Village life: an update

Yesterday, after 10 dusty days in the desert, I finally made it back to Dakar. Luckily, though village life was definitely VERY different from life in the city, we didn’t “suffer” nearly as much as everyone else at the non-profit had warned us we would.

Josie, Natalie and I left Dakar last Wednesday at 6am (two hours late, as our driver was running on Senegalese time) for Guedé-Chantier, a large village about 8 hours north of Dakar. Calling Guedé a “village” is actually a bit of a stretch. Though it’s definitely rural, it’s a pretty big and well developed town, and recently was officially promoted to “town” status by the government. As those at the Center would joke, Guedé is the bourgeoiest village in Senegal. Ousmane, the academic director at the Center, is not only from Guedé, but is also its mayor, and the students from last semester’s study abroad cycle went there with him to develop some income-generating projects for the villagers. Natalie’s assignment was the film these projects, which are on-going, for some promo videos for the Center. Josie and I were merely stopping in for a night before continuing on the Lahel, where we’d be working on our reforestation project. While Josie and I were prepping ourselves for no running water or electricity for a week and a half, Natalie arrived in Guedé to discover her house not only had a TV, plenty of comfortable furniture and a big yard with a view of the river, but AIR CONDITIONING as well. We don’t even have air conditioning in Dakar!! So yes, Natalie ended up at the bougeoiest house in the bougeoiest village. The rest of us had a fun time congratulating her on being hardcore enough to survive the trials of “village” life.

We spent the night in Guedé at Ousmane’s family’s house, where Josie and I met Diewo (pronounced JAY-o), Ousmane’s niece and our guide for the next week. Diewo is 20 and also on break from university right now, and was going to the Lahel to visit her family and to translate for us. I am not joking when I say that girl saved our BUTTS that week… I have no idea how she wasn’t part of the plan originally, but since almost no one in the village spoke French, she was basically our sole means of communication with them the entire time. So after spending the night with Diewo’s family, we woke up expecting to leave for Lahel, only to find out that her grandfather had decided to postpone the trip one day. Welcome to the spontaneity of village life. We stayed. I read a book. The next morning, we got up at the crack of dawn, clambered into Diewo’s dad’s weathered Peugeot, and drove an hour to Ndioum to catch the first ferry.

In the United States, things like ferries and buses run on strict schedules, and everyone scrambles to make it the port by departure time or risks missing the boat. In Africa, this is not the case. The ferry runs when it needs to run. So everyone arrives at the river bank, drops their packages and bags by the shore, and waits for the ferry to fill. If a car shows up, you’re in luck, because the ferry will leave right (cars pay more). But otherwise, it could be 10 minutes, an hour, or two before enough passengers show up to fill the boat. We got to the river bank to discover we were one of the first to arrive for the next departure. After a few minutes of sitting and shifting around, Diewo’s grandfather decided that waiting for the ferry just wouldn’t do… so he commissioned a canoe. As in, a dug-out canoe. The kind that will flip over if you lean too far to the left or right. So grandfather, Diewo, Josie, myself and ALL our luggage, bottled water and snacks for the week climb into this rickety canoe and scoot across the first river, praying the entire time that no sudden movement would cause us to topple over.

Very luckily, we, and all our luggage, made it across. We went and sat under a ferry terminal of sorts made out of tree branches and palm leaves while Diewo’s grandpa hired a boy with a horse and cart to take us to Lahel. After piling on our bags and securing them with rope, we climbed aboard the cart, waved good-bye to Diewo’s grandfather, and headed off on an hour-and-a-half long journey through the desert on the back of a horse-drawn wooden cart.

The sun was baking as we trotted along. Not too far from the first river, we came across the first desert village. In most of Senegal, the village houses are constructed from wood with dried palm leaf roofs, but in the desert, they’re built out of mud, with tin roofs secured on top with concrete blocks. Usually rectangular and surrounded by brush and cacti, the houses weirdly could just as easily be plopped down in the middle of the American southwest. We kept going. As we went farther and farther, the villages and homes got more and more spread out. But we could still see power lines, and were passed by the occasionally truck, usually piled to the brim with desert passengers with their faces wrapped up in scarves Tuareg-style. We made it to the second river. Unlike the first ferry, which had had a motor, this one was simply a small metal barge attached to a pulley system spanning the river. To cross, you simply boarded (horse, cart, and all), cranked a lever to raise the ramp, and began to slowly haul yourself across. And so we did. On the other side, we climbed back into the cart and kept going. Soon after, we lost the power lines.

