I do not like my homestay father. He is, to put it lightly, a chauvinist pig, and, according to my host brother, the only member of the family who still votes for Museveni. He's loud and blares the tv, and every time I speak Luganda to him he makes me add "ssebo" at the end, which is the equivalent to "sir." The other day when I was doing laundry he wordlessly threw down his hat at my feet to wash. Good thing he's starting to spend more time with his other wife.

bargaining here, on the other hand, is a lot of fun. Of course, it's when I miss speaking Chinese the most, but I love the playful interaction with shopkeepers after I tell them their price for bananas is outrageous. It inevitably ends in them first assuming I am Indian, second assuming I am British, and last exclaiming "Obama!" when I tell them that I am from the United States. People here love him. If they had their way they would have President of Uganda Barack Obama, with First Lady Rihanna. Roads and hotels and restaurants are named after him, and there's that nice get-out-of-jail-free card of America, for the first time in anyone's memory, having more enlightened leadership than any other muzungu country.

it's hard to keep myself set on Latin America when I'm loving East Africa more and more. It's the land of Obama, pineapples, The Lion King, and Mount Kilimanjaro. In Uganda, English is almost everywhere, but I don't mind the idea of learning an African language (I hear Swahili is easier than Luganda). Everything that drove me crazy in China is endearing in Uganda, and I have really loved exploring Kampala.

The only catch is the "muzungu!" shouting--it's getting to the point where I want to scream at anyone who says that to me. It's all I hear when I walk down the street, ladies murmuring and men calling. Also, Ugandan men for some reason think they are supposed to talk in cartoon character voices when addressing white women. "Are you married? Gyebaleko!" they squeal in high-pitched voices. Which, of course, really improves their chances. No matter how many times Ugandans tell me it's a good thing, they love white people, I can't help but think how politically incorrect it is for an entire society to shout your race at you every time you step outside. That's the thing I could never escape if I lived here for twenty years. I will always be that white girl. Or at least, that non-Ugandan girl, as I am apparently the least Irish Catholic-looking person of Irish Catholic descent (with the possible exception of my half-black, half-Indian, half-Peruvian, and half-Chinese cousins). Throughout my life I've had so many races attributed to to my ethnicity--Persian, Indian, Puerto Rican--that by taking a general tally I've concluded that the place I would blend in most would be an affluent Jewish neighborhood of Mexico City.

I still get thrown by the African/British English spoken here. I refuse to call my family's roosters "cocks" and for the longest time thought signs that read "to let" were a misspelling of "toilet." When you greet someone in Luganda, you say the equivalent of "how are you?" rather than "hello," so you can't just repeat the same greeting back like you do in English. Which also means, when you say "hello" to a Ugandan in English, they will often respond by telling you how they are, automatically throwing off the pace of the conversation.

it goes like this:

"hello."
"I am fine!"
"how are--what? Wait..."
"how are you?"
"I am...you are...er"

Things happen at weird times here. There are huge traffic jams in the middle of sunday afternoons, and every night my family serves dinner between the hours of 10 and 11 pm (sometimes I actually have to be woken up and gotten out of bed to take my tea and matooke). Every night, for the past three nights, my homestay family from eastern Uganda has called me at about 4 am. And last night, as I was getting ready for bed, my host brother and sister burst into my room and started having a photo shoot with my camera as I sat on my bed, exhausted and bewildered.

It's sad that most coffee-exporting countries just drink Nescafe, while muzungu countries that grow no coffee enjoy Ugandan blend for breakfast.

there is a character here who is quite unlike anyone I have ever met. His name is Mona, the driver, or "Minister of Transportation" as he calls himself. Lanky and mid-forties, he wears the same too-short pants every day that display his fabulous striped knee socks. When I first met him, I thought he was just an offbeat guy who liked to compare stories in life with animals. When he wouldn't admit to how many wives or children he had, he simply said, "like the elephant is big, I am a big African daddy."

