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Interaction between generations; young girls returning from a school function stop to talk to a village elder along the way, in Karimabad, Hunza.
I don’t know about other expats, but I generally forget I am one. Maybe it is because I have never truly belonged anywhere I have lived (brown girl growing up in rural England and all that) and therefore home is wherever I currently am. So when it comes to working in a professional environment overseas, I don’t realise that I stick out like a sore thumb and that all eyes are on me. Occasionally I remember I have an image to uphold, but more often than not, I am clad in combats with a notebook in hand and a camera slung over my shoulder.
A recent trip into rural Uganda saw my attempts to maintain my professional dignity tested to the limits. Waiting in a field for my interviewee to arrive from his homestead, I noticed a veritable army of ants marching along a little sunken highway in the grass. Now, if I could live my life again, I would be an entomologist, not an anthropologist. Ironically, I am painfully shy and awkward around people and, frankly, insects are wonderful because they don’t answer back…..they just buzz off, or sting, depending on their mood. These ants were irresistible, and I became thoroughly absorbed in my observation of them until several minutes later when my informant turned up.
Getting into the swing of the interview (a detailed discussion about blood sacrifices and ancestral spirits, though that’s a story for another day), I felt something crawling up my back – not an unusual sensation when traipsing through the Ugandan bush. What was unexpected, though, was the sudden burning sensation along my hairline at the back of my neck. Mid-sentence, I surreptitiously scratched the place in question making it look like a thoughtful interlude, and managed to arrest the offending biter between forefinger and thumb. Not wanting to break eye contact and risk derailing the discussion, I flicked the squirming object into the grass without a second thought, assuming it was a one-off. Unfortunately, I could not have been more wrong.
Over the next few minutes, what seemed like dozens of crawlies made their way upwards, straight to my hairline, biting with a vengeance. Realising my predicament, the local and my translator endeavoured to flick off what they confirmed were infamous red ants. Now to me, these ants look like any other….albeit a bit bigger in both body size and jaw size, but Ugandans detest them so much that traditional huts are typically daubed with herbal concoctions to ward them off, and you will sometimes see a bottle of an unknown liquid suspended above doorways to protect houses from infestations. I now understand why my translator virtually runs everywhere, even over the most difficult of terrains.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, neither of the two men realised their ant-flicking efforts were appreciated but ultimately futile, for it seemed that a majority of the ants had been waylaid in their upward march by my bra, and thus had settled to second best of biting my fleshy midriff and other sensitive places.
Struggling on with the interview, I wanted nothing more than to strip off and run naked and screaming into the nearest swamp: expat image be damned.