Murchison Falls Safari

The first stop on our two-day budget safari adventure last weekend was the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary where we trekked endangered white rhinos on foot for a couple hours.  Really the rhinos trekked us.  Upon setting out, we immediately stumbled upon a group of 4 rhinos, which is really rare because they are solitary animals.  They kept lumbering closer and closer to us as they grazed, so our ranger was constantly having us backpedal and swerve behind bushes.  Rhinos are supposedly really dumb, and if they charge you're just supposed to stand behind a tree and they will soon forget about you.  Next, we found a mother rhino and her baby, who was making whining calls.  We watched as the huge mother lay down and let the baby breastfeed.  The white rhinos had been extinct since 1983 in Uganda after civil wars.  The sanctuary was started by rhinos brought from other countries.  The first calf born in Uganda had a father from Kenya and a mother from Disney Animal Kingdom--so he was named Obama!

The majority of the weekend was spent several hours northwest of Kampala in Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda's largest national park at 1500 square miles bisected by the Nile.  We saw the most powerful waterfall in the world and where we went on a six-hour game drive starting before dawn. We saw elephants, hyenas, baboons (so human-like), Patas monkeys, buffaloes, bushbucks, warthogs, a crocodile, thousands of kob (East African antelope), vultures, and an eagle all right next to the off-roading van (walking around in the park was prohibited).  We also saw a leopard and some hippos in the distance. The best moment was finally spotting a couple giraffes, but then more and more raised their heads and we realized we were surrounded by about thirty.  We stayed the night for $6 inside the park and got about that value.  We did a lot of mosquito net patching with duct tape and ate the ramen we brought to avoid buying expensive park food.

Tubing the Nile

Transporting our apartment rug
through the streets of Kampala,
no one even gave us a second look,
it was a makeshift sleeping pad

Last weekend, as a late 4th of July celebration, we went to Jinja to float down the Nile.  We took a motorboat up current a ways, and then floated in groups of linked tubes back down.  Then we had a barbecue along the shore of the Nile and got to sleep in a tent.  It totally hit the spot.  It was very relaxing, and we met some hilarious law students from Pepperdine University.  They introduced us to Wednesday trivia night at Atmosphere Lounge--the only category won by the team with white people was African Geography.

We did this with the Mountain Club of Uganda, whom we first joined up with to go rock climbing in a quarry a little while back.

Ugandan Clothing

Ugandans love to dress up, and they will wear their best clothing often, no matter the occasion.  One day the young woman who sits next to me at work was in a long gown and the other day she was in a pink hoodie and plain knee-length black skirt.  The most sexualized part of a woman’s body is her lower thigh just above the knee cap.  For some older, more traditional men, they view it as pretty obscene.  However, all skirts fall right at the knee—until you get on the university campus.  Women pretty rarely wear pants; it’s funny when all three of the Yalie women show up at work in pants but all of our female coworkers are wearing skirts and dresses.  Instead of wearing shorts to exercise (never!), women and girls here wear leggings, no matter how tight or see-through.  This has struck me and my other American friends as so odd, because for us athletic shorts are the more conservative option.  It’s been a little tough when we want to go running in the heat of the afternoon and have to wear restrictive pants or leggings.

Women’s breasts are not sexualized here as much as in the West, because every woman almost constantly has a baby, so breastfeeding in public is very regular.  Tank tops and low-cut shirts are common for women.  Clothing showing the midriff and back are not too unusual either.  I think it may have to do with the longtime Indian immigrants and their saris.  Older women and slightly more rural women will wear traditional dresses or long skirts made of printed cloth with colorful patterns.  No one working at IDI will ever wear these dresses (except this one British woman who also wears hiking sandals with the dresses …) but many of the patients do.  Every single woman in the villages by Lake Bunyonyi and in Luuka was wearing one.  For the Buganda and Busoga ethnic groups, the dresses are called gomesi and they have pointy shoulders.

Picture from a Kampala newspaper of female cabinet ministers wearing gomesi

There is an enormous difference between what Ugandan women wear during the day and what they wear at night.  If they are going out for a nice dinner, or to a show, bar, or club, or hanging out with friends, they dress just like American women—super short skirts and dresses, anything goes!  I’m not sure how this dichotomy is able to exist in a culture that pretends at very conservative.

The men in Uganda all tend to wear the same thing, that is pants and either a t-shirt, a polo, or a long-sleeve button down.  Like Nicaragua, a lot of the t-shirts are brought here secondhand from the West, so they say the most random things.  I went up to a young guy in a Yale sweatshirt but turns out he does not, in fact, go to Yale.  (Looking in the Yale student facebook, there is only one Ugandan currently attending, and she’s from Kampala, but I do also know a Moses from orgo section whose family is from Kampala.)

