The Bizarre Truth (8 page)

This explains why we were greeted in Lwanika with an impressive amount of fanfare. All the women turned out, dancing and singing us into the main town square—just a dirt area surrounded by a cluster of four or five homes. It seemed everyone was curious about the arrival of these “mazungos” and their cameras.
Mazungo
basically means “whitey” in Ugandan culture, which never felt derogatory—they use it more as a term of endearment mixed with a healthy dose of good humor. The Embegge have an incredible sense of humor, and laughter is a regular part of the daily village cacophony of sounds. And why ignore the obvious? Mazungos just don’t show up in their village all the time, especially soft fluffy ones like me. The Embegge were very found of using that term around me, mostly because I totally embraced the culture, even if it meant I ended up making a complete ass of myself. Unlike me, most mazungos don’t dance with them, eat their traditional food, work with them, and sleep in teeny pup tents alongside their huts. I even went as far as joining the village’s all-female cooking co-op for an adventurous lesson in cooking matooke—a common dish
made from boiled and mashed green bananas. To the Embegge, this was probably the most bizarre thing they’d ever seen from any man, as the responsibility of preparing food belongs solely to females. In fact, once a male hits age twelve, he isn’t expected to even sit in the kitchen. Taking an active role in their everyday lives, instead of simply staring and gawking from the safety of my Land Rover as most visitors do, afforded me a singular experience that meant we bonded in a way that would have been impossible had I only hung out for a few hours a day, then bussed back to a cushy hotel room somewhere.

Life for the Embegge is very rustic compared to life in the city of Kampala. For the most part, they do not wear Western clothes in the American sense. Women wear a traditional native shift, the same sacklike dress they’ve been wearing for years. Men wear pants and T-shirts in the village, or just shorts and flip-flops. Young men here dress like beach bums in Hawaii. But because national charitable organizations here in the States organize fund-raising drives on a grassroots level, you will often see whole families or villages decked out in prom shirts from 1997 in Cleveland, or see three boys walking together across a jungle field all wearing “Kimmelman Bar Mitzvah 2006, WE LOVE YOU KENNY!” Tees. The families live in small, circular mud and straw huts, which they share with their goats, cows, and other animals, depending on the predators who live in the jungles nearby. Some families are situated in homes made of brick with penned enclosures for their animals. With each passing year, this is becoming more and more the norm. They cook over small fires, farm and hunt off the surrounding land, sharing what they can with their community. It’s the pinnacle of sustainable living, except that buzzword doesn’t exist there. It’s just the only way of life they know. In America, eating well, eating sustainably, and eating off the land are increasingly becoming metrics of social status. In East Africa, it’s the norm. And no one here is hungry, despite the embarrassing cliché of starving children plastered all over the
media. Food choice is limited, and other health issues are in desperate need of attention, but the soil is fertile and the animals are plentiful.

The Embegge people were gracious, kind, and generous hosts, more welcoming than I could have ever imagined. However, I’d be lying if I said these few days I spent with them weren’t one of the most physically, mentally, and emotionally stressful experiences of my life. You’re constantly fighting the oppressive dampness and moisture, the heat, hunger, hydration, the overwhelming stench of rotting plant matter, and the constant threat of disease. From dusk until dawn, all mazungos must cover themselves from head to toe in clothing that has been treated with permethrin, a powerful insecticide that you must soak your clothing in, and wear heavy-duty DEET repellant. Despite the fact that you’ve essentially bathed in these chemicals, the biting flies, some literally the size of cigar butts, continue to seek whatever purchase on you they can. At night, from the safety of our fire and wrapped tighter than Tutankhamen in fine cheesecloth, you could see the mosquitoes in cloudlike waves flying around our heads.

On the day we arrived in Lwanika, we drove through the village and spotted a man sitting on the steps of one of the common buildings with a giant swollen arm. When I say swollen, I mean grotesquely swollen to the point that it was bigger than his body. He had elephantitis. When you see that kind of disease symptomology caused by insects, it makes you think about seventeen times before you run out into the jungle to take a leak at 4
A.M
. Later that evening, I remember looking at the flap on my pathetic pup tent, seeing thousands of biting flies hovering outside. And let’s not forget about the elephants or lions that could stumble into camp at any given moment. I spent most of those nights lying sleepless in my tent, too terrified to venture outside to piss for fear of being devoured by
something
. Ziploc bags come in handy.

I was quickly forced to face my fears on day two as I accompanied some of the tribesmen on a lungfish hunt. To be perfectly
honest, I was really nervous about going lung-fishing from the first days of preproduction because of the horrific swamps in which they live. I was petrified of disappearing in a mud suck-hole or being devoured by snakes. I’m so thankful I never bothered to look at pictures of lungfish prior to this excursion. I never would have participated with such gusto had I known what was living just underneath the muddy water’s surface. Screw the bugs and mud, these lungfish are intimidating.

Early that morning, eight of us marched from our tents through the jungle to the swampy rice paddies where the tribe farmed their grain. There were dozens of paddies, each a couple acres in size, all bordered by mud berms made of swamp detritus. Reeds, branches, and grasses are cut by hand and piled like dikes between the ponds to regulate the flow. These organic items decompose very rapidly, creating a mud topped by spongy grasslike mossy compost, which acts as pathways between ponds after years of being cut and piled and shaped. The waters here are filled with poisonous snakes—several of the most deadly varieties in the world, in fact—as well as some of the most infamous disease-carrying insects. Fabulous. The mud berms were so brutish to walk on, they actually sucked my Keens right off my feet. I went barefoot for most of the day after that, encouraged by local pals who reminded me that the only thing in the water was mud and plant life. A lot could happen to me out there, but stubbed toes and cut feet were essentially physical impossibilities. I had envisioned my body helplessly succumbing to the mud after accidentally stepping in a sinkhole, however, so I insisted on tying a rope around my waist—just in case.

