Setbacks

Now that I'm back in the country, I can say this summer seemed even better than the last.  The traveling was easier, and the places and people were fantastic.  Packing in a carryon backpack was a great choice.

Wear the dupatta Kashmiri-style

Wiping out while running and destroying my phone.  I think I would've rather broken an arm, but here's to another summer of solo international travel without any phone.  I got covered in scrapes but eventually managed to sew up all the holes in my leggings.

Dropping the entirety of my anti-malarial pill collection into the sink.  When I fished them all out they'd turned from a nice pink color to an acid yellow color.  At this point I decided maybe I should start actually using my mosquito net above my bed at night.

Simultaneous upper and lower GI infections.  It's really been bound to happen since I try absolutely everything Ugandan street vendors have to offer.  The worst part was not having an appetite for over a week and feeling like I was losing all my muscle mass.

Losing my yellow fever vaccine certificate before entering the country where it's required.  To enter Uganda, one must present the certificate as proof of vaccination of yellow fever.  Sometime between Toronto and Entebbe, I stashed mine in my passport and then lost it.  My first introduction to the country was convincing the health officer on the tarmac to let me in regardless.  (To my relief he was so convinced, and I did not have to pay to be revaccinated in the airport.)

Swimming in the Nile where there's schistosomiasis.  It was totally worth it.  I bought the anti-parasite medicine while still in Uganda, because it was incredibly cheap so hopefully it's not counterfeit.

Forgetting to apply for my Indian visa.  Instead of applying the minimum 3 days prior to entry, I applied the night before.  To board the plane out of Uganda, I had to pull out my laptop to convince the attendant that I had at least applied for the visa.  When I got to the immigration officer's counter in India, I had no idea if it had been accepted yet or not.

Pahalgam

My last weekend in Kashmir, we drove 2.5 hours from the city of Srinagar to the mountains.  We stayed in a lovely hotel, rode horses, and went to a mini amusement park in the town of Pahalgam.  This would be the third time I've galloped on horse abroad with no helmet and no idea what I was doing.  Pahalgam had cool and fresh air, how all the Kashmiris said Srinagar used to be before climate change.  It was amazing to me that all the women in Kashmir, whether in the villages or the cities wore traditional style clothes.  (Men wear pants and t-shirts all over the world—actually jeans are considered really fancy in India.)  Only the well-off, young people might wear Western style clothes when they go to the mall or a restaurant, but not even on the street.

Our driver, Ayub

Koshur

On a shikara ride at Dal Lake,
there's also a lot of lush houseboats on the lake

Mr. Wonderful Flowerman

Kashmir is the most militarized country I have ever visited.  Every tenth car is an imposing military truck, and we would’ve had to stop at checkpoints along every road if my friend hadn’t had relatives in the government.  (Kashmir life runs on knowing the right people.)  The security was getting extra stringent as the anniversary of India’s independence, August 15th, approached.  For Kashmiris, this marks the day in 1947 that they lost their independence.  Throughout British colonial times, Kashmir had remained a fairly independent princely state.  They were majority Muslim but ruled by Hindus.  In 1947, as an unsatisfying solution to the claims of Muslims and Hindus, Britain split its territories into a majority Hindu India and a majority Muslim Pakistan.  Pakistan originally consisted of two parts on either side of India, but the poorer, eastern part later became an independent Bangladesh.  Kashmir, situated between India and Pakistan, wanted to keep its independence, and for that it has been the site of the longest continuous violent conflict in the world.  Pakistan, India, and China all lay claims to Kashmir.  The portion that Pakistan managed to control has to a great extent assimilated into Pakistani culture.  However, the “India-occupied” area retains more of its Kashmiri identity.  As they told me, they are friendly to the Hindu people, but they hate the government.  The Indian government made Jammu and Kashmir one state so that the Jammu Hindu-majority would weaken the voting bloc of the Muslim-majority Kashmir.  Most people there speak Kashmiri, but they learn Urdu/Hindu in school (the same spoken language, but different written scripts).  The Indian government refuses to invest in Kashmiri infrastructure, government programs, and even flood relief because of the fear that they will soon rebel, or that support would aid a rebellion.  The Indian military personnel are given clearance to shoot on sight, and multiple people are shot everyday are the territory.  Recently a 19-year-old Kashmiri independence leader was killed.

My friend and her family who were hosting me

I felt there was so much similarity between the culture I was a part of Kashmiri and the culture I was a part of in China, with the most glaring exception being religion and women’s roles (rather intertwined).  Both cultures place a vast importance on the family, and filial piety is one of the most valued qualities.  All generations live together in one house, and all generations play a part in the decision-making processes of the younger members.  A marriage is considered a union between two families, and arranged marriages still occur to varying degrees.  They eat family-style, and put food on other people’s plates.  They consider themselves exemplars of hospitality (but I haven’t met a culture that doesn’t) and like to make grand gestures of generosity, like huge meals at high-end restaurants where the concept of to-go bags is only recently becoming acceptable.  Gift-giving is an inextricable aspect of social interactions.  They take their shoes off when entering a house, without exception.  They drink tea all the time.  Colorism pervades relationships, driving women to use bleaching creams to feel more attractive.  The sexes are not much encouraged to mix, especially for teenagers.  Some of the overlapping experience was probably due to the fact that they are both developing cultures, but I also felt the presence of a shared Asian culture, based first and foremost on communalism.