The mosque near Makerere University

Just under fifteen percent of Ugandans are Muslim, with many more in Kampala, so sometimes there’ll be men wearing a kufi or even a thobe.  Only a handful of non-Muslim men might wear the traditional East African kanzu (a long robe, usually white, essentially the same as a thobe).  The Muslim women wear hijab and sometimes long robes.  It was very confusing for me at first because I saw all these women in headscarves who were eating during the day (even though it was Ramadan when Muslims fast sunup to sundown).  However, many Ugandan women wear headscarves whenever they feel like it.  It’s part of the traditional attire, and Black hair is much higher maintenance than White hair, of course.

Another thing I’ve learned is that Ugandans like to keep their babies toasty.  I’ve seen babies in the sweltering clinic wrapped in so many blankets you can’t find the baby.  I saw one baby in a snow suit!  All the schoolchildren, girls or boys, have their heads shaved and wear uniforms.  But then I see schoolchildren wearing winter coats on top, and then I see boda drivers wearing parka and mittens, and then I see every other person on the street wearing a winter cap, so I guess all Ugandans like to be toasty.

City of Seven Hills

Kampala is the capital and biggest city of Uganda.  It's a beautiful place, ranked as safer and more friendly than Nairobi or Kigali.  It's biggest drawback is the pollution that dogs most developing countries.  The weather has blown my mind; it is often cool and breezy, especially if the sun is taking a break.  It will storm only for a few hours every couple of days.  Being on the equator, the days are the same length the whole year round.  To tell time in Luganda, you count how many hours it has been since the sun rose (noon is always 6 o'clock for example).

Palace of the Buganda king on Mengo Hill

As you can see whenever you get a good view from atop a hill, the city is a real metropolis and now sprawls over many massive hills beyond the original seven.  Before becoming a British colony in the early 1900's, the Buganda Kingdom ruled ka'mpala, or the hills of the impalas.  Colonization combined several kingdoms that had never been of the same ethnic or linguistic tradition, as well as it divided kingdoms with national borders.  The kings are still around, only occasionally involving themselves in politics, but maintaining a very important ritual role for their people.  Even urban people still define themselves by their kingdom, and it is taboo to marry someone within one's own tribe.

The torture chambers of the infamous late dictator, Idi Amin

Baha'i Temple

Baha'ism is an inclusive, monotheistic religion originating in the Middle East in the mid-19th century.  It has about 5 million followers, and is all about the unity of all people and religions.  The Houses of Worship--there's only about nine worldwide--all have stunning, symbolic architecture.  This one is called the Mother Temple of Africa, and is surrounded by free gardens open to the public.

Four Yalies, our driver Moses, and our liaison Carole

Gaddafi Mosque on Old Kampala Hill

After climbing the mosque's minaret

                                            Gaddafi Mosque is the largest mosque in East Africa, holding about 16,000 with room for more if they worship from the terrace.  (The only larger mosque in Africa is in Morocco.)  Idi Amin initiated the mosque's construction, but the name comes from its financial savior, the other infamous late dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.

Luuka

Friday night, we went to a party hosted by friends of friends.  The youth expat community is tight-knit because we ran into tons of foreigners we knew, all doing internships and living on the cheap for the summer.  We've been meeting lots of young Ugandans too.  Later in the night, we went to a very neat club in a massive courtyard of an abandoned warehouse.

At the mouth of the Nile

Saturday morning, bright and early, our Ugandan friend picked us up for a trip to his village.  First we went to his house on the outskirts of Kampala.  Behind the compound walls topped with status-endowing barbed wire, the maid served us chapati (flat, grilled Indian bread) and warm whole milk with sugar.  The family driver then took us all towards Luuka in the east.  We made one stop in the biggest forest in Uganda and another at the source of the Nile river in Jinja.  The entrance fee was supposed to be $10 for each foreigner, but our driver exchanged a long series of greetings with the man at the gate, then they walked around holding hands for a bit, and then we were ushered right through.

We then reached his village where his grandmother welcomed us to her small, brightly painted concrete house.  The walls were covered with large photos of the middle generation, mostly the mother of our friend at her swearing-in ceremony for her position as cabinet minister.  A great-aunt brought out a bench which barely fit in between the living room chairs.  On it was placed plate of freshly steamed rice, cassava, yams, and matooke (made from pressed, unripe plantains) from the kitchen around back of the house.  This part of the meal is what Ugandans call "food," but a meal is not complete without "sauce," which can be a meat and its stew, beans, or g-nut sauce (a liquid, purple peanut sauce).  I sneakily handed off my beef and chicken and negotiated for just the soup the fish was cooked in.  The most fabulous course was freshly squeezed and sugared passionfruit juice (called obutunda).  The whole time, neighborhood kids were peering in the windows and through the curtains of the open doorway.  We walked to the family's fields on the edge of the village and back, greeting all people along the dirt road with "gyebale ko!"  The greetings here are so set that when we greeted a group of children they all responded in perfect unison, paused the exact same amount of time, and again in unison said the next response.  Greetings are so preordained that my Luganda teacher wrote out an entire conversation on the board where you could expect every single line to be exchanged word for word between two people before beginning their daily business.  Even a "hmm" after someone accepts your greeting is strictly prescribed.  Unlike Americans, when Ugandans ask “How are you?” an honest answer is acceptable, especially when it’s your friends.  However, this can only come after the first round of greetings where you always say you're fine, bulungi, because you're still alive and able to speak.  When shaking hands with some of higher status (an elder, or a woman to a man), people will support their right elbow with their left hand, to symbolize that they are too weak to shake hands with this high-status person otherwise.

