My body took its first breath in Uganda.
It was a shallow gasp of air, the kind that you take when you’ve just emerged from underwater, or maybe the kind that babies take when they’ve just been born. It was a breath like an emergency, like an alarm that says “get up stupid, you’re still alive,” like the shock of consciousness that says oh-my-god-I-need-air-to-survive.
It was not a deep breath. It was not a breath of air that tasted of chocolate, sensuousness or slowness. It was not a breath that regulated my nervous system. It was a breath from a nervous system that had been nervous for so long that when it suddenly found itself in an environment where everything appeared to be at peace it said, “Okay, maybe here you can take one breath.”
It would be another five months before I took my second breath.
Breathing has never come easily to me. One of my nostrils actually doesn't work properly. When I inhale, it closes. Air only goes in one nostril.
When I was a kid, there wasn't a time I can remember where I didn't have nose problems. Sinus infections turned into post-nasal drip, and when it wasn't one of those two, it was inexplicably stuffy. I was allergic to dogs and cats, then I wasn't, I was allergic to milk, and the seasons, then I was allergic to nothing, and then I was allergic to dust.
I was allergic, maybe, to life itself.
"It's all in her head," a doctor told my mother.
You mean to say it's all in her nose, I wish she had replied.
I was given the diagnosis of "chronic rhinitis" – which is medical jargon for "we don't know what the f*ck is wrong with your nose" – and sent home.
I think we stopped trying to solve the problem after that. But the problem didn't go away.
Until recently. In the last few years, I've actually started to be able to breathe again. Whereas once I couldn't remember a time when I could breathe, now I can't remember the last time I chronically couldn't.
When I say that in Uganda I could breathe, I am saying two things. I could breathe easily in my nose, and I could breathe easily in my body. I don't have a great explanation for the first one, other than that I am convinced it is related to the second. I arrived in Uganda and it was the first time that I had ever arrived somewhere without an end date or a job to go back to. I had no itinerary to rush through, no emails to respond to. I could breathe.
I didn't want to leave this place where I could breathe, so I stayed a second night, and then a third, before deciding that as much as I wanted to live out the remainder of my existence in this jungly oasis that cost me less than $20/night with breakfast, I best do the thing that I set out to do, which was to see the world and to heal.
It was at this place that I met a woman who had just come from the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria.
"Would you like to visit?"
Maybe?
She gave me the phone number of a man named David.
"He will pick you up from here, and take you to the ferry, then from the ferry, you will get on a local boat, then at one of the stops of the local boat, there will be a man named Andrew, and you can stay with him, and see the school that he is building."
I would miss this place, but adventure was calling.
My first few days in Uganda became the blueprint of what would become my next five weeks there. I spent more time in Uganda than any other country on my backpacking Africa adventure, in part because there were days where I did nothing at all except yoga and journal, and days where I said yes to random little side quests such as this. "I am backpacking Africa" and "I'm taking a break" were my mantras – and anything that fulfilled the mission became a viable path on the journey.
