I have been just one big ball of emotional instability due to severe jetlag and homesickness with a pinch of culture shock to top it off. Whoa. But I feel like I’ve almost recovered and I’m ready to go out and really explore. So far, I’ve been in my own little 2km bubble of school, home, and Italian market. Even in this confined little corner of a city of 1.2 million, there’s plenty to see and take in! Our guest house is on Food for the Hungry’s compound, and my first thought was it’s a Yellowstone lodge meets safari. It’s so nice and spread out, complete with an amazing cook, Grace. She definitely takes care of us, and feeds us lots of carbs. For those of you who though I would starve this semester, not the case. I will have to get an ameba if I want to maintain my current weight, otherwise I will be obese by the time I get home. Which wouldn’t be bad if I was staying in East Africa… Plumpness is a sign of wealth and beauty. Where did Americans go so wrong in their mixed up ideas of beauty???
Then again, no I might not need any parasites messing with my bowels. My whole body is so sore, courtesy of a massive hill we have to climb twice daily. The guest house is at the end of Tank Hill Road, and our classes are held a ways away at the top of Tank Hill. The pavement is covered with a thick layer of sweat and tears, then another coating of extra red dust. As if my heart and other vital organs don’t have a problem with the physical exhortation, a sick matatu, Kampala’s van form of public transportation, zooms past emitting some more lung cloggers/ nose burners. I know we have some tree huggers in the US who think we need to be all about zero emission vehicles, but come on people, we are way ahead of the curve with our regulations! I pass 4 categories of people: 1) the crowd of men who shout Mzungu at my large group of white peers, 2) the ones who are willing to converse and smile, but only once I initiate, 3) the bota drivers who either want to run over you despite having an entire road to navigate around or will jump over a curve to get you to hop on their death trap with him, and 4) the ridiculously happy people, especially kids, who run circles around us slow mzungus, who I absolutely love!
When I reach the top of the hill, though, I’m so rewarded with this amazing view of gorgeous fauna and rolling hills covered with terra cotta rooftops. That’s what I see when I look out our classroom, which is yes, totally distracting. In the morning, there’s a thick layer of smog that creeps over the hills, but it’s usually disappeared by the time we break. Day one of class, I walked back for lunch: amazing potato soup, but suffered the consequences of the walk back up the hill. Day two, I took a peanut butter sandwich and 3 mini bananas. I learned in Scientific Inquiry that the bananas of the 60s that Americans ate were much tastier than the bananas we eat today because all bananas are clones of each other, and some sort of plague wiped them out. My point here is that I hope there are no plagues that come and wipe out the mini bananas of Uganda.
After African Traditional Religion and Culture and lunch break/siesta, we have African Lit. By that time, I’m usually ready for more extended siesta, but today we had a guest lecturer, Dr. Austin Bukenya. He’s a renowned professor of Lit across the continent and a senior professor at Makerere University here in Kampala, but way too humble. He spoke to us about orature, which would have been interesting in and of itself, but his voice was so incredibly rich that I could have just gotten lost in his tone.
The trek home is always more enjoyable. There’s usually an afternoon breeze, but more importantly, at the bottom of the hill, there’s a little gelato shop called ciao ciao’s awaiting us. We usually see a few other foreigners like us. There’s something about seeing other white people here that confounds me. I am so excited to see them, and I feel like we automatically have something in common, but they don’t give us a second thought. Isn’t it weird that I’m more interested in the mzungus than the people of Kampala are?
So anyway, being back at the oasis that is our house has calmed me down from a previous jetlag/cultures shock/ homesick induced mental breakdown and I’m realizing that even when technology doesn’t go my way, I will survive. My computer conveniently connects to the wrong Linksys that will not work, which is probably a sign that I need to be less Western Tech dependent. If I don’t reply to your emails or messages, it isn’t because I don’t love you, I just may need to embrace this East African unsteadiness for the next 4 months and that’s okay too. Love you all!
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