An African kilometer

In most parts of the world, a kilometre is shorter than a mile — but not in Africa. Here, a kilometre feels many miles long.

Maybe it has to do with the condition of the roads: in northern Uganda, you mostly find soft-packed clay roads that devolve into deep mud with any measure of rainfall. Maybe it has to do with road width, often so narrow that tall savanna grass and scrub brush scrape your truck on both sides as you careen by. Or maybe it’s the unpredictability of what will cross the road —chickens, cows and goats are everywhere.

Whatever it is, I’ll tell you this: when you see a sign that indicates seven kilometers (a little over four miles) to your destination, you don’t celebrate and say, “Wow, we’re close.” Instead, you ponder and worry about what might happen over those next few kilometers to slow you down or, indeed, keep you from reaching your destination entirely.

However, as with most anything in life, overcoming challenges has much to do with the attitude you bring. And so it was today: we were two groups of Mercy Corps staff trying to get to villages where our programmes are underway, so that we could interview and photograph beneficiaries for our storytelling workshop. The roads didn’t make it easy. Those African kilometers seemed longer than ever.

Case in point: on one group’s way out to the village of Odoko Mit today, it took two hours to go 40 kilometers. That’s about four miles an hour. I think maybe people can walk about that fast.

Unsticking the bus from sticky African mud on a tiny African road. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

The other group’s bus got stuck in a morass of mud. But neither the mud nor sun nor long kilometers kept these workshop participants from action: they filed out of the bus with determination to get it back going again. All of a sudden, there were determined men and women from several African nations trying to dislodge several tons of metal from some of the stickiest mud in the world.

The mud won that round. But the participants had someplace to go and work to do, so they found and mounted motorcycles for the last few endless kilometers to the village. For some of them, it was their first time ever on a motorcycle. The smiles on their faces showed that neither the mud nor the road had defeated them.

And so maybe that’s one thing that those long African kilometers: fellowship. Teamwork. Building friendships. Because I know that, long after everyone returns to his or her home country, they’ll be talking not only how long it took to reach those villages, but how we laughed along the way and the work we did together once we got there.