Rural homestay

Wow. So it’s been a really long time since I updated, and I apologize for that. There’s a lot to catch up on, and this and making guacamole for 10 people are pretty much the only things on my agenda today so this is gonna be long. Where to start…

My rural homestay was in a really small community (Bunyoyi) about 20 minutes outside of a really small town (Busia) on the border between Uganda and Kenya. I had sooo much fun. Rural Uganda is so much better than the dirty, loud city. There is virtually no recycling or trash collection here so people just dump all their garbage outside their houses and when the pile gets to big they burn it. Lemme tell ya, nothing quite like inhaling trash on your way the school every day. Rural Uganda is beautiful! I think I’ve uploaded some pictures, but if not I will soon. My rural homestay was with a family who all lived on a giant compound that was land they inherited from their grandparents. My partner, Will, and I had our own little one room mud hut where we slept and were served all of our meals. We tried to get them to let us help them cook and eat with the rest of the family, but they were not into the idea at all. We kind of resigned ourselves to being taken care of because it gave us a little private time to process, and we figured out that we were being served different food than everyone else. We were only there for 3 nights so it wasn’t worth insulting them by refusing to let them carry out their hospitality in a way that was culturally acceptable.

The rest of the compound was all mud huts as well and was absolutely beautifully landscaped. People don’t spend much time in their houses because it gets too stuffy, so the way the outside area of your land looks is much more important to people than their actually houses. The family owned maybe a dozen chickens and a handful of cows and goats. We also gave them a hen as a thank you gift. The family members were primarily farmers, though a few of them had other jobs as supplemental income such as a brick maker, a cook at a girls’ boarding school in Busia, and a boda boda (motorcycle taxi) driver. I got very good at telling the difference between the plants for sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, cassava, maize, beans, coffee, pumpkin, and cabbage. My family also had a few cannabis and opium plants that they pointed out to me. Trying to be subtle, I asked what they used those plants for and my host mom just shrugged and said that she doesn’t know how they are used, and that she just sells them because they bring in lots of money. I haven’t decided whether I believe her or not.

Two of my host cousins (I think? Maybe uncles or brothers? It’s impossible to figure out because nobody will give you a straight answer and they all call each other brother and sister.) were studying at universities but were home for the weekend. It was unclear as to whether they had come home to be with us or whether it was a coincidence that the two best English speakers in the family just happened to be back that weekend. Hanging out with them was really fun because they had grown up in the area and knew all of the people and places in the area very well. On the first day they took us on a tour around the village. We went to a fish pond, the water source, and a Waragi (local alcohol that is similar to, if not exactly, gin) distillery. We also went to the village trading center (literally 3 small dry goods stores) and were taught how to play games that I cannot pronounce but figured out how to play really quickly. Upon reflection, I realized that the reason I figured out the games to easily was because they were almost exactly the same rules as Mancala, Uno, and Trouble. Small world… We were accepted everywhere because my hosts seemed to know everyone we ran into. We stopped multiple times as houses to share bowls of passion fruit (eating a passion fruit is not easy, btw. They are this hard little pods that you have to gnaw through with your teeth and then kind of suck the insides out all while carrying on a conversation and trying not to look like a complete idiot) with whoever happened to be around. Also, at the water pump, one of my host cousins got a little kid to run into the brush around the area and come back with these reeds that if you stripped down a certain way turned into whistles.

While we were there, our assignment was to practice Rapid Rural Appraisal techniques by studying any topic of our choice. Will and I chose to study construction because it seemed like something that could be fun and really hands on. The local “hospital” (a one room clinic that I never saw open) was in the middle of constructing a small building to serve as housing for nurses. It was commissioned by the government and so they were using bricks and cement to build, instead of the much more common mud hut. They let us build for a while, though by “us” I mean mostly Will because it was made clear that I should not be helping as I was wearing a skirt (as all women do in the rural areas) and was female (I don’t know why I even expected to be able to participate. Women are barely accepted in construction in the USA. No way were Ugandan men going to be ok teaching me how to build. Ugh!). On the last day, we also helped build the frame for a small mud hut, but by then I was feeling pretty sick with malaria so I didn’t help out very much. It was a good topic though. I just wrote a 12-page paper about it though, so I’m not thinking I really need to talk about it much more on my blog.

My last adventure was that on the second day of my stay in Bunyoyi we decided to walk to Kenya and look around there for a while. My host cousins said that they had crossed to border before with no problem and no need for passports. In retrospect, not my smartest move, I believed him, using the justification that you don’t need a passport to go between countries in the EU (Is that even true or am I completely making that up?)so maybe Kenya and Uganda had worked out some type of deal. I was starting to feel a little sick (as I got diagnosed with malaria the next day) so I asked whether it might be better for us to take a boda boda. My host cousins said that Kenya was pretty close and it would be an easy walk. Stupidly I believed them. We walked 2 or 3 miles in the hot sun to a school where they were having the annual contest to see who would represent the district in the country wide school athletics competition. We sat in the shade for a while and watched the students race, long jump, javelin, etc. The girls were doing all of this in skirts and nobody was wearing shoes.

