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.