Right on Time

I was talking to a lady the other day that lives near my house.  She just had a baby last week so I went over to see the little girl.  She was so cute and tiny and I got to love on her for a few minutes before she pooped on me. Ha.  Well, I was talking to the lady and I asked her if the baby had been late or early.  She stared at me like I was an idiot and then I went blabbing on about the due date and whether she came before it or after it.  Even though this woman had her baby in the hospital I highly doubt she had pre-natal visits but this thought only came to me after our conversation.  So she looked at me and said, “She was born right on time of course.” And then she dropped it.  I loved her answer.  Of course her baby was born right on time.  What baby isn’t born right on time?  How can something as amazing as the birth of a baby happen early or late?  In developed countries we manage to put a time-line to the day on everything, including creating new little people and bringing them into this world.  But doesn’t everything just happen right on time?

One thing that I think is very funny about Ugandans (and actually it is something that I have picked up on a lot lately) is that they always apologize.  No matter if it is their fault or not they apologize.  They say “sorry” when you trip and fall, when you spill stuff on yourself, when you drop something on the ground (wow, I sound clumsy).  It was hard to get used to at first, but now I constantly find myself apologizing for things that have nothing to do with me and were definitely no fault of mine.  Sorry… but I guess it’s a good thing. 

Ugandans love to bargain.  Whenever you purchase something here, it is a requirement that you bargain. It doesn’t matter what it is, you must look at them, scoff and then say, “Ssebo, salako.”  Which means, “Sir, reduce”.  It’s necessary for you to act like you know what the price is supposed to be and quickly undercut the actual price by 50%.  If you don’t do this they will not only take personal offense to it, but they will rip you off with a huge smile on their face.  A few days ago some of my friends came to visit and wanted to get curtains made.  We went to the tailor to ask how much curtains would cost to get custom made.  The guy looks at me with a straight face and says 150,000 shillings.  I burst out laughing.  Let me explain to you what 150,000 shillings can buy you in this country. A radio, 10 dresses, a full set of pots and pans, food for a week, probably a goat, etc.  So I said, “Ssebo, salako.” And then I told him I would give him 4,000.  He looked at me for a minute, considered and said, “Give me 10,000”.  I would like to mention that this is more than 1/10^th of what he was originally going to charge me, but I still knew it was a rip-off so I said 5,000.  He went down to 8,000.  I said 6,000 was my final price and he agreed.  Crazy, but true.  The curtains were made beautifully for 3 American dollars.  

I went to the clothes market on Friday to get a new shirt or two since I start teaching soon.  Most of the clothes come donated from the States and then the Ugandans sell it at the market.  I found this really cute shirt that would probably cost 20 bucks in the States, but it was used.  I asked the girl how much it cost and she said 4,000 shillings (2$).  I knew that in reality she should only be charging me 500 shillings so I got aggravated and told her I would pay her 1,000 (50 cents).  She disagreed, probably because I am a mzungu and then went down to 3,000 but wouldn’t budge from this price.  I have gotten so used to bargaining in Ugandan money that I was livid that she thought she could overcharge me by 2,000 (1$) and wouldn’t go down.  So I stomped away without the shirt.  Looking back I probably should have just purchased the shirt, but I have gotten accustomed to thinking like a Ugandan, so I think instead I will just congratulate myself on being thrifty and not getting taking advantage of.

Anyways, I love and miss you all.  Hope life is treating you well.  Oh ya, I got a new P.O. Box that is closer to where I live so hopefully the mail will get here a bit faster.  It is as follows:

Amber Commer, PCV

P.O. Box 894

Masaka, Uganda

Changin'

It’s funny how one begins to change as they stay in a place for a period of time.  It always baffles me when I see how differently I look at things now versus how I viewed them 3 months ago when I came.  For instance, small children playing with sharp objects.  Apparently Ugandans have no problems giving their children knives, or at least they don’t object to letting them find and play with them.  I visited an orphanage a while ago and saw a little girl of maybe 1 ½ years playing with a knife. I immediately jumped up and took it from her, not realizing that she wasn’t one of the orphans and her mother was standing a few feet away. The girl of course started bawling because I took away her “toy” and the mother looked at me with angry eyes because her child was now unhappy. Ha.  Now I have become accustomed to it, and barely take a second glance when I see a three year old with a machete.  That’s just how it is here.

