Less Serious, Probably More Boring

The last two posts were serious, and had little to do with what I've actually been up to, so here are a few random, short, potentially funny stories and updates.

1: I recently survived a crocodile attack. True story. More or less. True, it was only a baby crocodile, only about ten inches long, and it 'attacked' me only when I picked it up: it twisted its head back around, hissing, to bite me on the back of the hand between my thumb and index finger, and held on for a good ninety seconds before finally giving up its grip. And true, it didn't actually really break the skin much, but there were definitely teeth marks, and it was bruised for a few days. And that's how I survived a crocodile attack. It's actually not quite as cool as another time when we went to see the baby crocodile (it's in this little concrete pit enclosure down the hill from a place we stay in Jinja; I don't know why, but it is) and a friend of mine picked it up, it bit him on the finger, and his first instinct was to get it out of his hand. By throwing it. Right into someone's chest. So he actually wins, I think, as the only person (probably) ever to throw a crocodile at someone else. (I also got a pretty gnarly spider bite recently, which was much worse than the crocodile bite, and is probably actually going to be a nice scar. Uganda is apparently trying to eat me.)

2: Here's a list of some of the things that I've eaten recently, between various things trying to eat me–

• Cow shin: I've had this several times now, though it made me a little bit nauseous the first time. I ate it first when I went to my counterpart's home and she assured me that 'the part that presses the ground is the sweetest part.' It's not. I ate it for a second time when I was at the ajon circle (the local-beer-drinking place) and they had started serving food now, and I was told I had the choice between goat and cow, and I chose cow, for some reason, as if either would actually be a decent cut of meat, and it turned out to be the 'part that presses the ground' again. I'm pretty used to it now, though, and actually just order it willingly – when the choices are limited, that is.
• Goat pancreas: I've had this a few times, too. And it's actually good. They serve it dried, so it's kind of like if you were to make jerky out of liver and salt it. That sounds like something you'd want to eat, right?
• Goat tongue: The last time I was at the ajon circle and ordered the cow shin, I ate all of the meat –read: skin and gristle and fat– off the bone. I thought. Because there's not much there, so it's hard not to eat it all. I thought. The next time, though, we ordered food and my friend Martin turned back from the lady who makes the food to me, and said 'She is wanting to know if you would like the tongue of the goat.' I wanted to make sure I had heard correctly, and pointed inside my mouth: 'The tongue?' The laughter died down, and Martin said, 'Yes.' And I said, '...Sure.' She went off to serve up the food –the meat, or 'meat', comes with katogo, which is bananas boiled in a savory broth, and is one of my favorite foods here– and Martin leaned it and said, 'She is fearing that you don't like the molokon [cow shin] because you did not eat all of it last time.' Apparently, cleaning a quarter-inch of skin and gristle and fat off the six-inch-long, inch-and-a-half-diameter bone is not enough. I must have left an eighth of an inch of fat on there. Silly me. So I ate the goat tongue instead. Which was fine – I've eaten the entire face of a goat before anyway, in South Africa. No big deal.

3: There are a handful of work things that could keep me relatively busy for the last six months of my service, which makes me happy–

• The HIV counselor project is continuing and we've had good success with that; I'm going to try to go out with some of the counselors and collect first-hand (well, translated-first-hand) some of the success stories, which I think will be cool to see and meet these people and hear and record their stories directly.
• One of the counselors has created a group of people living with HIV/AIDS in his community who want to start a turkey-keeping project as an IGA (Income-Generating Activity). This comes after the handful of turkeys he already owned were stolen in the middle of the night, and the seedlings for the citrus-growing project that was supposed to start in their community were also stolen. But they put together an outline with a significant community-contribution and sustainability plan, which is always a good sign that it's going to be taken seriously, and so I'm going to be working with them to try to make that happen.
• Another counselor has people in his community saving money or pooling money together to buy seeds for keyhole gardens. I had told all of the counselors to encourage keyhole gardens (the mound-of-dirt style garden I planted –there are pictures on the blog, somewhere– which is good for people with HIV/AIDS as it allows you to grow the same amount of produce without having to move up and down rows in the garden), and they did, which was great – except that they all came back and said people needed seeds. I told them that people could mobilize –a favorite word in development-project-speak– for seeds, and I would love to help construct and plant the gardens. This was six months ago. I'd heard nothing back, other than that people wanted keyhole gardens and needed seeds, until a week or two ago. Finally.
• I'm going to get the life-skills club up and going again at the secondary school.
• I'm also going to try and start a football –soccer– league for kids who aren't in school, with a life-skills component, and I'm looking forward to that, if we can make it happen.