Jamia Mosque

Hyzerbat Mosque, contains a supposed hair of Muhammad, the lake shore is right on the other side of the mosque

However, Kashmir has additionally been influenced by the Arab culture that came with Islam.  It places women firmly in the private sphere of the home.  Even the dress (long skirts and sleeves for all, hijabs for many, niqabs for some) enforces that for a woman to spend time in the public realm, she loses some of her self-expression, comfort, and independence, whereas she is a lively participant in the home affairs.  This is in stark contrast to China, where women are held to just as high academic and career standards as men—or close.  And of course, China, while occasionally spiritual, does not have the omnipresent Islam that Kashmir does.  Foreign Muslims visiting Kashmir, though, are often aghast at how loosely they practice, for example not praying often and even then to saints or shrines rather than only Allah.  I love that Muslims everywhere share linguistic similarities.  Good Muslims are expected to be able to read Arabic so as to read the Qu’ran, and Arabic phrases involving Allah appear in every sentence, e.g. God forbid, thanks be to God, hallelujah, God willing.  I feel like instead of the future tense, Muslims just use the phrase Insh’allah, God willing.

Attending a Kashmiri Wedding

As soon as I landed in Srinagar, I was welcomed into the current of wedding activities.  We stopped at the tailor’s for the friend I was staying with to be fitted for another intricately beaded colorful outfit.  Then we went to the main wedding house where the bridal party was keeping the bride company while she got henna on her arms and feet.  She had to sit still for hours (she refused to get any more even though her family wanted it up to her knees), while the older women sang Kashmiri wedding songs and burned incense for her.

The second day was the nikah, or the official Islamic wedding ceremony.  The groom’s family was especially conservative, so the nikah ended up being a private meeting of a few men from each family negotiating the wedding contract.  Islamic wedding contracts historically were a way to protect a woman’s rights in her marriage.  The men then went to the bride to ask her if she accepted the dowry (in Islam, the man’s family gives it to the woman) and if she agreed to the marriage.  She had to respond out loud three times.  The bride’s family hosted the male relatives of the groom’s family for a huge meal that afternoon.

That evening the bride’s side hosted the close female relatives of the groom for mehndi or henna.  The women together ceremoniously filled in the last fingertips on their henna, there was of course more traditional Kashmiri wedding songs, and a huge meal of wasiwan was served.  Wasiwan is the famous Kashmiri style of feast, where guests sit in groups of four and eat with their hands off a large shared tray of rice.  Servers come by and deposit anywhere from 10 to 30 different types of meat on the tray.  Usually, there’s yogurt, spinach, paneer, and chutney, too.  You eat with your right hand only, because the left hand is used when there’s no toilet paper—there's never any toilet paper.

The next day, the bride’s family hosted everyone who had been invited to the wedding for wasiwan, the women first at 2:30 (it actually happened at 4:30—I can only think of a handful of countries like the US that have a strict sense of time) and the men afterwards.  Islamic culture does not often have mixed gender activities, and there was limited room in the massive tent erected in the garden.  Kashmiris buy houses specifically with weddings in mind.  Either they have their own garden for this purpose, or they share a vast lawn space with the directly adjacent neighbors.  The top floor of every house is an empty hall, only used for parties, like weddings and Eid celebrations.  The tent was luxurious, floored with carpets, filled with fans and AC units, and framed by drapes.  Everyone sits around the edge to eat, with two people of the wasiwan group resting their back on the outside and two people on the inner side of the rolled out strip of table mat.

This was the first night the groom came to the bride’s house.  When he arrived, everyone in the bride’s family (including me) put garlands of flowers and seeds over his feathered hat and around his neck.  At the end of the night, the bride finally came down from her room and rode back to the groom’s house with him.  She seemed very nervous beforehand, and mostly tired of taking pictures.  Some of the men from the bride’s family (and one strong-willed aunt who had planned the whole party) were allowed to go with her.  They finally got home around 4 am.

The next morning, the bride’s male cousins went to visit her at the groom’s house.  Later that day, the groom’s family hosted our side of the family for wasiwan, so they in turn could show off their wealth and gratitude.  It started with juice, nuts, dates, dried fruits, presents, tea, and cake, and ended with ice cream and more wedding favors.  The bride and groom sat on a slightly elevated platform at one end of the tent.

The pirsal occurred throughout the rest of the week, where members of the bride’s family took turns visiting the couple each day.  Like most Kashmiris, they live in a joint-family house, where different generations might have different floors of the shared family house.

