Where the heart is

The first time I came to Busia, the border post was old and run-down. Dusty and brown.

We had arrived by Kondele. A kondele was a Kisumu Matatu, an old Peugeot station wagon usually, frail and rattling but sturdy enough ,somehow, to carry a dozen people across the 200 kilometers from Kisumu to Busia,

On that day in January in 1988 I was one of those dozen. Myself, my mother, my two sisters and the few clothes, books and disappointments that were all Moi’s government had allowed us to pack when we were evicted from his republic bundled out of the creaking station wagon on the edge of Kenya. We stood waiting in the dusty sunlight for passports to be stamped and I looked across the brown gate for the first time at Uganda. Every memory of my childhood that I have up to that point is a happy one.