11/17 Week One

I am writing this on Thursday night, hoping to post tomorrow. The internet café here is a bit rough and I try to not spend much time there. Here’s week one in Uganda to review:

We arrived on Sunday and were taken to the Hotel Pacific on a main street on the outskirts of Arua. Definitely a change from the Imperial Beach Resort Hotel in Entebbe. The rooms aren’t too secure – they have wussy locks that open with a skeleton key that you leave at the front desk when you leave the premises. The toilets don’t flush well. Though now that I have had the experience of the water going out for a full day (Thursday), I won’t complain. At least when the water was working, they flushed a little. Yesterday water was out all over town, so I, my six co-facilitators, and 26 intrepid trainees got to spend the day using the pit latrines at the hotel where we had the training. That was an experience I’d rather not repeat. The electricity was out all day too. The hotel has been turning off the electricity at night, usually around 10 or 11, but usually I am sound asleep by then anyway.

The streets are busy all day from about 5am until about midnight. I can’t get a good sense of where people are going or from where they are coming. Traffic congestion in the streets is mostly caused by the boda-boda drivers, who offer public transportation in the form of a bicycle with a small platform on the back that you sit on, right behind the driver. They call them boda-bodas because apparently they originated at the border crossing between Kenya and Uganda. There was a kilometer stretch between borders where the more traditional forms of public transport (taxis, buses) wouldn’t go, so the “border-to-border” or “boda-boda” services popped up.

I wish I could say that the training was going really well, but it has been hard. Today (Thursday) everyone started getting lost in the material, and it’s clear that 99% of them don’t understand the program well enough to train other people (it’s supposed to be a training of trainers). I won’t get into the frustrations of work. Instead, I should say that the people are wonderful. Everyone – facilitators and trainees, hotel staff, staff at the workshop site – is incredibly friendly, kind, and enthusiastic. They are really entertaining too. At this point, the group has definitely developed rapport, which is fun. It’s actually very hard to see them struggling, because they are so energetic, and they clearly want to learn it. I wish we had more time here to help.

The only time I have really spent outside of the workshop and hotel has been to walk to the internet café, which has brought me a seriously heightened awareness of my race. I’ve spent a significant amount of time in Latin America, but somehow I never felt like I stood out so much there. In this little corner of the country, I am the only white person on the streets. Some people are curious, especially little kids. Sometimes I hear someone say “hello, my sister” as I pass by. Sometimes I get hissed at, usually by packs of boda-boda drivers with nothing better to do. Others seem to look right through me, as if the whiteness of my skin is washed into the background by the bright sun. I mentioned this to my colleague Adwoa, who is from Ghana andd is married to a white American. “I hadn’t ever really thought of it that way,” she said, when I told her how peculiar I felt walking down the street, “but I know the feeling well. I guess it’s probably good for everyone to go through that at some point.” In my world back home, I am neither a curiosity nor invisible, and I have to say, I’m much more comfortable with that place that falls in between.

That’s my week. We go to Kampala on Saturday, where I am sure more adventures (of the urban variety) await!