While on vacation this week, I’ve finally had the luxury of time to sit and read much of Robert A. Caro’s first volume on the life of Lyndon B. Johnson, The Path to Power.

I find myself riveted by the story, at turns amazed and revolted by Johnson, and thoroughly inspired by and, I confess, envious of Caro’s own powers. Undoubtedly the best education I could have on how to write political biography — all for the price of a library card.

What surprises me is how much the Texas of Lyndon Johnson’s youth and young adulthood reminds me of the kids of Uganda.

Homes Among the Hills

As I learn the details of life in the Texas Hill country in the early 20th century — the plight of farmers in a land that wasn’t meant to be farmed; the thin margins between survival and ruin; the fleeting and few opportunities for young people hoping to escape; the disaster of the Depression for families already on the verge of starvation — I think of the kids I’ve known in Bujuuko, Uganda, a village outside of Kampala, “the City on Seven Hills.”

Like Johnson and his contemporaries, kids growing up in Bujuuko have high hopes but few opportunities. Their families, many of them small farmers, get ahead a little in good years but go under when the rains are bad, or the rains don’t come, or the worst strain of the virus arrives before the vaccine.

They pray to be able to stay in school, to have a chance at a life of growth, achievement, some measure of prosperity — but often they have to sit out because the money doesn’t come in.

What’s a Century worth

How much difference a century can make, at least to a region linked to a national economy with powerful engines of growth. Politicians like Lyndon Johnson and his mentor, Sam Rayburn, made sure that Texas farmers got a share.

What could a century mean for the kids of Bujuuko? Will the engine of the African Union be strong enough to pull some regions into economic stability with, eventually, an exponential effect on other regions?