FRIENDS

FRIENDS

“You need to come play futbol with us,” says Gladys, Senior 4, age 18, about 5’9”, well over 200 pounds, backed by twenty girls and a half-dozen boys.

“Now?” I say, looking at my sandals, standing on the road outside the fence by the girl’s dormitory.

“Yes!  I will play you first.”

Futbol that day last September turned out to be taking turns trying to kick a soccer ball through the other person’s goal, two bricks on end about two meters apart, about ten meters between goals, best score out of five tries.

Short version:  Gladys wins, 3-2.

They are amazed that I can score at all.  So am I.

I tell Gladys, “I am glad you won.”

Everyone yells, “Why?”

I say, “Because you would have something really wrong with you if you couldn’t beat a 69-year-old Muzungu of my size (4’11”, 119 pounds).”

They all laugh, and the conversation begins.

“You can’t be 69.”  

I will be 70 when I come next year.

“What is your favorite food?” 

Apples and chocolate.

“Do you have a cellphone?” 

Yes, an iPhone.

“Is it true that Americans wear their clothes two times and then buy new ones?  

You saw me wear this same skirt and shirt when I was here last spring.

“You will have to learn our names.” 

I will learn four today.

“We will give you this rock: it has four corners, so you can remember us . . . Gladys, Tasha, Bett, Shamine . . . We are your friends now.” 

Webale.

Tasha

THE ETERNAL RETURN

Coming home . . .

A wonderful feeling that I experienced again last month.

Anticipation building . . . passing familiar landmarks as we come closer and closer to Mityana . . . now we are turning off the main road into Mizigo village . . . and all at once we are at Patrick and Eva’s house.  I am home again.

And life, and conversation, picks up, just like with good friends everywhere, right where we left off . . . a day ago . . .  a month ago . . . five years ago . . . six months ago . . .

Last fall, on my second visit to Uganda, after I had been here about two weeks, I wrote a friend, trying to describe what I was feeling.

“Hard to believe that I've already been here two weeks.  In some ways it seems as though I've always been here, a strange feeling, not deja vu but similar.  In other ways, every day is fresh and new, full of excitement and promise, similar to this summer at home.  Nice to remember that this feeling is how life should be for all of us.”

In December when I returned home to beautiful  “Catalpa Gardens” in Pascagoula, Mississippi, I experienced these same feelings, but, of course, I was expecting to.  After all, I was returning to family, friends, homestead, homeland.

But how and why do we feel this same way half-way around the world, in a place we have barely (or even never) seen or experienced?  John Denver describes it well in “Rocky Mountain High”:  “He was born in the summer of his 27th year, comin’ home to a place he’d never been before. . .”

During my more than twenty years as “the Utopian’s wife,” married to futurist Ernest Vlahos, I heard him talk many times about his version of the concept of the eternal return, one of the experiences that people seem to seek in their quest for a better life: a desire for both novelty and a sense of place . . . a sense of belonging, as well as a sense of  purpose, in life. Many of us have experienced this feeling of return, often from an early age, when visiting grandparents or vacationing in familiar favorite places.  

In promoting his Utopian vision of the Resort Circle, a worldwide network of intentional small-village leisure communities that even poor people could afford and enjoy, helping themselves and others, which he had been writing and talking about since the early 1970’s, Ernest would say, “Tomorrow you will live the leisure lifestyle that the rich enjoy today. You will want, and have, a second home.”

I never dreamed I might actually experience this feeling one day. (The wives of Utopians are, of necessity, wrapped in a protective cloak of skepticism.)

Mityana, Uganda, heaven on earth?  Practice, perhaps, for that day when we shall all meet again.