Irritation and Laughter

Is umbrage a choice?

I’ve been in Uganda for the last week, visiting my good friend and colleague Silas Oluka at Makerere University in Kampala. Tuesday we met up with Silas’ brother Stephen in order to visit a couple of rural schools. Stephen runs the government office charged with periodically inspecting the 3000-odd schools of Uganda’s Central District for quality assurance — a daunting task, given that his office consists of eight inspectors and one motorized vehicle.

The most immediately noticeable thing about Stephen is his size. He is very, very tall: the well-proportioned kind of tall that one doesn’t notice until someone else stands next to him or he dips down to pass through a doorway. The second most immediately noticeable thing about him is his joviality. He laughs frequently, deeply, and authentically: not the sniggering of the cynic or the giggling of the juvenile, but the gleeful peals of one who finds life to be an endlessly delightful comedy. He can be both jovial and serious at the same time. I saw him very gracefully and cheerfully, yet very pointedly, reprimand and warn a school headmaster when he found a stick prominently visible by the headmaster’s office door. “That’s a pointing stick, right? Used only for pointing?” (Said with laughter in the voice and steel in the eyes.) To me, the stick looked just about perfect for delivering a serious, no-messing-around hiding.

Stephen may be an extreme case, but joviality seems to be a common and general trait of the Ugandans I met and observed. Silas articulated the world-view succinctly: “It is better to laugh at problems than to be unhappy. What does unhappiness accomplish?” (Apologies if I didn’t get the words quite right.)

The Makerere University Guest House is not exactly a high-end establishment, though you wouldn’t immediately suspect this based on their prices. My last morning in Uganda, I was in a hurry to rise, shower, shave, dress, eat breakfast (something of a fiasco), pack, and meet Silas. Spending a half-hour in the shower wasn’t part of my plan, but the Guest House had other ideas. Just after I’d thoroughly coated myself hairline-to-toes with a good soapy lather, someone upstream of me turned on another shower. Or so I hypothesize; all I really know is that my shower suddenly faltered from a warm and adequate (if not exactly invigorating) stream to a cold and pathetic little dribble. Uh oh.

So I waited for my water pressure to return. And waited. And waited. At one point, it returned (glory hallelujah!), but petered out again after a ten-second tease. It even disappeared entirely for a short while. I don’t know exactly how long I stood soapy and hopeful, but I’d estimate somewhere around 25 minutes. When my errant water finally returned, I was moments away from screwing up my courage to rinse the now-gummy soap residue off in the agonizingly cold dribble, and punting on the shampoo. (“Agonizingly cold” may be an overstatement, but anyone in my family will affirm that I’m a wimp about cold water. I’d choose boiling oil first.)

While I waited, I got progressively colder, and progressively angrier. I’m no stranger to the vagaries of third-world travel, so I was initially unperturbed, willing to roll with the punches. Then a little disquieted. Then increasingly irritated, until I was fuming at the temerity of a hotel that charged first-world rates for a spongy saggy bed, lumpy pillows, criminally negligent breakfast service, and a water supply that could apparently only support one shower at a time within a bank of nine rooms.

And then I remembered Stephen. I pictured him in the same situation, and knew he would be in hysterics, shaking the walls with laughter.

It didn’t make me laugh, and it didn’t entirely dissipate my irritation, but it did make me realize that I, not the shower or the hotel or Circumstance, was the source of my unhappiness. And that, at least, helped me to put my umbrage back in the bottle. Even if I was irritated, I was conscious of the fact that I didn’t have to be.

When I told Silas this story, he laughed — predictably — with a perfect blend of amusement and sympathy. Then he said that Stephen would have gone to the hotel desk to inform them of the problem, and done it in such a way that he and the staff all had a good laugh together. And then he told me a Ugandan aphorism: “If you turn the tap and water comes out, or you flip the switch and the light goes on, you’re not in Africa.” Said, of course, without a hint of self-pity.

So here’s my question: is umbrage a choice? Are irritability and joviality merely choices that become ingrained habits? Can a taciturn Yankee like myself simply decide to adopt Stephen’s stance towards life and then achieve it through perseverence, or does one’s brain get irrevocably wired with emotional reflexes early in life?

Either way, I’m looking forward to visiting Uganda again. With or without water pressure.