The Island of Alone

The largest lake locked by land lies in Africa, or at least so purported one member of our boat. Alone, a French man I met some months ago at Backpackers Hostel in Kampala, quickly mentioned how it wasn’t the largest and how he thought it might be in Russia, or at least that one is the deepest. A Canadian girl then mentioned how it was, instead, Lake Superior between the US and Canada. The whole thing stood as little more than the recognition of the limitations of travelers, the sad and persistent need for the guidebook with all those little facts that attribute significances to locations. It could be enough, to sit in a boat with gentle waves lapping against it, feeling funny because the wet spray in the air lacked the salt that I was accustomed to—all this without the trivia debate, but these are the things we think about. I’m not sure how we learned this, if it was in the guidebooks, in National Geographic, on the Discovery Channel, but we come to places through facts, monuments, sites, and scenes. I am no different, except only if that I just wrote it down.
Alone scoffed for a short while about how Americans (the more holistic “Americans” which actually manage to include Canadians) felt the need to assert their superiority even in the size of their lakes before mentioning again that he was pretty sure it was in Russia. He tried to let the matter drop and return to his usual ambivalence to disputes between countries by explaining the reason why dropped out of school. Apparently in France they teach their students that there are five continents instead of the more English-accepted count of seven. At around fifteen, when Alone realized this discrepancy, he wondered how formal education could differ in such vast a category as that and deduced that the whole system was worthless.
The first time I met Alone, he was staying in a tent at the hostel I was at for a while. One of our first conversations was him remarking on how he hated it when people came to each other as citizens of a country first and people second. Apparently, he had been sitting on the couch in the hostel for a few months having the same conversation almost every night. Where are you from? How long have you been here? What are you doing? Few people seemed to listen to the actual responses and just nodded sometimes as if the other person was intensely interesting. After leaving school, he traveled the word for fifteen years, conducting himself in various ways, most of which I still haven’t heard about, but I know that at least he spent some time raising lions. At the time, he was stuck in Uganda, victim to some indigenous disease that kept him from traveling, but he was simultaneously prevented from seeing a doctor by a rather intense fear. Every day I would ask him if he had been to the clinic so he could leave. Every day he would respond, “Not yet, maybe tomorrow.”
By Easter weekend, I found Alone at the other end of the line when I was trying to see about space at a hostel on an island in the middle of Lake Victoria. After greeting me as we got on the boat, he explained that since the time I met him on the couches, after countless nights of similar conversations, he landed a job managing a once-defunct hostel on one of the Sese Islands. The stretch of land he now held was 40 acres, a considerable portion of the island stretching an entire tip of a peninsula jetting off the whole. On the trip, he pointed to a cliff and drew a line between a small set of rocky points. “That’s the equator. We found out one day when one guest had a GPS. A couple of weeks ago [April 1st], we drew a line in the sand about fifty feet from there and had people taking pictures in front of it.”
His section of the island represented a traveler’s paradise to Alone, who had definitely slept in enough hostels to conceive of one. His conceptions included vast plans for bungalows and a tree house with a bar and a pulley system for drinks and a series of pronouncements he wanted to write out and paste all over the place to explain his dreams. He wanted to write it all out when he was eloquent enough so that when every group came through he could convey himself even if the drinks and smoke, which were plentiful, inhibited his expression. In his dreams, the island was a sanctuary free from travelers’ squabbles between nationalities, missing the conflicts of backpackers and volunteers, and trying to accomplish what he could for the locals. (On one specific paper, Alone wanted to explain how he offered a nice house at the edge of his land to the staff, but they elect to stay in a shack because they don’t want to walk so far. He hated the idea that people would criticize him for racism, “It’s not that far, but they prefer the other. It’s not a black thing, it’s what they want.”)
Sitting on the small cliffs, the loft that allowed a view of both sides of the island, or even resting on the gravely beach, I could imagine it. Sometimes, it was infested somewhat with Alex Garland’s visions of a travelers’ utopia and other times with stories and dreams I’ve heard in the dorms of other hostels, but it was nice to imagine a small piece of it being acted out, that Alone had managed to secure for himself the exact thing that so many people have voiced their wishes for in the bunk beds of hostels around the world, “Man, I would create a small place, not like these resorts, but leave it untouched, people would only come if they had heard about it from friends, cheep beds, good food, nice drinks, yeah, and free weed!” After of couple of attempts I stopped trying to think what I would want from it and just enjoyed listening to Alone tell of the hopes he planned out in his head.
Part of the paradise came from the isolation of the place. Others I had talked with booked reservations for the holiday weekend. We happened to call Alone earlier in the day and slept that night with about ten other people. The second night, the only guests were Kevin and myself. Sometimes it was difficult to determine if Alone was hosting us or we were entertaining him in his isolation, but the breaks provided by solitude on the island were welcomed. (Of course, I also imagined the tedium of it, our young host sitting here on nights without guests singing to himself, “Je suis Alone. Tres, tres Alone.”) We had ample time to sit and imagine all the things we could do with time, lives spent appreciating Beauty and Joy, writing and making jokes all the time, without hours dedicated to reports and emails. I also planned the partial incorporation of these dreams; time dedicated to appreciation and reflection, set aside from work, but the fruition of those thoughts remains to be tested.
We were not completely isolated. As we walked through small paths on the island we passed fishermen and farmers that used these dirt throughways every day, I imagined the complexity of the island like a California roadmap, with branches and diversions that we tried to follow when the energy took us. It felt odd walking past the locals as they farmed and fished, struggled for a living, while we sought some sort of sanctuary. But this is the discussion I’ve had with James many times. What if the land next to the Internally Displaced Camps is beautiful? How can you go there and try to appreciate it? How can you strive for peaceful Joy while neighboring suffering? It must look odd to see pleasure-seekers strolling through your workplace.
The fish and farming offered by the island seemed bountiful enough, judging at least by the catches pulled from the waters in front of our small place. The island teemed with life, even wild hippos came by the shores and one crawled up the shore late at night despite the barking of dogs. Vast vegetation filled every inch of the island, which must have provided food and shelter to largest collection of insects I’ve ever seen. Every night we constantly swiped our arms and backs, killing four or five mosquitoes with every pass, putting that brave little tailor to shame. Despite the uncountable bites I suffered, the bugs offered another result—they fed the birds. The island not only sheltered us temporarily but also provided a temporary getaway for a ridiculous array of migratory and resident birds. Every tree filled to capacity with feathers and beaks with obvious hierarchies as eagles claimed the higher perches, several other species claimed the intermediate and kingfishers spread across the grass when they weren’t floating above and diving into the waters. The birds fought and, I would assume, mated with a tenacity that would have easily proved to be sheer delight for even moderate ornithologists. I almost felt guilty at the sheer childish joy that a birdwatcher would feel landing on the island, possibly an old man at the end of a life’s ambition, bearing dark green colors, high powered binoculars, and a notebook where he would make numerous checks and scribbles that day to the amazement and jealousy of his friends back home. And I took the island at a stroll, watching them dart in the air and hide in the bushes, swatting away their abundant food as it buzzed in my ears just as I brushed aside the deep foliage that barred my path. In the less dense bushes, I could watch as hundreds of frogs burst from the trail before my footsteps, spreading out like a living flower even as the dragonflies and other bugs floated beside me, following and accompanying the journey.
The island offered a distinctly pleasant place to pass Easter. It vastly differed from previous years spent with families gathered around tables. Even last year, I took up with an adopted family and was welcomed into a bounty of lamb and love. We had excellent food (Alone is French, after all) and solitude to match wherever our thoughts led. The beauty made it easy to celebrate the gifts of the holiday, the offering of hope amidst struggles—exactly what we were trying to seek in the vacation.
Never was it easier to appreciate the wonder and magnificence of God, with His intense juxtaposition of despair and hope, especially considering the historical context of the weekend, then into the beginning of Saturday morning as a storm rolled in. The day began, auspiciously enough, with Alone hoping that the sun would be out strong enough to lie on the beach but that his saying that would probably lead to a storm. We saw the clouds gathering over Entebbe just around breakfast, piling up heavy and dark while the sky above us still retained some aspect of blue. Soon in encroached, the sky growing and heaving and the dark storm twisting around and rolling towards us. As it approached, the clouds seemed inpatient with their burden the moisture inside them plummeting so quickly that they fell still as a cloud, a white whispering of rain that hung like a beard at the base of the darkness. The storm blew in ferociously casting water and wind over everything for an hour before passing over. The other guests left just after the storm, leaving the rest of the day to us as the sky cleared, the sun shown, and the heat grew enough to call for the coolness of the lake and a quick swim followed by lying about on the deck and thoroughly relaxing.
By the end of the weekend, we tried to tell ourselves we were rested, ready for work again, once more into the fray dear friends. We’ll see how prophetic that is, but every break, every chance to see something of this beautiful country reminds me of something deeper than the simple good I’m trying to do here. There was something selfish and universal that drew me to Africa in the first place, before I noticed the need and before I had some small idea that I might help. That’s something to hold onto as well.