Then we walked for over 2 hours to get to the Kenya border, which would have been fine had I been feeling well, but was not so fun at the beginning stage of malaria. Anyways, so we walk up to the border control area, easily pass through the Uganda border into no man’s land, and get about 5 steps into Kenya before a border control agent chases us down and asks us to come into the border control office, where, for about half an hour, we were all individually questioned about why we were trying to go to Kenya and why we didn’t have passports with us (they were all in a safe back in Kampala). Apparently, you DO need a passport to get into Kenya and they have a habit of arresting people who go into the country illegally. Crazy! The office was pretty chaotic and I was a little concerned because they were threatening to arrest my host cousins on the charges of trafficking in humans, but I stayed pretty calm to whole time. The thing that is comforting for me but horribly unfair at the same time was that I knew there was virtually no chance of us actually getting arrested. Arresting a muzungu (white person) is a huge hassle and logistical nightmare (especially if the media finds out a muzungu got arrested) from which no punishment will happen anyways because pretty much the entire court system can be swayed if you have enough money for bribes and good lawyers (which almost all muzungus have), so going through the trouble of arresting us just didn’t make any sense. Worst case scenario we would have to bribe the officers with like $20, but we didn’t even have to do that. Sure enough, after they realized that we were, in fact, just idiot students who wanted to get a few pictures in Kenya, they let us go back to the Ugandan side of the border. My host cousins said we should just run through and they wouldn’t follow us, but Will and I decided that it probably wasn’t worth it, so we just went back home. I did get a few feet into Kenya though!

So that was like 10 days ago… good thing not much has happened since then. I had malaria, but I mostly already talked about that. It wasn’t too bad. My friend had a really hard time with it though and was put on quinine, which has been around for hundreds of years, I am pretty sure is not FDA approved in the US, and makes you hallucinate and have panic attacks. Her parents decided she needed a break from her homestay and paid for her to spend a few nights in the Sheraton, which is the one really fancy hotel in Kampala. I went to spend a night there with her so we could be sick together, and got a small taste of what reverse culture shock is going to be like when I get home. We literally walked in the door to the lobby and just fell against each other, in hysterical laughter. This is not Uganda! Marble floors? An indoor fountain? Piano music? Concierge? A majority of white people? Really?! Then, once we got ourselves to the room we spent the night in somewhat of a shock taking showers with water pressure and temperatures between ice and scalding, enjoying real air conditioning, marveling at the lack of mosquito nets, watching the UK version of MTV (Super Sweet 16 marathon and then Cribs), and ordering room service that even had real salad! Too much and completely overwhelming… A nice break from reality though I guess.

The rest of the week was spent writing papers and having fun with my homestay family. Last Friday I cooked on a coal pot stove and made guacamole, chapatti, and macaroni and cheese with peas, broccoli, and onions. It actually turned out pretty good except that the cheese here is really bad compared to anything we have in the US. Having no comparison though, my family enjoyed it a lot. I know I haven’t written much about my family at all so I will do that as soon as I have another block of time to write a long entry.

I left my homestay family on Saturday and am now living in a giant house that 9 people staying in Kampala rented for the practicum period. It’s been a lot of fun having giant family dinners, watching movies together (you can get any movie or TV season for $1), and playing. We were going to go to a poker tournament last night at the casino, but decided instead to just have one among ourselves tonight. Most of the time, trying to go out here and just have fun and relax is impossible because we draw so much attention everywhere we go. I’m starting to feel a little isolated from Uganda though, now that I am not having daily interactions with Ugandans. This week I’ve been sleeping in, cooking lots of food for people who already have internships/ research meetings during the day, and doing a little bit of research for my practicum, which I can’t start until after Easter. My advisor does not seem to be concerned about the fact that I will now only have a 3-week internship though, so I am not worrying about it. Right now, I am just trying to figure out whether it makes more sense to live in a hotel in Gulu for 4 weeks or whether it makes sense to rent an unfurnished house (which we would have to minimally furnish) and pay for 5 weeks even though I will only be there for 4 weeks (we would all split rent and other people are in Gulu for 5 weeks). I also just realized that Passover is next week so I am trying to figure out what to do for that. There is one other girl here who is Jewish, and about 2 hours east of here there is a area of Jewish communities totaling around 1100 people, so we’re working on finding a way to get in contact with them and be able to go celebrate Passover with them. I really hope it works out. Somebody told me that while they have many of the same prayers, the tunes have mostly been changed to be much more African sounding. So fun!

Alright. Done with this essay. If you made it through it you get like 10 gold stars:-) Will try to switch back to smaller, more frequent posts.

Give a welcome to spring for me. So sad I’m missing all the trees and flowers blooming!