Hey! I’m walking here!!

          Traffic in Kampala is evolution in action.  Survival of the fittest.  It is an adventure everyday and although a bit confusing at first becomes second nature quickly if you need to get somewhere fast (which probably won’t happen)  Many of the boda bodas and mutatus have religious sayings on them somewhere.  I believe this speaks to the strong belief in a higher power you need to take your life into your own hands and travel in Kampala.

If you’d like to get from Point A to Point B you have several options:

Walk it out.  Safest option by far.  A definite downside to walking is that there are not many sidewalks that are actually for pedestrian use.  If there are sidewalks they are usually appropriated by boda bodas or mutatus. Clearly the government built those sidewalks with a clairvoyant understanding that they would be used by motor vehicles more often than perambulators because they are surprisingly wide and smooth.  However, most roads don’t boast sidewalks and you are forced to walk on the street.  This leads you to be hyper-aware of other things occupying your street of choice.  Honking is your friend, remember that.  If you’re walking, hear a honk, and would like to retain all your vital body parts then it is imperative that you move far to the side of the street and let whomever was kind enough to warn you of their presence pass.  If, in a fit of reckless disregard for your own personal safety, you decided not to heed the first warning then you may be warned a second time with a prolonged and more strident wail.  This usually means you should dive off the road because your possession of your limbs is about to be called into question.

I want to ride my bicycle.  Lots of people here have bicycles which makes me happy.  Many of them use their bikes and their calf muscles as a way to earn a living.  Every day you can see these old rickety bikes manned by their determined riders carrying seemingly impossible loads.  30 jerry cans, stacks of lumber, mattresses, bulging sacks of coal, amazing amounts of produce, and other people regularly grace the small space behind the rider as he pits himself against hills, pot holes, and traffic.

Boda Boda, so nice you have to say it twice.  Boda bodas are small motorcycles which you can hire to take you directly to your destination.  Few drivers wear helmets and even fewer have helmets for their riders, but they are incredibly convenient.  While other schmucks are stuck twiddling their thumbs apparently endless traffic jams, you are loving life as you zip through/around/in between cars, vans, and semi trucks!!  Men sit normally on the bikes when they are passengers but women are expected to sit side saddle to be more demure.  I am more than happy to pull my “Uninformed Foreigner” card and ride normally while clinging desperately to the driver.  Riding bodas is kind of like betting against the house while gambling; you may win few times but the house is always going home with the big bucks.  In the interest of economy, people manage to fit lots of people and things onto one boda.  The most impressive examples of this that I have seen are: 4 children and one driver or the driver, 3 adults, and one loudly protesting pregnant goat.

Taxis/mutatus/combis:  A rose by any other name will still be just as crowded.  These vehicles are the lovechild of a minivan and a buses; the liger of the motorized world.  They run specific courses through the city and the surrounding area and I am 99.9% positive that there is some method to the madness but the key to understanding it is still eluding me.  All of the buses say they are licensed to hold 14 passengers but if more people are willing to pay and not willing to wait for the next combi then they can carry however many passengers are willing (read forced) to squeeze in.  These guys are the ones usually stuck in the traffic jams in the mornings.  It once took my co-worker and I two and a half hours to go somewhere in the city just because traffic was so bad.  The plus side of this waiting is you have plenty of time to strike up conversations with the fellow passengers who are sitting in your lap or read some of your book.

Private hires.  What we would call taxis in the States.  Nice to use but you miss the interactions with other people and they are too expensive for everyday use.

Levitation.  Still working on it. I’ll keep you updated

So now that you have an idea what the main players are in the traffic game of Kampala, I’d like to tell you a story to illustrate the driving prowess of the people I get to share a city with this summer:

The organization I work for here does a lot of programming in the surrounding communities.  One day I was driving back from a testing and counseling outreach in a local slum area of Wabigalo.  The way through Wabigalo is, I’m sure, the most twisty, potholed, narrow path that ever had the audacity to call itself a street.  I was really concerned about how close our little car was to all of the people who live out their lives mere feet from this road.  We eventually had to slow down because there was a lorry (a small semi-truck kind of thing) was chugging slowly through the twists.  I was shocked at the optimism evident in the driver’s attempt to navigate a street that his vehicle was patently too large to be on.  But wait, there’s more!  There was another lorry intent on the same purpose coming the other way.  Neither one could backup through the mess of turns.  So what to do?  Leave both of them until Kampala’s city government decides to widen the street to accommodate two cars comfortably?  Of course not! They’ll just go around one another.  The plan is perfect except there was nowhere for them to go.  Or so I very naively thought.  After a series of false starts, the drivers consulted the watching residents of Wabigalo who quickly complied with moving store fronts, clotheslines and A HOUSE out of the path.  Then, in a maneuver that was a slap in the face to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, they managed to scoot around one another.  I’m sure that physicists around the world felt the sting of one of their principles being shown up so easily.  No worries though, after successfully getting around the oncoming truck, the coal lorry in front of my car promptly fell of the shoulder of the road and dumped most of its cargo so we know that gravity is still holding strong.  Everyone in the truck was fine and they had their coal reloaded quickly and were on their merry way.  Impressive.

Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth??

                The answer to that question is almost invariably, no.  Whether I am listening to someone speaking Luganda or they are listening to me speaking English, communication and comprehension is pretty low.  Luganda is a rough language for the American tongue because it frequently starts words with combinations like nz-, mz-, nb-, mb-, ng-, nk- or throws a double gg followed by a k right in the middle of a word just for funzies.  However, as I have found with other languages and cultures, if you can learn the greetings and smile many people are more than happy to try and teach you how to not mangle their native language.  Either that or they give up hope of that option and kindly switch to English to try and help get the point across.  I am sure anyone that has learned a new language can give you many examples of funny mistranslations; I’ll give you three I think are really funny

                Can you help me? I’m a goat.  Many people that know me and have been tortured enough to hear me sing can attest to the fact that I have absolutely no concept of tone.  Due to this, speaking languages like Luganda in which intonation is important is difficult.  The words mbuzi and mbuse are clearly spelled differently.  Sadly these two words are pronounced exactly the same way to my inadequate ears.  The first means “goat” and the second means “lost”.  For the first two weeks here I walked around telling anyone who would listen that I was a goat in a doomed attempt to get directions.  These statements were understandably always met with gales of laughter but no explanation as to why me not knowing where I live was so funny.  Recently a very nice colleague of mine who speaks English well enough to explain the situation helped me stop making a fool of myself in that way.

                Just Dance.  During outreaches into the community my organization plays music to entertain the clients while they await their results.  I was working in the lab tent one day when the wonderful people I work with and I spotted a little girl just lost in the music and having a great time dancing.  One of the fellow testers called “zina” followed by something else I couldn’t understand or remember out to her and she stepped up her game and rocked out to the song.  He explained to me that “zina” and the something else means “to dance”.  Easy enough.  Armed with my new knowledge I was ready to impress unsuspecting Ugandans with my mastery of their language.  A little way off I saw my onsite manager, Simon, lightly bouncing to the beat.  Target acquired.  I yelled loudly over the music “Simon, ZINA!”  This shout was met with a blanched and confused look on Simon’s face and tear-inducing rounds of laughter from my lab mates.  Once they had composed themselves enough, which took quite some time, they explained my mistake.  Apparently, the something else following “zina” is crucial in making the word mean “to dance”.  Otherwise it is an invitation for sex.  It’s an awkward thing to scream across a field to your boss  :/

                Lost in translation.  There is a really catchy song by a local artist that plays every five seconds on the radio here.  Since I have spent my fair share of time stuck in traffic listening to the radio, I’ve proudly learned all the word but none of the meaning.  I work for a Catholic based organization here and one day while waiting to go into the church for prayers I started singing my new jam with enthusiasm.  I was drawing some inquisitive looks but I assumed it was due to my complete lack of musical ability previously mentioned.  Oh no, not so.  Again a kind soul showed me the error of my ways.  The song, with its catchy beat and easy chorus, is very explicitly explaining the values of prostitution.  I don’t know how many Hail Mary’s are required to repent for corrupting everyone coming into the church but I am pretty confident that I’m going to be working on that for a while.

                Moral of the story: Make friends with people that really speak the language you are trying to speak.  They may not be able to stop you from making yourself look like an idiot but they will hopefully explain it to you when you inevitably do.

Row, row, row your boat…..

        Living in Uganda gives me so many options on what to do on the weekends.  Being centrally located in East Africa makes travel to several different countries relatively easy.  I plan on going to Rwanda in the next few weeks and then also to Kenya, stay tuned for updates.  There were plans in the works to be in Southern Sudan on the very day they achieved their independence; history in the making!!  Wiser heads prevailed on the third one and we just celebrated the newest country in our world back in our apartment.

         Kampala boasts attractions that are a bit closer to home too.  For instance…THE NILE!!  The disputed source of the Nile (Rwanda claims they have it too) is in Jinja.  Clearly being so close to the source of the most celebrated river in history and not experiencing it would be ridiculous so two of my colleagues and I planned a weekend excursion.  After spending several weeks in Kampala (which, while an interesting city, is crowded and polluted) the escape to the greenery and wildness of Jinja was much appreciated.  Jinja is a touristy place and features lots of things for the wanderer to enjoy.  We decided to follow the majority and go white-water rafting on the Nile.  If you ever do this, and I completely recommend it, Nile River Expeditions is a great company to go with.

