Dear Internet,

The Reasons We Came Here

2012-01-25T01:43:00.000-08:00

I've been back in Ngora for three weeks or so now, and one thing that hasn't changed at all is the lack of real work (hence the two blog posts in one day). Part of me blames myself for not having had much consistent work –I haven't been proactive enough, or creative enough in what I want to do, or whatever– but part of me wants to blame my organization too –for not needing me or my skills or whatever, for applying to get a Peace Corps volunteer to write grant proposals for them instead of doing real work. But it's not really about the blame, and I'm not the only volunteer who still hasn't had consistent, meaningful work.

So I was sitting at my desk at my organization a few days ago, the only member of the health team there that day, with nothing to do, and after an hour or so, I just put my face down on my desk and said: Ughhhhh.

I think that this translated, generally, to: What am I doing here?

Even when there's been no work at all, I've never regretted or thought twice to my decision to join the Peace Corps. I've never been unhappy about living in Uganda or hanging out in the village. I get to do and see things that I've never done or seen before and that I would never have gotten to do or see without joining the Peace Corps. I love living here. It's ridiculous and frustrating and hilarious and fun. This place is a mess, and I like it.

But still, I can't help wondering from time to time what I am doing here.

So, with my hours of free time and the mostly-blank notebook I use for project ideas and my boredom, I though maybe I could write down the reasons I came here. I wasn't really thinking about what I would write – and for some reason it came out all in the first-person plural we, though I'm pretty sure I'm speaking only for myself– but an hour or two later, this is what I had:

None of us chose to come to Uganda. Not specifically. We chose only to go somewhere. We could have ended up anywhere, really: in Mexico, South America, or the Caribbean; in Asia, Eastern Europe, or various miniscule islands in the Pacific. When we applied, we were choosing simply to go.

We shared a need to do more than travel, to be able to load heavy backpacks and army-green duffel bags with the things we thought we would need and hoist them onto our backs or sling them over our shoulders and carry them through cloud banks and night skies, to cross borders and chase sunlight, scaling mountains and wading through swamps and staggering across deserts and hacking our way through jungles with machetes, and then, having arrived somewhere, to set our things down and live.

We needed to see the world: to have its problems shoved in our faces; to have its stench in our nostrils and its coppery blood on our tongues; to have its fires singe the hair on our arms and its revolutions shake the ground beneath our feet. We wanted the world's people to embrace us, to reach into our chests and cradle our hearts in hands strong and calloused with lifetimes of hard work on unforgiving lands. We would give them our hearts and let the people fill them with anything and everything they could. We would give them our hands and let our palms and fingers become blistered and hard, our knuckles gnarled and stiff. We would be like them, then, we would be citizens of the world, champions of the broken, destitute, beaten-down. And they would embrace us, we knew they would, because our hearts were pure and our hands were willing and our minds were sharp.

We stuck out our chests and held our chins high and stared down the sun because we were already proud of what we knew we would do, because we knew that we would set our possessions down, the few things we carried, and would stand shoulder to shoulder with the world's vast majority, the sick, the poor, and the hopeless, and we would lead their march toward health and prosperity and political freedom, our millions and hundreds of millions of shoeless feet would pound the ground as we marched, would be like thunder cracking the sky open and rumbling tectonic plates shifting the axis of the earth, and we would chant and raise our fists in solidarity, we would not back down, we would rise up, and when people grew tired we would carry them, we would throw them over our shoulders, every one of them, and press onward, we would show them what billions of people could do when they were united, when they marched in unison, when their voices combined into one, booming out like the voice of God, to shout down inequality and injustice, to demand education for their daughters and healthcare for their mothers and jobs for their sisters, and anyone who saw us coming, a billion dark faces and raised fists, would know that this was right, that the time had come for the world to change, and if they didn't, God help them, if they stood in our way, we would crush them, would cast them aside, because this is our time now, we are the majority and our voice will be heard, my God, we're unstoppable, we are righteous and pure, we are infallible and perfect, and you will listen to us, you will listen to every word that rises up from our midst, we will not let you ignore us, we will destroy your plasma televisions if you turn up the volume to drown us out, we will kick down your doors if you slam them in our faces, you will listen, because we are here, we are here, and we are not the ninety-nine percent, we are not the Berkeley-educated kids sitting and waiting to be pepper-sprayed and inexplicably comparing themselves to the black Americans who were sprayed with firehoses and strung up from trees and shot in the back, we are the ninety-nine-point-nine percent, we are the children who are tear-gassed at school, the pregnant mothers shot in the belly with rubber bullets for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and finally this is the right place and the right time, finally this is our time, we are here, we are worthy, you will listen, oh my God, you will listen, you will listen.

We were naïve.

But we chose to go somewhere –and we ended up coming here– because we were naïve. We could deny it over and over –and we did, we still do– and we could say that we hoped to improve only a few lives, at the very least. If we could help even one family learn better farming techniques so they could grow more food year-round on the same small plot of land; if we could teach even one classroom-full of secondary school students how to prevent the spread of HIV and how to put on a condom; if we could help start even one savings and loans group to help women earn more money and wield more power in the home; if we could make just one old woman smiled wide with her missing teeth and her gums, make just one infant laugh like a flock of tiny birds taking flight – any of these things, and we would be happy.

We were earnest and truthful in these small dreams. We talked about throwing just one small pebble into still water and watching the ripples spread all the way across the lake. We had our development buzzwords down: we would empower women; we would sensitize communities; everything would be sustainable and community-based and we would sit back and watch lives improve.

But in the most honest corners of our hearts, we knew we wanted to lead the revolution, to pound our feet and raise our fists and shout.

You can understand that, can't you?

We had grown up with cable TV, the 24-hour news channels, the world's famines and floods and uprisings constantly on display – and we had absorbed this. We had read Twitter feeds from Iran, following government crackdowns in real time, in short bursts of text sent out by kids our own age, people with whom –in another, better world– we would have gone to college, who would have held our legs while we did keg stands, their fiery speeches in our international affairs classes would have given us goosebumps and earned our respect. We had Facebook friends in Brazil and South Africa and China. We worked for the Obama campaign and hosted parties on election night and popped champagne and cried when he won, had bolted from our apartments and sprinted past riot police through the downtown streets of our cities, our coastal, liberal cities, and danced to the impromptu marching bands playing in the middle of intersections, full of hope and change and pride and victory, because our generation had a new defining moment, because we knew people were celebrating in London, Nairobi, Berlin, because we had a joyous unity that we had been searching for since the World Trade Center fell, since the ash settled like snow on New York City, and we had wept then, too, because the world had become terrifying and uncertain and divided, you were either with us or against us, and all we had ever wanted was for there just to be us, just all of us.

And we had seen the world first-hand, too, if only all too briefly. We had studied abroad, and, after graduation, had taken meaningless temp jobs and saved and borrowed money to buy plane tickets to places our parents had never been.

We had walked the racial divide in South Africa, had lain on the beaches of Cape Town and navigated the narrow alleyways between the tin shacks of Khayelitsha, ashamed of ourselves and brokenhearted. We had been in mosques in Cairo, had basked in the relative silence as one of the world's loudest cities all but shut down on a Friday, and had been woken up by the earliest calls to prayer. We had held sugar cubes between our teeth as we sipped mint tea from tiny porcelain cups, had gotten high on hashish laced in hookahs almost as tall as we were, had ridden camels across endless deserts under an infinite sun. We had stood in the shadows of the Great Pyramids and marveled at all the garbage, had made fleeting eye contact with women covered head-to-toe in black burqas, their eyes the only part of them available to the world. We had felt invincible when we read about bombings in markets we had wandered through just days before; then we had felt ashamed. We had gotten violently ill in Mumbai and had relied on the kindness of strangers to take us to the hospital and still never fully recovered. We had removed our shoes at temples and made offerings to Mahalakshmi; had run our fingertips across the cool white marble of the Taj Mahal; had been extras in Bollywood films that we had never seen. We had been rocked to sleep by the swaying of overnight trains lumbering across Rajasthani desert; had escaped Delhi for Dharamsala where we filled our lungs with cool air flowing down from the Himalayas and sat on rock outcroppings with saffron-robed monks, listening to their murmured incantations and quietly clacking prayer beads. We spun Buddhist prayer wheels and watched sun-faded prayer flags carry whispered words into the sky. We had shuffled past Mao Zedong, lying in state, and been yelled at by armed guards for stopping too close to his portrait outside the Forbidden City. We had walked the Great Wall and counted terracotta soldiers and bathed in Shanghai's neon nights.

We had ridden trains and buses and taxis; motorcycles and tuk-tuks and rickshaws; camels and horses and elephants. We had waded through the milieus of Christianity and Islam and through the sacred places of Buddhism and Hinduism. We had been scammed and cheated and robbed by monkeys. We had thrown up in trash cans and pit latrines, had gone days without bathing in anything but our own sweat. We had cried and yelled and laughed and cajoled our way across continents and borders and timezones. We had learned to say thank you in Xhosa and Swahili and Arabic and Mandarin. We had worn out the soles of our shoes. We had loved all of it but it had only ever been for a few weeks or months at a time and it had never been enough.

We came here because we needed more. We had seen some of the world, more of it than many people we knew, but the world was fantastically and thrillingly huge. Our eyes were starving, ravenous. But we needed to be more than just eyes: we needed to be hearts and hands. We had homes and families and friends, but we needed new places to call home, needed more friends and more people we could call family. We needed more time, more experiences and stories. We needed to be a part of something that seemed bigger than ourselves. We needed more direction and meaning in our lives. We needed to find our place in that wonderfully large world. We needed to grow up and learn about ourselves, learn about our capabilities and our limits. We needed to be frustrated and put in our place. We needed to do something that would make us feel needed or successful or good. We needed to know what it would be like to be more than just eyes, we needed to know if we could do it, needed to feel purposeful, needed to matter. We came here because we were greedy.

We also came here because we were lucky. We were lucky to be born into an interconnected world where we could make a full circle around the globe by the time we were twenty-five. We were lucky to have graduated college before the world's economies collapsed, when a twenty-two year old could still get a job and quit six months later to travel, just to travel, without having to worry about never being able to find a job when he came back. We were lucky to be born into upper-middle class American families, to parents who encouraged and enable our need to leave, and who would let us sleep on the couch for a month or two when we came back, rent-free. But we felt like we needed more than American middle class-ness –we were greedy in this way, too– and we felt like our middle class futures were already assured –like I said: we were naïve. We were lucky to have hard-working parents: we came here because we were carefree children.

We came here because we were entitled. Some members of our parents' or grandparents' generations call us entitled, anyway. They say that we were told too often that we were special. We watched too much Mr Rogers, were hugged too often, had too many green-sky and purple-grass finger paintings hung with magnets on the refrigerators of our suburban homes. Everyone got trophies; even the losers won. They may be right. We may think too highly of ourselves. We may think we know more than they do. We may be self-centered and overly self-confident, with short attention spans and no moral fiber.

There's a flip side to this, too, though. Because now we've grown up and the world's started to fall apart and we've realized we can't all be president or quarterback or CEO. Some of us have realized we can't even be baristas. I'm not entirely sure what an IRA is, because even if I had one, I don't have any money to put in it. We've been driven and enthusiastic and proud of ourselves for our entire lives. And now we're moving back into our parents' basements in droves. We might not become homeowners until we're fifty (because we'll refuse to move out of the city) but that's not so bad because we won't be able to retire until we're eighty-five. We're fighting, now, against apathy, against becoming depressed because we're capable and desirous of everything and there's nothing. We've all that drive and enthusiasm and specialness with nothing to use it on.

(Of course, those same tired critics would say that we're not looking hard enough, or that we don't have jobs because we're only willing to take our dream jobs because we're too full of our specialness to settle for anything less, or that we're only depressed because no one else is appreciating how special and talented we are. Again: they may be right.)

This is the truth, for those of us in our twenties or early thirties who've grown up believing in the world, in ourselves and each other and our collective capability to do big things: with nothing to use our talents on, or with bosses who don't hang our metaphorical finger paintings on the metaphorical refrigerators, we've become cynical. It's true. We couldn't help it. But this is the beauty of our generation: we haven't become bitter. There's still that hopefulness and optimism that undercuts the cynicism. The cynicism is like a joke: gallows humor. It covers everything up.

We're so screwed– we say.

And we laugh about it.

They've totally already got nuclear technology: obviously– we say.

And we laugh about it.

Because we can't help it. We're optimistic and hopeful and certain of the fact that our future is assured, in some way. We can't help believing that we are talented and capable. Some of us can't help believing that we can do anything we want. The rest of us believe we can at least do something. And then there are even those of us who think we have to do something. Something big and important and revolutionary and world-changing. We believe we can lead the march. We believe in the people who are marching. We believe that things will change for the better, we want them to change for the better, the world deserves to change for the better, and we know that if nothing changes, we'll figure something else out. Some of us are misguided: look no further than those Berkeley-educated kids who compare their Occupy “protests” to the civil rights movement –I hate their self-righteousness and their lack of a real plan, but even I think that if their hearts aren't in the right place, they're at least in the general vicinity. Because it's our time. We are entitled to this. We are entitled to go out into the world and try to change it and maybe we'll fail but when we do, we'll laugh and learn from it and be better next time. We came here knowing that failure was either a strong possibility or an almost certainty. But we came here because we're ok with that, because even if we fail, we'll figure something else out; because even if we fail, at least we have the stories, at least we can laugh about it, at least we can say that we came here.

I don't know how the critics would respond to that, but I don't think we care.

We came here because we're screwed, and we're happy.

We came here to find out about the world and ourselves. We came here because we knew the world in a few ways and needed to know more. We came here because we were naïve and greedy; because we were earnest and hopeful; because we thought we could lead the march, or at least be witness to it, or at least throw one small pebble into still water and watch the ripples. We came here because we knew that even if none of that happened, we would still have more stories and another pair of shoes with worn-out soles. We came here because we knew we could always go back. We came here because we were young and free of debt and mortgages and children –and we wouldn't be, didn't want to be, free of those things forever– and our futures were long and wide-open, and we knew that we needed to take advantage of the opportunity, just in case they weren't. We came here because we wanted to be a part of Kerouac's rucksack revolution or because we had no idea what we wanted to do with our lives other than be a part of the world or because we had never been able to stay in one place for very long.

We came here because our eyes were wide and minds were curious; because our backs were strong and our legs could carry us; because we needed our hearts to be filled and hoped to have our hands put to work.

We came here because we had to; and because we could.

I Am America, and So Can You!

2012-01-25T00:05:00.000-08:00

I know I've been worse at updating this blog than Chuck Knoblog was at throwing to first base. (Yes, that was a long stretch for a bad joke.) So, it's going to be a double-blog-post day, since I've had this one sitting on my computer for a couple weeks now.

But I'm back in Ngora after a full month away, and I'm happy to report that America is still awesome and Uganda is still Uganda. Without going into too much detail about the two and a half weeks I spent in Seattle and Sunriver, eating and drinking and not moving too much, here are a few things people said to me–

When I got back to the States:

“Welcome back!”

“You're so tan!”

“I missed your big Irish head!”

“You're not as skinny as I thought you would be!”

“It's 68 degrees in this house: take off that down jacket!”

“Seriously: you've been wearing that down jacket for twelve days straight!”

“Did you just refer to Uganda as 'home?'”

When I got back to Uganda:

“Welcome back!”

“You're so white now!”

“So America was good? Because it looks like it was about fifteen pounds good!”

“You're fat!”

So that pretty much sums it up: I wasn't that skinny when I got to the States, and I was super fat when I got back to Uganda (which is entirely ok, since the PCVs who commented on my probably-unhealthy weight gain were just jealous, and the Ugandans who commented on it meant it as a compliment). It wasn't really that cold, technically –the coldest it got was one morning when it was 15 degrees out when I woke up; most of the rest of the days were sunny and in the 40s; and London was much colder than either Seattle or Sunriver– and there was no snow, but I opened presents on Christmas morning while wearing my puffy down jacket. I lost whatever tan I had, at least according to my Ugandan friends, the ones who told me I was “a real white man, now.” Without thinking about it, I did call Uganda home, but when I'm here, I call America home, too. So it was nice to get to go home twice.

Before I left to go back to the States, I had been thinking that it wouldn't be weird at all, going back. I'd left and come back and left before, so I didn't think it would be a big deal. Then I started thinking that maybe it would be really weird, since I wasn't expecting it to be weird at all. Then I got back, and I had been right the first time. It wasn't weird. I even asked my good friend Whit: “Is it weird for you that I'm back and I've been gone for a year and a half?” She said, “When you first showed up, I was like, 'Whoa!' But now that you've been here for, like, an hour, I'm just like, 'Cool.'” So I think everyone agreed: like I'd never left. There were no mental breakdowns over all the choices in the cereal aisles of the grocery stores (or even Costco), like the Peace Corps had warned us about during some silly Pre-Service Training session on culture shock. There was no righteous indignation at the excesses and ridiculousness of Americans. No mind-blowing new technology (though FaceTime on the new iPhone is pretty awesome, and new to me). I didn't even have any trouble staying on the right side of the road while I was driving.

Then I realized the reason why it wasn't weird at all: I've lived in Uganda for a year and a half, true, but I've also lived in the United States for about twenty-five years before that. So no, it wasn't weird.

One funny thing I did notice myself doing, while I was in America, was when I would get in line behind someone, like at the movie theatre or the checkout at the grocery store or wherever, I would stand really, really close to them. Because in Uganda –and Asia and India– if you're not basically standing with your head on the shoulder of the person standing in front of you, you're either not in line, or you're going to get jumped. So I've gotten used to that; it's completely ceased to be awkward. Unless I do it in America. Because I could just feel the awkwardness radiating from the stranger in front of me as I ruffled the back of their hair with my breath. Fortunately, I would realize what I was doing after a few seconds, laugh, and step back. It amused me every time though.

But so it was really awesome to see all of my friends, and my family, and Dublin; to get to drink real, delicious beer and eat so much food that I kind of felt ill the entire time (but in a good way); to be cold; to watch football, even if the Broncos got destroyed in both games I watched; the bed was ridiculously comfortable; there were snacks in the pantry for when I woke up in the middle of the night from jetlag; I got to “meet” the guy who's going to marry my sister; it was sunny and gorgeous every day in Seattle; I got to do (almost) all of the things that I loved doing before I left (and one of my favorites was sitting at Starbucks with Sarah, with coffee and breakfast sandwiches, reading the New York Times –because, yes, we are the “Did You Read That?” sketch from Portlandia, it's true– and laughing because we're just so damn funny); and it was just … good.

I was asked a few times, when it got to be a few days before I was heading back here, “So, are you excited to go back to Uganda?” And I said, “Well … no. Not really.” I had to qualify it then, because that made it sound like I just hated it here: “It's like, if I lived in Seattle, and went on vacation to Uganda, I wouldn't be excited to go back to Seattle.” I think that's how you know a place has really become your home: when you leave, and even though you love living there, you're not entirely excited to go back.

There was one other thing from home that made me laugh. I've been lucky so far that I haven't missed any major life events while I've been gone. No new babies or weddings or dog-funerals. Everything's been pretty steady, and this makes me happy. But I was sitting around with the fam, on Christmas Eve, maybe, and Mom said, looking and Ryan and Emily and Caitlin and me, excited like only Mom gets, “I can't believe you're all here!”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “And the next time we're all here, we might have a kid.”

“And,” Caitlin said, “you guys might have a new son-in-law.”

I paused, and thought for a second.

“Yeah...” I said. “And, I mean … you know … I'll be here.”

“But you'll be coming back again,” Dad said, “from somewhere else in Africa. Or Asia. Or wherever.”

I think he was just trying to make me feel better, but he's probably right: this is my life, and it's pretty awesome.

A Story

2011-11-15T22:06:00.000-08:00

I met him yesterday, this mzee.

His face was etched and ripped with wrinkles, like a mask carved from wood, or a piece of charcoal.

He greeted me with a handshake, his --spider-webbed with age, strong with years of hard work-- swallowing mine completely, and with a booming voice that made the leaves on the branches above him sway like in a warm breeze, and with a wide smile full of perfect white teeth that reflected the golden light, the late afternoon sun.

The day-old stubble on his chin sparkled silver.

If I had to guess, I'd say he was at least 65 years old.

I sat down with the other men there, four or five of them, wooden folding chairs in a loose, three-quarters circle around a clay pot of ajon.

He sat just off to the side, his own chair backed up right next to the trunk of a mango tree, his own long straw dipped into his own grapefruit-sized pot of the warm millet beer.

The swept dirt of the compound was dappled with pools of sunlight, circles and ovals of warmth that swayed with the leaves in the warm breeze.

He was stabbed in the throat with a spear.

Rebel soldiers came and stabbed him in the throat with a spear.
They left him for dead.

He lay on the ground at St Aloysius, the Catholic Parish, not three kilometres from mango tree under which he now sat.

Rebel soldiers came and stabbed him in the throat with a spear and left him for dead, lying on the ground at the Parish, the blood pouring from his throat, bright red, and mixing with the dirt, rust red, and making mud, dark brown.

The blood poured from his throat and between his fingers as he tried to hold it in and it turned the dirt into mud, bright red and rust red into dark brown.

Or maybe it was in the grass.
Maybe he lay in the grass and droplets of blood hung from the tips of the blades of grass like dew, reflecting the golden light, the late afternoon sun shining through them, turning blood into rubies.

This was in 1987.

The rebels were part of Alice Lakwena's army. Ostensibly, they were fighting to overthrow Museveni's government. In reality, they were just killing. Killing, and also raiding homes, stealing livestock, torching huts, stabbing with spears the throats of innocent men who just happened to be in the way.

He lay on the ground, in mud or jeweled grass, and they left him for dead, or to die.

Then they were gone.
They were gone and the Parish priest was there, picking him up and taking him to the hospital.

This was in 1987.

The loose three-quarters circle of men, the ones I was sharing the pot of ajon with, told me this in between sips from the long straws in the pot, after the mzee had left.

They debated, then, briefly, when it was that peace had returned.
One said it was five years later, in 1992. One said no, it was in 1990. One said no, people were still in the IDP camps in 1990.

So they settled on 1993.

And then, eighteen years after that, I met the mzee and we sat in mango tree shade and he greeted me with strong hands and a booming voice and a wide smile full of white teeth and golden light, as if the world had never been more complicated or brutal or tragic than warm sunlight seeping between mango tree leaves to pool in swaying circles and ovals on the rust red dirt around our feet, as if there was nothing more to worry about than slow conversation and your own pot of ajon and the setting sun.

(Two notes -- 1: Mzee is a respectful term of address for old men. 2: Alice Lakwena was an aunt of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army. Her army was, essentially, the precursor to the LRA. She had begun her insurgency with aims of overthrowing the government, like I said, and she would often bless her soldiers with 'holy water' and tell them they were impervious to bullets. They would then walk upright into oncoming fire and were, obviously, wiped out rather quickly.)

One Year Wonder

2011-11-12T03:45:00.000-08:00

I have been at site for over a year now.

Wait. No. That's not quite right.

I have been at site for over a year now!!!

That's better.

Seriously though. I can't quite believe it. I'm not sure where the last year (or 15 months, really, since we got here in August) has gone. Sometimes I feel like I haven't done anything important, haven't made a significant impact for the last 15 months, but sometimes I think I'm just too harsh on myself: living in rural Africa for a year by myself is kind of an accomplishment of its own, I guess, and if I'm honest, I know I've done some good work, even if it's still a little fewer and farther between that I want. But I'm working on that. At the very, very least, I've done a few things –

1: Made some of the best friends I've ever had, people that I'll know for the rest of my life.

2: Done and seen things that will make great stories to impress ~~girls~~ everyone with when I come home.

3: Not died.

– so really, all in all, even at the very, very least: success.

Here are some other things from a year in Ngora.

Favourite Thing I've Done in Ngora (Work Category): This is obviously the training of the HIV/AIDS counsellors. It was the first, so far only, really big project that I've pulled off on my own, and at least the training part went as well as I could've hoped. They're starting now to bring in their notebooks they've been documenting client visits in so that we can review them, and I'll write more about that later, but some of them really seem to be making an impact and that is awesome. I'm proud of this one, proud of the volunteers and the community for coming together on it. The runner-up is my life-skills club, which is also obvious.

Favourite Thing I've Done / Do in Ngora (Non-Work Category): Narrowing it down to a short list– Climbing rocks outside of town with monkeys and finding a place to sit by myself and watch the town for a while. Being made Chairman of a set of Peace Talks, a code name for getting together to eat delicious and illegal roast pork. Playing football with neighbour kids. Sunset bike rides.

The Most Frustrating Thing (Work Category): Still struggling with my organisation to figure out why they wanted me and what work they think I should be doing vis-a-vis the work they have for me or don't have for me; the fact that they simply seem to want me to be a secretary and type things because I'm a faster typer than anyone else.

The Most Frustrating Thing (Non-Work Category): My housing situation still is a bit of a source of frustration. The house itself is great, you've seen pictures. The issue is that, well, I don't have anywhere to be at home where I can just sit and relax by myself and not be surrounded by people other than inside. If I had a place to sit outside, a bit of a view maybe, and just relax, it would do wonders for my general contentment at site. Instead, I have neighbours immediately connected to my place who are always outside –I know I can't begrudge them that– and even if I were able to just sit out there, the view is of an empty lot across the street and a drinking circle a few hundred feet away. A small issue in the whole scheme of things, but still, I would die for just like a semi-secluded patio with just a view of a grass and trees.

The Funniest Thing That's Happened to Me: I can think of three– The cow that was eating my laundry. The small boy who attacked me with nun-chucks. Busting the crotch of my pants open at the market.

Weirdest Things I've Eaten: Termites. White ants. Offals.

Number of Haircuts I've Had: 3– count 'em, including the one I just got right before mid-service, the first one I'd had since early May; I could put my hair in a ponytail and that's a sign.

Number of Books I've Read: 68– count 'em (that's 1.2 books/week, just, ya know, FYI).

Number of Parasites I've Had in my Body: 2– I think malaria is technically a parasite, and schistosomiasis, aka bilharzia.

Number of Times I've Had Diarrhoea: 0– my immune system is awesome (and even the Peace Corps nurse during my mid-service medical exam was impressed).

Number of Times I've Been Called 'Amusugut': What's a number bigger than a bajillion but slightly smaller than infinity?

Number of Dead Mice I've Had in my House: 3– two dead in traps, one of mysterious circumstances.

Number of Goals I've Scored in Football Games: 3– two headers off of corner-kicks, one beaut that I arced perfectly over the head of the goalkeeper and just under the crossbar and I'm still proud of it.

Number of Tomatoes I've Eaten: 963, approximately– I eat a lot of tomatoes: on average, five every two days x 55 weeks = 963 tomatoes.

Number of Packages I've Gotten: 14– and thank you, everyone!

Best Item in a Package: Velveeta cheese. New music. Trader Joe's trail mix with Craisins and wasabi peas, mmmmmm. A 38 ounce bag of peanut butter M&Ms. Starbucks Via Instant Iced Coffee, which is delicious even when you can't get cold water, let alone ice. Books.

Most-Played Songs on my iTunes: Top five, not including the new Fleet Foxes album, which I listened to pretty much non-stop for a month or two and now takes up six of the top ten spots– 1: 'Summertime Clothes' by Animal Collective. 2: 'Knotty Pine' by Dirty Projectors & David Byrne. 3: 'This Must Be the Place [Naïve Melody]' by Talking Heads. 4: 'Daisy' by Fang Island. 5: 'Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)' by the Morning Benders.

Most Embarrassing Song on the Most Played List on my iTunes: 'Bad Romance' by Lady Gaga.

The Best Thing I've Done Outside of Ngora: Sipi Falls on Christmas Day. Rafting the Nile. Hiking in the Impenetrable Forest. Horseback riding in Lake Mburo National Park.

Longest I've Been in Ngora Without Leaving: Seven weeks– that's basically 49 days by myself within a few kilometre radius in rural Africa. I feel pretty good about that one. (And it's a funny thing, what that does to you, the way you completely forget –most of the time, until you're reminded by an amusugut-screaming child– that you don't resemble anyone else here.)

Longest I've Gone Without Speaking to Another White Person (except text messages): Eleven days– which is either pretty cool or means I have no friends, depending on how you look at it.

Favourite Thing About Site: It's my home. When I'm away for a while, it's always nice to be back in my own town and my own place.

Ugandan Quirks I've Picked Up in the Last Year: The quick raise-and-lower of both eyebrows to signal yes, and also instead of saying 'yes,' saying 'ehh' (like a long 'a'). Instead of saying 'uh-huh' like to show you're listening when someone's talking to you, saying 'mmm.' The two-handed wave in greeting – both hands held in front of you, chest level, like you're holding a grapefruit, kind of. Crossing my legs like a girl and/or British man, because the other way is kind of rude, I guess.

Things I'd Never Done Before This Last Year (since that last six-months update): Had a cow try to eat –or at least suck on– my laundry. Bought avocados / made guacamole. Torn up newspaper to use when I've run out of TP, routinely. Dislocated my shoulder playing cricket (cricket!). Commandeered two different boats, one on Lake Victoria, one on the Nile. Been to a burial ceremony. Debated the fact that Obama is not Muslim and was not born in Kenya. Chased rats around my house with a machete and a can of insecticide. Had to clean up a decomposing animal inside my house. Crossed the equator overland. Been a part of (or at least witness to) a cattle-sale. Been running on horseback alongside darting tophi ten metres off to the right and twenty galloping zebra ten metres off to the left. Gotten malaria. Spent a full year out of the States. Spent a full year in Africa and still had another year here.

Two Stories

2011-10-19T01:10:00.000-07:00

1: Malaria.

Last Wednesday afternoon, I was feeling a little weird in the general body area and tired and blah and kind of out of it. I chalked it up to some recent frustrations with my organisation and left the office at around three, went home and had some me-time by being lazy on the couch. I woke up early on Thursday, feeling normal, started to do yoga, and realised I was feeling really weak –though this could still be considered normal, really. But I quit the yoga halfway through when I started feeling weird again. I took my temperature, a little high, maybe 99.5, but no big deal. And I went in to work around 8:30. I explained that I had a bit of fever earlier and wasn't sure how long I'd stick around. My counterpart asked do you want to go get tested for malaria? I said no, I'm probably fine, I'll wait it out, see if I don't get better, and then think about that. I left work around 11:30. Totally exhausted, not nauseous but just weird feeling, I went home and lay down and then everything went in the direction of terrible.

I spent the rest of Thursday on the couch, alternating between being on a burning funeral pyre and being buried under the polar ice caps. I was sweating and shirtless in front of the fan. Then I was in long pants, sweatshirt with the hood up, socks, wrapped in a blanket –and shivering uncontrollably, teeth chattering. And then repeat. All the while my entire body felt as if I'd just rolled down the faces of two very steep, very rocky, very tall mountains. And then been run over by a truck once I rolled to a stop. I took my temperature a few times: a little over 100 when I got home, and then a few hours later, I was convinced that my thermometer was broken when it read 38.9 Celsius –or 102, in American.

The rest of Thursday and Thursday night went on like that, in and out of flames and icebergs, in and out of sleep and truly bizarre fever dreams –at one point, in the middle of the night, I was in a semi-awake state, conducting, out loud, a radio interview (I'd be listening to some of NPR's This American Life shows earlier) with a man whose name I remember forgetting and then making up on the spot, calling him Alfred Schneffleschott; at one point, I dreamed we were all beetle-men, our front halves human, our backs covered in giant shiny beetle shells– and moving back and forth from my bed, where the blanket was, to the couch, where the fan was pointed. I woke up in the morning to find my sheets were soaked through with sweat; I could've wrung them out by hand, instead I just went back to sleep. When I woke up an hour or two later, I was feeling somehow better.

I mentally agreed that it was probably a good idea to get tested for malaria, washed several inches of dried sweat off of my body, and laid down on the couch to wait for my counterpart to come check on me, like I knew she would –really a sweet lady, as much as I complain about my organisation– when I didn't come in to the office. So around 10:30, she showed up with one of our drivers, asked how I was feeling, and suggested we go to the hospital to get tested and I said that was probably a good idea. (Before you gasp hospital!?, we went to the hospital because it's the best place to be tested, not because I was really lying as close to death's doorstep as I felt like I was.)

