Travel Log of Danae Voormeij
Zeu, Uganda, 2008

I am writing you from Arua, northwestern Uganda. Here, with my team of 4, we are exploring for gold on the border with the DRC. We are currently working on a license that is about 2 hours drive from where we are staying in a guest house. We fill the truck up first thing in the morning to ensure a full tank should the supply of diesel in town go down. The tank takes an amazing 100liters. We take off and almost immediately we are off the tarmac and on dirt road. Warm brown earth with many dips and potholes and occasional quartz float armoring parts of the road. Many small pathways branch off this main route and lead to villages, which consist of a group of several round or square huts belonging to one family, surrounded by immaculately swept clean earth. Separating the villages there are acres of cultivated land. Corn, cassava, banana groves, coffee plantations and tobacco are common. Mango trees, guava and passion fruit vines are found around homes, pathways and trading centres. These peaceful centres have no electricity or running water. Goats and other domesticated animals sleep on the elevated ledge of the houses, just under the thatched roofs. Kids run around in either completely tattered rags for clothing or in a school uniform. Most children make it into primary school,a nd few into secondary. Any schooling is at the cost of the parents. At one time a pathway got me very close to one of the local primary schools and there were so many children, it sounded like buzzing of a bee colony. I got closer and stepped inside the first classroom. The children were instantly quiet and stared. There was no teacher and I counted 3 exercise books. I asked the class How Are You and they all answered “Fine!” in chorus. Then I asked What Class Is This and the choir responded “second year primary!” They don’t learn any more English than that until they get to secondary school. All boys and girls as well as adults, shave their hair or keep it very short, to prevent head lice from settling. The teacher showed up and I asked her how many students there were: 170 students crammed into one classroom!! I filmed them singing in class and afterwards showed them the video. They loved it. They were so happy; they surrounded the truck and ran after us with waves and smiles.

On market day hundreds of women walk the roads, in their finest kitenge, a cotton wrap with loud designs, with their latest child tied to their backs and enormous pots and baskets and plastic tubs balanced on their heads with heaps and heaps of produce. Surely 50kg of avocadoes, a very popular item, or a pot full of freshly steamed corn on the cob, or mangoes, which they are hoping to sell. Bicycles are the main mode of transportation for the men and as such, they carry ridiculously large loads on their bikes and push the two wheels forward, because they get too heavy to ride. I’ve seen men push bike loads from a market on the Congo side across the border for more than 30km to sell the rice bags full of rice, beans and sugar here in Arua. Bicycles are valued in terms of how much weight they can carry.

The place we went to today is called Zeu and lies in the province south to Arua, called Nebbi. We picked up Hon. Chairman Yofes, our local guide here in Zeu, and headed for the border. It is a little tricky getting around when you are near the border and this one photo explains a lot. Keep in mind that this is not at customs, but just a road close to the border. You can see two trucks that have come from the Congo, fully loaded and just paid 20,000 shillings (~16 dollars) each to get into Uganda. You can also see the closed gate, and only one guy in town who has the key to unlock it and he will make the trucks wait a while and then get a little bit of money from them as well. For vehicles, motorbikes and bicycles, one can pass on the left side of the gate, in between the two wooden pillars, yes, in between the two pillars where the guys are sitting. And as luck would have it, someone decided to change their tire right in front of the passage so we couldn’t get through. In broken Swahili, the driver and I try to first get the vehicle to move and since that was going to take a while, to then get the man from town, who holds the key, so we could pass. It took some patience and smiling and finally we got through. At the border we were meant to meet with Captain Patrick (in photo with me) from the customs who had invited us the previous day to see a gold mining operation in the Congo side, but he was a no show. The border is lined with tall eucalyptus trees and dangerously armed Congolese military. And while our chairman (dressed in blazer in the photo) was asking for the whereabouts of the good Capt., the customs guys starting pointing at me saying that I have money and surely one of them could take us across instead for a fee. I could easily picture how they could also stop us from returning because we don’t have the necessary papers to even cross in the first place. Not to mention the barracks with hundreds and hundreds of Congolese soldiers just 50m behind them just waiting for some excitement. And so we walked away from it and focused on fieldwork on this side of the border.

One of the interesting rock showings I had seen was one the side of the road of one of the small trading centres in Zeu, which happens to be the place of the chairman’s wife’s family, and she must have a lot of brothers for I met a lot of uncles. Families here are huge! Men are judged by the number of children he has and they can have 30, easy. They often have multiple wives.