Before I came I would say that I wasn’t a freak about clean food, but I definitely adhered quite closely to the 5 second rule when things dropped on the floor.  Now I find myself dropping food and not realizing it and then coming back into the kitchen 15 minutes later and thinking, “I am not going to waste that, and really how dirty can it be… not that dirty!”  On top of that is the fact that everything outdoors in indoors here and there is no way to avoid it.  No matter how quickly I put food in their containers, or cover my vegetables there are always fruit flies and ants all over them.  Last week I came home to find my precious jar of peanut butter (which cost me a good 3 dollars at the market in town) full of ants.  There was just no way I was sacrificing any of that good peanut butter, so I knocked off all of the ants that were on the outside and considered the rest to be extra protein.  Ha.  I am getting better at trying to figure food out, though it is a big challenge without a fridge.  As I stay here longer I am realizing that most things don’t actually need to be refrigerated so long as you eat them in a timely manner. My neighbor brings me milk fresh and warm from the cow every morning.  If I boil it in the AM and leave it out all day it hasn’t curdled by night so I can have milk tea then as well!  In the states if I left milk out for more than an hour I would probably chuck the whole thing.

I have been trying to compost all of my food scraps because I plan on starting a garden soon.  I just put them all in a bucket and add a little grass/ash and leave it.  A few days ago when I was sitting outside reading cows walked by and started munching on my compost! I was livid because it was three weeks of scraps.  I told the herdsman to stop them but he replied with, “It won’t hurt the cows.”  Well… that was the last of my worries!  The cow ate the entire compost, but I finally figured we are even because I drink his milk every day.

            I went to town the other night for the first time at night and was blown away at how different everything is at night.  The town really comes to life, with people hanging around and vendors selling rolexs (Chapattis and eggs) and cooked corn on the cob.  It is really a different place at night.  When we were walking around we came to a very lit area that was full of 100 gallon barrels with pieces of 30 foot long corrugated tin sticking out of the tops of them.  Around the entire place were huge flood lights, which is amazing considering the reliability of electricity here.  I guessed that it was some crazy Ugandan version of American Gladiator, but turns out they were just harvesting grasshoppers.  The grasshoppers get attracted to the lights, land on the corrugated tin and then slide down into the barrels and can’t get out.  Then the men empty the barrels, tear off their legs and wings and fry them up.  Haven’t tried them yet (they are my clan) but I think at some point I will have to because apparently they are delicious.

On a bit of a different note, its actually been a lot harder here than I ever imagined it would be.  The hardships have nothing to do with living in a third world country and so much more to do with just simply not fitting in yet.  I knew that it would be lonely and difficult, but I never really imagined it would be like this.  For some reason I had some image in my mind that I would come to Uganda and the whole country would be waiting with open arms to greet me and say, “Thank you so much for coming here Amber, we have been waiting for you.  Here are 100 things you can do to help us out, because we need so much help… being a third world country and all. We are so poor and have so much corruption and poverty, we just know you have all the answers.”  In all actuality, people tend to be very excited to meet me but that is where it ends.  Basically I feel as though they are saying, “We are doing fine.  In fact, we are happier than people are in your country.  We know that we don’t have much, but we don’t need much.  If you want to help you are welcome to, but we aren’t really sure what you should be doing because we weren’t doing all that bad before you came.  But we do appreciate it.”  It’s all a bit disheartening.  I know that I shouldn’t have thought that I could come to this country and suddenly be given thousands of responsibilities and duties, but the whole idea of Peace Corps is a bit romantic.  I just have to keep remembering that to build the capacity of a community you must first become part of it.  The communities here are very close knit and therefore are going to take a long time to get assimilated into.

