I laughed. I shouldn’t have laughed, but I could not help it. It was too great an irony. After tea Agnes brought Eliza and I to town to run errands. We first stopped at a shop with the entrance off a dark ally. As Eliza and I stood on the dark side of the ally, Eliza heard a cat meow. She looked for were the sound came from. She looked down she noticed a burlap sack move and twist. She found the cat. “Addison,” she said, “is it caught?” I looked down, and then laughed. The cat was in the bag. Forget the preverbal cat, there in front of me was a literal cat in a bag. Eliza stared in horror as the bag wiggled and moved. The meows became more desperate as the cat realized that it could not get out. The bag had been tied at the top to ensure it could not escape. The wriggling moved the cat from the side ally more into the one we stood in, and a bike almost ran it over. We cringed, but the wheel of the bike missed the bag.
“What do we do?” Eliza asked. “Should we let it out? Agnes,” she switched whom she spoke to, “there’s a cat in a bag,” I snickered, “whose is it?” “It is theirs,” Agnes pointed to the shopkeepers. “What are they going to do with it?” “They are going to take it away,” Agnes reported after she asked the man in the store. “Are they going to kill it?” “Eh eh,” Agnes shook her head.
Eliza looked to be in physical discomfort as she agonized over the fact that the cat remained in the bag. “Addison what should we do? I need to let the cat out of the bag. I can’t watch it.” She didn’t like my answer at first, but I still believe it was the correct one. “Then don’t watch it. Block it out. There’s nothing we can do. We can’t let the cat out of the bag.” I laughed in my mind at that one. “Addison I can’t watch, it’s making me sick.” “I know, but this is what they talked about in ISL with the stupid pre-departure stuff (this thing they got right though). We have to understand that this is how it is in Uganda. We have our own cultural beliefs and they have theirs. I’m not saying it is right, or justified, or ok. But, that is how it is and we have to respect it. We are living in their community. Also this is where Agnes buys her eggs. They would know it we let the cat out. No one else would do it. It would be different if we were just walking and let the cat out then ran away without having been standing here for a long time. Then we maybe could, ‘cuz who’s going to see us again right?” she nodded. “But that’s not the case,” I continued, “we are here with Agnes, and we have to think of how letting the cat out might affect her relationship with these people. It has to stay.” She finally relented. The whole while I continued to snicker internally at the morbid irony of the situation.
