How To Drown A Date

I catch a whiff of a very expensive scent that causes me to look up from my plate. My nose happens to be quite adept at picking out the exotic ones. O, and I absolutely love a good scent, courtesy of my significant other. This particular one is quite out of character with the place. Not that there is anything the matter with the diner but there are some places I classify as "for certain people" and not others.

I am just in time to see a shapely backside with a walking pair to match sashay past my table. The manner of her dress confirms what my ever-reliable nose had picked out earlier—some class. Not a single strand of what is obviously her expensive weave is out of place. In tow is a man who in my quick evaluation belongs. Tall, handsome, clad in a large blue t-shirt, baggy pants and shoes all the color of ebony. Even his skin tone matches. I smile inwardly at the pair.

I would have ignored the incongruous couple and gone on with the business of taming my hunger had Mr. T-shirt not guided Ms Shapely to the table where I sat. It is a four-seater, I was the lone diner there and three vacant chairs beckoned. Obvious choice, and why not anyway? He pulls a chair for her, waits for her to fit her shapely self into it and goes over to pull one for himself. A true gentleman.

The pair is now seated directly in front of me and I am perfectly positioned to steal appraising glances at the fairer one without appearing to stare. Fine looks, olive skin, blue-striped sleeveless blouse. I quickly size up the two, confirming my earlier take. A coupling of here and not-here. Do I read discomfort in her smile and posture? Yes, definitely. I am good at that as well. But Mr. T-shirt is right at home in this place. Now I knew who of the two had suggested the diner in the first place.

Quick as flash, a waitress materializes to attend to the couple. It is not lost on me that I had sat for the better part of 15 minutes without anyone bothering to as much as nod in my direction. I had even contemplated walking out at some point but the hunger pangs jabbing at my belly had persuaded me to stay put. But I am not one to gripe over such trivialities; after all my order had eventually been served.

But I digress.

The orders are quickly called. Mr. T-shirt: cassava, posho, rice, and luwombo of fish in groundnut sauce. Such tough carbs but I nod imperceptibly in approval, a true man of the place. Without waiting for Ms Shapely to have her say, he quickly blurts out an order for her, with the confident air of a man who is on top of things: chicken and chips.

I am already picturing three hot, crunchy, golden-brown drumsticks nestled among several long, thin, golden-yellow slivers of fried potatoes when I am rudely awakened from my culinary reverie.

Woman waiting on couple: we do not serve that food here.

Mr. T: What will you have?

Ms S: Do they have fresh fish?

Woman: Yes we do.

Bring her fish and rice, he quickly interjects.

Life’s good, obviously! I am glad the two chose to sit at my table, this is going to be one very interesting lunch.

Then the conversation starts in hushed tones but I can make out the story unfolding before me. I gather that Ms S is Mr. T’s date and he seems to be out to win her affections. He speaks fairly good English but I swear I cannot hear a single word of what Ms S is saying. Very soft spoken, and again, out of place in this loud diner where you literally have to shout to be heard. She smiles occasionally at Mr. T who keeps talking animatedly. Nice set of teeth. I am three quarters of the way through my meal by now but I make up my mind to step off the gas and draw out the remainder of my time at the table.

Their orders presently arrive and the woman-in-waiting elaborately opens the luwombo for Mr. T. His face lights up considerably. It is going to be a delicious meal. Ms S is presented with the order Mr. T made for her, a mound of steaming white rice on an over-sized, chipped porcelain platter. Accompanying this is another platter on which the fish rests, half submerged in its own soup.

What drinks will you have?

Mr. T opts for cold water. After a moment’s hesitation, Ms S decides she will have a glass of fresh juice.

Because of his chosen seating arrangement, Mr. T cannot see his companion’s face. I wonder why he inadvertently sat her facing me and chose to sit sideways from her. But that is a mundane matter right now. As a direct result, he misses to see the look on her face when she is presented with her food. Absolute bewilderment masked by a faintly lame smile.

Well manicured fingers reach out gingerly for the cutlery, specifically a spoon. The routine goes thus: scoop out some fish soup, pour it on the rice and attempt to eat. Eyes lifted slightly from my near-cleaned plate, I am taking in every movement of the fingers and the cutlery. I can even afford to look further up at her face because I know that all her attention is on the food and she will not see me. It is now all creased in consternation. Have I missed something? Maybe, maybe not but I can swear that S has seen hordes of all manner of dangerous microorganisms swimming in the fish soup and crawling all over the rice.

Every trip of the spoon to the red, luscious lips is a protracted exercise in agony. T is too lost in his heaven of luwombo to notice his companion’s troubled demeanor, let alone care. I told you, life’s gorgeous.

