UGANDA BY CAR

The very first time I traveled to Africa I was there a whole month. I was visiting primarily to photograph animals in Botswana and South Africa, so I certainly had my camera gear with me, but the itinerary was such that we spent very little time in a vehicle, aside from our twice-daily game drives. All of my transportation to and from the various camps was conducted by small, chartered airplanes, therefore I had almost no opportunities to explore or photograph any “real” African villages or rural communities.

Many years later, in Egypt and then subsequently in Morocco, I traveled by car a great deal, but northernmost Africa and the Middle East is such a vastly different place in terms of both location and culture, that it did nothing to contribute to my understanding of Sub-Saharan Africa and the provincial communities that lie there within.

Most recently, however, in Uganda, I was not only traveling by car for great distances and for very long periods of time— through populations both rural and urban and everything else in between— but I had my proper camera with me, as well as my handy iPhone.

These snapshots are the result of those journeys. I am not attempting to tell a story with these photos, and in fact, they have only the most tenuous relationship to one another, aside from the fact that I selected to share these photos over others.

So, don’t expect to gain much insight here, not even from my writings, as my understanding of what I was witnessing and photographing is rudimentary and subjective at best; I was just an outsider, looking in.

Or looking out, rather—to be entirely accurate—as many of these were shot from inside a car.

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NOT MY STORY'S HEROINE

Mimi, an irritating and oblivious white woman (who I talk more about HERE and HERE) insisted on throwing candy out of her window, even though we had all asked her repeatedly to stop doing so. But what did we know?!?

Well— only what we could all see with our own eyes— that her selfishly altruistic insistence on throwing candy out to the children always resulted in a chaotic frenzy and the inability for our car to move freely down the street. When she did this, we were always encumbered by a throng of begging children. The older and bigger children would invariably beat up the smaller younger ones and take whatever morsel of money or candy they’d been able to procure. Mimi’s misguided altruism meant that we were essentially just cruising through each village, leaving untold brawls and havoc in our wake.

This girl was presumably wearing the only dress available to her, nevertheless, the surprising fanciness and color of the ensemble was undeniable, especially as she was running barefoot next to our car in a cloud of dust, begging for candy and money. With her lithe physique and striking, model-esque face, I couldn’t help but be reminded of some bizarro and avant-garde fashion shoot; when in reality, what was happening was anything but. She moved effortlessly in the restrictive gown, even as she took to pummeling the younger children with her fists as she took away their candy. Again, Mimi, could you please stop throwing candy out of your window, it doesn’t produce the ingratiating results you were hoping it would!

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HERE'S OUR STORY'S HEROIN

I am not shy in writing about my past struggles with alcohol and hardcore drugs. And while this is all very interesting (and possibly/hopefully helpful to people still in the throes of addiction or NEW TO SOBRIETY), what it also means is that I’m quite familiar with what someone looks like when they are on more than just alcohol and am a pretty good judge of when a person is more than just drunk.

He stumbled down the street with glassy eyes and a staggered gait, his mind seemingly somewhere else entirely as he slowly approached our idling car. Our guide and driver had left us all alone in the car while he ran a quick errand. The car was running and the (manual) driver’s side window was partially rolled down. This inebriated man approached the open window, and as he stood there speaking a steady stream of unintelligible words, he appeared to be using the car to support himself, to keep himself standing upright. He refrained from engaging us directly, and instead seemed transfixed on the dangling cluster of keys that were hanging from the car’s ignition.

His overall demeanor and stupefied behavior did not strike me as that of someone who had overindulged on alcohol, nor did it strike me as unadulterated mental illness. This man was f*cked up. But on what exactly, I could not say. I was not/am not familiar with the drug culture of Uganda well enough to know what types of drugs and substances are readily available to them. And since I didn’t know what narcotics they have easy access to, I couldn’t even proffer a guess.

So, as he stared at our keys, I stared at my phone; and in between taking the occasional surreptitious photo of him, I Googled “What drugs are popular in Uganda?”

As he continued to linger and speak incoherently into the opening of our car window, I continued to read: “Crack, heroin and marijuana are popular on the capital's streets. Heroin is cheap enough to be an after-work routine for many in the slums who barely earn enough money for food.”

Well. A quick visual inspection of the surrounding area, combined with the fact that I suddenly had internet, told me we were definitely in a more “urban” area; it’s also the reason we had stopped in the first place, this town sold cell phone chargers. And an even quicker visual inspection of this man told me that of the three drugs mentioned in the article, marijuana was not the one I was witnessing before me.

