Taxi Tales - If I could choose my neighbor!

Some stories are are much easier to tell than others and this one that about to tell you has not been easy at all for me to to take pen and paper and jot something down as one would say, It has been weeks since the experience I am about to share with you happened to me on a journey home from Kampala to the Eastern Ugandan district of Tororo. There are indeed two stories; the second one being formed by return journey to Kamapala – again on a commuter taxi. The first part of the story involves a grey haired elder and the second part a young lady, perhaps in her late teens and both these two characters had some kind of encounter with me in those two taxi headed in opposite directions. The first part has been difficult for to tell because I really had difficult in telling the whole truth without being judged as disrespectful to elders and the second part was simply because I am the guilty party in waking up a sleeping dog. When I stepped into the homebound taxi through the driver’s door, that was a foreboding that it was going to be quite a journey with passenger seated on my left who could not let me pass through the passenger door because she was already seated and she had trouble with her knee. Well, she had a walking stick between her legs and that initially bid me to obey when she said that I enter through the driver’s door. The tone of her voice, though, was far from anything polite. Thirty minutes before the taxi pulled out of the park my lady neighbor had had at least four unpleasant verbal exchanges with hawkers at her window. She could neither quietly ignore them nor could she politely turn them away. Well, Kampala hawkers can be persistent and pushy but I expected a grey haired lady, probably in her sixties to have learned a better way handle such young people trying to eke for a living by hawking their wares to passengers at the Taxi Park. tk 039 Usually after about 30km to the east of Kampala, the taxi pulls over the one of the two roadside markets for passengers to have a snack which usually roasted chicken or beef, bananas, water and soda before proceeding on to Tororo on the longer stretch of the 220km journey. When the taxi driver pulled over the first Jinja Road market in Mukono, the old lady once again shouted at the hawkers to move away from her windows to go sell their food outside regardless of their customers being taxi passengers who do not disembark at this point. I was taken aback when she used the F word on one of the hawkers who could not take it lying down like most of them and she went on to call her an F slut. At this point I begun to wonder if my neighbor had any grand children or neighbors back home where she lived and how she lived with them. I wondered what kind of things she thought grand children if she had any. What if she was married to a polygamist, how well did she get on with the co-wives? When the taxi proceeded on the journey my bag that I had tightly held to myself keeping my legs together like the born-again Christian friend of the lead character in the Tyler Perry movie “The Family that preys” on her visit to a Las Vegas night club slipped off my legs on to side of my neighbor’s lap. Oh how she raged at me but I politely reminded her that she could see that I had strenuously avoided any contact with her despite the little space between us and the driver who had to be free to shift gears. When we got to Tororo the taxi made a stop before the taxi park for a passenger to disembark and the driver too moved out of the vehicle to open the boot for the passenger to get his luggage, At this point my neighbor turned to suddenly and asked, “Is this man going to leave us here? And I answered that I did not know, then I too stepped out of the taxi through the same way that I came in and sought for a boda-boda (motorbike taxi) to take me home. For much of that afternoon and evening mind went back again and again to that taxi looking at my neighbor to the left and wondering just what had stolen her peace that caused her to be so resentful. On my return journey to Kampala I travelled in a taxi which did not have a conductor and in the conductor’s seat sat the young lady that I earlier on introduced you to. Normally when passenger occupies the conductor’s seat he or she is expected to open and close the door as may be necessary along the journey. The young lady was not so enthusiastic about this courteous onus that had fallen into her hands as the last passenger to board the taxi. She had to be begged to open the door whenever a passenger disembarked and she did it quite reluctantly. When the taxi got to the first taxi park in Kampala when a number of the passengers were to light off, the young lady just sat back listening to music on her mobile phone. At that point I foolishly remarked that the young lady at the seems to be rather dull and unwilling to help. Oh my! I had stepped on a snake’s tail and I got the bite right away. “Who are you to bark at me when my own parents do not so. You must be very dense to say that I am dull,” said the young lady to me. I apologized despite my remark being far from barking but she could not stopped throwing at me all manner of ugly words that she could master until she finally disembarked. I got to the taxi home in Entebbe from Kampala a very sad man and just wondered how this dense man could possibly have anything to teach or tell his children. I hope and pray that in my next journey by taxi I will have nothing to write home about save probably that it was a sweet journey without incident.