This is the Bus Ride That Never Ends: Why I’m Avoiding Gaa Gaa Buses For the Forseeable Future

Hey cats and kittens, lemme tell you about the two longest bus rides I’ve ever been on and how they were within two weeks of each other, and how I’m not going to take that bus anymore.

The first was on my return to site after going to our All Volunteer Conference (more on that later). Imagine you are me, because I will be telling this story in the second person. Deal with it.

You specifically take buses which leave early in the morning because it takes 9-10 hours to get up north. You leave the hotel at 6AM in order to walk to bus park in order to get a seat on a bus leaving at 7AM. Good so far. The bus leaves relatively on time. Also good. Less than two hours outside of Kampala, the bus breaks down.

 This is how you know your bus is broken:

Instead of stopping momentarily (with the bus running) to drop someone off at their stop, the bus is turned off.

The turn man (like mechanic/loader/person who assists with turns in the city) is underneath the bus

The conductor and driver are out at front pointing at the bus

Angry Ugandans are yelling at the bus staff

Some passengers immediately seek alternate transport (taxis, bodas, etc)

So the bus breaks, it’s like that for maybe an hour, then you start moving again. Hurray! You think that maybe it was a minor problem and you’ll just be slightly delayed. You are wrong.

After two hours the bus breaks down again, and this time it stretches into three hours waiting by the side of the road. You take your things off the bus, thinking a replacement bus is coming. It is not. There are other buses from the same company your bus is from, but they are going other places, meaning it would only be a matter of time before you’d have to get off and pay more for a taxi (or probably two or three taxis) to get where you’re going.

You sit and drink a pop and eat some hardboiled eggs, because there is of course no real food in the village/trading center where you have broken down. Every time a bus comes by you think it is this fake replacement bus, but really there are just a hell of a lot of bus companies in Uganda, going every which way.

Then they ask you to reboard this bus, the one which has broken down, which you are convinced is not a good idea. But you get back on, and eventually you reach your destination, 15 hours after leaving the capital city. You cannot possibly get back to your site (another two hours from the city you’ve just arrived in) so you stay with another volunteer and head back in the morning, still pretty exhausted.

Guess what? Now you’re going to a neat literacy conference in the East of the country, so you have to take a bus back to the capital. Stupidly, you take the same bus company thinking maybe the other time was an anomaly. You are again, wrong.

The bus this time makes it almost halfway through the trip before they pull over and stop. You think maybe, just maybe, if you remain calm, they will fix it quickly and you will keep going, like your positive thoughts will flow out into the world and fix everything – WRONG. They give up on fixing it because it requires a part they don’t have and don’t carry with them regularly. You are now waiting for the later bus which is coming behind you. You wait for three hours, during which a drunk/mentally disturbed (or both) man tries to tell you that you’re Korean/Chinese and that he is a Korean trained commando who will protect you from other men, because you are his madam.

On the plus side, you do end up having a pleasant conversation with a University professor who is from Uganda, but spent some time in Canada and the last 30 years teaching in Lesotho. He’s pretty cool, and pretty chill, and so keeps you good company for a while. You also have made two friendship bracelets so far in the trip, and given one of them to the bus’s conductor.

The other bus finally comes; there are only a few seats, and you get one of them! It’s a tight fit, but you at least left behind the broken bus and are now on your way. Also, when you were leaving the other on the side of the road, the bus coming the other way (from the capital) stopped to give the broken bus a new part so they could fix it. You didn’t really think they’d be able to fix it, which is why you boarded this new bus.

The new bus goes for half an hour, then stops momentarily at a gas station for food and people to go to the bathroom. Then your old bus pulls up beside, apparently having fixed itself. Maybe. You’re told to get back on the old bus and you respond that you’d rather ride a bus which has not broken once. Then the conductor of the new bus says if you are in a hurry, you should get on the old bus. Why you might ask? Because now this new bus has a mechanical problem. You heard correctly. You have a choice between a broken bus, or a broken bus. These are your choices. You have not enough money and certainly not enough language skills to take any other form of transportation.

