Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
This is the story before the story. The story will begin when a door opens and I take my first breath of African air after a 43 year absence. I imagine I will be too tired to process much at that moment but that will be the real beginning. The beginning of what? We shall see. This blog exists so I can share the “what” with you as it unfolds. This first story is a chance for you to take a look at the program before the curtain opens.
As a child, I could hardly imagine a life outside Africa. Normal for me varied between the hot, scrubby bush of Somalia and the lush, green, high country of Tanzania where I went to school for awhile.
These normals were spiked with yearly visits to Nairobi. The Nairobi of my memory was a city of well-tended gardens, double-decker buses, fragrant open-air markets, and crisply uniformed officers directing traffic with white gloved efficiency. As a bush child, Nairobi was the closest thing to paradise I knew. As that child all grown up, Nairobi’s sad decline has been reported to me by people different enough for me to believe it. I don’t want it to be true. I don’t want any of the tragic stories out of Africa to be true.