            On a bright note, in the past 2 weeks I have been meeting with Agricultural Co-ops that are located in my area.  Most of them are groups of 25-30 people who basically work together to make sure their families are fed and hopefully make a little money in the mean time.  When I spoke to each of the groups they all mentioned wanting to expand their farms, improve their crops, raise more animals, etc. but all had the problem that they don’t have enough start up capital to make an investment in any of these things.  When I inquired about banks, they all replied that it is not possible to get a loan from the bank because they are sustenance farmers.  Banks here are impossible to work with because literally almost no one in the village has a bank account.  If you want to take a loan from the bank the interest rate is 25% and you have to pay the loan back in one month!  Can you imagine how much we would be stunted as a society if that were the case in the States?!!?  Even a savings account is not really advantageous here.  To open a savings account you have to have 25,000 Ugandan shillings, which is about 12 American dollars.  Your account must always have that much money it.  If you want to withdraw money from the account they charge you 5,000 Ugandan shillings just to take the money out! (That’s $2.50)  I know that banks in the States are not really people friendly, but it is outrageous here.  So all of the co-ops that I have been meeting with have started their own savings and loan schemes in which every member puts in anywhere from 500 shillings ($.25) up to 2000 shillings ($1.00) per month and then the group members can borrow the money.  Unfortunately that money is usually only used for emergencies and not really to expand farms or invest in animals.  Seeing this obvious need has got me interested in working with these groups to hopefully improve their saving and loaning schemes to allow them to save money more readily and hopefully invest it back into their farms, therefore increasing the amount of money they are able to make, etc.  Peace Corps uses a scheme called VSLA’s (Village Savings and Loans Associations).  If you are interested in reading more about it you can at VSLA.net.

            I start teaching here at the college next week, and they have told me that I will be teaching Early Childhood Education so that is exciting.  Actually doing something of substance where I feel like I can see results.  Wish me luck.  Love and miss you all!

photo

Tried for 2 hours to download more than one photo on blogger, obviously without success.  Here I am painting inside my house.  I like orange.

Wedding time!

There are a few things that Ugandans will never understand about the things that I do. They are as follows:

**They don’t understand that if I am running, it is possible that I am not running somewhere or from someone but simply running for exercise. Since I have been here for a good 2 ½ weeks and since I run almost every day you would think they would catch on… but no. Whenever they see me they always say, “Muzungu, where are you going?” And I say, “Nziruka.” Which means, I am running. And they look at me like I am crazy. I think that they think I am running from someone, like a Ugandan is chasing me and I am beating them. Ha. Either that or they think I am just a stubborn Muzungu and don’t want to take public transport. Either way it makes laughs.

**Ugandans also have a hard time understanding the fact that we white people are capable of doing things that they do. (i.e. cooking, walking places, getting dirty) After I painted my front room, my neighbor came in and was astounded. She said, “You know how to paint! Where did you learn?” And I thought for a second, and then was like, “I guess I just know how.” Because really, is that something that you are taught? It wasn’t a mural by the way, just painted the whole dang thing orange.

**They also don’t seem to understand how it is possible that I am still alive and yet I don’t cook Matooke (cooked bananas, which is their staple food). Ugandans have two things they eat food and sauce. Food consists of the following items: Rice, Posho, Matooke. These are the only things that are food in Ugandan culture, nothing else. So many times they say, “But you don’t eat food.” It’s funny. Everything else is sauce, which usually is bean sauce, pea sauce, or meat/fish sauce. And although this country is chocked full of fruit, Ugandans never eat fruit with their meals. It is only eaten as a snack between meals and they find it strange that I pile pineapple onto my plate at night. I end up making bean sauce a lot of the time, but I have figured out how to make American food (pasta, veggie burgers, soup) with ingredients here so I usually just eat those things.

