Tired and Underprepared

2009-05-17T06:24:00.003-07:00

In my last days in Kunming, I looked out the window and said, “no thank you.” It was cold and I was stressed, and all I could think about was Christmas. Kampala is dusty, poor, hectic, bustling, dry, and ragged, sure to induce vertigo in any new arrival. But the beauty of it is how much simpler everything is than it first seems. You can get into any car, whether it’s a taxi or not, pay a couple thousand shillings, and have them take you where you want to go. You can grab samosas from any street stand or sip yogurt out of a plastic bag from an Indian grocery store. Soon you realize it’s not so bad—a city that once seemed impenetrable is now perfectly straightforward, a bizarrely organized chaos. I have an easier time getting around here than I do in my hometown of 35,000. There is certainly more fresh fruit. I will miss it here.

a few thoughts I just needed to get out there before I left--

race here is funny. Because of my white skin, I am automatically assumed to be richer, smarter, and timelier everywhere I go. While my fellow American classmates scowl upon neocolonialism in development, I have been asked by Ugandans to come back, get a job, and “develop” them. My homestay sister tells me how she only likes to attend church services held by muzungus, because they “don’t waste people’s time.” My homestay brother tells me how he only wants to work for a muzungu company, because “unlike Ugandans, they actually pay you.”

What’s even more disconcerting is how white people are treated in comparison with Indians—it’s as if Ugandans feel more warmly about their colonizers than their fellow colonees. Britain unjustly ruled Uganda for the better part of the 20th century, and now they come back with aid, which either comes with too many strings or enables the horrifically corrupt government (or both) and perpetuates the gulf between Africa and the rest of the world, and they are loved for it. Indians bring business to Uganda, opening supermarkets and restaurants and electronic shops, and significantly influence the cuisine, yet they are despised. My host family didn’t even know that the tea they drink, the bread they eat, and the spices they use all came from India. One friend here even told me he wouldn’t eat the food of “that filthy people.” But all things muzungu are worshipped—when I had a stuffy nose, my sister asked me if that was the first time I had a cold because surely such things do not occur in American medicine. The fact that I shop at thrift stores and sometimes skimp on meals to save money was is completely alien to many Ugandans’ perception of me. There’s nothing like the rockstar treatment to add to my White Liberal Guilt.

I have very little respect left for my program. Compared to Lu Yuan and SIT China, Charlotte is a self-important amateur. From day one they treated us like high-schools in summer camp, unnecessarily prohibiting us from a range of ordinary activities and generally belittling our intellect. They would give such broad, idiotic suggestions as “avoid crossing roads” and order us to let them know whenever we planned to so much as go to an internet café. They told us to avoid using toilets because “one little splash” could lead to a UTI. They told horror stories of poisoned ice cream and gang-rapes at knife point and abductions in broad daylight. Yet when we actually needed their help, to ask advice about our research or find out what time a site visit was, they were inexcusably absent. When in Gulu we had trouble finding an affordable apartment, Kaitlyn called Charlotte, one of the ADs, to ask for advice and was told, “finding your own housing is part of growing up.” When we got sick, we were ordered to inform then, and they would systemically drop us off at the most expensive clinics and when a malaria test could clearly be obtained for half the price elsewhere. They told us to call them twice a week to “check in” during ISP, yet in the crucial few days before we left they turned off their cell phones and never showed up to the office. They gave us no practical instruction on how to write our papers, but then when it came to our presentations they would ask us condescending, inane, and downright rude questions about our methodology.

The most unforgivable part was when they took our passports. We were ordered to surrender them at the beginning of trip because “we might lose them,” but right before we left for Rwanda the support staff “temporarily misplaced” three of them. When we asked for them before our six-week ISP, they straight-out lied to us and said our passports were “being processed” when in fact they had been processed within the first few days of us being in Uganda and the ADs just didn’t want us to have them. When we persisted, they would sharply say, “what do you need it for? You’re not going anywhere,” unaware that as American students in Africa the one thing that has been engrained us is to always, always, always travel with your passport in case you get into any situation. When hotels asked to see proper documentation, we had nothing. If I had gotten into any sort of incident, it would only be my word that I was an American citizen with a student visa that allowed me to be in Uganda.

At the evaluation, when Charlotte was once again giving her pitiful justification for holding our passports, I became physically angry. It was all I could do to stop myself from throwing a bottle at her. Her excuse was offensive—we couldn’t be trusted to take care of ourselves. And then, bafflingly, “If there were a coup in Kampala and you were in Gulu, you would need to come back and get your passport.” I’m sorry, that’s the reason I would want my passport with me in Gulu, so I could just safely cross into Kenya instead of walking into a violent coup d’etat. If I lose my passport, well, shit happens and I’m the one who should deal with it because it’s my life. Charlotte also idiotically added something about how her holding our passports would prevent us from getting raped, but at that point I was too enraged to keep up with her logic.

In short, while I will be sad to leave Uganda, it may be good to put a country between Charlotte in me in case I accidentally jump onto her back and start pulling out her hair.

I’m sorry, should I end on a happier note? I really have loved it here. I hope you can tell that from my blog posts along the way. But I had a good time in spite of the program, not because of it. The five weeks I spent in Gulu were incredible for my self-discovery and academic direction. I think we’re all impressed by how we pulled together our research projects completely on our own, and I now even know what I specifically want to do with my life. At this point I don’t even know if I’m excited about coming back to the US—the bagels had better be as good as I remember them.

2009-05-13T06:41:00.000-07:00

sunday was our homestay farewell party. It felt a little like senior banquet in high school—we all met in the parking lot of our hotel in Kampala at five to get ready to go to the reception. Everyone wore nice outfits, invariably African dresses and suits that they’d had made at tailors here. We were all in denial that in only a week we’d be leaving Uganda.

I’d been spending the past week with my homestay family, but left on Saturday to check into the hotel with the group and finish writing my paper. These past few days have been wonderful—nice weather (in Uganda, May is much cooler than January, with a nice breeze and rain clouds permanently in the sky), being together again after our ISPs, and the combination of looking forward to home and enjoying doing my favorite things in Kampala one last time. I’ve been haunting 1000 Cups, the one coffee shop in town, with Barbara—every morning we get there, plug in our laptops, order the first round of coffees, then periodically get into conversation with the staff and other regulars, saying hello to our various other classmates who pop in throughout the day.

Even though I’d only been away from my family for a day, it was weird seeing them in a setting that felt like a graduation party. The reception was outdoors on the grounds of some museum, and my homestay mother showed up with three of my brothers and my two sisters.

I’ve never been one to surrender my personal space, but sharing a bed with my sister Rebecca this week has been surprisingly fun. We had pillow talk every night before we went to sleep, and I felt like we got a lot closer than we ever did in the two months where I had my own room. I was enjoying talking to her at the party, and then went with my brother to get beers for everyone in the family. We were all having a good time, and they begged me to break out my camera then spent about forty-five minutes taking turns taking family photos in every combination they could think of. I guess I never realized how much fun my host siblings were, or I’ve always just felt too weird about being so much more privileged than them to really let loose. Silver, William, Brian, Rebecca, and Lilian range from ages 16 to 25, but they all have so much in common that it felt like hanging out with a bunch of hilarious people my age. We spent the rest of the night dancing, which was about as much fun as I’ve ever had. Lilian, having recovered from a miscarriage and malaria at the age of 17, was particularly energetic and tried to train the muzungu out of me on the dance floor. When my family finally said goodbye to me and went home, I felt really strange and sad for a moment before I joined the SIT conga line.

The other day, I realized it’s been over a month and a half since I looked in a mirror.

When I get back to the US, I am going to experience air-conditioning again and buy a Wegman’s veggie sub an inch-thick in cheese, and get the Leornardo da Veggie sandwich at Bruegger’s, drink all the coffee I want, then have a bowl of penne alla vodka. I’m going to get fake hot dogs from Morningstar Farms and start making things with cabbage in them (Uganda has turned me onto this vegetable of my heritage) and soak oreos in mint chocolate chip ice cream. I’m going to be sad when I can no longer buy two pineapples for a dollar and mangoes for ten cents each. Jackfruit, rolexes, millet posho, and masala chips will no longer be there. It’s going to be a while before I can eat guacamole again, but I’ll enjoy reintegrating spicy things into my palate. Samosas and chapati will no longer be my go-to snack, and my mother is not going to boil a pot of chai every night. I will stop eating matooke and referring to potatoes as “irish,” and birthday cake will no longer resemble stale raisin bread. I will start taking menus in restaurants for granted, no longer having to preface my order with, “Are beans there? Is there rice? The vegetable curry, is it there?”

I’ll have to start walking places again instead of jumping on the back of someone’s boda. I’ll begin to wonder why guys who ask for my number don’t call, instead of hitting silent five times in a row to ignore creepy, persistent calls from security guards and hotel managers. People will stop laughing at me on public transportation. No one will be buzzing about what’s happening on the soap opera that’s on tv every night after airing in Mexico four years ago. Most importantly, people will stop asking me if I go to church, which is good because I’ve had it up to HERE with Jesus.

Rebecca, who is my age, plans to attend Makerere next fall, and I was helping her look over her requirements to apply. She sheepishly came up to me and told me there was a problem with her birth certificate. "My dad was in charge of it when I was in school," she said, "and he didn't know which year I was born." It turns out her official birth certificate read February 19th, 1976. I don't know what kind of father remembers the exact day of his daughter's birthday but doesn't even get the right decade, but there you go.

2009-05-04T00:35:00.000-07:00

one of my last days in Gulu was spent violently throwing up from some bad guacamole. This, thankfully, did not set in until after trivia night on thursday, the brainchild of a 60-year-old mad chain-smoking bachelor brit who bafflingly opened a tiki bar in Gulu. Seeing as I am neither old nor british, my trivia score was appalling but I enjoyed the downpour on my walk home. The rainstorms in Gulu seem to get scarier and scarier, which I find a delight. Sometimes the dust whips about and blinds you, and when the power goes out everything is eerie and quite, and it feels like the set of a certain Helen Hun/Bill Paxton movie about tornadoes. In Africa.

I spent saturday wrapping things up, doing laundry, avoiding Christine, saying goodbye to our tailors and grocers and waitresses. At 3pm I met with Charles, my NAADS adviser, for our final interview in the bar of my hotel. It had seemed like a good place to meet at the time, as it was quiet and mostly vacant and the power was off. But no sooner do I reach the moment for my planned heartfelt speech of appreciation when the power comes on, the Akon music videos start blaring, and the bar fills with drunken buffoons. One of them actually started waving a stick. "What?" Charles kept saying over the sound of the 4th replay of "It Don't Matter." It felt kind of like taking someone home to be embarrassed by my crazy family.

Coming home to Kampala was nothing if not more of a continued saga of ridiculous family moments. I arrived at the gate of my homestay to find the house in utter ruins, with no roof or windows. William was nonchalantly milking the cows, and looked up only to say, "oh, you and Rebecca are in Silver's room." Apparently the family is renovating the main part of the house where I stay, and so everyone has cramped into the few rooms in the other wing of the house across the driveway. The family's precious television set has been purchased in the doorway of my homestay mother's room, and we all watched "Second Chance" sitting on stools in the driveway behind the rainwater silo. I woke up this morning to a combination of sobbing and a strange buzzing noise, and walked outside to find the entire family on the other side of my door, holding Timothy, the baby, on a stool as Silver was shaving his head.

I can tell my baby cow missed me. I had an absolutely wonderful five weeks in Gulu, but it's nice to see my family again. I go back to the US in two weeks. It will be nice to see my family there again too.

2009-04-29T01:34:00.000-07:00

My ass has a permanent imprint from the back of the NAADS boda I ride an hour each way into the field every day. Charles is supposed to pick me up every morning at 8:30, but he is always tragically late so I usually chill out in the courtyard of our tiny hotel in my pajamas as my classmates come back from their runs, rush to the showers, boil water for tea when the power is on. Patiko sub-county, where Charles is the lone government extension work to train farmer groups in planting and harvesting, is a straight shoot from Gulu down a sporadically-paved road that makes my right eye tear from the dust. Half of my body is more tanned than the other, from the angle of the sun when we ride home in the afternoon.

What usually happens is Charles expertly discerns a tiny dirt trail through the bush off the main road and swerves down it until we park under a mango tree where the women of whatever farmer group we are meeting with are shelling groundnuts or mashing cassava. Most of them have returned from IDP camps in the past six months, and are either in their original villages or “satellite camps,” the limbo situation the government pretends is not a real IDP camp while the people wait to return to their original land. They bring us stools, and Charles and I usually sit for another hour before the last of the group members trickle over. There is no urgent sense of time in Gulu.

Charles tells me I can start asking questions, and I awkwardly prepare my notebook and start out with my first question, as Charles translates into Acholi. I ask them about farming before, during, and after the war, and how they benefit from the trainings they are receiving. This is the first planting season for a lot of people in almost 15 years, and because the land became much more fertile while they were away in camps, they expect yields to almost double when they harvest. Agriculture has been decimated by the war in almost every way, but the one thing that has changed for the better is the market: demand for food is almost astronomical, especially from Sudan.

My first discussion with the farmers I was terrified.

Charles typically then takes the farmers to their plot of land, and shows them how to correctly measure the spacing between rows of government-provided maize seeds. They use a string of twine with pieces of plastic bag tied every thirty centimeters as a guideline. Women dig with their hoes, then other women follow down the line sprinkling maize kernels and kicking the dirt back over with their feet. I just watch. Once, a group of women kept looking at me, then cracking up, then looking at me, and cracking up again, and finally one of them came over and gestured if I would like to try planting maize myself. I felt stupid, especially since Charles had told them I was a “farmer, just like them” and I had no idea what I was doing. I hoped I sprinkled maize into holes in a way that wasn’t horribly offensive.

On the way back, I try to duck my entire right side beneath Charles’ shadow on the boda, but I always look even darker when I get home, from the dust as well as the sun. I am usually in a good mood, and wave to small children and women carrying basins full of mangoes on their heads. When I realize I’m also waving to goats munching grass on the side of the road, I tell myself to get a grip.

One day, Charles took a detour on the way home from Ajulu Camp. He dropped me off under a mango tree in front of a mud hut, and said, “This is my family. I will be right back.” He drove off, and I looked at the man lying on a straw mat at my feet and the woman grinding some sort of rock into powder by the hut. I tried to greet them in Acholi, but elicited no response, so I sat on a stool and contemplated my existence for about forty-five minutes until Charles came swooping back on his boda to get me.

Last week I asked Charles what county he thought I came from. He squinted, and looked at me. “China?” he asked. I replied that I didn’t have Asian eyes. He said, “yes, but that’s the only difference.”

2009-04-27T06:17:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to Kaitlyn shouting in the courtyard. “What are you doing…I’ll move that…STOP!!!” I ran out to find all the guests and management of the hotel standing around the room of Christine, the grumpy old woman who lives across from us. Christine was holding a knife and shouting, gesticulating angrily from her crutches.

Kaitlyn had been sitting outside reading, and had said “good morning” to Christine as she'd come out of her room. Christine had responded by marching back into her room to get a knife, and chopping to shreds the scarf Kaitlyn had hung on the clothesline to dry. She was now shouting in Acholi at everyone who would listen, and many of the other tenants, to whom she had also been horrible, were standing there, smirking.

As everyone cleared the courtyard and we remained with Kaitlyn and her scarf, Christine came back out and glared. “You are white, and you can do anything to us,” she said. Apparently she is unhappy with our research, and thinks we are abusing her rights and researching her. That would violate about twenty IRB protocols, and all of us have made sure we are completely ethical when we talk to people in the field—they don’t have to participate and give consent for their responses to be used in our final papers. I keep telling myself we’re not doing anything wrong, it was an unprovoked episode from a madwoman, but it’s still unnerving that she said that.

Yesterday I went somewhere a little unconventional. Sudan has become inseparable from my research – I’ve yet to have an interview or focus group where it wasn’t mentioned. Sudanese traders come to Gulu at night, loaded with so much money that they don’t even bother to bargain, and buy entire acres of crops still growing in fields. Because farmers can get such high prices from a guaranteed buyer, they send off all their harvest in one transaction, leaving local markets bare and making food prices here even higher. I decided I couldn’t complete my research without talking to the traders.

The academic directors had taken our passports from us before we left for practicum, because they didn’t want us trying to go to Kenya for the day. (This left us traveling on our own around Uganda for a month and a half, with no proper documentation or proof of visa, and only our word that we were Americans, but that didn’t seem to bother them. We are on the only study abroad program in Africa that has forbidden weekend travel to other countries, but I digress.) Anyway, the conflict between North and South Sudan ended at about the same time as the LRA conflict here, and trade has been extensive. I asked several people I interviewed about going to Sudan and what the risks were before I left, and was assured that there was no danger. I had heard of Nimule, a market town just across the border where it was possible to visit for a few hours without getting a visa.

Six of us decided to go, and woke up at quarter to five on Saturday morning to catch the bus to Juba as it rolled into town. The bus was practically a skeleton, and the humungous spare tire was rolling freely down the aisle, knocking my arm every time the driver hit the brakes. Once we got to Atiak, the customs point for Uganda, the border guard took one look at our driver’s licenses (mine was expired) and student ID cards and said, “no way.” We stood outside, conferencing for a minute, when the guard came back out to fetch us. He told us he would expect us back at the border in three hours, and wrote us what was essentially a permission slip to show the Sudanese border agents on the other side.