The last stretch might have been the longest, but it’s hard to measure distance when traveling by horse and carriage. After what seemed like ages, and with sweat rolling down our foreheads and our mouths watering from thirst, we reached a single, lonely sign, simply stating “LAHEL.” We entered the village limits and passed the school, a narrow, two-room adobe building with its doors and shutters painted a cheerful green. As we approached village center, excited children began appearing outside. I heard the first shout of “TOUBAB!” and rolled my eyes. Toubab is the Sahelian equivalent of “mzungu” - literally, white person. Interestingly, the word actually derives from the Arabic word for doctor. While in Uganda, people constantly refer to white (and Asian) travelers as mzungus, in Dakar you rarely hear it. People here are very conscience of appearances, and to use a word like “toubab” conveys ignorance or a lack of education. In the village, however, all is lost, and after two days of constantly being referred to as “whitey” by children and adults alike I kind of snapped and scolded them with “Mon nom est PAS toubab!!”, after which thankfully they just butchered my name every time they wanted my attention (“Emry? Amly? Emery?”)

The cart pulled up in front of Diewo’s family’s house and a crowd of curious, staring faces quickly gathered. In a village as small and remote as Lahel (only 13 houses) the arrival of foreign visitors is the equivalent of the Superbowl. No — scratch that. It’s more like the World Series, which involves a week of constantly, intently watching us, so as not to miss a single move we made. Josie and I would be quietly reading in our room, only to look up and discover 10 children had gathered outside the door and were peeking inside. We would walk to the well to get water to shower and be followed by a pack of 15 loyal fans. Everywhere we went, there were children watching us. The adults, though more discreet, were just as bad. The first day, as we sat with Diewo and her 106 year old great-grandmother, slowly one mother after another would duck in to oh-so-coincidentally coincide her visit with ours. After the first few days this began to subside, but it was both funny and irritating to suddenly discover ourselves the celebrity visitors of a tiny Senegalese village.

[A quick interjection about Lahel: While most of Senegal is ethnically Wolof, most of the north is a different tribe, called the Halpulaar. They are Muslim as well and speaka language called pulaar. There are Halpulaar stretching all the way across the African Sahel, from Senegal through Mauritania, Mali, Chad, and the Sudan. The women wear big wooden earrings and many have decorative lines etched on the sides of their faces. Supposedly, the Halpulaar descend from the pharaohs of Egypt. That’s why we call our Pulaar friend Alasane “Pharaoh”.]

So after several days of travel, we had finally arrived. The only thing left to do was start the reforestation project. Ousmane had assured us before we left that he had already spoken to the ranger from Forest Services up north, who had all the supplies ready for us. We weren’t given many details other than “All the supplies are there. He’ll give you instructions when you get there. Good luck!” And so, we had logically assumed that on arriving in Lahel, the supplies would be waiting for us and we’d be good to go. Of course, this would have been FAR too easy. The second we arrived, we dialed the park ranger to tell him we were there and ready to start. He told us that was great… but that he, and our trees, were all in GUEDÉ. As in, the town we had just spent two days in. And had traveled miles away from to get to a tiny remote village on the Mauritanian border. Where there were NO SUPPLIES.

We were a little, erm, annoyed to have arrived in the village completely unaware that the supplies we needed for this project were elsewhere. We asked him when he could get there with the trees. He said he had some other villages to get to, but he could make it up by Tuesday. We had arrived on…… Friday. And so began our week of sitting in the village, waiting. We both read several books, spend endless hours swatting flies and fanning ourselves, and by Sunday were already plotting a way to leave the village by the following weekend, instead of on the 28th as planned.

Don’t get me wrong. The village wasn’t that bad at all, despite how everyone — including the villagers in Guedé — reacted when we told them we’d be there for a week (looks of shock). We were right on the River Senegal, which borders Mauritania, and the river provided plenty of wind. In the mornings, we stayed inside the mud huts, and later moved outside to lay on mats and enjoy the breeze. But the best part of the village was at night. There were no buildings or lights for miles, so you could see nearly every star in the sky. So each night, without a light to read by or TV or the Internet, we would just lay and stargaze for hours. It was beautiful and humbling.

The food, sadly, was not so enthralling. Mostly rice and powdered milk type concoctions, which often tasted vaguely of sand as the water boiled for food prep came from the muddy river. For showers, we used buckets of water from the village’s sole well, which was also a bit disappointing. Usually, the water was so sandy that it felt like we were throwing as much dirt onto our bodies as we were cleaning off. We were practically jubilant when we arrived back in Guedé and got to take bucket showers with CLEAR water! But in all honesty, despite minor set-backs, village life was perfectly bearable. I think a lot of people who think of certain luxuries like warm showers and air conditioning as essentials would be surprised to realize how easily you adjust to life without those things. If you really think you could never live without a toilet or the Internet, I’d say that probably stems more from a lack of confidence in yourself than an honest dependency on those things. It’s not that Westerners are overly materialistic even, I just think most people don’t give their own adaptability enough credit.

