Giving Kampala another chance

I had a really nice weekend. And since it was my last weekend here, that means that it makes it a little harder to leave!

On Friday afternoon, we had an office Christmas party at a rec center a little ways out of town. Saturday I slept in, did my final shopping runs with my housemate, and then met my friend Ruth for dinner at this really good Thai restaurant. We proceeded from there to grab a drink at what may be the only Irish Pub in Uganda, Bubbles O'Leary's. Some people call it Bubbles. I prefer O'Leary's myself though. They had real Irish music playing, and you could even get Baileys, which we did, of course. We left O'Leary's and continued our bar crawl to "Just Kicking." a pretty lively mostly ex-pat hang out.

Around 11, my housemate called to give me the coordinates of a party that we had to attend. It was just around the corner at a house belonging to a project director of another project here. Every year he apparently has a big blow out Christmas party, complete with hundreds of people, a DJ, and lots of beer. Ruth and I arrived to a huge and energetic crowd of mostly Ugandans and we danced until about 1:30am. Since this was way more social activity than I even have at home, and MUCH more social than I have been in Uganda, we called it a night and headed home.

Sunday, a former colleague invited me to spend the day with her and her 3 year old son at Munyonyo, which is something of a resort outside of town. Another big ex-pat hang out, but it was a lovely day and they had a good sized pool, so it was worth it. The three year old loves to swim and they have pony riding too, which was very very exciting!

Sunday night I attended an even that was definitely the highlight of the weekend. I went with a consultant we've worked with to see the Ndere Dance Troupe. This group of dancers, singers, and musicians is unbelievable. They put on a regular show of about three or four hours every Sunday night in front on a packed crowd. I don't think I have ever seen any performance with so much energy! And it took all of my own energy to sit still during the performance.

It was a really good weekend to end the trip on. I wasn't sick, I didn't hang out at a shopping mall all weekend, and I was super social. Can't beat that!

I start my journey home tonight, to arrive in DC tomorrow afternoon. I'm not looking forward to the process of getting home, but I'm eager to catch up with friends and family and start getting into the holiday spirit. I'll also find out (hopefully) today if I am coming back in January, so you may see a new round of stories in a matter of weeks.

Tune in next time...

SUVs aren’t all bad

Yesterday I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to Luwero to work with some folks in the District Health Office on budget and workplans. There is a cadre of drivers on the project team to get us losers who don’t drive back and forth from the field, but when every single one of them is out on call, we have to resort to the special hire taxi.

Charles arrived to pick me up around 2:00pm. Luckily, that meant that there wasn’t much traffic coming out of Kampala. We got moving…and boy, did we get moving! I’ve learned that drivers here are pretty fearless, but it feels a little more comfortable when you are several feet off the ground barreling down on a car your own size, rather then tooling along at 100km/h in Charles’ little Toyota Corolla. The bumps and potholes feel bigger and deeper when you go over them in a small car. And it doesn’t help that the main road between Kampala and Luwero is the straightest road I have ever seen. This facilitates high speeds, of course.

It is generally taken for granted here that anyone on four wheels has the right-of-way over anyone else. So when a driver is careening down the road, they slow for almost nothing. They use their horns liberally too, and everyone else knows what to do when they hear a horn toot. They scatter frantically to as far off the side of the road as they can. This goes for people as well as bicycles and motorcycles. And it’s not like the driver slows down while this happens either.

As far as I could tell, there were three things that Charles slowed down for while we were moving. A goat, a truck full of Ankole-cattle that was moving slowly in front of us (but only because there was an on-coming car so he couldn’t fly past said truck), and the rumble strips in Wobulenzi-town. At least someone was aware that this road is commonly mistaken for a NASCAR track. The rumble strips are big enough that if you don’t slow down to about 5km/h, you will probably tear off your undercarriage as you go over them. And there are about a half dozen of them too on your way through the town. Clearly, though, most drivers haven’t figured out that the purpose of the rumble strips is to cause you to maintain a constant slow speed all the way through town. Drivers go over the rumble strip at a very slow speed, and then manage to cover the 15 meters or so in between them at a normal “out on the freeway” speed. It’s not comfortable either with lots of lurching back and forth.

I made it, even though my heart rate did speed up significantly a few times, I found myself gripping the door handle a bit, and at least twice, the thought crossed my mind to tell Charles “you will not get paid by the project unless I get home in one piece.”

Anyway, as much as we all hear (or submit others to) lectures on how bad SUVs are, I have to admit, there are certain situations where I just don’t care about their impact on the environment. Often, when you are in a developing country that has two rainy seasons resulting in lousy roads and no speed limits, I admit, the oil crisis, ozone depletion, and acid rain are really the last thing on my mind. I’m just really thinking about getting out of the car safely at home.

Not just a herd of stampeding elephants...

If you are paying attention to the news, you might have already confirmed what I felt yesterday afternoon:
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KINSHASA, Congo (AP) -- A powerful earthquake has toppled dozens of homes and buried children in rubble in eastern Congo, killing at least two people in a region already beset by chronic violence and grinding poverty.

