Bad Juju

Recently Pat wrote me a text that said “you are having a very long stretch of bad juju.” I’m not really sure how to define “juju” but in my mind it’s kind of an onomatopoeia…rhyming with “voodoo” I guess, and similar to me in feeling…bad juju is like bad vibes, combined with bad luck/curses/and the like…kind of the same kind of phrase as a “black cloud” which I was often noted to have over my head relatively frequently during my shifts at St. Louis Children’s Hospital…everything that could go wrong, did go wrong (which is not usually what you want in a nurse come to think of it ☺). Not really what you want in a travel companion either…poor Anna.

So, you’re familiar with the fuel tank incident, following the next night by the infamous theft…so when Anna and I left Bundibugyo two weeks ago for some R&R, we were hard up for just that…rest and relaxation. We decided to take Kalita, the bus, because I was not in favor of driving the Zoolander that had just lost the fuel tank to Kampala and back while in search of rest…so 2 Friday’s ago, Travis ever so kindly drove us to Bundibugyo town at 4:15am and we got on the bus with our friends Musafara and Bahati. Between Fort Portal and Kampala the bus blew a tire and we stopped by the side of the road for a half hour or so while the tire was changed and then we were back on the road. Not a big deal, but big enough that I was glad I wasn’t driving and having to change the tire myself.

Moving the story along…Monday evening we were sitting at Café Java’s, I had just closed my computer after using their wireless internet and rifling through my wallet to pay the bill and then: HUGE explosive noise coming from the parking garage below…then 2 gun shots….EVERYBODY at the café hit the deck, staff, customers, EVERYONE. In a city which not a month previous had seen almost 80 people die in bomb attacks in 2 locations across the city, you could tell what was on people’s minds…it turns out the little rent-a-cops in the vicinity said it was thieves in the parking garage that the police shot at…shady in several ways (first of all it doesn’t explain the super loud explosive noise and second, since when do police SHOOT at thieves?!) anyways, TIA. Never a dull moment.

Then we fly to sudan. Another post entirely but JUST what Anna and I needed.

Monday night at the dinner table, I asked Michael how often they have MAF flights cancelled or postponed due to the airstrip being too wet or storms during rainy season… “So far, we’ve never had a flight cancelled” was his response. Well, you guessed it, the next morning we (Anna and I along with Kim, Larissa and Scott from the team there) were scheduled to fly out around 11 or so, and it rained ALL morning…Michael spent a good part of the morning assessing the weather and communicating with MAF and surrounding airstrips about the feasibility of landing in Mundri vs. Maridi… persistent rain and low lying cloud cover meant: 11am and everyone save Karen, Liana, and Gaby piled into the super snazzy new LandCruiser for a road trip to Maridi (2.5 hours away). Scott had an international flight to catch the next day, so the wait it out with the possibility of cancellation was not really a possibility…Nonetheless, it was a fun ride with typical road trip type chatter and complete with snacks (delicious chocolate chip cookies thanks to Phil and John!) and police stops and 4 wheel drive opportunities ☺. Like I said, never a dull moment.

Two days later Anna and I head to the bus park in Kampala, arriving at 7:30am for what we thought was a 9am bus so that we would be able to choose a good seat and have enough space to store all of our crap (suitcases, trunks, coolers, etc) underneath the bus…the bus didn’t leave until noon…soooooo, after waiting in the bus park for 4.5 hours, we got on the road. 2 hours to Mityana because of the status of the road, then another hour to Mubende. Anna scouted out 2 very nice pieces of chicken muchomo (chicken roasted on a stick) and roasted gonja and we ate well. 15 min. later another explosive noise followed by several windows shattering and a thump-thump-thump from under the bus…we stopped and a tire on our side of the bus had blown, along with something that looked to me like a wheel well cracking into 2-3 pieces…still not sure how or why the windows on the opposite side of the bus shattered leaving huge shards of glass in passengers’ laps just across the isle from us…this part of the story ends in us getting out in Fort Portal instead of staying on while they fixed the tire more completely and started over the mountains after dark…

So, yeah, that, ladies and gentlemen, is a long stretch of bad juju.

I’m not quite ready to discuss the theological implications of bad juju…so don’t ask, but in a place where the spiritual world is quite readily acknowledged to be a reality, bad juju is very much a reality. I am ready, however, to agree with the line that followed in Pat’s text though, “Praise God that He’s powerful over bad juju!”