There was plenty of drama throughout the entire process, as stress is high for any multi-day wedding, especially in a culture where every member of the family likes to offer their opinion on everyone else’s choices.  My friend felt very limited by the fact that we always had to wait for an available driver to go anywhere, and then we had to have our outing approved by every relative older than she.

Presents were exchanged every step of the way.  Each side of the family was constantly giving the other enormous baskets of walnuts, cash, and candy.  Every time either side hosted the other, they greeted them with flower petals, serve juice, dried fruit, and nuts, and beautiful gift bags filled with chocolate and walnuts.  The groom’s family gave the bride another wedding outfit and more gold to add to all the money and gifts that were given at the engagement ceremony two years ago.  The bride was never without weighty gold, and I noticed everyone had gold iPhones or gold phone cases at least.  However, Muslim men are not supposed to wear gold or silk.

The bride and groom met through her aunt who had consulted a couple munzamir (matchmakers, usually gay or transgender men) who had decided their families were compatible.  They had spent a little time together since then—they live in different cities—but had communicated by phone nearly everyday.  Neither was allowed to visit the other’s house.  While plenty of people have love marriages nowadays, Muslim women can only marry Muslim men, and the men can only marry people of the book (e.g. Muslims, Christians, and Jews).  A marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim would result in alienation by the whole family.

Everyone was so welcoming of me, and some actually thought I was a different Kashmiri cousin at first.  Kashmiris are famed around India for being beautiful, because they tend to have lighter skin and eyes.  The few lighter-skinned people generally originate long ago from the upper caste brahmins of India, and even a lost tribe of Israel, as legend has it.  So long as I wore the traditional dupatta loosely draped on my head or shoulder, people couldn’t tell I was a meme foreigner, or an Agraise.  Plenty of people on street still stared, and some asked to take photos with me, my friend, and her cousin (all very pale).  To get a good deal at markets, my friend would only talk to me in Kashmiri and I would respond in the few words I knew while pretending to follow along with what the vendor was saying.  Actually Kashmiri uses so many lend words from English that I could guess at a lot of the meaning.  At the wedding, everyone was so impressed that I ate the waziwan (it made my friend and her brother sick so they refused) and with my hands.  They also claimed the way I sat on the floor was like a Kashmiri.

Munnakampala

At the first dinner with our local liaison, she told us:

"If there are riots, do not go towards the riot, run away from the riot;

if you are in a building during a riot, stay in the building;

if you are in the street, run away from the riot;

if you are in the middle of a riot, try to find an opening and run away from the riot,

because there will be tear gas, and we have so much tear gas here in this country."

Although many locals seemed to be slightly, silently on edge about the long-reigning Prime Minister Museveni, we encountered no riots, and we fell in love with Kampala by foot.  Museveni is about to change the Constitution for a second time to allow himself to continue in power; he's been the only person in leadership since the war.  I'm writing this from the Entebbe airport, built back in the time of Idi Amin, which might give a clue as to how much of government funds under Museveni are going elsewhere besides public projects.  It is said that he sells so many infrastructure projects to Chinese companies because he gets a cut of the money.  I've been glad for all the Chinese businesspeople, because we actually had a lovely, final dinner with our Belgian friends at a Cantonese restaurant.

The last Saturday morning in Uganda, we walked to Makerere University to play squash.  In the afternoon we attended a rugby match where Uganda’s national team (the Cranes) got trounced by Namibia’s.  On this continent, Namibia is supposedly second only to South Africa in rugby.  Their team was all white (Uganda’s was all black); I learned Namibia belonged to South Africa until 1990 and is one of the least densely populated countries in the world.  Before the match, a helicopter landed in the middle of the pitch to deliver the speaker of parliament.  If anyone didn't feel like standing for the national anthem at the beginning, it was also acceptable just to raise your hand.  We were sitting very close to all the action and right next to the rowdy crowd.  It was very fun to join in the dancing and chanting and observe vuvuzelas in their natural habitat.  The team is sponsored by the local beer, Nile, and they were handing out plenty of free bottles.  I loved observing a new sport I was unfamiliar with, and the players definitely had the largest thighs of any athlete I'd ever seen.

Martha, Emma, and I spent Sunday in Entebbe.  We walked around a bit but spent most of the day in the botanical gardens.  We had lunch on a beach of Lake Victoria.

Emmere of Uganda

Sugarcane (a sweet stick that you suck on until you spit the dry twigs out on the street,
not that amazing) 

Crickets are more common than green beans,
 but this happens to be a photo of the latter

See crickets in background

Samosas are so common because of the longtime Indian immigrant communities

Chapati, the staple of UG street food,
one of the best types of bread I've ever had

Rolex (fried egg rolled in chapati)

Rolex in the making (these stands are ubiquitous around the city)

500 shilling (15 cent) street vendor ice cream

Sesame balls

Fried plantain

Fried potato ball with whole boiled egg in center

My lunch everyday at work (beans for the sauce, rice and pumpkin or potato for the food)

Typical Ugandan restaurant, tons of food and g-nut sauce (peanut sauce that's purple)

Meal at Ethiopian restaurant