Catching a lungfish is nothing like any sort of fishing I’ve ever done. First, you take a giant stick outfitted with four or five metal barbs, which are typically just pieces of stiff wire lashed to the end of the poles. It resembles a supersize fondue fork, maybe six feet long. Next, you jab the pole into these grassy, muddy walls, trying to find hollow spots where the fish nest. Occasionally, you’ll spot a
fish as it surfaces, breaking the thick brown water for a breath of fresh air. The lungfish we found were about four feet long, weighed about twenty-five to forty pounds, and had ferociously large teeth sprouting from their powerful jaws. They are extremely ugly and angry animals, and, as it turns out, they don’t like to have their nests poked by mazungos. They like it even less when, upon finding their nest, you start hacking away at the mud walls with a machete. Here’s the best part: Once these crazed, prehistoric creatures start to slither in, around, or out of their nest, you must blindly reach down into the mud and muck and retrieve them by hand. And considering their giant, sharp teeth, you better hope you find them before they find you. As you’re trying to get your hands on the fish, your fishing mates attempt to jab the fondue forks into the fish to immobilize them. Trust plays an important role in lungfishing.

All the lungfish that we caught were found by hand, then speared once they were found. Holding on to a wiggling, thirty-odd-pound, ferocious half-fish—half-lizard animal, all while standing chest deep in filthy stagnant water in the middle of the Ugandan jungle surrounded by biting flies, leeches, ticks, snakes, and God knows what else, was one of the more intimidating experiences of my life. I couldn’t have been happier that catching them actually happened a lot faster than I’d anticipated. Within an hour, we had five or six lungfish sprinkled out throughout our eight-man fishing party. Surprisingly, I’d landed one on my second try. The guides were cheering and screaming
“Mazungo! Mazungo!”
the entire time. Apparently, they had never even seen a white person try to catch lungfish, let alone actually score one. I am proud of many achievements in my life, but having dubbed myself the first mazungo lungfisherman in Lwanika is one of my all-time faves.

By this time in the morning, it had to be 95 degrees with 80 percent humidity. No joke. We were all such a dirty, muddy, sweaty mess, and I was just so thankful that the ordeal of collecting food was over. We carried the fish, impaled on our spears, over our
shoulders and back to camp. Interestingly, lungfish is one of the only foods the women will not prepare. The lungfish is considered a “cosmic soul sister” to the female tribe members, and therefore the men take a turn in the kitchen. Unlike fish preparation in larger African cities, where a salt and sun-dried method is commonly used, the tribe usually hot-smokes them. This fancy-food term brings to mind images of these wonderful, touristy salmon shops in the Pacific Northwest, which couldn’t be further from reality. The Embegge build a huge fire of brushwood, then place the fish fillets on a cooking grate, drying and charring them in the fire’s smoke. Once the process is completed, you end up with an overcooked, rock-hard, blackened and brown slab of fish. In that state, it continues to dry out and can later be rehydrated in boiling water and braised in a stew with g-nuts, which is what we would call peanuts here at home. Peanuts are incorporated into a lot of Ugandan and East African cuisine, commonly mixed into a paste with sesame seeds and used as a condiment for meat, crushed and served sautéed with greens, steamed with beans and rice, or boiled in a soup that’s used to rehydrate the lungfish, which is exactly what we did.

This was one-pot cooking in its purest form. The fish reminded me of carp, an oversize whitefish I’ve eaten plenty of in my time: kind of fatty, a bit fibrous, but definitely mild. This ferocious, prehistoric animal was more benign on the plate than I ever imagined. In fact, I’ve discovered that most of the time, the more ferocious and horrific-looking something is in real life, the more mild the flavor and timid the eating experience.

As we prepared our meal, I couldn’t help but think about how many times this scene is repeated over and over again in every African village. Whether they are lungfishing or collecting wild vegetables, seeking out ingredients is such hard work that they collect the bare minimum of food, gathering only what is needed that day. They really don’t have a place to effectively store food before it starts to go bad, bananas and grains being the two large
exceptions. We caught five or six lungfish, well over the normal daily prescription, because the entire village was turning out that night for the big dinner celebration.

In addition to the lungfish, the Embegge killed a goat for stewing, something typically reserved for special occasions. We ate the fish, the goat, roasted squirrel, flying ants, crickets, millet porridge, matooke, yucca, cassava, sweet potatoes, rice and beans, g-nuts, and other root vegetables that night, all of which are commonly served in tribal Uganda. You see more unseasoned, nasty root vegetables in tribal East Africa than anywhere else in the world. I’d be just fine if I never saw another steamed banana or steamed potato again after my three-week visit there.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Haruna and his extended family. The journey was difficult, the stress was insane, and the unknown was all around you every second of every day, but the simple fact of the matter was that for four days I never once thought of a bill I had to pay or a call I had to make. My entire focus was on giving full love and attention to everything I was doing, whatever was right in front of me. It was life lived at its purest state in a country that Winston Churchill called the Pearl of Africa because of its magnificent scenery, robust wildlife, and the friendly native culture. I can’t disagree at all.

A small octopus clings to Andrew’s hand
in the waters off Huatulco, Mexico
.