Saying Goodbye

I’ve always wanted to be a regular. I don’t mean sitting in a bar for hours with the same five drunk guys. I’m talking about the kind of ritual that you do regularly, that involves people in your neighborhood and connects you with your community.

So when I stumbled into being a regular in Kisoro, it was a pleasant surprise. Here’s how it happened: there’s a little shop (i.e. rickety wooden shack that sells whatever they can get their hands on) directly across the tarmac road from where I was living, and during my first week I stopped in to get a soda on my lunch hour.

I leaned my head in hesitantly and found five women, all my age or younger: two working foot-pumped sewing machines, one managing a phone charging station (a power strip of twelve outlets, with every phone charger known to Uganda plugged into it), and two just hanging out.

(I later deduced that these were not fixed but fluid assignments, rotating on some secret schedule. I never found them in the same places twice.)

Not surprisingly, I was a novelty item. They giggled at my attempts to speak Rufumbira, and at each other’s attempts to speak English. My solitary request was for a single glass bottle of soda, but since the brand varied day by day we always had a conversation topic.

(Perhaps “conversation” is too generous a word: when two year-olds babble at each other, do you call that a conversation? One day one of the ladies tried to offer to sew me a shirt. It took twelve minutes of pointing at my chest and the sewing machine for her to communicate that.)

But it was fine, we didn’t need to speak much. We had a simple interaction, some harmless flirtation. It was a ritual we all looked forward to. When they handed me the soda I would say “wakozi” --- thank you --- and as I walked out of the shop I said “n’gaho” --- goodbye.

On my last day in Kisoro I went over and purchased my customary soda. After our normal banter it occurred to me that I should let them know this would be my last day.

“So, um, this is my last day,” I said in English, not knowing any of the words of that sentence in Rufumbira. “So...ngaho.”

They smiled. “Ngaho!”

“No, I mean... like, ngaho for real. Ngaho forever.”

They stared at me. Why was I saying goodbye so many times?

I added a gesture, the motion that football referees make when ruling a first down. “Ngaho!” I said again, sending my arm out straight and trying to face roughly West as I did it.

This did not do the job. From the ladies' perspective, I kept saying goodbye but not leaving. Their smiles had already moved through frozen and were now awkward headed for uncomfortable. All right, we get it, goodbye, get the fuck out already.

So this is actually a sad story, because that’s how it ends. I was making things worse by persisting, so I just left. It was one of the most frustrating parts of my departure from Kisoro.

Maybe in a few days when I stop showing up they’ll have a little chat, and one of them will recall my strange behavior, and they’ll figure it out. That would be nice, then at least they’d know I’d tried.