The only saving grace we had working in our favor, and the only thing that kept me from spiraling into a state of absolute panic, was the fact that the man leaning on our car seemed too dysfunctional and neutralized by drugs to be much of a legitimate threat.

If I was forced to make an educated guess, my guess would be that this man was on heroin. And I remember thinking the same thing in my head that I’d thought so many times before when dealing with my brother in a similar state: that if it came down to it, I could take him down.

Easy, no question. He appeared to be in the most incapacitated and debilitated phase of the drug, the lethargic and useless phase— although I wouldn’t want to be around when it started to wear off and it became time for him to find more. That’s the phase when you need to start getting worried.

How funny that I’m reminded of MY BROTHER for the first time in ages, and it’s because a vagrant, drug-addled man in Kampala, Uganda is slurring incoherencies into our idling car’s window.

Meanwhile, Mimi, our heretofore self-proclaimed beacon of altruism, was rummaging around frantically in her purse. I assumed she probably intended to absurdly offer the inebriated man some pieces of individuality wrapped candy from her ill-advised (but seemingly endless) stash, but instead she loudly announced that she wished she had her mace with her. She then further insinuated that she was ready to just spray the man in the face and be done with it, but luckily for all, Mimi’s mace had been taken away at the airport.

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On the Beaten Path

When most of us think of a “bad area” in America, it might be in the context of a place you wouldn’t ever want to have car trouble.

“Just pray your car never breaks down around here,” someone might say, as you hastily speed through an unsavory part of town.

But now imagine that people and tourists are constantly visiting that part of town, that ghetto, more or less intentionally, because the impoverished slum you’d “never want to be at night” is also inextricably intertwined with tourism. Also imagine that due to their proximity to something desirable, the poor and desperate people who live in that area have to regularly contend with a constant stream of visiting tourists. These tourists are more well-off financially than the locals, and so they parade voyeuristically through the streets of the difficult and derelict place, spending money and taking photos with their fancy cameras, and just generally disrupting the privacy and lives of all the local people who would prefer to be left alone.

This is a huge difference between developing countries and America, and it’s something I constantly think about during my travels. People in dire straits are just trying to go about their daily lives and make ends meet, and yet, here’s all these foreign travelers. It must be maddening, humiliating, and infuriating.

In Nepal it’s Mount Everest, in Mexico it’s the beaches and Mayan ruins, in Egypt it’s the pyramids…. the list goes on and on, but people flock to these poor and developing countries because of a very specific attraction. The tourists are then forced to experience the grittiest and most impoverished aspects of that country simultaneously, because it’s all intertwined. And in turn, the residents of that impoverished place are forced to tolerate the obnoxious and entitled tourists. It’s just the way things are, an accepted cycle.

Over here in America, we like to keep our poverty hidden away. We keep our poverty sequestered and far removed from our tourist attractions, almost as if it doesn’t exist. Whether this is for better or for worse is debatable, but what it does mean is that here in America’s slums, the residents of our ghettos don’t have to wake up each day and tolerate a whole bunch of wealthy and oblivious tourists— people who really have no business being there— parading through their streets. The tourist vans and busses have no reason to pass through our most derelict and unsavory American places, and so they don’t.

And if I’m being totally honest, now that I’m sober, neither do I. There’s no reason for me to go to bad parts of town anymore, and so I don’t. I avoid them.

Just know that it doesn’t mean I am unaware of them— I actually have a very intimate and shameful relationship with many unsavory parts of America— but it’s something I find myself writing about less and less frequently these days. Now I mostly encounter abject poverty abroad, and so by default, those are the stories and issues I find myself writing about most frequently and contemplating most intensely.

However, this was not always the case. As many of my fellow drug addicts in recovery can no doubt relate, when you are addicted to an illicit substance, out of necessity, you will often become like a tourist yourself, albeit in your very own town. You will suddenly find yourself visiting dark and dangerous parts of the city you’ve never been before, parts of the city that, if it weren’t for the drugs, you’d otherwise have no reason to be.

I’d think to myself, “I sure would hate for my car to break down here in this terrifying part of town!”

Then I’d drive there again the next night. And the next, and the next…

In a very real sense, my compulsion to photograph certain exotic things in this world is very much like A NEW ADDICTION. It’s a new fixation that likewise brings me to some very dark and derelict corners of this planet that I would otherwise have no reason to be.

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Read more about my alcoholism, drug addiction HERE, HERE , HERE, HERE and HERE!