And so we went. By the time we arrived there, I was sweating again. I checked in with the nursing students, got my weight –70 whole kilos; I'll make you convert that yourself because it's a bit embarrassing– and saw the doctor for a second, then went to the lab. (This is actually the second time I've been tested for malaria in a foreign country. The first was in India after I vomited on a restaurant floor, almost passed out, then staggered back to the hostel to continue getting everything inside my body out of it. Both experiences were basically the same: since Dad is a famous international man of business, a guy he knew in India came and picked me up at the hostel, took me to the hospital, did all of the forms, skipped me through all of the lines, and generally helped me avoid all of the usual hospital bureaucracy that exists even in developing countries; here that was thanks to my counterpart –and my whiteness, of course.) I tried to look as apologetic and sickly as I could as we skipped the line for the lab –everyone else there to get the malaria test, too, I'm almost positive– and I got the finger prick, they did the blood slide, we waited for fifteen minutes or so, I watched rain clouds gather outside the screen-less, pane-less window, watched long banana fronds slap together in the wind, everything outside the window either green or dark grey until a nurse in neon pink passed across the grass field, and then the results came back. I frowned at them for a second before I was able to decipher the abbreviations and hospital-grade handwriting: p. falciparum (+++) seen. Plasmodium falciparum is the strain of malaria we have here, and positive tests for malaria are graded on a seriousness-scale of + to +++ with the three-plus being the worst. They told me to go back to the doctor for treatment.

After talking to the PC medical staff –the nurse I talked to on the phone, who is awesome and really, really nice, asked what she could do for me when I called. 'I'm at the hospital here and just tested positive for malaria with three pluses,' I said. My voice must've gone a little scratchy or something because, in total sincerity, she said, 'Are you going to cry? Are you crying?' Which caught me totally off guard and I laughed out loud and said that I was not actually crying at the hospital. She told me that it was ok if I cried though because I was very ill. It was really sweet and hilarious– I went home and started on the treatment, Coartem, which the PC gives us all a cycle of before we head off to site, and, long story short, I defeated malaria.

It took a few days, I think I'm finally feeling pretty much 90% of the way back today, and it was easily the worst sickness that I've ever had –take your worst flu and multiply by between a hundred and a million, depending on how bad your worst flu was, I guess– and I don't want to ever do it again –I'll be back faithfully taking my daily anti-malarial (which I'd been forgetting to do for the past month or so) and sleeping under my mosquito net every night (which I was already doing every night)– but I guess it wasn't all bad because 1: now I can say that I've had malaria, which is pretty cool, and 2: now I can have a lot more empathy or a weird form of respect for the people here who get it multiple times a year. I know they've built up some sort of immunity to it and so it's not always quite so intense, but even if it's a fraction of what I had last week, man, that sucks.

2: How I Got My Fingers Super-Glued to the Crotch of My Pants.

Just so you're not totally gushing with sympathy for my malarial plight and respect for my immunological fortitude, here's a quick story that will allow you just to laugh at me instead. This happened a few weeks ago. I rode my bike up to the market one evening, around dusk, just to pick up a couple extra things for dinner. After buying my tomatoes and peppers or whatever, I walked back to where I'd parked my bike on the edge of the market, and swung my leg over my bike and –POP! It was loud and where it came from was pretty unmistakable. I had busted open the crotch of my pants. At the market, the biggest single gathering place of people on a daily basis. Naturally, I think played it cool: I pretended like I hadn't heard anything, cleared my throat, and rode home. What probably really happened was something like this: I paused leg in the air like a dog at a fire hydrant, eyes wide in panic as everyone looks over and there's one single big intake of breath before everyone bursts into hysterics as I ride home, my shame relieved only by this new cool breeze floating into the crotch of my pants. When I got home, I realised that every single other pair of pants that I own was soaking in a basin to be washed in the morning. And after washing those pants and hanging them up for their six-to-eight-hour drying cycle, I had to go to work in the morning. But sewing the seam of my pants back up? That sounded boring. Fortunately, I'm a quick-thinking sartorial MacGuyver. And so I busted out the cheap Chinese super-glue I'd bought a while ago for some reason. Sure it hadn't stuck anything together that first time, but hey, beats sewing. Several minutes later, my fingers were super-glued to the crotch of my pants. (Ok, no, I was not wearing them at the time, but it's funnier if I don't point that out, right?) I am awesome. Anyway. I was able to detach my fingers from my pants-crotch. Unfortunately, the ability of the super-glue to stick my fingers to my pants did not translate into an ability to stick the seam of my pants back together, like, at all and I had to get out the sewing kit anyway, the task of sewing now made doubly arduous now that I had to push the needle through a thick crust of dried super-glue about a thousand times. And in the end, my sewing job was not pretty, but it held. Even when I got back on my bike in the morning.

Let's Do the Time Warp, Again

2011-10-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

Have I talked about Africa Time yet? If I haven't:

Time moves in a different way here, it's thought of in a different way here, in the local languages it's even told in a different way (somehow, like, seven am on your watch is one o'clock in the local languages, the first hour of the day; I could be remembering that wrong, but either way I remember it being really confusing during our language training). I forget who told me this, maybe because they were quoting someone who was quoting someone who was quoting someone else, but they said that in Africa –maybe just for PCVs or Americans or Westerners in Africa? I can't remember; it's beside the point– the days are interminably long, the weeks unbelievably short. I think this is two-thirds true: There are definitely days that last for weeks, but –conversely and just as often– there are hours that last for seconds; I don't think I've ever had a week that's lasted for more than a couple days (and at the first of each month, I find myself saying, I can't believe it's [insert name of month] already, even though I know I said the same thing last month and the month before and every month before that one and I'm even consciously aware, as I'm saying about this month, that I say it at the beginning of every month, and, yes, I said it this month, too).

Having been here for fourteen months now, having been in Ngora for a year as of later this month, I've gotten used to it, more or less, but it's still … weird, I guess. It's a time warp. There've been a lot of days when, for one reason or another or no reason at all, I've been out in the village or somewhere and we're not really doing anything or we're waiting for something to happen or something that was supposed to happen has happened and now we're waiting for the next thing and we're just sitting around, usually in the shade of a mango tree, talking when there's talking to be talked, not talking when there's not, and it seems like I can actually see Time passing, walking west down the road, following the sun, kicking up rusty dust with each footstep, and without my noticing, three hours have passed. Or, just as often, the opposite happens, when Time comes lazily walking out of the tall grass, half-hidden in the shimmer of heat waves until he comes closer, until he gets to where we're sitting and then he just sits down next to us in mango-tree-shade, maybe letting out a little sigh as he lowers himself to the ground, he's tired, he's been walking all day and it's so hot out, Time just needs to rest for a bit and this looks like as good a place as any, and then I'll look at my watch thinking that three hours escaped without any realisation on my part and I'll find that it's only been ten minutes. (This happens during rainy season, too, naturally, but I can only picture Time's languid, lethargic walk happening when it's really hot out; if it were raining, he'd be running towards the nearest covered place like everyone else here does –sit under cover when it's sunny, sit under cover when it's raining being the general wisdom around here; when I sit out in the sun when it's not too warm, like these days, 75 in the afternoon sometimes when it's not a raging monsoon, everyone tells me to sit in the shade, aren't you hot, isn't that sun too much, and they laugh when I say that it feels good to sit in the sun sometimes, especially for a Seattlite, and then they say you'll be our colour soon if you sit out there [out there being in the sun, as opposed to in there, which is, of course, in the shade, a foot or two from where I am, out there], which is possible, my freckles being more than capable of merging together like the pieces of the T-1000 in Terminator 2 [though they are less capable of becoming a killer humanoid robot … probably]; though I do take full advantage of the sit under cover when it's raining philosophy, because sometimes it just really works out in your favour, Example A [for Awesome] being the day after St Patrick's Day when I still had a half-litre bottle of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout left over and it was about ten in the morning and I was putting off going into work when, praise the God of the Irish, I heard that unmistakable pop! pop-pop! pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! of rain on the tin roofs and I couldn't go to work then, couldn't go out in that, so I sat and popped open my half-litre of ten am Guinness and watched the rain … abruptly stop after about two sips; but then I couldn't go into work then either, because I was drinking, and you ~~can't~~ aren't supposed to go to work when you're drinking, even if you're drinking Guinness the morning after St Patrick's Day, so it still worked out in my favour– so maybe the metaphor should be that three hours pass without my noticing when Time's running to get to the nearest corrugated tin sheet of an awning while ten minutes feels like three hours when Time's sitting in mango-tree-shade, but I don't know, and you're probably just skimming ahead, looking for the closed-parenthesis that's the end of this little digression. It's right here.)

To put it a little less (pretentiously and annoyingly) wordy, or to let a real writer (Roberto Bolaño in The Savage Detectives) put it differently: Lately I've been noticing that time can expand or contract at will, and also: it's as if time had fractured and were running in several directions at once. Exactly. That's exactly how time –or Time, since he's apparently working of his own volition– works here.

As for how time is thought of here:

The best –or at least my personal favourite– example of how time is thought of here is in the different ways that you can say you're doing something now (and this is definitely not unique to Uganda, these phrases, I mean; I first heard them / was really confused by them in South Africa; it is Africa Time, after all):

Now: This literally just means in the future. Seriously. Like, I'm coming there now really means I'm coming. At some point. Probably today. No guarantees though.
Just Now: This means in an hour or two, or maybe four.
Right Now: If something's going to happen right now then it's going to happen in, like, twenty or thirty minutes, or so.
Now-Now: If you're doing something now-now then you're doing it, well, right now (I mean, the American version of right now).

Going back to the Bolaño-well: their perception of time had suddenly diverged from ours. Right.

So, things'll happen when they happen, they just might not be happening yet, even if they're happening right now. And when now means later, people show up to things, more often than not, later. And the funny thing is that everyone knows that people don't come to things on time –don't keep time in Ugandan English– that things take way longer to get done than they could, that things don't happen when they should; everyone knows that Africa Time is a real thing and, yep, they even call it Africa Time. And if that sort of thing frustrates you, well, don't live in Africa. (I, despite or due to being somehow simultaneously Type A and Type B when it comes to keeping time –if I'm ready to go or want to go or if this [gosh-darn] taxi would actually just keep moving, even at two kph, instead of stopping every thirty metres [which is the bane of my travelling existence], whatever, I don't want to wait, at all, and I hate being late, at least in places where it matters, ie: not here; at the same time, if there's not really anywhere to go, or not any particular time to be anywhere, or nothing really happening, I can happily kill time for hours, like it's my job; which I guess means that I want to either be going or staying, just don't want to be waiting– simultaneously love and hate Africa Time, the love being when I can say I'm coming into work just now and go in two hours later, the hate being when, well, really only when the taxi keeps stopping every thirty metres or sits in the Kampala traffic for days and days, though I guess that really has nothing to do with Africa Time, just me being impatient, and so I guess, on the whole, I'm pretty alright with Africa Time, there are certainly times when I end up getting stuck some place where I'm just waiting for hours for something to happen and I don't have a book with me and I would rather be somewhere or anywhere else, but chances are pretty good that no matter where I am, about half the time I'm probably spacing out and thinking about things that are absolutely in no way related to whatever's going on around me, and so when I end up getting stuck some place where I'm just waiting for hours for something to happen and I don't have a book with me, I just crank the spacing out up to eleven.)

(Way to Kill Time #73: Writing Super Long and Pointless Blog Posts. But hey, #74 is Reading Super Long and Pointless Blog Posts, so there ya go, you're catching on.)

So, the reason I bring up Africa Time now-now:

A few weeks ago, on a Friday, my friend Emma –Emma being a man's name here, short for Emmanuel– asked me to come to church –or to 'go for prayers' as they say here– on Sunday. Sure, I said, and he said it starts at seven and I said that's fine, because I usually get up around five am so that I can go to bed around nine or nine-thirty since there's nothing to do after it gets dark, and he said I'll call you when I'm coming to pick you, and I said ok. Sunday morning: my phone rang at six-fifteen and Emma said I'm coming to pick you and I said ok and I got up at got ready, and then my phone rang again two hours later, eight-fifteen, and Emma said ok I'm on my way and I said ok and got up off of the couch where I'd laid down, semi-napping, after seven o'clock had rolled around and he still wasn't here, and then my phone rang an hour later, nine-fifteen, and Emma said I'm here, let's go, and I said ok and went outside and said good morning, Emma, and he said good morning and we started to go for prayers and I asked when do prayers start, Emma? and he said at nine, so we were already fifteen minutes late, which was better than the two hours and fifteen minutes late that I thought we were and I said ok and Emma said we'll go to my place first and I laughed and said ok and we went to his place and sat for a bit and then went to church at ten-fifteen, or four hours after Emma had first called me and said he was coming to pick me, and we were right on time, we showed up just as church was starting. (And then we left church three hours later – and it wasn't even quite over yet. What if we had been 'on time'?)

And that's the best summary of Africa Time yet.

Church was … well, it's kind of hard to say. The sparse brick building, tin roof and wooden rafters and packed dirt floor, was filled with probably a hundred people –not jammed full, taxi-style, but it was full, the women and children sitting on scarves and mats on the floor to the left as you entered, the minister (priest?) at the front, the men sitting at wooden desks and benches on to the right (and the middle being a bit of a mixture, a no-man's land, partially of overflow from either side, partially taken over by Sunday School kids in matching tunic/shorts outfits of tan patterned cloth with explosions of neon-pink fist-sized roses; a very good look overall); it wasn't quite as strict a division as that, though kind of it was: there were a few women in the seats and benches on the right side, a few men (like Emma) holding their kids, but, of course, no men sitting on the left side, on the dirt floor, natch. Anyway. It opened, church-slash-prayers, with, well, prayers, then a few songs and poems from the Sunday Schoolers in their matching neon-pink-rose-explosion outfits, then the guests or newcomers or whatever –ie: me, among a few others– introduced ourselves to the congregation (and obviously I got the biggest round of applause for my Ateso introduction), and then a skit from the rose-explosion kids, prayers again, then the sermon from a pastor –I guess, I'm assuming anyway, that in the Pentecostal, um, sect (?) there's the minster/priest who's the big man, in black robes and a white scarf, old and tall and distinguished-looking, who ran the whole deal, led the prayers, baptised the babies, etc, like an MC, and then there was the pastor or preacher or whatever, a guest speaker from Nyero (a town between here and Kumi), though I'm not sure if it's a different preacher every week, but so he gave the sermon while the minister/priest sat and, I swear, fell asleep at one point (because don't act like your eyes were closed because you were praying or concentrating so hard on the sermon, Father; I know that trick and I'm onto you)– and then more prayers, I think it was at this point that every man on the right side bowed his head though remained seated while every single woman on the left side was up on her knees, not resting back on her heels, but up with ninety-degree legs and hands clasped at her chest and heads bowed and eyes closed and the minister/priest led a prayer for fifteen or twenty seconds, everyone reciting aloud along with him and then the communal prayer ended and everyone just took up their own, still going on out loud –not a whispered, murmured prayer either, but a full-voiced one– praying for different things at different speeds but all quickly until it became just a buzz, a thousand of the giant thumb-sized bees that live here droning on at once, a hundred people calmly speaking in tongues at once (though I'm ninety-nine percent sure it wasn't tongues, just Ateso), the dissociation of the communally-recited minster/priest-led prayer into the buzz and hum of a thousand insects was like listening to the linguistic explosion at the Tower of Babel and it went on for what felt like a long time, babbling buzzing praying repenting confessing beseeching speaking in tongues whatever, the sound rising up to the rafters and the corrugated metal and bouncing back down as it broke apart, spilling out open windows and doorways into painfully bright sunlight, for two or three minutes, long enough anyway for me to think about how long it was going on for and then it kept going for another minute after that until it petered out, most people offering up their final syllables at the same time –was it planned, then? a recitation?– but maybe ten people still going, a hundred bees still droning on, having more to pray for or maybe just wanting to be holier-than-thou –no, that's cynical and unnecessary and probably untrue– and then it was seven people then three then one person left –'Just one more thing, Lord,' I imagined them saying– and then silence, just the hollow echo of prayers and insects off the metal roof, and then people brought gifts up to the front, like tithing, I guess –and the next time I go to church in the States, I'm totally dropping a whole pumpkin in the offering basket– and then another neon-pink-rose song, and then baptising babies and then more prayers and then Emma said if you're tired, we can go, and I said amen, brother, I was barely keeping my eyes open at that point, which is especially bad when you have at least two or three people staring at you at any given moment (and which made me happy that there were so many lengthy prayers / power-naps), and so that was my first Ugandan church experience and I'm kind of ok with the fact that it took a year before I went to church here.

After church was over, or after we left anyway, we went back to Emma's place. It's just off one of the main roads that leads from Ngora to the highway that runs from Kumi to Soroti, just turn off at the primary school there, the church is just past the school, all of this on the right as you're going from Ngora to Kapir, to the highway, north. Three huts in a surprisingly concealed little clearing –surprising because it's not as though it's surrounded by trees or anything, one mango tree, maybe, but mostly just tall grass, fields of millet, sorghum, cowpeas; you can't see the road, really, though it's only maybe a few hundred feet away; there are a couple banana trees, too, some eggplant, um, plants; and it was quiet too, a few kids one woman walked by to or from the borehole between Emma's and the school, but other than that the only sounds were the staticky radio, the heavy droning of one of the massive bees that was in the process of burrowing into one of the tree branches that held up the thatch roof of the awning we sat under in the shade, sipping sodas and eating biscuits as a post-prayers pre-lunch snack, and it was a beautiful beautiful day, sunny and bright and warm and breezy, and Emma's two-year-old daughter, Miriam, was an adorable adorable child, bright-eyed and brighter-smiled and dressed in her Sunday Best, a little red dress, white trim, something not unlike what Mom might've dressed Caitlin in as a two-year-old on Easter, and she talked non-stop, happily babbling mostly nonsense, and she called me mamai –uncle– sitting on my lap, falling asleep and making me want to fall asleep, too –and making me, sappily, look forward to having a two-year-old of my own someday to nap with– and playing with my hands my armhair my beard, talking the whole time, while Emma and I chatted slowly about whatever, and then we moved inside for lunch, chicken rice posho atap, and Miriam followed us in before Emma sent her back out, causing her to do the classic, universal sad-little-kid walk: drag your feet as slowly as possible, shoulders slumped forward and arms dangling –maybe swing them side-to-side a bit, loosely, for effect– like all of the bones in your upper body have suddenly ceased to exist, loll your head back and then drop your chin to your chest, preferably whining, 'But I don't waaaanna go...' as you shuffle away, and so we ate lunch, joined halfway through by Emma's brother-in-law and then, full, went back out, took the chairs back under the awning and sat in the shade, picking our teeth with toothpicks and then, when the wood became soft and the tips dull, with our fingernails, and we were actually joining, in the shade, Emma's mother and an older man and his son, and we sat there for a while, me stifling yawns, hoping they'd go unnoticed, Miriam drinking the rest of her uncle's purple soda from a blue plastic mug, calling it ecai –tea– the whole time, saying how hot it was, her eyes and smile widened when her grandmother took the mug and held it to Miriam's ear and she could hear the bubbles, the next best thing to listening to the ocean in a seashell as you'll find in landlocked rural Africa, and then Emma came back from wherever he'd said let me come back from and said Danieli, let's go, and I said ok though I didn't know where we were going but we walked up the path past the borehole to the grass field at the primary school where ten or twelve cows were grazing, tended by Okello, Emma's youngest brother (maybe ten or twelve years old, maybe twelve or fourteen years Emma's junior), and the transaction went down right there on the field: two bulls, massive, healthy-looking animals, one an ashy grey colour mottled with light brown marks and spots, the other solid coloured, that same light brown, both with nine-or-twelve-inch horns, the humps at the bases of their necks like fattened, rounded shark fins, the brown one stood next to me, its ribcage three or more times as wide as mine, its breath snuffling out of a wide wet brown nose as it tore up the already-short grass, and Emma would raise his hand to smack it, would should 'Eh!' and step towards it whenever he thought it was getting too close to me, he obviously wasn't reading my thoughts, didn't know that all I really wanted was for it to nuzzle its wide wet brown nose into my chest while I petted its head, rubbing the fur between its horns, and they negotiated the price –Emma and the older man, mostly, but also the son, and random passers-by who stopped to check on the sale, to see what was up– and a wad of bills was handed over, then, after more negotiating, a few more red 20,000 shilling notes, then more negotiation, we sat down on the grass, stood up again, Okello brought over a young black-white-brown calf, added to the sale and then the older man said to me, his one eyelid shut permanently, the eye missing or blind, making him look like he was winking at you, constantly trying to bring you in on a joke or a bit of hilarious mischief that was about to happen, he said to me you are also a member of this, and he laughed lightly, and said so what are your thoughts? and I said me? laughing, making sure he actually thought I knew anything about bulls or cows or selling or buying them, and he said yes, though I'm sure he knew I knew nothing about bulls or cows or selling or buying them, and I wanted to tell him you should pay a lot, these bulls have testicles as big as my forearm, they'll breed for ages, but instead I just laughed and confirmed my ignorance, and then, after a few more bills were handed over, the stack of shillings, the shilling stack, was counted and recounted and confirmed by one of the passers-by and confirmed –1.8 million for the two bulls and the calf– and hands were shook and then the older man went winking down the road, herding his new cows in front of him, bringing everyone in on the joke as he passed, and Emma pocketed the cash –I asked him later how often he makes a sale like that, thinking that 1.8mil is a cool load of money, he must be doing pretty well if he makes a sale like that every other month or so, but he said just once a year and I said ok and I thought but still, not bad– and we walked back to his place, Miriam running across the compound when we got there, barely slowing down as she planted her face in my thigh and threw her arms around my leg and I picked her up and we sat back down under the awning for a while longer, passing daylight, buzzing bees, stifling yawns, and then an hour or two later Emma said let's go and we got up to go and Miriam's face dropped, eyes wide, mouth open in shock, and and and, oh you could see it coming, she started bawling, couldn't believe I was leaving already and her sobbing made everyone else laugh and made me smile and then Emma took me home and I thanked him for the day, a really nice day, and I laid back down on the couch and took a two hour nap, and I woke up, it was night.

And back to Africa Time:

(Because do you see what happened there? We started off in one direction –Africa Time– and then we got a little distracted –right around St Paddy's Day– then got back on track, back off track, and now, several hours or days later, back on track. Just like being in Africa.)

Spending days like that –long warm afternoons spent sitting in the shade; long lazy conversations that meander with no real direction, that fall acceptably silent, that fall just into long pauses, really, before picking up where they'd left off ten quiet, peaceful minutes earlier, or before taking off in an entirely new direction apropos of nothing but the fact that it's a long lazy conversation on a long warm afternoon and it's understood that the directions the conversation takes don't have to be apropos of anything– makes me think of old men, the ones sitting in rocking chairs on front porches or folding chairs on sidewalks in front of bodegas or on the stairs of stoops of apartment buildings in the city, in summertime heat, early fall warmth, watching time and people pass, they wipe a palm on the thigh of their pants, their hand wet from the sweat of a bottle of beer or a lemonade, they talk when there's something to be said and don't talk where there are just things to think about silently, because sometimes there's just time for that, when you're that age, when you've done enough things and been enough places that now it's time to rest for a bit, to sit and watch other people doing and going while you just talk about it or don't.

Spending days like that makes me feel like I'm in old-man-training.

And, like seventy percent of the time, I'm totally ok with that. Because I don't think I'd really ever do that at home or if I were just travelling or whatever –just sit on the porch or wherever for literally seven hours, just sitting and watching and talking and thinking and passing time or being passed by it. Maybe we do that, but it's different, I think –there's always tv or sports or we get bored and go out to eat or whatever; we wouldn't just sit and do nothing, at least not without feeling a little guilty about it, like we're wasting the day. But that's what it is, isn't it? And is that inherently bad? Maybe it's an American or Western (maybe?) cultural thing: wasting time and its negative connotations. Sometimes when I spend an afternoon, a whole beautiful day, in old-man-training, I do feel guilty, frustrated: let's do something! But usually I'm ok with it. I'm outside. With people. No pressure. Watch. Watch everything, watch the grass, the trees, the clouds, the people, watch the cows go out to graze and watch the boys bring them back in, watch clothes being washed and watch them flap in the breeze on the line, watch people fetch water, pump the handle at the borehole, balance jerrycans on their heads, watch chickens and goats, the grandmother shelling g-nuts, smoke from cooking fires and charcoal stoves, watch football played with a ball made of plastic bags, watch kids knocking mangoes down from trees, watch bicycles and boda bodas, watch the sun move, cross the sky, dip, go down, watch the sky change colours, the clouds gather and threaten rain and blow away before it comes, watch the moon come up, the stars come out, because when am I going to watch these things again? how much longer do I have? because even when time expands and contracts and runs in different divergent directions, even when days last for weeks and hours for days, there's still only so much time, and then what?

Motherless Brooklyn

2011-09-26T00:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks to packages of books from the delightful and talented Sarah Tompkins, Jonathan Lethem is one of my new favorite authors -- Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, As She Climbed Across the Table: all definitely recommended.

So this quote made me smile: I think it sums up my wandering childhood -- read: childhood epitomised by the time I peaced out of the backyard in San Diego unnoticed, diaper-clad and cookie in hand, and meandered down to the busy four-way intersection at the corner where I was happily picked up by a random stranger who brought me home; thanks for giving me space to explore my freedom (to have potentially been the next Lindbergh baby), Mom and Dad; love you! -- which helps explain my subsequent life (or how I ended up here) in Uganda: my wandering adult(or at least fully grown man-child)hood.

Danny might have coolly walked out on his parents one day when he was seven or eight and joined a pickup game that lasted until he was fourteen.

And that's why Mom had a leash for me as a child. (If I ever come across a quote to sum up the time, not long after my diaper-clad expedition, when Dad caught me sitting on the kitchen counter using a butcher knife to scoop and eat sugar out of the jar, I'll be sure to post it. Anyway, point being: how am I still alive?)

Work

2011-09-16T08:59:00.000-07:00

So they usually say that after a year at site, you finally start to get busy. I haven't been at site for quite a full year yet – though I have been, and it's hard to believe, in Uganda for thirteen months now – and I'm still not quite as consistently busy as I want to be, but it feels good to have had some real work recently.

So, I mentioned before about training forty people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) to act as home-based counsellors for others with HIV/AIDS. After the whole fiasco with my organisation and the other local organisation that originally wanted me to do this project with them, after writing a lengthy grant proposal, after meeting with the HIV counsellors at the Counselling and Testing Centre at Freda Carr (the local hospital) and other community members and the LC5 Chairman (the highest government official in the district), after leaving site for ten days, and after scheduling and then having to reschedule the training – after all that, it finally happened.

Here's a little bit more of a background (from the Statement of Need in my grant proposal):

Ngora District was formed in early 2010 when it was separated from Kumi District. When the two districts split, Ngora was left with an estimated population of roughly 142,000. With this separation and the changes in leadership and government funding and programmes, the home-based HIV/AIDS counsellor project which had been well received in Kumi District was not brought over to Ngora. This left all counselling, testing, and antiretroviral therapy services to the CTS Centre at Freda Carr Hospital, near the district headquarters. There was no longer a system in place to get services and support to people in the outer reaches of the district.

Now, with only a few volunteer counsellors on staff at the CTS Centre, not only do many people have to travel ten or more kilometres for services, but they then have to wait a couple hours or more before they are able to spend a few brief moments with one of the counsellors. It should be noted that this should not reflect negatively on the staff at the CTS Centre who are committed and hard-working but, simply, a bit overwhelmed by the nearly 100 people who come for services each day the Centre is open. There are 2,504 HIV-positive individuals registered with the CTS Centre, 691 of who are on Antiretroviral Therapy (ART). However, there are many other individuals who have been tested through mobile outreaches or community testing days but are not registered with the CTS Centre. Using a lower estimate that has 6% of the total population living with HIV/AIDS, there are an estimated total of over 8,520 HIV-positive individuals in the district. There are, then, more than 6,000 PLWHA who are not accessing any services or counselling, not receiving any sort of adequate support, have not been well-educated on HIV/AIDS, and a number of them likely need to be started on ART. So the effects of all of these issues are felt by many individuals and families across the district. There is, then, an obvious need to increase the accessibility of services for PLWHA and a large, pre-existing client base. While it may not be within our power to expand testing sites and ART distribution points, one area we can build the capacity of the district is in the support of PLWHA, specifically with home-based counselling.

So, that's why we – the community, me – felt like this project would be a good idea, and why we felt like it could be a success. And here are the cool things about the rest how the training came to be and then how it went:

1: I had started trying to get my volunteer counsellors by going to Freda Carr on Mondays and Fridays, the days that people come to pick up their ARVs and get counselling, and giving a short little spiel about the project, then leaving a sign-up sheet for whoever was interested, planning on then, after a month (so that I'd hopefully give the spiel to everyone who comes for ARVs), doing a little interview or whatever to pick who I thought was really committed and would be good counsellors. When I went to do that for, maybe, the third time, I found out that the community members had already figured out who they wanted to be counsellors. They wanted this, they had people who they knew would be committed and would make good counsellors, and that made me happy. (And that after the whole original idea came from the community in the first place.)

2: I knew these people would know more about, or at least be way more – for obvious reasons – experienced with HIV/AIDS than I would, and so I went into the training planning on basically just running a discussion, bringing all of their knowledge and experiences together so that we could be standardized, so that they could all be using the same information when they were counselling people. And it worked perfectly. We covered about fifteen or so topics surrounding HIV/AIDS and counselling. They were more than happy to discuss, more than happy to share experiences and testimonies – to the point where I had to cut some discussions short in the interest of getting to all of the topics we wanted to get to – and they were all just as knowledgeable, maybe even more so, than I'd expected them to be.

3: At the beginning of the training, we went over the goals and objectives of the project: to increase availability and accessibility of quality counselling services, and so on. One of the objectives, the main one, actually, was that each of them would provide counselling to at least forty individuals within the first quarter of the project, or by the end of October. I had wavered on this number before the training, not wanting to ask too much of them, to tax their health and energy, especially since they were doing this voluntarily, and so when we were going over the objectives, I asked them, 'Does forty sound like a reasonable number? Or is that too many?' The question was translated for those who couldn't understand me – most of them can understand at least some English, but I always find myself speaking too fast, in too American of an accent, when I'm talking in front of a bunch of people, so some of them found it hard to understand me, or, as they say, they weren't 'picking' me – and immediately everyone started talking – sounding, to me, like, 'Rabble rabble rabble!' – and so I was worried that I'd set the bar too high. Martin translated their consensus back to me: of course we can reach forty people by the end of October, and not only that but we could even do more, why, just last week I talked to ten different people about their HIV tests, forty is no problem at all. I couldn't help breaking out in a big stupid grin.

4: People here – and I honestly don't think this is a reflection of people's attitudes or anything, but is a reflection of the foreign-aid-and-NGO-ification of everything in Africa – generally expect to receive some form of compensation for, well, a lot. Like coming to one of the sensitisations that my org puts on in the villages to teach people about family planning and reproductive health. People come – usually within their own village, not far – knowing that, at the very least, they'll get a soda. And it inexplicably extends to, like, conferences for NGO staff: a per diem allowance is expected; as in, I'm coming to learn new things that can either A: help people in my area, or B: help my organisation perform better, and, yes, I expect to be compensated for learning these things. Without going off on too much of a tangent... that's how it is, and there's really no getting around it. So I made it clear – in the few spiels I gave at the hospital, in the letter I wrote to the volunteers thanking them for being a part of the project before the training – that, while I would provide tea, lunch, and soda during the training, along with a small transportation refund – and I feel like this is understandable; I'm expecting them to come to me and to be there all day, so, ok, I'll pay for that – I would not be paying them any sort of monthly stipend for their work, I would not be buying them a soda each day they went to do counselling with people, I would not be buying them bicycles or t-shirts or messenger bags. It was a concern: I was worried people wouldn't want to do it for free – and maybe that makes me cynical, but I can at least say that it doesn't make me cynical about Ugandans or Africans or whatever, it just makes me cynical about, like I said, the foreign-aid-and-NGO-ification of everything in Africa – and I was told by the counsellor at Freda Carr that when they had a similar program, the one from when Ngora was a part of Kumi, the 'volunteer' counsellors were paid 50,000UGX per month (a number I laughed out loud at when he asked if I'd be paying my volunteers – no quotes – something like that). So, at the beginning of the training, right after going over the objectives, we went over their questions and concerns about the training and, natch, the issue of idiboro – literally a little something in Ateso – came up. And so I made it clear again: I really, really wish that I could pay you for this work, I wish that I could buy you bicycles to help you reach more people, all because I believe in you all and in the work you'll be doing, but, simply, the money isn't there, not only am I on a shoe-string budget here, but I'm actually over budget, and, I don't want to get too serious, but if you're here to get a monthly stipend or a bicycle or whatever then, well, you probably shouldn't be here. I said that last part haltingly, wanting to get the point across without myself coming across as a jerk. But, once it was translated, I was met by nods of agreement, or, if not agreement, then at least understanding, from all across the room. I was also met by, the rest of that day and the next two days of the training, engaged and active and – yes, it's true! – on time volunteers, all of them. This put another big stupid grin on my face.

And so, overall, success.

At the end, I told them how much I appreciated them agreeing to work with me, told them that the success of the whole thing was up to them, told them how much I believed in them, and how big of an impact they could make in the lives of the friends and neighbours. And then I blasted 'Eye of the Tiger' from a boombox and made them run up a huge flight of stairs, pumping their fists in the air.

