Chapter Two
The Day I Thought I Would Die
"The most subversive thing a woman can do us talk about her life as if it really matters."
~ Mona Eltahawy
I haven't got on the London tube in fourteen years. Ever since I returned from living in East Africa. The last time on it I got in a panic, had an asthma attack and had to get a black taxi to the hospital.
It was expensive.
After that when I had need to explain to someone why I didn't get on the tube I'd tell them it was because I'd spent the last few years in East Africa, riding on motorbikes, I didn't like being underground.
I believed it. For years.
It wasn't until quite recently one of my oldest friends told me it's because of the landslide of course. I looked at him and said, “huh?” He said, ”well you're afraid”. “Of what?” I replied. “Of the tube tunnel collapsing on you and burying you alive.” It made sense. I just hadn't been able to see it.
In March 2010 torrential rain in Eastern Uganda provoked a series of mudslides on the mountains above low-lying villages, killing over 300 people and causing devastation below.
I was working with Katherine Haywood. She’d come to live in Kampala a couple of months before. She had previous experience at Channel 4 and was hoping to forge her journalist credentials whilst in Uganda.
We’d become fast friends, bonding over American music and Ugandan beer. Together with my foreign correspondent boyfriend we travelled to Bududa.
The plan was to film pieces to camera, she in front, me behind. We intended to sell our footage to either Channel 4, CNN or Euronews depending on who replied to our pitching emails first. We’d written them on the journey to Bududa in the car my boyfriend had hired.
We arrived at night, dumped our stuff and took our cameras and pens to a nearby clinic we were told some of the survivors had been taken to. There weren’t many, but one woman with a bruised and puffy face, holding her baby to her chest spoke to us.
She’d spent hours trapped under some mud when her house collapsed under its weight, shouting for help until someone came and dug her and her baby out. It felt like a shaky start. Barely any survivors and horror stories before we'd been there an hour.
Early the next morning we gathered together, journalists and aid workers and headed to the bottom of the mountain where we would spend the next four hours walking up a steep incline to the death site.