The Air We Breathe

I've been in Gulu two weeks now and it seems an eternity.  I'm a fairly resilient person and have dealt with a number of challenges rather decently in my life.  But some sneak up on you through the tiny little crack in the back door - or in this case - the cracks in the windows.  Most of us who ventured to Peace corps imagined many challenges, but the challenges we are individually facing have little to do with those we expected.  Yes - there the challenge of  the sense of always being in the fish-bowl, of the language (less so here because most people in Gulu speak some English),  finding food in the market  (some little markets have only tomatoes and onions), ordering food if your village HAS a cafe ("Watye ki cam ango" - "What food do you have."), health issues (malaria, the trots, Mango flies, schisto - we've had 21 vaccinations if you don't count those of us who are older had to have re-done before PC would look at our application)... The list goes on.  My particular challenge of the moment - and one I had absolutely not anticipated - is air that I breathe. Air Quality!  This is AFRICA - more specifically Uganda, an under-developed country - not Houston, Detroit, New York or Los Angeles!  I think I can contribute here and do it with some success, but first I have to breathe

Growing up in Baton Rouge, with a pea-soup air thick with the fumes from Esso Refinery and the Alchoa Aluminum Plant, I remember first moving to Austin and asking what that smell was.  That "Smell" was my first real whiff of clean air - not laced with petrochemicals or bauxite.    And I'd gotten rather accustomed to it.  When I went to Bejing, Mumbai and HoChiMen City, VietNam I remember being accosted  by the mixtures of vehicle fumes with dust - after all there are congested cities with millions of vehicles belching unmonitored exhaust fumes!   One might expect that.

What I had not expected to be my greatest challenge thus far here in the middle of Africa was being able to get a breath.  To get through the day I take a cocktail of antihistamines, decongestants, nasal spray, BC Powders and at night a sleeping pill.  As I may have mentioned in some of my whining, is that my living quarters ( from which I am soon moving) are in the thick of the industrial district.  My place over looks a market which sounds quaint.  It isn't.  They start at 6:30 AM  burning the hair off of assorted goat parts.  Because this is done over a charcoal fire, by slowly turning and scraping the selected part, it takes a loooog time to clean a goat.  This is a horrid and nauseating smell - think singed hair to the order of 10.

Now around 7:00 AM, the traffic begins to pick up and this is the major road from southern Uganda to the Sudan.  ALL bus (transporting more humanity and chickens than one would think possible)  and truck (some also transporting humans) traffic travels this road and since emissions controls are non-existant, all are spouting noxious fumes and stirring up dust (not to mention noise). And let's not forget the hundreds of boda-bodas.  Like those little fish that travel in the wake of a shark - hoping to pick up the left overs from its meal - the bodas transport the remaining humanity not already taken by taxis, buses and trucks.

Mixed with all of this dumping into the air, add burning plastics, tires, garbage and the thousands of charcoal fires going all day - and I cannot breathe.  This is no small thing - I've been nauseated by the scent of certain perfumes all my life and this is not perfume.  I am awakened from a perfectly good sleep by gasping for breath because someone has produced yet another toxic cloud in the middle of the night.

Of all of the things one might be able to mitigate, do with less of - etc. air is not one of them.  It is as essential to life as water and toxic air will kill you as surely as dirty water. It just takes longer. Moving will help, I will no longer be in the MIDDLE of cancer-central, but everywhere here things are being burned.  One never entirely escapes the the toxic smoke of something burning. (No this is not like the smell of leaves burning on a crisp autumn day or hamburgers being grilled on a summer night - forget that).  Like the girl growing up in the middle of chemical soup of Baton Rouge and never realizing air doesn't stink, the locals might think this is "air."  But I know better and my body knows better.

So the next time you have to pay for your emissions test to pass a car inspection, or the cost of goods is high because the Clean Air Act forced some emissions controls on a factory - take a breath - in fact take several!  Take a good long one and enjoy the sheer beauty of clean air.  Clean air in an industrialized society comes at a cost.  Almost nothing you breath in the States will be this noxious, and even if it is, all you have to do is drive a mile or two to get out of it.  Not so here.  

Breathe....