Ok, just kidding. But only because we don't have any stairs here.

A few weeks ago, I was in Gulu, in the North, for Peace Camp. Peace Camp was a week-long pseudo-summer-camp started by a few PCVs from the north for teenagers, fifteen to nineteen years old (and one thirteen year old girl who lied her way into the camp, which is kind of awesome), who were affected by the war with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). It was a great thing to get to be a part of.

The LRA is the rebel group who terrorised northern and eastern Uganda for over twenty years (though now they've been pushed into the DRC). They abducted children and forced them to be soldiers or wives for the commanders, they forced them to kill their families, they raped them, they forced them to carry massively heavy supplies for days on end with no rest and no food. Those are the basics. The actual stories are worse.

I got to spend the week with eighty kids who were just awesome people, happy, assertive, intelligent, resilient. I helped to run the Life-Skills sessions of the camp, doing stuff on resisting peer pressure, but when I wasn't doing that, I got to hang out with the kids, play football, have a dance party, watch them perform skits and traditional folk songs and dances from their tribes, go to a ropes course where they all did a zip-line and were stoked about 'flying,' listen to them, watch them grow and develop – and I really believe a lot of them did – and impress me – like I knew they would – and just generally be a part of something that was, can continue to be, really good for the kids who were there and for their communities when they bring back everything they learned and accomplished.

Another reason I was looking forward to the camp was because kids from Teso were there, too. Along with all of the youth from the North, these kids were equally affected by the war, but haven't gotten the assistance and recognition that the Acholi, Lango, and other Northern tribes – though, really, mainly the Acholi – have.

We met with one of the local counterparts from Amuria at the weekend training we had a couple weeks before the actual camp, and he talked about how the fighting in the East has just literally never been documented. I read a book recently about the kids who were affected by the war. Near the beginning of the book, the author said, 'The South and West of Uganda are the tourist destinations; the North is a warzone.' There was no mention of the East, not only as being affected by the war, but as, like, existing. Butt kids there were forced to kill their families and become soldiers, they were raped and forced to become wives, they were orphaned and traumatised, just like the kids in the North. I almost feel like this sounds like I'm belittling the horrible experiences of the kids from the North. I'm not, obviously. It's just that there was never an Invisible Children for the kids from Teso; it's just that there aren't dozens of NGOs in Teso dedicated – regardless of their success or the way they go about fulfilling their missions – to helping these kids; it's just that, yeah, when people think of Uganda, they think of the gorillas and the amazing national parks in the South and West, and they think of the war in the North, and they don't think of the East. But, about five years ago, the LRA made it as far down as Soroti. There were tanks in the streets of the town 50km to the north of me. My counterpart has talked about driving around doing work in the villages and being constantly on the lookout for rebels. At one of the sub-county headquarters in my district, the walls of one of the buildings are covered in charcoal graffiti about the Arrow Boys, the – basically – civilian militia from Teso that fought against and, eventually, drove back the LRA. So, I'm really glad that kids from Teso got to participate in the camp.

Our man from Amuria also talked about how people in Teso often think that the LRA is the Acholi and the Acholi are the LRA, and having those kids come to the camp will help to break that misunderstanding. Some people were worried about the kids coming up to Gulu because of this belief, and hopefully, after the camp, some of that will change. One night at the camp, there was a forgiveness and reconciliation ceremony. The kids wrote down forgiveness messages – to the rebels, the government soldiers, whoever they felt like they needed to forgive – and burned them, symbolically releasing those things they've been carrying with them. After that, they had the kids from each of the four tribes – Acholi, Lango, Iteso, and Alur – forgive each other. There were a lot of tears and – seemingly – flashbacks, one girl fainted, it was all very intense for all of them, but we hope it was worth it.

We hope they'll bring that back to their communities, to the other youth affected by the war, to their families and neighbours and friends, and foster forgiveness and reconciliation in their towns and villages. And though we recognize that maybe that's a lot to ask of 15-19 year-olds, we hope that it really did mean something, something other than simply scratching at wounds that time had allowed to become scabs or scars until they bled again and then leaving them with no bandages to help the wounds re-heal after they left the camp. But I think these kids are resilient and brave enough to make it, regardless; I think they've proven that already. And a lot of them were already excited to go home, back to school or back to the village, wherever, and share with everyone there, start Peace Clubs with other youth, become leaders among their peers and communities. Awesome.

A couple other quick highlights from the camp:

Monica's goal: one of the days, we had some free time, and I was playing football with a group of the boys. Mostly boys, I should say. There were one or two girls on each team, and after twenty minutes or so, the game was mostly bogged down in the midfield, no goals yet, not really any real chances. Then one girl, Monica – a tall, confident, sassy (in a good, hilarious way) girl from my friend Sandi's school in Pader, east of Gulu – jogged onto the field, picked a team, and, about ten seconds later, ripped a shot from thirty yards out, a serious rocket, a low line-drive that the keeper had no chance of stopping, didn't even try to stop, a goal that – and this was the best part, really – none of the boys could be able to top, before or after, all week. (And, for the record, it was the best goal I can remember seeing in a game that I've actually been a part of. Seriously awesome.) We'll call that 'Breaking Gender Stereotypes,' or, maybe more accurately, 'Showing the Boys What's Up.'

The traditional dances: all of the tribes were great, it was great to see how excited they got about getting to perform their songs and dances in front of everyone, they were proud and enthusiastic and talented. But, at least for me, the Langi were especially impressive. Thirty kids (I think), spears, feathered headdresses, the girls in matching skirts, the boys with ash rubbed on their faces, two of them wailed away on drums while the others were chanting, jumping, moving both aggressively and gracefully, circling the drummers. Hard to describe, very cool to watch, very cool, also, just to see how pumped they were to be up there, doing their thing, representing their tribe, especially in front of one of their tribal leaders (because we had a leader from each of the tribes come and address the kids).

The, let's call it, solidarity: we had several deaf campers in two of the camper groups, with a couple of the local counterparts translating everything from English to sign and back. It was, first of all, cool to see them interacting with all of the other kids. There weren't any cliques that developed – which was actually true for everyone, and was really nice – and none of the separation between hearing and hearing-impaired that you might expect. The highlight, though, was during one of the group reflection sessions. A Ugandan woman from an NGO in Gulu was leading the session, and, at one point, she asked for a boy and a girl to come up and do a short skit. Two of the deaf kids immediately raised their hands, stood up to go up to the front, when the woman running the session stopped them, saying, 'No, no, we need someone who can talk.' (To be fair to her, I certainly don't think this was malicious or intentional. I think it just came out without her thinking about it.) We PCVs, sitting in the back of the room, immediately looked at each other, shaking our heads, disbelieving, but almost before it even registered, the kids started murmuring, shaking their heads, then calling out, 'No! They can talk! Let them do it!' The facilitator, embarrassed and realizing what she'd said, let them do it, while giant smiles broke out across all of our faces in the back of the room, goosebumps spreading across our arms. Just eighty really, really good kids in that room.

So that was Peace Camp. An awesome week, a great job by everyone who put it all together, a great job by everyone who was there. And, most of all, the kids who came – and those who couldn't come, but are no less amazing than the ones who could; one of the other PCVs who was there said that some kids in her town couldn't come, knew they couldn't, and were still almost unable to control their excitement for the ones who could – and were, are, just generally pretty amazing human beings: what is there to say?

(Oh, one last thing: the movie War Dance. You should all go rent it, Netflix it, do whatever crazy new technology there is now that I don't know about. It's about a group of primary school students from Pader, all, like our campers, affected by the war in one way or another or many, and they tell their stories while it also follows them practising and performing in a music and dance competition in Kampala. It's beautifully shot and, well, just watch it. You'll cry. And, though Pader isn't what I would call exactly close to Ngora – maybe 200-ish km away – it looks pretty similar, so you can, sort of, see what it looks like where I live.)

The Burial

2011-09-13T02:48:00.000-07:00

Last month, before I left for Peace Camp (I'll write about that and other work soon), Moses' – a friend from my organisation – father died. I went to the burial; I was glad to be able to go, out of support for a friend, out of interest in the cultural experience, because I'd never been to a burial, a funeral, before, ever, anywhere.

Moses' father was 80-something years old, he'd been sick for a few months by then, but it's still always sad for someone to lose a parent, and I felt a little guilty about wanting to go partially just out of curiosity about the ceremony itself. But, well. (Well? I don't know. It seems fair to me; maybe I'm just insensitive though.)

The burial was in Amuria, a district bordering the north of Soroti (which, remember? [just kidding, I don't really expect you to remember], is the district that borders Ngora to the north and is the district in which the Iteso kids who came to Peace Camp live, another reason I was glad to be able to go), and we piled into my organisation's Toyota Hi-Lux pickup – I always kind of enjoy pointing out that it's a Hi-Lux because all I knew of Hi-Lux-es before coming here was that the Taliban and the, um, rebels (is that what we call them? are they still rebels if they basically run the country?) in Somalia mount machine guns in the beds of theirs, a feature that, I've since learned, does not come standard – and I was sitting in the bed of the truck with, from my organisation, Martin – my 'twin,' remember? again?, the Opio to my Odongo, because we're the same age – Peter, Cuthbert, Vincent, Scovia, Mr Oloit – whose other name I somehow still don't know, though, at least, now I know the one name: after he'd been with my org for several months, my supervisor, randomly, asked me, one day while we were eating lunch under the mango tree and Oloit came and sat down, 'Danieli, you know his name?' and I said, 'Yeah... totally... he's been here for a long time now... ha...ha...' and then she asked what it was, she told me that was what people said when they don't really know, and she was totally right: embarrassing – and, not from my organisation, two old ladies who I'd never met before, and so, needless to say, it was crowded, nine adults (and a full-sized spare tire) in the bed of a pickup. We headed out, bouncing down the dirt road, I covered my head with a pair of someone's waterproof pants during a brief, pelting rain, we bounced along up to the main highway, everyone laughed at the wind wildly whipping my hair, we flew down the tarmac to Soroti Town, through town, then maybe twenty kilometres north of town, we turned right off the tarmac onto another rutted dirt road, this one at times angled at a nearly-forty-five degree angle, and Amuria looks not unlike Ngora though it's less flat, less totally planar, there are long rolling hills, there aren't any of my favourite massive rock formations, there's more space, more empty – read: not cultivated for farming – land, vast expanses of grass, and the grass is tall, taller than in Ngora, tall like in the North, able to hide rebel soldiers, as tall as me, and we hopped out of the back of the truck while Emma – our driver, or, as they say here (and as I love that they say here), our pilot – navigated a metre-deep trench, broken concrete pipe, current of dirty water that cut a swath across the road, everyone disparaging the construction team who'd put in the concrete pipe, 'Eh! These Ugandan engineers... Tsk!' – the disparagement of their fellow Ugandans, and their fellow Africans as a whole, is an entirely different subject that I could go off on but won't here; I feel like it happens a lot, and it bothers me, makes me uncomfortable; it feels like racism that was so engrained during colonialism that they now just take it for fact; I never know what to say when, for example, they say Africans aren't as good at science as Westerners, usually I just end up stammering, 'That's not... It's... No.' But, anyway – then we hopped back in, clambering, and soon after, after two and a half hours total, we were there, Moses' family's homestead, a collection of mud-and-thatch huts.

The ceremony had just begun when we got there. We got in the back of an orderly – more orderly than any I've ever been in in any non-Western country – single-file line, we moved past the coffin, a wooden box, nailed shut, covered in a royal-hued (standard though, not actually for royalty) purple cloth, a large floral arrangement sitting on top, it would've been sitting on his stomach were the coffin open, and though the coffin was closed, nailed shut, there was a small window over his face, his eyes were closed, his expression peaceful, his skin wrinkled and aged but somehow relaxed, you could see the gauzy material the rest of his body was wrapped in, and all I could think about was Mao Tse-tung, lying embalmed in Beijing forever, for (I think?) like forty years by the time we – Sarah and I; hi, Sarah! – saw him, by the time we made a similar silent, single-file procession past his coffin – his not nailed shut, not wooden, simply a large glass box mechanically raised up from the floor each day for the, um, viewings – all I could think about was Mao because he, that, was the only dead person, body, I'd seen before – in that state anyway; I'm not including those lovely folks at the University of Washington cadaver lab, as I mostly saw their guts and, most memorably, their feet, which still had all of the skin and nails and everything – and so I looked at his face, peaceful, wrinkled, and thought of Mao, all while constantly moving slowly by, then, hurriedly, as I moved away from the coffin toward our seats, I remembered to think of a few words of consolation for Moses, his family, his late father, I didn't want to only think of Mao, and then we sat down and the ceremony continued.

The crowd that had gathered, maybe a hundred-strong, was, if not sombre, then certainly subdued, respectful, and I'm lacking another good word for it, but this subdued atmosphere was really only noticeable to me when I thought of it in relation to every other gathering I've been to here, celebratory, educational, whatever, and not when I thought of it in relation to the typical – stereotypical? – Western funeral, or Middle Eastern funeral, or Indian funeral – all of which, of course, I've only read about, seen in movies – because there was no one clad in mournful black, no black-mesh-veiled widow weeping, no stoic son's arm being clutched by a despondent wife and mother, there was no fittingly atmospheric overcast sky, no cold drizzle or autumn leaves that, in a reflection of the occasion, would lose their last grip on the branch and float slowly down in a peaceful death to land on wet cemetery grass, and there was no gnashing of teeth, no rending of garments, no funeral pyre, no screaming out to God in anger and grief, and I realize that this may be a factor not of the cultural – though, I don't know, maybe it is; but I think back to the wails of grief I heard that one night, the night my former neighbour Peter told me that the other neighbours had lost an infant to malaria, and I think not – aspect, but of the fact that it was the burial of a man in the eighth decade of his life, who'd been ill for several months, who'd been a good, successful, respected man – I think he was a deacon in the local church – and I only saw one woman – wife? widow? – let out a single cry of sadness, one that racked her whole body and almost brought her to her knees as she passed by the nailed-shut, purple-clothed, windowed coffin shortly after we'd taken our seats, but even she, like many of the other women there, was dressed in the garish, synthetic colours of a gomes – pronounced gomez; the traditional fancy dress, conical shoulders and a wide sash-like belt tied with a square knot in the front around the waist – a few men were in suits, but even Moses, though his face was uncharacteristically long, wore just a grey polo shirt and khakis, everyone else dressed in whatever they'd wear to go about their normal day after the ceremony, they've done this all before, more than a couple times, I'm sure, and even the weather, blue sky, the sun warm and bright, was less than sombre, subdued only by a handful of heavy black rainclouds gathering in the distance. So: subdued. I mean that the dancing, the music blasted from speakers at an ear-splitting volume, the happy songs and ululations, the loud chatter and louder laughter, those things that typify every other gathering I've ever been to here were absent, but the two short speeches that made up the bulk of the ceremony were more lighthearted than not, seemingly anyway, judging by the speakers' tones of voice and the – albeit, again, subdued – laughter elicited by, presumably, charming anecdotes about Moses' father, and there were these two short speeches, neither longer than five or six minutes, they were followed by the reading of a few verses from the Bible, a hymn sung by the gathered crowd, and even this wasn't mournful-sounding, just respectful, subdued, and then the coffin was lifted, carried to the grave-site, we all followed behind, walked half a kilometre through tall grass under warm sunshine, and we, everyone, gathered around the grave, the coffin had already been lowered in when I walked up, there was another speech, shorter even than the first two, another hymn sung, and handfuls of rocky red dirt were scooped up, tossed down onto the coffin – nailed-shut, purple-clothed, windowed – the dirt and rocks clattered on the wooden box, sounding like the first drops of a heavy rain on a tin roof, and, maybe five minutes after walking up to the graveside, we turned around and walked back through tall grass under warm sunshine to the homestead, the ceremony was over, I asked Martin just to be sure – Is that really it? – and it was, they served lunch, we said goodbye to Moses, hugged, and we'd only been there for barely an hour, even the length of the ceremony, relative to typically hours-long gatherings, was subdued, and we left.

It was interesting. I was glad that I got to go.

And we went back down the angled, rutted dirt road, hopped back out with Emma navigated trench, broken concrete pipe, current of dirty water, and, this time, I was sitting on the edge of the truck-bed wall, the only place to hold onto was the wall, a hand gripping the metal immediately on either side of my butt, not much – barely any – leverage, we bounced along and I tried to keep my balance, my white-knuckle grip, tried to keep the legitimate concern off my face, they'd never let me ride in the back again if I fell out, mostly because I'd probably be dead, then we flew down the tarmac of the highway again, one of my hands fell asleep and I couldn't tell if I was still holding on or not, the rain clouds were gathering again though the sun was still shining brightly as it dipped westward, a couple kilometres off the highway, I could see a column of rain, grey, silvery shafts of water coming down, clearly delineated from where it wasn't raining, maybe one square kilometre getting poured on while the rest of, well, everywhere was still dry, and we picked up two more people, and their two kids, in Soroti Town, now thirteen people in the bed of the truck, and the woman sat down in the bed, her back pushing against my legs and sliding me back so that I was hanging at least eight inches out over the tarmac, at least I'd gotten a better hand-hold on the rail running along the back of the roof, but still, lorries flew by, a metre away from tearing me in half, Emma drove the same way he'd've driven without anyone in the bed, the tarmac whizzed by beneath me, I silently cursed the woman pushing on my legs, my knuckles were white, I pretended just to be hanging off the truck like Kevin Costner in Waterworld, the sun was dipping towards the horizon, the light was golden and warm, we bounced off the highway and down the dirt road toward Ngora, we made it back, I could finally let go, my hands hurt, but I'd never felt so personally responsible to – still – be alive as I did at that moment, and I was happy, maybe inappropriately so, but the feeling was amplified by the fact that I'd been to a funeral for the first time, by the fact that I'd just looked a corpse in the face, that I'd been a tenuous grip on the truck away from the pavement and the speeding lorries, that I'm twenty-six, that I'm healthy, that my family's healthy, that I'd looked a dead person in the face and thought only of Mao because that was all that I had to go on.

Speaking of..

2011-07-27T00:34:00.000-07:00

..ghosts, monsters, Africa, and 30 Rock: this quote from 30 Rock made me laugh and describes occasionally-eerie rural Uganda pretty accurately.

Africa's great. We have juju monsters, gum gum trees, and horsicorns, which is a unicorn with a horse's head.

All true. It's a magical, mystical place, this Africa.

Ghosts

2011-07-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

I was lying around my house for a few days this past weekend, sick and not feeling all that awesome. I can only watch so many episodes of 30 Rock -- so many being, approximately, twenty -- in a row, and so this is what came after that.

(Please ignore all the silly British spellings in this blog post. I was finally able to download a Microsoft Word substitute after my copy expired since I lost or never had the code to enter, and, being where I am, the spellcheck is set to British English, I can't figure out how to change the default settings, and so, typing blog posts on that, we end up with everything being auto-corrected to include a u after every other o and spell maneuver manoeuvre. Oh well. Maybe it will add a certain refinement to my normal inanities. Anyway.)

People here are, well, a lot of – let's not generalise; I am in the PC, after all – people here are fairly superstitious. There are witches and wizards (no joke, they call them wizards, which is awesome), witchdoctors – though I think we're calling them 'traditional healers' these days – who, for an often-extortionate price will 'cause' a woman's female rival to have a miscarriage or – all Haha, how quaint! thoughts aside – still have been known to sacrifice – no, let's say 'murder' instead; spade a spade and all that – children for who knows what reasons. But people, and I think it'd be fair to say the majority of people, at least to some extent, still – and I say 'still' as in 'it's a belief system as old as, maybe older than, depending on who you ask, Christianity that, despite the fact that the population in the area of the belief system was always relatively small, has still persisted, in some form, to 2011 (also, still, despite missionary work by Catholics, Protestants, Muslims that sought to rid people of such 'savage' ideas; though some of those missionaries were, undoubtedly, Irish, coming from a country where some people still believe in faeries and, more commonly, banshees)', not 'still' as in 'I can't believe they, those people, them, not us, still believe such things despite science!' while using an index finger on the bridge of my glasses to slide them back up my nose (because what do I know? I'm not a potion scientist. And, while I do feel confident enough in my in-born Western scepticism that I feel like getting cursed by a witchdoctor would just be a cool story, I'm still probably not going to try my luck.) – believe in the abilities of witches and wizards, fear the curses of witchdoctors, and would be terrified to find human faeces on their doorstep or a beheaded and defeathered hen outside their hut one morning (but who wouldn't be a little freaked out by that?), and believe in the effects of potions like dokiyo, which will make you fall so in love with the person who gave it to you that you weep uncontrollably until you agree to be with them.

Phew. Now that I've claused any sense out of those three sentences and got my don't-offend-anyone, don't-generalise-everyone bases covered (right? we're good? we're PC enough?), there is a point to all of this.

The point being: I believe.

If Fox Mulder had a picture of a witchdoctor instead of a UFO on that poster of his, I would be him.

Ok, I'm mostly kidding. The part of me that says I believe facetiously is walking around town, going to the market, pretending like Goal 2 – of the three main goals of the Peace Corps: number one being doing actual work, numbers two and three being about cultural exchange – is actually work, all in the bright hot crystalline equatorial daylight. The part of me that is not kidding is running a couple miles from town – fine, let's be honest: more like a kilometre and a half; I can't run that far, I'm not one of those volunteers – deep into the village at 5:30 on a cool misty pitch-black starless moonless morning with nothing but the three-foot-wide halo of light from my phone-torch between me and the witches and wizards and beheaded, defeathered hens and ancestral ghosts swirling in and out of the mist and the darkness. Aw, yeah: this is a ghost story. It is also completely true, and all happened in the span of, like, forty minutes, because, like I said, I can't run that far.

(Note: this story may make it seem like I'm afraid of the dark. That may or may not be entirely true. If it is true, though – which it might not be, remember? – then I blame Mom – hi, Mom! – for letting us watch Arachnophobia when I was, like, seven. I also blame the cable channel TBS for letting me watch The Exorcist when I was, like, twelve. No, TBS, I don't care if it was edited for television. Also, Paranormal Activity. Enough said. I'm not afraid of the dark anyway. Don't judge me.)

I got up at 5:04 the other morning – due to my affinity for never setting my alarm for x:15 or y:30 or some time like that – to go on a run. Since I've somehow developed the World's Smallest Bladder since being in country, I had to pee like a [cliché]. I pulled on shorts and a t-shirt and, tapping the up-arrow key on my phone to switch on the torch, headed out to the latrine, stepping outside into total darkness, clouds like a black velvet blanket – is that a thing? a velvet blanket? – blocking all of the stars and the sliver of a waxing moon, tendrils of swirling mist wrapping around through into above under the stunted beam of the torch, a fine Seattle-esque mist that floated down onto exposed skin to prick up goosebumps wherever it landed, and I shivered, like someone had just walked on my grave – or like I really had to go.

Cold water from the rainstorm during the night sprayed my feet and ankles as I hurried across the grass to the long, narrow latrine structure I share with the neighbours and a breeze slowly swung one of the doors shut with a groan like an old man who's tired of waiting to die and then with a creak like a Halloween CD of haunted house noises and then, the breeze gusting just a little harder, swirling the mist just a little more, with a final emphatic slam. I rounded the outer wall of the latrine area to go down to mine, Door No. 3, and half-leapt, half-stumbled backwards – or was I pushed? – in the World's Worst Defensive Manoeuvre as a calamitous death-rattle shattered the morning's quiet from behind Door No. 4, bony fists pounding the corrugated metal begging trying to force their way out to disappear into the mist and darkness, and just as suddenly as they started, the bony fists stopped, leaving a hole in the silence, until the silence returned, somehow thicker than it had been before, echoing with the cacophony though the sound had been sucked away by a cold wind.

I didn't move. I didn't move, I just stared at Door No. 4 and shivered again. Then Door No. 1, at my back, the door to my bathing area, the one that had just groaned creaked slammed shut, groaned back open against the breeze the breeze was blowing the other way the breeze should've pushed the door shut except that the door had already been closed what the what – and I thought all of these things, a hurried stream that ran across the front of my brain in half a second until I was launched out of my paralysis by a thunderous bony-fisted punch to the metal of Door No. 4 – did that..? I swear that dent in the metal wasn't there just a second ago – and leapt to the door of my latrine as the death-rattle pounded and I deftly unlocked the padlock and swung the door open swung myself inside swung the door shut in one quick motion and the heavy silence made heavier by the absence of sound returned.

I held the torch in my mouth as I – oh, thank God – 'watered' the seething mass of cockroaches I was sure was making the ground shimmer and slither twenty-five feet below me (like, have you seen the caves episode of Planet Earth?, with that one cave where there's a hundred-foot mountain of bat guano only you can't see it because it is literally covered in cockroaches?, like that), and the silence was broken again by the insistent buzzing of a fat bluebottle fly that made strafing flights across my face, attracted to the light in my mouth – easily, easily, easily the most disgusting thing that happens to me on a fairly regular basis – and I clamped down on the phone with my teeth and shook my head to get the fly away from my mouth and then caught the fly in the torchlight again as it buzzed lazily towards the corner then buzzed insistently as it found itself stuck in a spider web and then the buzzing reached panicked levels, echoing off the metal door, off the metal roof, echoing down into the brick-walled pit under my feet, as a spider the size of a small goat – exaggeration? Maybe. But, also... maybe not! – lowered itself down from the shadows of the roof, its long, hairy legs pin-wheeling in eager anticipation, and I watched as the spider reached its breakfast and twirled the fly in circles in a macabre ballroom dance and then, satisfied that its prey wouldn't escape, it ascended, slowly, silently, back up into the shadows – stopping only so that I could give it a high-five and remind it that that's why I allow it to live.

With the reverberations of the fly's last words slowly dying down and with my bladder emptied – which, being a Guinness World Record holder like it is, only takes about five seconds, fortunate on mornings like this – I slowly pushed open the latrine door with both hands, torch still getting slobbery in my mouth, just in case I had to shove someone something away and make my escape. But it was quiet. I could see that Doors No. 1 and 2 were shut. There was only the breeze and the mist that wrapped itself around me, somehow comforting despite its chill, as I stepped outside and pushed the door shut and put the padlock back into place and began to think, again, about how cold I'm going to be in the Great PNW in December and I felt my shoulders slump a bit and relax, there were no ghosts here, no angry spirits who died in the pit latrine and now want to get out, and I squeezed the little padlock closed, not realising that the small metallic click somehow both dampened by the mist and amplified into a gunshot by the cool wind was a cue, and I leapt sprinted stumbled almost swallowed or spit out my phone as, barely missing a heartbeat – or desperately, desperately missing the feeling of a heartbeat – after the click of the lock, bony fists beat a tympanic solo on Door No. 4, thunderous and metallic and angry and desperate and beseeching, and the wind found some small aperture to whistle and howl over, and I kicked cold water off blades of grass and swung my front door open swung myself inside swung the door shut in one quick motion and was back inside, less than three minutes after getting out of bed.

I took a moment, reminded – or tried to convince – myself that I am a man, and then pulled on socks and my running shoes and stepped back outside, the swirling mist curling around the beam of the torch like fingers beckoning me to come with them somewhere I knew I didn't want to go as I closed the lock on my door with a heavy click. I walked out onto the road leading away from town. Silence whirled as thickly as the mist. The only lights I could see were the four globe fixtures at the corners of the brick wall surrounding the other white family's compound, the yellowish light reflecting, refracting, bouncing off the mist until the globes were as large as full moons. I walked for a minute to warm my legs up, away from the full moon security lights, away from the sleeping town, and as the glow of the lights surrendered to blackness, I switched on the torch and started to run, unable to see anything but the three-foot circle of road lit up at my feet and the dim silhouettes of trees where that blackness gave way to the sky's blackness, unable to hear anything but my feet pounding the packed dirt, a quick scuff as I scraped over a bump that hadn't been lit well enough by the torch, the sound of my own too-heavy breathing and too-rapid heartbeat and, in the silence all around me, these quiet sounds gathered together like a wave, a white-noise crescendo, a Sonic Youth song, or a heavy rain on a tin roof and they filled my ears and made my eyes glaze over in daydreams and suddenly I wanted to run without the torch, I wanted to see or not see how dark it really was, and, feet pounding, heart thumping, I switched off the torch and there was nothing, it was black, totally, there was nothing except me, I was running on nothing, I was running past nothing, I was running nowhere, there was absolutely nothing but the faint uneven line across the division of land and sky, the division of darkness filled with all the things you can't see and darkness filled with nothing but the absence of light, and a gust of wind swept down the road towards me and turned the beads of sweat running down my temples and soaking into the chest of my shirt into droplets of ice water and teasing out goosebumps on my arms.

I switched the torch back on with an involuntary shudder, and my heart double beat its already-quick pace, I gasped in an extra breath – two figures were lit up right in front of me on the side of the road, two figures I hadn't seen, hadn't heard, hadn't sensed, two black shapes, barely more than ripples in the darkness, and I suddenly knew that if ghosts existed this is what they would look like – shapes that move the air without moving through it, shapes that you can stare at when you see them, stare at until you can't see them anymore, until you can see them again because they never left, did they? – they had no faces but I knew they had arms and they were close enough to reach out and grab me by the arm, close enough to rake claw-like fingernails down my back, they had no faces but I knew they had arms but they didn't move as I ran past, pretending not to have noticed them, they had no faces but I felt their eyes grab onto my shoulders as I ran past, yank at my arms, pull me by the wrist into the darkness filled with all of the things you can't see, I ran past, I heard the shuffle of feet behind me as I ran past, they were gone or I was, their eyes released their hold on me, they were gone or I couldn't see them anymore, I was alone again, I told myself that I was alone again.

I told myself that I was alone again. I kept running. I sped up. I left or tried to leave the two figures, the ghosts, behind me. The pounding of my feet grew louder. My breathing grew heavier. The faint jagged line of the division of trees and sky rose up ahead of me, grew higher until I had to look up to see it. I was running through the forest. I knew it from the daylight: the forest before the flat, empty, swampy plains that continued on for another ten or twelve kilometres to the lake. I kept running. I sped up. I was running through the forest and the pounding of my feet grew louder, it echoed off the tree trunks, sent out from where my feet hit the packed dirt into the wood and back, amplified once and again and a hundred times more off of a hundred tree trunks until it wasn't the pounding of my feet, not anymore, it was a tribal drum, a hundred tribal drums, carved out of the tree trunks, thundering the start of war, thundering to call down rain or fire. I kept running. I sped up. My breathing grew heavier and the breaths escaping my lungs twisted through the branches, wound back to my ears on the mist, swirled and crescendoed and echoed until they weren't breaths, they were whispers, they were words, I couldn't understand them but I knew what they were, the murmurs of a witchdoctor in the forest, off somewhere reciting incantations, sim sala bim on his tongue – and that's not my line, I know, but I like it – sending curses on the cool breeze, bringing my goosebumps back, whispering words that I couldn't understand, words that became louder than the drums, and war and rain and fire and curses and incantations swallowed everything else and then, one more step forward, went silent. I was out of the forest. I kept running.

The drums stopped crying for war and the curses evaporated into the mist and it was suddenly flat and empty. I couldn't see it, but I knew it was completely empty. I knew I could run for miles in any direction without hitting a hill, without hitting anything – unless I kept running straight, in which case I'd end up in a lake, but still.

The silence after the drums and the whispers was the same silence that had settled in after bony fists had stopped pounding on the latrine door. It was heavy. It swallowed up the pounding of my feet and the breaths that left my lungs. There was nothing anymore except the halo of light in front of me and I ran towards the halo of light and sped up but never reached it, but I'm easily amused so it was fun to play that game for a second and my mind went off somewhere or nowhere and there was nothing except running to catch the halo of light. At this point, on this morning, in this darkness and mist and chill, I should have known that nothing would become something and suddenly. My mind was brought back from nowhere in an instant, the feet-pounding breath-escaping sounds that had been dampened came roaring back on the mournful scream of a child, the mournful screams of children, at least a dozen of them, a dozen howls, lonely and sad and just feet away from me on either side of the road, they wailed, banshees, their cries so loud and long and mournful that I could see them, I convinced myself I could see them, their mouths open, sucking in the blackness and wailing it back out, mouths open so wide their jaws unhinged as they howled as they stood half hidden in the stalks of maize and millet and watched me and reached out to me and wailed at me, to me, crying to me, long skinny bodies between tall stalks, mouths open, eyes clear and full of confusion and sadness and an anger that they felt but couldn't identify because they could only cry out, long piercing notes, howling, wailing, drowning out the sounds of my running, clear eyes and unhinged jaws, I saw all of these things like in broad daylight or at least like in the trailer for Children of the Corn, the children were wailing, my feet were pounding, the children were bleating their cries into the darkness, they were bleating, bleating – wait. Bleating?

They weren't children.

They were goats.