Once getting over the whole thrill of being in Sudan, the whole thing was pretty normal. It looked similar to the Ugandan side, except flatter and drier, with higher hills looming in the background. The people were shyer, and only the children came up to us, following us and laughing. We walked down the Juba road for about a half-hour before we came to Nimule, an outpost with boda men and trucks parked around a tree, and a small market with stalls on the other side. I found the pavilion in the center where women sat on blankets selling piles of cabbage, onions, and tomatoes, and started working my way around, talking to them. They all spoke English. Most of them had come back from refugee camps in Uganda within the past few years, and either traveled to the Gulu markets themselves or bought Ugandan produce from the traders that parked under the tree. But most of the sellers seem to think that within a year Sudan will start producing again and stop buying so much produce from Uganda. To thank them for talking to me, I purchased a backpack-full of onions, which will last us for many nights of guacamole to come.

The little hiccup of the trip didn’t start until we were in the taxi on the way back. By the time were got to Gulu, we had been in the car for three hours longer than necessary and the taxi had changed all four of its tires. Back home, we are now all afraid to hang our clothes on the line, but management has threatened to kick Christine out if she tries anything again. Later, as she walked past us on her way back from the bathroom, she started babbling in incoherent noises that sounded like a mix between the girl from “The Exorcist” and a turkey. She then threw her head back and laughed, as if to say, “research this.”

2009-04-23T05:24:00.000-07:00

My research here is going well. I don't think I've ever felt this relaxingly productive in my college career. I have very low-key, manageable days, talking to farmer groups and UN organizations. It’s hard to sleep in past seven because my classmates are obsessed with jogging, and I usually have a couple of hours in the morning before I go into the field. Living here is like living in weird NGO world. The seven of us in Gulu each have six weeks to complete our individual research projects, and we all live together and come home at night to make dinner (read: guacamole) together and talk about our various interviews of the day. Whenever anyone hits a road block, they just get out the NGO guide and start calling numbers. I’ve gotten used to spotting the same logoed Land Cruisers passing me on the road as I walk to appointments. When I think about it, I don’t know of any other circumstance under which I can imagine the past six weeks taking place. Everyone in town has come to know us in our regular spots, the tailor, the café with the most reliable outlets, the pineapple seller, the Human Rights Focus resource center where we use the internet, the Indian grocery store where we buy yogurt. In the evenings my classmates and I run into each other buying chapati and avocadoes in the market.

It’s going to be hard to go back to the real world after this utopian Research World. What do we do? Nothing, really. When people ask us how our work can help people in Gulu, we feebly respond, “uhh, well, I hope that by just talking to organizations and getting the information out there…uhh…we’ll raise awareness of the problems.” We talk to NGO staff with ambiguous titles such as “liaison for peace-building affairs” and “livelihoods project coordinator.” If I hadn’t already exhausted myself trying to figure out how everything really works, my bullshit meter would be on constant alert. But, for all the tricky conundrums of development, the one thing that can assuage my growing personal sense of uselessness is, at least they’re all Ugandan.

The office of the Norwegian Refugee Council has not one Norwegian in sight. The Gulu branch of the World Food Programme is completely Ugandan-run. Action Against Hunger, Catholic Relief Services, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization: all Ugandans. I was supposed to meet with someone from USAID named Hayden Aaronson, a suspiciously muzungu name, but he called in sick and I met with his Ugandan coworker instead. I don’t know why I had this image of white people running through the hallways of their organizations in developing countries, but thus far I have been underwhelmed by the muzungu presence here. It’s not exactly neocolonialism, though some of the donor conditions (ahem, USAID) may point in the other direction. Maybe things used to be different, but it’s pretty hard to make the case in Gulu that white people run the show.

I don’t know what this means for me, a white girl who wants to come to “help out” while simultaneously avoiding all the negative associations between her race and international aid.

The only thing I can take away from this is that white people shouldn’t look at development as anything more than an ordinary job. If I happen to be academically interested in agriculture in Africa, why shouldn’t I be able to have a career reflecting that? But I think I know just enough at this point to assume that’s ultimately benefiting me more than any African. That’s how most careers work, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it certainly doesn’t justify a holier-than-thou notion that what you’re doing is an unselfish act of charity.

I’m just happy to be here.

2009-04-20T10:03:00.000-07:00

There was no one to take my business at the electronics shop on Saturday morning. I needed a new plug adapter for my computer, and one of the customers, a middle-aged man trying to buy a lantern, chatted with me while we waited. His name was Kennedy. He told me he hoped I would come back to Gulu and work in development, and I asked what he thought of white people engaged in aid in Africa, and he said that any development worker who is white automatically has more connections. I hear that a lot, especially when I interview farmers, and it’s so strange because people here interact with far more donors and projects than I ever do. I’m just a college student from upstate New York still trying to graduate from university, but their image of me, simply because I’m white, is that I dine with the rich bankrollers of London and Washington DC.

When it became clear we would not be waited on anytime soon in that electronics shop, Kennedy offered to take me to another place in town to buy an adapter. Never one to prolong happenstance encounters with strangers, I protested, but since it is Ugandan culture to physically take a person somewhere instead of just giving directions, I relented. On the walk to town came that inevitable, dreaded question: “do you pray?”

I decided to do something I’d never fathomed before in Uganda, and come out and admit I wasn’t Christian. “I respect many things about it, but I’m just not a spiritual person,” I replied. “Okay,” he said. The next twenty minutes were then filled by his harangues about Jesus and how people living outside the Lord are living in the dark and I must go to church and pray or else my life would never see joy and it’s not to late for me to be saved and I must choose the path of righteousness because Jesus loves me. I walked along and took it, trying to focus my mind on the plug adapter that would soon be mine. When we finally parted ways, he asked for my number, which I knew he would since everybody asks for your number, and I was so mentally exhausted that I just gave it, making a note to myself about screening my calls.

One thing here that has left my classmates and I utterly bewildered is the tendency of Ugandans to whom we give our telephone numbers to call us over and over without relent. My rural homestay father in Busia, who I knew for a total of four days, still calls me repeatedly at odd hours of the day; I have long since stopped answering. Our first week in Gulu when we were sharing a bed, Katie would jump awake at four in the morning as the housekeeper from her Kampala homestay unapologetically rang. “Hello again, Harriet. Yes. I am fine,” Katie would say in her sleep, accustomed to this ritual. People we met on taxis the first few days of the semester would unaccountably call a few months later, and you can forget about any guy you give your number to in a bar. So I was not surprised when Kennedy called me thirteen times in a row. I wish I were exaggerating but I’m not. One, two, three, thirteen. I turned my phone on silent and sat there, watching the screen light up and fade away.

Why?

Sometimes when people realize we’re not proper Christians, the politeness and chatter at the beginning slowly turns into resentment. This happens with tailors, hotel management, the old lady named Christine who lives across from us. The first few days she was so friendly, telling me about how she just moved back here from Masindi and remembering my name. Then one day Leslie hangs her gym shorts on the public line and all of a sudden Christine starts refusing to acknowledge us when we say good morning, rudely brushing us off when we try to carry her things. I’m tired of trying to force the American out of me. Sometimes we wear gym shorts and don’t go to church and have homosexual friends and eat guacamole. It’s so much more fun that way.

I’m also tired of being hit up for money, which happens at every moment of the day, either in passing (people shouting, “Muzungu! Give me some money!”) or through a long, drawn out story that ends, as a grand finale, with a request for money. Maybe it’s horrible, but I think I’ve become immune to every rehearsed, pitiful plea. I’ve moved past the stage of white guilt to the stage where I just feel used and annoyed.

I just witnessed a boda parade outside. I’m not sure what the cause was, a Manchester United victory or just boredom, but about fifty bodas crammed together snaked up and down the five-street grid that spans Gulu’s downtown, the drivers yelling and honking, a half -exasperated, half-laughing policeman failing to hold them back at the front. Bodas are probably my favorite thing about Uganda, and in Gulu they’re in no short supply. This town is smaller than my college campus, but I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t walk more than a few meters before I’m hit by the urge to hail a boda. I wish there were some sort of market for bodas at Tufts—it’s late at night, you’re alone, you have to walk back from Davis…

This probably means my next boyfriend will have a motorcycle.

2009-04-17T05:04:00.000-07:00

unlike Kampala, where the power sometimes goes out, in Gulu, the power sometimes come on. We've had huge chunks of days with naught but a flickering of the lights every now and then, and when the electricity does come on, the water tends to go off. It's like camping. I've gotten used to making guacamole on the floor in the candlelight with Leslie and Ben. We've all become accustomed to picking up the sound of a generator from a mile away, knowing all too well that it means our hotel will have no power. There are very few places in town that have generators--the Indian grocery store, and that delightful little pentecostal church on the other side of my wall. I don't know which is worse, the clanking roar of the generator or the shrieking congregants cursing their souls to be rid of evil spirits. Oh wait, I do know.

religion has always perplexed me without necessarily terrifying me, but the screaming coming from that church every afternoon makes me want to dig my fingernails into my skin until there is blood. The songs are okay, even nice sometimes, but when it gets to the Jesus-wailing I just want to book it back to Brighton. Little children cry, men scream, and women shriek verses and prayers that could be heard on Zanzibar. And then there's an electronic keyboard that tries to accompany the whole thing. Ugh, that might actually be the worst part...

in other news, my malaria is gone, though it took a while for me to be able to move my shoulder again. It healed just in time for a drunk man to grab me by the arm yesterday as I was trying to enter a building and hold it in grip worthy of Arnold Schwarzeneggar. The whole management staff had to run out and pry him off me.

there's not a lot of food in Gulu, as evidenced by the one skimpy market in the middle of town. If there are no sweet potatoes at the market, there are no sweet potatoes in Gulu, and therefore any restaurant, when you order them, will simply say, 'they are not there.' Menus are useless; when entering any dining establishment it is custom to preface by asking, 'is there food?' Which may frequently be met with, 'it is not there.' Currently, pineapples are not there, much to my chagrin. Whenever pineapples are in season, mangoes are not, and vice versa. I never thought I could become sick of mangoes, but there you have it. Most nights I just end up making guacamole for dinner, as the market's three most dependable produce items happen to be the ingredients for a certain Mexican dish beloved by all muzungus. I'm taking a leaf out of my mother's book (well, except I'm not trying to substitute plain yogurt for avocados).

I've connected up with NAADS, the National Agriculture Advisory Services, and have spent the past couple of days with a farmer training worker named Charles who takes me to see his farmer groups in IDP camps. The irony that I've made it my life goal to study agriculture while barely setting foot on my farm at home never dawned on me quite so bluntly as when I first stepped onto the field where the farmers were planting maize. I wanted to collapse from thirst and from the sun, and I wasn't even holding a hoe. But it was really nice to be able to go out and see the farmers plant. They asked me if I knew any donors, and I sheepishly told them I was just a student, but they talked to me a lot about my research and told me about what it was like to try to farm during the war. Right now there is very high demand in Sudan for northern Uganda's crops, and the farmers seemed encouraged. I feel as though I am studying the right thing.

2009-04-14T06:53:00.000-07:00

it may startle some to learn that Uganda is a Christian country. So Christian, in fact, that the only place in town apart from the Indian grocery store that has a generator is the great big pentecostal church with which I share a wall. I am asked on a regular basis if I pray, if I have been saved, if I hate the homosexuals. So at the times when there's just a little too much Jesus (aka Holy Week), we get the urge to take the first bus out of town.

Mbale is where the Abayudaya are, the largest Jewish community in Sub-Saharan Africa. Now, the student body of SIT is pretty much a mirror image of what I'm used to at home (vegetarian, gay, Jewish, or some combination of the above), but I was just desiring a little more Judaism in my life. A couple of classmates are doing research in Mbale, which is right under Mount Elgon on the border of Kenya, and we Gulu-dwellers stormed down for a Passover visit.

(the bus ride down was, quite literally, the Road to Hell. The bus driver had many different horns at his disposal to compose a sort of trumpet fanfare as he barreled down the road, which was not a road so much as a dirt trail through the bush. Jamie and I made sad faces to each other the whole way there.)

on a side note, one of the most enjoyable parts of the weekend was when Kaitlyn and I happened across a Chinese grocery store. We stayed for almost a half-hour at the cash register, conversing with the shopkeepers in putonghua. I think the owners (from Shanghai) were a little extra-jolly at the prospects of meeting people in Africa who actually spoke Chinese, but it was an endearing exchange nonetheless. Beijing opera played on the tv in the background. As we left the grocery store, it was dark, and street children swarwed around us, grabbing us and shoving us and asking for money, and we were so flustered that we couldn't find our hotel, which was just one street over. I actually shouted, 'I miss China!!!'

I do though, and I think about China all the time. I don't feel the same connection as I do here, but there are things about it that I always miss. Especially in light of how I am treated as a white woman in Africa. We went on a hike up Mount Elgon on saturday, and dunked our heads under the waterfall, but I feel a little maxed-out on scenery after last semester. I know it's terrible, but I just can't find Africa nearly as beautiful as I should after seeing Tibetan prayer flags in the Himalayas. I keep thinking about going back to Yunnan and Tibet, if for nothing but an extraordinary hiking trip.

transport to the Abayudaya for shabbat was a bit of a pickle. We were running late, and there were no taxis and bodas were too expensive for the long distance, so finally someone went up to a lorry parked on the side of the road and said, 'how much?' The drivers agreed to take us for only 1500 shillings each, and we all piled into the back of the lorry, which was just a glorified pickup truck with bars overhead. I was just desperate to see the Jews.

later that night I was having some trouble with my eye, so I spent about a half-hour on the phone with my mom freaking out about losing my vision. She told me to go to the clinic to get checked for pink eye, which was a good idea considering the next morning my eye was even puffier. I also noticed some aches in my joints, no moreso than my left shoulder which felt like it had had about a million meningitis vaccines. I hobbled over to a clinic which was mercifully open on Easter Sunday, and found out that I had not only pink eye, but malaria. What a joyous gift. Fortunately because of the malarone I've been taking it's only a mild case with a slight fever. I could most aptly describe malaria as hallucinating a broken arm. Just a few more days, and I'll be good as new.

(the drive back to Gulu from Mbala was also, quite literally, the Road to Hell. With a side of malaria.)

2009-04-07T00:08:00.000-07:00

my taxi ran over a baby goat. It frolicked the wrong way into the road and gave a dying bleat as it clunked under the wheels. Everyone in the taxi started laughing. I felt like crying.

living in Gulu is like living in weird NGO world. There's the city proper, a dusty grid swarming with bodas and airtime vendors, and then there's the NGO village up the hill, with offices of ever major NGO and UN committee in the world. It's surprisingly easy to do research here. You just make a phone call, set up an appointment, show up, ask your questions, and repeat. No one denies you, everybody wants to help. I'm having the problem that my project is almost too easy; I'm going to have to focus to make sure I don't get carried away on every little issue.

we're finally moving into a house today, after a week in real estate hell a.k.a. flooded hotel rooms (it's the rainy season). It's been hard looking for places that will rent only for one month, and have a security wall, and have electricity/a water source all at the same time, but I'm looking forward to having a permanent place to live. The other day the managers of our hotel actually called Katie, Ben, and I into a meeting; they were, of course, trying to tell us the room cost more than it did. We were not fooled. I'm a little sick of basically walking around with a $ sign on my forehead.

yesterday I went down to Lira, a couple of hours south of Gulu, to talk to the World Food Programme office there. I met with one guy, Michael Besigye, for our appointment, and when I went outside the sky was a terrifying thing to behold. The clouds were low and dark and maliciously contorting. Mr. Besigye yelled at me to get on his motorcycle so I wouldn't have to call a boda to the bus park, so I awkwardly hopped on until the rain and wind started coming down like a hurricane. Ten feet out of the compound we made a U-turn back. Luckily, just then the World Food Program Land Cruiser came barreling down the road, and the driver said he was picking some stuff up to take to the Gulu office, so Mr. Besigye arranged to me to catch a ride. Now, I may deride NGOs for thinking that no operation is complete without a shiny white Land Cruiser, but the prospect of riding in a vehicle with those baby blue UN letters on the side thrilled my inner IR nerd. I was sitting in the backseat, gloating at not having to pay the 10,000 shillings back to Gulu, when into the front seat comes Gilbert Buzu, the head of the Gulu Sub-Office. Twenty minutes of small talk later, he knows my name and life story and has invited me to 'pop in' to his office anytime to see about observing some projects in the field.

this is so much fun.

2009-04-03T02:23:00.000-07:00

I've been in Gulu for the past few days, having taken the 8:00 am post office bus from Kampala on tuesday. Right before we left, a post office employee came on the bus and I thought she was going to make announcements about Gulu, but she just asked if anyone on the bus could lead us in prayer for a safe journey. I closed my eyes and missed New England.

I continue to be astounded by East Africa. Gulu is tucked into the corner of Ugana between Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo, and has been host to the longest civil conflict in Africa, the Lord's Resistance Army rebellion. It's one of the poorest parts of Uganda, agriculturally backwards, and with most of its residents still in IDP camps. I was expecting to arrive in a war-torn, crumbling outpost with dust instead of roads and no sign of a market economy. Oh, how the media can leave us so misinformed. You would never know Gulu had been in a civil war. The roads are paved and in better shape than many of Kampala's. The only soldiers are bank security guards. The town is bright, orderly, and charming. There are guest houses everywhere and shops where you can buy five different varieties of imported cereal. The atmosphere is very laid back, and happy hour seems to be a staple of the work week.

