The poorest man in Uganda.

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Having finally made it back to my feet, I’m on the first bus out of Kampala, desperate for a change of pace. Sitting at the “Source of the Nile,” Jinja is a quiet, leafy respite from the capital’s congested mayhem. The center of town is colorful and compact - brightly painted shops, flowery sidewalks, women selling withered produce in the market - and around it dirt roads shoot out toward the dark, still waters of the Nile. It’s friendly and low-key and mercifully flat, and I spend a few days strolling around, down the colonnade of palm trees by the waterfront, under a shrieking canopy of bats in the treetops, past the cream- and pastel-colored Hindu temples that look like they’re made from marzipan.

It’s an odd, weathered, roughed-up place; once one of Uganda’s most prosperous towns, it suffered greatly in the post-Amin years. Around the leafy suburbs, white-washed bungalows sit in different states of disrepair: broken windows, missing doors, roof tiles battered by the elements. Ragged women stand in the doorways, surrounded by squealing kids. They sit in the shade on the porch, chanting “Mzungu! Mzungu!”, or dangling barefoot and grinning from the trees. It’s as if a whole city of mid-level bureaucrats - their modest salaries paying for modest homes with modest lawns - were chased out by some apocalyptic uprising, and now the squatter families have moved in, dragging their mattresses onto the porch and watching the water stains slowly spreading across the walls.

In its own small way, though, Jinja’s enjoyed a revival. The birth of the rafting industry on the Nile’s Class IV and V rapids has brought with it a surge in tourist traffic. Campsites cluster around a scenic perch at Bujugali Falls - some, like Nile River Explorers, achieving a certain notoriety for the libidinous escapades of buff young kayakers and their blond, chain-smoking hangers-on. Downtown, beside the pork joints and DVD shops and stationery stores, you can pick up carved masks and statuettes, woven baskets and beaded necklaces, hand-made goat-skin drums. You can also take a sidewalk table at the Source Café, an attractive little tourist trap with bougainvillea tumbling from the trellises. I spend quite a few mornings here, enjoying a strong Ugandan brew and reading in the shade, while groups of local volunteers - pale Americans with elaborate walking sandals and braided hair - practice their Luganda and roll their eyes at the tourists who walk down the street, banging their goat-skin drums.

(Incidentally, there’s also a hokey tourist attraction at the river’s so-called source - a carnival set-up of yellow and orange pavilions, sponsored by the local Nile brewery. Here you can sip a cold beer at the approximate place where John Hanning Speke discovered, in 1862, the river’s elusive source. The discovery itself is, of course, a matter of great dispute. And the failure of so many of the epoch’s great explorers to find it for themselves lends a certain extravagant irony to the ornery theme park that would have, no doubt, made Livingstone reconsider the ill-fated quest that would end in his death. But metaphysical asides aside, it’s a pleasant enough place. I spend an afternoon hitting the sauce while a storm blows in, rain falling in fat drops and dimpling the gray smooth waters.)

I’ve come to Jinja with absolutely nothing on my agenda, and that suits me just fine. While just about everyone who comes to Jinja does so to raft the Nile, I’ve taken a glance at the promotional videos - best described as “white-water carnage” - as well as a glance at my empty wallet and decided that, at $125 for the day, I’m happy to give the rapids a pass. I stroll through the market with Shufy and Omer - two Israelis I met at the hostel - while they haggle over fruits and vegetables. I terrorize small children with my camera. It’s a swell couple of days, all in all.

One morning I take a long, looping walk along the river road. I meet a group of boda drivers resting in the shade of a great flowering tree. A tall, handsome man approaches and takes my hand. His name is Hamzeh. He’s wearing a crisp, button-down shirt with black cufflinks and designer jeans and brown loafers - a poster-child for a happy Uganda, if ever there was one. Soon we’re joking and talking easily when, to my surprise, he asks for money.

“We are poor people,” he says, his palms turned up to the sky.

