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.

Emily's Uganda Wish List

Hello all who feel they want to send me things - here are things I want! I'll try to keep it updated on a weekly basis with things I've received so I don't get doubles. I love you all and appreciate your love and support. Keep in mind it takes about a month to get to me! Please try to wrap food in hardy plastic so that insects don't get into it as it waits for me at the post office.

Last updated: May 8 2015

FOOD (probably the largest section)
Applesauce
Raisins
Chocolate chips
Chocolate anything - chocolate I've gotten so far has not melted. got a bar which looked like it had started to melt but reformed, and it was fine to eat!
Mac&cheese
Jerky
Salami
Dressing mixes
Soup mixes (low sodium if you can manage!)
Drink mixes (Crystal light, etc)
Brown sugar
Baked goods
Walnuts
Pecans
Tuna (packets are lighter to send than cans but might be more expensive?)
Small wrapped candies (Laffy Taffy, Starburst, etc)
Dried berries
Craisins
Sriracha (hot sauce)
Parmesan cheese
Cheetos
Couscous
Flaxseed
Quinoa
Brown rice


FOOD RELATED
Tupperware
Ziplock bags, big and small


HYGIENE
Dove conditioner
Tide to Go Pens

HOBBIES/KEEPING MYSELF SANE
sendairtime.com - this is to buy me airtime (basically like minutes on a US prepaid phone) - if you're doing this option please contact me for my numbers as I'm not posting them on a public site. buying MTN airtime helps me with internet and call my non-PC coworkers, Orange Airtime lets me international minutes to call home
Mod Podge
Sticky tack!!!
TIME or Utne or Mental Floss for me!


FOR THE KIDS
Construction paper
Low level (early elementary) spelling/children's books, hopefully ones that deal with Africa or African themes
Old magazines - kids magazines are best but ones with lots of pictures are good, also maybe some
Finger paints


TECHNOLOGY
Earbud headphones

OTHER
Michigan themed things
Wall hooks for hanging things
Big things of DEET bug spray
Citronella candles
Stationary sets for writing letters
Pop up hamper
Set of queen sheets
Lint rollers
Plastic empty spray bottles

End of Term Wrap-Up and IST

So the first term at my PTC ended this week. I left early because my group had a training in Kampala. There were no end-of-term exams because they just didn't end up getting made? So the plan is to make beginning-of-term exams and the students will take them when they return.

I only actually taught for about 4 days out of the whole term. The last month of the term, the Year One students were taught in mass classes (like college classes in the states), because the Year Two students were out for school practice and most tutors were out observing them. I didn't want to teach in mass classes, so I waited for a few weeks and then started teaching. However, the timetable (what we call the schedule here) was still not finalized, so despite having set times to teach math, sometimes that didn't happen. There are also classes scheduled at 7:30, when assembly is supposed to end, but most often assembly goes over and we don't start until 8 or 8:15, and at that point I refuse to teach because I think it's a bit useless to fit an hour's material into 15 minutes.

So I now have to finish my unit in term two along with teaching a term two unit. At our IST training this past week,  we spoke about rearranging the curriculum to make mathematical sense (learn operations before factoring). The problems we found were not so much that the curriculum was out of order, but that the tutors were teaching everything simultaneously vs in order that makes sense. I'm going to try to speak to the math department when I get back to school and see how we can make things better.

I finally bought a new power cord and a new powermatic (power adapter)!!! My wonderful mom is sending me/sent me a power cord but I feel better with two, one to keep at site and one to travel with. I'm also in a place now where my internet modem gets good service. Looking like I have to buy one from a different carrier to get internet at site.

Overall I feel like I'm moving into a better place emotionally and mentally. During the middle of the term I was pretty down, but now even small things that happen I take as a part of life. I lost my raincoat transferring taxis on the way back to site. I think at first I would have been pretty upset, but I just accept theft/loss as something that happens here. Many people don't leave UG with any clothes they brought here, and sometimes that applies to possessions as well.
I lost three days instructional time because of Easter and other college activities, and while it was frustrating, the frustration just went away and I worked on a malaria project we were doing in April.  I think I'm integrating better in my community, working on stress relief better, and adapting to sometimes just not having my computer or internet. I'm excited to work on projects for the rest of the year and visit people at their sites.

I really wanted to go home, and I'm really glad I didn't. I'm excited for my service, and the future ahead.