So you get back on the old bus, certain you have made a mistake, you have lost your coveted window seat and are now sitting next to a mother and her five-year-old who only stops crying when asleep. And she doesn’t sleep the whole time. And she’s sick. And sneezing/coughing everywhere.

The bus, surprisingly, does not break down again, and you make it to the capitol about 4 hours behind schedule. Huzzah!

Congratulations, you have just lived my last two bus rides. Isn’t it fun to travel?  : )

Stay tuned for more entries about our All Volunteer Conference, and the Literacy Conference I'm currently attending!

What's the Happity Haps

Hello all! I’ve been absent for a while, mainly because things are happening at my school! This is exciting, and my plan is basically to throw bunch of balls in the air so that I can focus on many things at the same time. Those who know me know I love to multitask, and I’m forcing myself to do it so that I don’t go crazy.

I’m part of a 20 volunteer grant involved in getting new books donated to our schools as part of a program called Books for Africa. This in turn is helping me motivate the librarians at my school to move old, outdated books out of the library and into a storage room. Why not use the books for raw material or burn them, you may ask? (We burn a lot of trash here.) One of the librarians told me that the Ministry of Education recycles a lot of old books, so they go to the school and pick them up to take them to the recycling place somewhere in Kampala (or Entebbe?). So I’m planning to meet with my principal to work out a storage place where they can go. This isn’t even thinking about the larger plan, which is moving the library to a larger building (right now it’s cramped and dark and not cleaned very well). But that’s for the future.

I’ve started teaching ICT – Information Communication Technology, for those who were as confused as I was when I first heard it. Basically it means computers. Until this week, I was only teaching theory, as we hadn’t tested any of the computers or husks of computers which were hanging out in the lab. The second man in charge for ICT came back from his university studies this month, and he’s been crazy helpful. He actually knows a lot more about computer hardware, and especially power regulation in a country where power is not reliable or steady.

PICTURES

The parts which are working. 

 One of the working computers, set up so we can install some software.

 The parts which are not working. Looks like a lot of Googling for me. Is it worth it to fix keyboards and mouses?

 The other working tower which is not hooked up at the moment. We had to move a hard drive from a different tower into this one to get it to work.

 Our power setup. The extension cord is running to solar. We found out the limits of this, as the battery died after about 5 hours of desktop use/people charging their laptops/phones/etc.

Solar batteries. 

Solar controller - on/off switch and battery/load indicator lights.

I’m teaching ICT at night, because the current class schedule is insane and doesn’t allow for ICT during the day. Or rather they’re not willing to give up time during the day. I’m teaching 3 nights a week, in order to fit in all the Year 2’s, which is the only year I’m teaching right now. The students are split into three groups called streams, and so each night is supposed to be a stream. The largest attendance I had was on Night One, but after that it’s steadily dropped off.

Many students are studying for exams, but I suspect many of them have been waiting for the computers to start working before they start coming. The students call these practicals, and not a night goes by when someone doesn’t ask “Madam, when will we have  practicals?” However, in a Year 2 of almost 200 students, only about 62 total have come to two weeks of classes. So I figure I’ll give those students first dibs on the “practicals”, while the rest will wait and learn some sort of theory first before jumping in.

When I started teaching, I didn’t want to go too low, so I didn’t define some basic terms like ‘mouse’ or ‘keyboard.’ It became evident that while many of the students had heard of computers, they had no idea what anything was called or how to use any of it. So the next lesson I defined things, and still it takes them a while to remember the terms and how devices work together. It’s a bit unfair to them really, that the outside world of applying for jobs or moving up in their lives is becoming more based on computers, while they don’t really receive good computer instruction at all during their education.

I’ve also been teaching Maths, though the way that happens has changed 2 or 3 times since the term started. At the beginning of term, we were grading exams, and so classes were sort of a free-for-all. I hadn’t been assigned topics so I wasn’t really teaching, just grading exams and trying to keep my house in order (turns out I’m super bad at cleaning house every day). Then we organized a slot on the timetable (schedule) for me to teach, and  I was subsequently out of town for various reasons (not on purpose) on that day. The one day I came back and taught in my schedule was a good day. Then the Director of Studies announced we were combining all the streams to teach in mass classes because all the departments had too many subjects and not enough time really. So that week ended in me teaching Math for 2.5 hours, trying to cover as many subjects as possible.

