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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.