I like Kampala, but I love Gulu. Everything is within walking distance, and in the worst cases you can just take a boda. English is still pretty prevalent, and everyone is even more friendly than in other parts of the country. There are seven of my classmates here, currently staying in hostels while we look for an apartment. Katie, Ben, and I, more cost-conscious than the rest, share a bed in a squashed room barely big enough to hold our duffle bags. When not going to interviews or exploring, we have come close to polishing off the entire fourth season of "Friends." Considering our ambitions for the next six weeks, everyone is pretty calm, and I feel significantly less stressed than I thought I would. Every day we can just get out of bed and walk to our organizations, since Gulu has a branch of just about all of them, and be back in time for lunch.

maybe I'll write again in a week when I figure out the catch.

2009-03-30T22:50:00.000-07:00

my computer, and everyone else's computer, caught one of the deadly East African viruses. I actually had about sixteen of them, but the one of greatest concern was called Sweetheart, which I luckily nipped in the bud before it could do any harm (though it did ruin a few of my friends' computers). I think there's a big parallel here between computer viruses and HIV. We all caught Sweetheart by plugging our flash drives into internet cafe computers and then plugging them into our laptops, a metaphor for intercourse if I even saw one. Since you pretty much have to use your flash drive in internet cafes because the appallingly slow wireless here, it's unavoidable to eventually catch a virus. Much like how women here know it's only a matter of time before their cheating husbands bring HIV home, since it's a taboo for the woman to suggest a condom.

however, this is where computer HIV becomes more like the Clap, because it is symptomless and curable if you treat it before it messes up your reproductive system (hard drive?). Kaitlyn in particular kept lamenting the lack of a flash drive "condom," which we knew would be the solution to all our problems, until we finally found a computer repair stand that provided us with such a thing (a program that scans any USB device for viruses before letting it in). Now I know I can't just insert my flash drive anywhere without protection.

I had my first interview with the World Food Programme yesterday, which, like my church, hands out free condoms in the bathroom. My professor had found the number for Elvis, the man in charge of Purchase for Progress which is the local food aid procurement initiative I'm looking at, and I called him on a whim, half-expecting him to be a stuffy old suit who wouldn't help me. The WFP office was on the other side of town, amid the rich Muzungu office parks that look more like a neighborhood of San Francisco than an African capital. But Elvis was actually really helpful, and gave me a really long history of food aid in Uganda as well as a lot of good advice and contacts in Gulu and Lira. I left feeling pretty good about my ISP--only hope things keep going so well. But if I can hook up with the WFP offices up north then I can talk to distributors and farmers and that's what I want to do right there. It's so different doing research in an English-speaking country, I never realized how much language was an obstacle in Bolivia and China.

I've been thinking more about the World Food Programme. While I believe the WFP is a vehicle of short-term aid that creates long-term dependency, I respect them for acknowledging this problem themselves and trying to come up with a policy that addresses it (no matter how much it pisses off the US farm lobby). Right now about 70% of food aid in Uganda is purchased in-country, but the big problem is that farmers in the North, which was a hot spot for civil war until a couple of years ago, can't produce much more than what they eat themselves. The biggest no-brainer of food aid is that it's far better to stimulate farm production of developing countries by purchasing food from them than to ship in food from the US and EU. The WFP still doesn't know how to purchase from the smallest farmers, but it's trying.

poverty is strange. Out of all the homestay families of my classmates, mine is one of the poorest. Students from rich families bring fruit and lunches their family packs them to school, while my family doesn't even feed me breakfast. Dinner for me each night it a single chapati with a portion of beans, which is still better than what the rest of the family eats (posho). I know that my family can afford to feed me more, because the program pays them each week, but they use the money elsewhere, and my appetite has shrunk anyway. My family has a car but can't afford school fees for all the kids. My host mother has a cabinet filled with more dishes than I've ever seen in my life (from when she couldn't afford them and the neighborhood went a little overboard in helping out), but the boys wear too-small shoes with holes in them. There aren't enough chairs in the living room, and when watching "Second Chance" I either have to stand or grab a milking stool from the cows, yet the family bought another second-hand TV when theirs broke. I don't think any of this is because they are pretending to be more poor than they are; there's just another set of priorities for consumption that I've never thought about, being rich and from America. I don't understand why they wouldn't use money for clothes and toilet paper and food, but then I've never grown up in a country with no property rights or insurance policies, where the police are corrupt to the point of uselessness and malaria is unavoidable.

when the water pipes in Kampala are shut off half the time, it's more convenient to have a pit latrine even if you can afford a toilet. When the electricity goes every afternoon, it's hard to have a business that involves using computers or the internet or electrical cooking appliances. I once watched my host brother spend all afternoon shaving one customer's head in his salon, because the power kept shutting off every fifteen minutes. Here, electricity is a luxury, and you're better off if you don't depend on it in your daily life. Kaitlyn's family isn't even on the electrical grid, but they have their own housekeeper.

if it took me two months of living here to figure just that out, how can any outsider organization presume that they are in the position to help?

2009-03-27T06:33:00.000-07:00

Dennis, my Luganda professor, gave me a Luganda name one day at lunch, "Mirembe," or "Peace," which is the same name as one of our cows. Unsatisfied, I asked by rural homestay father to give me a Bagwe name. He pondered for a day and then told me he would name me "Angela." And then, randomly in the grocery store yesterday, the guy who was mopping the floor shouted "Nawa Kula!" at me. "It's a name," his coworker explained. "He is naming you."

the taxi system is quite genius here. You can get anywhere you need to go, and if you need walk further to get to your destination, you can just hop on the back of someone's bicycle. Each taxi is a Toyota microbus with a driver and conductor; the conductor hangs out the window shouting "Kalerwe Kyebando Kanyanya Mpererwe!" etc and picks passengers off the side of the road. Anywhere from fifteen to twenty people cram into the seats, and you are supposed to pay before you get off (the most unlucky get the fold-up seats at the end of the row which tip over at every turn). To get off you yell "masaawo!," which will cause everyone in the taxi to crack up if you are a muzungu. There are technically "stages" which are the designated stops, but really anyplace along the route you can yell at the conductor to get off or picked up.

in downtown Kampala there are various stages where taxis stop to fill up, and there are usually men walking up and down the stage directing people into the right taxis. Additionally, there are two huge taxi parks, Old and New, which were described to me by Zack as "a beach, only with taxis instead of sand." There are market vendors surrounding the lot and boys selling g-nuts and men who ask where you're going, seize you by the hand, and shove you into the appropriate taxi. It's a pretty well-run system, overall. Boston could do to take a leaf from Kampala.

I'm 90% sure I'm going to Gulu in the north for my ISP to study farming, or, "The Post-Conflict Restoration of Agriculture Through Local Procurement of Food Aid." Until a couple of years ago Gulu was a hot spot for the Lord's Resistance Army, which has since moved into DRC, and receives a ton of food aid that has created a cycle of dependency EXCEPT for an initiative to buy the food locally instead of importing it through the US and EU's agricultural surplus. It is, in a nutshell, everything I am interested in academically, and (crossing fingers) I'll be in Gulu for a month before coming back to Kampala for a few weeks. There are 5 or 6 other students headed up there so we're hoping we can all rent a house. I'm really excited because I actually have direction unlike for my China ISP, though I'm sure other aspects of it will fail to measure up to last semester.

today I had brunch at City Oil. In Uganda, the nicest restaurants are at gas stations. It had air conditioning and I was even cold! But I maintain that no place outside of New York State knows what a bagel is. They should be boiled! The ideal bagel is crusty on the outside and doughy and moist on the inside, and shouldn't even require cream cheese.

2009-03-24T04:45:00.000-07:00

I do not like my homestay father. He is, to put it lightly, a chauvinist pig, and, according to my host brother, the only member of the family who still votes for Museveni. He's loud and blares the tv, and every time I speak Luganda to him he makes me add "ssebo" at the end, which is the equivalent to "sir." The other day when I was doing laundry he wordlessly threw down his hat at my feet to wash. Good thing he's starting to spend more time with his other wife.

bargaining here, on the other hand, is a lot of fun. Of course, it's when I miss speaking Chinese the most, but I love the playful interaction with shopkeepers after I tell them their price for bananas is outrageous. It inevitably ends in them first assuming I am Indian, second assuming I am British, and last exclaiming "Obama!" when I tell them that I am from the United States. People here love him. If they had their way they would have President of Uganda Barack Obama, with First Lady Rihanna. Roads and hotels and restaurants are named after him, and there's that nice get-out-of-jail-free card of America, for the first time in anyone's memory, having more enlightened leadership than any other muzungu country.

it's hard to keep myself set on Latin America when I'm loving East Africa more and more. It's the land of Obama, pineapples, The Lion King, and Mount Kilimanjaro. In Uganda, English is almost everywhere, but I don't mind the idea of learning an African language (I hear Swahili is easier than Luganda). Everything that drove me crazy in China is endearing in Uganda, and I have really loved exploring Kampala.

The only catch is the "muzungu!" shouting--it's getting to the point where I want to scream at anyone who says that to me. It's all I hear when I walk down the street, ladies murmuring and men calling. Also, Ugandan men for some reason think they are supposed to talk in cartoon character voices when addressing white women. "Are you married? Gyebaleko!" they squeal in high-pitched voices. Which, of course, really improves their chances. No matter how many times Ugandans tell me it's a good thing, they love white people, I can't help but think how politically incorrect it is for an entire society to shout your race at you every time you step outside. That's the thing I could never escape if I lived here for twenty years. I will always be that white girl. Or at least, that non-Ugandan girl, as I am apparently the least Irish Catholic-looking person of Irish Catholic descent (with the possible exception of my half-black, half-Indian, half-Peruvian, and half-Chinese cousins). Throughout my life I've had so many races attributed to to my ethnicity--Persian, Indian, Puerto Rican--that by taking a general tally I've concluded that the place I would blend in most would be an affluent Jewish neighborhood of Mexico City.

I still get thrown by the African/British English spoken here. I refuse to call my family's roosters "cocks" and for the longest time thought signs that read "to let" were a misspelling of "toilet." When you greet someone in Luganda, you say the equivalent of "how are you?" rather than "hello," so you can't just repeat the same greeting back like you do in English. Which also means, when you say "hello" to a Ugandan in English, they will often respond by telling you how they are, automatically throwing off the pace of the conversation.

it goes like this:

"hello."
"I am fine!"
"how are--what? Wait..."
"how are you?"
"I am...you are...er"

Things happen at weird times here. There are huge traffic jams in the middle of sunday afternoons, and every night my family serves dinner between the hours of 10 and 11 pm (sometimes I actually have to be woken up and gotten out of bed to take my tea and matooke). Every night, for the past three nights, my homestay family from eastern Uganda has called me at about 4 am. And last night, as I was getting ready for bed, my host brother and sister burst into my room and started having a photo shoot with my camera as I sat on my bed, exhausted and bewildered.

It's sad that most coffee-exporting countries just drink Nescafe, while muzungu countries that grow no coffee enjoy Ugandan blend for breakfast.

2009-03-22T06:01:00.000-07:00

there is a character here who is quite unlike anyone I have ever met. His name is Mona, the driver, or "Minister of Transportation" as he calls himself. Lanky and mid-forties, he wears the same too-short pants every day that display his fabulous striped knee socks. When I first met him, I thought he was just an offbeat guy who liked to compare stories in life with animals. When he wouldn't admit to how many wives or children he had, he simply said, "like the elephant is big, I am a big African daddy."

But soon his attitudes on gender became the bane of my existence. Mona calls all the guys "General" and slaps them on the back when taking his leave; with the girls, he does not even make eye contact. He only talks to us when giving bizarre advice on following cultural norms ("Do not eat the pork. It is a man's food. If you eat it, it will make your children make the noise of pigs") or when yelling at us for leaving our belongings in the vans. The other day when he was dropping Barbara and I off at our rural homestay, he started turning around and giggling at us as he was driving, and then suddenly screamed and startled us half to death. It turns out he was trying to warn us about about hyenas by improvising being attacked.

another day a few of us were having a focus group discussion under a tree with a self-help group in Mbale district. I suddenly start to hear this snorting noise that I assume must be coming from a cow, only to look up and see Mona, holding a small child he has caught, blowing intensely to get the dust out of the child's hair and swatting his clothes. This went on for a full ten minutes, before Mona came and joined the discussion and started talking about cows or something, I can't even remember.

so we just came back from the eastern Uganda excursion, where we were treated to a full week of Mona's company. We started out in Sipi Falls, where I turned 21 and went on a couple of AWESOME waterfall hikes where we climbed around the rocks and were bombarded by torrents of water. I know that everyone says this about every rock that happens to be large and in Africa, but we found this rock that really felt like pride rock--beautiful and windy and looking out over the savanna--and just spent a long time sitting and watching the sun go down. We were sleeping in dorms built right into the hillside which had spectacular views, and the Academic Directors even got the place to make a huge batch of guacamole for us. I mean, it's green. Not the worst way to spend St. Patrick's Day.

the big event of the week was the rural homestay--we were split into pairs unlike in China, but we were each in our own little village, about a kilometer from the Kenya border. Barbara and I stayed with a jolly politician named Mango who seemed to have significant clout in the village and therefore helped us arrange focus groups right away to do our "participatory rural appraisal" on school dropout rates. It was really cool; our host father brought us to the school and the headmaster talked to us and brought us around to each of the classes, then we talked to a group of parents and a group of teachers. Barbara and I felt really proud of ourselves for getting our research done until our host father asked us if we could recommend any NGOs to help the village. That's when we went right back to feeling useless again.

my rural homestay family actually seemed richer than Kampala family--there was no running water or electricity but the compound had dozens of buildings and huts and they had eleven cows (wow!!). Our host dad told us he had had to pay eight cows to marry his first wife, but "it is necessary to pay a bride price to put a padlock on the wife." Okay.

today I went wading in the river Nile.

2009-03-14T03:31:00.000-07:00

I was on the national news the other day, pathetically sweeping a taxi park filled with small orphan children.

This was not, however, the worst thing that happened to my classmates this week, as the "Gender" module fared even worse than "Grassroots." Slum Aid, the NGO they'd been working with, ushered them through a succession of photo ops, telling them they were doing "community service" when they were really painting things that didn't need to be painted and shoveling things that didn't need to be shoveled...all the while wearing bright "Slum Aid" t-shirts and having their pictures snapped by photographers hired by the organization. And learning nothing about gender. At the end, they had to march in a parade carrying big white banners (which was also played on the news), proclaiming Slum Aid responsible for all the "development" taking place within the community.

that shows you right there how easy it is for a famous NGO to come into a country, not really do much, and then get a million pats on the back for their good work. You could spend your entire career doing this, and we participated in it without even meaning to.

we just finished our Luganda lessons and had exams; I got an A-, which was pretty impressive considering I haven't conjugated verbs since leaving spanish senior year of high school. Luganda is pretty similar to spanish, except for the fact that it is about a million times harder. But I have enjoyed my kindergarten-level comprehension when talking to Ugandans. Whenever I go to the tailor, the ladies always fawn over me and ask me over and over again the same three questions that I can understand--"are you married? Do you have children? Do you have cows?"

if buying bootleg DVDs was my downfall in China, then in Uganda it is going to the tailor. The fabric here is awesome, and we found a dress shop run by three disabled women that we have been flooding with business. So far I have had five dresses, a shirt, and three skirts made, and I'm going to cut myself off. Any day now.

there are a couple people here who've studied abroad in China, and we can't help comparing it to Uganda. Certainly we are a lot more comfortable here, not constantly blinking our eyes at the strange cultural norms. I have had so many fewer "wtf?" moments in Uganda than I did in China, but I do miss the language. If I could somehow live in an African country that spoke Chinese and ate Indian food and watched Mexican soap operas, that would be my idealdream. Kaitlyn and I have been practicing our Chinese in the taxi. I think the Ugandan people think we are aliens.

food here can be classified into three categories: starches that we have in America, starches that we don't have in America, and carbonated beverages. One Ugandan favorite is a stale bread similar to Wonderbread but with half the nutritional value. Posho is pretty straightforward: cornstarch mixed with water and solidified. I asked my Luganda teacher if it had any nutrients whatsoever. "Of course!" he replied. "It has carbohydrates." There are potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, matoke, chapati, and samosas. I am legitimately concerned about my body getting the vitamins it needs.

god's gift to Uganda: the rolex, which is a fried egg rolled inside a chapati. Soooooo good. Also, mango lassi from the supermarket. I've found that I only really need one meal a day here, plus a peanut butter chapati. I just don't get too hungry.

going to eastern Uganda for a week so probably no internet there.

2009-03-12T05:10:00.000-07:00

weirdest. day. ever. yesterday which made me feel completely disoriented and like a sheep. Sometimes, when you're in a group and you are constantly being told to get in and out of vans, you lose all sense of individuality and will go any place you are directed unaware of what you are getting yourself into.

this whole week we have been in and out of NGO offices, driving two or three hours outside of Kampala every day to different field visits, talking to group of women after group of women. I'm pretty sure I've reached my capacity for talking about social capital and interest rates. We've gone to a chicken feed manufacturer, a piggery, and a quarry. But yesterday was the all-time king.

Random people ride with us to the sites every day, and so no one thought much when two Ugandan men dump their equipment in the back and climb into the seats next to us. We get to the UCAA Kibogo district office, where we sit through the NGO's official anthem ("self-reliant, self-reliant, participatory development!"). The strange men take out their video cameras and start to film, except they are only filming us, not the people actually performing. The day continues much like this, slightly more awkward because we all know we are on-camera, until we finally get to a village with a big clearing where all the taxis are parked. I herd out of the van with my six classmates, nothing in particular going through my mind, since sheep don't think for themselves.

