This is Uganda

The azure blue of the morning sky, flecked with cotton wool clouds and whirlwinds of Weaver birds, glowed above me as cool air streamed past my face and tangled its wispy fingers through my hair.

Perched precariously side saddle, one hand gripping the sticky leather of the motorbike seat - the other grasping gathered folds of my traditional African emerald green Gomas, I couldn’t help but mirror the happily amused expressions of faces flashing by. An elderly woman, gnarled and bent, leaning heavily on a hoe embedded in the upturned earth; a young mother expertly balancing a sack atop her head, bobbly-headed child cocooned to her back; all stopped mid movement to marvel at the sight that was I. Releasing my grip to return their waves, I risked death, my smile mirroring theirs and splitting my face in two jubilant halves.

I alighted amid a cloud of rusty red dust and raggedy, wide eyed children. Tiny warm fingers slipped into my hands and tugged at my cascading gown, pulling and coaxing me forward. I followed them, bemused and intrigued, inside a structure of bare tree trunks and glinting scrap metal.

Her ebony skin shimmered as she sang the lead, looking above, one hand aloft. The sashaying and shimmying of the choir, the stomach-rolling and hip-grinding of the congregation. The room ebbed and welled with rapturous adoration. A simple, pure feeling flowed from her to them and back again and it captured me. Self-consciousness fell away as I begun to dance with abandon, arms raised, swaying to the melody of a children's electric keyboard beaten furiously into submission by a dreadlocked youth with a toothy grin and an upturned profile. Sweat beaded and trailed down each glowing face including my own.

I closed my eyes and the sun, appearing in winks and flashes through holes in the rusty tin roof, lit my eyelids a fiery amber-orange. I felt it, the energy that is a people's love for their God, and I sang all the louder to the words I didn't know.