 a.m. and she shows up. But no Aron. I apologize, tell her to hold on for a second, and I ring Aron. No answer. So we keep waiting. 7:30 a.m. 7:45. By now I’m getting embarrassed. Something in the back of my head whispers, he’s not coming. He found another job that’s paying him more, and if you’re lucky he’ll find you another driver, but it’s going to be late and he’s not coming. About two minutes later I get the call.

“Hello, madam!” It’s Aron. “Why have you not been picking up your phone?” Because it hasn’t been ringing. “I cannot drive you. I forgot that there is a presidential convoy and I have been hired.” What did I tell you? “I have told my friend to come and get you, he is on his way.”

Great. So all that planning, all that quarreling, and I still have to ride with a stranger. I go back to Joyce.

“Hey Joyce, still want to go in your car?” Joyce looks at me like she’d like to do some oil drilling in the general region of my frontal lobes.

“Yes,” Joyce says. “But what about your driver?”

“Yeah,” I say sheepishly. “Turns out Museveni wanted him more.”

So I wound up going with Joyce, after all. I paid the driver 50.000 /= to apologize for the short notice. Joyce told me later that the driver was her husband, which ticked me off, but by then the money was gone. But I guess in the end I saved money, even if the car we rode in was smaller.

The ride itself was surprisingly uneventful. I didn’t much want to talk to Joyce, so I wound up just sleeping in the passenger seat. Occasionally I would wake up and talk to Joyce’s husband (she refused to tell me his name) about the Rift Valley or the tobacco plantations, and I took a quick film of a baboon sitting by the roadside. We saw some falls on the ride over, passed two small IDP camps, and suddenly we were there.

Despite taking half the time we took to reach Moroto, this ride was both hot and humid, so I pretty much curled up in my miniscule hotel room and went to sleep as soon as I checked in. And that was it.