         

             We arrived in Jinja early on Saturday morning and loaded ourselves, our rafts, and all other provisions into several open air buses bound for the starting site.  Apparently we missed crucial instructions for the ride to the site because my co-worker Karrin took what she assumed to be an innocent picture of a dam that crosses the whole width of the Nile.  Our bus was immediately stopped and some very angry guards start shouting at the river guides who are riding with us.  All the other passengers don’t know what was being said any more than I did and the guards were loud and armed, so that was a little scary.  Eventually we figured out that because of possible terrorist activities, photos of the dam are illegal.  Who knew, right?  EVERYONE, except us L  The guards deleted the offending photo and we continued on our adventure.

               When we got to the starting site we organized ourselves into groups of seven or less.  Basic none-dying lessons were given before we jumped into our boats, ready to attack the Class 4 and 5 rapids.  Each of our rafts was staffed with one guide and at least two safety kayakers.  The guides were fabulous!!  Ours was Paolo but he wasn’t Italian as he tried to convince us.  Funny, talented, and reassuring; I felt better risking my life with him.  Even better were the safety kayakers.  They paddled around the raft making small talk and doing fun flips mainly for our entertainment.  Their job was to run the rapids before each raft and then rescue the people who were thrown out of the raft and kindly paddle them back towards the raft in time to attack the next rapid.  I made a special effort to be friendly to one of them, Alex, because I was pretty sure he’d be dragging my a-NILE-ated (shamelessly stolen pun from someone much more clever than I) corpse from the river by the end of the trip.  More thorough instructions were given by our individual guides in our rafts like how to properly lean, how to seek refuge in the bottom of the boat, how to paddle so Paolo could “safely” navigate us down the river.

                    The total trip was four Class 4’s and four Class 5’s separated by several long stretches of calm water where you could talk to fellow rafters, engage in epic water fights, or just abandon ship and swim along with the raft.  Sometimes whether you were in the water in calm areas wasn’t up to you at all.  On one stretch Paolo leaped out of our raft and left us to our own devices.  He then, very stealthily, swam back behind us and yanked me and another women right out of the raft.  The other lady was terrified!  She was sure at first that a crocodile had pulled her into the water and then, once she realized Paolo had done it, was equally convinced that she was about to be attacked by a crocodile at any moment.  This was a completely baseless fear as we had already been assured that all the crocodiles we would encounter that day were strictly vegetarian.  How convenient!

        Honestly, the majority of rapids were a blur.  Dehydration wasn’t a problem even in the African heat because I am pretty sure I swallowed a good portion of the Nile.  Since most of the time I was trying to stay in the boat and not in the water (which was a woefully lost cause, we flipped at least 4 times), I didn’t see a lot of the action with the other rafts.

           A couple memorable rapids stuck in my mind though.  We were behind another boat which was attempting the hard line of the rapids.  They managed pretty well at the beginning but then the almost inevitable happened, their raft tripped past the point-no-return and they were on their own in the water.  However, their guide, in a spectacle of impeccable timing and strength managed to flip himself on to the bottom of the raft as it tipped over.  This left him on the previous underside of the boat where he began doing backflips in apparent exhilaration on the completion of a trick that has to fail more times than it succeeds. 

         We were approaching the hardest rapid on the trip and our boat was deciding which line to try (easy, medium, hard) as we watched another boat attempt the hardest path.  Their guide had advised them to paddle hard and then throw their oars clear so they could hold on with both hands.  They dutifully put their backs into the paddling until the “Get Down!” call came.  They all flung their paddles and prepared to let their guide manage the steering but their guide was thrown clear of the boat and there they were, going down the hardest rapid without paddles, a guide, or much hope.  They did flip, spectacularly, and all surfaced smiling but a bit bruised.  You could tell they loved it though!

          When we had all successfully completed all 8 rapids we hit the landing site.  There was an incredible BBQ waiting for us and, after a whole day swimming and paddling hard on the river, we devoured the food with impressive speed.  That night we stayed at a backpacker’s camp right on the edge of the Nile.  Something happened to our “reservation” for the hostel dorms so we slept in tents that had been set up everywhere to deal with the overflow.  What a step up!  The night was warm, the tent was comfortable, and once the music quit for the night you could hear the rush of the river enticing you into dream land.

             The next day was all ours because we didn’t need to meet our homeward bound bus until the evening.  We decided to hike down to the site Bujagali Falls and then to the site of the new dam being built.  They falls are beautiful and awe-inspiring in their power.  The sheer amount of water that pours over them daily is baffling.  We hiked most of the morning and then caught a boat to explore several islands in the middle of the river.  In October, when the dam is finished, the water level of that part of the Nile is anticipated to rise almost 50 feet.  The islands and falls we explored will be nothing more than a memory.  Hopefully the dam will be able to provide the intended electricity and an easier life for those people surrounding Jinja.

