My ass has a permanent imprint from the back of the NAADS boda I ride an hour each way into the field every day. Charles is supposed to pick me up every morning at 8:30, but he is always tragically late so I usually chill out in the courtyard of our tiny hotel in my pajamas as my classmates come back from their runs, rush to the showers, boil water for tea when the power is on. Patiko sub-county, where Charles is the lone government extension work to train farmer groups in planting and harvesting, is a straight shoot from Gulu down a sporadically-paved road that makes my right eye tear from the dust. Half of my body is more tanned than the other, from the angle of the sun when we ride home in the afternoon.

What usually happens is Charles expertly discerns a tiny dirt trail through the bush off the main road and swerves down it until we park under a mango tree where the women of whatever farmer group we are meeting with are shelling groundnuts or mashing cassava. Most of them have returned from IDP camps in the past six months, and are either in their original villages or “satellite camps,” the limbo situation the government pretends is not a real IDP camp while the people wait to return to their original land. They bring us stools, and Charles and I usually sit for another hour before the last of the group members trickle over. There is no urgent sense of time in Gulu.

Charles tells me I can start asking questions, and I awkwardly prepare my notebook and start out with my first question, as Charles translates into Acholi. I ask them about farming before, during, and after the war, and how they benefit from the trainings they are receiving. This is the first planting season for a lot of people in almost 15 years, and because the land became much more fertile while they were away in camps, they expect yields to almost double when they harvest. Agriculture has been decimated by the war in almost every way, but the one thing that has changed for the better is the market: demand for food is almost astronomical, especially from Sudan.

My first discussion with the farmers I was terrified.

Charles typically then takes the farmers to their plot of land, and shows them how to correctly measure the spacing between rows of government-provided maize seeds. They use a string of twine with pieces of plastic bag tied every thirty centimeters as a guideline. Women dig with their hoes, then other women follow down the line sprinkling maize kernels and kicking the dirt back over with their feet. I just watch. Once, a group of women kept looking at me, then cracking up, then looking at me, and cracking up again, and finally one of them came over and gestured if I would like to try planting maize myself. I felt stupid, especially since Charles had told them I was a “farmer, just like them” and I had no idea what I was doing. I hoped I sprinkled maize into holes in a way that wasn’t horribly offensive.

On the way back, I try to duck my entire right side beneath Charles’ shadow on the boda, but I always look even darker when I get home, from the dust as well as the sun. I am usually in a good mood, and wave to small children and women carrying basins full of mangoes on their heads. When I realize I’m also waving to goats munching grass on the side of the road, I tell myself to get a grip.

One day, Charles took a detour on the way home from Ajulu Camp. He dropped me off under a mango tree in front of a mud hut, and said, “This is my family. I will be right back.” He drove off, and I looked at the man lying on a straw mat at my feet and the woman grinding some sort of rock into powder by the hut. I tried to greet them in Acholi, but elicited no response, so I sat on a stool and contemplated my existence for about forty-five minutes until Charles came swooping back on his boda to get me.

Last week I asked Charles what county he thought I came from. He squinted, and looked at me. “China?” he asked. I replied that I didn’t have Asian eyes. He said, “yes, but that’s the only difference.”