***

Before I could return to Gulu, I had to negotiate Kampala. This can challenge me enough with the traffic, the smog, and the expenses, but as we were leaving this time a new obstacle was placed before us—riots. It seems the government here is set on giving away a significant portion of the remaining rain forests, Mabira Forest, here to a sugar company. Another unknowable natural resource will be sacrificed in the name of Gross Domestic Product. The inspiring portion of this story is that the entire country seems to be rising up in protests, in editorials, in conversations, and even from the pulpit on Easter Sunday. The disheartening part is that this protest is having no effect on policy. This last weekend a number of people staged a protest and delivered a petition to parliament, only to see their peaceful display dissolve into chaos as police shot tear gas and the wild mob attacked Indians because an Indian corporation owns the sugar company. Three Indians were killed in the chaos and the point of the demonstration was lost by the time the news hit reels that night, blood took the place of ecology easily enough. Something has to be done but it’s hard to see what. Mostly it comes down to a vast majority of the world being uninformed about the actions of governments with no accountability. The administration seems content to plow ahead hoping the electorate will forget within the next four years before elections—not a difficult supposition considering the previous actions that have gone ignored. Boycotts and protests seem ineffective and if the international community ignores millions of people starving in camps than it seems difficult to imagine them rallying behind trees. There’s hope somewhere, and that should be a more appropriate focus for especially this weekend, the embodiment of hope in my religion, where hope left us and then returned for good. But it’s difficult to find at times.