The Only White Guy Around

Entebbe, Uganda

With my work here done I had a day to see what Uganda looks like outside of a conference room. I long ago made it a practice to stay anywhere I go an extra day.

I headed out on the back of a "boda-boda", the motorcycles that serve as taxis here. With the equator's warm wind whipping back my hair, in short order I ended up at the Botanical Gardens. The Botanical Gardens is pretty much the only tourist attraction Entebbe's got, if you exclude the airport, where Israel once staged a famous rescue raid three decades ago.

If Dr. Seuss had designed a nature park, this would be it. Wildly high trees with impossibly wide branches stretched out like long stringy arms. Vines growing up the sides. Purple flowers with pungent smells. Enormous birds, looking like storks that got blown up three sizes too big. Black and white monkeys hopping from branch to branch. Lake Victoria reaching out to the horizon.

The mere mention of the Garden to anyone here is immediately met with, "They filmed Tarzan there you know. The old version with Johnny Weissmuller, in black and white." Dr. Seuss meets Tarzan.

As the sun started to sink I sat down on a slope. Within minutes I was encircled by a group of a dozen Ugandan kids, loaded with a string of questions.

"Which country are you from? [Bolivia through them for a loop.]"

"When do you leave?"

"What kind of airplane do you fly on?"

"Do you have a camera?'

After taking some pictures and showing them off on my 2 x 3 inch digital screen (this made them very happy) they started to play with my hair. In Uganda there is basically one hairstyle – girl or boy, man or woman – and that style is a quarter inch of fuzz. As they messed, laughing, with my forever-in-need-of-a-haircut brown mop, I was reminded of the day my Afro-Brazilian friend Barto visited the orphanage that my wife and I ran in Cochabamba. Bolivian kids had never seen ANYONE with long dreads before and we couldn't get them to keep their hands off all that wild hair.

Kids, the universal kindness in all cultures. Kids and hair they have never seen up close before, the universal curiosity.

Bolivia and Uganda, two countries separated by a world. Two countries joined by their simplicity and humility. It is good to live in cultures that are simple.