I stopped running. It was time to turn around.

I started running back towards town. I ran back past the mournful wails of the children of the corn. I ran past the thundering war drums and the whispered incantations. I ran past where the two figures had been standing at the side of the road, the ripples in the darkness, the faceless shapes with clawing eyes. I ran and formulated this blog post in my head, telling myself ghost stories until I believed them. I kept running. I sped up. I heard footsteps. I kept running. I looked behind me and there was a flash of light. Someone had switched on a torch, just like mine, then switched it off, like they'd seen me see them. But I'd seen them. I knew. They were going to follow me, they'd be faster than me, they'd run me down, I sped up, I looked over my shoulder, the torch flicked on and then off again, closer. I kept running. The torch flicked on, off, right behind me. I kept running. I looked over my shoulder. Nothing. I ran. I looked over my shoulder. Nothing. They'd given up – because I am the fastest man alive!

I kept running. My feet were still pounding on the road. I kept running, pounding, and then the earth shook, it rumbled and swallowed my pounding feet and then I was bathed in two beams of yellow light, they swallowed my torch, I was bathed in yellow light and blinded by it and I kept running, blindly. Earlier, I'd switched off the torch and ran blindly in the dark, now I was running blindly in the light. A lorry engine roared to life with the lights just behind me to my left – why was there a lorry in the middle of nowhere? in the middle of the village? just sitting in the dark? – and I knew. They were coming for me. They knew they couldn't run me down, I was too fast, faster than them, but they were coming for me, they weren't giving up yet, they had a lorry now. It swung out into the road behind me, I was running just beyond the furthest reach of the headlights, but it still made the ground rumble, the engine roared, they'd be on top of me, over top of me, in seconds, I sped up, my feet pounded the ground, the lights brushed my back, I sped up, I was sprinting now, and my foot scuffed over a rock and I pitched forward, stumbling, I stayed on my feet but I was out of control, I wouldn't stay up for long, I was bent forward and my arms windmilled at my sides, the torchlight shining erratically on the ground then the trees then the sky then the ditch then the trees then the sky and the lorry pulled closer, I found my balance and kept running, I stayed at the furthest edge of the headlights, I could feel the yellow light grabbing at my heels and my back, it was trying to swallow me, it wanted to blind me, they wanted to crush me in the rumbling earth, I ran, I could see the faint line of the horizon, the faint line separating this darkness full of everything from that darkness full of nothing, and the line took the shape of buildings, squat squared angles, and I knew I was almost there, I knew the turn for my house was coming up and I pounded the road, I ran, I sped up, the lorry sped up, the earth rumbled, the headlights burned my back, the yellow light swallowed my torch, the rumbling of the earth swallowed my footsteps, the squared angles of town grew closer, my turn was closer now, I ran, I sped up, I outran the yellow light, the heat, I outran the rumbling earth, I cut to the right and leapt over the ditch and was on my own road, and the lorry roared by, the yellow light didn't swallow my torch, they couldn't run me down, I was too fast, I was faster than them on foot, I was faster than them in a lorry, but my back was still hot from the headlights, my feet were still swallowed in the rumbling earth so I kept running, I wasn't home yet, but I knew they wouldn't catch me now, they never could, they knew it, they kept driving, farther, the rumbling died off, the yellow light of the headlights was replaced by yellow full moon security lights and fingers of mist beckoned me and this time I followed, I kicked cold water off of blades of grass and I swung my front door open swung myself inside swung the door shut in one quick motion and I was back inside, I was breathing heavily, my feet were still pounding even though I wasn't moving, I was back home, I'd outrun them all, they knew they would never be able to catch me, I was home, and I believed.

So, yeah. No beheaded, defeathered hens, and I've still never met a witch or a wizard or a witchdoctor, but I (mostly-facetiously) believe.

(The morals of the story – 1: Being chased by ghosts and children of the corn and demon lorries makes running way more fun. 2: I still have no idea what was pounding on the latrine door or who was running behind me with the torch. 3: Ok, fine, I do. It was a couple of those giant beetles battering themselves against the door, and the torch was a few fireflies that happened to light up in order so they kept getting closer. Don't you wish you didn't know, though?)

Home and Garden Dan-nel

2011-06-18T04:43:00.000-07:00

See what I did there?

Now see what I'm doing here.

This is my house, freshly painted, by me, a couple weeks ago. The first two are my living room / kitchen. The papyrus mat on the left wall is covering up a big metal door that went into the other half of the building which is either someone else' house or an office of a primary school -- I've heard both and don't know which one is true. But the metal doors were ugly to look at and a little too prison-y feeling, so the papyrus looks a little nicer. The map of Africa is from a 1950 National Geographic which is awesome but also makes me a little sad that I won't be able to go to places like Upper Volta and Bechuanaland. Then the third picture is my bedroom, again covering up a prison-style metal door. Please ignore all the unfolded laundry. Some of it is clean, some isn't, but either way I usually give it a smell-test before determining if something's ok to wear for a third time between washings. Then there's my bike and the blue color that I painted the window-walls in both of the rooms. And then there's the pictures of some of those pretty faces I left in the States. It's nice to have everything finally done, especially since it took six months to get all of this finished.

And this is my garden. It's a little bit hard to tell the mound of dirt from the rest of the dirt, but it's there. If you look at it from the top down, the whole in the middle -- there's no dirt in the middle of those sticks; that's where the compost goes -- and the little walkway in front make a keyhole shape, hence the name. Next time, I'll do a little better on the construction of the compost pit in the middle. The sticks are longer than they need to be and come together too much at the top, but, other than that, it's looking pretty good. I just planted a week ago, last Saturday, so not a whole lot is coming up yet, but the second picture is the two little cucumber plants that have sprouted nicely. There are also about six or seven beanstalks coming up so far, but for the lettuce and carrots that I planted, I'm having a hard time telling, right now, what are vegetables and what are weeds, so we'll see. The thorns that I put around it, I didn't get those out there until four days after I'd planted the seeds, and so I'm hoping the chickens didn't come and nom on all of my seeds. I also tried to follow the planting instructions on the seed packets, but I didn't know what things like 'sow thinly' meant, so I ended up going with the 'put a bunch of seeds everywhere and hope things grow' approach. Our rain has been less than consistent lately, too, so there are days where the entire garden is drenched and days where, at least on the surface, the soil is totally dry and cracked and rock-hard. So, green thumbs crossed. The last picture is part of the rest of The Nursery, what my org calls the field. All of that used to be long, pretty grass to lie in, and now, unfortunately, it's a buncha dirt. But I'm hoping that I can help plant there next planting season and we can try to do some biointensive techniques that I've been reading about in a manual I got from the Peace Corps office. But, in the distance there, is the big rock that marks the beginning of town, the one that I was on top of the last time I posted the pictures of town. So that's all that.

I've gotten some pretty good reactions towards my garden from people in town, too, which has been fun. A couple secondary school boys who'd come to help me cut the branches for the middle came back a few days later. I was just finishing up and getting ready to plant the next day, and they came up and said, Daniel! What is this you have made? I told them it was a garden. Sure?, one of them said, in the traditional high-pitched Ugandan-English exclamation of disbelief. Pretty sure, yeah, I said, and explained how it was supposed to work. Eh, one of them said, shaking his head in wonder, I have never seen such technology before in my life! Technology isn't quite the word I'd use to describe a pile of dirt and some sticks, but I laughed. It made me feel like I was building an alien spacecraft out in the field.

When I went into work a couple days after finishing, my supervisor said, Danieli, what is that you have made in the nursery? I told her that it was my garden. Ah, she said. We thought it was a trap. I laughed, again. Not quite.

And, last time I wrote about the garden, I mentioned the boy who lives next door to The Nursery, who comes over and chats with me whenever I'm out there, and when I say chats with me, I mean that he speaks in really fast Ateso, 99% of which I can't understand, and so I just talk to him in English about whatever. Every once in a while, I'll be able to pick one or two words and get the gist of what he's saying and formulate some sort of coherent answer. So, he came over when I was getting ready to plant. I greeted him, Yoga noi!, literally saying hello very much and asked how he was doing, Biaibo ijo? He said he was fine. Biabibo esomero?, I asked. He said school was fine. And then he said, Ateso ateso! Ateso ateso ateso ateso. Ateso? Ateso ateso. And I said, Oh, I know, right? I can't believe it, either. He laughed, like he always does when I talk to him in English, and said, Ateso, ateso ateso. Ateso ateso ateso etogo ateso?, and he made a motion to go down the walkway of the garden and crouch through, into the middle part. He was asking if it was a house. I laughed, again. Ejai etogo kon?, I said, asking him if it was his house. He said it wasn't. Ikoto ijo etogo?, I said, asking if he wanted it to be his house. He said he didn't. Aso... I said, disappointed -- Well... And then I explained that there were going to be carrots, cabbage -- because I don't know if there's a word for lettuce -- and beans and cucumbers. He seemed disappointed. Maybe I should've just told him that it was a house.

(And, speaking of cobbling together sentences in Ateso, one short, last sidestory: There's a restaurant in town that I've been going to fairly often in the last couple months. All they serve is posho -- a cakey sort of thing made of maize flour and water -- and beans, but it's a ridiculous amount of food for 1000/=, and, since that's all they ever serve, I can go in there and just say, Eong da inyamat. This always makes me happy because that literally translates as Me also food. It seems like the most appropriate way to ask for a two pound bowl of food.)

Sunset Bike Rides

2011-06-14T08:54:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I really love it when there're only four colors here that are visible as far off into the distance as I can see and they're each clearly demarcated from the others, they each have their place, their thing they're made of, and they don't mix. Red dirt road, pile of red bricks; green grass, green bushes, green trees; blue sky, painfully blue; white clouds, puffy and scattered and then gathering. But then something else will come along and it won't care about the four colors and the demarcation and the not mixing. Sometimes it's yellow jerrycans balanced on someone's head, sometimes it's a couple kids in fluorescent pink school uniforms, and sometimes it's even better than that and it's a woman in a wrap skirt that's such a garish neon orange that it's refusing the onset of night and competing not with the four colors of the daytime but with the thousand shades of a fading sunset that seems to be sucking the color from everywhere else and combining or rearranging or remixing it all back together and then flinging it across the western sky so that there's no color anywhere except where the sun wants there to be, because it's egotistical and jealous and it wants you not just to look, but to stare, it's telling you, Look at me, I'm a sunset, and everything else is soaked in gathering darkness, a dull purple-gray, and there's only her in her wrap skirt, one woman who's refusing to be covered by darkness and refusing to let the sun have all the color.

I saw her a few nights ago when I was riding my bike while the sun went down. This has become one of my favorite things to do since I got a bike a few months ago. It's cool out and beautiful and sometimes it's fun to race the rain home and all the bugs I ingest when they fly into my mouth or get stuck under my eyelids -- I always try to remember to take out my contacts and wear my glasses instead but I always forget -- or burrow into my ears are really good sources of protein and picking them out of my hair keeps me occupied for a good thirty minutes after I get home.

Everything else had given its color to the sun, which spread orange and purple and pink and soft golden yellow across dark black rainclouds with absolutely no regard to the daytime splits between red, green, blue, and white. So the sunset was colorful to an obscene degree, the sun was angry, out to prove a point, and everything else was simply darkening, shaded over, dusk. And then she was there and it took me a few seconds to figure out what it was, this glowing bit of orange in the middle of a field, anything but shaded over, lighting the area around her rather than simply growing dark, she was bent over, hinged at the waist, digging -- gardening -- in the small field near her huts and that skirt, that neon orange, was her challenge to the setting sun because she still had work to do and as I pedaled past it seemed like she could have kept digging all night if she wanted to, lighting her fields with that bit of sunset wrapped around her waist.

So the sun eventually gave up, having proved its point for the day or having realized it would never get the color from that woman's skirt, and all that was left were broad swathes of gold and silver across black clouds, all off to my right as I rode south back towards town. But once the sun is down, here, it is dark almost immediately and when there's no moon I have to get off my bike and walk because I can't see the ruts and potholes and puddles in the road anymore and, with no shocks and a hard plastic seat, hitting any of those things at any speed is less than fun. Darkening, shaded over, turned to dark, pitch, and cloud cover blocked the unbelievable number of stars you can see here and the shimmering line of the Milky Way, and, as I walked, I was left with three sources of light.

The flat, solid layer of clouds overhead was pulled and bunched and piled up in the distance, south and west, and there was the lightning, you knew it was coming, just bursts of illumination inside the clouds. And then there were fireflies, more than I think I've ever seen, flickering on and off, no fewer than a hundred lit up in front of me at any one time and they'd strobe their way over the fields and they'd blink their way across the road and, once, and then two, three times, one flew right past the side of my face, leaving a comet trail of yellow light lingering in my peripheral vision. And then there was another light ahead of me, small and round and indistinguishable, at first, from the snowflakes-under-a-streetlamp-at-night of the fireflies, until I realized it was constant and growing, quickly, the headlight of an oncoming boda, and it got larger and brighter and closer until it swallowed everything else, the lightning and the fireflies and the darkness and me, until the whole world as I could see it was dusty yellow light, just for a second, and then the boda was past and everything was darker than before and shapeless until the light from the fireflies poked through and I could make out shapes again, or maybe not shapes but just variations of dark, and could be sure I was still on the road, not walking through a field, like the time I didn't realize I was in someone's cemetery until I tripped on a headstone, and when I got back home and the power was out, three or four fireflies came inside with me, the only time I've ever liked having bugs in the house, and so, for a little while, I left the candles unlit.

Chronic City Redux

2011-06-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

One more from that book that, I think, gets at the heart of this here web-log.

These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. Yet I go around forming sentences.

I think that about sums what I do on here.

The Question Box

2011-06-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

One of the first things I did with my Life-Skills Club was introduce a Question Box, where they could anonymously drop questions about anything they were curious about, and then we'd go over them together as a group every few weeks or so. Yesterday, I went and picked up the box. Tomorrow, we're going to answer as many of the questions as we can.

These are their questions, as they wrote them. They're hard, honest, funny, and sad.

Questions about periods and pregnancy:

'Is it true that when a girl plays sex when she had eight days after her periods that she will not get pregnant.'
'Is it true that when a girl of 13 years plays sex and she had never had her period can she become pregnant?'
'Is it true that if a girl who has recived her periods sleeps with a boy will she get ~~prig~~ pregnant?'
'Habiba was my girl lover in P7. She loved me so much and one day, I asked for ayame [literally: "to eat"; figuratively: a euphemism for sex] and she axcepted and we continued playing with out a condom. She didn't get prignant. WHY? and she had her periods.'
'I prignated a girl but she told me that she wanted to abort and yet for me I don't want to kill because it's my own blood and yet I don't want my ~~own~~ people to know about it and making the situation worse she wants to come home b'se I have told her not to abort. What should I do to be comfortable in mine?'

Questions about HIV/AIDS:

'I live with HIV/AIDS but I have my firendboy He want play sex with me I told that I have HIV/AIDS - what will I do?'
'Is it true that if a boy with HIV positive have sex with a girl who is in HIV negative if we use condoms will I get aids'
'I am HIV positive, I have a girl who is HIV negative; I have tried to tell her that I am positive but she says she will die with me. I love her so much but I don't want to kill her with the virus and I don't want to lose her as well. What do I do? help me.'
'Why is it that most people who are HIV+ have gonorrhea'
'AIDS kills and has no cure. Why is it not advicable to say that it kills and has no cure and yet in actual scence it kills [huh?]'

"Other" questions:

'Why do most americans like decorating themselves with tatoo? What is the secreat behind it?'
'~~I hear~~ Imagine of america. a country which is rich and the people there are rich. What advice would you give me in order for me to reach to america on my own'
'How does cancer transmit from one individual to another'
'people tell us that you are good in muscle art [???], is it true? some of us like it.'
'What are rounds in sex? Pliz help me out.' [I have no idea.]
'AT the end of this club you going to give us some thing like books?' [Nope.]
'I like acting so much and I want to be an actress. I have been trying but there is no surport. Please may you help me to exprese my talent.'
'we request you to sing for us one song next wednesday because we know you white people have soft voices and are good in singing' [This is not a Request Box. So, no.]

Questions about delaying sex:

'I have aboy friend who demands sex from me whenever I meet with him, what Imy going to do should I leave the guy or no!'
'I have aboy friend and whenever I meet with him he wants to have sex and he has given me dokiyo [a "charm" or sort of potion that when you give it to some one and they eat or drink it -- I'm not exactly sure which -- it makes them fall undeniably in love with you to the point where they are weeping over it, hence the name, dokiyo meaning tears -- all this according to my counterpart] what can I do?'
'Why should we abstain yet we can die any time and miss out good things like bearing children.'
'If I am not rede to play sex with aboy and the boy force me what will I do?' [Please let this be hypothetical...]

And one question that was shocking and sad and that I don't know what to do about (except call Peace Corps in the morning to find out what I can do):

'I live with boys who tatche me the whole body and whenever I recive my periods I tell one that ~~I have~~ I have recived my periods so live me alone he told me that that is what I want if you test [?] you will live schooling ~~what can~~ and they nomaly ask for sex what can I do?'

These are my kids. You'd never know the things they're going through and wondering about just from looking at them or messing around. They're awesome. And so I hope I can find the right answers.

Chronic City

2011-06-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

To make up for the last post which might have taken you until now to finish reading, here's something to take up thirty seconds instead.

In the delicious seediness of the taxi I felt I'd passed tests, survived fjords, ghettos, tigers.

Because sometimes that's what transportation here is like.

(And massive thanks to the hilarious and charming Sarah Tompkins, who sent that book -- in a padded envelope that made it here in a record two weeks -- along with the fantastic new Fleet Foxes album and who most certainly did not tell me that she deserved this shout out for her efforts.)

So Many Things

2011-06-01T05:35:00.000-07:00

The problem here is that the internet doesn't seem to care how long it's been since I've done my Doogie Houser on this blog. At home, my internet has been painfully slow and erratic at best and non-existent the rest of the time.

But now we've got rioting and another trip to the borehole and a lesson on how to jump a car in the village with no jumper cables and Filipino soap operas and a forest that was impenetrable until we arrived and more. So, here we go.

(Sidenote, before you start reading: I wrote all of this over the course of about two weeks. So, just be warned that this one is long. I really should just start writing shorter ones more frequently, but I haven't gotten into that yet -- maybe I just want to be sure that you're really committed to this blog. It's like a test of how much you really want to know what I'm up to.)

A little while ago, I said that these things didn't happen after the election: rioting, unrest, violent government crackdowns, basically all of that exciting stuff that was happening pretty much everywhere else in the world. What I forgot to say was this: yet. As in rioting and unrest didn't happen, yet. Because between then and now, well, that's exactly what happened.

Around the beginning of April, about a month before Museveni's inauguration ceremony, people were growing increasingly unhappy with the cost of fuel and food and all of that stuff that constitutes the "cost of living." So, the opposition leaders -- the number two candidate, three-time runner-up in the elections, Kizza Besigye, and others -- organized a Walk to Work campaign. They were going to leave their houses in the morning and walk to their offices (where they would do whatever opposition politicians do once they've lost another election), most likely joined by their supporters along the way. It was supposed to show, I don't know, solidarity or whatever with the people. It was all supposed to be peaceful, could have gone on relatively quietly, except that, then, Museveni decided not to let it. Besigye and a few other leaders were arrested less than an hour into their walks. I forget what the grounds for the arrests were, but they were, well, there weren't any, I guess, really, but the arrests were internationally denounced, and everyone was released the next day, vowing to do it all over again.

I was in Kampala at the time, enjoying a dentist appointment and a (positive) test for schistosomiasis, and I left on the day of the second scheduled walk. Despite the arrests, everything was relatively calm and there were no worries about getting home or getting caught in anything. So I was on the bus, headed out east, and we'd made it out of the city proper into the suburb ("suburb" as in just outside the city, not as in "Issaquah, Washington" and "cul-de-sacs" and "parks") of Mukono. The bus slowed down, and I looked up from my book to see that we were surrounded by riot police -- black helmets, black flak jackets, black canisters of tear gas, black automatic rifles -- running alongside the bus. Curious, I stuck my head out the window, naturally, as one does when they may be driving into a riot, and saw that our bus was at the front of a long, slow-moving traffic jam while the riot police and green-uniformed, red-helmeted military police cleared makeshift roadblocks of bricks and logs and boulders and two-by-fours with nails sticking out of them from the road in front of us, and then I saw the crowds along the side of the road start to disperse. Quickly. People starting running and pushing and I watched one man try to get into a tiny, glass-enclosed butcher stand and I watched the butcher refuse to let him in until the guy shoved his way in and then was immediately shoved back out. And then I saw the hazy gray cloud of tear gas they were all running from and I pulled my head back into the bus and slammed the window shut as we drove through it. Then I looked out the windows on the other side of the bus to see, driving along next to us, a massive armoured personnel carrier, with a soldier standing out the of top, manning the giant machine guns and what I'm going to go ahead and call rocket launchers. And the whole time, I was just bummed that I didn't have my camera. But as we passed the tear gas, we hit the end of the road blocks and were off, and I was home a few hours later, where there definitely was not any rioting.

Things continued for a while, just like that: walk-arrest-release-repeat. Then it all exploded, turning into walk-arrest-riot-don't release-riot-release-repeat. There was tear gas, rubber bullets, truncheons, riot police, and then there were live rounds and people were killed and people rioted more or harder and tires and pallets of wood were piled in the middle of the streets and burnt and hundreds were arrested and Museveni said he thought he'd be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize some day, for some reason and Besigye had to be flown to a hospital in Kenya after he was pepper-sprayed at close range and was temporarily blind and this led to a rumour that he had died which led to a whole new explosion of rioting. Exciting!

But, so, then Besigye called, from his hospital bed in Kenya, for an end to the rioting, and people kind of stopped talking about it and Peace Corps stopped putting us on Standfast for eighteen hours every week and it all sort of just... stopped. I guess.

To be honest, I kind of have no idea what's going on now. Oh, but I did hear that Besigye did come back from Kenya, on the day of Museveni's inauguration, and there were thousands of people there to meet him at the airport, thousands more than were at the inauguration, and, I heard, they pushed his car from the airport in Entebbe all the way to Kampala and, I heard, it took eight hours to cover the thirty-some kilometres, but no rioting or anything. But those were just random facts from random people, so who knows? Not me, anyway, I don't really get a whole lot of news out here and haven't been able to be on the internet much lately and so I generally have no idea what's happening in the world outside of little Ngora District, where life was utterly unchanged by the whole thing.

Oh, but I did hear that the world is supposed to end in, as I'm writing this, about ten minutes, so maybe none of this even matters! I can't believe I'm spending my last minutes on earth blogging for you people! You're welcome.

For about a week before I went to Kampala, water in town was, as they say, over. And that means, yep, going back to the borehole. After making my trip to the farther away one (that's not far at all, unless you're carrying ninety pounds of water), I looked out my window one day, and said to myself, "Oh, hey, idiot, there's a borehole right there, about three hundred feet away." So, with the water over, I did my usually irregular bathing and washing of dishes in hopes that the water would stop being over until it was clear it wasn't coming back any time soon, and then I went to the borehole.

Oh, I also bought a bike. It's just like what ninety-nine percent of people in Uganda ride -- a heavy black one-speed cruiser, the design and materials for which probably haven't been updated since when bikes first went from those silly ones with the giant eight-foot wheel in the front; for example, there aren't brake cables, there are steel brake rods, and after my first multi-hour ride on it, the hard plastic seat made my butt so sore that it was painful to sit for a few days afterwards. And while the emblem says that it was made by the Roadmaster Bicycle Company of Kampala, Uganda, everywhere else on the bike it says, clearly, Made in India. It also came complete with a bell and a rack on the back.

This is important to the story.

Because I went to the borehole with both of my jerrycans strapped onto the rack on the back, feeling all smug and local and integrated. It was about seven pm when I went over there, getting dark, and looking like it was going to rain. But, again, I tried to wait and to not be that white guy, and since there were only like six or seven people in front of me, I was good and I waited for a while. And then I started to realize that those six or seven people in front of me all had about eight or ten jerrycans to fill up. But still, when a guy came over to me and said that he was going to move me to the front and fill my jerrycans, I said, No, I can wait. And he said, No, it's ok, and I said, No, it's ok, these people were here first, and he said, Are you sure?, and I said, Yes, thank you, and he said, Because these people will be here until 10:30, and then I said, Ok, let's do this thing. Because as much as I don't want to be that white guy, even more than that, I don't want to sit at the borehole for four hours. I'm not going to be that white guy, either.

So, we filled my jerrycans, I pumped the water for a while until they told me I wasn't strong enough, as per usual, and then, still feeling rather smug and local and integrated -- slightly less than I had been before, but still feeling pretty good -- I went to put the jerrycans onto the rack of my bike, planning on saying thank you after I had gotten them all strapped on, rehearsing in Ateso in my head, Eyalama noi! Eyalama aswam! Eyalama akipi! -- Thank you very much! Thank you for the work! Thank you for the water!, when a woman yelled out, "Amusugut, no 'thank you'?", making me now look like the worst kind of white guy.

Awesome.

So, I said my thank-yous, which now sounded forced out of me, and left. And I made it about ten feet. It was completely dark at this point, because power was also over, and so I stopped and went to pull out my phone, which has a flashlight on it, holding my bike and my ninety-pounds of water upright with one hand, reaching into my pocket, losing my bike and my ninety-pounds of water and sending it all crashing to the ground in front of everyone.

Awesome.

Trying to ignore the uproarious laughter I imagined coming from everyone at the borehole behind me -- though I didn't actually hear any, I have to give them that, I'm sure they were all saying, "Sorry, sorry," but sounding like, "Soddy, soddy," the way everyone does whenever you do anything like that, slip or fall or knock something over, though I generally assure them that I forgive them and it wasn't their fault, though this is just amusing to me and confusing to them -- I unstrapped the jerrycans and a woman ran over and helped me right the bike and get them strapped back on, and I thanked her before she could ask for it -- no, that's bitter, she wouldn't have asked for it, she was nice -- and I set off again, but not before a man suggested that I take one at a time, and I assured him that I could handle both.

So, now I'm walking the bike and the jerrycans across the muddy, rutted field between the borehole and my house, in the dark, and -- guess. I bet you can't guess what happens next. Ok, I'll tell you. I made it about halfway across and then -- did you get it? -- the bike slipped in the mud and I dropped everything again. Only this time, I tried to hold them up and save myself at least a little bit of pride, forgetting that, oh yeah, I was in a slippery field of mud and I wasn't going to be able to hold them up and save myself at least a little bit of pride because I was going to slip in the slippery field of mud and I probably now only weigh fifty pounds more than the bike-jerrycan-combo and so instead it was going to pull me over so that I fell on top of it in the mud.

Awesome.

Picking myself up from on top of my bike in the mud, the woman came running over again, and she brought a friend with her, and I think I was probably just standing there with my head hung in shame when they got to me and told me that they wanted to help. I let them. Or, well, they weren't asking, really. It was more like they were just telling me that I needed help and that's why they were there.

So they unstrapped the jerrycans from the bike and popped them up onto their heads and carried them the rest of the way home for me while I followed sheepishly behind with my bike.

Awesome. This is my life.

(Really, though, that part was pretty awesome, or super nice of them at least, so...)

The water in my tap came back shortly after that, and, a few days later, I remembered something, and I said to myself, "Oh, hey, idiot, remember that one time you got water from the lady with the giant rain-tank who's only one hundred feet away?"

And so I started going to her again whenever the water is over, and since returning there I've had two twelve year old girls ask my marital status (Single, ladies!) and, last time, when I was carrying my jerrycans home, I had not one, but two people -- within a distance of a hundred feet! -- tell me that I am strong.

Redemption!

(Sort of. I rode my bike past that borehole the other day -- keep in mind this is now, like, two months later -- and a woman saw me coming and totally started cracking up laughing. And, knowing what she was laughing at, I had no choice but to do the same.)

And there ended all of my trips to all of the boreholes for the rest of... ever.

Fortunately, now we're in the middle of the rainy season, which means that water is over a lot less often than during the dry season. I, for one, love almost all parts of the rainy season. We get these unbelievable monsoon-like downpours that usually don't last more than thirty or forty-five minutes, but when they come I can put the plastic basins I use for washing dishes and clothes outside and they're completely full in less than ten minutes. And they're at least six inches deep. It's a lot of water coming down. I have a ceiling now, as opposed to my first place, which just had the tin roof, so it's not quite so deafening, which is kind of nice, and which I kind of also miss.

One night recently, the wind started slamming my metal shutters closed, repeatedly, banging them against the bars so they bounced open and then banging them shut again. The power was out and so my house was only lit by close, bright flashes of lightning -- though it hadn't started to rain yet, the wind is always the indicator that it's coming soon -- and, as I ran between the two windows, bolting the shutters closed, battening down the hatches, seeing, across the street, the lit charcoal and bright orange embers of someone's cooking fire go flying down the road, I realized that I didn't have any water in my jerrycans for dinner. So I went outside to fill them at the tap, the wind howling, and the lightning close and frequent enough that I didn't need to take a flashlight, and I felt like I was in Twister. I was holding my jerrycan between my legs as it was filling to keep it from ending up in the next district over and it was pitch-black when the lightning wasn't lightninging everything up like massive spotlights, and it went pitch-black and I couldn't see anything and then spotlights and I could see all the outlines of the buildings and powerlines and trees that seemed to be thanking their roots for keeping them in one place and then pitch-black and then spotlights and people were running down the street, headed for home or at least cover and then pitch-black and then spotlights and a pig was standing right next to me, had come out of nowhere, startling me so that I kicked out at it before it was pitch-black again and then the pig was gone when the spotlights came back on. I started filling the second jerrycan when it started to sprinkle a little bit and, by the time it was halfway full, I heard the roar of the rain on the tin roofs but still just a few drops were coming down on me, and I thought, That's weird, and then there was a new, huge gust of wind and before I could turn off the tap and put the cap on my jerrycan, it was torrential and before I could make it the fifteen feet back inside, I was soaked. And so I went got down to my boxers and went outside and bathed in the rain, lit up by spotlights and plunged into darkness.

But I gave myself major good-Peace-Corps-hippie points for bathing in the rain and then handwashing my clothes the next morning in the water I'd collected. (Combine that with the fact that I've started making my own granola and digging a garden and I'm only a few short steps away from having to care about stuff.)

The rainy season does tend to knock the power out on a pretty regular basis for anywhere between ten minutes and a week straight, recently. I'm going on 24 hours right now. I really can't complain about that, though. Lots of volunteers don't have power at all. And when there's no power, it's super romantic, because every dinner I have, with myself, is candlelit. But, to be honest, I would totally complain about not having power during the dry season, when it hovers around 85 degrees in my house at night. This is another reason that I love the rainy season. It's finally cool enough at night that, when the power's out, I can leave the windows open and actually sleep in my bed as opposed to sleeping in the pool created by my own sweat when the power's out during the dry season (because I bought a fan as pretty much my first and most important purchase when I got to site). And there are even days now that I'm not near-constantly sweating, as it gets down to a brisk 75 out. Properly chilly.

(Sidestory: When the power's out, other issues can arise, as I discovered a couple nights ago when I was getting ready for bed with only one candle lit in the corner. I started to brush my teeth, and after about thirty seconds, I started to wonder why the toothpaste tasted so bad. And then I started to wonder why my lips were going numb. And then I realized I was brushing my teeth with anti-itch cream that you use on bug bites. And then I wondered if that stuff was poisonous and I read the back label and found that it advised me to call the poison control hotline immediately if consumed, but that was just going to be way too expensive of a phone call, so I just gave myself a little pat on the back, a little congratulations on at least making it this far, and I hoped that, if I did die, no one would figure out that it was from brushing my teeth with anti-itch bug btie cream.)

However, the things that I don't like about the rainy season come along with having the windows open all night. Because that's when the bugs come.