I reach over and tug his pant leg up till his shiny loafers are exposed. “Look at these shoes!” I say. “This man wants to tell me he’s poor. Look at my shoes.” I gesture toward my mud-spattered hiking boots. The others laugh wildly. “You want me to give you money? Why doesn’t someone want to give me money? I’ve been in Uganda for six weeks, and not once has someone said, ‘Hey, mzungu, here: have some money. Have 1,000 shillings, mzungu. Buy yourself a drink.’” This leaves everyone in hysterics.

Hamzeh laughs, too. He gets a phone call and walks off a few steps to take it. When he returns I grab him by the wrist and show the others. “Wooo-eee!” I say. “Is this a fancy phone or what? This poor man wants me to give him money, with his fancy phone.”

Hamzeh becomes solemnly indignant. He protests, saying that it’s the cheapest phone in Uganda. I tell him that’s impossible: I have the cheapest phone in Uganda. I pull out my light-weight Nokia and show it to the others. There’s a murmur of approval: it is, they all agree, a very cheap phone. Hamzeh asks how much I paid for it, and I say Ush40,000 - about twenty-five US bucks. He shakes his head, unimpressed: his phone cost just Ush10,000 - about the price of a frappuccino. He says that his phone is so cheap, if he drops it on the ground, no one will even bother to pick it up. I do a little comic pantomime of me kicking his cheap phone on the ground, and he says no: they wouldn’t bother to kick it, either.

I congratulate him, then turn toward the others.

“This man right here,” I say, “is definitely the poorest man in Uganda.”

Hamzeh joins in the laughter, but then his face grows serious and earnest. “Mzungu,” he says. “I met an American last week. I met him right here,” he says, pointing to the ground, “and he said that in America, when you have the new year, you take all the things from the old year and throw them away. You buy new things for the new year.”

The others nod in agreement. This is, it seems, a story they’ve heard many times before. I protest at the wild improbability of what he’s saying, but none are swayed. Hamzeh continues, building his case.

“He said that you throw away your old radios and buy new radios. You throw away your old televisions and buy new televisions.” More nods. “Mzungu, is this true?”

It’s almost a moment of high drama, but for the sheer lunacy of the accusations being flung. Still, that a dozen men gathered on a dirt road in Jinja could believe such things is, in itself, deeply revealing. I assure him that it’s not true, that most Americans, myself included, have weathered old stereos and TVs and kitchen appliances, and that many Americans are, in fact, poor. This meets with a few whoops of disbelief from the crowd. If I’d decided, at this very moment, to strum Brahms’ Cello Sonatas on my pubes, it would’ve seemed no less fantastic to their astonished ears. When we part, I can imagine the looks of reassurance being shot behind my back, as if to say: we Ugandans might be poor, but it sure beats being crazy.

Later that day I get a sobering call from Kenya. It’s from Peter, my footballer friend who - last I heard - was weathering the country’s post-election storm with his family in Kitale. The violence in western Kenya has been the country’s worst, and it’s not long before I learn that Peter’s family is in bad shape. Like many Kikuyu living in the west - in Kisumu and Kitale, in Eldoret - the Munenes were targeted soon after the rioting began. They’d been lucky to escape unharmed, but Peter tells me their houses were burnt down. They’re living in a local church, hoping to find a way back to Central Province, where they can join the rest of the family.

The timing has been especially bad for Peter: this month he was meant to be in Nairobi, trying out for a place on Mathare FC - one of the country’s top football clubs. Now, with gas prices rapidly climbing because of country-wide shortages, he explains that the cost of a bus ticket from Kitale to Nairobi has doubled: from Ksh500 to Ksh1,000 - about fifteen US bucks. It’s more than he can afford, but he’s desperate to get to Nairobi. So I visit the Western Union the next morning and arrange to send him some money - enough for a ticket to Nairobi and, I hope, food for a couple of weeks. He thanks me, and promises to be in touch when he reaches the capital.

Two weeks later, when I finally hear from him, he sounds exhausted. He was arrested in Nakuru - he doesn’t offer details - and by the time he got to Nairobi, it was too late: Mathare’s squad was full. Now he’s going to go back to Kitale to be with his family, though he doesn’t know what will be waiting for him there. I promise to keep in touch and do what I can for him, but I don’t know what that might be, and I doubt it would be enough, and the words feel like little consolation.

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