Uganda Through the Senses

I originally wanted to write so much more about Uganda and now I fear my memories are growing dimmer and dimmer. Here is an attempt at collecting some of my impressions of the country in short phrases and snippets. I could write at least one blog entry on each of these comments, but for now, this list will have to suffice.

What I Saw:
Abandoned pit latrines covered in maggots and flies.
Malnourished children with potbellies protruding from their torn cotton shirts.
Children playing in polluted streams, alongside trash and agricultural waste.
School girls, shaved heads a-glisten, wearing Sunday church dresses from the 1950s.
At the trainings: Africans in full business suits, Europeans in short sleeves and slacks.
The university’s dingy hallway laboratory: a few tables and supplies, no real equipment.
Minivan-taxis without seatbelts but with inside-panel handlebars, just in case.
NGOs and missionary settlements at every corner, especially on the border to Sudan.
Supposedly temporary mud and reed huts for families internally displaced from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Is twenty years of displacement truly “temporary”?
Billboard campaigns warning against “sugar daddies” and HIV/AIDS.
Bold front-page slogan of the Daily Monitor newspaper: “Truth everyday.”

What I Heard:
“Good morning, Madame. How are you, Madame?”
At least five languages being spoken at any one moment.
Roosters crowing at 4:00 in the morning.
Babies crying from hunger.
Monkeys calling to each other and leaping between branches of mahogany trees.
Mangoes dropping from trees onto the ground in a rare midnight rain- and windstorm.
“The electricity is out this morning.”
The rush of rapids over the Nile River
“The electricity is out this afternoon.”
Stories of Idi Amin’s reign from those who lived through it and of those who did not.

What I Smelled:
Flowers of infinite variety.
The stench of abandoned pit latrines.
Insect repellent to ward off malarial mosquitoes.
Sunblock constantly reapplied throughout the day.
The clay earth after a gentle rain.
Sweet, hot milk and sugar for afternoon tea.

What I Tasted:
Sweet, steamed bananas in matooki
Mangoes
Pineapples
Watermelon
Passionfruit
African tea, close competitor to chai for the best black tea on earth
Maize meal
Basmati rice
Chapatti bread
G-nuts, later clarified as “ground peanut sauce”
A sip of restaurant tap water by mistake – either I have a strong immune system or I was very, very lucky because the water did not make me sick.

What I Felt and Sensed:
Eight hours of constant potholes, driving from central to northern Uganda.
Panic when driving on the left side of the road for the first time in my life – surely, we would crash!
The mesh of my first mosquito net. (Does this thing really work?)
Shame for staying at guest houses (ho(s)tels)—like British royalty—when we were supposed to be working together with the local community members.
The constant struggle as a US-American to understand African English.
The pride of the high school senior who taught her classmates to use ecosan toilets and how to compost the waste for fertilizer.
The power imbalance between European “researchers” and East African “project partners”.
Mixed feelings.
A constant internal comparison between our ROSA team and Engineers Without Borders – similar technical topics with completely different management styles.
Solidarity between ROSA team members. Regardless of how long this project takes, we are making a tangible difference in East African sanitation.
A wariness of labeling all things Ugandan “exotic”, as if US-European customs were the “norm”.
The inadequacy of two weeks working vacation to actually experience Uganda, whatever that may mean.
The desire to go back – both to Uganda and to other African countries. In Europe, I am an expert on Uganda; in Uganda, I have so much more to learn.

Update in Words

It occurred to me this morning that I stopped including my "Word of the Day" feature on these blog entries. Don't worry--I'm not going to bore you here with all of the missed words, but I thought I'd just list a few to get started again. So:

sich vergewissern (fer'-geh-viss'-ern) - to assure oneself (sich = oneself); My contact teacher at the school where I'm teaching always wants to make sure that I'm "doing okay", i.e. not inundated with frantic teachers, nor twiddling my thumbs with nothing to do. I'm usually doing just fine, but she wants to make sure.

leiwand (lie'-vahnd) - top-notch; the Austrian equivalent of the German "geil"; used when something is "really super". The teachers at one of my fellow Fulbrighters' schools have forbid her to use the word "geil" around them. (She taught last year in Germany.) Instead, they insist she use the word leiwand at least once a day! What were we saying about Austrians believing they have better German than the Germans ...?

das Sprunggelenk (Shprung'-geh-lenk) - ankle - A friend of mine who used to run track recently sprained her ankle while doing (what else?) running. "No worries," she assured me, "I've sprained that ankle so many times and have torn all the ligaments that I can't possibly injure anything else." Sheesh! Crazy athletes.

eine Sicherung durchbrennen - to blow an electrical fuse; Yes, I've blown a fuse in the apartment already, but at least I know where the circuit breaker is now.

das Bemessungsbetriebskurzschlussausschaltvermögen - the capacity at which a circuit is rated. Oh, how I love German spelling ;-)

Photos

Just a quick note:
I do have new pictures (particularly the last 100 photos from Uganda) to post online, but I have exceeded the 100 MB limit on Flickr. Therefore, I will be transferring my photos to Google's Picasa Web (limit: 1GB) and posting the new ones there, too. So watch out in the next week for new sights of Uganda and mabe some of Austria, too.

EDIT: I have uploaded all of the pictures, but still need to write captions for the ones from Uganda.