So we survived. Though we were bored. Really, REALLY bored. But Tuesday finally rolled around, and we woke up (at 5am, to the sounds of yelling children and women, per usual) excited to FINALLY start our project. Two hours later, it was pouring. We called the ranger. The roads would be too muddy to pass. They’d come Wednesday. AWESOME.

So WEDNESDAY rolled around, and bright and early, up rolls a white pick-up truck carrying the ranger and several helpers. The ranger himself was kind of a trip. He was a muscular, boisterous guy dressed in military fatigues and black aviators. He smiled and joked and showed us and the villagers how to dig holes for the trees and water them properly. And so being the “tree planting”. Despite it being the sole task with which Josie and I had been endowed, in reality we ourselves “planted” a total of one tree each. And by “planted”, I mean we ceremoniously held the trees upright as the villagers poured soil in the hole. The villagers did the rest, with Diewo giving instructions to them in Pulaar. Josie and I were left to “supervise”. As soon as we realized the tree planting would take less than 24 hours to complete, we immediately called Brooke, our supervisor in Dakar, to inform her that after a week of hard work in Lahel we’d be returning to the city a BIT early.

The next day, after several excruciating hours of waiting in the heat, another cart arrived to carry Diewo, Josie, and I back to Guedé. The next morning, we left for Dakar at 6am with Natalie and our friends Cody and Pharaoh, who had also been working in Guedé. First thing I did on arrival was take a long, cold shower — in a REAL shower!! CRAZY

So that’s my village story. Don’t be that impressed — really, it wasn’t THAT trying. If you really think it sounds so, you need to come to Africa and see for yourself :P

Tour du Sénégal

First of all, I’m sorry these updates have gotten so sporadic, and in effect, LONG. Despite the much wider availability of Internet in Senegal, I have WAY less free time here than I did in Uganda. Of course, this all changes tomorrow morning when I head to the village, but needless to say I won’t be sending emails from there…….

Things have been pretty busy around the office for me. The organization I’m working with here, le Centre Vivre et Apprendre, is in the process of merging with Earth Rights Institute, where I intern in LA, and I’ve been working on updating their website (a new one, not launched yet) to have the new name, all the proper information, etc etc. while simultaneously aggregating all this info into a print version to archive. Sorry, didn’t realize how boring that sentence was until I finished it. Anyway, I’m also helping write up all the French and English incorporation documents for the non-governmental organization (NGO) establishment process in Senegal/the US, which is pretty interesting.

Outside of work, the past couple weekends I’ve luckily been able to hang out with my host family and the other interns and see a bit of Dakar and Senegal. A couple weeks ago Natalie, Salah and I went to L’Île de Gorée with two of our host brothers. Gorée is an island off the coast of Dakar that in colonial times was the launching point for the slave trade out of Senegal. Africans would be kidnapped from their villages — usually by rival tribes looking to make a quick buck off the Europeans — and brought to Gorée to be put on ships to the New World. No one knows for sure but many historians as many as half of those forced to make the journey died on the way, and those that did make died as slaves in the Caribbean or America. Despite its kind of horrifying history, it’s actually an incredible beautiful place, with brightly colored colonial homes and hidden windy paths lined with flowers. The island itself is very tiny, but there’s still a very vibrant community there. There were kids playing football (soccer) everywhere and tons of people on the beach and boubou-clad women on every corner selling African crafts to the tourists (us). I took a million pictures, which I will upload at some point in the next 1/2/12 months.

Last weekend was double booked for sight-seeing. On Saturday, Natalie, Salah, our British friend Lucy and two other interns from the Eco-Village Institute packed into a hired “sept-place” (seven seater taxi) and headed to Touba, the holy city in the center of Senegal. Senegal is a Muslim country, but Islam here is definitely unique. Most Senegalese Muslims are Sufi and belong to one of four spiritual brotherhoods, each headed by a council of marabouts. The marabouts supposedly have a mystic link to Allah, and they are incredibly respected and influential in Senegalese culture. Everyone here wears gris-gris, which are little leather pouches or silver rings that have tiny scrolls with verses of the Koran written them inside. The marabouts either bless or curse these, and I’ve had more than one person implore me not to ever take a gris-gris from anyone, as it may be cursed.

Anyway, the biggest brotherhood in Senegal is the Mouride brotherhood, which was founded at Touba. All over Senegal, you’ll see graffitied paintings of the two most prominent historical leaders of the Mourides, Amadou Bamba and Baye Fall, and their names are scrawled across walls, taxis, and buses everywhere you turn. Amadou Bamba was the founder and all the successive caliphs have been his descendants. He’s buried at Touba in the grand Mosque, which is one of biggest mosques in Africa, if not the world. It is HUGE. We hired a guide to take us in, which first required all of us girls to cover up completely from head to toe. Wearing a veil and a floor-length skirt was pretty interesting in the Senegalese heat… but the Mosque is absolutely GORGEOUS inside so it was well worth it.