I open my eyes, and six hundred orphans are staring me in the face. They're silent and gaping, swathed in their worn-out neon school uniforms, which makes me feel like I have entered munchkin-land from "The Wizard of Oz." A man stands at the front center, towering above his minions. "Welcome, muzungus!" he shouts, using the Luganda word for white people. He holds seven reed brooms in his hand. "Today, you are going to clean the taxi park!"

a few of the kids trot forward and dispense the brooms. We all look at each other, as if we had awoken from a nap in a strange world. The children wait expectantly. The strange men have their cameras rolling. Hesitantly, Jesse bends over and starts sweeping, a million eyes upon him. We all follow, and suddenly the crowd explodes around us, children touching our clothes and hair, women scolding us to let them do the sweeping because it's dusty, us trying to do anything that could be considered useful. We resort to picking up trash and bottle caps with our fingers, our bodies turning orange from the dust. The children swarm us into a parade, with seven white people awkwardly sticking out the top, and we march down to a little clearing behind the stores and form a semi-circle around a pile of garbage. The village chairman ceremoniously hands Jesse a box of matches, and raises his hands up like a sorcerer as Jesse lights the pile of garbage (read: plastic bags) on fire.

then, at the end of the day, seventeen of us hired a taxi to go to Brad's homestay for a dancing/drumming lesson and we got stopped by the police .002 seconds after we left for "being over capacity" and had to bribe them to let us pass. Since I've been in Uganda I've taken literally dozens of taxis that had at least 20 people crammed in, and not once has one ever been pulled over.

sometimes, I hate being a white girl in Africa.

2009-03-09T07:03:00.000-07:00

I love America's frankness. If we want something, we don't go through eight rounds of formal greetings before cutting to the chase. If we have to go to the bathroom, we say so. Apparently, Ugandans don't have bladders. If you have to pee when you're in a car, you tell the driver to stop so you can "check the tires." If your friend is in the bathroom, you tell people he has "gone behind." And if you are confronted about where you're going, you say, "to make a short call."

I find this all very unnecessary.

if the Chinese had a few problems with politeness, Ugandan manners are on steroids. Sometimes it's cute, like when I was walking down the road this morning and a boy said, "good evening, Madam!" But then sometimes I wish I could just shout, I DRANK ABOUT TEN GALLONS OF ORANGE FANTA, WHERE IS THE PIT LATRINE???

a few weeks ago I heard a joke: in Uganda, drunk drivers go straight, while sober drivers swerve from one side of the road to another. That's pretty much how I would describe the roads here. If you fell into a pothole, you'd need a ladder to climb out. I've never been one to get carsick, but constantly getting thrown around in the back of a taxi has marked a plummet in my nausea threshold.

yesterday my family took me to the bush to see the village where my host mother was born and visit our jja jja, or maternal grandmother. Silver, Isaac, Lilian, Rebecca, my host mother and I all piled into our family's '87 Toyota Corolla, and squeezed even more people in as we went from stop to stop. We picked up our brother William, who's away at boarding school. He's 16, but looks full-grown and is very outgoing. The way my family talked, I could tell they really missed him at home. I can't get over how old I am and yet how young I feel compared to everybody else. Lilian is two full years younger than me and has already experienced pregnancy, prepared herself for motherhood, and had a near-death delivery that killed her baby. I've never experienced that kind of pain in my life.

our program has divided into four modules: grassroots, gender, human rights, and public health. I'm in the grassroots one, and last week (before I got violently ill due to my malaria medication) was full of lectures from NGOs that alerted my bullshit meter. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people are only capable of talking in the abstract, using buzzwords like "sustainable development" and "empowerment" and "a participatory framework for development." An NGO with a vague name, the Uganda Change Agents Association, talked about "training" villagers in "leadership," which all sounded very fuzzy to me. But today we had a field visit (with a different NGO, thankfully) which was actually pretty incredible. Kathy, Jesse, Zack and I observed a group of women, who conduct their weekly meetings in their village to encourage savings. They've been meeting regularly for two years, and the concept is very simple: every week contribute 500 shilling (about 25 cents), and in return you can ask for month-long loans from the group to cover things like your kids' school fees. There are no white people micromanaging the operation, there is no bureaucracy, no donor conditionality--no aid money at all. Just a bunch of women who bring their kids.

it's ironic that, as a westerner interested in development, I don't think that westerners should be involved in development. Certainly not in the way that they are now. I'm still reconciling my existence with my experience here. It's not that it's not nice to help, it's just that more often than not, we do more harm than good. One of the most credible things about this program is that for the first two weeks our lecturers laid it to us straight: aid doesn't work. The very best speaker (who told the joke about the roads) was Andrew Mwenda, the editor of Uganda's only un-censored news magazine. He was one of the most brilliant people I have ever heard talk. He drew from Enlightenment philosophers and international politics and experiences of other African countries and spoke at about a mile a minute, but his conclusion was what most of us already knew. As students of development, chances are that we will be part of the problem, as our career opportunities end up being with organizations like Save the Children which use pictures of starving children to scrounge up money from American donor--which will either a) never actually leave the country, or b) go to some one-size-fits-all program that simply looks good on the surface and that no one will bother to follow up on.

there's been a lot of soul-searching on this trip, but I can't think of anything more dangerous than never having been warned.

2009-03-07T02:28:00.000-08:00

last week, my sister came up to me as I was sitting outside the house reading and said something about a fellowship. I assumed she was talking about some sort of scholarship i.e. applying for a fellowship so I said yes when she asked me to go with her. We walk along a winding dirt path past farms and banana fields until we get to a decent-sized house with a truck parked outside it. Rebecca tells me to take off my shoes before I go in, and we are greeted by three or four other families sitting around the living room. I sit down expectantly, waiting for someone to hand Rebecca some sort of form to fill out--perhaps these are her competitors for the grant. A man comes into the room and introduces himself to me as Fred. "Well," he says, "shall we start with a prayer?"

I think it's weird that we have to pray before Rebecca applies for her fellowship, but then again, this is Uganda, and every taxi in Kampala is emblazoned with slogans like "Jesus saves!" and "I <3 the Lord." Since no one in their right mind would offer car insurance in the web of chaos they call infrastructure (Uganda has the 2nd highest traffic accident rate in the world), cars have bumped stickers that say, "I'm covered...by the blood of Christ!"

So I sit there for a few minutes, awkwardly, with my eyes closed and hands folded in my lap until I sense that everyone around me has finished praying. Fred asks if there are any announcements. Rebecca answers, "this is my sister Courtney. She's a Presbyterian, so she might be able to follow along."

For the record, that is the second time I have been so naive about Christianity that I ended up signing myself up for the bible without knowing it. Freshman year I registered for a class called "The Romans," assuming it would be a course on Roman history rather than straight-up Sunday school and apparently unphazed by the description: "The Fifth Gospel." But there I was, on a wednesday night in someone's living room, attending a Born Again church service instead of helping my sister apply for a "fellowship" at a university. Fred asked if I would like to lead the people in song. I said, "uhh..." and stared in disbelief at the fact that I did not know the words to one single Christian song.

I got through it alright until everyone closed their eyes and started clutching the air and wailing outloud for ten straight minutes. Since my ability to pray in front of people on command was nonexistent, I mumbled about any thought that came into my mind, testing myself on the names of my cows and numbers in Luganda, reciting what I'd had for breakfast, talking about what I thought would happen on the next episode of "El Cuerpo del Deseo."

next time I lie and tell people I'm a presbyterian, I'll make sure I wikipedia "Jesus" beforehand.

2009-03-02T06:24:00.000-08:00

Lilian went into early labor this weekend. The baby died and she almost did too. The mood is very somber at my house, but thank god she's alive. The malaria had weakened the baby too much, and it was too late to do a C-section.

it strikes me that a lot of people are afraid of Africa, as evidenced by the endless gasps I received whenever I told someone where I was studying abroad. The association of Africa with nothing but images starving children is patronizing, and it's offensive to me that people think Africans are incapable of conducting ordinary lives, no matter how poor they are. Kampala is a dusty, run-down city that can't afford public buses, but wherever there are people that need to get places, there is a market for affordable minibuses. Africans use the internet and watch tv and a lot of times get along better without our help.

sometimes I wonder if it's just because we assume Africa is so pathetic that it stays underdeveloped. That and the Berlin Conference. Why should it always be kept in a separate category and be spoken about in hushed voices?

at the same time, we have a need to prop up our self-esteem with "success stories" from Africa. Before I came, I read everywhere: "Uganda is on the right track. Uganda has good governance. Uganda has high growth." I thought of President Museveni as an enlightened despot, who had brought order and prosperity despite the fact that he has been "democratically elected" for 23 years. But he's become just another African dictator, universally despised and spending money on presidential jets instead of schools. Uganda has an intellectual, highly-developed civil society, with great newspapers that act as if the opposition has a chance of winning, but the physical characteristics of the country are nothing like what I read in those World Bank publications. I think a lot of Ugandans would be surprised to hear how often their country is cited as the "poster child" for development.

in other news, I still love Uganda and my host family and my cows and the fact that Rihanna plays even more often on the radio here than in the US. My camera was pickpocketed last week in Rwanda so I lost a lot of pictures of Obama-themed stores and advertisements. So it goes.

2009-02-28T08:05:00.000-08:00

it's been a rough week. My pregnant 18-year-old host sister had severe malaria, and had to wait 9 hours on the hospital lobby floor before getting treatment, even after bribing the doctor. I visited her in the cramped ward of the hospital, which was filled with patients in beds and family members camping out on bedding on the floor. I don't know what was more depressing, hearing Lilian telling stories about patients who die because they can't pay for medicine and treatment, or realizing that some of the stories didn't sound too different from ones I've heard about the US. But Lilian is going to be fine, at least.

we visited an IDP camp for Rwandan Hutu refugees. The World Food Program and the Red Cross had stopped services, in hopes that the refugees would return home. Some of the refugees hadn't eaten in a few days. They have no plans to go anywhere. Thousands of Hutus a week still come into Uganda, and there are about 300,000 in the country right now, because the racial tensions that led up to the genocide are exactly the same today. The Hutus are hated by the Tutsis for committing the genocide, who they have hated since the Belgians deemed them inferior, and it would not take much for the genocide to happen all over again, as evidenced by the attitude of the refugees. They told us that they only reason they would go home would be for "revenge."

I also went to one of Jeffrey Sachs' Millennium Villages. UNDP was managing the project at such an intense level that I see no possible way it could be applied to a larger scale, much less handed over to the Ugandan government. They do have a nice clinic, though. On the wall there's a plaque proclaiming the foundation to have been laid by Jeffrey Sachs, who would never waste an opportunity for self-applause.

We crossed over the border to Rwanda, where my stomach was in permanent knots. It is the most bizarre place. It's like Singapore. The roads are paved and smooth and there is no garbage and everything is new and expensive because the autocratic Kagame government keeps everyone in line. You look at this modern city and think, how on earth could a genocide have happened here? We went from genocide memorial to genocide memorial, talked to people who had had their entire families chopped. There was one church where the pews were simply filled with the clothes taken from the victims' bodies. I have never seen so many human skulls.

none of us really know how exactly this happened, but we suddenly found ourselves in a wednesday afternoon evangelical service in a Kigali prison, surrounded by genocide perpetrators jumping around singing hymns. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be happy Rwanda is trying to keep its society intact in the aftermath of the genocide, or horrified that I was suddenly staring at the people responsible for all those memorials.

Basically, it's complicated.

2009-02-19T06:39:00.000-08:00

my host family started out very poor. My father has over 20 children, though I don't know how many wives he has. In Uganda the wives each keep separate homes. He married my host mother when she got out of school, and they ran an inn and made a small profit. But he spent the money on women and bars, so my mother began stealing money from him. Soon enough, the inn went bankrupt, and they would have been turned out had she not kept that small savings.

She heard about a program to help farmers. Farmers make up about 80% of the Ugandan population, and my family had no other way to make money. The government offered a course with Heifer International which taught how to keep a dairy farm. My host mother paid the registration fee to learn how to care for cows and sell the milk, and at the end of the course she even received a cow of her own, which she named Hope. Soon, with the money she earned from selling Hope's milk, she bought another cow, named Peace.

when my host father saw how successful my host mother was, he bought a cow of his own, named Joy. However, Joy had several miscarriages and my father was so furious that he was about to sell her when my mother called in a vet. That year, Joy gave birth to a calf, Happy. After that, my father loved the cows. My host mother continues to run the milk business, selling to neighbors in the village. My father claims the credit.

2009-02-16T07:16:00.000-08:00

someone, somewhere taught Ugandans to speak in rhetorical questions.

for example:

"she was a attacked by a mob of angry men. Because she was wearing what? The mini skirt. You come from where? The United States. Where you have what? The homosexuals."

which was basically our safety lecture last week. It's endearing at first, but during lecture it becomes like watching a DVD that skips. During one 97-minute lecture, rhetorical questions were asked a total of 639 times, or 6.58 times per minute. On top of that is that fact that we are where? On the equator, so the rooms heats to about a bajillion degrees in a matter of minutes.

there are three things bad about Uganda:
1) you have to iron your clothes lest you be regarded as a social leper
2) the homophobia/rampant christian fundamentalism
3) the internet situation here could more aptly be described as Uganda stealing bandwidth from the North Koreans.

to combat #2, I lied and said I was a presbyterian.

Also, strangely, my host family thought I was Indian. It's probably just my sick knowledge of palak paneer and navratan korma.

other than that, I cannot tell you how many times a day I feel so lucky to be here. Ugandans are almost universally friendly, patient, and polite, and getting to know my way around Kampala is thrilling. There is no constant uphill struggle with the culture/food like there was in China. I don't miss electricity or running water or personal space nearly as much as I thought I would. Every evening when I walk home from the market, little children run after me and giggle when I take pictures of them.

I've been hanging out a lot with one of my host cousins in particular, a sweet 11-year-old boy name Douglas who wears the same fleece every day even though it is 90 degrees out. He and I have an arrangement. Every night he helps me with my Luganda language homework, and then he pulls out his schoolbooks and I go over his English assignments. He was very shy the first day but now we are friends.

his older brother Raymond is 14 and a lot more independent, preferring to neglect his chores and switch on the tv when my host mother isn't looking. Sometimes he climbs the tree in the backyard to shake down the avocados and I help him gather them on the ground. He's HIV-positive. When Rebecca told me I felt strange, because he's so healthy but just a ticking bomb.

yesterday morning my brother Silver woke me at 6:30 to milk the cows. I spent the rest of the day reading and doing laundry and playing cards with Douglas. Then the whole family watched El Cuerpo del Deseo, the Mexican telenovela that is taking Uganda by storm. Every thursday, friday, saturday, and sunday at 8 we all crowd around the tiny, damp, dusty living room on stools, and I've gotten so into it that I've rearranged my plans to be home.

the cows' names are Happy, Joy, Peace, and Hope. They said I could name the baby.

2009-02-10T07:11:00.000-08:00

Ugandan birds are terrifying. While China was filled with furry and adorable puppies, the streets of Kampala instead run amok with giant storks. Their wingspans are larger than a middle-aged Kodak employee, and they swoop dangerously low over taxis and hapless pedestrians. They have huge drooping sacks under their beaks and pink humps that look like tumors on their backs. In short, they are evil, and I will add them to my list of things that are evil.

things that are evil:

the US farm lobby
the Chinese government
storks

so far everything else about Uganda has been great. My homestay family are dairy farmers who live in what, for all practical purposes, I will call a village on the outskirts of Kampala. We have four cows and an adorable baby calf with the longest eyelashes. We also have three little pigs, a dog, and mango, pineapple, papaya, and guava trees in the backyard. There's no running water and a pit latrine, but China prepared me well for that! I still have to work on bathing properly out of a little plastic basin. My host sister Rebecca is the same age as me and helps me out a lot. She also takes care of a baby named Tim who was orphaned and lives with them. Tim likes white people (mzungus) a lot and cries when I am not holding him. I have some other siblings older than me, and two cousins about 8 and 12 who came to live with us when their father died of AIDS. The family, like a lot of families here, is polygamous, and my host father leaves at night to visit his other wife.

lectures so far have been awesome, exactly what I came here for. We're at Makerere University taking Luganda classes and a seminar on development studies. It's kind of frustrating to get to school, though, because everyone lives over an hour away. There are no buses here, just shared taxis that squeeze as many people in as possible, and you have to figure out which route goes where you're going or else you get totally lost.

I don't miss American food at all. I have chai three times a day!

2009-02-07T06:58:00.000-08:00

fact: I'm in Uganda. Finally. The two and a half day plane ride seemed longer than the two months I was home after China, mostly because it was spent at Heathrow and British people can't handle a light dusting of snow. Thus, the city was shut down, and I paid eight pounds for a hummus plate at the airport.

the dirt here really is as red as it looks in National Geographic, and the leaves really are as green. Kampala is big and poor with the few token amenities of a developing African city. Such as this internet cafe, which you should not count on for frequent blog updates. The first few days I slept in the car every time we went somewhere, so it seemed as though we simply magically appeared at places around the city. It wasn't until yesterday that I became slightly less disoriented. I was trying to find the hospital (just to check it out, no tropical diseases yet!) and walked into a large slum, which was eye-opening to say the least.

there aren't really private taxis here, just minibuses that pick you up and drop you off along the main streets. Everyone dresses really formally and looks upon Americans as "dirty." And, something pharmacies in the US do not tell you when you pick up malaria medication in the states is that it doesn't actually do much to prevent it, so I have that to look forward to (I have a bed net, mother) . One of my friends studied in Tanzania last semester and said that every single person on her program got malaria, but they treated it in time to cure it.

awesome!

the food is GREAT. It's so different from China, where I half-dreaded every meal. I think food has a lot to do with how welcome you feel in a country. Indian food is pretty much universal, along with matoke, which is mashed plantain served with beans and ground nut sauce. So good so good!