But soon his attitudes on gender became the bane of my existence. Mona calls all the guys "General" and slaps them on the back when taking his leave; with the girls, he does not even make eye contact. He only talks to us when giving bizarre advice on following cultural norms ("Do not eat the pork. It is a man's food. If you eat it, it will make your children make the noise of pigs") or when yelling at us for leaving our belongings in the vans. The other day when he was dropping Barbara and I off at our rural homestay, he started turning around and giggling at us as he was driving, and then suddenly screamed and startled us half to death. It turns out he was trying to warn us about about hyenas by improvising being attacked.

another day a few of us were having a focus group discussion under a tree with a self-help group in Mbale district. I suddenly start to hear this snorting noise that I assume must be coming from a cow, only to look up and see Mona, holding a small child he has caught, blowing intensely to get the dust out of the child's hair and swatting his clothes. This went on for a full ten minutes, before Mona came and joined the discussion and started talking about cows or something, I can't even remember.

so we just came back from the eastern Uganda excursion, where we were treated to a full week of Mona's company. We started out in Sipi Falls, where I turned 21 and went on a couple of AWESOME waterfall hikes where we climbed around the rocks and were bombarded by torrents of water. I know that everyone says this about every rock that happens to be large and in Africa, but we found this rock that really felt like pride rock--beautiful and windy and looking out over the savanna--and just spent a long time sitting and watching the sun go down. We were sleeping in dorms built right into the hillside which had spectacular views, and the Academic Directors even got the place to make a huge batch of guacamole for us. I mean, it's green. Not the worst way to spend St. Patrick's Day.

the big event of the week was the rural homestay--we were split into pairs unlike in China, but we were each in our own little village, about a kilometer from the Kenya border. Barbara and I stayed with a jolly politician named Mango who seemed to have significant clout in the village and therefore helped us arrange focus groups right away to do our "participatory rural appraisal" on school dropout rates. It was really cool; our host father brought us to the school and the headmaster talked to us and brought us around to each of the classes, then we talked to a group of parents and a group of teachers. Barbara and I felt really proud of ourselves for getting our research done until our host father asked us if we could recommend any NGOs to help the village. That's when we went right back to feeling useless again.

my rural homestay family actually seemed richer than Kampala family--there was no running water or electricity but the compound had dozens of buildings and huts and they had eleven cows (wow!!). Our host dad told us he had had to pay eight cows to marry his first wife, but "it is necessary to pay a bride price to put a padlock on the wife." Okay.

today I went wading in the river Nile.

I was on the national news the other day, pathetically sweeping a taxi park filled with small orphan children.

This was not, however, the worst thing that happened to my classmates this week, as the "Gender" module fared even worse than "Grassroots." Slum Aid, the NGO they'd been working with, ushered them through a succession of photo ops, telling them they were doing "community service" when they were really painting things that didn't need to be painted and shoveling things that didn't need to be shoveled...all the while wearing bright "Slum Aid" t-shirts and having their pictures snapped by photographers hired by the organization. And learning nothing about gender. At the end, they had to march in a parade carrying big white banners (which was also played on the news), proclaiming Slum Aid responsible for all the "development" taking place within the community.

that shows you right there how easy it is for a famous NGO to come into a country, not really do much, and then get a million pats on the back for their good work. You could spend your entire career doing this, and we participated in it without even meaning to.

we just finished our Luganda lessons and had exams; I got an A-, which was pretty impressive considering I haven't conjugated verbs since leaving spanish senior year of high school. Luganda is pretty similar to spanish, except for the fact that it is about a million times harder. But I have enjoyed my kindergarten-level comprehension when talking to Ugandans. Whenever I go to the tailor, the ladies always fawn over me and ask me over and over again the same three questions that I can understand--"are you married? Do you have children? Do you have cows?"

if buying bootleg DVDs was my downfall in China, then in Uganda it is going to the tailor. The fabric here is awesome, and we found a dress shop run by three disabled women that we have been flooding with business. So far I have had five dresses, a shirt, and three skirts made, and I'm going to cut myself off. Any day now.

there are a couple people here who've studied abroad in China, and we can't help comparing it to Uganda. Certainly we are a lot more comfortable here, not constantly blinking our eyes at the strange cultural norms. I have had so many fewer "wtf?" moments in Uganda than I did in China, but I do miss the language. If I could somehow live in an African country that spoke Chinese and ate Indian food and watched Mexican soap operas, that would be my idealdream. Kaitlyn and I have been practicing our Chinese in the taxi. I think the Ugandan people think we are aliens.

food here can be classified into three categories: starches that we have in America, starches that we don't have in America, and carbonated beverages. One Ugandan favorite is a stale bread similar to Wonderbread but with half the nutritional value. Posho is pretty straightforward: cornstarch mixed with water and solidified. I asked my Luganda teacher if it had any nutrients whatsoever. "Of course!" he replied. "It has carbohydrates." There are potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, matoke, chapati, and samosas. I am legitimately concerned about my body getting the vitamins it needs.

god's gift to Uganda: the rolex, which is a fried egg rolled inside a chapati. Soooooo good. Also, mango lassi from the supermarket. I've found that I only really need one meal a day here, plus a peanut butter chapati. I just don't get too hungry.

going to eastern Uganda for a week so probably no internet there.