Now the timetable has changed again, because the school is playing host to some British visitors, who have been giving high priority. They are now taking two hours in the morning to discuss instructional materials, theory, and early childhood development. It seems no one on the staff besides the principal knew that they were coming. Even they were confused at the timing, asking why they were teaching during exam prep. But they had already come and couldn’t really go back, so the schedule was shifted.

I’m also attempting to work on HIV/AIDS awareness at my school. We’re working with the Anti-AIDS club at my school to arrange some activities for close to the end of term. But it’s not finalized yet so I don’t want to spoil the fun!

That’s all school-wise I can think of at the moment, but I did want to mention that I white-water rafted the Nile for the 4^th of July weekend with a bunch of other volunteers, and it was definitely worth the obscene amount of money I spent over that weekend. It was loads of fun, and there’s a professional photographer that goes along the river, so there’s some pretty great pictures of me falling out of the raft. Class 5 rapids baby! I’ll be sure to upload them when I have the time/internet.

I don’t take a lot of pictures, but I’ll try to be better about it.

Until next time,

stay well.

A Tale of Two Lives

Living as a Peace Corps Volunteer has many juxtapositions. Between your American education and their own disjointed, interrupted education. Between your “salary” and the money they live on. The way you are able to travel throughout their country and the way many people in your village have never left their district. The largest differences are obvious when you travel to the capitol.

For Peace Corps Uganda, Volunteers occasionally travel to the capitol to see Peace Corps doctors, for various meetings about projects, or to travel through the city to get to other parts of the country. I think this is similar for other PC countries as well. For me, I have to travel to Kampala to get anywhere in the country other than the North.

Usually you are not alone in Kampala. Others are there for their own reasons. So you end up eating with them, watching movies with them, going to the mall with them. You live almost like you were living at home. It’s a nice break from the village, but the more you go back and forth, the more you marvel at the differences.

A child born in Kampala may never travel to the village, though their parents will surely try to get them to see their ancestral land. They live in a world of consistent electricity, Western influence, plentiful food women in trousers, good roads, lots of cars, lots of foreigners, and lots of English. It remind s me of the difference between a city like New York or Chicago, and a small town in maybe Iowa or Nebraska. But the difference is even more striking. Around 15%-20% of Uganda is illiterate, and most likely a larger percentage have limited literacy skills. It’s difficult for them to save any money, have any say in their government, travel very far from their homes, or receive a good education.

I feel very guilty going to the capitol for long stretches of time, but it is sometimes unavoidable, both for official reasons and because for mental health, I need to leave my site sometimes. I think it’s difficult to compare your life at site and your life while traveling as well as your life back home. We are here to attempt to live like the people we are serving, but surely that can only go so far. Some volunteers “go village” and truly integrate, only emerging for trainings and few other things. But I would say the vast majority cannot change, at the core, who America has made them.

This is not to say that we cannot learn from our host country or cannot integrate. It’s just that there is a limit to those activities which has nothing to do with how much we try.

I Went to a Wedding!

So this Sunday, I went to my first Ugandan wedding! First, some background information.

Weddings here are notorious for being very long, starting in the morning with a long religious service and with the reception starting in the afternoon and going until the evening. There are three main types of weddings – traditional, church wedding, and the Muslim wedding (niqa). A traditional wedding includes the tradition of bride price, meaning that the male relatives of the groom and male relatives of the bride get together to decide what the bride is worth in terms of barter (mainly livestock but can also include money or houses). A traditional wedding also may not be recognized in the church or by the government, instead is just done by the villagers between themselves. There may not be a big ceremony and dress code is probably traditional African fabrics.

A bride price can even happen with more modern church weddings. This was the kind of wedding I attended, but I didn’t ask about the bride price. I believe the bride was Catholic and the groom was Anglican. This type of wedding more closely resembles the American idea of a wedding – some religious service to start, and then a reception for friends and family.

A Muslim wedding, called a niqa, is something I don’t know a whole lot about, never having been to one. But from what my friends tell me they are also long, with lots of people talking. It’s most common for Muslim men to take multiple wives here versus other religions, so you may be attending the wedding of the second or third wife while the first and second wives sit looking on. Dress code is more conservative at these events.

