I’m Glenna Gordon, an American photographer and journalist, presently commuting between West Africa and Brooklyn. Previously, I lived in Liberia. And before that, I lived in Uganda. I’ve traveled and worked in over a dozen countries in Africa.
2008
On a train somewhere between New York City and upstate New York, we pass snowy banks peppered with naked trees, snaking along an intermittent river with cracked sheets of ice. The surface looks like a map, but as the blocks of ice move with the river, it seems that the countries drift away from each other.
I’m reading a book about Liberia, describing the way rain forest meets the ocean, and pepper soup and canoes and soldiers. Thinking about the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and shivering with my coat on, I feel ready for tropical humidity and a new set of challenges.
Being back in the USA has been its own challenge. Trying to reconnect with family and friends who I see literally twice a year can be wonderful but can also be trying. It’s hard to explain the where and the why of my life as we walk around Soho, surrounded by women whose purses cost more than most people in the world’s annual incomes. Several years of annual income. It’s hard to find common ground with my good friends when I go off on a tangent about HIV or an obscure border conflict in central Africa.
I had dinner with a journalist friend now in New York, who I’d met in Kampala. Over $15 ramen, we talked about Uganda. We were at Momofuku, a restaurant in the East Village. While my friend was in Uganda, he’d received a package with a bunch of copies of the New Yorker, and in one issue there was a profile of Momfuku’s chef that made me crave food not available in the entire country.
And then, I was there, at Momofuku, talking about muchomo. My friend ordered us appetizers – scallops and oysters. They came on a bowl of iridescent green seaweed in individual shells, small morsels of raw fish swimming in flavorful clear broth. I wasn’t sure how to eat them. I watched my friend gulp down the liquid and the fish in one quick swallow, as if he’d taken a shot of Waragi. I tried to follow suit, but ended up drinking the broth and then eating the fish.
I thought how a Ugandan would say, “This scallop has defeated me!”
My very New York friend just said, “You’ve been in Uganda for too long.” But not with the inflection on too long, as a Ugandan would say it, but just straight, as an American would say it: I’d been there for too long.
On the second shell, the oyster, I did better, and ate it all at once, enjoying the savory, buttery, slippery mess.
I learned so much in Uganda about the kind of work I’ve done and the kind of work I want to do. And now, I’m off to Monrovia, Liberia, in early January, ready for the second shell.
When I first was heading to Uganda, two and a half years ago, I mailed my passport to the Ugandan Embassy in Washington DC. They lost my passport, just a week before I was supposed to leave. Enraged, I asked the lady at the embassy what I was supposed to do with a plane ticket but no passport.
“You should follow your heart, dear,” she said. At the time, I thought that was an absurd piece of advice for a practical and logistical nightmare.
Now, it kind of makes sense.
I’m ready for Liberia’s challenges: a buttery slippery mess.
My last day in Kampala, I took this photo at the junction of Kabalagala and Kibuli.
