From: Violence & Alcohol

I live in a city where the girls are so pretty it makes you want to curl up in a ball and bite your knuckles till they bleed. They fill the streets— every four feet there’s someone else to fall in love with. Wavy braids, lip gloss, tight tight jeans. The uptown girls with rich fathers, who go everywhere by cab and think in English and speak with the accent they got from schools abroad and honed on years of satellite TV. They wear the jeans like a second skin, and claim beauty as if it is theirs by right, as they flit around being colourful and alluring, trailing the admiration and wonder of strangers in their wake. Never a backward glance—it’s all taken in stride.
Then there are the downtown girls, who used to be poor and just discovered that money, once acquired, could turn them into little goddesses. They wear their jeans like a meticulous disguise, and learn the wiggling of the head and the fluttering of the eyelids and the drooping of the hand, and they act as if they are always enchanting. But they speak in Luganda so it isn’t hard to accept the possibility that, a few hours ago, when morning struck, they were in the cheap suburbs where there are no tarmac roads, and were waking up with unruly, chaotic manes of hair, in frayed and tattered old nightdresses. But that was then. They are not in frays and tatters anymore. Now they have their jeans, and now they are butterflies floating around the garden that is Kampala. Trailing admiration and wonder in their wake. Claiming beauty as if it is a treasure dug up on a desert island finders-keepers.

-C&R99