First, the beetles. The one pictured in the last post. They really are that big. Like golf-ball sized. And they're attracted to light, conveniently enough, and they fly. Fortunately, they fly terribly. Like drunken Kamikazi fighter pilots, they take off, do a couple confused loops, nose-dive into the walls, and then fall to the ground, landing on their backs where the slowly move their legs for several minutes until they're able to right themselves and do it all over again. So they're pretty non-threatening. I always know when they're right outside my house by this buzz-smack-pause-smack sound, or the loud clang when one of them takes on my metal door. A couple other PCVs and I recently invented the new game of Kicking The Beetles While They're Down (And Extra Points If You Get Them Airborne). It's fun. But I've had a few of these guys fly into my house at night. The first time, the fella in the picture, he flew in and knocked some dishes off of my kitchen shelf. I was in my bedroom and jumped up to see what was the clatter, and watched him walk off the edge of the shelf and land on his back on the floor. So, I leapt into action, grabbing a bowl and covering him with it, figuring that I would, as worked out so well in the Termite Incident of 2010, deal with it in the morning. Then he started moving the bowl across the floor, rattling it, getting ready to flip it off at any time. Not content to let him force me into dealing with him right then, I filled a pot with water and put in on top of the bowl, and held him in place like that, listening to the occasional, rapid-fire tick-tick-tick-tick of his wings on the bowl. Then I decided I need a picture. So, I decided I'd just wait until he died under there so I could get one. (This is normal, right? Or am I just totally weird? I mean, you've gotta entertain yourself somehow when you're left alone for several hours each night in two small rooms, often in the dark. Right?) I felt good about this plan. Then, I heard him still occasionally going nuts under there the next morning. And the morning after that. And for several mornings after that. After about five days of this, I took some Bop! Insecticide (With New Approved Formula) and sprayed it under the bowl and left him to breathe that in. The next day, I checked on it again, and it was on its back, not moving, and so that's when I took the picture. But right after I did, it slowly starting moving its legs again. It was still alive after about six days under the bowl, one spent breathing in insecticide. Impressive, yes, but I still threw it out after that. I'd gotten what I wanted.

Second, the mosquitoes. I've had clouds of them inside my house recently. There are so many that I can hear them constantly, that high-pitched dentist-drill sound. All the time. I employed Bop! again, spraying it all around the room, and they all beat it to the window, bouncing off the curtains in attempts to escape the fumes. I pulled aside the curtain and, for a solid five seconds, they flowed out, and then it was startlingly quiet.

Third, the white ants. These are large-ish sized ants with big, diaphanous wings that come out of their tall, conical hills at night, a day or two after a big rain. They're also a beloved snack. You catch them, remove the wings, fry in oil, add salt, and enjoy. They're pretty good, but the legs get stuck in your teeth like mango fibres and they're not quite as tasty as the termites. They are also, of course, attracted to light. So I was lying in bed the other night, late, like 2AM, because it was Friday and I didn't have to get up early in the morning, watching a couple episodes of my new favorite tv show that I'm slightly embarrassed to love and am not going to mention the name of because of this -- cough-Glee!-cough -- and I had my kitchen light still on, as well as the outside security light that's above my door. At one point, I looked over into the kitchen to see about a hundred white ants flying around my kitchen. So I got up out of bed, next to the open window, and found myself face-to-face with a middle-aged Ugandan man. If it weren't white ant season, and if I didn't have an outside light that was on, and if I didn't know that people collect them between midnight and three in the morning, this would have been disturbing. As it was, it was mostly just awkward as I waved to him while wearing only my boxers. I think he was more embarrassed than I was. But the white ants are harmless, mostly just annoying when they drop their wings all over the floor / when their wings blow in the open door, and I turned off the kitchen light, told them to show themselves out, left the outside light on for my intimate new friend to collect his ants, and went back to Glee. I mean, went back to... what's a manly show on tv these days? Ice Road Truckers? Is that still a thing? Let's say I went back to that.

Here is a short lesson on how to jump a car deep in the village without jumper cables, a technique I learned when I was on my way home from Kampala -- the same day as the teargas and riot police -- and I was hitchhiking from Kumi to Ngora because I had missed the last taxi of the day by about twenty seconds and we had to make a pit stop in the village to pick up an old woman, who, I'm sure, had no idea where I had come from or why I was also in the car, and take her to the hospital outside of town.

Step 1: Open the hoods of both cars and look at stuff in there for a while. Feel free to point at things, also.
Step 2: Remove the good battery, Battery A, from its car, Car A.
Step 3: Remove the dead battery, Battery B, from its car, Car B.
Step 4: Place Battery A in the battery-spot (?) of Car B.
Step 5: Start Car B.
Step 6 (and this is the most important): While Car B is running, disconnect and remove Battery A, thus blowing the mind of that random white dude who's hitchhiking with you who had no idea that a car could run without a battery.
Step 7: While Car B is still running, replace Battery B into the battery-spot of Car B and connect the cables, while your random hitchhiking white dude waits nervously -- excitedly? -- for one of you to touch something to something else that it shouldn't be touched to, giving you a massive shock and letting us see your bones like in a cartoon.
Step 8: Replace Battery A into the battery-spot of Car A and you're on your way!

It's as simple and as mind-blowing as that.

I'm a fan of English Premier League ~~soccer~~ football. This is handy because so is the entire continent of Africa. Specifically, I'm a fan of Manchester United. This is handy because I think more people in town know me as Man-U rather than my name. Or maybe that's not handy, just sad. Either way. I think it's funny. People I've never spoken to before, let alone discussed soccer with, have referred to me as Man-U. And I answer to it. I turn and look when someone yells out, "Man-U!" This probably doesn't help people to care to remember my real name. And why my name hasn't gotten around like that, I'm not entirely sure, but it probably has a lot to do with the fact that I have a Manchester United shirt but, for some reason, don't have a shirt that just says DANIEL.

Anyway. A few times before, I've gone to a guesthouse in town that shows the games. It's always a good time; there's usually about 75 people packed in there, watching and yelling at a 25-inch tv. At least that's what they used to watch and yell at. A couple weeks ago, I went in to watch Man-U/Arsenal, and, when I walked into the room with the tv, I laughed out loud in shock. Guffawed, if you will. Amazingly, they now have a shiny, new, 35ish-inch HDTV mounted on the wall. It's crazy. I may have to travel for an hour and a half (one-way) to buy peanut butter. And I may go to the bathroom in a big hole in the ground. But I can now walk two minutes from my front door and watch Man-U/Arsenal in high-definition. Development is a strange thing.

So, a few nights later, Man-U was playing again. I could have sworn that the game started at 8PM, and so I walked over about fifteen minutes early to be sure to get a chair. I walked in to the reception/bar area of the guesthouse, asked if they were showing the game, was told that they were, and so I ordered a beer and headed over to the tv room. When I walked in, there were only like five other people in there, and there was a Ugandan soap opera and/or sitcom (it was hard to tell which) on the tv. But since it was still a few minutes til 8, I figured that more people would be showing up, or that maybe not many people came to watch at night as on a Sunday afternoon, and that they'd change the channel when it was time. So, I sipped my Nile and tried to make sense of The Hostel, the soap opera / sitcom / 90210-type teen drama we were watching. I gave up on that after about a minute and then, just to make sure, turned to the guy sitting a few chairs down from me and asked if they were going to show the game. He also told me that they were. Unfortunately, he also told me that it didn't start until 9:45. Bummer. I looked at my mostly-full litre of beer and tried to get comfortable and enjoy what was on next. And I did. Because it was a Filipino soap opera, called Mari Mar, which was badly dubbed into English and, what with the talking dogs and all, was totally Homeward Bound meets The OC. In case you're confused, that means it was awesome. So, I didn't get to watch the game, but I can't say that I was totally disappointed.

I overheard this snippet of conversation on a taxi the other day when the guy next to me took a phone call: "Hello? ... Yes. ... Yes. There is a bag of beans. ... And there is a bag of poison. ... The choice is yours. Choose wisely." I may have ad-libbed that last part, but I think that's where he was going with it.

I did my laundry the other day, early in the morning before work, and I hung it up to dry and then went back inside to get ready for the day. About fifteen minutes later, I looked out the window to see a skinny, young, cream-colored cow with half of a shirt in its mouth, standing on two others it had already pulled off the line, stomping them into the mud. I ran outside, the cow gave me a shocked, caught-in-the-act look and started to run off and I bent down, on the run, and scooped up a rock, like a shortstop bare-hands a ground ball, and flung it at the retreating cow, getting the metaphorical out at first with a satisfying thwack! against the cow's butt. I know that the cows do this because they like the smell of the soap, but I couldn't help feeling like this time it was payback, since, just the evening before, I was playing soccer with some of the neighbor kids when I accidentally booted that same cow in the ribs with the ball. This was certainly more annoying than the chickens who've started coming into my house, but not quite as bad as the mouse that's started coming in at night and taking tiny bites out of every single individual piece of fruit or vegetable that I have. I'm not quite sure how to deal with that yet.

I started digging a garden last week. My organization has a plot of undeveloped land across the street from our office, and so they let me go at it. I bought a hoe and a machete and everyone is very impressed that I'm digging (which is what they call gardening, and which, I think, sounds much more fun). I'm working on a keyhole garden, which is basically a mound of dirt with a space in the middle for composting, and you plant around the sides of the mound. It's supposed to be good for growing more stuff in a smaller space, and for people who are sick or weak, ie: some people with more advanced HIV/AIDS, because they don't have to move around or tend to as much land-space as with a traditional garden. So far, I've dug up all of the grass and weeds and gotten rid of most of their roots in the space that I'll be using, so now I just need to build up the mound of soil and make the composting area and I'll be ready to plant. Unfortunately, I got an infection in my thumb, near the nail, which I'm pretty sure came from digging in the soil, and I had to come into the Peace Corps Medical Office in Kampala when it started to spread in a big red streak up to my wrist. So I haven't been out there in a few days, but my thumb is no longer looking like it will fall off, and I should be able to finish in a few days. Once I'm sure that I can do the garden right and get things to grow, the plan is to plant a few more around the district as training or demo gardens, and hopefully people will take to the idea and start using them at home. It's going to be a part of the HIV counselor training project that is starting to come into shape these days.

Mostly, though, it's just been fun to be out in the field, playing in the dirt, doing something where I can actually see physical results, being completely dirty and drenched in sweat -- though it only takes about thirty minutes before my shirt is soaked, it takes a little bit longer to be covered in dirt -- and, since the concrete skirt around my house that acts as a porch looks out onto a relatively busy street and not much else, sometimes I just go out to the field where the garden is and sit in the grass and watch the sun set or the cows going by or the guinea fowls and talk to the two kids who live in a house nearby and come over to speak rapid-fire Ateso to me for about fifteen minutes each time I'm out there (most of which I can't understand, though occasionally I can get some important words and figure out what they're asking; so I've been able to explain to them that I don't have a wife and that's why she's not out there digging with me, and I've been able to tell them what I'm going to plant. They actually remembered my name too, although they thought it was Emmanuel, and not Daniel, but at least they remembered.) because it's nice to be able to sit outside, relatively unnoticed, somewhere with a view, and just hang out and lounge in the grass.

While I'm a little disappointed that I've been digging out there a lot and still haven't found any buried treasure or cursed Indian bones, I'm still happy about it. And once it's time to plant, I'm going with lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, and green beans, and maybe some tomatoes and bell peppers too. Maybe the infection is just the start of my thumb changing colors. (To green.)

Garden update: I got back from Kampala -- where I had a real, amazing steak for the first time since leaving the States -- all ready and excited to finish the garden. I went out there at 6:30 this morning, taking a thermos of coffee with me, like a man, and found that an area of about 50 feet by 12 feet of the field that I was digging in had been completely dug up, encompassing the area that I had already dug up, and almost all of the biggest branches of the two 35 foot trees had been chopped off and were strewn all over the field. This was not a happy surprise.

I was pretty upset because, 1: Gone were the branches that provided the majority of the shade, 2: Gone was all of the tall grass that I liked to lounge in, 3: I thought my counterpart had told someone to do this, thinking they were finishing most of the work for me, because she was afraid -- 'fearing' in Ugandan English -- that I'd come back and start digging and get another infection or something and had told me before I left that when I came back she'd find someone to dig the garden while I watched and gave directions, something that I was adamantly opposed to, not only because it's my garden and I want to dig it, but also because the thought of being a white guy giving directions to my black field workers just really didn't make me all that comfortable.

(Speaking of fearing things, this is an excerpt from a conversation I had in Kampala -- Other PCV: "So, you know how Ugandans are afraid of everything?" Me: "Yes, go on." It's weird and true. Because until I came here, I'd never seen children who are -- pretty much all of them -- absolutely terrified of puppies. Like, running down the street screaming while the puppy chases them, having the time of its life, terrified. I mean, I get it. People here went through and deal with a lot of stuff that would make you afraid of a lot of things. But still. Puppies.)

As it turns out, though, my organization had basically just decided that they were going to plant there instead. And so they dug up all of that land. That still doesn't explain why they chopped the branches off of the trees, but I couldn't be too upset, in the end. There's still space for me to dig my garden, I don't really mind starting over because it's fun and it's something active and productive to do, and I spent the morning hacking up the branches into smaller pieces with my machete -- which is a great way to take out your frustrations and a great way to guarantee that by the time I leave here, no small children will be able to tell me how soft my hands are again -- and clearing more brush than George W. So, I'm starting over, but that's ok. I am going to miss all of that grass, though.

What do you do when you padlock your metal door shut and then realize that you left your keys in the pocket of the shorts you were wearing earlier and what's a locksmith? First, you're happy that you always leave your windows open, pretty much any time it's not raining. Second, you're happy that you, randomly, have twine in your backpack. Then you MacGuyver together the twine, a tree branch, and a pair of cheap rubber flip-flops and pull your shorts and your keys through the bars on your window. Finally, you feel really good about yourself.

Now. Man Week.

I left my house at 9AM on a Tuesday and I got to Kisoro, in the farthest southwest corner of the country, just a couple kilometres from the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at 5PM the next day. That's twenty-one hours of traveling by bus, matatu, and small-car taxi -- a four-door, stick-shift, sedan with four of us (including the driver) in the front seats and, though I couldn't quite turn around to check, I think at least six in the back seat. But it was worth it.

Kisoro is green and mountainous and surrounded by big lakes dotted with mounds of green islands and a line of volcanoes -- the one who's name I can remember is Sabinyo, which means Old Man's Teeth -- that fanged up into white cloud cover and it's (relatively) cold, and seeing hills always make me happy now, and so does the cold, though it also just makes me really cold.

The first night we were there, we went to a restaurant where you order pork by the kilo and it comes out on a massive metal platter with potatoes and cabbage and there are no knives or forks or plates. We ordered seven kilos. That's fifteen pounds of pork. That's how you start Man Week.

The next morning, we headed to Nkuringo, the village where our campsite was, just outside of Bwindi National Park, also known as the Impenetrable Forest, and the home of mountain gorillas. We hired a driver and left early in the morning, winding up from the valley where Kisoro Town is, up a rocky -- maybe bouldery is a better word -- road that curled around the sides of the mountains that rose almost vertically skyward, and the fact that people were growing crops on the sides of these mountains without terracing the land first was amazing and kind of unbelievable and seemingly impractical. But people did it, digging into soil that seemed to rise up directly in front of their faces, almost like they were planting on a wall, turning the mountainsides into patchworks of every possible shade of green, leaving no room for any other colors except the silver of the tin roofs reflecting the sunlight, the blue sky, white clouds.

Gunning the engine one more time, Nicholas, our driver, launched us up one last hill and into our campsite. We were greeted by a few staff members there, one who told us his name was God, and another who said, "Hello, I'm Adolf." As we set up on our mountaintop, we looked across the valley to the unbroken canopy of treetops that carpeted the mountains on the other side -- Bwindi. The valley extended off to the horizon, rolling mountains on either side, all the way to Rwanda. We looked over the tiny village of Nkuringo, a dozen small buildings, maybe, set along a winding dirt track, and, to the left of the village, down to the Western Rift Valley, flat, blank expanse of land stretching out until another range of jagged volcanoes rose up in the DRC -- the forbidden land, and I stared at it, knowing that we weren't allowed in making me want to go.

Low clouds, fog, rolled into the valley in minutes, turning the view into a solid wall of white, and it was hard not to picture, floating in with the mist, the gorillas, silverbacks and their groups, that we knew were moving around out there, invisible in the mist and underneath the broccoli-tops of the forest, like ghosts that we knew were there and couldn't see, but had to believe in because we'd been told. References to Michael Chricton's Congo were inevitable.

We sheltered ourselves from a few hours of rain, set up a guide for a hike into the forest in the morning, and then, when the clouds broke and shafts of late-afternoon sunlight shone through, tauntingly, onto the DRC, we spent the next several hours and a glass Coke bottle full of kerosene keeping lit a fire that would have gone out without constant tending -- blowing on the embers, rearranging the wood from teepee to Lincoln Log, chopping bigger logs into kindling and pouring kerosene on everything -- while talking about the things that guys our age talk about that can't be repeated here. Just know that we think we're really hilarious.

Back up in the morning and out of the tent, having slept in all the clothes I wore the day before and would wear again all day today, we set off, heading out to penetrate the Impenetrable.

We met with our guide, Ignacius, who led us across the valley, from our mountaintop down -- steeply down, prompting more than one or two, "This is gonna suck to walk back up," observations -- to the valley floor and the edge of the forest, to the camp where soldiers stayed, including the two that were coming into the forest with us, just in case. With one soldier leading and one bringing up the rear, both carrying machine guns -- though at one point, I noticed that one of them was carrying his by the clip, upside-down, so the barrel was pointing up towards his own head, and still he wouldn't let me hold it for a picture -- and wearing green uniforms and green caps and black rubber gum boots, we left the camp and entered the forest. Wait, no. We left the camp and entered The Forest. It deserves capital letters.

The trees grew closer together, the underbrush grew denser, the sky, which was bright white, covered with a layer of high clouds, became obscured by the canopy. We weaved through all of the green and growing things along what narrow bit trail there was and, after fifteen or twenty minutes, we came to a river. If the edge of The Forest we had just passed through was dense, the other side of the river was where it became, what was the word? Oh, yeah. Impenetrable.

We picked our way across a short bridge made of sticks, gingerly, because none of the sticks were thicker than my wrist, and because Ignacius told us to, letting us know that some of them were rotten. Fortunately, we'd all lost enough weight to not crash through. After the sticks, we graduated to a log, fifteen feet above the river and twenty feet long, to get across, and when we stepped off the log on the other side of the river, the forest floor dank and spongy beneath our feet, we felt it -- penetration.

It was as easy to understand how Bwindi got its nickname from inside its guts as it was from outside our tent on the other side of the valley. While it was solid broccoli carpeting from a distance, once you were inside, it was ancient, untouched rainforest and it was exactly what you would imagine that to be. There's no sky in The Forest, only a canopy of leaves laced together a hundred feet up. There's no horizon in The Forest, no distance, only trees, ferns, vines, overgrowth, often keeping you from seeing more than twenty or thirty feet in front of you. There is no trail in The Forest, we simply tramped through, assuming Ignacius knew where he was taking us, skirting along another obscene-angled hill, trying not to slip, being certain that if you fell, The Forest would swallow you and there would be no coming back, though, admittedly, being tempted by the prospect of becoming the gorillas' Mowgli, of becoming more gorilla than Diane Fossey, of finding Amy her rainwater drink, and we all slipped, even our soldiers, stepping on a wet, moss-covered rock that had been hidden in the bush, or taking a step forward to to discover that the ground there is a foot or two lower than the step before and now you're knee deep in leaves and vines and ferns.

It was even harder not to slip because we were looking for gorillas, for the elephants we'd heard lived there too (although that was really hard to believe; it seemed impossible that they could move in there), and Ignacius pointed out gorilla poop and I tried to get someone to touch it, to see if it was still warm, but no one would, and he pointed out a gorilla trail, a more distinct path than the one we were allegedly walking on, though where our trail ran parallel to the edge of The Forest, only a couple kilometres in, the gorillas' trail plunged perpendicular to ours, straight into the heart of The Forest, in a way that tempted you to try and catch them. We didn't catch them, though, and they didn't catch us either, but I'm pretty sure they were watching us from the shadows and the darkness between the trees.

Because, really, the way that the forest closed everything in so tightly around itself, and because the way that, on that day at least, where the sky was able to be seen and where the light was able to get through, it was dull, screened by those high clouds, and it seemed to suck almost all the color out of everything. Where, in the bright sunshine and sparkling blue sky on the drive up, the greens of the mountainsides and valley floors were, seemed to be, shimmering, infinitely varied in hue, in The Forest, under the dual canopies of high treetops and higher clouds, it was dark. Bright green faded to green shaded with black, vines and branches furred with moss that may have been vibrant and happily colored in the sunshine and the blue sky, were instead, hidden from all that, a dull pea-soup green, looking wearied, as if they had seen it all, over thousands of years, hanging from trees with black-green leaves, black branches lacing and meshing with their neighbours, and the brightest shade of green were the ferns but even these, almost as tall as me, only served to remind me that I was somewhere ancient and primal, somewhere that would swallow me whole, that would then only allow me to survive in a loincloth, a thin vine serving as a manly headband holding back hair that had grown long and matted over the years as I became one of Bwindi's own, moving through the overgrowth and with the mist.

We moved through The Forest until we reached the waterfall we'd be heading towards all morning, and it wasn't much after spending Christmas morning at Sipi, but the getting there was more than worth it. So we sat and had lunch there by the waterfall in the biggest clearing we'd seen in The Forest, and I wasn't allowed to hold one of the guns, and after that little break, we headed back. We'd penetrated as far into the impenetrable as we were going to, and so we went, slipping and sliding in the bush, back across the log and the river and the stick bridge -- which cracked on me at one point, but, fortunately, not all the way through -- and then back out into the valley where the sky was visible. We left the soldiers at their camp and went back up the mountainside towards Nkuringo, confirming our suspicions on how much it would suck to walk back up, proving ourselves geniuses, infallible predictors of the future, because it did suck, but we made it all the way up, back to the village where we bought bananas and water, and back to the campsite where we got hot showers and had MREs for dinner, and gave up on another fire after another few hours of rain, and went to sleep, tired from the penetration and needing rest for the twenty mile walk back down to Kisoro in the morning, rest that I didn't get.

I didn't get much rest, let alone any sleep, that night because I had... let's call it indigestion. And I was up and out to the latrine and back and out again, tossing and turning when I was up, and then I didn't get up for breakfast, and packing up all of my stuff was a chore. I somehow shouldered my backpack and we left the campsite, walking back down the winding, bouldery road we'd driven up, knots twisting my stomach as I tried not to get indigestion all over my pants. I was barely able to stay within a kilometre of the rest of the guys and was unable to negotiate a ride down that wasn't obscenely expensive, and so we walked. With no sleep and no breakfast and no water left in my body, we wound down the green patchwork mountains, then back up, then down again, and the lake came into view and disappeared again, and I left my indigestion in a couple places along the way, and somehow made it down to the lakeshore, twenty miles from where we'd started. I was rewarded with the unfortunately fake Brown Badge of Courage for my efforts.

We got lunch at the lodge on the edge of the lake, and were told that guys with the dugout canoes we were supposed to paddle across had decided they were tired and had left. So we took a slow pontoon boat across instead, and I was ok with that. The lake was glassy, with rounded green islands dotting it throughout, some with the Xs and Ys of leaves of banana trees, and the clouds lifted from the three volcanoes behind Kisoro, just for a minute, and kingfishers and hawks swooped around and nested on the islands, and then we were across the lake and back to town and ready to sit.

The next morning, Easter Sunday, heavenly shafts of sunlight split the clouds over the volcanoes and I begrudgingly had Rolex instead of monkey bread and headed the two days back home, and I got there feeling refreshed and like I had gotten exactly what I needed.

Pictures!

2011-05-21T05:06:00.000-07:00

Exciting, right? The first few are from a trip I took with three friends down to Bwindi National Park, also known as The Impenetrable Forest, also known as the home of the mountain gorillas. Though we didn't do the gorilla tracking, or see any of them in the forest, it was still completely awesome. After that, there's one of the massive beetles, brought out by the rainy season, that flew into my house (one of several that have flown into my house), next to my phone for scale. Because you really need to appreciate the size of them. Seriously. Appreciate it. And last is just a shot from out my bedroom window on evening after the rain had stopped, a creamsicle rainy season sunset.

More on all of these things and even more stories to come soon!

"Work"

2011-04-13T06:35:00.000-07:00

I think it's probably time to let everyone know about the "work" that I've been doing here. And about the work that I've been doing here.

I'm calling it "work" because, so far, it's been a little hard to come by, and work -- actually doing things where I feel useful and busy -- has been a lot less common than "work" -- where I do useless and frustrating things like going out into the community with my counterpart when she asks me to present some information on some topic like reproductive health or early childhood development which she will then translate, which then ends up meaning that I talk for a couple minutes, stop to let her translate, and she talks for twenty or thirty minutes about I have no idea what.

But, in the last couple weeks, I've started to have slightly more work and slightly less "work".

A while ago, I wrote about how I was going to be doing some work with another community-based organization (CBO) in the district. They had some people who were acting as home-based counselors for people living with HIV/AIDS (or PLWHA, as the acronym goes here), but who'd never actually been trained on what it meant to act as a home-based counselor for PLWHA. So I was going to train them, using only my bare hands, the little bit of knowledge that I have, and a lot of notes from a lot of different books and manuals. I was excited. It was going to be work, not "work", and it was going to keep me busy for a while, and, also, had the potential to turn into a lot of other things -- HIV support groups that I could meet with to talk about income-generating activities (IGAs) or village savings and loans associations (VSLAs) or planting a simple garden to grow some food that is more nutritious than cassava. Work! Exciting!

And then I got back from IST in January, all ready to start doing some work. I called Okello Moses, the director of the CBO when I got back, and we set up a time to have a meeting to discuss the training. We met one day when he came to meet me at the office of the organization I'm placed with (Vision Teso Rural Development Organization, or Vision TERDUO, because acronyms, or VT, if you want an acronym inside another acronym), and then we went to the office of his CBO. There I met with him and a couple of the guys who were acting as the counselors. We talked about what they were doing now, what they felt like they needed training on, and what they felt like the needs of PLWHA in the community were. Moses said they were going to mobilize resources (NGO-speak for getting money) for the training and then we could set a date and get going. So it all went really well, and I was, again, excited.

About a week later, I still hadn't heard from Moses, so I gave him a call: Moses, how are you, blah blah blah, let's set a date for the training, let's do this thing. Yes, ok, he said, but there's been a problem. And he asked if anyone at my organization had talked to me. They hadn't. I asked why. And then Moses went on to tell me that after we had met that first time, my supervisor (at VT, not the Peace Corps) and the executive director of our organization had called Moses into the ED's office, and proceeded basically to verbally harass him, asking him what he thought he was doing working with me, why he thought he could just come in here and work with me, and on and on, to the point where they were, Moses told me, threatening him and his organization if he continued to try to work with me. And so, Moses said, thanks for the offer, but no thanks.

Needless to say, 1: my organization had not mentioned this to me, despite the fact that I had told everyone that I would be doing this training, despite the fact that I had told everyone that I was working on material for this training since that meeting, despite the fact that my counterpart and supervisor were both at Peace Corps trainings where the topic of secondary projects -- projects that PCVs do outside of their organization, projects that PCVs do with other organizations or community groups in the area, projects that PCVs are strongly encouraged, almost required to do -- was brought up more than once or twice, and 2: I was pissed. It was early afternoon when I called Moses, and I was at the office, and I hung up the phone, thought, Expletive, expletive, expletive, picked up my things, went home so that I wouldn't tell my supervisor and counterpart and the ED what I really wanted to tell them, and called another PCV friend to rant.

Because not only had my organization ruined what was, really, the only work I had so far lined up, and taken away an opportunity for PLWHA in the community to (hopefully) improve their quality of life, but they also hadn't, themselves, given me any work to do; they had only given me "work."

So the next week, I sat down with my supervisor and counterpart and we talked about secondary projects. I said, PCVs are placed with an organization, but they don't belong to that organization, blah blah blah, our responsibility is ultimately with the community we're placed in and the Peace Corps, blah blah blah, secondary projects, blah blah blah. They said, ok. And I said, I'm going to do a training with another CBO. And they said, ok.

So I called Moses back: Moses, how are you, blah blah blah, I've talked to the people here, and I'm sorry for what happened, but, in reality, I'm a Peace Corps volunteer, and not a Vision TERUDO volunteer, and I'm supposed to work in the community, not just in the organization, blah blah blah, so let's set that date, let's do this thing. And Moses said, again, Thanks, but no thanks.

And that was that. No more work. Back to it only being "work".

So then, a week or two ago, after numerous other organization-related frustrations, and wondering if it was, in the long run, going to work out with VT or if I'd have to try and change organizations, wondering who else VT had told not to work with me and wondering how that was making me look in the community, and talking about the whole situation with my program coordinator at the Peace Corps office, I sat down, again, with my counterpart and supervisor to talk about work versus "work".

I said, I feel like I haven't been given any real work, blah blah blah, the project that the health program is working on is totally covered and doesn't need my help, blah blah blah, I want responsibility, and work, and things that I can be in charge of on my own, and I think what I'm going to do is make a couple project designs, things that I can be in charge of and responsible for, that can still be done under the auspices of VT since you don't want me out of your site ever, not even for a minute, and then we can go over them together and see where we can go from there. They said, ok. (They also said that when they first found out they'd be getting a PCV, they thought that their PCV, AKA me, would be writing grant proposals and mobilizing resources, which, like I said, means getting money, to which I said, Yeah, no. But that could be an entirely different rant than this one, and I'm kinda on a roll here.)

Then my supervisor said, Aren't you doing that training with that other CBO? And I said, Ha.. ha.. yeah, about that.. That's.. um.. not going to be happening, because now he's.. um.. refusing to work with me, because.. well.. someone here told him that he wasn't allowed to. And I stopped there and looked at them, and they didn't look at me, and they didn't react at all. So I guess that's that.

And, so, here we are.

All in all, despite all that, I feel pretty good about where things are right now, and where they could, if VT doesn't try to take everything over and destroy it all, go from here. I'm working on a couple project designs -- the same training for HIV counselors, so that I can get them the information even if their CBO doesn't want to work directly with me; and a peer educator program for a secondary school in town, where a select group of students will be trained to basically be available for questions and issues the other students in the school have, about HIV or social issues or pregnancy or peer pressure or whatever, and also lead some sessions on all that stuff at all-school assemblies, and all that good stuff; and the one project that I most want to do, which I'm not ready to share with my organization yet, until I can be sure that they're going to let me do things how I want to do things, which is a soccer league for boys, probably ten to fifteen years old, who aren't in school, where the league will run, over the course of ten to twelve weeks, in a tournament style, while also incorporating life-skills sessions.

And so I've given these work-plans, or project designs, to my counterpart and supervisor to review, and we should be able to meet at the end of the week, or the beginning of next week to discuss details and hopefully get started.

So I feel good.

Other than that, on the work side of the "work"-work divide, I've started an after-school Life-Skills Club at a secondary school in town. And, so far, it's been awesome.

The school, called Light College, is not a college, is small, about 120 students total, spread across four grades, Senior 1 through Senior 4 -- basically like high school in the States, S1 being Freshmen. It's one building, rough, unfinished brick walls and a tin roof, one classroom for each grade, students dressed in blue pants or skirts and white button-down shirts cramming into desks that are one wooden slab for sitting on attached to another wooden slab for writing on, the teachers dictating lessons with the use of cracking blackboards that never really seem to get clean and caning students with a long wooden switch when the students -- actually I don't know why; there's no reason for that.

There are about 35 students in the club, some from each grade, and I love them. Silent at first, they had trouble understanding my English either because of the accent or because I was talking to fast and were simply not used to participating in class or being asked to ask questions or speak out or do anything besides copy notes from the board, now they're energetic, charismatic, funny, engaged, intelligent, and eager to learn. This is the first term of the school year (though it's ending this week), so I'm looking forward to meeting with the kids in the club once a week, each term after this.

The Life-Skills Program is used by PCVs worldwide, and the PC has a great manual with lessons and topics, warm-ups and games to play. Life-skills are basically, how should I put this, skills that you use in life. Some of the skills you use in life, anyway. Minus basic karate skills or speed-boat driving skills, the life-skills we're working on are along the lines of self-esteem building, communication skills, responding to peer pressure, assertiveness vs aggressiveness vs passiveness, decision-making skills, along with more informational sessions on things like the facts and myths of HIV/AIDS, and sessions that open debates and new lines of thought on issues like gender roles.

So the first week of the Life-Skills Club was a little rough. I think the students had a really hard time understanding me, we weren't doing the most exciting things -- we just reviewed the basics; set up some club rules like being respectful, giving me the Time-Out signal (hands in a T-shape) when they can't understand me, and so on; voted on peer educators, six students that would help me out by leading small groups and helping to lead sessions as well as being available for questions from other students; and intoduced the Question Box, where they could drop questions, written down, that they didn't feel comfortable asking in front of the whole group -- and so it wasn't the most fun forty minutes any of us had spent.

The next week, worried that they'd be worried that every week would be like the first one, I decided not to do anything relating to learning or sitting in their desks where they'd been sitting all day, so we just played games. We did creative thinking games, we jumped around, we made an African version of Simon Says. They all laughed, tried to think and approach things with different perspectives (something they're never asked to do in school), jumped, had a lot of fun, and I did too. And they talked more and started to open up more and, I think, realized that it wasn't just going to be me lecturing at them every week, because I don't want to do that either.