I love it here.

long overdue

2008-12-22T13:12:00.000-08:00

I miss China. I know that's the last thing most of you expect of me, but I do, and I knew I would. This semester was really unbelievable, and mostly because of the people I met. I got to know my twelve other classmates down to the grossest, most intimate detail, and I love them. I miss them all, especially the venerable Courtney Morse, the girl with an eerily similar name and my sister from another mister. I miss Tenzin, my Tibetan host father, and Sophie, my three-year-old sister from Kunming. I miss the pigs from my home in Shaxi, and, more than anything, I miss the mountains at the edge of the world.

In China, I ate chicken eggs, quail eggs, and hundred-year-old eggs. I drank goat's milk, yak's milk, cow's milk, and warm milk. I traveled to the tropical rainforest, tea plantations, the Great Wall, and the himalayas. I lived with the Hui, the Dai, the Bai, the Mosuo, and the Tibetans. I shouted at waiters to blend into my surroundings. I pet nearly every dog I met. I went bowling. I witnessed a Tibetan bar brawl. I climbed mountains. I experienced what my classmates and I dubbed "China rage."

besides my whole, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" mantra, I am thankful that China pushed and prodded me in all these ways. Life in the countryside was hard at times, but nothing like it is for many of its citizens. Most of China continues to be rural, though the cities get most of the press. But if I didn't tell you what a fucked-up, backward, self-obsessed country China is, I wouldn't be doing my job. I don't think it would be a service to anyone except the Chinese government if I came back and didn't share the frustrations I felt, because China has a millennium to go if it is going to bring liberty and progress to all its people. I hope that everyone who reads this will keep in mind that the same country lauded for the most dramatic poverty reduction in history saw little reason not to throw thousands of democracy supporters in jail right before the Olympics.

Before I went to China, I believed the hype. I believed that the Communist Party might soon fall out of power, and that wealth was reaching everybody, and that the the consolidation of power might actually be doing some good. Now the idea seems ludicrous to me that China could ever change. Even its desire to "save face" abroad does not trump its Machiavellian obsession with greatness.

My experience in China was so meaningful because it helped me to understand that. A lot of things I saw enraged me. They made me appreciate more than ever to come from a country like the United States, which often deservingly receives a bad reputation, but which fosters discussion and diversity inside its borders.

Beijing is a nice city. I would have loved to have more time to explore it, in the way that I would like to explore New York or Hong Kong. But for all you potential China travelers out there, it would be a crime to leave China without seeing the mountains. Go to Tibet. And don't you dare let the Chinese government off the hook for anything.

2008-12-16T05:06:00.000-08:00

From having little interest in the outside world to an obsession with being number one to a feigned concern for its own minorities' protection, China has a lot of the qualities negatively attributed to the US. In the past three and a half months, China often left me completely frustrated, as I struggled to understand so many things about its culture. From the six-fold leap in decibel level to the staged "minority shows" to strangers on trains telling me I would catch cold to the baffling continuation of Mao-worshiping, I felt like a martian who had disembarked a spaceship in a parallel universe. While Beijing may be an area of comparatively free political expression, my experience is that it in no way reflects the countryside and smaller cities, which might as well be another planet.

What really drove me nuts was that not only did China have very little idea about the outside world, but it pretended that it did, and would claim influence in a realm of areas in which it had very little business. I'm not being facetious; a country that prided itself on isolation for centuries is still very obviously dealing with the consequences.

On one of my last days in Beijing, I was riding a taxi and picked up a copy of Taxi Magazine, available for passengers' reading pleasures. There was a feature on a festival called "Christmas," which was suggested to be a spinoff of China's Spring Festival.

Not only was the introduction unapologetically uniformed ("Americans celebrate christmas for 7 days while Europeans celebrate it for 14"--really, how difficult is it to google the 12 days of Christmas?), but sexist: "even the stingiest Danish housewife will make sure her family has enough goose live paste to celebrate the holidays." Everything was stretched very thin to allude back to Chinese history, as the article proceeded to literally make shit up about each country, claiming that Mexicans ate only fruit on Christmas and that Swiss fondue was inspired by Chinese hotpot. This greatly offended my Swiss friend, to say the least. I went home and searched the web for anything to back up this connection; there has not been so much as a facebook note crediting the Chinese with fondue. The Chinese also claim that Italian pasta is not actually Italian at all, but brought from China by Marco Polo when it was in fact introduced by Arab traders in the 8th century. And for a piece on one of the most celebrated Christian holiday in the world, there was not a single mention of Jesus Christ.

I have a lot of good things to say about China, because I really did have an extraordinary and eye-opening experience, one of the most rewarding of my life. But I cannot with a clean conscience go on to tell any of that without first getting something off my chest.

China, get over yourself.

2008-12-11T00:41:00.000-08:00

I had culture shock coming to Beijing. Compared to the rest of China, it was almost like an American city. The only thing I thought when I was looking out the bus window on the way from the airport to the hotel was, "money." Everything was sleek and clean and new, and when I went to the drugstore, it sold things like deodorant (which is simply not available in Yunnan) and people formed lines to get to the cash register. Buildings are made out of glass windows instead of smudged concrete and Beijingren are polite and apparently have political opinions. It was weird to walk down the streets and not be blocked by tricycle carts and linked-arm girls, and not to see fruit vendors and people shouting at shopkeepers.

at lunch at a nice restaurant yesterday, Kelly and I were raving about the food and the ambience when all of a sudden the huge heating vent fell from the ceiling and cut her as it came down. The waiters and Lu Laoshi hurried over to put medication on her side, and she was just sitting there awkwardly trying to eat as they were lifting up her shirt.

today we had a snowball fight on the Great Wall. Driving through the countryside, the branches of trees were covered in ice, and Ashley and I sang christmas carols. I bought a panda backpack.

I prefer Beijing to Kunming, but I don't think anything's better than northwest Yunnan. I miss the mountains already.

2008-12-05T21:38:00.000-08:00

I sent my clothes to a washing woman in Shangri-La and they came out smelling like barbecued yak. I don't mind, because at least my clothes are clean and not filled with Tibet-dust, but I wish I didn't smell like a meat locker.

in the past few weeks, I left Shangri-La, stopping over in Kunming to stock up on snacks from Wal-Mart for the train to Guilin. I was on the third bunk for the 18-hour ride; below me were some very yappy Chinese ladies with tragic taste in fashion. I accidentally dropped the foil seal from my jar of peanut butter on their beds, and that sent them yapping off their rockers in unintelligible haranguing. I was happy to get off the train.

Yangshuo was pretty cool, a city outside of Guilin where all the karst is. Karst is limestone that has been chemically eroded to produce steep, jaw-dropping peaks covered in green, and it's really famous in southern China. I thought maybe the karst would be in this one little park cordoned off by the government, filled with boisterous Chinese tourists, and demanding a 70 kuai entrance fee to view from a crammed platform. Wrong. The bus ride from Guilin was spectacular, construction workers and pomelo vendors and rice paddies still brimming with water surround the towering, vertical karst peaks. Yangshuo seems to have squashed itself into the most beautiful piece of land of all, mossy cliffs everywhere in the backdrop. It was hard to get over. The company wasn't bad either.

we rode bikes through the karst valleys at sunset, and took a bamboo raft along the Li river.

Now I am in Kunming, which is cold and gray, trying to finish my paper in an internet cafe. I had my presentation this morning, thank god that is over. The only thing good about this city is the Indian food.

2008-12-03T05:52:00.000-08:00

Things That Describe China:

yelling

spitting

shoving

staring

slurping

interrupting

rubbernecking

smoking on buses

driving like madmen

wasting no part of an animal

toilet stalls without doors

KTV for hours at a time

screaming into cell phones

cute fat furry puppies (not all things on this list are negative)

wearing slippers indoors

wife-seeking white men

not drinking water during meals

no indoor heating

couples who wear matching outfits

the asian squat

wearing surgical masks outdoors

using umbrellas when it's sunny

getting geared up in proper hiking atire but then not actually doing anything

taking a million pictures of your girlfriend holding a cappuccino

yelling at waitresses

long pinky nails

pouting (if you're a girl)

eating pickled eggs and chicken feet as snacks at movie theaters

men pulling their shirts up to their nipples at bars

telling tourists not to eat at your restaurant because you don't feel like cooking right now

wearing the same outfit three days in a row

putting sugar on tomatoes

bureaucrats getting off on making your visa extension miserable

yelling at white girls wearing shorts

corn-flavored popsicles

telling foreign exchange students from the Upstate New York that they will catch cold (we're at the Tropic of Cancer)

children not having to do chores

weird acid-wash jeans

Kung-Fu movies on buses

card games at bars

not knowing that the Olympics are over

my semester in China is winding down. I have had a fantastic time on my ISP, and really enjoyed getting to meet all the people I did. I'm in Guangxi province right now, but will return to Kunming to see my classmates for the first time in a month. I will miss the people and the experiences, but China, I'm sorry, there's just no love lost between us.

you should go to Tibet though.

2008-12-01T21:27:00.001-08:00

also, the Obama cabinet is really cleaning out prominent Democrats. The administration is taking three of the best and most visible Democratic senators, two great governors, and the 4th-ranking Democrat in the House. What will the Democratic caucus be like without Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden? At least he left us with Ted Kennedy and Chuck Schumer.

2008-11-29T00:02:00.000-08:00

It's been said before, but I have to say it again.

John McCain: classic white-haired West Coast republican, experienced in foreign policy but sometimes doubted by the conservatives of his party

Arnold Vinick: classic white-haired West Coast republican, experienced in foreign policy but sometimes doubted by the conservatives of his party

Barack Obama: young, energetic, handsome, idealistic black candidate from Chicago who gives a good speech but who lacks foreign policy experience and who many believe can't win the election

Matt Santos: young, energetic, handsome, idealistic Hispanic candidate from Houston who gives a good speech but who lacks foreign policy experience and who many believe can't win the election

Rahm Emanuel: young, energetic, handsome, Jewish political mastermind who used to be a ballerina when he was a child and is fond of practical jokes. Driving force in recruiting candidates for Democratic party and in behind-the-scenes congressional politics. Highly partisan; Chief of Staff for President-elect Obama

Josh Lyman: young, energetic, handsome, Jewish political mastermind whose character is based upon Rahm Emanuel. Driving force in recruiting candidates for Democratic party and in behind-the-scences congressional politics. Highly partisan; Chief of Staff for President-elect Santos

Hillary Clinton: original frontrunner and star of Democratic party. Seen as safer bet; more centrist and a "political insider." Current Senator; First Lady for former Democratic administration. Ugly, drawn-out Democratic primary leads to upset in which the dark horse candidate wins

Bob Russell: original frontrunner and star of Democratic party. Seen as safer bet; more centrist and a "political insider." Former Senator; Vice-President for current Democratic administration. Ugly, drawn-out Democratic primary leads to upset in which the dark horse candidate wins

Joe Biden: older, politically-astute Washington insider with foreign policy credentials, picked for Vice-President due to experience and to add confidence to ticket instead of to pick up a swing state

Leo McGarry: older, politically-astute Washington insider with foreign policy credentials, picked for Vice-President due to experience and to add confidence to ticket instead of to pick up a swing state

Sarah Palin: ridiculous, out-of-touch Governor from an irrelevent red state (Alaska) who is picked as Vice-Presidential candidate to appeal to the conservative wing of the party

Ray Sullivan: ridiculous, out-of-touch Governor from an irrelevent red state (West Virginia) who is picked as Vice-Presidential candidate to appeal to the conservative wing of the party

Secretary of State: once elected, Santos puts aside past differences and offers post of Secretary of State to former rival Arnold Vinick, whom most people originally thought would be the next president of the United States. Obama offer post to former primary challenger Hillary Clinton, whom most people originally thought would be the next president of the United States.

the only difference is that Joe Biden's not dead.

2008-11-22T20:02:00.000-08:00

I love this town. I love this place. I could never set foot in Kunming or any other Chinese city again and be fantastic. The cobblestone streets are hilly and filled with yaks and dogs, and gossip travels fast. The last I saw of Dakpa, I was walking with Tenzin and his family and we see two men outside of Arro Khampa, rummaging through a big cardboard box. Dakpa turns around, a bottle of french wine in each hand, and bellows, "Hello! Come and have a drink!"

Tenzin is a good man and a good host father. He, along with Dakpa, knows and is known by everybody. I even learned about him in the book I was reading, on the Tea Horse Caravan that linked Yunnan to Llasa. He had a nomad wife who died soon after they married, and has a peculiar passion for Nescafe, which I witnessed the first morning when he handed me two mugs, one filled with coffee and one with butter tea.

Whenever the family isn't looking, I give my butter tea to the dogs. I spilled some on my shoes, and they followed me around the house, trying to lick it up.

Yesterday I left the house at the lethargic hour of three in the afternoon, and the sky was gray and angry and a thin dusting of snow covered the path. I have a ritual meeting with Sam and Ashley every afternoon, where we sit in the Raven, warm from the stove, and drink tall mugs of hot chocolate.

Last night Tenzin invited Sam and Ashley over for dinner. I wish I could remember our conversation over Tibetan stew forever. I love how Tenzin laughs, he cracks up at his own jokes and starts hyperventilating. He had two other friends over as well, fellow Tibetans who had also spent time as monks in India. It was almost like a yuppie dinner conversation in the Northeast; Tibet, Buddhism, travel, and laughter.

I've made a lot of empy promises to people I've met here return. I've lied and said that I love China. But Tibet is different. Tibetans are tall and proud, and their country is beautiful. How could I not come back?

2008-11-20T05:11:00.000-08:00

I made the mistake of opening an urn-type thing on the kitchen table. There were some strange white slabs inside. 'What's this?" I asked. "Dried yak cheese," Tenzin replied. "For the tea. This morning, I think your tea was not so good. Tomorrow you can put the yak cheese in it, and it will be delicious."

I think my host family is trying to set me up with their nephew Tsultrim. He came over last night for dinner and made momos, Tibetan dumplings filled with potato (or yak meat). "He's a very good cook," my host mother said encouragingly. "And handsome."

It was hard to follow the rest of the dinner conversation though, because it was in Tibetan. So far I know two words, "foreign girl" and "yak."

2008-11-19T19:42:00.000-08:00

I've moved in with my Tibetan homestay family. I'm back in Shangri-La for the third time (I just can't stay away!). Tenzin, my host father, is one of the most successful men in town, I'm discovering. A few weeks ago I haggled a bit more aggressively than I should have for a scarf, only to find out that it was my host father's store and I would be eating breakfast every day with the girl I had tried to take down. Tenzin also co-owns my favorite restaurant in town, has a travel agency, and is working with an American client to have Citigroup invest in a hotel project in Deqin. He grew up as a nomad in the Tibetan part of Sichuan province, lived in India, and speaks Tibetan, Chinese, English, Hindi, and Nepali. I even googled him.

This is all very different since my last homestay father was a bean farmer.

His house is absolutely beautiful, a traditional Tibetan lodge with textiles and dark wood, with a huge living room where everyone hangs out. Last night we watched a Tibetan documentary in which a man drowned in quicksand. The best part is Tenzin's little white Tibetan puppy Dunba, who likes to lie on his back and wave his little paws at me.

I had yak butter tea for breakfast, per Tibetan tradition. I love yaks, but I wish they would stay out of my morning beverage.

Last night I met up with Sam and Ashley, who have been living at the Tanka Center for the past few weeks. They have to teach English every night to the Tibetan students at the center. I watched Sam with his white board, drawing pictures of every fruit he could think of while his student achingly repeated, "honeydew...lemon?" Ashley was very cute in her Tibetan uniform, frolicking with her new friends. She apparently spends six hours a day learning to draw from the head monk of the center.

last night we went to the "disco" in the town square, where all the villagers get together every night and dance to Tibetan music in a big circle. I tried to follow the moves of a man in a mustache and fedora.

2008-11-17T05:05:00.000-08:00

Yaks are kind of funny. They just stand in one place for hours, and they don't even blink. Today I was trying to get to the bathroom but a yak stood dumbfounded at the entrance, blocking the way. You'll be walking around and see a yak standing outside a house, and when you make your way back forty-five minutes later, the farthest the yak has gone is a few steps to the left. They wear Tibetan bells around their necks, and at night the fields sound like Christmas.

I am completely fixated by yaks.

I also can't remember the last time I've seen a flush toilet. Or stall doors. Most Chinese bathrooms are little huts built over a stream-type thing, with a couple of little partitions (in the best of situations) so that three people can go at once. Pulling my pants down in front of other people hardly phases me anymore. I've seen so many Chinese butts. I hate it when they come into the stall with you though, and wait for you to finish peeing. Chinese people are so impatient.

This is what the trek was like: we hiked down from Feilaisi, a town on the ridge, and found our way through the yaks and desert shrubbery to the Mekong river canyon, where the only way down was a path along a crumbling ledge. We crossed the river via footbridge and asked farmer after farmer where the town of Xidang was, where we spent the night. The next day was a grueling hike up a mountain and down the other side into the perfectly secluded village of Yubeng. I've never seen anything like it. These wooden Tibetan houses are clustered around terraces, surrounded on all sides by snow-capped mountains. The only way to get there is on foot or by mule. It almost looks like somewhere the Trapp family would live, only with Tibetans instead of Austrians (or Vermonters).