General picture of the wedding.

So the wedding started at church, and this part I did not attend. It was in the local language, Lugbara, and the neighbor I was attending with was also not going until the reception. This worked out well for me because I didn’t really like the idea of sitting in church for three hours listening to something I couldn’t understand.

The reception was held at the primary school next to my college, as the bride is a teacher at the school. They had sectioned off an entrance way with mesh over most of it except for a small part for people to enter through. They put down red carpet for people to walk on as well. The bride and groom arrived in a car with lots of ribbons and balloons tied to it, as well as a leading car (the college truck) honking and playing music.

The couple enters solemnly, making their way to their provided tent, while the rest of the wedding party, including women whose sole job it seemed to be to yip loudly and shake palm leaves, are dancing and shouting behind the couple. All the guests are either seated in their own tents, or up standing trying to get a view of the couple and take a picture or video. They are also dancing and singing.

Bride and groom enter the reception.

This is one thing I love about this culture. Music is a part of their daily life. It’s a part of the big and small occasions, for happiness and sadness. At funerals they don’t even wear black, but they wear nice dress up clothes and play loud dance music. I don’t think I’ve heard a Ugandan song without a booming bass line to shake your booty to. It’s simply accepted as a fact that you dance as a Ugandan, or that you sing as a Ugandan. For men it’s not seen as feminine or emasculating, and for women it’s not seen as trying to be a diva or show off your crazy dance moves. You’re all showing off together, as a big family.

The bride was wearing a Western style wedding dress, large and white with a veil and a large white necklace. All the bridesmaids, though their dresses were handmade, no doubt were fashioned after Western style as well. The groomsmen were also in tuxes and matching ties. It makes me wonder what they wore 100 years ago to weddings. Most likely the traditional dresses and kitenge (kah-TENG-gay or kih-TENG-gay).

You can sort of see the bridesmaids dresses here.

As everyone gets seated, the MC made some announcements which I didn’t understand because they were in Lugbara, but I did catch the part about “men’s bathrooms over here, women’s over there”. The best man and a few other people made speeches, and there were a few rituals put on by the bride and groom. They set out a chair and a woven mat on the ground in front of it. The groom sat in the chair while the bride sat on the mat. She poured water over his hands for washing and fed him food, then wiped his mouth. This is to signify the women serving her husband. After this the groom also fed his bride, but she remained seated on the ground with him in the chair. This is common here. I noticed it with my host family as well. Whenever my dad was not home, my mom would sit in a chair and the kids would sit on mats. When he came home, my mom would sit on the mats with the kids.

 Then it was time to eat!

Just realized I didn’t take pictures of the food because I have gotten used to it, but I will try to update this post with pics from daily life - since they eat it every day!

Enyasa, the staple of the West Nile region, is made of dried cassava pound into a flour, mixed with water, and then stirred and cooked for a long time. It doesn’t really have a taste other than starch, and the texture is not really comparable to anything in the States. The closest thing I can think of is if you took bread and made it the consistency of bread dough, but much stickier and able to hold together more. Most people fill up half their plate with this, much like Westerners do with rice or pasta.

There’s always some sort of meat at large events, usually beef, but sometimes they’ll have fish. The beef comes in two pots, one for what I would consider “regular chunks” like you’d make stew out of, and the other pot has parts of the animal that I didn’t know were eaten. Intestines, mainly, and I know because of the little bumps sticking up from the meat. Then there’s beans, sometimes rice, and this time they had cabbage! They also usually have pop (Pepsi, Fanta, Stoney – ginger ale, Sprite, Mountain Dew).

There’s no table service, in fact there’s no tables as we are all seated in chairs squished together under tents. So each tent takes its turn getting food, buffet style. We eat, and then a woman comes around to collect the plates. I hear later from my neighbor Felista that the cooks were supposed to bring out the bull’s head, and whichever woman dances with it on her head is the next one to get married.