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.

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.

last week, my sister came up to me as I was sitting outside the house reading and said something about a fellowship. I assumed she was talking about some sort of scholarship i.e. applying for a fellowship so I said yes when she asked me to go with her. We walk along a winding dirt path past farms and banana fields until we get to a decent-sized house with a truck parked outside it. Rebecca tells me to take off my shoes before I go in, and we are greeted by three or four other families sitting around the living room. I sit down expectantly, waiting for someone to hand Rebecca some sort of form to fill out--perhaps these are her competitors for the grant. A man comes into the room and introduces himself to me as Fred. "Well," he says, "shall we start with a prayer?"

I think it's weird that we have to pray before Rebecca applies for her fellowship, but then again, this is Uganda, and every taxi in Kampala is emblazoned with slogans like "Jesus saves!" and "I <3 the Lord." Since no one in their right mind would offer car insurance in the web of chaos they call infrastructure (Uganda has the 2nd highest traffic accident rate in the world), cars have bumped stickers that say, "I'm covered...by the blood of Christ!"

So I sit there for a few minutes, awkwardly, with my eyes closed and hands folded in my lap until I sense that everyone around me has finished praying. Fred asks if there are any announcements. Rebecca answers, "this is my sister Courtney. She's a Presbyterian, so she might be able to follow along."

For the record, that is the second time I have been so naive about Christianity that I ended up signing myself up for the bible without knowing it. Freshman year I registered for a class called "The Romans," assuming it would be a course on Roman history rather than straight-up Sunday school and apparently unphazed by the description: "The Fifth Gospel." But there I was, on a wednesday night in someone's living room, attending a Born Again church service instead of helping my sister apply for a "fellowship" at a university. Fred asked if I would like to lead the people in song. I said, "uhh..." and stared in disbelief at the fact that I did not know the words to one single Christian song.

I got through it alright until everyone closed their eyes and started clutching the air and wailing outloud for ten straight minutes. Since my ability to pray in front of people on command was nonexistent, I mumbled about any thought that came into my mind, testing myself on the names of my cows and numbers in Luganda, reciting what I'd had for breakfast, talking about what I thought would happen on the next episode of "El Cuerpo del Deseo."

next time I lie and tell people I'm a presbyterian, I'll make sure I wikipedia "Jesus" beforehand.

Lilian went into early labor this weekend. The baby died and she almost did too. The mood is very somber at my house, but thank god she's alive. The malaria had weakened the baby too much, and it was too late to do a C-section.



it strikes me that a lot of people are afraid of Africa, as evidenced by the endless gasps I received whenever I told someone where I was studying abroad. The association of Africa with nothing but images starving children is patronizing, and it's offensive to me that people think Africans are incapable of conducting ordinary lives, no matter how poor they are. Kampala is a dusty, run-down city that can't afford public buses, but wherever there are people that need to get places, there is a market for affordable minibuses. Africans use the internet and watch tv and a lot of times get along better without our help.

sometimes I wonder if it's just because we assume Africa is so pathetic that it stays underdeveloped. That and the Berlin Conference. Why should it always be kept in a separate category and be spoken about in hushed voices?

at the same time, we have a need to prop up our self-esteem with "success stories" from Africa. Before I came, I read everywhere: "Uganda is on the right track. Uganda has good governance. Uganda has high growth." I thought of President Museveni as an enlightened despot, who had brought order and prosperity despite the fact that he has been "democratically elected" for 23 years. But he's become just another African dictator, universally despised and spending money on presidential jets instead of schools. Uganda has an intellectual, highly-developed civil society, with great newspapers that act as if the opposition has a chance of winning, but the physical characteristics of the country are nothing like what I read in those World Bank publications. I think a lot of Ugandans would be surprised to hear how often their country is cited as the "poster child" for development.

in other news, I still love Uganda and my host family and my cows and the fact that Rihanna plays even more often on the radio here than in the US. My camera was pickpocketed last week in Rwanda so I lost a lot of pictures of Obama-themed stores and advertisements. So it goes.