if you ask me, pogosticks just plain encourage childhood obesity

There’s a truly awful movie playing in Kampala right now involving cheery Hooters waitresses, a perplexing restraining order and an Unstoppable train which proves to be quite stoppable after all. Pretty darn stoppable. So entirely stoppable, in fact, I have to wonder if Hollywood didn’t consider less deceptive alternative titles like Unstoppable for a short time, then quite Stoppable or The train that would eventually slow down until it could only accurately be called Stopped.

My life may not be filled with jumping waitresses, hastily placed restraining orders or awkward dialogue, or at the very least not jumping waitresses, but it also doesn’t cost me 16,000 shillings ($8) and if it did have a title I assure you it would be something honest, something straightforward…something like ‘My bus caught on fire the other day, but it was Stoppable.’ Because the other weekend, after a painfully long day of travel to the capital with just 40 kilometers left to go, my bus caught on fire and I was forced to elegantly jump out of the window to escape. Of course by “elegantly” I mean my skirt fanned out in an extremely elegant manner to reveal my elegantly polka-dotted underwear, which elegant women call delicates, to the group of men standing below. And also that I refrained from stringing together a long series of swear words, which elegant women call expletives, when I felt blood trickling from my elbow and foot, which elegant women call appendages, and instead laced said expletives into a series of elegant sentences in subsequent phone calls to the Peace Corps nurse and my boyfriend, who both quite inexplicably responded with Unstoppable laughter.

Now at least one of these people has literally been trained and certified in sympathy and I’m fairly certain the second grew up in a time and place where neighbors actually did strange things like bake casserole for you when your pet or child died instead of secretly poisoning your pet or child so they could get a full night’s sleep. And so I was understandably confused until I realized the mental image of me jumping from a bus window is actually somewhat funny. I don’t really jump. I hate hopscotch. I break my mother’s back every time I get to a particularly cracked part of the sidewalk. I had a pogostick once but I was never quite heavy enough to coax the pogo down the stick. I had to have a friend literally coach me off the top bunk of an unusually designed hostel bunk bed a few months back and it still took me a full five minutes to get down. And I really had to pee, which elegant women call to tinkle. Also, my reaction speed isn’t great; I thought I felt a spider crawling around inside my shirt yesterday and literally finished my cup of tea before investigating.

Yes, the odds of a successful and timely bus escape were set against me, but given the general state of confusion and panic on the bus and my general lack of familiarity with the word “FIRE!” or the phrase “Calm down white girl, we’re not being hijacked” in even one of Uganda’s 43 colorful languages, I actually thought our bus was being hijacked and was happy to jump. Maybe not as happy to jump as a fake waitress frightened by an altogether stoppable train, but awfully close.