Night Crossing

The lights have dimmed. The night has been on us for hours now. Midnight is near. We are laying on our bags near a trash dump in a dark driveway in Kampala, Uganda. Lines of shadows, silhouetted by shallow yellow light, lounge around us, waiting. Pop music pounds through the cement wall that separates the driveway/”bus station” from the bar next door. Rats chase each other behind me in a race to snatch the scraps from the nearby candlelit chapati stand. Diesel fogs the city and curdles in my nose as this Saturday night throws itself at my feet on my way out of town. I pretend I am not white and try to blend in with the shadows. It works only in my mind. But in the cover of darkness and the shadow of a Nairobi bound bus, I am just like the luggage around me - tired and bored and headed for the border on a night bus down that long lost highway. I am long and lost. That’s for sure.

After a short but silent frenzy and a mad rush to board, Nairobi pulls into traffic and disappears while Usher fills the space it leaves behind. New shadows shuffle into place along the cement walls. That rotten egg yellow light from a single bulb runs from its cracked shell somewhere in the boarded up structure behind the lot.

When our bus pulls up, we almost miss it even though it is an hour and a half late. There is no announcement or much sound at all. We only recognize it by the masses that throng at its door as soon as it pulls into our lair. Scott and I are shuffled away in the very back  row in a corner as usual but glad we are on the bus, out of sight and relieved to be in darkness. Squeezed in next to four locals with unwieldy knees, it looks to be a long trip. But we are on and bound for Kigali tonight. The bus swings out into a hoard of oncoming boda boda motorcycles --who swerve like court servants on the dusty road out of its way - and rumbles on into the night.

Kampala’s dusty lights have long faded from view. The grumble of the engine whines on toward early morning. The road turns from swervy and jumpy to completely unpaved and potholed. In the back row its like riding a stallion bareback except with very little to hold on to. The bus is careening into turns and the wheels loose their grip on the road for a breathless few seconds each time. Hours pass. Less and less light makes it through the windows. The whole dark bus somehow finds` sleep circa 3am, and we are four wheeling our way through the Ugandan countryside. At times our whole bodies are propelled into the air and the sufferings of the bus wheels haunt our every dream. But trusty as an old pack horse, this old dog is still a’runnin and a-rumblin on its night rounds through Southern Uganda. A few stars somehow force their light through the dust covered windows. Otherwise the night is dark and holding its breath. The rich banana leaves and smooth green grasslands have dropped from the canvas outside under broad strokes of black paint. The occasional sleepy ghost town opens one eye to us as we pass, most often in the form of a single saloon light with lounging shadows drooping from its lashes. And the road? Bump, crash, launch!, rumble rumble, breaks screaming, rumble, rumble. The rumble rumbles anesthetize and rock you into sleep before the next !launch! Every time you wake, you wonder what time it is and how you are not dead yet. Are we at the border yet. Has the bus lost a wheel yet. Rumble rumble launch! is the answer.
Just before dawn we screech to a halt at the border. Not a word is said but the bus empties into the chill of a milky early morning. Nearly everything is completed in silence - even an attempted scam to get my passport information by some guy with earphones in pretending to be border authority. After resigning ourselves from Uganda at a desk that looks like the front desk of a motel 6 off the highway at 4am, we walk the long, guarded corridor between countries, crowned by the steeples of cement towers and slinkys of barbed wire. The sun has yet to lift the cold mist from the borderlands and we walk toward a wet, clouded nothing we imagine to be Rwanda. Official entry into the most beautiful, fresh faced country we had seen yet awaits us. So do the stories of what apocalypse happened here 17 years ago, along with the people who are trying hard to move out from underneath them.

Stiff barricades and barbed wire loom up from the icy mist in rows as we pass. Shadowy guards with AK 47s dot the fog like gargoyles along the roof of a cathedral. Anxiously we hurry toward customs as the sun sleeps that last hour before dawn, two shadows scurrying along a wall of morning mist. A mist so thick it strips you of your identity, your country, your senses. And this is how, in between the borders, we find the importance of belonging. Suspended in the sky we are, seeing that the sky has fallen on us during the night. But the clouds are just minutes from rising.