Nature! Naaaaaature!

I was never really into Tibet at home, even though everybody talked about it. I was never really into hiking or the outdoors either. But being here has changed my life. I'm definitely investing in a good pair of hiking boots. What is it about Tibet that draws so many people in?

2008-11-14T00:51:00.000-08:00

I'm in Deqin in November, exactly what my professor told us not to do. But I've got some altitute meds and some mittens, and tomorrow set out to hike to Kawagebo, one of the holiest mountains in Tibetan Buddhism. It has never been summitted, just like the rest of the Beautiful Snow Mountains, which form an intimidating ridge against the Tibetan Plateau .

It's beautiful here.

the road from Lijiang to Shangri-La takes you up into the mountainous highlands, where the cows turn into yaks and the landscape goes from cute to terrifying as your bus makes death-defying passes on roads clinging perilously to the rock face. But that's nothing compared with the road from Shangri-La to Deqin. When you're not stopping for a yak crossing or for one of the million photo/bathroom breaks demanded by Chinese tourists, you're wondering how it is that you've reached the edge of the world. It's desolate. The cliffs are a straight drop. The earth is brown and red and purple, until there is only rock and snow.

one man picked himself a snack of a twig with some berries that he brought onto the bus. I glanced back at him a few hours later to see him filling a surgical mask with the peel of his orange, which he strapped to his face. I will never understand Chinese people.

2008-11-09T05:58:00.000-08:00

I've been on Lugu Lake for the past however many days. I've lost track of everything to do with the real world. Can it be that I have found the last unspoiled piece of China? The only boats on the lake are the long wooden canoes of the Mosuo people. I asked a woman today where her husband was. "On the Sichuan side," she said, pointing across the lake. "He has his own family and I have mine."

I came here to study and to write my research paper, but I can't speak Mosuo and my computer currently has a broken hard drive. Instead I play with puppies and kitties in this animal kingdom where pigs, ducks, and ponies roam the streets, and turkeys wander in and out of restaurants.

2008-11-04T21:19:00.000-08:00

since China is 13 hours ahead of the East Coast, the polls didn't close until 10 am on November 5th. Last night we all went to bed excited after attending a Naxi music concert conducted by an eccentric Chinese millionaire, who had given us a lecture that morning at his home. When he was talking about some incomprehensible aspect of modern Chinese culture, he mentioned "gaibian," the Chinese word for "change." He paused, as if he wasn't sure if we quite understood, then said, ""Obama?" punching his fist into the air. Then he pointed to Justin and said, "like you!" Justin never gets a break from being the only black man in China. Chinese people really have no concept of race. The conductor said, "my mother was Tibetan and my father was a Turk, so I was better than the stupid Naxi." We laughed uncomfortably and looked at our watches.

We asked for lecture today to be postponed so we could all watch election results. In the morning we went to some temple to get blessed by another living Buddha, then booked it to a cafe to sit anxiously with our laptops and repeatedly refresh MSNBC. At about 11:30 am Pennsylvania and Ohio were called for Obama, and after that it was just madness. I'm so happy for Jack Murtha, Eric Massa, Dan Maffei. North Carolina, Jesus Christ. Right now we're in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Lijiang, filled with Chinese tourists who barely even know about the election, and who would favor McCain if they did. Everyone in the cafe was bewildered, but we kept yelling results to each other at the different tables and hugging each other and trying to stream McCain's concession speech. One Australian turned to his friend and remarked, "Obama has won the election...so I hear."

There are thirteen kids on this trip, including one Bermudean and one Swiss. Not a single person voted for McCain. I literally feel like singing the star-spangled banner right now. I wonder what the madness is like in the States; I spent the last presidential election waving signs on a rainy street corner in Pittsford Plaza, watching the results in county headquarters in wet socks with my dad, everyone ready to cry into their champagne. Now I'm in China, wishing I were storming the quad with the rest of the students at Tufts. If people are half as excited as they were about the World Series, that is.

2008-11-03T02:10:00.001-08:00

after this weekend, I don't think anything else in China is worth mentioning. Shangri-La is amazing. I want to live there, and I'm the last person on earth who should live in China.

we drove up into the foothills of the Himalayas, to the border of Tibet where that beautiful place exists. It's beautifully desolate, cold and the color of dead grass. Yaks graze everywhere and big racks for drying wheat surround traditional Tibetan wooden houses.

our point person in Shangri-La, or Zhongdian in Mandarin, was a gregarious Tibetan man named Dakpa. He used to be a monk when he was younger and exiled to India, and runs a Tibetan culture NGO (and a really good Indian restaurant... he's pretty much Mr. Zhongdian) and knows everybody and everything worth knowing. He also looks like a Tibetan Viggo Mortensen, case in point that Tibetans are pretty much the most attractive race on this planet.

Tibet is also an extremely musical culture, as it turns out. Beside Dakpa's songs of welcome, we spent our first dinner in Zhongdian exchanging songs with the table next to us, a boisterous group of Tibetan reporters. Then Dakpa took us to a bar and we sang traditional Tibetan songs until we were invited by another Tibetan man to celebrate at his restaurant with more songs and dance. Alison and I sang a very shoddy rendition of Hava Nagila. The night ended with a drunk, belligerent Tibetan man, who believed he had been promised the next song, climbing onstage and ripping the microphone out of Joe's hand, then throwing a full bottle of Dali at Dakpa's head.

we had been warned that when Tibetans get mad, they don't like to use their words.

the next when Courtney and I found ourselves in an African drum circle with Japanese hippies and a Belgian innkeeper. The night after that, by chance we ended up with the same hippies at a different cafe, drinking yak butter tea and dancing with Tibetan locals. Everyone here is so friendly and warm. It's hard to even bargain with a shopkeeper without ending up with an invitation to dinner that night with their family.

we visited a lamasery and received blessings from the living Buddha. We visited an orphanage and played duck duck goose with Tibetan children (one child was confused and instead played goose goose duck). We went to a tiny temple in the countryside, where our companions were a friendly goat and some roosters. We went to a mountain and bathed in hot springs in our underwear.

I was never really into Tibet at home, but now I'm enthralled. I'm thinking of coming back here in a couple of weeks, Dakpa has already introduced me to a family I could live with. Hiking in the daytime, Tibetan music at night.

2008-10-31T05:32:00.000-07:00

My host mother is obsessed with my socks. She keeps taking mine, including my Pizza Days socks, and giving me new ones while she washes them. And when I don’t wear her socks, she goes down to the village meeting house and complains to my professor.

“She’s so confused,” Xiao Zhou said to me. “She gave you socks, why won’t you wear them?”

I also don’t understand why Chinese people think they can make any situation better by giving you a pomegranate.

Our last night in Shaxi we went to the village meeting house to see a performance of traditional Bai song and dance. My host mother sat in front of me, and kept looking back every two minutes to make sure I was okay. When I got up to talk to Xiao Zhou at the other side of the room, Justin told me that she asked everyone in her general vicinity if they knew where I was and when I would be back. Then she told me I should dress warmer or I would catch cold. I’m sorry, I’m from upstate New York. At home you can ice skate on my birthday, but here I can catch cold by wearing flip flops in sixty-degree weather?

Bathing was so awkward.

I got home from lecture Sunday night and my host mother seized me by the hand and showed me a pair of plastic basins, into which she poured hot water from a thermos. I hadn’t seen a sink anywhere in the house yet and had been wondering how to shower/wash clothes, but didn’t expect to arrive at this crossroads so soon. My host mother handed me a bar of laundry detergent. “For my clothes?” I asked. “No. For your face,” she replied. We were right in the middle of the open-air “hallway” between the “kitchen” and “living room;” she and her brother were both looking at me. I sat down and started to rinse my face with only the water, but the brother unwrapped the detergent and put it in my hand. So, with them examining me closely, I washed my face with laundry detergent.

When my host mother went into the other room for a minute, I hurried and got a dab of shampoo from my room and started to wash the roots of my hair. She came back and tried to take the basin away from me, saying the weather was too cold, and I was trying to explain to her that I had shampoo in my hair, and then her brother came back out and tried to take the basin away too, and took a towel and started drying my hair as I was washing it. I managed to get all the shampoo out of my hair as I was wrestling with them, and slunk away to read the National Geographics I had found in the village meeting house.

2008-10-28T20:04:00.000-07:00

If I thought my Kunming grandmother was overprotective, she has nothing on my Shaxi mother.

Since my ISP has been predetermined by Zhong Laoshi of the Tufts Chinese department to be on the Mosuo people of Lugu Lake, I wanted to spend my time in Shaxi learning about what I’m really interested in: farmers. My Shaxi mother and uncle are both farmers, but since they can barely speak Mandarin we are reduced to the communication equivalent of body language.

Yesterday morning my host mother took me on a walk along the river on the outskirts of the village. It was just about the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Even in Yunnan, at its tropical latitude, you can feel autumn. The patchwork fields were out of a storybook, with far-off villages dotting the mountain foothills. Everything had a dreary tint to it, perhaps because of the rain that hasn’t let up in four days, but that just made it even more majestic.

She dropped me off at the village school, where I met a few of the teachers. One teacher, whose English name was Victor, took me to his dormitory and cooked me lunch. Now I know my mother might be worried reading this post, but as I told Jess Bidgood, white women in China have about the appeal of Eleanor Roosevelt. He played me traditional Bai music, and found one of the gym teachers, who used to be a farmer, to talk with me about agriculture. I stayed there for hours, drinking cup after cup of tea. The gym teacher invited both of us to eat dinner with his family that evening. Victor also invited me to sit in on his classes that afternoon, but I told him I had better check in with my host mother to tell her where I was. Which I felt was very big of me, considering the opportunity I was passing up.

I ran into my host mother while I was walking home, and asked her if I could eat dinner with the gym teacher, expecting her to say alright. “Bu xing, bu xing,” she repeated. “Not okay, not okay.” “Weishenme?” I pleaded, why not? Because I had already eaten lunch with them. That should be enough. I didn’t need to eat dinner with them.

Xiao Zhou told me that my host mother had only said that per routine, and I should disregard her and eat with them anyway. But as I was on my way to buy them cigarettes as a thank-you present, I ran into my host mother again. “Bu xing, bu xing.” I was almost in tears as I brought her back to Xiao Zhou, who, after an epic discussion on my character flaws and attributes, convinced her that since the family who would cook me dinner was not the same as the family who had cooked me lunch, I would not be too much of a burden.

Sometimes I hate traditional Chinese culture.

But thank god I ended up eating dinner with them, because it was the best experience I have had in China to date. I felt so welcome in the gym teacher’s home. He would speak Bai, and Victor would translate into Mandarin, and we spent three hours eating and chatting that way. All my malevolence towards China went right out the window, as I felt how rewarding it was to speak with them in earnest. The gym teacher invited me back to hear him play traditional Chinese instruments, and I regretted my time in Shaxi was so short.

I received a call from Xiao Zhou half an hour before I had said I would come home. My host mother was beside herself with worry. It was 7:30 at night, where on earth was I? Victor and the gym teacher walked me home, and halfway there we ran into my host uncle, who was out searching for me with a flashlight. He wordlessly brought me to my host mother, who made me call Xiao Zhou right away to tell her I was safe. She followed me into my room and made me change socks in front of her, because my old ones would “make me catch cold.” Then I sat on the bed as she personally rolled up my pants legs. She scolded me for my secret stash of crackers, and took all of my clothes to put in the wash.

It’s not the living conditions I mind here in Shaxi. I couldn’t care less that there’s no running water, or that the bathroom doesn’t have a door. It’s the lack of personal choice. I wish I could be allowed to hear that gym teacher play the erhu for me, without my host mother thinking I was too much of a burden. I wish I could communicate with her, because living in the countryside makes my two and a half years of Chinese feel like nothing.

In a small moment of freedom before bedtime, I shined my flashlight in on the pigs. The three of them were asleep, fat, and snuggling side by side.

2008-10-26T03:59:00.000-07:00

I thought my frightening incidents with animals in China were over when I got off that mule. Then I was attacked by a monkey.

We hiked down from Jizu Shan and went to Dali, the center of the Bai people. It’s a touristy village on a lake, and also attracts a few westerners. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see much of Dali because I was too busy voting for Obama. The day we left Kunming my absentee ballot still hadn’t come, and I was heartbroken at the thought of sitting out my first presidential election until Alison suggested we just print out the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot, which ended up taking the entire afternoon. If I had to miss cormorant fishing on Lake Erhai with a bunch of Chinese tourists, at least it was so the world would be in better hands.

A small temple in some misty mountains was our next stop, and we hiked up there to spend the night. It’s also where there are lots of wild monkeys, and my professor brought a bag of peanuts hoping to attract them. I offered to carry the peanuts, and was minding my own business when we heard the stampede of about thirty monkeys coming our way through the woods. I can still hear the monkeys’ footsteps. One ran straight for me, leapt around my waist, and grabbed my bag of peanuts as I shrieked my head off. They all swarmed around the peanuts on the ground as I was ushered to safety by my friends.

The temple was so beautiful, though. There were grottoes and waterfalls, and we all slept in one room of this old inn. The next day we got to the next temple, one of the most important in Yunnan, that a local governor had saved during the Cultural Revolution. It was rainy and cold, and the mist turned into thick, impenetrable fog which we hiked through to get down to the Bai village of Shaxi. It was a surreal experience. We hiked silently in a line, wearing brightly-colored rain jackets and pushing past pine trees along a ridge high above the valley. Parts of the trail were collapsed by landslides, and we were all soaking by the time we got to the bottom.

In Shaxi we met the group of families with whom we are going to live for the next five days. My host mother snatched my bag as soon as we met and led me down an old cobblestone path past low-slung houses and muddy trenches until we got to her home on the edge of the village. It’s different in every way from my homestay in Kunming. In Shaxi, everyone is a poor farmer. My bed is next to the chicken coop, a plank cushioned with straw and an animal hide. The whole thing isn’t so much a house as a series of rooms accessible from a muddy courtyard, with bales of hay piled everywhere and ears of Yunnan corn drying on string from the eaves.

I’m still not sure who exactly is in my family. There wasn’t a formal introduction like in Kunming. I ate alone with my host mother, except for when the nainai, or paternal grandmother, shuffled in and wheezingly served herself some soup. The only other person I have seen is the didi, or mother’s younger brother, who is a farmer like she is.

There’s a constant sound of trickling rain and everything is damp and dark. My host mother is nice, she tells me to wear more clothing and eat and drink more. It’s hard to understand her. Everyone else in her house speaks Bai, and she’s the only one who knows a little Mandarin, but speaks in a heavy local accent. My shoes are wet from the rain, and I have no others to wear while they dry out. I huddle around my computer for warmth.

2008-10-23T02:56:00.000-07:00

the further out of the Kunming valley we get, the more extreme the terrain is. Half the time it looks like desert, half the time the Himalayas. Finally, we arrived at the temple where we spent our first night. We ate dinner with the monks, in bowls we washed ourselves. There was a rule that no food should be wasted, so it was really unfortunate that I had served myself some fermented tofu.

We prayed with the monks before dinner. Prayer isn’t exactly my strong suit, but there’s something fascinating about Buddhist monks, and how they chant expressionless for hours at a time. The monks suddenly lined up and circled the inside of the temple in a procession, the back of which we joined. It was funny, a bunch of confused white people following chanting monks walking circle after circle around the temple, having no idea when it would end.

We took mules up to the top of a mountain to reach the monastery where we spent the next night. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I mounted my mule that memories of my childhood horseback riding accident came back. Every time he slipped on the steep path through the woods, all I could remember was my horse getting spooked and charging off through the trees with me clinging on for dear life until I got thrown off by a fence. I thought I had finally regained my composure by the end of the hour and a half ride, until I got off the mule and promptly burst into tears.

I can't describe enough how beautiful that monastery was. It was on top of a towering mountain, and beyond the mountain were other mountains, and on the other side were other mountains, and they were all rugged and misty and blue. It was freezing cold, and Tibetan prayer flags whipped around in the wind. The temple was built right onto the cliff, and a few of us woke up early to catch the sunrise. The local villagers were already out, reciting their morning prayers. I love it I love it I love it.

2008-10-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon my family took me to KTV, or karaoke. Having heard various friends’ horror stories about their own experiences at KTV that lasted four, five, six hours at a time, I was a little apprehensive. Upon arriving at the complex, which was adjacent to the bus station, I was ushered into a private room with my Chinese mother, grandmother, three-year-old-sister, and her pet turtles. As in, two live turtles she had bought at the market that morning and was swinging around in a little plastic cage. My grandmother told me that since I was the guest, I had the honor of singing the first song. And the second and third and fourth songs, as it turned out. I alternated between Elton John and assorted Christmas favorites.

When I told my Chinese grandmother on Sunday I was going to meet friends to study, she wouldn’t let me leave the house without an entire picnic of items from the kitchen. We argued back and forth until I finally managed to leave the house with only a loaf of bread and a pomegranate.

I survived riding my bicycle in Kunming. I am one with Chinese traffic. To imagine that this summer I was too afraid of cars to even ride my bike in Medford…I don’t think I will ever think Boston drivers are crazy after having lived in China. I am fearless. Okay, so I have been walking the past few days since my back tire blew. But there are only five bike-repair stands between my apartment and school, and I’ve already been to all of them.