The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.8, struck at 2:20 p.m. (12:20 a.m. GMT) and was centered beneath Lake Tanganyika on the Congo-Tanzania border, about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) southwest of Nairobi, Kenya, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site.
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This was reported on cnn.com. The epicenter was a fair distance south of us, which shows you how powerful it must have been there if we felt it pretty significantly here.

The excitement never ends here...

Unexpected Thrills

It's about 4pm on a slow moving Monday. The most exciting part of the day was that we just felt a smallish earthquake - tremor really, but it was enough of a shake that a lot of people went flying out of the building. Your's truly included...

Non-Verbal Communication 101

The most interesting people here are the ones who I feel like I can’t adequately communicate with. I’m frustrated by my verbal limitations here. Even when I am (I think) speaking the same language, the accents are so different that both I and the other person end up repeating ourselves over and over trying to be understood. Sometimes I finish a conversation aware that my mouth is really tired because I have been focusing so much on an exaggerated enunciation of each and every word, every syllable. It reminds me of vocal warm ups from drama class in high school.

But then there are the situations where I have a true language boundary. Like I have with the gardener. He’s a very sweet guy. He greets me every morning with a big smile and “good morning madame!” Most of the exchanges we have usually consist of me saying something, usually with pantomime gesturing, and him grinning and nodding saying “okay!” It doesn’t matter what I have said, or what I have asked him. The response is always a spirited “okay!” He has no idea what I’m saying, I think.

Today (Saturday) I was sitting out on the front patio writing Christmas cards. He came around the corner, saw me sitting there and greeted me. We briefly discussed the universally appealing topic of the weather (I said, “the sun came out!” because this morning it was overcast. He grinned and replied “okay!”). He sat down on another chair and looked off across the yard towards the primary school behind us, where there seems to be an all day festival going on with lots of singing and dancing and drumming. I’m not entirely sure what he was doing there, and I tried a few more angles of conversation before I gave up and got back to my Christmas cards.

It’s quite possible that he simply wanted company.

See, this guy is the gardener, and as far as I know, that’s his main, possibly only job. He lives in a small house on the compound. At night I hear music playing from his house. During the day, he is often talking to the day guard, a young woman who is also very nice. (I have decided that they would make a good couple. :-)) He is single, and his family is in a village far, far away. He says he may get back there over the holidays at some point but that's not certain.

It must be really lonely being far away from your family, and not having people to talk to who understand you. The day guard was gone today, which probably added to his boredom.

I can understand what he’s going through. I went to hang out at the mall today. The MALL. I’m 31 years old. Hanging out at the mall on a Saturday afternoon is something that people don’t usually do past the age of 16. Nevertheless, sometimes when you need human interaction, you are willing to go to desperate measures. So, when push comes to shove, I hang out at the mall in a far away country, and my gardener friend hangs out on the front porch with the Mzungu who can’t even communicate with him. Sometimes we expect very little from companionship I guess. Sometimes someone’s presence is just enough.

Right about now, I would kill for a pizza

A nice greasy deep dish pizza.

I’ll admit, I am sure there is much much more to Kampala than what I have seen. Maybe I’m not being adventurous enough. Maybe I’m just feeling like I should save money so that I can but people Christmas presents. Whatever it is, I have indeed been skimping on food (having food poisoning Wednesday didn’t help either, of course!) during this trip. It’s easy when you are traveling to eat at restaurants…at least when there is a restaurant nearby. I will be moving into a hotel on Sunday, and I am really excited about having access to a restaurant. But so far, I have been surviving on cereal, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and some traditional Ugandan food for lunch. Maybe we are spoiled when it comes to food. I am so used to having a wide variety of culinary choices that when I am deprived of that choice, my body seems to think it is literally starving. I remember having these inexplicable cravings for Pad Thai when I was living in Guatemala. So far this past two weeks, several people have asked me at lunch if I’m vegetarian. They see my plate full of rice, potatoes, posho (corn meal, sort of), and peanut sauce, and I suppose the question makes sense. I have had a hard time eating goat, which is commonly served. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it’s easier to eat chicken. I see just as many chickens running around as I do goats. Then there’s the fish. I am not much of a fan of fish to begin with, but even less so when all original parts of the fish are still attached. I sat across from the IT guy yesterday and watched as he waded through fins and gills and skin. Ick. So maybe I should just tell people that I am vegetarian. But then I will have to explain myself when I make a lunchtime run to Lugogo Mall tomorrow. I noticed the other day that there appears to be a fast food fried chicken place there. That might give me the fix I need to make it til I get back to DC.

Have a good weekend. I’ll check back on Monday and let you know how the weekend here was and how my new digs are. Apparently part of my Friday will be spent shopping for housing. I guess that’s the courtesy they give you when they insist that you go low-budget. I’m thankful for that.