I’ve been sitting on a big rock at the base of Sipi Falls near Mt.Elgon. The rainy season is beginning late and the water falling is much less than it was when I was here in December. Then it fell straight. Now the wind pushes it back and forth across the never dry moss rocks and it breaks in a more gentle white spray as far away from the center of a the 50-yard area as the wind allows. I’m here on a hike with a handful of the American students who are here studying for the semester. I stayed at the big falls to sit--they’ve hiked on with the guide up to the three smaller falls. Two children--boys--followed us down from the village town and they chose to stay with me. They spoke enough English to say “give me money” but not enough to understand when I asked them “why?” They squatted and watched over my right and left shoulder as I reclined in a natural rock seat and watched the water fall and thought and wrote a little about a hundred different shopping mall fountains and unacknowledged delicacy. When I laid my head back and tilted my hat down against the sun, the boys got up. I thought they were gone. I dozed for a couple sunny minutes and woke to the sound of singing. The two boys had gone and brought back three more. The five of them danced and asked for money and sang and asked for money and climbed barefoot around the steep and wide mossy rock faces to get into the green sprawl growing up the rocks behind the waterfall and dance and sing and ask for money. I smiled and laughed and waved and moved to a different rock--the rock I’m on now. I could still see them and they climbed down and I only thought once about the possibility of them slipping and sliding face-first the 100 steep feet down the rock. None of them fell and they all waved when they walked by my new rock and one said, “I think I want to cry.” Then the others joined in and they climbed up away from the falls on the loose dirt trail pushing and pulling each other, laughing back at me, all of them saying dramatically, “I want to cry.”
It’s Saturday. I’m leaving Uganda Wednesday morning. I’ll land in D.C. Wednesday night. I’ll fly south the next day, see the family, then drive down to Tampa. One week from today I’ll be standing in a suit on some Gulf Coast beach watching Jeff Kirtley get married.
I think I’ll notice delicacies then. I’ve always tried to notice delicacies, whether I’ve called them delicacies or not. But I think I’m more aware of delicacies of all kinds after this time in Uganda. Delicacies of physical beauty and strength, delicacies of spiritual faith and doubt, delicacies of comfort and discomfort, delicacies of need and luxury. Delicacies of a dry season waterfall. Delicacies of children chanting “I want to cry” in a foreign tongue while I’m sitting wondering what to say.