Monday, November 3, 2014

Nights Here...

...are the darkest I've ever experienced.

One of our first evenings in town, we got taken out to a local bar/restaurant for dinner after dark (fun fact: in Kisoro, a "restaurant" is a place you can eat AND sleep [rooms in a back courtyard usually], while a "hotel" is just a place to eat.) and we were genuinely terrified to even cross the street. Hovering motorcycle lights whizzed by through the blackness; silhouettes of people cast eerie shadows by the smokey headlights of the few cars of the road. The two of us were practically paralyzed. The hotel we were going to eat at was literally 50 yards away but crossing the black expanse of road -- teeming with ill-(or not-)lit motorcycles, bicycles laden with 12 foot sugar cane, and any number of herded goats and cows -- was daunting, not least of all because we couldn't clearly see a single one of them.

 I couldn't shake the feeling of being 8 years old and deep into one of those "Haunted Hayride" experiences where bloody scarecrow leap out from corn stalks. The differences here are of course that the latter is farcical amusement and the former -- our night crossing the street in Kisoro -- is normal daily life.

I never realized how I've taken streetlights for granted until that first black night. Walking at night in the U.S. (while cautioned against by mothers) was never a particularly harrowing experience: follow the straight lines of the sidewalk from streetlight to streetlight, look both ways before crossing the well-lit streets and, after a series of right-angle turns you'd have reached your destination.

If the initial feelings of peril have lent a mildly sinister air to the night-time hours here, a cloudless night sky makes up for it. It's still the rainy season so clouds usually hang overhead but on days when  most of the rain was rung out during the day, the nights are left clear and sparkling. The edge of our galaxy is visible as a milky band stretching nearly from horizon to horizon and the stars teem in numbers unlike almost anywhere else I've been. Add the silhouettes of the impossibly huge volcanoes on the horizon and the magic of the Kisoro night more than makes up for its initial jitters.

1 comment:

  1. Seen any shooting stars? Any new constellations? What kinds of sounds do you hear at night? So interesting about the words restaurant and hotel. Do they have "fast food"? And -- what might it be? Thanks for helping us continue to understand a little more about your life in Kisoro.

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