The drinks arrive. I would not be too bothered to give S’ juice a second look. Apparently, neither would she who ordered for it in the first place. Thin and yellowy it looks, the glass presented uncovered and sitting on another over-sized plastic tray. What is with these people and larger-than-life crockery? My eyes are now scrutinizing S’ every expression. You would be forgiven to think that I am conducting a research for my doctoral thesis.

Did I say that she occasionally steals glances at me? Well, she does. It must be the deadpan expression she finds me wearing each time she looks in my direction. He he he. She gives the juice one lo-o-o-ong, hard look, the kind a mother usually reserves for her little boy when he plays irritating pranks in front of the visitors she told he was the most adorable boy in the neighborhood.

I could be wrong but there is no way on this planet that S is going to as much as attempt to drink from that glass. T is really enjoying his luwombo, making light banter while at it, blissfully oblivious of the scenario developing right next door. S continues to carefully pick at her mound of microorganisms while I go about the mundane business of pretending to clear the scattered nibbles still resting on my plate.

I am starting to lose interest in the goings-on in front of me so I beckon to the young man who attended to me for my bill. But knowing the time it took him to process my order in the first place, I know I am in for a lengthy wait so I might as well make myself busy. My next destination is my area electricity supply office, they had earlier asked for a sketch map to my home to make some installations there. I fish a pen and paper out of my rucksack and get to work.

Half way through the sketch, I hear S let out a muffled “OMG”, like the microorganisms had suddenly developed wings and were flying off into space. Fearing the worst, I look up from the sketch but everything still looks exactly as I left it a minute earlier except that both S and T have abruptly suspended the exercise of decimating their respective meals. Two pairs of eyes are now fearfully trained on the glass of yellowy juice.

Following their gazes, I soon discover the reason for their mortified expressions. But in all honesty, T’s seems to me more amused than anything else. There in front of all three of us, plain as day, is a navy blue housefly furiously flapping its wings and paddling all three pairs of legs, frantically fighting for its life in the lake of juice.

Seemingly unbothered while furiously taking mental notes, I go back to finishing my sketch but not before glancing in the direction of S. Our eyes lock fleetingly and I mouth a pained “sorry”. She quickly drops her gaze and folds her arms in a final gesture of defiance.

Defiance of the food, the juice, the over-sized crockery and every last thing about this damned place teeming with billions of cretinous microscopic creatures.

I pick up my stuff, mumble my excuses and make for the exit. As I leave the table, I steal one last glance at T still engrossed in his meal but this time, his shoulders appear stooped in resignation. I can only hazard guesses at what is going on in his mind.

Houseflies are as commonplace in many diners as sand on beaches but unfortunately for them, they were not made for swimming and thus tend to drown in fluids. This one chose the wrong place to take his afternoon swimming lesson and had inadvertently drowned a man’s awesome date.

I wished I could stay a little longer to witness a happy ending to this misadventure but I need to deliver my sketch map to the electricity guys before they close shop for the day. Good luck Mr. T-shirt, good luck to you too Ms Shapely, you will both need it soon.

Methinks anyway.

Mother and Child

I stood in line waiting to have my turn at the serving table. My mind was in places, working to come up with appropriate illustrations for the mid-morning teaching session after the break.

We were at one of the upscale hotels in Fort Portal, a town situated approximately 300 kilometers west of Kampala the capital city of Uganda. It is a beautiful town—cool weather, gently rolling hills and easy-going people. From anywhere in the town, one can easily see the Rwenzori mountain range in the distance and if you are not too pressed for time, a drive to Bundibugyo 70 kilometers away further west will bring you to the foot of these breathtaking ranges that stretch across the impressive distance of over 120 kilometers.

 

The Rwenzori Mountain Ranges

In front of me was one of the participants at the training workshop we were conducting for a team of community leaders from the Bundibugyo Area Development Program of World Vision Uganda. If I remembered correctly, his name was Joseph. Always smartly dressed and well-spoken, he was no stranger to me as we had interacted informally at previous workshops. As we neared the table, he turned to me and started to make small talk, asking about how the training sessions were progressing for me as a trainer. I indulged him for a while and before long, it was our turn at the tea table.

There were three giant thermos flasks with labels that read “milk tea”, “milk” and “hot water”. There was also a tribe of beverages to choose from which included tea, drinking chocolate, instant coffee, soy coffee and several others I would not be too bothered to sample. I had already decided that I was going to make myself a cup of strong coffee to give me some kick and help me combat the drowsiness that I was beginning to feel. Teaching can be a draining job and I had been at it for four consecutive days.

