The Good, The Bad, and the Totally F----ed Up......

It’s gonna be a looooong 8 months in Gulu. I finally admitted it to myself this morning, while watching a guy clutching the legs of 8 stunned chickens with both hands.

At least I think they were stunned. They were definitely alive, and some even had some serious game left, flapping and squawking the whole time. But for some reason, they weren’t able to get a grip and run like…..well, like a chicken with its head cut off when the guy placed them on the ground near my table at the open-air restaurant where I was eating “breakfast.”

Sigh. The weekend brunch at Café Atlantico in DC is a tragically far too distant dream. Hell, the daily special at I-Hop would be cool at this point. I ordered the sausage with scrambled eggs, baked beans, coffee and pineapple juice, hoping to get something that at least faintly resembled American breakfast. Well, the sausage came out pink….not as in undercooked, but as in shot through with nitrites and other cancer causing chemicals. The eggs were scrambled, but can a sister get a little salt and pepper? The coffee was instant (no more amazing machiatos like in Addis), and the pineapple juice….well, most restaurants here don’t really roll with the whole “fresh squeezed for every glass” thing. There are zillions of pineapples and passion fruit in the local markets, but it tastes like most eateries simply fill a trough with water, run a piece of fruit through it, and then serve it up lukewarm to expat suckers like me, thinking we’re so disoriented , we won’t know the difference.

And the thing is, why did it take half an hour to get instant coffee???

Okay, now that I’ve done a little therapeutic venting, let’s get back to the guy with the chickens. When we left off, he had placed the dazed birds on the ground and was negotiating a price with one of the kitchen staff. I was fascinated and horrified at the same time. I mean, you just don’t see the live product paraded through the dining area at most American restaurants. I resisted the urge to splash my bottled water on the hapless hens and shoo their feathered asses to freedom.

And then I realized something important. Something you’re not necessarily guaranteed in every American restaurant, even some of the pretty good ones.

When you order chicken curry at the Bambu, or the Bomah, or the Take Away restaurant in Gulu, you can be pretty sure it was alive about 12 hours ago. It’s the ultimate freshness guarantee. And talk about your free range, organic, hormone free poultry…you’d pay 8 bucks for that kind of yard bird at Whole Foods, when you can buy one here for $2.50.

Of course, Whole Foods does you the favor of plucking and gutting ‘em first, but there’s good and bad in both scenarios.

That’s the point of this particular post. For every inconvenience here, there really is something positive to replace it. There are no movie theaters in Gulu, but how much time did I spend going to movies in DC? And there’s fresh air here…palpably fresh air, as opposed to the smog and fumes in Urban America. Apart from the occasional septic assault, I’m gulping pure high test oxygen every day.

There’s no TV, but also no brain rot from watching too much mindless TV. No shopping malls, but no chance to buy the 5th pair of black shoes you don’t really need, but they were 50 percent off. No reliable Internet, but absolutely no temptation to descend into the swirling toilet of cyber desperation that is the online dating scene.

I have to keep that perspective, or some unsuspecting Gulu-ite is gonna get a royal, neck snappin’ DC-style cussin’ out any day now. That’s where the “totally f----ed up” part comes in. One thing is crystal clear….to cope over here, you need to expect, even embrace the fact that no matter how you plan, something is going to go wrong. Somebody’s gonna be late, or the order you were guaranteed will be a couple of months late, or the car you just had serviced will die about a mile after you leave the garage. That happened to me today. The first stop I made, the engine wouldn’t turn over. I’m talking cold and dead. I was about ready to set it off in downtown Gulu, before thinking,

“This is just my first week and a half here. If I let this give me an aneurysm, I won’t last 8 more hours, no less 8 months.”

So I hopped onto the back of a boda boda, went back to the garage, adopted the sharpest Ugly American tone I could muster, and had a mechanic drive me back to my stalled car with a new battery. Problem solved.

You do what you gotta do, whether it’s in Gulfport or in Gulu.

(Oh, and I’ll tell you what a boda boda is later.)