After a long ride back from Touba, the next day Natalie and I and three other interns/consultants at the Institute decided to make a trip to les Îles de la Madeleine, a national park site also off the coast of Dakar. The islands in all are pretty small — the minor being so tiny you can’t really even land on it — and completely uninhabited, aside from the red-billed tropicbirds that nest of the cliffs and a healthy community of baobab trees. The islands were absolutely beautiful, and we spent all day swimming in the blue cove, hiking around the arid cliff top, and lazing in the sun. I had a really fun time watching the schools of tiny fish swim around and watching snails and sea urchins creep in the tide pools.

So tomorrow I’m heading off to Lahel, a TINY village that’s so far north it’s nearly in Mauritania. Josie, an intern from NJ, and I are going to be working on a reforestation project up there. An explanation from my notes:

“In the early 1980s, the Senegalese government granted a heavily forested, ecologically diverse area of northern Senegal surrounding the village of Lahel to Guinean businessman for the creation of rice
fields. After completely deforesting the area, the Guineans left with the timber but never followed through on the creation of the rice fields, leaving instead a barren desert completely void of trees, plants, or animals. As a result, the village of Lahel is now subject to debilitating dust storms exacerbated by increasing desertification due to global warming.”

So yes, we’ll hopefully be helping to deter the debilitating dust storms. Not too sure yet on the specifics yet, but that’s kiiiind of how it goes in the village. We’ll be spending nearly two weeks without electricity, running water, or contact with the outside world. Needless to say, we’re packing a lot of books.

This post is quickly becoming a novella, so I’ll leave you at that. Expect a VERY interesting update about village livin’ in two weeks.

Lots of love from Senegal.

Salaam alakuum, y'all

Sorry I haven’t written in a while, I’ve just been preoccupied by Senegal’s AWESOMENESS. No seriously, I’ve actually been pretty busy with my internship, traveling around Dakar, and having Senegalese family time. So far things have been really great, and I’m absolutely loving Senegal.

As I said in my last email, our family here is HUGE, and it’s taken the three of us Americans a while just to figure out who everyone is and who they’re related. In our house alone, there are like 15 people at any given time. Our host mom, Mère Diagne, pretty much runs the household. It took us a while to figure out where Père Diagne was, but we finally found out from our host borthers that he’s actually on a UN Peacekeeping mission in Abidjan right now, monitoring Côte D’Ivoire’s upcoming presidential elections. The three Diagne brothers all live at our house. The oldest is Matar, and he and his wife Yacine have an ADORABLE 9-mo-old son named Omar. Our brother Médoune is 29 and actually used to work at the non-profit I’m interning at, but now does website maintenance/design somewhere in Dakar. Lamine, who’s 20, is the baby. He’s in university in Dakar and is ridiculously goofy. Their sister Fatou and her husband live really close by, and their daughters Djiegen (8) and Khary (4) are on summer break right now so they’re at the house pretty much everyday. The Diagne’s two other sisters are both abroad right now — Grassé is at uni in Morocco, and Sény lives in Italy with her husband. Their adorable daughter Ro is living in Dakar with us right now though so she can learn Wolof. Yacine’s niece is staying with us too, and then there’s also Mère Diagne’s niece Nabou and her daughter Mami Chou, who live there permanently. Throw various cousins/friends/neighbors and the three American interns (me, Natalie & Salah) into the mix, and yeah, there’s quite a few people hanging out.

It’s great though, because our family is totally Senegalese and thereby totally fun. They play aweomse Senegalese music all the time, and Nabou and Lamine have been teaching us Senegalese dancing, which is CRAZY (YouTube example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEkXO-UPvco) We also get to see lots of Senegalese TV, which is usually either dubbed soap operas from France, Mexico (Africa LOVES telenovellas!), or India (Google “Allo Bombay”), OR Senegalese wrestling. I have never considered myself a wrestling fan, but Lammb, the traditional Senegalese wrestling, is SUPER fun, mostly because before every match the two competitors and their respective posses have a DANCE-OFF. I kid you not. This is a mild example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-nbnwFu_oY. We’re scheming to get to a live match sometime in the next 5 weeks.

Other awesome bits of Senegalese culture… well, in general everyone here is just SUPER FLY. Dressing well is part of their culture, so people generally are either dressed in really chic Western clothes, or in colorful traditional boubous. Nabou’s best friend is getting married on Saturday, so yesterday Salah, Natalie, and I all went to market to get fabric to bring to the tailor so we’ll have boubous to wear. SO excited!!! The food here is also amazing. It’s really spicy and rich and generally delicious. At meals, they lay a blanket on the ground and put a big bowl or plate with all the food in it in the middle, then everyone circles around and shares. Typically, then everyone finishes quickly and gets up and makes us Americans finish the rest. They are unapologetically trying to fatten us up… everyone is constantly telling Natalie and I we need to work on our “jaay fonde”, aka, big butts, which are a prized female attribute in Senegal. “Fonde” is actually a porridge made from millet flour that the women eat to get the “jaay fonde”, and “jaay” means container… so the word for big butt literally translates as “porridge container.” Gotta love Senegalese humor.