As I was stirring my mug of coffee, Joseph was busy adding spoonfuls of chocolate powder to his milk. Almost casually, he asked me a question that caught me flat—footed and set me thinking in a whole new direction. “Teacher, what is this?” he asked as he scooped more chocolate from the tin labeled “Cadbury drinking chocolate”.

The question caught me off-guard mainly because it seemed to me trivial and misplaced at that time in that hotel lobby. But as my tired brain slowly digested it, its implication struck me like a blow and jolted me back to life.

 

Cadbury Drinking Chocolate

Basing on my secondary school geography/agricultural lessons and from what I had read up on the subject here and there, I could clearly remember that chocolate is processed from the cocoa plant. The cocoa pods are harvested from the cacao tree growing mainly in countries in the narrow belt 10ºN and 10ºS of the Equator, where the climate favors them to no end. The largest producing countries of this much sought—after crop are Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Indonesia.

West Africa and the Indian Ocean aside, I also knew that Joseph hailed from the Bundibugyo region, an area famed for growing cocoa as its number one cash crop. No homestead in this part of the country is complete without numerous plants of the cacao tree strewn across its gardens. Trade in cocoa has educated the children of Bundibugyo, built imposing mansions, constructed schools, sparked endless feuds, been responsible for lavish weddings, and made many well-intentioned folk polygamous.

It is that lucrative, and divisive.

I frowned in complete bewilderment at Joseph and at what I thought was his simplistic question, and informed him that the dark brown powder was called cocoa. His face quickly became a picture of complete shock as his mind digested this latest piece of information. I think it was the word “cocoa” that triggered him off. “You mean to say it is the same cocoa that we grow back at home?” I replied in the affirmative and all he could do was look down and slowly shake his head. He was clearly baffled by this new knowledge. It would seem that my answer had caused him to experience a total paradigm shift.

 

A Cacao Tree Plantation in Bundibugyo

The irony of this seemingly mundane episode could not be lost on me. Here was this well-intentioned gentleman enjoying the luxury of a beverage made from a crop he grew in his backyard, a crop I was certain he interacted with on a daily basis from when he was a child, but blissfully ignorant of how it was inseparably connected to the beverage he was now enjoying from the comfort of this hotel lobby.

As I walked back to my seat thoughtfully sipping from the now-tepid mug of coffee, I silently shook my head at the absurdity of the whole situation. I was certain that from Joseph’s perspective prior to our little chat, the chocolate powder in these fancy tins was an exotic beverage imported into the country for the luxurious indulgence of the well-to-do who could afford to sleep in this hotel.

For the life of him, and except for that fateful question he asked me innocently, he probably would never have been able to relate this sweet brown powder to the golden—brown pods that hung from the cacao trees in his gardens back at home, that the pods gave birth to the said powder.

Mother and Child!

 

Mother and Child...

And I thought, what a pity that from the perspective of Joseph, the child was completely unknown to its mother. He grew the crop, harvested it year in year out, sold it to some middle men who in turn sold it to some other higher-middle men, who then aided it on its elite journey to Cadbury’s state—of—the—art factories in Singapore, and onward to Tasmania and Victoria (even Kenya and the rest of the world) where it was processed, packed in those fancy, shiny tins and eventually re-exported to Uganda.

Here it was distributed to various supermarket chains and up—market hotels in places like Fort Portal so that during one random training seminar there, the likes of Joseph tasted the beverage with their milk and discovered for the first time that the tree which birthed this exotic powder grew in their plantations back home. Imagine the odds!

His could have been an isolated case of a child’s lack of knowledge of its mother, and I honestly hoped it was but I knew in my heart of hearts that I was wrong and that my hope was but a sham.

A few months later, I made a trip to the town of Bundibugyo. Everywhere I passed, there were these cacao trees in full bloom, laden with their unmistakable golden brown and maroon colored cocoa pods. At the Ntandi village cocoa cooperative union, I met a gentleman who was weighing out a sack of dry cocoa beans, all nicely fermented and ready to be sold to a waiting middle-man. I engaged him in conversation and asked him what the beans were used for. He gave me a blank stare like I had requested him for directions to Mars. He blurted out “I do not know”.

My heart silently wept at my government’s 30-year ineptitude to build modern infrastructure for value-addition to agricultural produce, and by extension, its active participation in the hypocrisy and sheer robbery of capitalism.

Walking through a peaceful cacao plantation on an overcast morning the next day, birds chirping cheerily in the sky, I stopped by a tree with three beautiful maroon cocoa pods. Pointing my camera lens at them, they seemed to look straight back and smile at me. With no premeditation, I smiled back, clicked away some more and waved to them as I walked off thinking: Mothers deserve to know their children, anything less is an affront to and a rape of their dignity.

My Three Maroon Friends