I genuinely love Sophie. I usually compare small children to kittens—they’re cute and small, but the novelty wears off very fast. But Sophie is like a miniature real person. I like everything about her, how she asks me every day if her outfit looks beautiful and how she comes to get her grandfather during the scary parts of Sleeping Beauty. Living with a family let me transcend my habit of treading water on the sidelines, and I’m so thankful that they helped me to understand more of Chinese culture. I will miss them. I will also miss the kid who practices piano every night somewhere in this apartment complex. It reminds me of my brother after dinner when we were in high school.

My grandmother asked me if we had the Barbie movies in the United States. I said I thought so, but I personally had never watched them. She nodded. “You don’t have time,” she said sympathetically. I didn’t have the heart to set her straight about my relationship with Barbie.

Tomorrow morning I leave for the countryside, where I'll be for the next month and a half. Chinese cities are great (well, no, they're not), but this is what I've really been waiting for.

2008-10-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

Vocabulary I have Learned in Chinese This Semester:

(sound made by oil when cooking)
To conduct oneself in society
To raise children to assure one’s security in old age
Family happiness
Struggle
Conflict
Filial piety
A tendency to avoid problems and live a happy life
To forget all moral principles at the sight of profits
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
To help each other when both are in humble circumstances
College entrance exam
To poison
To smuggle
To shoulder heavy responsibilities over a long period ahead
To leave a mistake uncorrected and make the best of it
To be good friends despite great difference in age
Philistinism
To be too fond of drink
To not go back to one’s home for the whole night
Love and respect for one’s elder brother
Moral crossroads
Sparkplug
Self-cultivation
To lose face
“To tell the truth, I am rather disappointed with the nature of man.”

2008-10-16T21:40:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I eat, Sophie brings over all her toys and tells me they are for lunch. I must try each one with my chopsticks and give her feedback on her cooking. So far I have enjoyed the playdough more than the stuffed dolphin, but I think that’s just because I am a vegetarian.

It’s funny how whenever my family thinks I don’t like something, they ask me if I want sugar on it. I don’t know where they got this idea that Americans put sugar on all their food, but I certainly don’t like it on tomatoes and fried goat cheese.

My Chinese grandmother is kind of controlling. I love her, but it’s true. I think she likes to change tiny details of my plans just to show that she can. If I say I’ll be home at 6:30, she’ll say 6. If I want to sleep in until 8, we’ll haggle until I get her down to 7:30. If I want to read, she’ll trick me into going shopping (“we’re just going for a little walk”). My Chinese mother and grandfather are much more loose. So far I’m just amused by my grandmother’s antics, but if I were living here for longer I wonder if she would drive me crazy. Is she testing my American-ness? I like to test her too. I intentionally shock her with things like, “My parents are divorced.” “My mother likes to order takeout.” “I plan to put my career before a man.” “In America we do not think that wearing a t-shirt is the reason someone catches a cold.”

I came home fifteen minutes early from class yesterday, and the kitchen was filled with women. They were my Chinese grandmother’s friends. It was like having fifteen Chinese grandmothers at once. They kept urging me to sit down and eat even though no one else was ready, because in China you don’t wait for everyone to be seated, so I awkwardly picked up a jiaozi, and they kept coming over every thirty seconds to tell me to eat more and to try replace my chopsticks with a fork. There is nothing more offensive to a foreign exchange student in China than being offered a fork.

My grandmother got out the photo album I had given her and pointed to a picture of the Tufts econ department. “This is her house!” she said, and her old lady friends gasped. Then they started speaking in Kunminghua. The only thing I could understand, other than “she doesn’t understand Kunminghua,” was, “you let her ride her bicycle by herself?” I just moped by the fruit. Thank god pomegranates take so long to eat, and my grandmother was making me eat the entire thing. Otherwise it would have been me, a bunch of old ladies staring at me, and nothing to do but meet their eyesight.

Instead of lecture we went to a Wa village to get some more of that indispensable cultural immersion. I don’t really know what exactly the point was, but it started with a Wa man pointing to Justin, the only black guy on the trip, saying that since they both had dark skin they must share the same ancestry, and ended with Justin up onstage with a gong tied around his waist. Then we all had to chant one by one into a microphone and perform some kind of borderline sexual dance that involved a lot of hair-swishing and bending over, as Chinese schoolchildren looked on in boredom. One twelve-year-old even plugged his ears.

2008-10-13T01:09:00.000-07:00

I had a China-tastic weekend. We all piled into my host grandfather’s Mitsubishi to take Sophie to the suburbs where she played "constructively," in English of course, with the six little girls of an American missionary family.

Me: Are you going to celebrate Halloween now that you live in China?
Girl: My mommy says Halloween is Satan’s birthday.

We took two of the girls to go bowling, because that’s apparently what you do in China at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. On the way, there was some sort of detour, for a reason that escapes me, to what can only be described as a talent show for the elderly. I shrank back along the sidelines until I was seized by a 65-year-old man with a crumpled sheet of paper bearing what I later determined to be a shoddy English translation of some weird Christian hymn.

Man: I am overseas Chinese. I live Burma. I am doctor. You know? You know?
Me: Yes. I know.
Man: Do you know the river of no return?
Me: Um. No.
Man: OK. You sing with me onstage.

My host grandmother finally, after a million years, noticed that an old man was trying to drag me onstage and came to my rescue. Then we went bowling.

No matter what I do, I can’t eat my food at anything but lightning speed. It’s an American thing. My grandmother is always telling me, “man man chi,” eat slowly, but in a matter of minutes my meal is gone, while the others haven’t even served themselves rice. When they try to spoon more greens into my bowl, I protest, “wo zhende chi bao le.” They all put their chopsticks down, pause a minute, and direct me to the fruit bowl, where I am supposed to eat one tangerine after another until the rest of the family has finished.

My grandmother likes to feed me fruit. I don’t mind, because I happen to be a big believer in fruit, but it’s kind of funny how she sits there, watches me eat a banana, then tries to give me another one. I have gotten used to evening conversation over a pomegranate. Every morning, my grandmother tries to stuff my schoolbag with apples, until I explain to her that the added mass actually makes riding my bicycle even more miserable.

I am really at wit’s end with this whole bike-riding thing. I have to keep looking for new bicycle-repair stands so the shopkeepers don’t think I’m a complete asshole who keeps breaking her bike. Instead of marching into confrontation with the school rental place, Xiao Zhou and I decided it would be better if I just rode her bike, which she never uses. Which was great, until halfway home when the chain fell off. Then a policeman yelled at me for riding in the crosswalk while I was in the middle of a busy intersection. Honestly, aren't there bigger fish to fry in the realm of Chinese traffic law than a hapless foreign exchange student on a bicycle?

China is one big puppy parade. Puppies scamper down the mossy steps of old temples and chase each other between the legs of octopus-tentacle vendors. I don’t know why they never seem to grow old, but they must send the elderly dogs into a doggie nursing home (my vegetarian euphemism for hot pot...). Puppies in China look like they had sprung alive from the pages of a Chinese comic book: small, fat, ridiculously furry, and with a certain googly-eyed stupor. I love to watch the old ladies who walk in the park in the morning, practicing taiji exercises as they stroll surrounded by puppies.

There is an old German Shepard named Xiao Hu, or Little Tiger, who belongs to the guard of our apartment building. She likes to eat sweets. My grandmother gave me a handful of coconut candies to feed her.

One thing that kind of bugs me about China is how everything is staged. Everything is one big spectacle. Come see our Elephant Reserve and roam with wild pachyderms! Come see our Minority People! Chinese culture show! Taijiquan! Natural Wonder! Village that can only be reached by cave but has an enormous lot in which to park your SUV! I say this with all due respect, but Chinese people are a little obsessed with their own culture. These shows aren’t even for Western tourists, as I had originally presumed. No, it’s simply what Chinese people like to do in their free time. They like to file into a room with stadium seating, be served tea by people dressed in cheap, brightly-colored costumes, and be entertained by a hyper emcee who practically yells into the microphone. Even the decorations for Mid-Autumn Festival and Chinese New Year have cute little cartoon characters—it’s hard to take them seriously. The building across from our apartment is a wedding complex. You can look into the window and see Chinese families eating food while a stupid-looking performer swathed in tacky red cloth and sequins reenacts some long-lost tale of heroism.

I love China, but sometimes I think it wants me to appreciate its culture so much that it drives me away.

And then there are times like yesterday, when we drove for hours to reach a forgotten temple in the woods, surrounded by Hui villages and fishing ponds, and even though it was sunny in Kunming, a misty rain started to fall as we entered.

2008-10-10T01:15:00.000-07:00

My bicycle has been causing me to lose face. When the pedal fell off as I was riding, I repaired it. When the chain fell off as I was riding, I repaired it. But when the brake came off in my hand as I was trying to stop, I decided it was the last straw. Tomorrow I am going to march into the bike rental shop of my university and give them a piece of my mind (or more likely just cower behind Xiao Zhou).

Riding through traffic in Chinese rush hour is a nightmare. Really, I think I would rather someone just chop me up and feed me to the poor. Chinese drivers are mad in the most original sense of the word. If a police car pulls up to check out a crime scene (well, that’s an exaggeration of what Chinese policemen actually do), drivers will just honk at it to move out of the way. The bike lane is useless because taxis pull up out of nowhere and nearly throw you over your handlebars. And Chinese pedestrians just flop into the road like dead fish. Literally. I was once almost killed by a man who absentmindedly put a bucket of fish in the road as I was trying to pass.

Thank god we’re leaving for the countryside soon, because if I were in Kunming much longer I’d have to go into a home for frustrated bicyclers.

Beside my emerging issues with road rage, I really like my homestay. My family is very gracious and I feel bad that I can't do more to reciprocate their kind gestures. I've been so used to living on my own that my basic routine is wake, go to school, come home for lunch, go back to school, come home for dinner, work, sleep. But we have had a lot of chances to talk. If you had told me when I was a high school senior sitting through AP Spanish that I would soon find myself living with a Chinese family in an isolated province speaking their language, I never would have believed you.

the father in my house is gone because of the One Child Policy. He left shortly after Sophie was born, disappointed that she was a girl. Sophie is the smartest three-year-old I have ever met. How could that be a disappointment? But now it's as if her whole life is now a mission to prove her father wrong. The amount of resources Chinese parents pour into their only children is incredible. There are no cousin, uncles, or siblings anymore, just the relationship between the generations, which is fiercely tight. Sophie is lucky to have grandparents that take such good care of her while her mother works, taking her to English Corner every thursday night and buying all the educational toys and computer programs they can find, in hopes that she can carry on the family torch.

my grandfather is such a good cook. He's a Hui, a Chinese muslim, and he doesn't quite look Han. He seems to be mid-sixties, and you can still see that he was handsome. I admire how much energy he has. Today he cooked the eggplant dish I love so much, with tofu this time. It tastes like ginger and garlic. I want him to show me how to make it, but I'm afraid I won't remember.

I went to a Chinese zoo today. It made me want to cry. Everyone was in a pretty somber mood. Lions and tigers are stuck in cages and look like they have no more will to move.

2008-10-08T00:50:00.000-07:00

I’ve moved in with my host family. I am with a young, single mother who lives with her parents and her three-year-old daughter in an apartment in downtown Kunming. My host grandmother likes to keep me at arms’ length, putting a blanket around my chair when I’m doing homework because “I might catch cold.” The grandfather does the cooking and plays with the three-year-old girl, Sophie, who happens to speak perfect English. No one else in the family can say a word, but of course the toddler strolls right into my room an hour after I move in and announces, “my name is Sophie, what’s yours?”

It’s kind of bizarre living with a family that speaks only Chinese and a toddler that only wants to speak English. But Sophie seems to have made an executive decision to help my Chinese by flatly refusing to translate anything her family asks her to. Of course, she addresses me nonstop in my native tongue—“where are your slippers? Why are you in bare feet? You’re eating too much pomegranate,” but when her grandmother is trying to explain to me where to lock my bicycle, Sophie glares up with arms crossed, and shakes her head.

That’s right, I’ve decided to grab the bull by the horns and ride my bicycle in Kunming, a sort of carpe diem moment for me. Also, my host family lives a forty-five minute walk from my university. Within the first twenty feet of riding, one of my pedals fell off. I just looked at it in disdain. At least the Chinese drivers did not make roadkill of me today. Perhaps tomorrow.

Home-cooked Chinese food is infinitely better than restaurant food. They don't feel the need to drench everything in oil. My host grandfather cooked me eggplant with cloves of garlic that I simply could not get enough of, and I don’t even like eggplant. There was boiled spinach, familiar enough. And thin tofu strips with slices of red pepper. They mercifully kept the hot pepper on the side so I did not have to choke on everything I ate. I was so confused. Why was it so good? I didn’t even have to supplement my meal with hidden crackers after everyone had finished.

The first morning, I woke up (to Sophie pounding on the door, “wake up, wake up!” It made me miss Shay) to find breakfast already laid out on the table for me. Sophie and my grandmother sat across from my plate, watching expectantly. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and they had painstakingly arranged the ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a serving of potato chips, and a red apple. My grandmother looked very pleased with herself.

My bed here is a lot more comfortable than my hard dorm bed, with a big squishy comforter, though bus station lighting seems to be a general trend in China. Also, I have discovered that my family stored their bootleg B-movie DVDs in my closet. Surviving Christmas with Ben Affleck last night, Lord of War with Nicholas Cage tomorrow?

But bootleg movies aside, since I was pretty nervous coming into my homestay, I am truly thankful about the family I am with. They are all very wonderful to me, if a little overprotective--I think I can deal with a 6 p.m. curfew for the time being. My Chinese has already improved drastically. There really is no substitute for living with a real Chinese family. I’ve talked to my host mother so much that sometimes I don’t even notice I’m talking in Chinese. Until Sophie comes along and tries to feed me dried prunes or whatnot and I jump at how strange English sounds to my ears.

I hope my host mother doesn’t mind putting up with my kindergarten-level comparisons. That’s all they make you do in Chinese class, dumb comparisons about Zhongguo versus Meiguo. “Oh, Chinese broccoli is spicier than American broccoli, how interesting!”

Last night was my host grandmother’s birthday so we went out to one of those hospital-sized restaurants that are so common in China, where families can rent their own private rooms. I ate peanuts, fried goat cheese, a slightly greasy tofu dish, and pumpkin fritters. Being a vegetarian is very convenient because not only is Chinese meat sketch-tastic, but not eating it reduces the number of dishes which people can randomly spoon into my bowl. Which they do, quite frequently. Also, whenever people turned their heads, Sophie would grope my food. My grandmother would catch her, than transfer whatever she had fondled onto her own plate and give me an even more generous serving of the tainted item. And then she would scold me for not eating more, and other people would join in the fun of heaping food into my bowl, or just shout words of encouragement from the sidelines. The whole thing was very complicated.

On the way there, we all piled into the Volkswagen of who I am 99% sure is my host mother’s younger brother’s fiancé. They insisted that I sit in the front passenger seat. Not only did they insist that I sit there, but Sophie insisted on sitting on my lap. Not only did she insist on sitting in my lap, but she turned around and stared at me the whole drive there. It baffles me that my host mother won’t let me go outside without a million layers of fleece, but she lets her three-year old daughter roam around in the front seat of a moving vehicle in a Chinese city on the lap of a foreigner. Obviously I have a lot to learn.

2008-10-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

Xishuangbanna is less a part of China and more an extension of Southeast Asia, and I wanted to quit school and stay there. The streets of Jinghong could not possibly have fit any more palm trees, and the local Dai language was above every Mandarin sign. Burmese men in sarongs hawked jade and fruit. Instead of noodles, the vendors sold steamed bamboo, and there were practically seconds between when ripe mangoes, papayas, pineapples, and bananas were plucked and when they were sold right on the street. Courtney and I found a little alleyway that led to creaking huts, squashed around a damp courtyard hidden by banana trees, where we spent most of our nights.

I don't know what was better, being practically in Burma or meeting the other people who were just as awe-struck as us. We met an American motorcycler who had been detained for a few hours that afternoon for taking a picture of the border, and ran into the same pairs of Spanish, Israeli, Dutch, French, and Belgian backpackers in the cafes that dotted our section of town, getting to know all of them.

Courtney and I had taken the overnight bus from Kunming, settling down a 16-25 hour drive that we in fact made in fewer than 9 (causing us to wonder, at 4 in the morning, where on earth we were and what we had gotten ourselves into...cue nap on bus station bench). We decided to first check out one of the backpacker cafes we had heard about (after waiting until a more reasonable hour) and see what this town had. The Forest Cafe was a hole in the wall that served us muesli with fresh fruit; Sara, the famed owner, was a petite Han Chinese woman with cropped hair and a loose sweater over a peasant skirt. She offered to take us on a trek later that week, and tried not to laugh as she gave us directions to the elephant reserve (which was completely worthless) (which had no elephants) (which led me to follow the elephants' cue and thereby after swear off any place visited by Chinese tourists).

so Courtney and I rented bikes and spent a day riding around--Jinghong quickly turned into a series of huts and squatter farms lining pathetic roads. We swerved down a dirt path and found the Mekong River. I suddenly had visions of Martin Sheen and armored rafts, but quickly regained my composer as we rode along the banks. SO BEAUTIFUL.

The whole time I couldn't shut up, going on about how I loved Asia, was ridiculously happy, planned on purchasing a bike as soon as I returned to Boston, wanted to open a pineapple plantation, blah blah blah. I'm sure Courtney wanted to shoot me.