What else, what else… hm, well it’s worth noting that even though we live in a super urban area, our neighborhood is an ancient fishing village where there are still fishermen and farmers. So, it’s not uncommon to see people herding sheep or cattle down the main highway or giving goats baths at the beach. Photographic proof to follow. In general though, it’s a pretty good mix of traditional and modern African culture, which also means we have wi-fi pretty much all the time, so I can Skype whenever WOO

Long post, I’ll shut up now, and also it’s almost dinner and I don’t want to miss THAT.

A brief sojourn to Kenya & arrivée en Sénégal

I got off the plane in Nairobi expecting to immediately hop on my flight to Dakar, which was scheduled to leave after a two-hour layover. After waiting in line for 15 minutes, I reach the transfer desk only to find out that not only had that flight been canceled, but Delta stopped that service TWO WEEKS AGO. I was like, uhhh NEWS TO ME, DELTA. Beezies never contacted me!! Luckily I’ve had enough experience with airport mess-ups that I was able to remain a pillar of Zen and simply request a flight change (to Kenya Airways, the Delta affiliate that’s still actually flying planes to Dakar) and a hotel room for the night. Which ended up being a total score because they put me up fo free in a really shwish hotel outside the airport, plus two delectable buffet meals in the hotel dining room. The next morning I left at 7am for the airport, got on my flight, and after a brief stop-over in Côte D’Ivoire, finally landed in Senegal.

Just little over 24 hours in, and Senegal is already AMAZING. Natalie, me, and one other intern are all staying at the same house. Our family is really big - there are six kids, various spouses and five grand-kids who come and go throughout the day. Everyone is SUPER friendly and the kids are adorable. The family speaks Wolof to each other and French to us, though the three boys all know English and speak it with us. Since Senegal is a Muslim country, there’s also a lot of Arabic writing around the neighborhood, and Arabic phrases and words get interjected into Wolof a lot. One of the grand-daughters, Rokhaya, is two and is visting for a few months to learn Wolof, but she was born and lives in Italy, so Natalie has been attempting to speak Italian with her. Oh, and the other intern staying here, Salah, is Moroccan-American and is going to help me with my Arabic. We’re a multi-lingual household, clearly.

Today we ate breakfast (Nutella on a baguette and coffee..MMM!!!) and headed 5 min down the road to the BEACH. The buildings here are all veyr Arab-influenced in style, and the roads are sandy, so it kind of lots like a Middle-Eastern beach town. the beaches are GORGEOUS and the water is sea-green and cool. We played football (the world kind, not the American kind) and played with the kids. It was super relaxing and I’m psyched because we get to go to the beach EVERY SINGLE DAY for the next six weeks!!!!

We start our internships tomorrow. I’m pretty excited! Hope everything is well aux États-Unis. BISOUS!!!

See you later, Uganda

It’s been an eventful week. Last Monday, we moved the youth center from its tiny house in the Nabulagala neghborhood of Kampala about 10 min (walking) up the road to their HUGE new home in the Lubye neighborhood. The new house is just down the hill from the Kasubi Tombs, where a couple Bgandan kings are buried. The tombs are housed in the largest thatch-roofed hut in the world — and so they are a designated UNESCO world heritage site. So we were staying 10 min away from the biggest hut in the world… who knew?

The first week in the new house (and our last week in Uganda) was really chill, as we were mostly just moving things in, organizing, and chilling. The new house is SO big and spacious, with a gorgeous view of Kampala and a huge yard. The bedrooms were big enough for three bnk beds each PLUS plenty of space to move around, which was a huge improvement over our last rooms, where the beds were literally a foot apart from each other. We also upgraded from latrines to tiled squat toilets that FLUSHED! SOOO luxurious, I know, I know. The only downside was that the plumbing in the new house was not done being installed yet, so we had to haul in buckets of water from a tank outside and fill the tank of the toilet to flush. And we had to downgrade from cold showers to cold BUCKET showers, which believe me, are not as easy to take as they sound.

On our second to last night in Uganda, some of teachers from on of the schools we had taught at took us out to dinner to thank us for volunteering at their school. We had a traditional Ugandan meal (potatoes, greens, rice, groundnut sauce, chicken for the meat-eaters, and pineapple and watermelon for dessert) and watched the NZ vs. South Africa FIFA match. It would have been a really relaxing meal except the megalomaniac headmaster made three speeches, including one which he printed out and gave to each of us so we could read along… and all know when he was improvising an additional paragraph here and there and delaying our meal. Afterwards, we decided (minus the teachers) to go out and experience some Ugandan nightlife. The most popular club in Kampala, Silk, was supposed to be having college night, but when we got there we discovered it was closed (typical Africa). So instead we went to a local bar for *reggae* night. East Africa is allll about reggae and Rastafarianism, so you run into Bob Marley paraphernalia and Jamaican flags everywhere you go. We had a couple beers (Bell and Nile Special are the staples) and chilled out to reggae music and the NZ-Australia rugby game on TV (go All-Blacks!). It was fun for a while, but then we all got bored/sleepy and made our way back home.

