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.

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.

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.

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!

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.