The next few days we explored the rest of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture (as it is called), staying as far away from Chinese tourists as we possibly could--which consequently led us to be dropped off by a bus in a town the middle of nowhere, with naught to do but explore shanty farms until we were chased away by a farmer's dog (and his son, incidentally, who also barked).

every night Courtney and I went cafe-hopping, ordering smoothies, dinner, and deserts and the different backpacker havens. It was like living in a small, happy town--waving at our backpacker friends across the street, meeting up and deciding to all go to the next cafe, sharing stories about what to do and not to do. Trying different combinations of juice--orange and lemon turned out to be simple, yet the most refreshing.

In between activities we would often sit on the porch of our little hut, welcoming other pairs of backpackers as they moved in and out. There was a really nice sense of solidarity. One time at a cafe while I was using the computer, the waitress came over and handed me a potato.

The last few days we spent on our trek, which started out along the Mekong and swerved up into the (green, lush, misty, just kill yourself) beautiful mountains where we passed Dai, Ake, and Aini villages. We spent the night on the floor of a Dai family's hut, in a village perched somewhere really high up, wherever it was. It was us, Sara, and four other European backpacker pairs. We saw so much--all I can do is gush. The view was incredible. We followed the Mekong until we swerved onto the other side of the mountain peaks, where we saw rice paddies, tea terraces, and rolling mountains forever. As I was crossing a pineapple farm, I fell on my face in front of a Dai woman.

Anyway, the whole experience made me think. I'm studying abroad in China more to make the most out of a Chinese requirement than because this is necessarily the place I've been dreaming of. Chinese cities are hard to love. They are invariably gray and damp and filled with car exhaust, and there are no Westerners and quaint old buildings have been torn down in favor of drab apartment complexes. But no matter how sarcastic the tone of my blog is, I don't want anyone thinking I don't like it here in China! Because it's not the cities I ever really love when I travel abroad. Spending that week in the tropical countryside, seeing old buildings, old people, so many ethnic groups, was a transformation of how I feel about China. I can't wait to travel more.

2008-09-27T07:04:00.000-07:00

Even though every developing country claims its drivers are the most deranged, I think the trophy must really go to the Chinese. Never in my life have I seen one city bus cut off another with such hateful vigor. Or been in a bus that did a complete U-turn on a four-lane highway. The bike lane isn’t much better, motorcycles are much harder to spot until they zoom up behind you and nearly knock you down in your path. I would love to bike here more often, if only I weren't completely terrified of any combination of a Chinese person and a set of wheels.

Also, taking note of the bus bombings this summer in Kunming, it suddenly unclear which is more dangerous, being in the bus’ path, or actually onboard. Kunming buses do, however, play soothing videos of grasshoppers frolicking on dewy, green leaves.

It’s funny how fast it took everyone to know what there is to know about me. People here have already picked up on my quirks, the ones that I'm only even aware of from other people’s observations. How I swear really loudly from my desk when I’m frustrated and think about foods I hate just to gross myself out. I’m known as the girl who likes Indian food, puppies, war movies, and the “Latin America” section of msnbc.com. I guess no matter where I go, I can’t escape my compulsions. I just like things how I like them.

It’s discouraging how mediocre I am at Chinese. Granted, I’m a white girl, but all this effort seems like it needs to start showing. I left Spanish when I was really good at it, to slave away at an elusive language unwilling to be tamed, for mediocrity in the tongue of a country I don’t even plan on spending time in after I’m done with the Tufts language requirements. The only times I am actually good at Chinese are when I’m supposed to be responding in a different language. A few nights ago Sam asked me a question in Spanish, and the only words that popped into my head were Chinese proverbs.

At least I know how to scold parents for spoiling their children. And discuss horticulture.

Today Tal and Aly didn't come to class so I was all alone with Zhang Laoshi. She made me act out a skit with her in which I was a taxi driver and she was a passenger who had lost a cell phone, for which she offered me a 1000 RMB reward. My goal was to use our vocabulary to politely say I didn't want the money but "begrudingly accept" after an annoyingly long period of beating around the bush. It reminded me of the Iranian taarof custom. Why do other cultures bother so much with politeness when it comes to things like cups of tea and lost cell phones, but have absolutely no respect for anyone who wishes to walk in your general vicinity?

I’ve been making mad trips to the fruit vendor to stock up on vitamin C for combating my cold, buying about a pound every evening right outside my door. My favorites are the little tangerines the size of ping pong balls, and enormous tangelos that take about an hour to peel. Fruit stands were such a good idea. Whose idea were they? There's nothing like a Chinese tangerine, they're small and firm and just sour enough and start to spray juice as soon as you crack open the peel.

We had a lecture from an guy from an environmental NGO the other day. He said that ecotourism in China is actually more detrimental than tourism in general because Chinese people’s idea of ecotourism is driving a Volkswagen into the deep forest to take a million pictures of themselves on a horse. And then they get off the horse. And shout a lot, as it turns out. Noise pollution, as well as pollution of the air, water, and general dignity of the earth.

The bottled water stand around the corner from me has a little boy who always plays on the dirty cement expanse of the sidewalk. All his toys are lined up neatly next to the ice cream freezer, which sells slightly icier versions of Magnum and Good Humor. Walking past tonight, I saw the cot behind the counter of the little stand. The man was tucking his worried-looking wife into bed beneath the worn plaid blanket. The boy was still playing on the sidewalk.

Chinese is so dumb. Even if you recognize the character, and know the pinyin, and know the tone, and know the meaning of that individual word, you may still have no idea what anything says. For instance, who knew that “car water horse dragon” means “heavy traffic”?

It does feel good when you get it right, though.

2008-09-24T06:31:00.000-07:00

today we visited a drug clinic, the biggest rehab facility in China. Not only does Yunnan have the most poor people, but also the most heroin addicts and the highest incidence of AIDS, all in province!!! What a deal. The clinic was exactly what the government wants you to see. Cheerful inmates in matching tracksuits perfectly arranged four-to-a-table in the library. Smiling smack addicts performing a cheesy Chinese culture revue, led by an emcee who probably thought he was on a game show. All around was propaganda about "6.26," the Chinese-invented "miracle drug" that was supposedly an herbal cure for heroin addiction, with a 98% success rate and no side-effects. Ok. It was like the Olympics, "6.26" on posters on the walls and flashing from every page of the patient-run magazine, Kaishi. "6.26 is a cultural miracle! Unlike the deadly chemicals spawned from German labs! We praise China's enduring kindness and cunning scientific wit!"

it dawns on me that some of you just want to hear about a typical day here, one unmarred by forced basketball games with heroin addicts. Not that heroin addicts are bad people, I'm just not really into basketball. Every morning I wake up around 7, take a shower and review some homework before heading to class. I usually eat a mantou, which is basically boiled Wonder Bread, or sometimes a scallion pancake or mushroom dumpling. Unless I am getting Indian food that evening, that is the best-tasting food I will have all day, which, let's face it, is pretty sad.

(for lunch at the rehab clinic, the only thing that wasn't battered and deep fried--really, China?--was defrosted cherry tomatoes. Which tasted like they had been repeatedly put in and pulled out of the freezer over a period of weeks by someone who couldn't quite make up his mind on whom to burden his sad fruit).

We have Chinese class from 8 to 12 every day, with a little break in between where we do taiji with an old Chinese guy whose only English is, on repeat, "the legs..." I can't wait to tell my chiropractor.

after Chinese I get lunch, from the noodle vendors in the alley or from the Muslim cafeteria. Then I try to fit in some more chinese homework (but usually end up sleeping) before afternoon lecture on Chinese history and culture. Thank god we finished the unit with the terrifying videos on the Cultural Revolution. I was starting to lose my faith in the human race.

there isn't much time to do things between classes and the library, but we often go exploring around the little shops and parks nearby, and almost always end up on Western street. Since Kunming doesn't have any tourists, all the foreign people are expats and college students, which can be pretty interesting. All the white men throw themselves at Asian girls, must find wife. You start to run into the same people everywhere you go, since it's such a small community, especially at Salvador's, the coffee shop where we all go do work and dabble in the smoothie menu.

every night in the library here, there seems to be some sort of cult that meets across the hall, droning on and on in a chant that could be a membership prerequisite to some sort of secret society. Our professor later informed us they were learning Vietnamese.

This is what it sounds like:

Professor: Maaaaaaaaww.
Chinese people: Maaaaaaaaww.
Professor: Maaaaaaaaww.
Chinese people: Maaaaaaaaww.
Professor: Maaaaaaaaww.
Chinese people: Maaaaaaaaww.

besides the omnipresent pug, Chinese people are very fond of huskies and samoyeds. The front baskets of bicycles are often filled with fat, curious puppies, and it's not uncommon to see a large man walk down the street cradling a little white ball of fur.

we have four more straight days of class, on Saturday and Sunday, before they have to get rid of us for a week due to the holiday. V. excited for Xishuangbanna!

2008-09-18T01:36:00.001-07:00

sirens went off for 13 straight minutes this morning. At first I thought it was just regarding the sort of car accident you might expect from Chinese drivers. But later I found out it was because today is the day Japan invaded China.

I haven't done any reading for my Chinese culture class because of the amounts of homework my indefatigable Chinese professors assign. Every night I have to memorize new characters for the tingxie, write an essay to read aloud before the teacher, figure out complicated grammar exercises, and translate texts. To add insult to injury, the lighting in my dorm room is about what you would expect in a low-security prison. There is no light at my desk so I hunch over by my suitcase. My body keeps flinching as if it wants to get up and turn on the light, only to remember that the pathetic blueish glow illuminating the corner closest to the door is the climax of our room's brightness.

I find this stressful.

in other news, I finally discovered a Chinese dish that I didn't find completely awful. Yunnan is famous for its water-fried cheese. It's the only province in China where you can even find cheese, unless you want the carrot-flavored stuff found in select grocery stores. It tastes like thin crispy slices of mild goat cheese, and is probably also the most unhealthy food in China. Oh wait, except for everything else. Today I think I actually improved the nutritional content of my lunch by adding a diet coke and a Snicker's bar. I am dying to eat something not slathered in chilis and drenched in oil. Indian again tonight.

People who say Chinese food is good are lying.

Some very exciting activities are on the horizon. This weekend we are going to the Stone Forest, one of the coolest places in China and coincidentally only a few hours' bus ride from Kunming. During National Week, where Chinese people go on a free-for-all, a few of us are going trekking in Xishuangbanna, the southern part of Yunnan and the only part of China located in a tropical rainforest. It's supposed to be interesting because of its Dai people and its elephants, and I look forward to exploring some villages.

The groups we learn about in lecture are right outside, waiting to sell you noodles, or right in the hallways, attending classes. There's the Dai, the Bai, the Yi, the Miao, the Naxi. I can't keep track of all of them but it's very cool. In November I am going to be spending a month on Lugu Lake studying the Mosuo people, in a place rumored to be more Tibetan than Tibet. Looking forward to some yak butter tea (...) (...) (no). But the rest of it should be awesome!

I can't believe I spent this much time on my blog instead of doing homework.

2008-09-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

come now, aren’t classes in study abroad supposed to be fake? I was preparing to indulge myself in the joke, enough to please Tufts to allow me transfer of credit, while really being a tourist in disguise and spending my days exploring the city. But I barely even have time to see the mingsheng guji of Kunming because I must always instead go to the library to learn vocab and translate Cinderella and The Departed into Mandarin and struggle with grammar structures quite above where I left off in Chinese 4. I am very shaky at speaking, and my nerves are made worse by the bell (Chinese universities have bells?) that goes off every twenty minutes like an oven timer (always when I am mid-sentence). The commuter rail in the backyard is mind-boggling loud, and there is some sort of construction either in the room next to, above, or below us, though I have never actually seen anyone with a hammer or nail. Two nights ago my roommate and I were awoken by a man shouting hysterical obscenities at the door of the woman who lives across the hall.

Every day when I walk to class I am stared at. It’s like some warped version of high school. Chinese girls hold hands and Chinese boys perpetually have their arms around each other, and their heads follow me when I walk by. There is nothing as frustrating as being trapped in a mob of Chinese students, who walk haphazardly and at a snail’s pace. I race and duck, trying to discern a logical pattern to their movement as I rush up the seven flights of stairs to my class. If anyone is capable of blocking an entire stairwell with naught but her own tiny frame, it is a Chinese student heading to class. One time I was caught behind a group of people eating corn on the cob.

Every morning we take a break between Chinese classes to do taijiquan in the courtyard with a spry old taiji master. You’d think we were the Olympics by the crowd of Chinese students we attract. They gawk and even take pictures, standing there for the entirety of our stretches and jabs. I’ve never been so aware of my whiteness.

My point not to suggest that I'm having a hard time, but to emphasize that studying abroad is no rocks for jocks. At least not here. It’s really hard to integrate into Chinese culture. We don’t like to eat what they eat, and we don’t wear the things they wear, and we constantly astound each other with our own cultural norms. I said “sorry” too much when I lived in the United States; here, I once said “duibuqi” after narrowly avoiding a collision on a hiking trail, and was met with astonishment at the fact that I had even thought to apologize. Crossing the road the other day, I started screaming when the line of buses and motorcycles suddenly broke free of the red light and came charging at me. The accents here sometimes make me feel like I’d never left Boston, hearing pronunciations like “idea-er” and “empher-size.”

Thursday we heard from a remarkable guy, a 90-year old man who was imprisoned under Mao for twenty years. He had sad old man eyes and responded “much obliged” whenever someone brought him some tea. We’ve been studying the Mao era this week, and I never got how messed up China was until I got here. I asked the old man how people still respected Mao here, never disputing his tyranny yet at the same time paying homage to his tomb and praising his contribution to Chinese history. How is that possible? It’s a walking contradiction, but people don’t bat an eye. I don’t think I can ever understand.

2008-09-10T02:42:00.000-07:00

today was Teacher's Day, to honor our teachers' virtues, pains, and contributions, so instead of class we went to some temples in the western hills of Kunming. I could visit temples forever. I could do a trip that was just the temples and small dogs of China. We drove in an old bus up some truly terrifying roads that would put Bolivia to shame, into the forest and mountains overlooking the valley of Kunming, and explored the expanse of temples built clinging onto the mountainside. The stairs kept going up and up, through little passageways in the rock face, from one altar to the next.

some of us decided to try to get to the peak of the mountain from the topmost pagoda. Climbing up the karst alleys on all fours was some of the most fun I've had on this trip; we weren't sure how we would get back down but we just kept on going. Finally we got to the top, and had the most drop-dead gorgeous view of Dianchi Lake, which is vibrant green, and the cookie-cutter mansions dotting the shores on the outskirts of Kunming.

Justin and I got lost climbing back down the mountain and reenacted a scene from a Vietnam war movie in which we were soldiers separated from our unit. When I got home, I washed all the red soil out of my shoes.

classes started this Monday, which were terrifying in a different way. I felt a bit over my head in the advanced class they placed me in, but I'm slowly regaining my footing. Every day I get breakfast and lunch from the street vendors in the alley, at a cost of between $0.35 and $0.50 cents. At night, we go to "western street," which has almost no westerners, and treat ourselves to Indian food and falafel, where dinner might run as high as $3.

I still can't believe I'm in China. The times I can't believe it most are when I go to the bathroom and find myself staring at a hole in the ground.

2008-09-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

I couldn't describe Kunming as beautiful. I couldn't describe China as a whole as beautiful; it's more awe-inspiring. It's a parallel universe. There have been moments in the trip so far where the horizon was filled with nothing but mountains, jungle, and Buddhist temples, and there are certainly parks in Kunming that make my jaw drop open. But for the most part, it's a gritty, poor city, where almost nothing is sleek and the air reeks of car exhaust. My dorm is off a dirt alleyway filled with street vendors, a short walk from the rocky train tracks that bustle with people regardless of whether a train is coming or not. My hallway has the other twelve kids on my program plus some Chinese students at Yunnan Nationalities University, the school in the city that caters to minority groups and the university at which the program is based. My roommate, in a twist, is named Courtney Morse; she is also a vegetarian.

today Courtney, Justin and were sent on our "drop off." We were given a sheet of paper with chinese characters and told we had six hours in which to find it. Ours read "da guan lou," so we set out from the university, past Green Lake Park with its inflatable cars for rent in the shape of animals, past all the stores that sold shoes and tea accessories and mensware, looking for some sort of building that might possess any kind of view. What we ended up at a "Western Playground," which turned out to be a theme park hidden in the forest next to a polluted lake with some of the scariest rides I have ever seen. There was also a sort of mini-Olympics in which Chinese people gathered in hordes to watch their compatriots complete the monkey bars and raft across an expansive inflatable pool.

everywhere I go I am used to Latin America, where the men catcall and small children come up to sell you baskets of gum. Chinese people for the most part seem oblivious to the fact that there are any foreigners among them; it is as if they have deemed their enormously favorable balance of trade more than enough to compensate for their lack of desire to hawk small dolls on the street. I've never been anywhere so cheap in my life, I'm not sure I've even spent $13 dollars in the week I've been here. The flavors are exotic and tolerable up to a certain point, I've eaten hundred-year-old eggs, lukewarm soy milk, and all sorts of roots and fungus, which were good enough. I hid behind my vegetarianism when duck head and eel and insects were brought out. I crave bread and cheese, and already feel nauseous at the thought of eating another bowl of squishy noodles.

the lights in my hallway switch on with a clap, or really whenever someone opens a door or says something a little too loud. The toilets can only be described as holes in the ground--I may now know how the asian squat came into existence. Small dogs everywhere are well-groomed. No one, no one, no one speaks English. My pants will soon expand beyond recognition without a dryer to shrink them down.