The week after that, they split into small groups, led by my awesome peer educators, to prepare role plays that they'd perform the following week. They were to make a short drama about a risk situation that young people might typically face, where the characters in the drama engaged in the risk behavior because they were missing some of those important life-skills. I didn't give them examples of risk situations or behaviors, because I wanted them to have to be creative and didn't want each group to end up doing the same thing, and, when they performed the role plays the next week, they were creative, they didn't all do the same thing, they had assigned roles, memorized lines, brought their own props, and practiced during the week.

We had fifteen year-old girls getting pregnant, people getting HIV after having unprotected sex, everyone seemed to be stealing school fees from their parents and skipping school to go drink instead, someone got run over by a car for some reason, someone brought a flat-brimmed, fitted baseball cap with the hologram sticker on it that was worn by the "bad" boys in the dramas. But each role play was funny and insightful and creative, and the kids were really excited to do them. And I was excited about it too.

The best part, so far, is that they've started asking questions too, and they seem like they've started to feel like they can use me as a resource for those questions. And their questions have been direct, topical, frank, and bold. One boy asked, in a country where you can be stoned to death for being rumored to be gay, "These Europeans who are practicing homosexuality -- is that a good thing or a bad thing?" And so I told him what I thought and that it was a really good question, because it was. And then he followed it up with, "So if I'm infected [with HIV] and I take this boy as my sexual partner, will he also get the disease?" And so I explained the four fluids that transmit HIV and how they can transmit the virus between two men too, not just between a man and a woman, and I told him that it was a really good question, because it was. And someone else told me that they have a friend, a boy, who has a girlfriend who is pressuring him into having sex with her though he doesn't want to, he's still in school, he wants to finish, but he does love her (apparently, in the way that 15 year-old kids can love each other), and her family is rich and his is poor, so she's buying him things and keeps pressuring him, and so my student told his friend that he would ask me what my advice was on what he should say to her to get her to stop pressuring him. And so I told him what I thought and that it was a really good question, because it was, and I told them all that I'd always be available for more. (And I will be, I want to be that resource, because they will have more questions -- the Question Box, before it was stolen by some little kids who climbed in through the windows over one weekend, was full of questions, which will, hopefully, be put into the new Question Box, which will, hopefully, not be stolen.)

And so, when I'd gone to the last couple meetings feeling a little unenthusiastic, a little tired, or a little distracted, within a couple minutes of being there I was happy, energized by their enthusiasm, and I'd forgotten about the things that were distracting me before.

I felt useful, like I was doing even the smallest bit of something good, and I was happy to be doing that work, the kind with no quotation marks around it.

Like 2Pac Says

2011-03-22T23:40:00.000-07:00

Ch-ch-changes.

I finished reading two books this week. The first was about the Iteso, "my" tribe here, appropriately called The Iteso, written by a British guy in the early 1950s (not the most objective viewpoint ever, but surprisingly not super racist) before Uganda gained independence, chronicling the changes that had happened in the fifty years of British occupation (or, well, he calls it British administration; I call it British occupation, the limey bastards). The second was called Beyond the Sky and the Earth, written by a girl, basically a Canadian version of a Peace Corps volunteer (aw, Canada -- adorable), posted for three years as a teacher in Bhutan in the late 1980s.

Both of these ended up being reminders that things change, most things change, and drastically, but some things don't change, and some things never will.

In The Iteso, it had pictures, old black-and-white photographs taken in the late 1940s, early 1950s, of typical life in Teso -- cattle herding, goat herding, sifting through millet, drinking ajon through long straws. And all of these pictures could have been taken by me, yesterday, then converted into black-and-white on my computer. The cows looked the same, with the same young man herding them with the same long papyrus cane, the mud huts looked the same, the bicycles looked the same as the bicycle I bought last week, the same men were sitting around the same pot of ajon in the same wooden folding chairs drinking out of the same straws wearing the same checkered, plaid, or solid-colored button-down shirts with the same haircuts and the same woman pouring more fermented millet into the pot. The only difference was that the men in the pictures were wearing shorts (a novel idea, considering it gets up to around eleventy-billion degrees here), while, these days, if you wear shorts, you're a primary school boy. And today, that cowherd would have a cell phone and would herd the cows across a road, dodging taxis and motorbikes, and sometimes you drink ajon out of a jerrycan instead of a clay pot and talk about the latest developments in world news seen on Al-Jazeera or CNN World. Things change, things don't.

And in Beyond the Sky and the Earth, it was funny -- interesting funny, sometimes ha-ha funny -- reading the observations of a pseudo-PCV posted thousands of miles from here, twenty-plus years ago, and seeing how many of those observations can be applied directly, without translation from Asia to Africa, the '80s to the '10s (?), Sarchhop to Ateso, to my life here in Ngora. Like feeling out of place, a foreigner, and feeling right at home, judging tourists; embracing and struggling with cultural differences -- embracing the pace of life, the "simplicity", struggling with the drunk man groping the teenage girl, the skewed gender gap, the canings in school; learning the language; despairing and not despairing, or understanding, the Westernization; trying to get students to talk -- and both me and the author of the book writing TALK on the board in class, getting laughs from the students who then fell back into silence; thinking about going home, not wanting to go home, not yet, and then wanting to go home, right now; and being miserable and as happy as you've ever been. And though I don't have to wait nine months for a package, only two (!), and letters aren't my only correspondence home, and Uganda is not Bhutan and Bhutan is not Uganda, it's still kinda the same. Things change, things don't.

2Pac says so, anyway.

And, so, from Beyond the Sky and the Earth:

I say that lives in the villages might be hard and short, but the people seem genuinely content with what they have, and this is a function of their faith, which recognizes that desire for material wealth and personal gain leads to suffering. Dini says that they are content with what they have because what they have is all they know. How deep do you think those values go? she asks. Their lifestyle is not a matter of choice but a function of the environment. If they could have cars and refrigerators and VCRs, they would. Let the global market in here with all its shiny offerings, she says, and see how fast everything changes.

And:

I am aware of two possible versions: I can see either the postcard (Lost World Series, Rural Landscape No. 5), or I can see a family bent over the earth in aching, backbreaking labor, the ghosts of two children dead from some easily preventable disease, and not enough money for all the surviving children to buy the shoes and uniforms required for school. It is too easy to romanticize. The landscape cannot answer back, cannot say, no you are wrong, life here is different but if you add everything up, it is not any better. You can love this landscape because your life does not depend on it. It is merely a scenic backdrop for the other life you will always be able to return to, a life in which you will not be a farmer scraping a life out of difficult terrain.

Things change, things don't. And it's not bad or good -- no, that's not true, it's bad and good, but mostly it just is.

Mob Justice, Boreholes, and (No) Revolutions

2011-03-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

These things happened:

Iganga is a highway town on the main road that goes east from Kampala to Mbale. It's hot, dusty, vibrating with passing vehicles. I was there recently, and I was in a second-floor cafe. I walked out, to get some fresh air, to pass a minute or two, to look for other PCVs who were outside somewhere, onto the balcony overlooking the highway where lorries roared past, matatus stopped to let passengers out and started again once they'd packed passengers back in, where construction of a new building going on across the street included a six-man brick-tossing assembly-line where the bricks went from being part of a giant pile through twelve hands to being part of a rising wall, and where general pedestrian traffic milled about, moving back and forth, walking with a purpose or standing about chatting with nothing better to do. And then I noticed, on the opposite side of the street, a stream of people running down the sidewalk to my left, which turned, quickly, into a river of people, and then I heard their voices, angry, shouting, rise on the current up to where I was. I turned to the person standing next to me on the balcony and asked what was going on.

"Somebody has stolen something."

I knew what this meant. I knew what this crowd was coming to see and do. But it still took me a minute to find the man in the middle of the mob. When I found him, though, he was unmistakable. His shirt, ripped open in the front, down to his belly, was stained bright red at the collar and shoulders from the blood that was pouring from his head. He tried to fend off the crowd that advanced towards him menacingly, that had already gotten to him and surrounded him. He covered his head when another man stepped forward and landed punches on his skull and his arms raised for protection. He bounced off the grill of a lorry as he was shoved back against it. And then a man to his left, behind his field of vision, bent down then raised back up with a red clay brick in hand and launched it, from two feet away, like a bowler in cricket, against the thief's head, and he collapsed briefly from the impact, the collision of stone and skull enough to make me wince from a couple hundred feet away, then sprung back up, quicker than expected, quicker than I expected anyway, and then I saw, on the far side of the crowd, from the entrance of a supermarket, a security guard, armed, as they always are, with an old bolt-action rifle, start to push his way through the crowd, and I covered my mouth, but for some reason not my eyes, as I assumed the bolt action rifle was about to be put to use, the thief was about to go from having blood on his shoulders to having blood pouring from a bullet hole in his head, until, somehow, in the commotion caused by the rifle, caused by the gun making its way through the crowd, because it was the gun making its way through the crowd, really, not the security guard, the thief was able to push his way out of the ring of people surrounding him and run, stumbling, bleeding, down the street and around the corner and out of my view and five or six men gave chase but the rifle didn't, the security guard didn't, and I told myself he made it away alive, deservedly so, even though he's a criminal, even though, according to someone else watching from the balcony, this was his third time being caught stealing, and I went back inside and the other PCVs I was with came back inside and I was glad I didn't see him get shot or beaten to death and we all talked about it for a couple minutes, some of them were down there, street-level, while it happened, and then we moved on to better things, better topics, because that happens here, mob justice happens here, and what's the point of dwelling on it?

Right now, middle of March, we're moving from the dry season into the rainy season. It's still hot, at least for me, who's hot when it gets above 80 in Seattle, but it's started to rain a bit at night, clouds have started to gather during the day, the winds have started to blow cool instead of hot and dry (but they're still usually filled with dust). But, maybe a month ago, middle of February, heart of the dry season still, the water in the tap that I have fifteen feet from my door ran out. It ran out one night and, since I didn't notice until it was already almost 9:00, or since I'm lazy, I waited. I didn't bathe the night it ran out. I didn't wash my dishes. I hoped it would come back in the morning. It didn't. I hoped it would come back in the evening when I came home. It didn't. So, dirty dishes piled up in the basin, my entire body filmy with dried sweat covered in fresh sweat, I needed water. And that meant, without the tap, going to the borehole.

It's not that I didn't want to go to the borehole. I was kind of looking forward to it. It'd be a good experience. It was just that there was one thing: jerrycans are heavy. But, whatever. I'm fit. I'm young. I'm healthy. And Ugandan women carry full jerrycans on their heads.

But.

I'm not a Ugandan woman. And, apparently, I'm not as fit as I think I am. (Although I calculated later, in an attempt to make myself feel better, that a full jerrycan, 20 litres of water, weighs about 44 pounds, and I have two, to carry at the same time, and they're unwieldy, I swear they're heavier than they sound. Oh, and the borehole is an entire kilometre away. I don't know how many miles that is -- because America! -- but when you're carrying 88 pounds of water, it feels like about twelve.)

To get to the borehole, I walked that kilometre through the centre of town, at sunset because otherwise it was just too hot, bright yellow jerrycans in hand, and extra stares passed through town with me, and I walked up to the borehole, big stupid grin on my face, anticipating how silly everyone would think that this was, white guy needing water. I greeted the crowd, maybe forty-strong, as I walked up -- "Yoga kere!" -- and set my jerrycans down at the end of the queue. I was determined not to be the imusugun who walked up to the borehole, skipped the queue, got his water, and walked away.

With my jerrycans in place, end of the queue, I stood and watched the whole process -- people towards the end of the queue, like me, milling about, pacing back and forth, chatting with each other, as they waited for their jerrycans and buckets to inch closer to the flow of water; people taking turns pumping water or making fun of the person pumping water or telling someone else to pump water, the water spurting out in bursts then flowing smoothly, funneled through the inverted, cut-off, top-half of a plastic water bottle into jerrycans, buckets, canteens, plastic bottles; people fighting forward through the crowd to get just a bottle, just really quickly, or just this little bucket, it'll just take a second; the two street kids crouched at the small gutter, trying to scoop up the runoff water that was quickly soaking into the mud; everything, slightly chaotic as it seemed, somehow in order, and there was, in fact, someone in charge -- for maybe ten or fifteen minutes.

So far, so good, on not being that white guy.
Then this exchange happened, when a older man came up to where I was standing slightly outside the main crowd circling the borehole, looking slightly amused at everything.

Him: "Good evening."
Me: "Good evening. How are you?"
Him: "I'm fine. How long have you been here?"
My thought process: Oh, he wants to know how long I've been in Uganda. I get this question all the time.
My answer, somewhat proudly: "I've been here for six months."
His thought process: You, sir, are an idiot.
His answer, somewhat slowly, like he was talking to a child: "I meant... at the borehole..."
Me: "Right."

And then he didn't wait for an actual answer to his question, he just grabbed my jerrycans and waded through the crowd, to the front of the queue, leaving me there, protesting to his back, "Wait-- but-- everyone else is-- I can--" and then I was that white guy.

And being that white guy led to a chain of reactions from the crowd: "We are all in line here!" which led to "But we are assisting this stranger!" which led to "He is not a stranger, he is a friend of ours!" which, the mouth of my first jerrycan now under the spout, led to -- directed at me, don't just stand there -- "You pump your water!" which led to -- directed at me, after my pumping the water wasn't much better than my just standing there -- "More effort is needed!" which led to -- directed at me, from myself in my head -- "My arms are so tired this first jerrycan isn't even full yet how am I going to carry these home I'm so weak this is terrible!" which was understood by the kid standing behind me who took over pumping, much to my relief.

Two jerrycans full -- "Eyalama noi!" -- I picked them up to walk the twelve miles back through town. As I picked them up, a jerrycan in each hand, I thought, These aren't so heavy. I've totally got this. Then I took about seven steps, and I thought, Ohhhhhhh thesearesoheavy Idon'ttotallygotthisnotatall. But, somehow, I made it. I mean, I made it about a quarter of the way home before I ran into Julius, a member of one of the Village Health Teams outside of town, who had his bicycle, and we talked for a couple minutes, and I can't tell you what we said, because I was concentrating all of my mental powers on willing him to put my jerrycans on the rack on his bicycle and take them home for me.

And he did. Probably less because of my mental powers and more because he's just a really nice guy, but still. Thank you, Julius. Eyalama noi.

And then I bathed for the first time in way longer than is appropriate.

These things did not happen:

Rioting.
Unrest.
Mass demonstrations.
Revolutions.
Anything, due to the election results.

And more stories to come sooner rather than later, promise!

Vote, Rocked

2011-02-21T21:49:00.000-08:00

As pretty much all of our northern neighbors -- South Sudan, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and on up to Bahrain, Yemen, Lebanon, Iran, and, hell, even Belgium just set a record for the longest time a country's been without an official government, and back to Africa now to stampedes in Mali, and of course there's always Somalia, oh, and it's not just north, now we can go south too, to Zimbabwe, where people were arrested for watching Al Jazeera videos of the protests in all of those other countries -- are overthrowing (or attempting to overthrow) their collective or respective governments, the election here ended up pretty much the same way I said it was going the other day.

Quiet, slow, orderly, mostly peaceful, and rigged (depending on who you ask).
Here's another NYT article on the whole process.

When I went to the polling station near my house around 4.00 or so, it was empty except for the workers, everybody either having marked their ballots already or been driven home by the wind storm that whipped dust and garbage into cyclones up and down the street earlier in the afternoon.

But the results are out, Museveni won with around 68% of the votes.

His victory was "categorically rejected" by the opposition on the basis of widespread ballot tampering, bribing and intimidation of voters.

And now we'll just be waiting -- to see what the opposition decides to do, and to see what happens next.

Rock the Vote

2011-02-18T01:36:00.000-08:00

It's finally here, after months of build-up and speculation and yellow NRM t-shirts and pickup trucks with massive speakers driving around endlessly blasting ear splitting music: election day.

So far, so quiet, which means so far, so good. I just spoke with my neighbor who'd just returned from voting in town. He said the line was long, but orderly, and that seems to be the case around the country.

Here's an article from the New York Times with a short background on the election, current president Yoweri Museveni and his twenty-five (and counting?) year time in power and his ridiculous hat, and why Uganda probably won't turn into Egypt in the next few days.

"On Friday, Mr. Museveni, a close American ally whose relatively small nation gets hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid, faces re-election, seeking his fifth consecutive stint as president. By all measures — polls, diplomatic analyses, even taxi-driver talk — he is expected to win.
But while Uganda shares many of the same, combustible conditions that have fueled popular uprisings in the Arab world — grinding poverty, masses of jobless, students glued to Facebook and a leader who refuses to step down after more than two decades in power — few here expect widespread upheaval."

That's the gist of the article, and probably how the election's going to turn out, for better or worse -- but mostly likely for more of the same.

Six Months Update

2011-02-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

As of last week, I've been in Uganda for six months.

Does that sound insane to anyone else?

And, I know what you're thinking, because I'm thinking it too: Just what, exactly, have I been doing this whole time? So here's just a little update with a bunch of random things from the last half-year. Which might, somehow, answer that question (although I can tell you now that the answer is either Not a whole lot, you lazy jerk, or, That's a lot of cool stuff, you lazy jerk, depending on how much you like me).

Places in Uganda I've been: Wakiso. Kampala. Gulu. Pader. Entebbe. Ngora. Kumi. Soroti. Ngai. Mbale. Masindi. Lira. Budadiri. Jinja. Iganga.

Books that I've read: 21 (and a half) -- but I won't list them all. My favorites though: 1 Let the Great World Spin. 2 White Teeth. 3 A Fraction of the Whole. 4 The Satanic Verses. 5a Interpreter of Maladies. 5b A Fine Balance. 5c The Lizard Cage. And I reread You Shall Know Our Velocity! before giving it as a birthday present, but that's in a category of its own.

Most played songs (of the last six months) on my iTunes: 1 "Knotty Pine" by Dirty Projectors & David Byrne. 2 "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" by Talking Heads. 3 "Fools" by The Dodos. 4 "Romance is Boring" by Los Campesinos!. 5 "Surprise Hotel" by Fools Gold.

Things that I'd never done before these last six months: 1 --------. 2 --------. (Censored. You'll just have to ask me in person if you want to know what these ones are. Gotta get you guys to talk to me somehow.) 3 Seen a pineapple plant. 4 Danced until 4am. 5 Eaten offals (surprisingly good!).
6 Eaten chicken gizzards (unsurprisingly terrible!). 7 Eaten jackfruit, passionfruit, liver, matooke, and drank ajon (all surprisingly or unsurprisingly mediocre!). 8 --------. (Again: ask if you need to know.) 9 Waited out a thunderstorm inside a mud hut. 10 Been in one country abroad for this long. 11 Been out of the States for this long at one time. 12 Hand-washed a whole load of laundry (and then started paying someone to do it for me). 13 Seen the heads of cows, recently removed from their bodies, lying in the dirt on the street, and the head of a goat, recently removed from its body, nailed to a tree by the ear. 14 Seen birds the size of the maribou storks. 15 Scored goals in a soccer game (and yeah, ok, sure it was against tiny orphan children, but I still feel good about it, ok?). 16 Seen so many guns so often and so casually. 17 Thought brownies could taste so good.
18 Killed so many cockroaches. 19 Heard the footsteps of thousands of termites. 20 Seen over a dozen cockroaches crawl out of the hole of the pit latrine to crawl around the floor at my feet and up the walls by my head. 21 Seen, up close, the effects of a recent war. 22 Used a machete, for any reason, or, more specifically, to chop up bricks into smaller bricks. 23 Thought insects could taste as good as fried termites. 24 Stood ankle-deep in the Nile River and watched the sunrise.
25 Celebrated Christmas and rang in the New Year in Africa. 26 Had a baby named after me.
27 Had to chase away goats so they didn't eat the laundry. 28 Seen mob-justice in action (though, fortunately, not with fatal results; which is a story to come soon). 29 Had a crowd of forty-ish kids in the village come just to look at me and mistake me for Wayne Rooney. 30 Gotten water from a borehole (which is another story to come soon). 31 Seen so ~~many boobs~~ much breastfeeding.
32 Ridden twelve hours in six taxis across almost an entire country in one day to see the people I like the most.

In the manuals the Peace Corps gave us for our Phase II assignments (that we completed the first three months at site), one suggestion was that, since the first few weeks at site can be stressful, we should make a list of all the things here that make us happy. I read that, laughed at how cheesy it sounded, and then did it anyway, not out of stress but out of just the fact that it was something to do one afternoon when there was nothing else to do. Here are some of those things: 1 Walking home with the sun setting in my eyes and the acrid smell of the smoke from cooking fires in my nose and kids running along by my side. 2 Cheese, brownies, real coffee, pizza (all at the same time even, I don't even care!). 3 Two dicks, vertical (--that one's just for you, Dan). 4 Pineapple trees. 5 The sound of heavy rain on my tin roof. 6 Lightning in the distance at night when it's not raining and it colors the clouds purple-black. 7 Open-back lorries packed with cows with curving, pointed, three-foot long horns. 8 Traveling: the hours of stories when I'm sitting next to a friend on the bus, or spacing out while staring out the window, buying meat on a stick when the bus or the taxi stops, and knowing that I'm on my way to see people I like or on my way home feeling refreshed and ready to work after spending time with those same people. 9 Telling people my name and having them understand me. 10 When a new person in town, who I haven't introduced myself to, somehow, one random day, knows my name. 11 The guy with the upside-down bicycle who pedals backwards to sharpen knives and machetes on the wheel, sending sparks flying, orange and bright. 12 Old women riding bicycles in traditional dresses, garishly and synthetically colored, with conical shoulder-pads. 13 The goats that, for some reason, love standing on top of four foot high anthills. 14 Falling asleep crammed into the backseat of a taxi with three other adults and three little kids and having it be the best nap I've gotten in months (because when you wake up and realize your head was resting on a stranger's head, you've taken napping to a whole 'nother level). 15 Cows, five feet from my door, cutting the grass. 16 Free mangoes. 17 Lying in bed, early morning, while monkeys climb the walls (outside, un?fortunately) and jump on the roof. 18 Sitting outside, early morning, with samosas and coffee for breakfast. 19 Packages from home. 20 Finding good, fulfilling, challenging work, which, really, just means feeling useful, or, at least, good, fulfilled, and challenged.

So there ya go. Six months. All right there in just a couple paragraphs.

I guess that answers that question.

Story Time

2011-01-30T07:29:00.000-08:00

I just got home to Ngora a few days ago from Kampala, where we had our three-month In-Service Training (IST) and where I went to get my glasses fixed and pack on a few pounds' worth of pizza, brownies, and (believe it!) awesome Mexican food with a pitcher of sangria, and from Jinja, where 30 some-odd PCVs from my group relaxed, went on a sunset cruise, and did some intense whitewater rafting on the Nile River. A pretty awesome trip, needless to say (but I said it anyway). I hadn't seen most of the other volunteers in the three months since coming to site so it was really good to catch up with them, and it was really good to get hot showers, tons of good food, and more than a couple dips in the Nile (while somehow mostly avoiding sunburns and completely avoiding crocodiles).

So, I figure it's time for some more random stories from the last few weeks. And here we go.

I want to start with a story about work, since I haven't talked about that much, and just to prove that I'm not, as a friend from home (ahem, Rory) put it, on a long, government-funded vacation. I was sitting at the office of my organization one morning, a few days before leaving for IST, waiting for my counterpart, Mary Margaret (or MM, as she likes to be called) and unsure where she had gone off to. So, twiddling my thumbs (figuratively -- I've never actually found that to be a very good way of passing the time), when another Ugandan man who I had never met came in and said that he was here to see my counterpart. I told him that she was probably around somewhere and would probably be back soon and he was welcome to wait.
So we got to talking and I asked him what he did for work. He told me that he was the director of a small community-based organization (CBO) a little bit outside of town. They're still relatively new and trying to partner with other, more established organizations in the area in order to mobilize resources and really get off the ground, which was why he was here to talk to MM. In answer to my question of what his CBO does, he started to explain. Agroforestry. (Eh.) Agriculture. (Eh.) HIV/AIDS counseling. (Cool.) I'm also interested in HIV/AIDS counseling, I told him. What are they doing for that? Not much, yet, he told me. They had some volunteers acting as counselors who were going from home to home doing counseling, but there was a problem with that. Whenever they would find someone who was HIV+ and open to counseling, the volunteers would inevitably be asked if they, too, had HIV. None of them did, and that's where the program stalled out. People living with HIV/AIDS want to talk to and/or be counseled by other people who are living with HIV/AIDS. Fortunately, he went on, he had found some HIV+ community members who were willing to and interested in acting as counselors. Unfortunately, he went on again, none of them had ever been trained as counselors, and his little CBO didn't have the information or resources to train them.
So that's when I got excited (since I've been wanting and trying to find work outside of my organization -- though my organization is great -- that I could do and plan and carry out on my own). Maybe that's something that I could help you with, I told him. He seemed excited about it too.
Though I don't have much direct experience with it, I really do think that I have, at least, the resources available to be able to plan and run a multi-day training session on the best strategies and practices for counseling and specifically for counseling people living with HIV/AIDS.
And while it'll only be starting with meeting the people who want to become counselors and running the training session, it definitely has the possibility of moving on to a lot more from that. There will be follow-up and monitoring as the newly-trained counselors go out into the community and start meeting with other HIV+ individuals, and there could be other HIV support and meeting groups to come out of it, and on and on.
So we exchanged phone numbers and he assured me that, while I was gone, he'd meet with the potential counselors and get them interested and mobilized for when I got back.
And he called me while I was in Kampala to find out when I'd be back in Ngora, so he sounds serious.
I'm excited.

Also along the work side of things, the school term is going to be starting up again soon here, and I've already discussed with a couple people the possibility of me teaching some life-skills classes at one or two of the schools around here. (Life-Skills is a program that looks, essentially, at positive living -- self-esteem, decision-making, assertiveness, positive role models, etc -- which is lacking in a lot of Ugandan youth.)
And, recently, I've been kicking around the idea of starting up a Boy Scout troop. Because Uganda has Boy Scouts, it's true.

And that's work, for now. It'll be picking up soon, and I'm really looking forward to it.

The presidential elections here are coming up quickly, as voting starts on February 18. President Museveni is looking to extend his 26 year term, while the challengers talk about it being time for change and a new face and claiming that, "We are the ones we have been waiting for."
The main opposition opponent in this election, as in the last two, is Kizza Besigye, Museveni's former personal physician, and the leader of the FDC party. He had a rally in Ngora recently, giving a speech to a massive (for Ngora) crowd at the primary school across the street from my organization. I listened from outside our offices, not wanting to be in the middle of the crowd since we're not supposed to take part in any sort of political action or activism as volunteers, as the person who was introducing Besigye got the crowd (even more) excited. Crackling over the speakers: "Ngora, oh yeah!" (Crowd cheers.) "FDC, oh yeah!" (Crowd cheers.) "Kizza Besigye, oh yeah!" (Crowd cheers.) And then to more cheers, Besigye took the stand, but most of his speech, though it was in English and then translated, didn't make it from the speakers over the crowd and cars and cows and bristling hot air to where I was standing. But the people who could hear him apparently thought it was quite the speech.
And then, when he was finished, we watched as he drove through the throngs of supporters, standing out of the sunroof of a shiny, late-model SUV, both arms outstretched, looking (unintentionally, I'm sure) very Nixon-esque, as he waved both hands in the signal of the FDC, the peace sign.
And as I watched the crowd disperse (to wherever they came from, because it was definitely more people than the town's population), jubilantly walking away on foot, or hopping onto open-back lorries blasting music, or cramming into cars that then almost ran over a small herd of cows, I had to wonder if he really stood a chance.
It's hard to tell from what people here tell me. Some people say he does have a chance, some say he doesn't. Some say that he'll win, in the vote total, but that it won't matter anyway because Museveni will win, in reality. Some people say that there will be violence and rioting if he wins, some say there will be violence and rioting if he loses, some say there won't be violence or rioting either way (and I probably agree with that last group). Someone told me that the Indian supermarket owners in Soroti weren't fully stocking their shelves because they're worried about rioting, someone else told me that they were fully stocking their shelves because they weren't worried at all (and I don't get up there enough to be able to tell the difference -- there's still more stuff than in the shops here and that's what really matters to me). Peace Corps is still bringing in the newest group of volunteers in a week or ten days or something, so they must not think there are going to be any major issues either, although they do also have us going on Standfast from February 11-25, meaning that, for safety and security reasons, we're all to stay at site that entire time.
But, two things, regardless of what happens -- 1: I can't wait for the elections to be over so that the campaign lorries that blast obscenely loud music and drive around town will (hopefully) stop doing that. And, 2: It's an interesting time to be in Africa. Ivory Coast. South Sudan. Egypt. And now Uganda, which hopefully goes more smoothly than all of those. And I think it will. I'm not worried, just interested.

I came home the other day and one of my neighbors, nowhere to be seen, had their dirty laundry sitting outside in basins ready to be washed. They must have gone back inside for something, because it was left up to me to chase away the goats that were getting ready to eat their clothes.

Sitting outside on my front step the other day, I watch as a kid comes around the corner of the half-constructed house near mine. Looking behind him to make sure he hasn't been spotted, he doesn't notice me either. Thinking he's in the clear, he starts to squat and drop his shorts. That's right. To poop in the grass, not twenty feet from my door. Halfway into his squat, he looks up and sees me, half-surprised, half-trying-not-to-laugh. He pauses, slowly hikes his shorts back up, and tiptoes back around the corner out of my line of sight. Two seconds later, he comes back, shorts pulled up, looks at me, and says, "Ejai emopiira?" -- "Do you have a football?"
Yeah. Let's just move on. Pretend like you weren't just about to do what I saw you about to do.
And no, I don't have a football.

Ugandan quote of the week, to me: "Most Americans are big and strong. I don't know why you are so short and thin." It wasn't meant to be an insult, just pure confusion, and I had no answer for him.

I had my first Ugandan baby named after me. About a month or so ago, I was out with MM, driving around doing something, when she got a phone call that someone she knew was at one of the health centres near town, in labor, with complications. Since we were already in the car, and since she had to be transferred from the HC to one of the bigger hospitals in the area, we went and picked her up, went to the nearest hospital where they could help, in Kumi, 20km away, then found out, after some waiting around, that the doctor wasn't there, and, so, took off to the next closest hospital, probably at least 20km farther away, where we dropped her off, again, after not a little bit of waiting around. So basically, I had nothing to do with this, or with the delivery, but it was a healthy baby boy, and, since I was there, though not when he was actually born, they named him Daniel. Despite doing nothing to earn having the baby named after me, I still felt pretty good about it.
One reason I felt good about it was that, the vast majority of the time, when I tell Ugandans what my name is, they don't understand me at all. It usually goes like this -- Me: "Nice to meet you, my name is Daniel." Ugandan: "Channelrelyel...lel?" Me: "Good enough."
I tried introducing myself as Danny for a couple months, but that always came across as Tony. Which, I guess, is at least a real name, but still.
However, success of the day today, I introduced myself to someone while I was at the dairy buying a bag of freshly boiled whole milk, and, unbelievable as it sounds, he understood me. Blew my mind. And was almost as awesome as having that baby named after me.

I mentioned the "pterodactyl birds" in my last blog post. Unfortunately that's not their real name -- they're actually called maribou storks -- but it's a pretty good descriptor. Standing up, they probably come up at least to my elbow, are hideously ugly, with bald heads covered in places with a few stringy hairs and pink, rubbery waddles hanging from their necks and massive beaks that you can hear clopping together if you're close enough. There are, literally, flocks of them everywhere in Kampala. And they are easily the most hideous animal I've ever seen. Anyway. At IST, a friend and I were joking about running up to one and punching it. I said that I'd punch it right on the top of the head, while she thought it would be a better idea to go straight in with a gut-punch. We debated which was better, and after I helped her buy a bike later, we almost got to test those theories. We were walking the bike back past a flock of six or seven of them standing in the grass about a hundred feet away. We both looked at each other, looked at the birds, looked at the bike, and then I hopped on and started pedaling straight at them. Drive-by punch to the skull. Or that was the idea anyway. I sped closer and closer, they barely flinched, but I definitely did and veered away at the last second. No way I was actually going to touch one of those things. But it's the thought that counts.

I'm a terrible saver. I had an awesome package from home waiting for me when I got back from IST. Velveeta shells and cheese, caramel popcorn, a couple Clif Bars, instant oatmeal packets, water-flavoring packets, along with a couple books, crossword puzzles, my nice rain jacket, and a sweatshirt for whenever I go way down to the southwest or end up climbing Mt. Elgon. I opened the package as soon as I got home, and within less than 48 hours, had eaten the shells and cheese, all the caramel popcorn, both of the Clif Bars, several oatmeal packets, and several drink packets. And I don't feel bad about that at all.

