Essay – My first Africa without baggage in 2019
原文で表示 (日本語)I waited for my luggage at Entebbe Airport, but it never showed up. My WS in Uganda started with lost luggage.
It was my first time to go abroad, but I thought I would do it cheaply, so I decided to go from Narita → Naha → Bangkok (3 days stay) → Muscat → Dubai → Kigali → Endeavour, one connection after another. There was a lot of trouble along the way, and the plane failed to land three times in Okinawa. In Bangkok, I got into a fight with a cab driver, and in Dubai, I almost got scammed. And the package never arrived in Uganda. The teachers who were waiting for me there were smiling and saying, “Los baggages? The teachers who were waiting for me there were smiling and saying, “Los Baggages? In the end, my life in Uganda began without all my luggage.
I didn’t have anything, not even a change of clothes. I had no idea what I could get in Africa. As I drove to the place where I would be staying, I desperately tried to find out how many daily necessities were available. There were markets piled high with clothes, trucks full of bottled drinks, and supermarkets. It looks like we can get what we need there for now. Also, I expected to sweat a lot, but the humidity was lower than in Japan, so it was surprisingly cool in the shade and I didn’t sweat much. This was the first time I learned the meaning of the workshop’s task statement (‘Shade for Stops’). First of all, I didn’t have any clothes, so I chose a tacky shirt out of the large number of shirts I had.
During the workshop and the fieldwork, I was interested in the way things are in Africa. What I noticed was the freedom of use of things in Africa. I got the impression that things are treated more flatly than in Japan, where anything that can be used is used and misused repeatedly on the spot. Beer crowns used as umbrella pegs, barbed wire used as clotheslines, wooden pallets used as bridges, etc.
In addition, the free use of these objects has expanded the area from the original building frame to include a place for trading and a place for children to sleep.
Based on these observations, we attempted to expand the area of the Yamasen building, the site of the workshop, by freely using local objects.
Since I was able to observe the objects from the lost baggage in the workshop as something that I desperately needed, the discovery became incidental to the way things are. It was an interesting experience for me to be able to observe the area flatly as a person with nothing. My luggage came back a few months after I left Japan, and now it is a good memory.
Daiyu Inoue
