“Listen to this,” she said, flipping through the pages. “Hippos graze like cows.”

“Sure. A cow that’ll bite you in two,” my father said.

“Would you just listen?” my mother said. “So normally they leave the water only at night. But,” and here she paused, “in Queen Elizabeth Park — or what is it now? Rwenzori National Park? — anyway, the hippos graze all day. We could see hippos strolling around. Now wouldn’t that be something?”

“That would be something,” my father said.

“You have to read this. It’s hilarious.” To my mother, funny was a bad smell or a suspicious activity. When something made her laugh, she called it heelarious. It was one of the few words where I could hear her Finnish accent. “Listen to this guy. I love him,” she said. “Generally speaking, the hippo is an inoffensive beast, provided he is left alone. But here’s the best part.” She looked up and down the page, trying to find what she had laughed at earlier. “Oh here it is. To get between a hippo on land and the water is a most dangerous proceeding.” She looked up then. “But he doesn’t tell you what to do.”

“Run,” my father said, “fast.”

It didn’t seem that we would get off the hill anytime soon. Petrol was too precious, and my father was occupied with Bugema College. He taught beginning and intermediate Greek, New Testament Epistles, Physiology, and Life and Teachings of Jesus. He taught one class before breakfast, another after. His mornings were spent biking up and down the hill. In the afternoons, he attended committee meetings, and at night, he attended the school’s worship service. “You’re always rushing off,” my mother complained.

My mother was adjusting to what life meant in Uganda. Each evening, she boiled water and left it to cool. The next day, she would tip the pot against a Tupperware container and pour. Her mornings began with water. She would then make breakfast, my father, in the background, dashing through the house, looking for his pens, his students’ papers, his book from yesterday. If my mother had traded soap for passion fruit, she would rinse them in the sink, two by two. They were the size and shape of eggs and looked the way rotten eggs ought to: wrinkled, purplish-brown, soft. She would slice each one in half and set them on our plates. Cracked open, they became cups of orange pulp, which we ate with magnificent slurps.

After breakfast, my mother would wash the dishes, have worship with us girls, wash laundry, hang it to dry, think about lunch. She could leave the hill if she wished, but it usually seemed too much of a hassle. In the afternoon, when Sonja and I were napping, a ritual so fiercely enforced that it was nearly religious, she would reread Animals of East Africa, perusing it for instruction. She underlined snatches that struck her as important: Impalas both browse and graze. She underlined and starred facts that seemed of particular significance. The steenbok has no lateral, or “false” hooves. When she needed to (if she needed to), she would know the difference between a steenbok and a duiker — two miniature antelope so delicate they looked as if they belonged in a dollhouse.

We had been in Uganda many months when a medical technician needed a ride to Ishaka Adventist Hospital. My father was fast to volunteer. The town of Ishaka rested in the western dip of Uganda, a hundred kilometers away from Rwanda, Congo, and Burundi. It was a dusty strip of a town: a few restaurants, a few empty stores, a few bars, a few inns. The main attraction was the eighty-bed hospital. To my parents, Ishaka meant safari. The road through town led also to Rwenzori National Park.