Leah's Portfolio

Red, Blue, Green and Light

By Leah Bevis

Imagine, if you can, a rust-red road, cutting like a river through a world of Green beneath a sky of Blue. The road is no more than a dusty, uneven, gravelly path with shallow trenches on either side. The green sliced by the road is not a Forest Green nor a clear, Sunlit Green, but a dusty, deep, Enduring green. It is a green splashed with brown and dirt and dry and death, but it is these patches of faded ills, woven into the vines and the fruit, the flowering shrubs and the tall, tall trees, that make the landscape beautiful; make it real. Imagine village houses of brick or mud or concrete, with thatch roofs, tin roofs, or occasionally shingle.  Outside the houses children gather in groups, old men and women sit in the shade munching sugarcane; mothers and daughters pound maize or millet, or dry the grain on wide-open sheets in the sun.  As you drive by, children shout and towards your car.  Adults wave or simply watch you go by, and their eyes are some friendly and curious, some guarded and cold.  The houses and the people are interspersed with the landscape so organically, so gently, that they seem to be part of the green and the brown and the sky and the bush and the road, rather than set against it. 
Imagine, as you drive, a branch of the road to your left, lined with flowery shrubs and surrounded by banana trees and other plants you do not know.  Papaya, certainly, and perhaps ground nuts.  Your car turns into the road, which is actually a driveway.  The red path curves and then curves again, surrounded always by a bright array of plants and smallish trees. At last, you arrive before a large house, beautiful in its simplicity. The house is one story, wide and open and smiling.  It is surrounded, to your mind, with every plant in the world, a Garden of Eden in the bush of Uganda.  Later, you will receive a tour of the house and its garden.  Outside bananas and papaya grow, soy and peanuts and pumpkin and sesame, tomato and cassava, Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes and herbs and even sunflowers.  Goats meander through the backyard, (though later they will be tied up for the night) mixed in with a few small lambs and a couple stray dogs.  A chicken coup is tucked away to the side, and back a bit further, among the millet and the maize, a pig sleeps in its little cage.  Behind the house, land stretches out for distant green miles, meeting far-off mountains that kiss wide-open sky.  The land, 36 acres, as well as the paradise-house belong to an elderly couple and their family.  They grown mostly maize, 5 acres at a time so the land can rest, and villagers all around are paid to help farm it. 
Imagine you will be staying at the house overnight.  The back garden will be lit with a fire, and the large family that lives here will dance and laugh and argue and sing.  You will be served hot spiced, milky-sweet tea in the music-dark night.  A few times you will be pulled up to dance, which will delight the family to no end - a white girl, dancing with their sons, in their garden!  At one moment, you will stray away from the fire on a whim, and you will encounter stars that glow in the sky like infinity caught in an instant, and a Milky Way that shines so tangibly bright that you feel as if you could bathe in it, could wash your skin with the dust of a thousand million stars. You will think of a folk tale told to you by a friend, of the Cow-God who slides from the sky to the earth on rivers of Rainbow, to drink at the streams and ponds on Earth. This Cow-God, if he catches you, will whisk you away, back up the rainbow and into the sky… and so if you see a rainbow in Buganda, stay away from the end where it meets the earth, lest you be carried into the sky forever! Surely, if this Cow-God can slide down Rainbows, there must be some way for you to slide up the Milky Way, winding like a river through the stars. Surely, if you could only grab hold of one low-hanging star, you could swing yourself up like an acrobat, and land with a splash in a sea of light… live in castles by the river-side, and dance with the gods that live in this sky… you could live forever in stories of this beautiful place, and in the minds of a people who understand the beauty of this world far, far better than we do.