In Uganda, everyone has about three names, and there’s never any particular order for how they are mentioned.  Someone will have a Christian or Islamic name (I’ve met many-a Moses and Muhammad).  They’ll also have a traditional Ugandan name.  And then they’ll have a family/clan name.  There’s no definite hierarchy in who calls you which name either.  Other names I've noticed are Proscouia, Rechael, and Jemima (pronounced VERY differently here than on American syrup).

Traditional Busoga dancing (the hips gyrate while the upper body is perfectly still)

On the drive back to Kampala, we bypassed hours of standstill traffic by falling in line behind a police escort for some politician's car.  Our driver, extraordinarily aggressive as always, turned on the emergency lights of our black SUV truck, and we zoomed along behind the police car sirens.

Road to the "garden" (the fields of all the village families)

On Campus at Makerere University

I made my first Ugandan friends outside of work by playing pickup basketball at the University of Makerere (the biggest and best in Uganda).  Women don’t play many sports here so they are always really surprised but welcoming.  When I tried to rent a tennis racquet, the owner replied accusingly “who taught you??"



This weekend, by sweet serendipity, we additionally discovered the outdoor pool at the University of Makerere, which cost 3,000 shillings to the Sheraton’s 25,000.  It’s beautiful with grass steps leading to the only slightly cloudy water.  The first bizarre thing was that they were burning trash right next to the pool gate, which is normal here but still smells horrible.  The second bizarre thing was that one end of the pool was being used for baptisms.  Adults and children in nice outfits were being tossed into the water by a plainclothes preacher.  There seemed to be very little ceremony, just a lot of splashing around.

After the baptisms were over, the only people at the pool were a very large, informal university men’s swim team.  They ended up being super friendly and let us join in relay races.  Most of them had only learned to swim in college.  I was doing pushups by the side of the pool when a guy joined me, and it turned into a pushup then plank contest.  By the time we were done, we’d gathered a crowd, and everyone was cheering.

Mzungu

Our driver’s 8-year old son was killed last week in a traffic accident.  There’s a phrase that Ugandans do everything slowly until they get behind the wheel of a car.  Sometimes the streets are so packed with cars and motorcycles overflowing onto the sidewalk that the mass of pedestrians can barely walk through the jam.  Uganda only has 8 cars per 1000 people, one of the lowest of any country (compare to the United States at 797 and San Marino at 1263).  The noteworthy part is that the list excludes motorcycles.  There’s endless numbers of ‘boda bodas,’ and they are more than willing to act as taxis which can weave through stopped traffic.  There’s also ‘matatus,’ which are vans that act as jam-packed public buses.  Just like in Nicaragua, these buses have big, colorful letters painted on the windshields; here they say things like "bismillah," "trustworthy," "Manchester U," or "God is willing always No. 3."   Cars drive on the left side of the street here, meaning I run into people on the stairs all the time.

Greetings are a huge part of the Ugandan culture.  Every morning, coworkers always say “wasuze otya, ssebo/nnyabo?” to each other, literally how did you spend your night, sir/madam?  My Ugandan friends will never start a conversation with me without first saying “Hello, how are you?”.  I’ve heard that this is so important in East Africa, because it’s a region of past ethnic strife, and greetings reaffirm every single morning that one’s relationship with the rest of the community is still strong.  When I walk in the busy streets of downtown Kampala, hundreds of people might say “hello, mzungu” in one hour (mzungu means white person).  I much prefer this culture of friendliness to the excessive catcalling of Nicaragua.  Still, it’s telling that usually only men are the ones to shout “mzungu,” and sometimes from the balconies of buildings, the other side of the street, or while trying to grab my arm.  Once I was walking on the road with a lot of schools right at dismissal hour, and I was mobbed by kids wanting to follow after the mzungu.  Street vendors will shout out “Sister! You’re welcome please!” meaning “come see my wares!”  Uganda English puts “please” and “ehh?” on the end of most things said.  They also talk extraordinarily quietly.  And to be understood when asking for tomatoes, you have to pronounce it the British way.

Some new phrases for me are:

• What are you called? What is your name?

• Where do you stay? Where do you live? Very different from where are you from?  Most Ugandans may live and work in one place, like Kampala, but they are from another, and that village or area is known as ‘the place they will be buried.’

• When are you going? When are you turning?  In context of asking someone’s birthday.

• When do you swallow? What time to do you take your pills? Learned through watching patients receive counseling on their antiretroviral drug treatment.