Overlooking the valley below

Perched half way up one of Kampala's famous hills on a ¼ acre of parcel of pristine real estate, Becca’s house, where I am staying, is by far one of the nicest places I have been. With five bedrooms in the main house (and an odd assortment of midsized rooms jutting out in odd places like the bathroom), it may also be one of the largest. And that’s not counting the “boy’s quarters” right beside the main house that has two rooms and two baths. I asked how much the place was while we were chatting on the roof deck overlooking the valley and another of Kampala’s seven hills. At roughly $2,000, it’s a bit less than my previous small one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.

Go figure: in Kampala, one gated house; in Brooklyn a one-bed. But then again I get potable water from the tap, while they get malarial mosquitoes. Somehow, it all washes out in the end.

The most remarkable thing about the neighborhood is how mixed it is. Not racially, but economically. Just down from the house is a beautiful apartment complex that you could find in Miami.

Adjacent to those flats are one-room huts made of mud bricks where its residents travel some 500 meters to get water. They are lucky enough to live just below water towers that service the complex but unlucky to see none of it.

This morning, I walked past those shacks on my way to their watering hole, or better-termed, protected spring (see below). The water was fresh and cool and provided relief for the kids playing soccer on the field below, some off-duty soldiers traveling by “leg” -- I believe they said – and the woman who filled up jugs. (Although a protected spring in a city does not provide the cleanest source of water with septic tanks and people around likely contaminating the source to some degree.)

In speaking with the first woman I met filling her yellow jerry cans, I found out she was Achioli, meaning she was from the north -- Kitgum, to be exact, the region bordering Sudan, where we conduct our projects. It did not take much questioning for Mary to tell me her story: her father was killed in the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army and well, pretty much everybody else; Mary then fled south with her mother who has HIV. She couldn’t afford school. She got married and has all the while dreamt about going back to the north to see some family members who were left behind but did not have the $12 or so needed for the ride. So she makes three trips a day to get water. She still smiles a lot.

Somehow my personal narrative, where I survived the fall of Lehman Brothers, is not nearly as compelling and feels far too easy. And she was just the first woman with whom I chatted at the spring at the side of the road.