I was inspecting the road side in this centre, with the usual group of onlookers, the locals get very close to see what I am doing, especially the Brunton compass gets a lot of close attention. I have to ask children to move back a little when I am hitting rocks for samples. No-one ever touches me and rarely do they speak to me, but they talk a lot amongst themselves. Shouts of amazement when I slide the magnet along a small vein of pure magnetite and it sticks and holds.
One of the guys says Yes, that’s the good rock! I will show you more! And the chairman says that the man may be a little drunk but he had worked in the gold mines in the Congo and probably knew what he was talking about. So we follow the swaying man and quite a posse of young men are now part of my team. As our group of 16 comes down the path, people run frantically across the fields and the guys laugh and laugh. I’m thinking, scary, these guys enjoy the fear on their own people? But then it was explained to me that the chairman was due for checking on sanitary regulations in this area and that the locals thought he was coming to arrest people. That didn’t make me feel too much better. Soon, though, the locals were having a good laugh at their own foolishness for running and having fear over nothing.

We passed a black smith, where one man works the bellows, made of goat skins, and another man takes red hot blades out of the fire and holds them between sticks over a granite slab, where yet another man pounds on the metal with a hammer, shaping it into spades, blades, arrows and spears. I moved a little to the sound of the bellows and soon everyone was shaking their hips a little as we moved along. We see a young woman and the chairman says it’s his daughter. His brother’s daughter, he then explains. Hmm, they count their brothers’ children as their own? That’s how they reach such high numbers. We pass through a pine forest that is so similar to the forests in the Pacific Northwest, it is remarkable. Tall pine trees, ferns and mosses, even a type of blackberry! I tell the men of the Canadian forests and the bears with enormous claws and thick fur and how they hibernate for months and months. I describe the salmon run and they say that surely such a spectacle must get thousands of visitors.
We pass through the forest out into grasslands. Tiny black and white paradise birds with extremely long tail feathers fly over and tiny grey sacs rub off the tall grass and explode on my pants and hundreds of pin-head sized ticks burst forth. But the rocks are good and we sample many.

On our way back to the vehicle, a tropical rainstorm started, water literally poured from the sky within seconds of the first drop and we all ran for cover. Now I looked through the curtain of water across to other shacks where people were hiding to see who had my sample bags. Looked like everyone wanted to help a little, so one by one guys ran across to deposit the bags in a small heap in front of me. I gave their leader, the guy who carried my hammer for me, some cash so he could treat his guys for all their help. Immediately, one of the guys tries to convince him that surely some of them had done more work than others and how they should divide and spend the money. They all looked very happy. The rain didn’t stop and it was getting late. The chairman, who calls me sister, suggested some coffee in the tea house across the street. Finally I agreed that perhaps it would warm us and I gathered my small team. I grab an umbrella from the truck and cover the chairman from the rain as we cross the road. This caused quite a shouting from the locals and his status was surely elevated even more. The tea house was a single small room with two benches and a small table. On the shelves were plastic cups and plates and in front of the house there was a kettle boiling. It was dark inside, no electricity in Zeu, and rain pounded on the tin roof. I got my cup and looked inside, I saw a lot of black things and two large white floaties. I looked into the chairman’s cup, who was sharing my bench. His didn’t seem to have the same in it so I wagered a complaint. Excuse me, is this coffee or tea? After all, tea could have flowers and leaves, right? Oh, it’s coffee, the chairman assures me. I try to take his coffee to look a little closer if he didn’t really have the same, and he did have a few black spots upon closer inspection, but not the big white things. I think there is some chapatti in my cup, I suggest and they get fished out with a spoon. Perhaps the girl overlooked this cup, the chairman offers. Great. Not wanting to be insulting I start drinking and to be honest, any hot liquid felt good.

The rain stopped and the roads hardened quickly. It had been a good day and we still have a few hours drive to get home, so we leave to come back to Zeu tomorrow. At the guesthouse in Arua we are greeted with hot water, a fabulous luxury, and a dinner of savory mashed bananas (!) with G-nut(peanut) sauce and peas. I thank the Lords in the great blue sky for the bottle of Capt. Morgan’s rum I found in town last week and pour myself a drink and prepare for tomorrow.