I should have known that the trouble was only just beginning when the monkey stole my mango.
I had been carrying it, cherishing it, all morning as I clutched the shoulders of the boda boda (Swahili for "motorbike") driver on the hourlong ride from Fort Portal, Uganda, to the Crater Lakes.
When I arrived at my accommodation, a staff member directed me to a spot where I was to pitch my tent. As I was placing the poles, the monkey dashed over and pilfered the mango out of the hole in my open bag.
“HEY!” I cried, chasing the monkey, fruitlessly.
The monkey climbed up into a nearby tree and took a big bite out of the side as my heart sank. A few staff members came over, laughing. I asked them if I could move my tent elsewhere, but they reassured me that they would keep an eye on it.
Later that afternoon, when I came back from exploring the lakes, I found that the monkeys had climbed under the rain fly of my tent and peed through the netting all over my down feather sleeping bag. They had also chewed through one of the ropes securing it to the ground. Upset, I confronted a staff member.
“You said you would watch my tent,” I griped. They handed me a bucket and a bar of soap to wash the sleeping bag, and said that they could move me into an empty room.
I looked at the bucket and the bar of soap. I knew that the $400 sleeping bag that I had brought to keep me warm while summiting Kilimanjaro was only supposed to be washed with a technical wash for down feathers. I knew that to dry it, I needed a machine dryer because the UV rays of the sun damage the fabric.
But I also knew that I wasn’t going to find either of those things in Uganda. Even the one time I brought my laundry to a laundromat instead of hand washing it myself, it was hung on a line outside to dry. So I washed the monkey pee out of the sleeping bag using the bucket and the soap, threw it over the line, and hoped for the best.
I was now very hungry and in a bad mood. I had missed lunch, but the staff told me that I could find food in the nearest town – a 30-minute walk away.
As I made my way down the dusty red road, I felt the eyes of people staring as they passed by on boda bodas and in cars. I had grown accustomed to my appearance drawing looks, but I didn’t enjoy it. After living in New York City for so long, where I could go about my day mostly invisible, it felt exhausting to constantly be the center of attention.
Then a group of ten elementary school children came up behind me and started mocking me. They must have just left school, I thought. The leader of the group mimicked the way that I walked. They were getting close, trying to get my attention. A few tried to reach out and touch me, but then pulled away at the last second and laughed. I kept walking, silently, debating what to do. I thought about saying something. After weeks of being on the receiving end of this, I was tired of it. Particularly of people coming up to me and touching me without asking. There is no understanding of what this is like for me, I thought, no consideration of what it must be like to be me, and to constantly have to accommodate touching and mocking and ogling.
Time to finally say something. To teach them a lesson.
And then… I didn’t. I crossed to the other side of the road. The leader followed. I straddled the ditch between the road and the hill next to it, and waddled as the leader followed my pattern. I smiled. The other children shrieked with laughter. A game.
I skipped; all the children now skipped too. I waved my arms like airplane wings and so did they. We ran, we marched, we hunched like gorillas. We took big steps, we shook our hips, we patted our heads. Adults in cars and on boda bodas stared at us with open mouths as we passed by. Some smiled. As we got closer to town, the kids started to hold my hands. And my arms. They all wanted to touch me and I let them. And then they all got in a line, all of us holding hands, and we did the can-can as we entered town.
And finally, skipping our way down the busy street, the kids started to peel off from the chain one by one, on the way to their homes. Bye, I waved, as they waved back. The adults continued to stare. What they were thinking, what emotion was hidden behind their stoic countenance, I will never know.
But I hope that the children will remember that day they walked home from school with the strange but friendly and fun white lady, and look upon people who look different than them with a smile, remembering that we are not so different inside. Inside, we all have the capacity to play, to laugh, to spread kindness. To greet mockery with a game. To diffuse hostility with open hearts. To allow children to explore their curiosity and even perhaps fear, so that they might be kind to the next human stranger they see along the road.
The lesson I so desperately wanted to teach them with admonishing words, I showed them with loving actions. A lesson, for me, too.
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