One thing that is very different about Uganda is that they keep time by the sun as opposed by the clock. This doesn’t mean that they use the sun to tell time, but that they call the first hour that the sun is up 1 o’clock. Since I live on the equator, sunrise and sunset basically stay the same throughout the year. Convenient. This means that 7 is 1, 8 is 2, 9 is 3, etc. Basically if you look a the time right now and then look at the number opposite of it on the clock you know the Ugandan time. But this can be very confusing at times, because I never know if they are speaking in Ugandan time or in American time because they think I don’t understand Ugandan time. Usually I can tell which one they are telling me based on what the activity is, but I was invited to a wedding and the man told me it started at exactly 11. Which in American time would mean it probably actually will start at 2 in the afternoon, and in Ugandan time it will start at 3 in the evening (9pm American time). Since both options were feasible, I had to ask one of the workers at my school if he knew what time the wedding started. Lucky for me he did, and it was supposed to start at 11 Ugandan time (i.e. 5pm American time). The wedding actually started at 7 which is to be expected here. J

Ugandans still have traditional weddings where the grooms fathers must bring things to the brides family in exchange for her daughter. Because as they have children their children will have the clan name of the father (not the mother) and therefore his tribe will grow in size. Interestingly enough, in Uganda there are 40 some-odd clans all represented by different things in nature (grasshopper, bushbuck, fish, etc.) and you can not marry someone in your own clan. I thought this was strange because it seems like clans would want to marry within themselves, but when I inquired they said it was to keep the people strong so inbreeding didn’t happen. Fascinating.

The wedding was a blast. I was introduced to the whole group of around 800 people as a representative from Barack Obamas Cabinet. Ha! It was very embarrassing because first they introduced the local chairperson, then someone from local parliament, and then me, as though I am someone of importance. Everyone cheered when they made that announcement, thank god for Barack Obama! (It’s nice to have a president that is loved elsewhere in the world, especially in Africa. Kind of a new thing for us Americans.) The reception took place outdoors under the starlit sky and a full moon. It was very similar to an American wedding in many ways but there were a few obvious differences. First being that the father and mother of the bride are not allowed to attend because they are the ones who are giving their daughter away. I thought that was such a tragedy. A mother never gets to see her daughter get married! Halfway through the reception the bride changed out of her white wedding dress into more traditional garb. After she did this, she was supposed to come back in and dance with her husband. Apparently in Ugandan tradition, the husband changes and then comes back and hides in the audience of 800 people before the bride comes back. When she comes back, by golly she can’t find her husband! So they put on some bumping music and she goes around asking people she trusts where her husband is hiding. Most of them steer her in the wrong direction until finally she finds him amongst the crowd. It was fun to watch! Another difference with Ugandan weddings is that each person presents the newlywed couple with a gift, as opposed to just setting it on the table with a card. It is a whole long process (what isn’t in this country?) whereby music is played and everyone gets in somewhat of a conga line and starts dancing their way to the bride and groom who are standing at the front. Once someone reaches them they dance for a moment and fake give the present to the groom, playing around with him and also dancing with him, and then they hand over the present for real and the couple show their appreciation.

One thing that I found interesting was that the bride still had to kneel. That is actually something I haven’t talked about yet in my blogs. Women and children here kneel to people who they respect, which include husbands, elders, teachers, etc. Whenever I am running and greet a child they will often drop to their knees and respond. At first it was something that blew me away, but I have actually gotten used to it now. In my host family, all of the children (who were in their 20’s!!) kneeled to their mother when greeting her in the morning, before getting her food, and whenever they returned from school. I think that it is respectful for children to kneel to elders and people that they respect but I find it a bit disheartening when I see grown women doing it. It is as though they are below the men and that disturbs me. Back to the wedding, the bride was kneeling in this huge wedding gown that was already too long for her and all I could feel was pity. After they cut the cake she even came over to me, kneeled down and presented me with a piece. Wow, did I feel like a jerk. At your wedding people should be kneeling to you, not the other way around. Just like everything else here, it’s just something I will have to get used to.

After all of the traditional hoopla there was a massive dance party, of which I obviously participated. Everyone was surprised that the muzungu could dance. Ha. Moses (the 35 year old driver at the school and one of my closest friends) went to the wedding with me and therefore guarded me on the dance floor. After three or four songs we just had to leave because people (i.e. teenage boys who had probably been drinking) were getting a little too pushy and aggressive with me. Boys always ruin the fun. But overall, the wedding was wonderful and I loved being able to see a little part of Ugandan culture.