4: I killed my first chicken a couple weekends ago, a milestone moment in any white-guy-in-Africa story, and the only time I've ever killed anything but insects and spiders. I had gone to church with Mr Olinga, the security guard from my organization, because they were doing a fundraising auction to raise money for an event celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Diocese. People brought in g-nuts, cassava, chickens, goats, flour, among other things, and everything was auctioned off. I bought about seven pounds of g-nuts, which is awesome, and should last me probably until the end of my service. I was also given a chicken to auction. I awkwardly stammered through my Ateso numbers and the word chicken and the phrases 'Who wants?' and 'Any more?' until finally the bidding ended. I went to give the winner their brownish-red new chicken, its feet tied together with string, when they told me they had actually bought it for me. Someone I'd never met, and actually didn't end up meeting at all, spent 10,000 shillings on a chicken for me. Really nice of them, and it led to, later, after the auction was finished and we were clearing out, a sentence I'd never thought I'd hear in church: 'Daniel,' someone called out. 'Where is your cock?' I assured them I knew exactly where it was. When we left the church, we stopped first for lunch at the primary school across from the church, and then Mr Olinga and I went on to his place, walking between and over giant boulders, thin threads of pathways through tall grass, hot and bright sun, through homesteads of huts built up against the walls of rock, nothing else in sight but more rocks and grass and brush, me with a chicken in one hand –holding it by its feet, it hung upside down with splayed wings and flitting eyes– and a black plastic bag full of g-nuts in the other, and Mr Olinga with three more chickens and his wooden folding chair that he'd brought with him to church, and it was possibly one of the most visually 'African' experiences I've had, and then we were at his place, four or five huts and a mango tree for shade, the last homestead before the swamp. He showed me how to kill the chicken, then, after sharpening the knife on a rock. I yanked out a handful of feathers from the throat and, standing on the feet, took the head in my left hand and drew the knife across and back and across, and I must have done something not quite right, because blood sprayed out and speckled my pants and feet, hands and arms, but I finished and ten or fifteen seconds later, the chicken was finished writhing around, too. We put it in a pot of hot water, which makes it easier to pull the feathers out, and easier to strip the skin off the legs and feet. Mr Olinga's son and granddaughter finished cleaning and gutting it, and I walked home through the village with a whole raw chicken in a black plastic sack, salmonella probably festering in the 95 degree heat. I boiled the entire thing with I got home, for about an hour, and was proud while I ate an animal that had been alive an hour earlier and that I'd killed with my own hands (and a knife).

5: We're supposed to be at the tail-end of dry season right now, but it feels like we're still just right in the middle of it. It's been unbearably hot the last week or two, mid-nineties during the day, and not a whole lot cooler at night. My tap ran dry a few weeks ago, and stayed dry for about a week. I'd recently gotten an accidental buzzcut, though, and it proved to be the best accidental haircut I've ever gotten. It's much harder to tell that I haven't bathed in six days when my hair is only half-an-inch long. The smell is probably still there, but, hey, you get used to that. They've also started load-shedding again, which means they shut off power for any seemingly-random number of hours. This means that, without the fan on at night, I've taken to sleeping on my concrete floor. It's the only way that I can get moderately cool enough to actually get some sleep. We've been teased with rain over and over again, but I don't think it's rained for more than three hours total so far this year. I can't wait, though. It's like this, actually:

Sweet summer night and I'm stripped to my sheets, my forehead is leaking, the [fan] squeaks. A voice from the clock says 'You're not gonna get tired,' my bed is a pool, and the wall's on fire. Soak my head in the [basin] for a while, chills on my neck and it makes me smile, but my bones have to move and my skin's gotta breathe. Slide down the stairs to the heated street and the sun has left us with slippery feet. Rip off your sleeves, and I'll ditch my socks. We'll dance to the songs from the cars as they pass, weave through the cardboard, smell that trash. Walking around in our summertime clothes, nowhere to go while our bodies glow. And we'll greet the dawn in its morning blues, with purple yawn we'll be sleeping soon. When the sun goes down, we'll go out again. When the sun goes down, we'll go out again … Let's leave the sound of the heat for the sound of the rain. It's easy to sleep when it wets my brain. It covers my rest with a saccharine sheen, kissing the wind through my window screen.

