Light and dark are a simple analogy for so many things. Waiting at the baggage counter for my pack and pondering the miles of home beyond the exit gate, I think I would have done well to consider how light and dark interact. How they manage, in a way, to make each other. Allow you to see what it is you have left and what it is you are moving into. Your eyes adjust until someone opens a bright door and you hurt. I didn’t think any of these things at the time. Instead, I wondered why, for the first time returning from a journey, I felt panicked.
I couldn’t make sense of that reaction two days ago, and withdrew into a pattern of sleeping, checking email and avoiding people. Mostly avoiding people. Avoiding people and their peopley things. The malls. The weekend get togethers over drinks. The five/two rhythm of salaried working life and the stories that come to make up its universe.
Mostly, I didn’t want to have to talk about the last two weeks. “How was it?” is a question so easily asked, but the weight of the thing I felt I needed to give as a comprehensive response was just too large. Too inappropriate. Ten minute appraisals in the middle of everyone else’s weekly story seemed too disrespectful. A full emotional explanation would be impossible. An attempt to give one would be poor conversational etiquette. Would lower the mood. Or something.
Not far down the road, on the way to school, the sunrise promises the mango trees a rich and rewarding day.
Nobody wants to hear about people who lost their limbs, lost children they are resigned to never seeing again. The old lady who gets wet when it rains because she is too old and doesn’t have the money to reach and repair the bullet holes in her tin roof. The interview that eventually became hard to track which daughter was raped when.
Maybe that was why nobody asks how it was. It’s easier not to know.
And it’s easier for me to believe that than to think that nobody really cares about these characters from another universe.
They are friends you haven’t met yet. People you might actually quite like. Might laugh with. Might come to care about.
Except that they aren’t simply characters. Points of intellectual interest, or a platform for a discussion about the merits of this type of development aid versus that. They are living, breathing, trying people that would be so easy to assist in the lives they are trying to fashion for themselves and their children. Not help, like some anonymous charity. Some unit expense to salve a conscience. But to assist. To work with.
They are friends you haven’t met yet. People you might actually quite like. Might laugh with. Might come to care about. They are as real as the people we cry about when they break up with us, or lend a hand to move their house or drop their kids off somewhere. Except that they are more than a thousand miles away, and so they can’t make friends of people like you or I.
When you are in Kampala, and you look to the West. It's quite possible that you will see something like this.
Before I left, I thought it would be a journey into darkness. To meet the people that the Lord’s Resistance Army did their terrible deeds to. I thought that there I would need to struggle emotionally. And yet I recall mostly laughter. Smiles and new friends. People who gave their time freely to talk about all sorts of things. Yes the painful things. But also coming over to play the harp for us. To tag along on a cheeky election campaign rally. To show us fat piglets and kids who laugh a good deal more than many I have seen at home.
Just a few meters beyond the husk of a house that we slept in, people would return home or head to market to buy food for dinner. Headlights and dust made for an eerie scene.
It has taken two days since returning and a great deal of soul searching to realise that I had the metaphor wrong. There is no darkness there. No place deserving of a divine, benevolent light. Instead, the darkness lies here. Lies at home. In the fact that we aren’t interested in the stories of the places like Gulu. In the way this world smothers the stories of the lives of these people and reduces them to simple silhouettes that we can deal with in the coins we pop into an aid collection tin. In darkness, it’s difficult to see the texture and fine detail of a place. Of people. In darkness it’s hard to relate as equals, one to another.
Every story I was told. Every life shared and memory created together in Gulu is a little piece of light in the blindness of the world beyond the airport arrival gate. I can see it now in the undeniable detail that each renders about places and lives that – in so many senses of the word – we cannot see from here. If the metaphorical light needs to be brought anywhere, it needs to be brought here – to the places where we are blindest.
And with that thought, stepping back home becomes manageable.