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