Postcards from Teso

One of the most memorable things I've done since I got here was the week I spent in Teso after Pascha (Easter) 2006. I am just now posting the pictures.

Teso is a region in the central-eastern part of Uganda where the Itesot tribe lives. The Itesot are a Nilo-Saharan people; as you can tell from their name, they don't belong to the baNtu family that includes the baGanda, baSoga, baGisu, baTooro, etc. In fact their language is as close to baNtu as Chinese is to English! An Etesot speaks with other Itesot in an Eastern Nilotic language called Ateso, which is one of the Teso-Turkana language cluster that includes Nkaramojong (to which people the Itesot are closely related). They are basically small-farmers and pastoralists, although cattle herding is considerably down these days, because the Karamojong, who believe that all cattle on earth belong to them, have been raiding them for some years now&mdash— an annoyance when it was done with arrows and spears, but far deadlier with AK-47's. Caught between the rebels, the government troops, and the Karamojong, the Itesot also have suffered terribly over the past 20 years or so because of the Kony rebellion. As of the 1991 census, there were about a million Itesot in Uganda, which makes it one of Uganda's larger tribes, and there are another 300,000 in Kenya. The ethno-linguistic family tree is Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic, Nilotic, Eastern Nilotic, Teso-Turkana, Ateso. An example of how it looks and sounds:

Isirerengitoi itunganan yenimam elosenenei kotoma ainerun naka ikaronok,
Karaida abwoenen korot loka ikadiakanarak;
Karaida aiboienen koicolongo loka ikamenak.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers. (Psalm 1)

One difference between Ateso and luGanda is that the baGanda have a very hard time distinguishing the letters 'r' and 'l', whereas the Itesot don't have any trouble with l and very pronouncedly trill their r's. Well, there are more differences than that. The same passage in luGanda is:

Alina omukisa omuntu atatambulira mumukuteesa kw’ababi,
Newakubadde okuyimirira mu kkubo ly’abo abalina ebibi,
Newakubadde okutuula ku ntebe y’abanyooma.

The two main towns in Teso are Kumi and Soroti. Kumi is quite small— maybe four or five blocks wide and ten long, although it seems to be experiencing a boom these days. Soroti is a pleasant place situated at the foot of an enormous hemispheric rock that's about, um, maybe 200 feet high. Populated by some few thousands of people, it would be considered a small town in America, but here it's fairly sizeable— it's downtown is about the size of Kumi. At the foot of the rock is a large and rather wretched Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp which is now mostly melted away since the rebellion has died down.

I stayed for the most part with my friend and seminarian Francis, at his family's homestead some half-hour's walk from a village called Mukongoro, which is about a half-hour by motorbike from Kumi. In other words, we were waaaaay deep in the village. We have a church in the same area, and Richard, another seminarian leaves not far from it. Francis has a cousin Stephen, who lives some ways away from Soroti, and we visited there also.

Here are 66 pictures. I'm posting so many of them because Francis is now at Holy Cross in Boston, and will most likely appreciate being able to show his friends where he comes from. But I think my regular readers will like them too.

It seems that most of the Itesot live in traditional round grass-thatched houses. These houses are wonderful! There is a small gap between the top of the wall and the roof, and I will never forget waking up in the cool stillness of the deep morning and being able to see nothing but a great circle of light filtering in under the eaves. The houses are very cool in the hottest weather, and yet pleasantly warm at night. Why anyone was ever persuaded to build square houses roofed with iron sheets, which heat up like pizza-ovens and stay unbearable until 2:00 am, I will never figure out, but that style is now supplanting the traditional architecture. Which is really sad! But it was a privilege and a sheer delight to spend that week at Francis's immaculate family compound:

And some other nearby places:

Around the home, a morning's work might consist of shelling the newly harvested g-nuts (like peanuts, only smaller), clearing stones out of the beans, processing cassava:

Other work might include planting or harvesting rice at the swamp, or plowing the fields. Plowing, it turns out, is not really hard work, at least not all the time. The cow puts in most of the effort; these young boys and I just bascially had to keep the plow properly upright. The hardest part for me was the fact that the implement was made for someone much shorter than I am.

These are some pictures from Richard's compound. In the last one, you can glimpse how the houses are built:

On the way to somewhere interesting we met one of Francis's friends, a musician who plays the adungu. It has a ringing, metallic sound, something like a 12-string guitar. They come in all sizes. Lovely music!

I used to hunt lizards with my friend Jack when I was a boy. Ya gotta be fast, but I was pretty good. So I was complaining to Francis that the beautiful red and black lizards they have in Teso were very, very wise and you couldn't even get near them. He said, No problem! and showed me how to make a snare with a long piece of grass....

Some more pictures of Richard's place:

We rode a bike up to Mukongoro. Teso is very gentle and beautiful, as you can see. Most of the trees along the way were mango trees, and since it was the season, we pretty much enjoyed fresh mango whenever we felt the urge! Mukongoro itself is a typical Uganda trading center where you can get basic stuff, repair your motorbike, etc.

In Kumi there's a large outdoor market. We also visited Fr Haralampos at his home.

Back at Francis's place, in the afternoon, Mom was pounding dried cassava root to make flour. Later, I made my special Wyoming cowboy coffee for Francis's parents, while the kids were showing off in front of the camera:

Sooner or later, everyone ends up at the spring to get water:

They drink a local millet beer called ajon. I probably have too many pictures of this, but the whole process fascinated me. It seems usually to be brewed by women, and consumed by men (though women drink it too). It has a sour taste and it's not particularly strong, as beer goes, especially since they keep adding warm water to it as the pot goes down. The method of consumption is very convivial.

I'll never forget those wonderful mornings:

On the way to visit Stephen near Soroti, we often passed by villages like this:

Unlike Francis's place, where the houses were relatively large with walls of wattle-and-daub, Stephen's family seemed to prefer building lots of smaller-sized huts, with walls of brick. Their main agricultural products were sweet potato and maize:

The kids. Stephen's sister is showing me the whirly-gig she made from a leaf and a stick:

The friendly pot of beer. I noticed this one was stronger than the last one:

Local cows. I just like the picture:

This is the Panaghia Church in Mukongoro. A nice group of people, but as always in Africa, in desperate need of catechesis:

Back at Richard's house, shelling the g-nuts on a Sunday afternoon. Life is very sociable in the village.

We were bicycling down the road one afternoon and heard some kind of drumming in the bushes. Francis stopped and said, You've gotta see this:

The boys had made an elaborate system of pipes and tubes leading from an ant-hill to various containers. They were beating on the ground to make the ants come up into the containers, whereupon they would take them home and fry them up. Not bad; we ate them most nights at home, since it was the season.

And to Francis, who will see this, here are two pictures of the noble hosts who so graciously let me share their family's life for a moment that was too brief but would be great to repeat: your parents and brothers and sisters.

I expect you will be happy to be able to show pictures of where you're from to your friends in Boston!

Anyway, I can't believe it's taken me this long to get all of these uploaded, but it's because there are so many of them!