On Friday at around noon half of us said good-bye to our Ugandan family and left Lubye for the airport :(

…And this when I end up stranded in Kenya.

Down ze NILE

Yesterday night we got back from our one big excursion in Uganda — our trip to Jinja, the source of the River Nile. We thought initially it’d be just the nine of us American students, Divinity, Ibra and a Ugandan youth leader (Sarah) making the trip, but we were really excited (though somewhat skeptical) when we found out AGYA baby mascot Taata would be joining us, to celebrate his birthday and another exciting event.

Background:

Taata is a rambunctious but precious toddler who lives next door to the current AGYA house in our slum-like neighborhood of Nakulabye. He abandoned as a baby by his mother and put up in an orphanage. When he 6 months old he was adopted by a British family that was staying in Uganda, but 7 mo later they had to live and because of legal red tape they couldn’t take him with them. So they brought him to his grandma (the youth center’s neighbor) and since then he’s lived with her and the 3 other grandchildren she’s raising alone. Taata shows up at the center early every morning and stays all day to play with Shanita, the cook’s granddaughter, and the other neighborhood kids. It’s about as close to a real home as he has. Taata’s real name is Arafat, but he got the nickname bc he calls ever man at the center “Taata” (dad) and every woman “Maama” (mom), probably bc he doesn’t have either as part of his life, and is, understandably, confused. A month or so ago, Taata’s father showed up at AGYA to thank Ibra for everything he’s done for Taata, and told him he’d like Ibra and Divinity to adopt him. This week they decided they are going to, and Taata will be moving to the new house with them on Monday! KIND of crazy, bc even though Divinity and Ibra are getting married this fall, they are still very much our peers and the thought of being a parent at their ages (23 and 26) is KIND of crazy by American standards. However, they (and we) love Taata and want him to have the brightest future possible. He’ll probably be the first of many kids they adopt over the years.

So anyway, with Taata in tow, we left for the bus depot in Kampala bright and early Thursday morning. The bus/taxi park is the biggest in East Africa, and it’s CRAZY. There are no traffic lines or people directing traffic or anything — it’s literally just a big dirt lot where taxis and buses pull in every which way and hawkers run around banging on windows trying to get you to buy their wares. We found a bus headed to Jinja and clambered on board. We had to wait a half hour or so for the rest of the bus to fill (they PACK these buses… it’s so insane/not legal in America) and then we were off.

Leaving the city was really eye opening. Kampala and the neighborhoods/suburbs surrounding it are really congested, so our vision of Uganda thus far had been one of traffic-filled dirt roads and crowded slums overflowing with discarded trash. Once you leave the city limits, however, it’s a different Uganda. There are the same shack-like stores and markets and vendors along the road, but there’s so much more space and GREEN. We passed rolling pastures and fields of leafy banana trees. Most of us ended up dozing off to make up for the early morning, but soon enough we were getting nudged awake by Ibra to find we were crossing the Nile. We all gasped and clicked away on our cameras and appropriately pondered its importance in the development of human civilization. I mean, come on. It’s the freaking NILE.

The first glimpse wasn’t nearly the best part of the trip, though. After the bus dropped us off in Jinja, we commissioned a gang of bodas (eek) and took off on a motorcycle ride through the countryside to the source of the Nile. After a bumpy but pretty ride past fields and schoolyards, we pulled off the main road onto another windy dirt road. We got off the bodas and walked down a steep hill to the edge of the river. At its beginning, the Nile is wide and its current relatively fast. There are alligators and hippos further down, but here the current is too fast for them to hunt (sadly. I would have loved to see a hippo.) As we sat and ate a picnic lunch of PB&J (SO ethnic, right?) Ibra hired a boat to take us to the source. We all climbed in and started moving up current towards Lake Victoria. Along the river, we saw monkeys jumping from tree to tree, and even a Monaco(?) lizard — a beastly thing that kind of looks like a small dinosaur ie, AWESOME!! There were also tons and tons of different species of birds (straight up Lion King style). The boat finally arrived at a small island right at the mouth of the river. Here, the water bubbles up from below in a constant and purposeful manner — this is the SOURCE, the underground spring that feeds the world’s longest and most revered river.

Cool.

