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.