Then there’s the presentation of gifts! Unlike a wedding in the States with a gift table,  the gifts are brought in the same way the wedding party is – with much pomp and circumstance and of course, dancing!!! People bring money, goats, chickens, tables, chairs, and at this wedding I saw them carry in a queen bed complete with four posts, mattress, and mosquito net! Don’t forget the yipping ladies and the shouting and the music. And the conga line of people bringing gifts.

Afore mentioned bed that was carried into the reception.

Entrance to the reception, including African conga line!

Felista was presenting a cash gift from the local women’s savings group and asked me to go up with her and two other women from the college. So we walked around to the entrance way and danced in – didn’t take a video, sorry! One of my fellow teachers did take a video so I’ll try to get it from him.

After this we left the wedding as it had started to rain a little bit. The tent we were sitting under partially blew off the frame and the wind kicked up like crazy. They were trying to wrap it up quickly actually because they had predicted it was going to rain.

Overall I like the communal feel of events here, much like daily life here. It’s like admitting that everyone is connected, and everyone is welcome. The wedding was fun even if I didn’t understand most of it, because I understood what was important – we are a large family, and we’re happy and celebrating with you for the creation of your new family. Joyous day. Here's some more pictures.

Mainly I was trying to get a picture of all the cakes, but also got a picture of the woman who was dancing around with some animal part stuck on a stick. Or it's possibly enyasa. Who knows. Lots of the cakes were given as gifts to the groom's family and bride's family. Not many people bake here (wheat flour is expensive) so cake is kind of a big deal.

Children dressed as navy officers?? Super cute anyhow.

I just loved this woman's dress.

Ceding Control

Americans are, I think, used to being in control of their lives to a certain point. You decide what you eat, where you work, what to go to school for, what you can wear, who you can associate with, how conservative or liberal you want to be, how you transport yourself around your neighborhood. When you live in a developing country you lose some of that control. Things don’t always work, transportation depends on unreliable cars and badly maintained roads, you can’t eat the things you’re used to, you can’t wear what you want to, the weather is not what you’re used to, and you have to manage your views or ideas to control the level of safety you may have.

So you tend to cling to things you can control – personal hygiene, hanging out with other expats to have a chance to speak like you did back at home, depending on care packages for food versus going to the market, buying things for your home, communicating with friends back home online (but even that is difficult sometimes).

I think the key to living abroad (not in an expat community, but more integrated into culture) is finding the balance between what you’ve realized is out of your control, and what you can fight for. When you first arrive, you decide you’re going to fight for everything. Call people at home everyday. Spend lots of money at restaurants designed for foreigners. Shop at supermarkets versus the local market. Spend lots of money on internet to live the life you did at home. But at some point you realize you’re not at home anymore, and even when you’re on a limited contract, that you’re not going to be home again for a while. You start to let go of things which simply bothered you, and start to focus on the things you can control.

How often will you see your expat friends? How often will you spend money on comfort food or comfort items? How much work can you expect to get done now that you’ve seen the systems and their limitations?

Grassroots work is hard. And change takes an extremely long time. But you focus on the people and the things you can affect, and that helps.

Malaria! Still!

It occurs to me that I told everyone in Uganda what I did for World Malaria Month (April), but not everyone at home! So let’s fix that.

In late March I attended a workshop which mainly focused on HIV/AIDS awareness and activities, but also focused a small amount on malaria. We were encouraged to do malaria activities in our schools and communities to raise awareness and educate people on the disease. I, with another staff member at my school, co-planned a week of college activities involving the students and the staff.

On Monday April 21, we had a Health Officer from Yumbe hospital come to do a general talk about malaria. HO’s are like emissaries from the hospital who work with VHTs (village health teams) to educate Ugandans, especially in rural areas, about healthy habits and preventing disease. Save any outside organization loaning management help, VHT’s are comprised of only Ugandan nationals.

Tuesday, the students organized skits around malaria myths and facts. I had wanted them to do it completely on their own, but to make sure they got the correct information I gave some example situations. For example, a man is told by a doctor that he should sleep under a net every night. The man says he is strong, has had malaria before, and is okay, so why should he? The answer we’re looking for at that point is something like, just because you survive malaria doesn’t mean your family will. If a mosquito bites you and you have malaria, then it can be passed to your children, your elderly relatives, or people who are immuno-comprimised  like people with HIV or AIDS. Other myths include that sleeping under a net will give you cancer, malaria is spread through saliva, and malaria is spread through sexual contact.

