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?