Thanksgiving

I wanted to post this yesterday, but Thanksgiving was such a normal, hectic day in Vienna that I didn't have the chance. After all, we began eating dinner at 9:00 pm. So here it is my list of thanks, one day later:

What am I thankful for?

1. A loving family, regardless of the number of miles between us.
2. Loving friends around the world.
3. Good health.
4. Life in a relatively peaceful country, free of war.
5. "Luxuries" of the "developed" world: clean water, sanitation, shelter, enough food to eat, education, reliable transportation.
6. The opportunity to have visited "developing" countries and understand how luxurious basic human rights can be.
6. The opportunity to devote a year to teaching, research, and experiencing life in another culture.
6.5. The decision to accept the Fulbright, and those of you who convinced a crazy girl to do so.
7. Technology to communicate and keep in touch with family and friends.
8. A camera to capture the images and moments around me.
9. Sunny days and starry nights, both precious rarities in Vienna.
10. You.

Fulbright Impressions

I've been asked to write an article for my college about my "Fulbright experience". I've read these articles before. They appear on the school's website and in the alumni magazine, and attempt to give a first-person account of a newsworthy story. On the one hand, I appreciate the opportunity to give some publicity to the college that offered me so much as a student and I also appreciate the open-endedness of the question, which allows me the freedom to write what I want. On the other hand, the same open-endedness of the question is what makes it so difficult to answer. What has my (2-month) Fulbright experience been so far? What have I learned? What elements of the experience have impacted me the most? Do I mention Uganda--by far one of my most significant experiences--even though it has nothing to do with Austria or even Europe? How does my current Fulbright experience measure up to what a Fulbright experience "should" be?

Christkindlmarkt

I was supposed to see a film at the university tonight, but the film was cancelled, so I ended up walking back to the bus stop through the center of town, past City Hall and the first Christkindlmarkt of the season. The city hall was completely lit up with golden lights and oversized Christmas ornaments hanging from tree branches. I'll have to return with my camera soon to take some pictures. I walked through the market fairly quickly since it was about to close, but I did see about 50 different vendors, selling everything from Christmas ornaments to candles to jewelry to wooden toys for children. There was also a cluster of vendors selling Lebkuchen, Würste, and Glühwein. (There's nothing like a glass of Glühwein to warm the heart on a cold winter's night!) This particular Christkindlmarkt at City Hall is known for being the most touristy, and indeed, I did hear a fair amount of English being spoken. The real markets, complete with artisans and their professional crafts, will open next week.

Uganda Day 1

I left Vienna at 5:00 in the morning with the project team leader, who happens to also be the closest approximation I have to a university advisor here. After a ten-hour flight with a one-hour layover in Amsterdam, we arrived in Entebbe, Uganda, safe and sound. In Entebbe, one of the project members from the Ugandan university met us at the airport and drove us to the guesthouse in the capital city of Kampala, where we stayed for the first two days before the other 36 EU- and East African project members arrived. The official occasion of our gathering was the 12-month meeting of the 36-month project. For me, however, the gathering served primarily as an on-site introduction to the project, to the country, and to the people involved.

The ride from the airport to the university guesthouse was definitely more exciting than the flight from Vienna to Entebbe. First, I forgot that Ugandans—like the British—drive on the left side of the road and have their steering wheels on the right. As a passenger sitting in the back seat on the left side of the car, I felt like we were going to crash at every turn. My worrying was also not confined to tight turns; traffic in Kampala is crazy enough that you could easily get into an accident while sitting still. Cars drive in every single direction: forwards, backwards, left, right, diagonally; the lanes painted on the streets are only used for decoration, when there are any lanes painted at all. Most of the „streets“ in Uganda are actually dirt and/or gravel paths, completely covered in potholes. (More about the joy of potholes on long journeys when I tell about our eight-hour trip to the rural town of Kitgum a little later.)

After an hour-ride through the city of Kampala, we arrived at the university guesthouse, where we stayed for the first two days of the trip. I did not at all expect such upscale accommodations. In fact, this was probably my biggest surprise of the entire trip. I had expected to stay with local organizations (churches, schools, etc.), but as European partners we were treated as royalty. This made the us-vs.-them (Europe vs. Africa) dynamic particularly difficult to avoid. Granted, the other East African partners—those from Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia—also stayed in the guesthouses and hotels, but even the hotel management gave special attention to the “European tourists”. And essentially, we were tourists. We worked on the project during the day, but at night, we visited and ate at restaurants finer than anything I would ever visit in Austria. I wonder what the people who perceived us as tourists would say to us if they knew we were working to give them access to clean water and sanitation. Would we still be dumb tourists? Would we be condescending foreigners? Or would the street people of Kampala greet us the same way the locals in Kitgum did—with open arms, warm hearts, and bodies ready to work?

Uganda

For those of you who have heard: yes, the rumors are true. I have been travelling Uganda for the past two weeks to work on an engineering and sanitation project between the European Union and four East African countries: Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Contrary to the State Department's warnings of anti-American/European hostility and rebel activity from the Lord's Resistance Army, I actually met some of the friendliest people during my journey. Everyone wanted to know what I was doing in Uganda, what I thought of the country, and even how my family was doing. I received many invitations to visit the country again and was also invited to stay with colleagues and friends in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, too.

In the following entries, I'll try to record some of my impressions of Uganda and East Africa, as well as some lessons learned. I'll also try to explain the project a bit from a non-engineering and broadly defined point of view.

Let the journey begin.

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