Richard Stupart

Up at 04h30. In Entebbe airport by 06h00. On a plane by 08h30 and starting the long trek home. It’s all so managed. So clean. In your seat. Eat your meal. Listen to music or fall asleep for distraction. I feel awry in the whitespace. My clothes are filthy, and probably smell a little.

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[From the hip] So let me get say this right off. Ituri district is absolutely nothing like what you have been told the Eastern DRC is. It’s undeveloped, and it has crap roads – these things are true. But it is also full of really friendly people, to whom we have not had to pay a single bribe, who have really gone out of their way to show us a great time.

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There are twenty four minutes left on this laptop battery. Power to the plugs in ‘hotel’ Tropikana (don’t ask) has failed, though the lights work absolutely fine. Outside is a little dark, and slightly infused with the smell of burnt trash and roasting meat. Somewhere out there, a bar cranks out huge sound while patrons lounge in plastic furniture drinking beer. The waitresses at the bar no longer trust me to return their beer bottles and have begun keeping a deposit. This has not been entirely unreasonable on their part.

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This post should have gone up two days ago. But packing can be such a demanding mistress. Have I put in too little? Too much? Do I really need an extra bandage in the first aid section? (yes) Have the extra batteries for the camcorder arrived? (No). And so it has gone. So these are the words that should have been. Not on time, and not as carefully wrought as I’d like. But I suspect there will be a lot written from the hip in the days to come.
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I’ve been holding my breath a lot the last fortnight or so. Catching myself needing to stop, unclench and breathe a little easier, over and over again. The invitation letter I need for my visa came through today. The fixer is confirmed. A thousand ephemeral shards of some implausible dream have suddenly spliced themselves together into something real. I can see my reflection in the enterprise at last. And some emotional spring has been storing the energy ever since.
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Two years and some some change ago, on a dark rooftop in Addis Ababa, I recall having my thousandth Ethiopian espresso with Jonathan, a friend and adventuresome soul who had come to join me for my days in the country on my slow road north to Cairo. I can’t recall much about the setting, besides that the light was a dull orange, and Jonathan had just received something called a peanut tea, that looked nothing like tea. Instead, it was a sort of peanut-coloured froth in an espresso cup. It may have been delicious. I can’t recall.
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[Taken from the Ugandan Journals]

Come morning, I sleep in until I can’t possibly anymore. Claw my pillow until every inch of tiredness has been attended to. Then brushing teeth in the damp, green cupboard of a communal bathroom, sitting on a top-loading washing machine that abuts the shower. Then breakfast.

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Miles and miles lost to ourselves in sideways glances from bouncing buses. Good years of good lives spent watching and smiling beyond our greasy half-reflections. I’ve been bored, I’ve felt profound. I’ve been a dozen different doppelgängers in a thousand running landscapes and zip flipping paint on bare black roads. Read the rest of this entry »

This has been rather a long time in coming, but all the technical jiggery pokery-programmery is finally in place for a WTRG newsletter. It has been polished until iridescent, and will lend an air of exotic sophistication to the inbox of even the most staid of mathematical modelling specialists. If you are a mathematical modelling specialist, I apologise. I love you too.

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[Taken from the Ugandan Journals]
It’s a hot morning in Kitgum, some three hours’ journey in a bus from Gulu, Uganda. I wake reluctantly under a clinging mosquito net inside the steel and painted-concrete guesthouse. It’s the final days of my trip here, and the arc of the journey is about to turn back on itself. I have three more days left until it is time to board a flight back from Uganda to the first world. Do people still call it that? They could.
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Once a year, like an artistic atom bomb, the National Arts Festival – or Fest to its friends -comes to Grahamstown. Artists of all stripes and skills descend upon what is otherwise a small and difficult to reach settlement in the already-pretty-remote Eastern Cape. Last year was my first experience of Fest in person, working as a photographer on a newspaper that gets produced for the length of the event. Which, last year, meant fifteen days. It was a tough, but rewarding experience. One which unfortunately left  me delirious with some evil flu at the end, the likes of which I have only ever had on one other occasion. This year was wholly different.
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