Manafwa Road, in Mbale, bustles under the equatorial sun. Boda bodas swerve around cratered potholes and empowered pedestrians, ferrying shoppers from errand to errand. A shiny TotalEnergies gas station is conveniently adjacent to the taxi park, where drivers loiter by their vans and hawkers push corn, sugarcane, plastic, to anyone around. Activity on the street is frenetic even in this relatively small town.
We came here to see the site of my father's birth. Fifty years of separation means the memories are mostly overridden, but the building my grandfather constructed remains standing. The street was much quieter back then. Same with the Kampala corner my grandmother grew up on--Uganda's population has exploded since they left. Amidst the change, however, there remain signs of what once was. Many of the shops lining Manafwa Road are still South Asian-owned.
My mother struck up conversation in Urdu in one of these businesses, to check if maybe someone had stayed through Idi Amin's regime, if maybe someone remembered when this was our home too. She found the ears of a more recent arrival, Ahmed, who came from Pakistan a few years earlier. With great hospitality he offered food, drink, shelter, anything of service to fellow speakers of his native tongue. Very Ugandan of him--the culture is communal, exuding a jovial tolerance evident in how the people drive and gather and laugh.
Ahmed told us he initially hoped to live in the US. In 2017, he flew from Punjab to Brazil, where he had landed a visa. This man subsequently traversed the length of the Americas towards the allure of a better future. Our exhaustion from tracking mountain gorillas for a few hours in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest just days earlier was now shameful: Ahmed had crossed the Darien Gap, the jungles of Central America, the Andes. He reached the US-Mexico border at Tijuana months later. After jumping the wall, he was swiftly detained. He shivered and despaired in detention for an entire year before deportation back to Pakistan.
A home is left, I thought, and becomes home for another. Movement, that defining trait of humanity, is our foundation. Where we are, how we got here, where we will go. What is the destination of our never-ending journey?
I sensed perseverance in the bones of Uganda. Humans have walked there longer than almost anywhere else. Strength, and perspective, comes with such old, deep roots. There is a general calmness flowing from the shared certainty that life goes on. I stood at the grave of my great grandfather, in the soil my ancestors once came to, and was connected.
I have no doubts that people will dot those fertile, rolling hills until the end of time.