I don't know if I've talked about the Rolex before, but it's long overdue, if I haven't. It's a popular Ugandan street food, where fried eggs are mixed with cabbage, tomatoes, and salt, and then wrapped in a chapati, like a delicious breakfast burrito. I was fortunate enough to have a Rolex Guy in Ngora, and I made sure he knew how happy I was about that by giving him lots and lots of business over the last few months. Until I got home from Christmas.
One night, a day or two after I got back, at about 8:00, I walked over into town to get a couple Rolexes. I was really excited about it. A good Rolex is a very, very good thing. It was pitch dark out, since there was no moon, but I managed to make it to where Rolex Guy always is with his stand. Or to where I thought he was. The broken-down lorry that had been sitting on blocks next to his Rolex stand since I got to Ngora (one of the biggest landmarks in town, especially when it's dark out) was gone, and Rolex Guy was replaced by the tenth Chicken-and-Chapati Guy in town. I couldn't believe it. I was actually so confused that I just stood there for about fifteen seconds, wondering where I was. But then I realized what had happened. Rolex Guy was gone. Devastating. (It might not sound like much to people back home, but, believe me: devastating. I might actually lose even more weight now.)

One of my favorite Ugandan-English phrases is "You were lost!" They say it to you when they first see you after you've just gotten back from any sort of extended trip. It's like you only meant to leave for a few minutes and then spent all the rest of that time trying to find your way back home. Or, maybe, it's like you left and when they realized that, they spent the entire time you were away searching everywhere for you. And now that they've found you, after all that desperate searching, the only thing to say is, "You were lost!" I like it.

I went to an introduction ceremony for a guy who works at my organization. The introduction ceremony is one step before marriage here, where the groom-to-be is "introduced" to the family of the bride-to-be, people give a lot of speeches that I can't understand, they figure out what the dowry is going to be, and then there's food and drink and dancing.
At this introduction, though, the negotiation of the dowry was taking forever. Usually the have a pretty good idea of what it's going to be coming in, so it's all just finishing up the details at that point. But after an hour had passed, during which time all the other guests and I (since the committee who negotiates the dowry does so in private) were just sitting around making small talk and waiting for dinner, I asked what was making this take so much longer than I had been told it would.
The bride-to-be got pregnant before the wedding, was the answer. And since the groom-to-be was the one to get her pregnant before the wedding, his family was going to have to pay more for the dowry.
But by "got pregnant before the wedding," I mean, "they have a three year-old daughter." So, it's like a shotgun wedding. It's just moving on African time.

Speaking of kids: As I left my house to go to work the other day, a little boy, maybe not even two years old, ran up to me, alone, grabbed my hand and started walking with me. We walked, super slowly because of his tiny-little-kid steps, for a good five minutes, while the neighbors laughed and asked where I got the kid (or something like that), and I kept waiting for him to realize that he was getting farther and farther from home (I assumed) and wondering what I was going to do with him when he ended up walking all the way across town with me because he definitely did look like he was planning on letting go any time soon, and we almost made it to the main road, when a woman, maybe his mom, maybe not, called to him and he looked at her, then looked at me, then ran off. It was pretty awesome. Mostly I just like it when kids aren't A: completely terrified of me, or B: asking me for money. The ones that just want to kick it make me happy.

Crazy newspaper story: 30 baboons were killed by a vermin control team in Luweero District last week after farmers were complaining that the baboons were destroying their crops and scaring women and children as they went for water. Crazy. But the best part is that the story said that the vermin control team attacked the baboons "at their hideout" like they were a posse of Wild West bandits, although, more than the Wild West, all I could think of was the movie Congo and gorillas with laser guns strapped to their backs. Crazy story, but awesome mental image.

One last story, that's not actually mine, but it's too good not to share. Another volunteer was in her room at home the other day, middle of the afternoon, she was lying in bed reading and dozed off for a minute, lying on her side, facing the wall. She woke up to a sort of shuffling sound, something moving around a little bit, but figured it was the neighbor girls in the next room over. Then she rolled over and found herself face-to-face with a massive cow that had walked into her bedroom. It was just standing there. Inches from her bed. Understandably surprised, she slapped the cow in the face with her book and it, since it was fully and entirely inside her bedroom, turned around and shuffled out. She had no idea how long it had been in there. That's got to be the quintessential living-in-rural-Africa story of the month. Awesome.

That's pretty much it for now.

Except for rafting. We spent the day on the Nile, charging over a bunch of Class 5 rapids (with Class 6 being the highest, and, also, being technically impassable), flipping the raft on a smaller one, falling out a few times even when the raft didn't flip, and getting out and floating down the river on the flat parts, balancing, for a while, pineapple slices on our chests like otters. It was my first time rafting and it will be pretty hard to top it. Just awesome all around. And this is what it looked like when we flipped (that's me in the middle in the blue shirt). Good. Times.

Sipi Christmas

2011-01-12T23:20:00.000-08:00

A few of my best friends here and I spent Christmas day hiking up to Sipi Falls. It was not the way any of us had spent Christmas before, but it was a really awesome way to spend our first Christmas in Africa.

To get to the falls, we started off on a small path, red Ugandan dirt, and the mob of children that had met us on the road fell away as we declined offers of guides and told the older kids who started to explain how to get there that we weren't going to pay them to tell us. The path led us away from the road and over green rolling hills covered in banana groves and overgrowth and dotted with huts, we were in the middle of a sharp valley, almost more of a large ravine, maybe a mile across, with the walls rising up quickly on either side and the banana trees in the distance making green Xs and patterns on the sides of the hills, and we greeted people as we walked right through their gardens and we declined to pay more people who insisted that there was an entrance fee and, look, they even have receipt books, so you know it's official (but it's not, and there is no entrance fee, but clever, with the receipt books.) And after twenty or thirty minutes of walking, we could see the falls coming off of a cliff face, just one white streak against the brown rocks and green trees, and just a little farther after that and we could hear the white noise of the water on the rocks below, and just a little farther after that and we could feel the mist swirling around and making us shiver against the wind that would make the waterfall sway to one side, and it was all very Jurassic Park as we passed among taller trees that had raking scratches on the bark, maybe from lions or velociraptors or just because that's how the bark looked, and then we were right at the falls. We still stood up on a smaller hill, some ninety meters below the top of the falls and ten meters above the pool at the bottom (if Martin, a local kid, sporting a Barack Obama shirt, who somehow became our guide despite us telling everyone we didn't need one, was right in his confident statement of the fact that the falls are 100 meters high). So we stood and watched the water falling and shifting in the wind and I said the mist reminded me of Seattle and someone said that makes Seattle sound terrible and I disagreed and then shivered. And we made our way down to the pool where the mist was thicker and we shivered more and walked around and talked about whether we'd rather be a bird living in a nest in a tree or on the side of a cliff, and agreed, cliff, definitely, and if we'd rather have a house where we could hear the ocean all the time or hear a waterfall, and agreed, ocean, definitely, and then we were too cold and made our slippery way back up to the hill where we sat and watched the water fall. And when we'd had enough of being cold and damp and watching water fall off of a cliff, we headed up one side of the valley, along another narrow red dirt path, past more huts, declining more receipt books, picking up a chameleon and watching its perfectly round eyes roll around its head and its mitten hands gripping a stick, and with Martin asking, repeatedly, if we were tired, and with us insisting, repeatedly, that we weren't, we made it to the top, to a guesthouse (called the Crow's Nest, a fact we had to repeat, loudly, many times on the phone with the driver who was coming to pick us up -- "We are waiting at the CROW'S NEST... Yes, it is called the CROW'S NEST... CR-- ... CROW'S ... NEST.") with a small restaurant where we could sit again and watch the water fall, but this time we could do it from a distance and with a beer in hand. And we waited until dark for the driver with heavy rain clouds threatening and drove down the winding road in the dark, with lightning striking where we had just been, back to our guesthouse where more beer and a fantastic spread of Ugandan food was waiting for us. Merry Christmas.

(Side note: I ended up not climbing Mount Elgon. One of my friends had to fly back to the States for a couple weeks, and so I decided to entertain her by traveling to Kampala and Entebbe with her instead, and whether or not she was entertained, I still had fun, and by fun I mean we ate pizza and brownies and got real coffee. But the mountain will still be there, I assume, for the next two years, and I'll definitely do it at some point, and I'm looking forward to it already.)

We had a few more days of relaxing too, just bumming around, sleeping in late, trying to think of names for someone's new kittens (and settling on Susan Sarandon and The Bejazzler, after getting rid of my favorite idea, which was to call them both The Mighty Ducks, though, sadly, a few days later when they got home, they found out, as they put in their text to me: TERRIBLE NEWS. ALL THE KITTENS WERE EATEN BY A PTERODACTYL BIRD. WORST. DAY. EVER.), and at one point I even ate a legit quesadilla and a mocha milkshake, and all of that was really nice too. Really solid Christmas, despite the fact that I think we were all missing our families and traditions from home just a little bit, but how could you not? No Totino's Pizza Rolls on Christmas Eve is a crime.

But, by far, the best story from Christmas:

The whole time we were around the town we stayed at and going up to the falls and even once or twice on the hike to the falls, we kept seeing young Ugandan men, maybe in their late teens or early twenties, wearing women's skirts. Like, there was no mistaking that these were not kilts, or wraps, or something that could, with a certain perspective, appear manly. These were cut for a woman's hips, patterned in bright flowers or colorful paisley. We could not figure it out. We could also not help laughing at them behind their backs, joking to oursleves, "Hey, dude. Nice skirt."

And then we found out why they were wearing skirts. And then it got even better.

All of these young Ugandan men were wearing women's skirts because they had just been circumcised.

Nothing to keep you in your place after enduring an extremely painful (I assume, confidently) rite of passage into manhood like having to put on ladies' clothes.

The best, however, were the guys who'd be shuffling along slowly, one hand gingerly placed in front of their freshly chopped manhood, walking along with a limp and a grimace.

Merry Christmas? Ouch.

Interpreter of Maladies

2011-01-10T23:09:00.000-08:00

"Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."

Just that.

The Tallest Man on Earth

2011-01-10T08:43:00.000-08:00

Stories and a couple pictures from an awesome Christmas are coming, but here's this for now.

The power was out last night and so I sat outside on my front step with the first pin-prick stars and the smallest sliver of the moon, though it was dark enough that I could still see the shadow of the rest of it, and listened to music and I remembered that this line, when I listened to this song at home, made me think of living here, and now that I am here, it makes me think of living here -- how it's so flat out here that when you climb up above everything else you can see until you can't, and the way that the lightning colors everything pale purple-white during diagonal lashing rains or lights up piles of clouds in the black night distance, and when I got home from Christmas and it was hot as hot and so dry and dust-blown because it hadn't rained in weeks and I couldn't bathe because the tap had gone dry and people in town had to walk, jerrycans on their heads or roped to the backs of their bicycles, for maybe an hour or maybe more to find water somewhere else, and when there's no moon and I wake up in the pitch-black in the middle of the night and open my eyes and nothing changes and I wave my hand in front of my face, my fingers inches from my eyes, and am unable to see it or even sense the movement and for just a second I wonder if I can see anything at all as I roll over and go back to sleep, hoping, still half-dreaming, that I'll be able to see the sun when I wake up -- and it's this: "Well, hell, I'm just a blind man on the plains. I drink my water when it rains, and live by chance among the lightning strikes." And then the power came back on and I could still see in the morning and I was pretty happy about that.

Blah Blah Blahg

2010-12-21T13:17:00.000-08:00

You guys. I know. You're all like, "Danny, you need to blog more. Why are you even in Africa, if you're not going to blog about it. I mean, come on."

I hear you. I hear your italics. Oh, and I'm gonna feed you, baby birds.

So here's a wormy regurgitation of random stories and things out of my journal from the past couple months, from my mouth to yours. Merry Christmas!

(Note: I'm probably going to refer to "the other day" as when most of these stories took place, which could literally mean the other day, or could mean, like, October. Just don't want anyone to think this is all typical of one day here in Ngora.)

Out with my counterpart the other day when an old woman comes up to me asking for money. My counterpart turns to her, says something to her in Ateso. The old woman looks at me, looks back at my counterpart, looks confused, looks skeptical. But then she walks away. My counterpart turns to me, says, "I told her you don't have any money because you're not actually white, you're a Ugandan who lost all the color from his skin and was shunned by his family, and so we have taken you in because we felt sorry for you."

The other day, we were out in one of the villages, parked in the shade of a mango tree. In our maroon Toyota Hilux pickup truck, I was sitting sideways in the passenger seat, idly kicking my feet out the open door, sweating, staring out at nothing but green and tawny colored grasses and mud huts and goats standing on top of anthills. We were waiting for, what?, something, or we were just waiting, sometimes in Africa you just wait, and you don't talk, you all just sit and stare out at nothing, and sometimes I like to chew on grass while staring, but that's beside the point. We had the radio on. A reggae version of a familiar song came on as I was sweating and squinting against the equatorial sun.
"I'm dreaming... of a white Christmas..."
Reggae Jingle Bells came on next.
I squinted a little harder into the sun, felt sweat droplets roll down my spine, tried to process all of those things at once, and my brain exploded a little bit.

"I met a man who bicycled across the country twelve times. His legs are ruined now, but the maps on his wall are dark with Magic Marker lines showing the places he's been."

Oh, so we had a pool party in Mbale the other day. We went to a grocery store for a few things first, and there was a guard outside the door, armed with an old bolt-action rifle. One of the other volunteers I was with asked the guard if he could have his gun. The guard said no. We asked if it actually worked. The guard said yes. And to prove it, he pointed at the pockmarks of two bullet holes, one on the ceiling of the awning, the other ten feet up on the concrete wall, both just a few feet from the store he was guarding. His sheepish grin said those were just for fun, or an accident, or he's a terrible aim, or all three of those.

I got a phone call from Fred, our Safety and Security guy the other day, letting me know that he was sending someone out to inspect my new house. But so the phone rang, and I answered, not recognizing the number.
"Hello?" "Hello, this is Fred with the Peace Corps. You sound weak, are you ok?"
I told Fred I was fine. I didn't think I sounded weak.
Then I hung up with Fred and went for water and had to carry a full 20L jerrycan about 100 yards and I realized he was right.

I ate offals. Offals are the intestines of a cow and/or goat. They weren't bad. I also ate fried termites. They weren't bad either, because they were delicious.

The other night, I waited out a thunderstorm in a hut. We were sitting around outside as the sun dipped to the west and black clouds built up in the east. Then those black clouds rushed overhead and expedited the sunset and fat droplets of rain began to splatter in the dirt and he hurried into the hut. I sat opposite the door way and watched the rain come down in fat droplets and then sheets at a forty-five degree angle and then currents and rivulets across the dirt courtyard, and the wind blew jerrycans away and threw unripe mangoes into the mud, and the lightning flashed so close and lit everything, for just a second, in pale, purple-white light, and then the thunder sounded like someone was cracking the sky in half.
And it was perfect.
But it was so perfect that I couldn't help myself, and I simultaneously felt like I was in an exhibit in a natural history museum -- and I immediately hated every elementary school field trip I'd ever been on -- and like I was listening to one of those white noise machines from Sharper Image -- and I hated every time we'd ever stopped there in the mall. Damn those massage chairs they always had out front.
But, tried to forget those things, and it was still pretty perfect, and I still do love all those elementary school field trips.
Afterward, I walked home in the dark, except when lightning lit everything in white and purple, dodging new ponds and rivers of rainwater, except when I didn't and went ankle-deep in it, and I got back into town and the power was out and it was totally post-apocalyptic with the lightning and the half-constructed buildings and the flickering lanterns and boda boda headlights and people shouting and laughing and running across the street, and they're just silhouettes after sunset if you can even see them at all, and I bought chicken and chapatti from a cardboard box, and made it back, muddy-footed, to the bar, or home, where surly youths sat inside huddled around a lantern, plotting ways to kill Kevin Costner in Waterworld.
It was awesome.

Here's something: I've spent three weeks straight at site now without hanging out with another American. And, as of this month, I've spent a full year total of my life abroad, so I feel good about that. Now, I'm no math doctor, but if I've spent one year abroad out of twenty-five, then that's like 25% of my life that I've spent around. That's pretty cool.

Walking out to my pit latrine the other night, I turn the corner and get hit in the face by a moth with a six-inch wingspan. I freak out a little bit, naturally, and run to the latrine, turn on the light, and unlock the padlock on the door. The moth, being a moth, sees the light and beats me into the latrine. It flaps around insanely for a minute or two, while I stand with the door open hoping it will fly out. Instead it lands on the wall. This gives a chance for an eight-inch lizard to dark out from the shadows and attempt to chomp down on the moth's head which leads the moth to batter the lizard with its dusty moth wings until it escapes and flies out. Godzilla vs Mothra, in my pit latrine.
Two nights later, coming back from the latrine, I walk into my house and get hit in the face by a moth with a six-inch wingspan. This time, when it lands on the wall, I kill it with a flipflop. Thrown tomahawk-style twenty feet across the entire length of both rooms of my house.

The other night, I was sitting around a pot of ajon (the local Teso beer, made from fermented millet flour, basically, I think, which is usually drank out of a clay pot, but this time when I say pot, I mean jerrycan with the top cut off) with my friend Martin (or "Martino" as they pronounce it here, because they Italianize names, which is why I am known as "Danielli") and his brothers and a few dudes from town, when a couple kids come up to watch me drinking from one of the communal four-foot straws.
Dude to my right: "They are curious to see how you suck."
Me: "Oh, burn."

There is a village outside of town called Osigiria. In Ateso, this means donkey. It's called Osigiria because there was a white man who lived there around the beginning of the 1900s. He owned one donkey. One night the villagers stole, killed, and ate his donkey. Then they named the village after it. The white man never knew what happened to his donkey.

The other night, under the pale light of a nearly-full moon, around a pot of ajon (I swear, I've only drank at site four times, literally) with twenty (I counted) long straws sticking out, in a clearing of mud huts, with a small white calf with protruding ribs standing off to the side and lowing loudly, bats flitting overhead, the orange glow of a cooking fire radiating from behind one of the huts, with bits of termites stuck between my teeth, without an electric light in site, the faces of the other men becoming indistinguishable in the dark, the older man to my and Martino's right -- the teacher from Ngora High, with the beard flecked with gray, the one who had advised me to take a Ugandan wife, then asked if I was married, then advised me to take a Ugandan wife, again, and had wondered if it were true, as he had heard, that white men fear death but don't fear HIV, but it's not true, because I fear it, and had wondered if it were true, as he had heard, that in America you can't see the moon or the stars and in those Scandinavian countries some days the sun never comes up, and who said that after September 11th, at night, you could see the American fighters flying overhead on their way to Iraq but you couldn't see them during the day because the sun was too bright, and whose eyes seemed clear but whose speech began to drag a little bit but not so much that he couldn't quiet the crowd around the pot -- gave a speech welcoming me to Africa, to Uganda, to Teso, to Ngora, and explained that they drank this way, communally, from one part, because they were communal, a community, and now I was part of the community and I needed an Iteso name and he gave me one. He said that Martino and I were twins, and we had to be called by the names that twins are called by, and he said that Martino was to be Opio, which meant that I was to be Odongo.
We'll see if it sticks.

"Whatever insights I have are fragmentary and fleeting. I am not so much seeking anything as I am allowing the world to come to me, allowing the days to unfold, the dramas of weather and wild creatures, the many different ways the world appears to the human eye -- the colors and shapes constantly shifting."

Ok. That's all for now.

For Christmas, I'm off to meet up with my favorite people here and see Sipi Falls and maybe check out one of the traditional circumcision ceremonies of the local tribes and climb the Rainier-sized Mount Elgon, which definitely sounds like something from Lord of the Rings, and so I'm going to throw something into the fires of it. But a trip like that means pictures, so you can all look forward to seeing those.

Merry Christmas! And happy New Year! I hope it's wonderful for all of you, and for those of you who actually are enjoying a white Christmas, enjoy it.

Nothing Much

2010-12-05T04:09:00.000-08:00

I know it's been a while since I've posted anything. Sorry for that. But it's too hot to go outside right now, so here's a monkey. Happy now?

In other news...

1: I'm going to be moving into another place tomorrow. It will probably only be temporary, since I'm going to keep looking for a house a bit outside of town where I can sit outside and enjoy some sort of a view and maybe see more monkeys. My counterpart told me that people do a lot of construction on houses in December and January since they aren't paying school fees and have more disposable income in those months. So I'll be on the lookout and putting the word out that whitey wants a new home. We'll see what happens. If I can't find anything or if I end up really liking the temporary place, I'll put some work into it and it will definitely be liveable. Either way, I'll miss having a shower and a sink.

2: I had a great Thanksgiving and was reminded of all the things I have to be thankful for both here and back home. There wasn't any turkey or pie, but I ate so much homemade pizza I almost threw up. Which I am also thankful for.

3: Other than that, I've just been trying to keep getting integrated into the community here -- hanging out, wandering around, using more Ateso, and climbing up big rocks -- and trying to figure out what exactly I can do for the next two years in terms of work. The other day I was sort of cat-called by name by about twenty older secondary school girls who were all sitting in the bed of a pickup truck, which was funny and totally inappropriate, but at least people are learning my name.

And that's pretty much it. There are other stories and random stuff, but, again, it's just too hot. So things are just moving at the pace of Africa and they're good and getting better.

Ngora

2010-11-21T07:19:00.000-08:00

I live in Ngora. I think I might have forgotten to mention that until now. Actually, I live in five different levels of Ngora-ness. In Uganda, the government is broken down into different levels of Local Councils. There are districts, which are the biggest areas, like states at home, then there are counties, sub-counties, parishes, and villages. So I live in Ngora District, County, Sub-County, Parish, and finally in Ngora Town, itself. It's pretty small, there are three main roads in town, each runs east-west, and they're each about a quarter of a mile long, or so. There is the main-main road, and then I live on the third road over. I recently read that there are a little over 43,000 people in Ngora, and although that didn't say Ngora District, specifically, that's what I'm assuming is the case. So it's little, but it's nice. Now that we're a district (up until July of this year, Ngora was part of Kumi District), they tell me that there's going to be a lot more things happening here in the near future. I'm not entirely sure I believe that, but it will be interesting to see. Ngora Town actually used to be very nice, from what I hear, due to a large population of Indian business owners. Idi Amin kicked all Indians out of Uganda, though many have come back, but it's easy to see the effects are still here, most prominently in the run-down Hindu temple in the middle of town, as well as all the well-constructed (at one time, anyway) buildings which are now abandoned and falling down. These buildings though, I'm told, are being rebuilt and reoccupied now, again, because the town is a district headquarters and we're going to be big-time. Anyway. Ngora is part of the Teso Region of Eastern Uganda. It is very, very flat out here, hot and getting hotter, I swear, every single day, but also (although this could change with the dry season coming up, the effects of which are already being seen in the amount of red dust that blows around everywhere now, coating my hair and clothes, without the rain to tamp it down) very green, with tall grass and (mostly) short trees stretching literally as far as you can see. We also have rocks. Lots of them. Giant, hundred-plus-foot gray monoliths that dot the countryside and break up the flatness. I love them. So, the other day, we climbed to the top of the one that marks the beginning of town. And here is what Ngora looks like from there. On the left is part of the main road and the shops there. In the middle, is my (the third) road. You can see my house if you look towards the far end of the road, the electricity pole on the right, where you can see some umbrellas, and the yellowish coloured one is mine. Then on the right is the middle/second road. So that's my little town, where I once found a pineapple, the only one I've seen, in the market. (And, click on the pictures to make them bigger.)

And, naturally, kids followed / guided us up and sat, enjoying the view, just like we were, while others below saw us and shouted "Imusugut!" and we could hear their voices but couldn't see where they were coming from, from that high up.

Cheers

2010-11-15T09:53:00.000-08:00

Remember how I said that my living situation is really awesome? It got more awesomer recently, with the addition of a shower in my bathing area and rumors of a sink to come. The shower doesn't work yet, but it's pretty to look at and I like the fact that I'll probably get a shower before I get a ceiling. And they've been painting and doing a lot of other work on the compound as a whole.

Unfortunately, after that, it got a lot less awesomer.

They're turning the whole place into a guest house. This is fine with me, I think it could be nice to meet people who are coming to stay for a few days or so, though I'm pretty positive tourists don't come to Ngora, so I don't think I'd be meeting anyone.

Actually, let me go back for a second. The compound part, with all the rooms and bathing areas and latrines actually only makes up about two-thirds of the building. The rest is a store-front that opens up onto the street, which, until recently wasn't being used for anything.

So, they're turning the compound part of the building into a guest house. This is fine.
They're turning the store-front part of the building into a bar. This is not fine.

Ugandans really love music. Naturally, then, they play it at an obscene volume. And now there are speakers playing said music at said volume about fifteen feet from my home. I don't mind the Ugandan music, and I actually enjoy a lot of it, but not quite so much when it's louder in my home than my computer speakers can go.

Some Ugandans also really love drinking, sometimes way more than they should. And now there are people drinking, probably more than they should, about seven feet from me. I don't mind drinking, but not quite so much when it's random people drinking next to my front door.

I had originally assumed that the bar would be only in the store-front, and not outside my door, and that there would be a lock on the door between the bar and the compound and that life would go on as usual, maybe slightly louder (but, I have to admit, I hadn't really thought about the music yet). And, you know me, I'll put up with a lot of stuff that I don't want to put up with because I don't know why, I'm either nice or spineless, but let's go with nice.

So I discussed this with a few other volunteers today. One asked if this meant that I was going to become an alcoholic or if it just meant that people should come visit. One told me a story of his neighbor and landlord who came home totally wasted the other night, came into the his side of the house, wouldn't leave for over an hour, then asked him if he wanted to fight, and then kissed him on both cheeks when he said no. One told me that I was the type of person who would put up with a bar in their compound for two years without saying anything (is my lack of a spine, er, my niceness that obvious?) and that that was a bad choice because they'd probably never come visit. Among other reasons.

Needless to say, I'm probably going to have to talk to Peace Corps. Earlier I was saying that I would just talk to my neighbor Peter about putting the tables and chairs in front of the bar, rather than next to my front door. And that I could probably put up with the music after that. But then I was reminded that this is two years, and, as I'm sitting here jamming to Ugandan pop, I'm realizing that next July or December or the year 2012 when they're playing the same songs at the same volume, I will probably have already gone insane. And I just talked this weekend with some PCVs who've been here for a year and a half and they said that being here this long makes you a weirdo anyway, so I don't need to help the process along.

So, that sucks. 1: It sucks to move. 2: My house is really nice. 3: Shower! 4: I really like Peter and it was really quiet here before and I like being right on the outskirts of town.

But, if I were to move, it wouldn't be all bad. 1: I wouldn't be listening to this song anymore, I mean, for the love of God, I think this might be the same song they've been playing for the last six hours. 2: Since I'm already out here, I'd be able to see the other options and choose the best one. 3: Moving would also be a chance to get to know more people and a different part of town.

So, we'll see what happens.

However, I also went on a long walk out of town towards the villages this evening while the sun was setting and it was green and quiet and beautiful and I spoke a lot of Ateso and everyone pointed their homes out to me and asked me to come back and visit and an old woman walking ahead of me turned and saw me and waited for me and we walked together for a good ten minutes until she turned to go home and we talked and it was nice because she just wanted to greet me and didn't ask for anything except that I greet her back and I tried to get a small child named Sylvia to give me her herd of goats but she refused for some reason, probably because she pointed at them and said "Akinei!" meaning "Goats!" and I just pointed at them and said "Akinei ka?" meaning "My goats?" so she said "Mam!" meaning no and she was right, they weren't my goats, but maybe I can still convince her to give me some later, and the whole thing was easily the best experience I've had since being at site.

Roommates

2010-11-14T06:59:00.000-08:00

Here in Uganda, we've all learned to deal with some pretty intense situations when it comes to the insect life here. Cockroaches the size of your thumb are the norm. I've heard tales of a spider so big you can hear its footsteps while it walks across your room. You hear the sound of wings flapping outside your pit latrine at night and think it's a bat, only to find out it's actually a beetle the size of a baseball. You have a ten-day battle with a three-inch long wasp that lives in your house and chases you from one room to the other and back.

There's not a whole lot you can do. You ignore some of them and hope they go away and/or don't bite you and/or aren't poisonous or carrying disease. You kill others and hope that more don't come to take their place.

So the other night, I was lying in bed, reading with my headlamp on, when I get hit in the face by a praying mantis. I grab an issue of the Economist from spring of 2009, and swat it, sending it bouncing off the wall and under my bed. I roll over and shine the light under the bed to make sure it's dead.

I hadn't looked under my bed since I got it, two and a half weeks ago.

The praying mantis was dead.
And I found an entire colony of ants had built a series of dirt tunnels under my head while I slept.

Insane.

So I rolled back over and spent a few minutes debating what to do. Get up and deal with it now or go to sleep and hope that it had taken them a while to build that much and that I wouldn't wake up covered in dirt tunnels and ants and deal with in the morning.

I went to sleep. And then I didn't get around to the ants for a few days.
I'm gross, I know.

When I went to take care of it today, the tunnels were still there, snaking from the corner over to the box from my stove. I didn't see any ants though. Until I sort of kicked at the box. A thousand ants swarmed out of the box, back into their tunnels, back through the crack they came in. I could hear them. Millions of tiny legs make a surprisingly loud and creepy noise.

Needless to say, I lost a lot of brain cells today from spraying a lot of BOP Insecticide (which, according to the can, has a New Approved Formula, so that's nice). And I'm going to try to stop being a disgusting human being.

(And the picture is sideways for some reason, but you get the point.)

Pineapple Trees

2010-11-10T07:24:00.000-08:00

Obviously I've learned a lot in the three months that I've been here. But this is about the best, and possibly most important fact that I've learned so far.

Pineapples do not grow on trees. I know, right? Who knew?

This goes back to training in Wakiso, when, one Sunday afternoon, my friend Eliza and I took a walk out of town. Wandering down one of the dirt roads, talking about nothing and admiring the view every time we reached the top of hill and being hemmed in by trees on either side when we reached the bottom. From the top of one hill, we saw a compound of buildings on the next rise and, wondering what it was, decided to try to get over to it. We branched off the main road and after another ten or fifteen minutes reached the fence and then the gate of what turned out to be a school and an orphanage.

The kids who lived there were excited to see us, as always, and they brought us inside where we chatted and played with them, my arm growing tired from doing bicep curls with a little girl whose pants gave way to serious plumber's crack every time I picked her up. Eventually they took us on a tour of the compound where we saw all the school and the dorms and the lake and the football field and the pig sty.

As we were walking around the compound, one boy in front of me pointed to a short, spiky plant, which distinctly resembled aloe.

Sweet little orphan, trying to teach the muzungu about Uganda: "This is a pineapple plant."
Me, not wanting him to go through life misinformed about pineapples, I mean, seriously, what are they teaching in the schools here?, poor kid: "No, it's not. Pineapples grow on trees."

I told this to Eliza a little bit later.
Her, laughing, hard: "That probably was a pineapple plant. They don't grow on trees."
Me, skeptical, using a common Ugandan phrase: "Are you sure?"

Needless to say, two months later, I still knew that I was right about pineapple trees.

Until this past weekend, when Eliza mentioned to her counterpart, Tony, that, not only did I think that pineapples grew on trees, but I had also once, out of the goodness of my heart, corrected an adorable orphan boy on the subject. Judging by his reaction and the reactions of the neighbors who'd also heard the story, this was maybe, nope, definitely the funniest thing to ever happen in Uganda.

Me, over their laughter and my own, using another common Ugandan phrase: "Is it not so?"
Tony's neighbor, still laughing: "I have never seen a pineapple that grows on a tree!"
Me, still skeptical: "Well, I have never seen one that doesn't grow on a tree." (Lawyered!)

After that they quickly sent us to the nearby pineapple farm to set me straight.

And pineapples do not grow on trees. I know, right? Crazy.

(Actually, there were no full-size pineapples on any of those "pineapple bushes," only a few apple-sized baby pineapples, so I still haven't seen real pineapples growing on an aloe plant, so, I'm still pretty much one-hundred percent sure that pineapples only, seriously, because how could it be any other way?, grow on trees.)

Then, later that evening:

Me, looking up at a palm tree with round, orangeish fruits hanging from it: "Are those coconuts?"
Eliza, with the confidence of someone who doesn't believe in pineapple trees: "Um, I think so..."
Me, only half-joking: "That's what I thought. But... they look like pumpkins."
Eliza, not believing in pumpkin trees either, and laughing, again: "Wait until Tony hears that."

Reminders

2010-11-04T10:58:00.000-07:00

If I ever need a reminder of exactly where I'm living (though I don't think I do, or I hope I don't yet, anyway), the newspaper provides some pretty good ones every other day or so.

Like the other day, when I read a short article about a lion loose in Kibaale. It had been heard roaring and had attacked a woman near a water source and several goats had gone missing since it had first been spotted and kids were staying home from school in fear. Yeah. So, we get bears every once in a while in Seattle. But, this is a lion. Loose in a city.

Or today, when I opened the paper to an article about a preacher who had been murdered. It was a really sad story. He was killed with a spear. Yeah. Speared.