Just a small town girl

    Where I hail from; Angola Indiana, is not the thriving metropolis some unscrupulous people would have you believe.  It is a nice, quiet, small farming town of about 8,000 people when the lakers are not invading out borders.  There, if you are so inclined, you can take part in the agriculture program called 4-H.  I was so inclined in my younger days and had the good fortune of making friends with a guy named Justin.  He graduated in 2002 and I had not seen or talked to him since.  Thanks to facebook and my extensive stalking skills I knew that Justin had been to Uganda so I messaged him with a request for info about my temporary home.  As it turns out, he was traveling here this summer too!  So after 9 years of separation from our roots in A-town Indiana we got to renew our friendship halfway around the world at an Ethiopian restaurant in Kampala.  Clearly not impossible, but highly improbable.

        It turns out that Justin has been doing some pretty incredible work since we last talked in my sophomore year of high school.  He is working hard to promote and improve literacy among refugees. He founded a non-profit called Refugees Read, which I think you should check out to see what he is up to!

Malaria, Malaria…Oh what a disease!

                Mosquitoes are terrible.  They spread all sorts of disease through creepily sucking your blood.  Of greatest epidemiological importance among all the diseases that these little blood-suckers spread is malaria.  In 2008 the World Health Organization estimated that 247 million (!!!!!) people were infected and nearly 1 million deaths were due to malaria. Just for illustrative purposes that is 676712 new people infected each day!!  I feel that these numbers completely justify these kinds of tactics.  For the scoffers out there, Cracked is definitely a reliable news source :)

             In Zimbabwe the nursery children sang the “Malaria, Malaria” song every day to express how much of a problem malaria poses to their daily lives.  For the five months I was in Zimbabwe I did not take any anti-malarial medications, slept without a bed net, and never used bug sprayed when I ventured out during dawn or dusk, prime biting time for the Anopheles mosquitoes.   Not a plasmodium in sight.  Ignorance is bliss; such a true statement and probably the reason that I am usually so happy. 

                Now here in Uganda I think about contracting malaria a lot. It might be because some of my American co-workers are a little obsessed with their medications, or that every local has had malaria multiple times, or that mosquitoes factor heavily into my daily life (I live next to a lovely swamp made possible courtesy of Lake Victoria).  Some preparations I have now adopted to prevent myself from joining the two million annual malaria sufferers are taking doxycycline, sleeping under a bed net, and fully appreciating the man who fogs our area every night.  The bed net presents a problem because it keeps me in my sleeping area more effectively than it keeps mosquitoes out.  Every morning I have a more prolonged and distressing fight with my net to find where it ends and how I can get out.  Also, our fogger guy may be THE definition for occupational hazard.  Like clockwork, every night at 7:12pm he starts running around the hotel with some ridiculously loud machine that spews the most terrible smelling grey fog.  I feel bad for him because he has no mask to protect him from the evil mosquito killing cloud and he does this every night.  Yikes!!

                However a bright spot to this increased awareness of malaria is my reaction time.  I am lightning fast death from on high to my winged adversaries, much like this only with more enthusiasm. Also, I am getting pretty good at spotting little plasmodium on slides of people infected with malaria.  So if I fall sick I will be able to diagnose and treat myself.  That’s the upside here J

                Fun fact:  We, as Americans, say “mos-skee-toes” here they say “mos-quit-toes” just like it is spelled.  Say it aloud to really appreciate the difference.  It makes me giggle like a small and easily amused child every time we talk about the flying pests.

Leaving On a Jet Plane

Hey Friends!

Tomorrow morning marks the beginning of a several day long journey that will eventually leave me in my home for the next three months: Kampala, Uganda.  All of your heartfelt responses and encouragements meant so much to me when I was in Zimbabwe, and I would love to have you all be a part of this next episode of my life.  I decided on a blog instead of the emails as a more efficient way of sharing my experiences and stories with you all.  Hopefully I can post some things that both inform as well as entertain.

After a day of orientation in Washington D.C., I will be partaking in the miracle of human flight.  Swapping one national capital for another, sooner or later I will arrive in Kampala. I will be living there all summer with several other interns from all over the US while working for the Global Health Fellows Program.  My specific internship will revolve around working with orphans and vulnerable children infected with HIV/AIDS; hopefully empowering them to improve the quality of their lives.  The GHFP did not have an intern in this position last year so I kind of get to make up what I will be doing all summer- pretty sweet job description J  When I know more, you will too!

I am looking forward to learning about the people, the culture, and the country and then sharing that with all of you. I think I will be able to be more in touch this summer than I was during my last trip so questions, comments, insights, or random thoughts are more than welcome and I will respond to them as quickly and completely as possible!

Lots of Love,

Lindsey

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.  Mark Twain