After that little pilgrimage, we headed out to our lodging for the night, a little camp by Bujagali Falls, these beautiful rolling waterfalls further down the river. Most of the rest of the trip was spent laying on the grass and watching the falls. The next day, we headed out around 3pm and got to experience 5 hours of African traffic. If you think the US is bad — try rush hour in a country without stoplights or traffic laws. We finally made it home late that night, and today it’s back to classes and hanging out with the kids. Tomorrow, we have our last Sunday meeting here, where we’ll present what we’ve done with our classes over the past 3 weeks, and then on Monday we move to the new house. In less than a week, I’ll be on a plane to Senegal and Part II of my epic African summer.

Eating Nemo

Aside from all the weirdness that’s been going down lately, classes have been pretty normal. We’re still teaching at the local schools a few times a week. My classes so far have been about positive thinking and goals and ambition, concepts that aren’t really touched upon in Ugandan curriculums. We’ve also been exploring Kampala quite a bit more. And here’s one more shocking story for you all…

I ate fish! But for good reason, I swear… basically, our supervisor in Senegal emailed Natalie and I, who are both vegetarians, and was like, “ummm you guys are going to have some issues being veggie in Senegal, where every meal is made with meat or fish”. They’re going to place us in a more modern home stay where they’ll understand us not eating meat, but not eating fish there is kind of weird/mildly offensive since it’s a fishing village. So, we were both like, fine we’ll eat fish there, no big since its basically sustenance. To ease ourselves into it, we both decided to order fish and chips today when the whole group went out for lunch. Here I’m thinking, ok fish and chips will be nice, ambiguous looking fish sticks, which I used to enjoy back in the day when I still ate fish (8 years ago), so a pretty innocuous food to choose in transitioning back into eating creatures, right?

Duh, it’s Africa. SO WRONG.

They bring out the “fish and chips”. It is not fish sticks and fries in a newspaper cone like I had eaten ten years ago in London. NO. It’s an ENTIRE FISH, face and all, coated in batter and fried. WHAT THE EFF. After the initial shock, all we could really do was laugh and bravely dig in. It was kind of weird and I just blocked any mental image of this fish swimming around in Lake Victoria before making it to my plate, but I think if I was going to prepare myself for life in a fishing village, this was definitely the way to do it.

(I did cover its face with my napkin though.)

General sketchiness

My time in Uganda is just flying by. As of today, I have just 10 days left here before I jet off to Senegal… kiiiind of crazy.

The past week has been kind of surreal. There’s just been crazy stuff happening all over the place. We found out a few days ago that the older brother of one of our youth leaders, Brian aka B-Start, had been murdered. B-Start is in high school and helps out at the youth center teaching hip hop and music to the kids (B-Start is his rap name. Nicknames are big here, and I actually don’t even know a bunch of the leaders’ real names.) B-Start’s spent a lot of time with us and we all really love him, as he’s a really sweet kid with a HUGE smile. Anyway, come to find out his older brother was a really big boxer here in Uganda, and some horrible person decided out of jealously to stab him in his own home. It was actually a really big deal since he was a well-known boxer, and it made the front page of the local newspaper. B-Start and the other youth leaders who were friends of his brother were understandably devastated. Grief in Africa though is very interesting — people are very intent to push on with life after a loss. In Africa, death is part of day-to-day reality. B-Start has still been at the center everyday since his brother passed away, and the other kids have kept pretty quiet about everything since the burial. It’s a sad situation, but the African way is to recognize that life must go on. And luckily, they caught the murderer and are now going to trial.

In other equally bizarre but slightly less depressing news, the youth center is MOVING within the next week. In the 7 months since Ibra and Divinity (the co-directors) founded the organization, its grown exponentially. Every Sunday, they have community meetings, and the attendants are literally almost spilling out of the yard now. So, Ibra and Divinity were THRILLED when they discovered this HUGE property about 10 min up the road, which is about 4 times bigger but only $100 USD more for monthly rent. They were really excited at first, but the landlord wanted 6 mo rent upfront, which they realized they couldn’t pay, and understandably went from being really excited to really depressed. However, the 9 of us American students here decided together to contribute as much money from our own pockets as we could and surprise Ibra and Divinity with the gift. Between our contribution and the money they already had, we were able to come up with 3M Ugandan shillings needed to pay 6 mo of rent on the new house.

BUT, of course the story doesn’t quite end that happily. We surprised them with the money, Ibra and Divinity were ecstatic, and they went back to the landlord the next day with the cash (and all of us in tow for moral support — ie, muzungu influence. Post-colonialism is SKETCH). Now, in Uganda, renter’s rights and real estate law are sketchy at best. When a property is up for rent like that, basically whoever shows up with the cash first gets it. So Ibra and Divinity show up with their money only to find out some woman had come the DAY BEFORE with cash and claimed it. However, Ibra and Divinity were willing to pay 100 Ugandan shillings more a month, so the landlord, being kind of a sketchball, was like, okay, you can have it, BUT we have to get rid of this lady somehow. At the time, he made it sound like all he had to do was refund her money, so he concocted this elaborate story that Ibra was he son, who SURPRISED him in the middle of night by coming back from abroad with his wife (Divinity) and nine foreigner friends (us) who needed the house to live in for the summer. WTF, I know. At the time we were kind of confused as to why he couldn’t just say “they have more money, SORRY”, but this question was answered the next day when we had to show up at 7 in the morning (!!) and pretend we had spent the night.

