Rats!

You can tell that a ship is leaking by the inexplicable absence of rats in the ship scullery, so goes a saying I've read in one of my lengthy travails through the world of literature. What basically this means is that if something is wrong somewhere within a system, you tell by the mundane manifest discomforts.

Back to that in a tri. My semester ended jana, and like most reprobates in pretended pursuit of education at the Ivory Tower, I am looking foward to several weeks of continuing what I have been doing throughout the semester-alot of nothing. I am looking foward to it because much as it is a continuation of what I've been doing all along, this time I get to do it from the more pleasant surroundings of home and so I don't have to feel so guilty about it!

But before one gets to enjoying the next phase of his lazy existence away from the incredibly irritating distractions posed by courseworks, lectures, tests, projects and other equally useless things, there exists one very minuscle but nevertheless extremely pertinent phase: Getting home.

Of course that won't be a problem if you hail from Wandegeya or Kikoni or Bwaise any other place disturbingly near enough for your dad to access your faculty notice board when the coursework mark list for your worst-performed course unit is displayed, or worse still, near enough for your good-looking coursemate from Ethiopia to meet your younger sister.

But if you come from more far-flung places such as Bulemia village of Budalang'i division in the Samia district of western Kenya, such problems are mercifully eliminated, but getting home requires more than just packed belongings and a quick good-bye-see-you-next-sem-please-keep-in-touch to your friends. It also requires fifteen thousand Uganda shillings for a taxi ride to Busia Kenya, fifty Kenya shillings for another taxi ride from Busia town to Bumala centre, and two hundred Kenya shillings for a ride in a contraption that bears a frightening resemblance to a pregnant pig all the way to Bulemia.

The problem in this case however is not money, but comfort. Between Iganga and Bugiri, you eat more dust than a mafia execution victim in the sahara. Between Busia and Bumala, you pray very hard that you won't meet the fate of all the bugs that hit the windscreen of the taxi you are travelling in at between 120 and 130k.p.h. Between Bumala and Bulemia, you struggle not to gag at the stench of unwashed humanity around you. Such scenarios, you will have to agree with me, don't measure up to a vast many people's acceptable standards of comfort.

And the smells you sometimes encounter are exceedingly strange, for example the smell of a fresh cob of maize being chewed by a decent-looking guy I sat next to inside the pig-inspired contraption. Not strange in itself until you consider that the maize cob being chewed is straight up raw, as in straight from the fields into the belly, no hint of fire or a milling machine having been involved anywhere its lifespan.

Maybe some of you wouldn't find that strange, but I did. It was actually the first time I have ever seen someone who is not a child or someone of unfortunate mental circumstance chew on a raw maize cob, and much as it is anyone's inaleniable constitutional right to chew on a raw maize cob if he so wishes, I just had to ask him why the hell he was doing that.

"The price of maize flour has gone up." He answered.

Back to rats and sinking ships. You know the food situation in your country is really bad if you see a sane person eating raw maize because he claims he can't afford the finishing product!