So, I realize those are slightly morbid. But still. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that I really am living in Africa. Where lions and spears could apparently be lurking just around the corner. It's exciting. And I'm counting goats from now on, just so I know when to hide from the lions.

Kids

2010-11-02T12:54:00.000-07:00

There's one statistic about Uganda's population that always stuck out to me. I don't remember the exact figure off the top of my head right now, but it's basically this: something insane like 50% of the population here is under 20 years old. In a country of roughly thirty-three million-plus, that's a lot of kids. And with an average fertility rate (number of children per woman of child-bearing age) of 6.7, there are only going to be more.

Which is good and bad. Good because the kids are totally fun and awesome. Bad for lots and lots more crucial reasons.

These last (first) few days at site, I've been going out into surrounding villages with my organization conducting a baseline survey on family planning knowledge and use, looking at things like birth control and spacing the births of the children, etc.

The villages are really remote, most at least an hour's drive down small, rutted dirt roads or, as often as not, down a small footpath (we drive out to the villages, and then walk from house to house), and are just small compounds of round mud huts with grass thatched roofs spread across grassy savannah and scrubby trees with the few taller trees and the leafy mango trees providing shade to meet in. All that goes to say that most of the kids in the villages, and, again, there are a lot of them, have probably never (and at the absolute most, maybe once or twice) seen a white person in, well, person.

So today we went out to one such small, remote village, this one probably the furthest out of town that we had been. My counterpart and I got out of the car at the furthest household, the one on the border between this and the next district. Within five minutes of us sitting down under the shade of the biggest tree in the compound, there was a crowd of (yes, I counted, because I was impressed and slightly taken aback) twenty-nine kids all standing within five feet of where we were sitting. Staring, some glaring, whispering to each other, craning their necks to get a better look, a few of the smaller ones were stark naked while most of the rest were dressed in dirty rags or clothes six sizes too big, swollen bellies and snot-crusted noses and dirty bodies making me fall in love with all of them, even as we asked their parents if they've ever used birth control or family planning or why they didn't.

So I smiled and greeted them in Ateso, "Yoga kere!" with a wave. One may have waved back, a couple may have quietly replied "Yoga noi" but most just kept staring. The man we were interviewing snapped at the kids and they all sat down immediately, plopping down in the dirt, without taking their eyes off of the weirdo with the pasty skin sitting in front of them. It went on like that for a while, as we interviewed several parents, ranging from early twenties to mid-forties with three to five to seven kids, some of the kids in the crowd getting bored of my inactivity and wandering off, others coming to take their place, others, noticing something new and crazy about me, whispering to their friends and pointing.

It was good to see that, when a completely unexpected (I turned and stared until it was out of sight too -- literally the second aircraft I've seen since being here, third if you count the plane we flew in on) low-flying helicopter soared overhead, they were more impressed and intrigued by that then by me.

But when the helicopter was gone (apparently, probably, carrying the president to a campaign speech in the run-up to the elections in February), the kids came back and, yes, I counted again, because I could have sworn they had multiplied again and now there were forty-six. Forty-six kids, just coming to look. That has to be a new personal record.

Slowly though, one word started going around, repeated first as a question, though I'm not sure who asked it first, then as an exclamation, then as a question again, and then, seemingly, as a statement of fact.

"Rooney?"
"Rooney!"
"Rooney?"
"Rooney."

That's right. Wayne Rooney, superstar English striker for Manchester United, nursing an injured ankle, had finally arrived. Right here in their village. No wonder they were so excited. Fortunately there wasn't a football around, so I couldn't prove them wrong.

Most of them chased the car until it was out of sight.

Later this evening, I stopped in the market for some food for dinner. Two tomatoes, two onions, two bell peppers, all for less than fifty cents. Walking home from the market, three kids ran up to me from across the street. We exchanged excited greetings in Ateso: "Yoga!" "Yoga noi! Biai bo?" "Etamit!"

Then the little girl, maybe four or five, said something I couldn't quite understand: "Akoto eong something something" which translates as "I want something something." I shrugged, she repeated herself, I shrugged, she repeated herself. Then a woman shouted from a storefront: "Idwe!" -- "Children!" They stopped and stared at her, ready to be reprimanded. "No, it's ok," I explained to her. "I just did not know what she was saying." The woman explained that they were saying they wanted to come with me.

I laughed and looked at the kids. "Ilosi iso!" I shouted. "We go!" And I walked towards home with the sun setting in my eyes and the acrid smell of cooking fires stinging my in nose and an increasing number of kids skipping and running at my side.

Those were today's things-that-make-having-millions-of-kids-in-this-country-awesome.

Then there was tonight.

I had my headphones in while I sat on my concrete floor, washing and cutting up the tomatoes, onions and peppers, stir-frying them in garlic chili oil and mixing them with pasta for the first legitimate dinner I've made for myself since being here. I was texting other volunteer friends and hearing funny stories about their days (like the meeting of the Department of Health in Oyam district where one long-winded doctor drew a detailed diagram to explain the location of hemorrhoids, for some unknown reason). The music was good and the stories were good and my dinner was good. And I washed my dishes in the basin and took my headphones off and went to throw the food scraps and water in the pit outside the compound.

As I walked outside, I heard an intense commotion from a house nearby. Crying, no, not crying, wailing, and screaming, and raised voices. I quickly opened the compound door into the pitch black of the night outside, emptied the basin into the dark, shut and locked the door again, and turned to my neighbor Peter who was sitting under the light outside studying for his exams.

"A baby has just died, in the house of that mzee next door."
Did this happen just now? I ask.
"Yes, they took it for treatment two days ago, but it has just now died."
I'm very sorry to hear that, I say out loud, then think to myself that I'm sorry to hear that another baby has died and I'm sorry that I can hear the family weeping from inside my house and I'm sorry that I feel that way and I feel disrespectful wanting to put my headphones back in to drown out someone's grief over the loss of a child and I text another friend so I'm not listening to it alone and she says that life is hard here and I say I know that and she says she knows that I know that and she also knows that I know that sitting and listening to it and wallowing in it won't change anything and won't help anyone and she knows that I know, but advises me anyway and rightly so, that I should recognize that those things happen every day and recognize the tragedy of it and then put my headphones back in and she's right.

That was today's thing-that-shows-that-these-millions-of-kids-cannot-really-be-cared-for-properly.

Peter says they think it was malaria.

Home

2010-10-31T11:40:00.000-07:00

I'm listening to Talking Heads' "This Must Be the Place" and there's a line in the song that goes "Home -- is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there ... If anyone asks, this is where I'll be, where I'll be."

So, that's fitting.

Because this is my new home, as of week one. My kitchen/living room/entry way and my bedroom and the whole compound too.

Both rooms are maybe 10x10, so it's pretty cozy, but it'd be a great find in New York City, or even in Seattle really. You can kind of tell from the picture of the bedroom that there's no ceiling (as of yet, or maybe never, who knows?). I mean, the exposed bricks and rafters are kind of a cool look to offset the kind of intense baby blue walls, but it gets a little warm with just a tin roof.

In the picture of the kitchen, we've got my basins for washing dishes and clothes, my little gas cooker (which I've used three times now without it blowing up in flames, so I'm feeling good about that), and my chairs. So, you're all welcome for a dinner party if you don't mind sitting on the concrete.

I'm also having some shelving units made by a carpenter in town, so everything won't be on the floor, but those are still a couple weeks away right now. Looking forward to that though. Then I can actually unpack completely.

But there's only one other couple living in the compound, so it's nice and quiet, and they seem cool, so that's a definite plus.

I've spared you pictures of my pit latrine, but that and the bathing area are just outside, still in the compound, along with a tap for water, so there's really nothing to complain about. I'm right in town, so like a two minute walk to the market or the shops for food or airtime for my phone or whatever (not really whatever, supplies are a bit limited, but I bought a pineapple in the market the other day, so, score).

Oh, and now that it's raining, I have to admit that I love the sound of the rain on the tin roof. It gets pretty loud.

And yeah, if anyone asks, this is where I'll be (after dark).

(And, by the way, you can click on the picture to make it bigger, I think.)

New Address!

2010-10-28T11:42:00.000-07:00

I have a new address. Send me things. But I have no idea how long they'll take to get here, so don't send any puppies. Check the sidebar to your right! >>>

Block Quote!

2010-10-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

One great and not-so-great thing about being in the Peace Corps is the downtime. To be honest, there wasn’t much during training, but there was some, and now that I’m at site, there is going to be a lot more (because that's what happens when you're in your house by dark, also known as 7pm, and there's no TV or anything else going on). And one thing a lot of downtime means is a lot of reading. Naturally, I’m looking forward to that. I’m a little concerned about the fact that I sat down and read Let the Great World Spin, which was excellent, in just over one day. If I do that too often, I’ll be really sad when I run out of books and am six or seven hours from the bookstore in Kampala.

I also just recently finished reading A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, which was also really good and since, instead of writing my own blog post, I can quote other people who say better things than I ever will, here:

The sky a vast foreign country. The setting sun in my eyes but too happy to blink.

This was the life I wanted, blowing around like a leaf with appetites.

I was experiencing one of those horriblebeautifulterrifyingdisgustingwondrousinsaneunprecedentedeuphoricsensationaldisturbingthrillinghideoussublimenauseatingexceptional feelings that’s quite hard to describe unless you happen to chance upon the right word.

There’s always a fire, always houses lost, lives misplaced. But nobody packs up and moves to safer pastures. They just wipe their tears and bury their dead and make more children and dig in their heels.

And, ok, last one:

He somehow became dreamy and positive and took sunsets dead seriously, as though the outcome of the event might not always be that the sun sets but that it might freeze just above the horizon and start going up again.

Those are some of the ways that I’ve felt in Uganda. Better said than I could have.

I have the what? The internet.

2010-10-23T08:22:00.000-07:00

There is an awesome quirk to Ugandan English where someone will be telling you something and they will say "...the what?" and then answer that question themselves. It still makes me laugh.

I now have a mobile internet stick modem thing, and am at site, in my very own home, so blogging should be more frequent (though not necessarily any more entertaining; consider yourselves warned) from here on.

Starting here, with the long post I wrote almost two months ago. I didn't re-read it, or proof-read it, so I don't know if I've told some of the stories already, or if it makes any sense at all, but what are you going to do about it?

More updated stories to come, but here you go:

I left Seattle two weeks ago Sunday night and I've been in Africa for almost two weeks now and it seems unbelieveable that it's only been that long. It feels like months already but that's not a bad thing because Africa is fantastic and Uganda is fantastic and everyone else here is fantastic and, as if you couldn't tell from that, I am happy here. Don't get me wrong, I love home and I love Seattle and I love everyone there and I've felt homesick and disconnected for moments here and there, but this is different and exciting and fun and energizing and tiring and it was busy and hectic and long and going by so, so quickly that it's already becoming comfortable so that I feel like I can thrive here and I think there's been something new everyday to remind me where I am and how lucky I am to be here at this time and with all of these people who are all going through the same things as I am, except the other volunteers we've met who've been here for a while and are happy, most of the time, and encouraging, all of the time, and still energized and glad to be here too, although they've not been afraid to share the fact that sometimes it's been hard and challenging and there have been down times, they're still here, and some are staying longer than the 27 months, and that is good.

So here are a few quick updates and a few quick stories.

I've started into my language training. I'm learning to speak Ateso, which is spoken in the Teso region of Uganda (if I've understood everything correctly so far...). The Teso region is out in Eastern Uganda, over towards Kenya, so that's where I'll be headed after we swear in on October 21st. I'm excited to know that much, and we'll find out our actual sites in like six weeks or so, but for now that's all I know.

Training can be long (8am - 5pm, five and a half days a week) and sometimes boring, but it's going well and I think I'm catching on to the language pretty well, or at least as well as I could hope.

I'm a little over a week into my homestay and things are going well. I live with a family in the village of Kisimbiri in the Wakiso district, about 20km northeast of Kampala. I have a host mom, grandmother (who doesn't speak English, only Luganda, which I only speak several words of, obviously), a 15 year-old brother named Sula, and a 13 year-old sister named Labiba (although she went back to boarding school in Kampala on Sunday, so I won't see here again, until/unless I come back to visit later), and I'm their first homestay. They are a really great family. Sula wants to be a doctor or psychologist and Labiba wants to be a lawyer/astronaut and I like this. And I have a really nice living situation, complete with a sit-down flush toilet, which all of my fellow PCTs are totally jealous of. We don't have electricity, but some nights we sit around the kerosene lantern and play board games (it gets dark here around seven and gets dark quickly, but it starts getting light again around seven; twelve hours of light, twelve months of the year, thanks to the equator), and the food is pretty good, although if I never saw matooke (the Ugandan staple food of mashed and steamed raw plantains) again I'd be pretty thrilled. I learned how to handwash my clothes this last weekend, or, at least, I learned that when I get to site I'm paying someone to do it for me. Call me a muzungu if you must. You'd only be about the one millionth tiny, adorable child to do so. I do an ice-cold bucket bath every morning, and sometimes at night, and it's an abrupt way to greet 6:15am, but no more abrupt than being woken several times at night by dog fights right outside the window (although those don't compare to the dog-vs-monkey fights we heard the first week when we were staying at a church compound south of Kampala). All in all, it's a pretty good sitch, though the whole be-home-before-dark deal can get tedious at times. I walked another PCT home the other night so she wasn't wandering in the dark alone and got home around eight and was promptly reprimanded in Luganda by my host grandmother, translated thanks to my brother, Sula. It's nice to know they care about their muzungu though.

Actually, here's a story about that.

It was pouring rain on the walk home the other day without a rain jacket and the rain turned Uganda's red dirt in darker rust puddles and ruts and rivulets in the road with the sun breaking through clouds in the distance while banana trees steamed and wonderfully scented the air and we walked through the village with smiling, waving, muzungu-yelling, beautiful kids and shop-fronts and boda bodas and the red clay leading onto pot-holed pavement and back to clay and we stopped for bottles of cold-ish (or warm-ish -- it's all in your perspective) Nile beer to the tune of Celine Dion and Michael Bolton videos that they turned up the volume on just for us and then the two of us cut across the main road dodging bodas and taxis and bicycles as the sun was going down in broad, vibrant strokes of orange and pink against rain-cloud gray and it quickly got darker and I turned up the path that I was sure was my path home and waved to more muzungu-yellers and quickly realized it wasn't my path and it was getting dark-dark and I felt a bit of nerves as lantern flames began to flicker and then Sula rode up on his bike looking for me and I lied and said I wasn't lost, only a half-lie really, and we went home and he said "Now you are home" and I had people, a family, who were glad to see me and worried about me and it seemed like a bonding moment and we talked and joked and played board games and ate posho-matooke-gnut sauce-cassava and cabbage and carrots and I choked down, somehow, a plateful of avocado because, good Lord, I can't do anymore starch, and it was ok and I felt wanted and was happy to be here and doing this and not anything else even though I missed home earlier and wanted to talk to you but I am glad to be here and it did feel like home, and, good Lord, yes, again, it is beautiful and fascinating and vibrant and humming with life here and I'm here and that is good.

Anyway.

My host mom corrected people in the market the other day: "His name is not 'Muzungu!'"

Bananas, pineapple, passionfruit, jackfruit, papaya all grow here and readily and I'm happy about all of that. And milk tea with sugar is my friend too (although it started out with three tea-times a day and they've weaned us to two, and if they take another one away, I think nerves will start to go).

And even though I'm eating pretty well, if it weren't for the Nile, I'd definitely have lost weight. Beer is good. The 45-minute-each-way walk to the training center burns it all off.

Everyone loves Obama here and I've been asked several times, as if we were friends, how he's doing. I say he's probably stressed. In Kampala the other day I saw a poster with pictures of all of the current African leaders and in the center was a giant picture of Barack, so, who knows?, maybe his birth certificate is right next door after all.

The other day -- Sula, to me: "One of your friends walked by here earlier, a girl." Me: "Oh really, who was it? I mean, what did she look like?" Sula: "I don't know... The fat one?" Good times.

It's pretty funny to me how many of the conversations between us PCTs revolve around poop, pooping, not pooping, pooping in a bucket, pooping in a pit latrine, pooping in your pants, explosive pooping, who's going to start dating who, and matooke.

The soaps. I've had two brief experiences with these horribly-dubbed-into-English-so-everyone's-voices-are-grating-and-they-sound-like-they're-shouting-all-the-time Mexican or Brazilian or, apparently, Japanese and/or Filipino soap operas that are really unbelieveably popular here (or so I hear from people who are staying with families with electricity and tvs). But consider my mind blown. The one I saw was called Untamed Beauties, and I believe it's Mexican, and it was awful. And awesome.

Oh, man. Pretty much my favorite thing that's happened so far (or ever): At dinner last night, my host mom and brother told me that I was already changing color (as in getting tan). And they decided that, in a year or two, I'm going to look just like them. I'm going to be an African. And they're African, so I'm pretty sure they're experts on the subject.

Actually, Greatest Moment is a tie between that and this: During the first week here, I spent one awesome afternoon and I played football with about 50 beautiful orphans between the ages of probably three and eleven and I scored twice, heading in a corner kick and chipping a shot over the keeper, and then I ran, arms out like an airplane, windmilling across the field as the kids chased me down screaming and laughing and it was sunny and warm and the sky was a perfect blue as the sun leaned towards the west, towards home, and it was loud and happy and heartbreaking and Africa and beautiful and amazing and something I'll remember forever with a full heart and knowing that, if nothing else, I have that moment, here, in the pearl of Africa and here, where I really feel like, right now, I'm supposed to be.

And you deserve some sort of medal if you've read all this nonsense this far, so pat yourselves (-self, if only one of you makes it) on the back.

One More Really Quickly

2010-09-16T04:14:00.000-07:00

And then I swear I'll put up the big one that's sitting on my laptop at home.

In the tiny town of Pader in northern Uganda right now, just on the internet for a few minutes, as usual. I'm here with Eliza (who's another PCT) and we're visiting Sandi who's been here for a year. She works at a secondary school for girls who were orphaned/abducted by the LRA, helping (among other things) to teach life skills to girls who haven't lived normal lives in years or ever and so we're going over there in a bit. It sounds really intense, but also really awesome.

Five hour bus from Kampala to Gulu on Tuesday, saw Jamie Roach's (for those of you on Mom's side of the family) picture on the wall of the cafe there that he helped start with IC, then yesterday we took a 3.5 hour matatu (shared minibus taxi with 12 other people) out here. Really awesome. Eliza and I were sitting there, hot and dirty, as Peace Corps kids sharing a car with 12 Ugandans on a middle-of-nowhere red dirt road dodging pond-sized potholes and lorries and white NGO Land Cruisers that drive straight at you until the last minute (so don't stick your hand out the window) and goats and kids and bicyclers, passing concrete schools with uniformed kids playing football in the field outside and round mud huts with grass-thatched roofs listening to Bob Marley on her iPod. Stereotypes.

But it is good to be here. Good to be out of Wakiso. Good to be away from lots of other white people (not in a bad way) (except in Gulu, which was nice, but was also NGO-Central, which actually was a lot more noticeable than I thought it would be, not only with the logo-ed Land Cruisers and white people, but also infrastructure-wise as far as roads and cleanliness and all that; but that's a whole other story) and good to travel somewhere and sit in a bus and a taxi and look out the window and see somewhere new. All that goes to say that I'm really excited to be here. Which is why we're getting off the internet in a few.

But, one more story. Yesterday we saw an older man who was sitting outside leaning against his hut and when we walked by, he went to wave at us, we realized he had no hands and no feet, and it took me a beat to realize that he was not born like that, and that he had hands and feet at one point, and they were savagely taken away from him. So that's what it's like up here, I guess. Just constant small reminders that they've been in a war for 20+ years that no one is unaffected by, even if it isn't as obvious as with that smiling, happy-looking man who's obviously been through things that would keep most people from smiling again.

That's all. It's intense. But it's good. I'm happy to be here -- Pader-here and Uganda-in-general-here, I mean.

(Also, we crossed the Nile on the way to Gulu, so now I've seen it right near it's source and it's mouth, and I thought that was neat.)

Really quickly!

2010-08-28T04:52:00.000-07:00

Oh hey. I only have a couple minutes on the internet here in Kampala, so this is just a quick update. I have another blog post typed up on my laptop to post at some point, hopefully sometime next week. But everything is going really, really well, and I'm loving Africa as much as the last time, although I can't believe it's been two and a half weeks already and I can't believe it's only been two and a half weeks so far. I'm learning to speak Ateso, which is spoken out in eastern Uganda, so that's where I'll be headed in about eight weeks or so when we all split up and head to site (and I'll know specifically where my site is in like six weeks or so). And I'm living with a Ugandan family and the other night they told me that I'm already starting to change color and that in one year I'll look just like them and I'll be African. And they're African so I feel like they know what they're talking about. I walk 45 minutes to and from training each day and have at least fifty kids yelling "See you, muzungu!" and waving the whole time but they're adorable so you can't get mad about it and the walk is nice too, over rolling hills through banana trees and fields of cattle once you get out of town and stop having to dodge the boda bodas and taxis that kick up the red dust that covers everything here.

I don't know if that makes it sound nice or not, but I am loving it. Being back in Africa makes my heart happy.

More later this week (hopefully).

Pack It Up, the Third

2010-08-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

Adding one more thing to the packing list: this guy.

He shoots mini-Polaroids and is seriously awesome and I can't wait to be able to give the pictures out and/or hang them on my walls.

(Much thanks to Whit...)

Home

2010-08-07T15:26:00.000-07:00

I'm also going to miss: Concerts at Neumos / the Showbox / the Crocodile / the everywhere else. The free concerts at the Mural, and Block Party. Lying in the grass and reading in Cal Anderson Park on sunny afternoons. Judging hipsters in Cal Anderson Park at all times and in all weather-systems. Monday nights. Jeopardy-time. Elliott Bay (the bookstore and the body of water). The chants at the Sounders games and at the George and Dragon. Trivia. Paseo (but I said that already) and, along those same lines, Serious Pie / Red Mill / Mr Gyro's / Hopvine / the Taco Hut / Molly Moon's / all those other places we love to eat. Nighttime bike rides. Angry Birds. Snow days. Fremont Oktoberfest. Fremont Solstice Parade. Fremont. Capitol Hill. Ballard. GChat. Those two cats in the mix. Alki and its bonfires and sunsets and frisbee and pizza and beer. KEXP and KUOW. HIMYM and LOST. Maybe even the Jersey Shore. The purple Bandit. Rock-climbing off Exit 34. Hiking and snowboarding. Sunriver. Leaving and coming back and the feeling, when you get back, of being home. The Olympic Peninsula and when you could see the mountains from the deck. Apple cider whiskey on the deck with a winter sunset when it's icy cold out. BBQing on the deck with a summer sunset when it's sticky hot inside the apartment. Walking around the city when you come around the corner of a building or to the top of a hill and you see the Space Needle sticking up into a sunny blue-orange-pink-purple or cloudy gray-gray-gray or a Blue-Scholars-inkwell of a starry night sky, reminding you where you are and how lucky you are to be here in this city and with these people during these -- the best, the best, the best -- years of our lives and your heart swells to fuller than full so that you never want to leave even when you do want to leave, so you can't leave, not really, because you're taking so much of it with you, in your head and your heart, and all you hear as you look out at your home, at your city, is that one distinctive voice, giddy and truly happy, reminding you, as if you could ever, ever, ever forget, saying, "We live here."

Seattle Things

2010-08-06T13:51:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about leaving is being motivated to do things around Seattle that I love doing or have always wanted to do but haven't gotten around to yet.

So, late on Tuesday night, Ryan, his friend Michael, and I hiked up to Camp Muir on the south side of Mt. Rainier. We started on the trail at 2:30am, brought our snowboards along, and just as the sun was brushing orange and pink across the summit, we were strapping in and coasting down, looking out on a jagged range of peaks across the valley while fog nestled in around their foothills.

It was stupidly gorgeous. I got a chance to sit in the snow and shiver and I don't know how long it will be until I am cold and surrounded by snow again. It was one of those things that I wish I had done earlier so I could have done it again. It was a great way to spend one of my last nights here.

(And when you include the fact that, before heading up to the mountain, I went to Paseo for dinner, it gets even harder to top this.)

(Also, just FYI, you can click on the picture to get the full size. It's pretty awesome.)

Pack It Up, Again

2010-08-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

Some of those various miscellaneous things I was forgetting last night:

Maps: Detailed map of Uganda / World map (to show everyone Seattle).
Tapatio! (Hot sauce) (To make the starchy banana-mash staple food more palatable.)
Gifts for my Host Family: Something small / Seattle-related (postcards or a calendar) to go with what I'll get them when I get there and actually meet them and see what they'd want/need.
Power Strip (for charging multiple things at once).
Pot Holders (which apparently are not available in Uganda).
Superglue (because, if you've seen my sunglasses..).
Bungee Cords.
Small sewing kit (for replacing buttons, stitching up wounds sustained while wrestling lions, etc).
Passport-sized Photos for official documents / copies of all important documents.
Aloe Vera (for my lily-white skin).
Seeds (in case I want to supplement my diet by growing a green thumb).
Addresses of friends and family.

And, again, I'm sure there's plenty of stuff that I'm missing. But, hopefully, I'll remember it all before Sunday.

Pack It Up, Pack It In

2010-08-04T23:07:00.000-07:00

At some point in every conversation I've had about going to Uganda, someone's asked me, "What, exactly, are you bringing with you?"

Until about two days ago, I always responded, "I don't really know. I haven't looked at the packing list yet. So we'll see." (And yes, I am currently vying for Peace Corps Uganda's "Procrastinated-the-Longest Award That I Just Made Up." It's really coming down to the wire, but we'll find out the results later.)

Now, however, though I haven't actually begun packing, I do have a packing list.

And here it is:

ELECTRONICS

Netbook / Charger
Camera (Lumix) / Charger / Memory Card / Card Reader
Camera (Canon) / Charger / Extra Batteries / Memory Cards / Card Reader
Lenses: Canon EFS 18-55mm / Canon EF 75-300mm
Ipod / Powercord / Headphones
Hard-drive
Voltage Convertor?
Plug Adaptor?

CLOTHES

T-Shirts (5)
Button-downs (4)
Tie (1)
Khakis (2)
Jeans (1)
Boxers - ExOfficio Travel (4)
Socks (Dress: 1) (Running: 2)
Khaki Shorts (1)
Gym Shorts (1)
Board Shorts (1)
Belt (1)
Thermal Shirt (1)
Jacket (1)
Hat (1)

SHOES

Rainbows (Flip-flops)
Running Shoes (Salomon XA Pro 3D Ultra)
Boat Shoes (For more formal occasions)

MISC.

Headlamp (1) / Flashlight (1)
Knives (2 pocketknives, 1 kitchen knife)
Duct Tape
Towel (2)
Sunglasses
Flat Sheets (2)
Pillow (1)
Mattress Cover
Batteries (AA and AAA)
Cliff Bars
Ziploc Bags
Nalgenes (2)
Bandana
Pens
Moleskine / Small Notebooks
Pictures

BOOKS

TOILETRIES

Glasses (2 pair)
Contacts / Case / Solution
Eye-drops
Toothbrush / Toothpaste
Deodorant
Razor / Shaving Cream
Shampoo
Beard Trimmer

So that is it for now. I'm probably 99% sure that I'm missing something important on there or haven't listed various minor extras that I'll end up bringing. For now, though, that's what I'll be leaving with come Sunday (!!!) night.

(And the picture at the top is of my actual packing list -- I was playing around with the new 75-300mm lens. I enjoyed it.)

It's Been Awhile..

2010-08-01T23:28:00.000-07:00

..But suddenly I'm running out of time.

So here's a quick update:

Since the last time I posted, lots of things have happened.

Job: Quit -- and I'm really thankful for the opportunity I had to work there; I wouldn't have gotten into the Peace Corps if I hadn't been working at the Arc.

Car: Sold -- and then I regretted selling it so quickly; the bus is slow and I'm pretty sure it's always late, but everyone (rightly so) tells me it's just getting me ready for Africa Time.

Apartment: Moved out of -- and it only took twelve hours yesterday, plus several hours on Friday, up and down fifty-one stairs, over and over; so by my rough calculations, I climbed to the top of the Empire State Building probably at least one and half times, carrying probably the weight of the Empire State Building.

Possessions: Down to four boxes and a little bit extra.

So now I've got a rough packing / shopping / to-do list and I'm trying check off the boxes and squeeze in as much time with as many people as possible and simultaneously process the fact that I'm moving to Uganda in a few days while also not thinking about it too much so it doesn't make my head explode in a combination of excitement and stress and anticipation and sadness or not necessarily sadness but bittersweetness or whatever the real word for that is.

Basically I want to be able to quote Daniel Faraday from Lost: "I can do it. I can make time."

Independence

2010-07-05T15:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, as I was watching fireworks from my deck and trying to remember what summer is actually supposed to feel like (since it was in the 50s, overcast and raining here, on the 4th of July, no less), I started thinking about how this will probably be my last 4th of July in the States for a few years.

So I tried to spite the weather and enjoy it anyway.

It was a funny feeling, though, watching people celebrate America while I'm trying to prepare myself to leave it.

I mean, sure, we Americans are overweight and loud and probably don't appreciate enough just how well we have it. But we're also genuine and tolerant and diverse and polite. Or, most of us, anyway. And hey, at least we're not Canadians.

But as much as I like this country, I also love leaving this country.

And while I'll miss celebrating the 4th of July, I'll also be looking forward to October 9, 2012, when Uganda celebrates the 50th anniversary of its independence from England. After, at that point, having spent two years in Uganda, I feel like I'll be able to appreciate both the celebrations and the inevitable reflections on the past and the present, and where to go in the future.

And nine months after that, I'll be back here, to celebrate and reflect on -- and in -- America.

Block Quote.

2010-07-03T02:25:00.000-07:00

A summation.

The devastation, the wrenching heartbreak of the AIDS crisis in Africa.

At the graveyard, there was a struggle: there was no space left for new graves, not space for the coffin of even a frail and wasted twelve-year-old. And so in the end, they reopened the grave of Mpho's mother, dug down, and buried her daughter on top.

And yet, ultimately, almost inexplicably, there is hope.

"It is not God's plan that people die at eight years old. Or twelve. Or thirty. God gives us the knowledge and skills to prevent or postpone death. Now it's about what people do. We've never seen a disease so vulnerable to the right policies. HIV is not like cancer. If I adopt a combination of prevention approaches, and protect the blood supply, the disease will retreat like it did in the U.S. We know what works. We can defeat AIDS if we do the right things. And we know what those are."

These are quotes from Stephanie Nolen's 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa. Read it. It will enlighten you, then break your heart, then frustrate you, then piss you off, then inspire you. It's done all those things to me and I haven't even finished it yet.

Wow.

2010-06-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

I'm sure most of you have heard, but violence has been erupting in Kyrgyzstan this last week or so. But what you might not know is that Kyrgyzstan is also a country with Peace Corps volunteers.

So if you've ever wondered what the Peace Corps does to protect and evacuate volunteers in the event of such terrible, widespread chaos and violence, this is an incredible first-hand account (and also, obviously, an exception to the majority of Peace Corps experiences). It's frightening, and I can't possibly imagine what it would be like to be in such a situation, but at the same time, it makes me feel pretty safe if something like this were to happen in Uganda (which, hopefully, is unlikely). I feel like the hiring of armed local drivers shows that the Peace Corps is willing to go to some extreme (and necessary) lengths to protect volunteers.

I had actually read a different version of this last night, but was skeptical about the fact that it was passed on by a "friend of a friend on Facebook" and the idea of the Peace Corps hiring "five masked Kyrgyz gunmen" to evacuate volunteers.

Apparently, it's true. And all volunteers are safe and accounted for.

Now we just pray for an end to the violence (there and everywhere).

GOOOOoooOOOoaLLL!

2010-06-13T22:25:00.000-07:00

I've been sacrificing sleep for the World Cup since Friday.

A couple friends and I went to a cafe at 7AM Friday morning for the opening match between Mexico and South Africa. We got there five minutes after they opened and could barely squeeze through the door.

That sounds like it would fit in pretty well with the World Cup scene in Uganda.

'Business coming to a standstill.'
'People abandoned their offices and shops to storm the nearest pub.'

And: 'Delegates attending the International Criminal Court review conference abandoned the meeting, only to resume after the opening match.'
So, yeah. That's commitment. (Justice can wait another hour. The World Cup cannot.)

And, on the subject of the World Cup -- though this just interesting and doesn't have anything to do with Uganda -- why, exactly, do we Americans call it soccer?

And, here is the source for that picture (which is actually in South Africa, not Uganda, but there are some great shots there).

Kampothole

2010-06-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was (unofficially) National Pothole Day in Uganda. Fortunately for me, Seattle also has terrible roads, so I should feel right at home.