Wednesday, we had a demonstration of how to hang the net on the dorm beds provided here. They also talked about how to hang the nets when you don’t have four poster beds. Many people who live in huts just sleep on mattresses on the ground, and so it’s much easier to hang a net from a single point on the roof. To do this, they gather the top of the net with rope or by placing a bucket lid underneath and hanging it from that. We also talked about repairing nets and washing them. They actually need to be washed about every 4 months to reactivate the insecticides. Only about 13% of Ugandans currently sleep under nets, which is a ridiculously small amount. As a facilitator at one of my workshops said, mosquitoes live less than a month. So basically if the whole country slept under nets for at least a month, malaria would be almost wiped out.

Thursday, we had another skit in the form of a radio show (they unironically love drama and skits and music here, which I love). Some of the students posed as local health authorities, nurses, doctors, district health officers, politicians, etc. Then they called on the audience to have “callers” into the show. Radio has a large presence in Uganda, mostly because it’s an oral culture, and because lots of people don’t read. They especially don’t read their local language. So lots of broadcasts are in multiple languages and they even have BBC World Service at 6pm each night. I still need to get a working radio, because even though most phones come with FM radio transmitters, it’s not powerful enough to pick up the signal for BBC. Sad day.

Friday was the culmination of our activities, when we had a sort of a game show program, which probably would have worked better if the students were split into groups. (There are 450 students at my college, and most of them showed up at the event on Friday.) We also drew names for giving out new mosquito nets to the student body. Unfortunately the grant I received for my activities didn’t cover buying nets for the entire student body, so I bought 35 and said I’d look for funding for the rest. My hope is to by the time I leave, have a storage and checkout system so that all students who come to the college have a net to use while they’re here.

The entire week was exhausting, but the results were good. I got good feedback from my students and staff. Peace Corps Africa had a competition in April among the countries to do lots of malaria activities (each activity had a point value). Uganda ended up winning! Makes me proud to be in Peace Corps. For a while I thought competition was silly as a motivator, but knowing that we were competing against all the other countries made me want to do more and more.

Malaria isn’t just an April problem, but an always problem. So while I’m thrilled with all the things I did, I look forward to doing more, multiple times a year. I urge you to donate to organizations which provide nets, malaria education, or anyone who is researching a vaccine (which would be awesome!). And thanks for reading.

Term 2: Electric Boogaloo

School is back in session. Sort of.  Students started arriving Thursday, but classes won’t actually start until sometime next week. Most deadlines in Uganda are soft deadlines. For Americans, it’s hard to adjust to, but a lot of people here just take it in stride. They say things like “Americans love to keep time” as in, “Americans start things on time”, but don’t really make any in roads to change their attitude on time. So far I’ve been spending my time lesson planning, both for maths and ICT, and attempting to get electricity back in the ICT building so I can test computers and computer accessories.

Currently the electricity is wired to the administration building so the secretaries can type memos and other official documents. I don’t have a problem with this except that, as previously mentioned, there’s no power in the ICT building.

When I got home after traveling for a few weeks, it felt different. It felt good and like I was coming back to a place where I was home. I started baking using a dutch oven (stop laughing you know who you are). Dutch ovens are basically the Russian nesting dolls of baking. You place what you’re baking in one pot and place it inside another larger pot which has rocks/sand in it. Then you cover the whole thing. The rocks/sand act to hold the heat like a real oven would. I still need to get a giant pot to use specifically for baking; otherwise I end up baking cookies like 3 at a time. But the bread I’ve made so far has been awesome and wonderful and did I mention I love baking?

I’m feeling more at home here and the community feels more like home. The children of my fellow tutors come by to play, though some days I have to turn them away because I need to do some work or if I just don’t have the energy to play. My fellow tutors come by to discuss American culture, Ugandan culture, and things going on at the college.

I’m feeling more and more comfortable in Uganda, and with a new group of Business/Health volunteers coming in June, my group won’t be the newbies in country anymore. Looking forward to this term and the challenges it brings.