6: I also recently saw a baby monkey drink beer out of a guy's mouth. Africa!

Bayt

Caitlin and Shane got engaged a couple weeks ago now. I am happy, happy, happy for them. I've also been, since then, unbelievably excited to go home. Not to get out of Uganda, but just to go home and have the wedding to look forward to, seeing everyone and celebrating and being back. I'm also anticipating the itch that I know will come as soon as the wedding ends and the celebrations start to die down: the itch to leave home again. This, from a great article in today's New York Times:

“Your first discovery when you travel,” wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, “is that you do not exist.” In other words, it is not just the others who have been left behind; it is all of you that is known. Gone is the power or punishment of your family name, the hard-earned reputations of forebears, no longer familiar to anyone in this new place.
In Arabic, the word “bayt” translates literally as house, but its connotations resonate beyond rooms and walls, summoning longings gathered about family and home. In the Middle East, bayt is sacred. Empires fall. Nations topple. Borders may shift. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is finally the identity that does not fade.

Loved that, and wanted to share, and I guess that's all. Just excited to go home, happy to be here and have home, as it resonates beyond rooms and walls, to go back to.

One Year Wonder

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.

Let's Do the Time Warp, Again

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

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?)

Speaking of..

..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.

Chronic City Redux

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

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

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.)

Like 2Pac Says

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.

Interpreter of Maladies

"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.

Blah Blah Blahg

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.

Block Quote!

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.

Block Quote.

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.

Block Quote!

One of my all-time favorite books is You Shall Know Our Velocity! by one of my all-time favorite authors, Dave Eggers. It's a novel about two twenty-something guys who try to circle the globe in a week and give away $32,000 to people they find deserving. It's about traveling and being twenty-something these days and trying to find some purpose in life among all those other things.

My copy is dog-eared and underlined and every once in a while I pull it out and flip through it and find my favorite parts and read them again.

Like this:

"I can't believe I got to Africa," he said.
"I know," I said.
"How did we get to Africa?" he said. "Already I don't want to leave. Did you feel that air? It's different. It's African air. It's like mixed with the sun more. Like our air isn't mixed as well with the sun. Here they mix it perfectly. The sun's in the wind, the sun's in your breaths."
"I'm glad you could come," I said.

I love it. It's true.

And this:

All I ever wanted was to know what to do. ... And we came here, or came to Africa, and intermittently there were answers, intermittently there was a chorus and they sang to us and pointing, and were watching and approving but just as often there was silence, and we stood blinking under the sun, or under the black sky, and we had to think of what to do next.

And this:

You see the rest of the world, then you come back.

And I could go on and on, but I would end up quoting the book.

Block Quote!

Final preparations for my interview in exactly 60 minutes!

This quote is from An Imperfect Offering by Dr. James Orbinski, who is a former international president of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres -- MSF). It's a horrifying and amazing book and I think it should be required reading for everyone in America.
But this quote is from when he asked a colleague of his what his reasons were for joining MSF.

"We suture, we record the events, we tell the world. We struggle daily with private thoughts of of whether or not we make a difference. The ultimate solution may be political, anonymous and nebulous, in some remote teak conference room. But I have seen the blood, the people cry in pain and the people laugh with hope. And I know we need to be there."

It inspires me every time I read it. It reminds me why I'm going to this interview today.

Block Quote!

Really quickly:

If you ("you" being my non-existent readership) have never read Kerouac's The Dharma Bums then, well, you are missing out. On some great writing about travel, life, and the great PNW.

And here is an example of just what you are missing.

...See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming... all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures...

That's a little more out-there than I am (I don't hate consuming, and life would be dull without some kind of work). But I like the idea that maybe I am, or was, at least for a few months, a part of that rucksack revolution. I love to / want to wander and see things and meet people.

But now I want something more purposeful than just the wandering and the seeing, something that will give people visions of eternal freedom. (I think I'll skip the part about becoming a Zen Lunatic, though.)