Smile test

Smile test

 

It has been stated many times before that I stand out like a sore thumb in this country, but I don’t know if I have truly been explicit enough with the details.  The color of my skin is the main discussion of a majority of people that I encounter throughout the day.  When I go to the market, the vendors whisper “Mzungu”.  When I walk through the college I can see the students (grown men and women) point and say mzungu (though I have made it clear that they are to call me Nakimera and not mzungu).  When I meet someone new, they program my name into their phone as “Mzungu”.  As I walk down the street children jump and do a little dance while chanting Mzungu (which is something that I actually enjoy because it makes me laugh).  If I go to a local restaurant people stare for the entire time I am there either perplexed at the fact that I am white, or confused that I would eat their food… not sure which one. Which brings me to the point of staring.  Ugandans can stare.  And stare they do.  Ugandans could be put up against anything in the world in a staring contest and without a doubt would win.  They would win against a lion for gods sake.  I tried for a long time to ignore it, but it is so blatant that it is really not possible.  Then for a while I tried staring back, but they never back down and invariably things get awkward for those of us who know it is improper to stare.  Then I got mad about it and decided to scowl at people who were staring, which I realized was also ineffective because I think they like staring at mad mzungu’s even more than they like looking at happy ones.  So I finally came up with a method that I feel like is working.  Anytime I find someone staring at me (which is approximately 85% of my day) I smile at them.  I felt like a genius when I finally figured this one out.  It’s really fool-proof.  Probably as much, and possibly even more than staring, Ugandans love to smile.  So I smile.  When I am running.  When I am eating.  When I am reading.  When I am walking to town.  In the market.  On the road. In the morning.  At night.  Underneath the blazing sun.  I smile my little life away.  And the Ugandans smile back.  Every time they smile back.  It hasn’t failed me once.

            So I am curious.  Would this work in the states?  If you tried smiling at 100 people per day would all 100 smile back at you?  I think they would… but someone should really try it and let me know the results.  On top of that, when you smile all day you feel happy.  And when people smile at you all day you feel even happier. J  So smile at people for no reason.  And see how happy you are.

            I was walking to church the other day (I know what you’re thinking…. And a Pentecostal Ugandan church of all things, but bear with me here) listening to Joshua Radin and basking in the equatorial sun when something caught the side of my vision.  It was a huge feather floating down out of one of the trees.  The feather danced down and down taking its sweet time to fall through the sky and I watched it for a good minute or so just flutter and twirl until it landed on the ground.  This is how I know that I am slowing down.  I stopped my walk for a feather.  I quit everything I was doing to watch a feather tumble from the sky.  You should try it sometime… stop everything you are doing for something as infinitesimal (or some might say extraordinary) as a feather.

            One other thing that is happening to me here is that I am becoming exceptionally patient.  This was by far one of my weakest points back home. If I had a hair appointment at 5 and the person came at 5:10 I was cussing up a storm. (I know you all are thinking about that time when you were late to your hair appointment and feeling bad about it, but don’t).  If I was supposed to meet someone for dinner at 6 and they showed up at 6:15 I put on a patient face but my blood was boiling (unless of course I had a rum and coke in my hands, in which case I would have just sucked it dry and then smiled).  But now, I really can’t tell the difference between 15 minutes and 2 hours because it is all the same here. 

I went on a trip to the islands in the middle of Lake Victoria called the Ssesse Islands.  It is really only about 60 kilometers from my place so about 40 miles, so if we were in the States we would figure that I would get there in about 40 minutes (in rush hour traffic).  Well… there is no rush hour traffic in Uganda, which one might consider a good thing, but the only problem is that there is no traffic at all and therefore the roads are never repaired.  I got on a matatu at 1:30 ready to leave.  It left at 2:30, who knows what we were waiting for.  It took us 1 ½ hours to ride 30 kilometers (20 miles) which is not uncommon here, and I was pretty sure that I had knocked one of my vertebrae out of place because of the severe amount of bouncing that had occurred.  To give you an idea, it felt like we driving a minivan over a dirt bike course, you know the ones with ramps and whatnot.  On top of this was the fact that I think our matatu had been in a wreck sometime back and had been shoddily repaired because each bump we would hit would end in a screeching noise with the right side of the mini-bus seemingly coming detached from the center (by the way, I was sitting on the right side).  I was pretty sure that if we hit a large enough bump the right side would just split off and I would be sent tumbling (but would probably live because we were only going 12 miles an hour). 

