#30

On the list of Things I'm Going to Miss About Uganda, taken on a recent game drive in Murchison Falls National Park.

Turkey Time, Part One

In the last post, which, I know, was a long time ago, I mentioned a turkey project. It was an idea and plan that came from Okwakol John Michael, one of the volunteers I trained as a home-based HIV/AIDS counselor last year. He gathered a group of ten individuals from his village, Odwarat, some ten or fifteen kilometres from town, all of them living with HIV or AIDS, that would raise turkeys, keeping and feeding and breeding them to expand their flock, as an IGA, a way to make money to pay for antiretroviral treatment, or school fees for their children, or food, or whatever, along with more turkeys. A month or two after he first came to me with the idea, and after a lot of support from some wonderful people (you know who you are; embrace that warm-and-fuzziness that you're more than welcome to feel), we bought the first group of turkeys, seven females, and made plans to buy three males when I got back from a trip to Rwanda I had planned (which means we should be able to buy them this week, and stories from Rwanda will come shortly). We went together to Odwarat, north out of town and then east well off the main road down a narrow rutted dirt track, flooded over with massive puddles where it wasn't covered with five or six inches of loose sandy dirt, to where there was nothing to be seen but the occasional handful of huts interspersed between fields of sorghum and millet and cassava, to the home of the woman whose name I forgot who had turkeys for sale, stopping on the way to meet one of the group members and its treasurer. She showed us into the small hut, barely seven feet across, where she kept seven turkeys. They negotiated over the price, agreed on four of them, then we went back outside where they herded together three more from between the legs of a handful of cows and the trunks of orange trees. The sale complete, Okwakol took me down another narrower dirt path to his home, a couple huts of and a small, not-yet-finished square brick house and a mango tree in the middle of the compound under which his white-haired and smiling mother sat on a mat shelling a pile of groundnuts, to show me the turkey house the group had constructed, another small hut, the door latched and bolted with a shiny new gold padlock. He smiled and laughed and talked to me in way more Ateso than I could understand, but it was obvious --as it already was in the fact that he was wearing his best, shirt buttoned up to the collar, trousers pressed, grey blazer clean and smart-- that he was happy and grateful and hopeful and proud and the feeling was mutual.

Okwakol, checking out the turkeys.

Four of the birds he decided on.

Price negotiations.

Rounding up the other three turkeys.

Our turkey lady. (She was smiling and gregarious the whole time, Ugandans just don't smile for pictures.)

Okwakol, outside of the newly constructed turkey house, at his home. (He wasn't ready for the picture, so I was able to catch a smile.)

Okwakol and his mother, because she asked.





So, there it is, part one. It made for a pretty great morning, and hopefully it'll make for a pretty great, and long-lasting, source of income for the group, thanks again to some awesome people. Another update, more pictures, when we get the last three turkeys, hopefully in the next few days.

Home and Garden Dan-nel

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.)

Pictures!

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!

Story Time

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

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.

Nothing Much

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

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.

Roommates

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.)

Home

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.)