Anyways, we finally reached the ferry to take us to the islands and we got there right on time, imagine that.  Unfortunately for us the ferry itself was not on time so we spent a good hour waiting for it to come.  The ferry ride was nice and it was good to get out of the car and see the lake, but that too took another 1 ½ hours.  When we finally reached the islands I was relieved as Cynthia informed me that it would merely be another hour before we reached out destination.  The matatu was packed full of people and stuff and we hopped back on and headed to Kalangala.  We stopped after 20 minutes to un-load 3 people, 4 matresses, 2 huge bags of flower, and some buckets.  20 minutes later we stopped to unload 3 more people and enough Ugandan liquor to keep the whole island drunk for a week.  We stopped 3 minutes later to pick up more passengers.  We stopped 4 minutes later because we hit one too many potholes and had a flat tire. This took about 20 minutes and the help of some drift wood (don’t ask) and we were on the road again.  We stopped 10 minutes later to pick up more passengers. We stopped 10 minutes later to drop more passengers off. (Are you getting the idea here?)  So by this time I was starving and we wanted to make sure that the place we were going for dinner would actually have food (restaurants run out of food here. Ha) So we called and had them start making out food because we were only “30 minutes away”.  We ordered fish which I was stoked about because it is hard to get here and I don’t get to eat it often. 1 ½ hours later we arrived at the restaurant and sat down.  We recounted the day and realized that we had been traveling for over 7 hours, it was now 8:30 at night!  I was imagining myself 4 months ago in the situation and the number of times I would have complained about how long everything was taking.  7 hours of travel, I could have been in Denver by now.  But instead, I was on the Ssesse Islands in the middle of Lake Victoria and life was good.  And then the lady at the restaurant informed us that she was out of fish and forgot to mention it on the phone.  I just about went up and punched her after the long day I had, and then I smiled and realized maybe not so much has changed. J  Instead, I had about 4 pounds of potatoes and rice for dinner, and thought about how I should be more patient when it comes to people making mistakes.

            I started teaching yesterday.  I was so very excited to teach but of course I had to jump through about 100 hoops to even finally get into the classroom.  At first they weren’t sure what I was to teach, and once they figured that out they couldn’t seem to find the syllabus for the class (still don’t have it).  There is no book for the class, so I am working out of the chapter of another book focusing on education.  I am supposed to be teaching Early Childhood Education (ECE) to first year students at the college.  So I put in a request for my teaching schedule and they agreed.  When I got the final time table there was not one class that I was teaching that I had requested and in fact I couldn’t actually teach some of the classes because they had scheduled me on days that I am doing outreach.  I was flustered to say the least, but finally went into the principal to discuss what could be done and I think that I got my schedule figured out. I taught 3 times today and it was very interesting.  The first class had 53 students which is not an exceptional number but is still a lot, and I think they were excited to finally have me teach.  I let the first 15 minutes be questions that they had for me, which were hilarious from “Are you married?” to “Why do you run every morning?” to “What is your favorite food?” to which I promptly answered “pizza” (of which they know nothing of and is not really my favorite food at all).  Then I tried to explain it to them but they don’t have ovens in this country so it was a bit difficult. Ha.  Anyways, I guess I was just craving pizza.  The class went well, but it is amazing how much rote memorization impacts the students ability to reason, etc.  Whenever I asked them to define education they each did so without hesitation, “Education is something that proceeds from birth to death and is the learning of skills, knowledge, values, and attitudes.”  They could each say this verbatim, which is somewhat of a good thing and a lot of a bad thing.  They are so used to memorizing definitions that their critical thinking skills are slim to none.  That is one thing I am trying to incorporate into my class.  I have them write an opinion paper every week that just gets them thinking a little bit out of the box. This week I asked them to describe their favorite teacher and why.  Next week I am going to compile their answers and have a discussion about it.  So, overall the class went good, except for the fact that I am very hard to understand because of my ‘Merican accent and they laugh at anything I say that has an “r” in it.  We will see how the rest of the semester goes.