So the lady shows up to discover all of us in the landlord’s living room watching TV (landlord and his family live upstairs, the youth center is renting the downstairs). The landlord and Ibra sit down with her and really dramatically explain their story about Ibra’s surprise “homecoming”. The lady is clearly pissed, but tells Ibra she understands, she just thought it was very unprofessional on his “father’s” part. So, that’s when they whip out the CONTRACTS to terminate them. So yeah, what we thought was going to be a simple cash refund was actually a whole legal process of terminating WRITTEN AGREEMENTS. Divinity works for a law firm, so she was reading them over and kind of like “uhhh this is really sketchy”… the contracts had already been signed by both the landlord and the lady, and it explicitly said in them landlord couldn’t terminate the contracts without a month’s notice, etc etc. So yes, we all got a very profound lesson in the greyness of African legal agreements and an ethics lesson to boot. Everyone is really happy we got the place, but understandably we all feel badly for the lady and kind of shady. We’re all just hoping any negative energy from her will be directed at the ladlord and not the youth center, though hopefully she won’t ever find out about the center and realize she was played…… uggggh so sketchy!! But I mean, there you have it. Welcome to Africa. (As a sidenote: Divinity wrote up the new agreement and made it SUPER tight… ie, they have to refund them the full deposit plus 15% if they terminate the agreement. They also brought it to the local chief, kind of like a magistrate, right away to get it officially recognized. SO hopefully the landlord won’t pull the same shady biz on the youth center).

So yes, weirdness of that story aside, on June 15th we’re moving everything from the current house to the new house. The manual labor should be fun!! (lolzz)

Kampala & primary school

Still in Africa, still alive.

We ventured into Kampala, Uganda’s capitol, the day after everyone else arrived. By taxi, it’s only about 15 minutes to city center. After converting some cash at the foreign exchange, we walked around for a bit and got a feel for the city. The actual urban area is not that big, and you can walk pretty much everywhere – which most people do anyway, because cars are so expensive. Since traffic laws aren’t very well enforced (SLASH aren’t actually enforced AT ALL) the city streets are really congested and noisy. If you don’t want to walk, you can either flag down a taxi (which will pick you up even if they already have some passengers) or charter a boda boda. The bodas are motorcycle taxis that FLY through the streets, swerving through traffic and cutting everyone off. We’ve repeatedly seen them run red lights at one of the only three stoplights in the city. The bodas are a little more expensive than cabs, but I guess the trade off is that they’re WAY faster than sitting in a cab in traffic (unless, of course, you DIE).

Kampala is definitely a developing world city in SO many ways. A lot of the buildings have tin roofs and everything is covered in a blanket of red Ugandan dust. You’ll see vendors and construction workers walking through the streets with wooden carts or riding by on bicycles stacked with straw or sticks or other supplies. However, since all the wealthy Ugandan elite live in the city, the shanties and beggars are contrasted by luxury SUVs and sparkling new buildings. On our first trip into the city, our taxi was passed by a police escort made of probably four shiny cop cars, six to eight more cops on motorcycles (much newer than the bodas), an ambulance, and three brand new BMWs. This is a pretty good illustration of how wealth in Uganda is distributed – the handful of elites at the top control the parliament and the resources, and everyone else is left to fend for themselves.

Walking by the offices of Parliament reiterated this. The government buildings, which in theory are there to give all Ugandans due representation, are surrounded by vast green lawns and high gates. In the few days I’ve been here, a few of the youth have asked me what I study at university, and when I tell them I study international politics, they scoff. “I don’t like politics,” one told me, “because in politics, nothing ever changes.” I guess you can’t bring about much change in policy when the people in power never change.

After our day in Kampala, we jumped right into life at the youth center. We’re part teachers, part camp counselors here, though unfortunately it’s much harder to pull out my old camp counselor tricks when not all the kids speak English. They are all absolutely adorable though, and SO much easier than American children to entertain. We colored in pictures with them, and as we handed out the papers and markers, not a single child complained or asked for a different paper or color, and then they all just sat quietly and colored intently for 15 min. We gave them stickers when they finished and they were SO excited. A few of them put them on the front of their school books and then ran over to show us because they were so proud. Some things are kind of sad though — one little boy handed me what looked like a folded up newspaper that he had out his sticker on. I was like, “That’s great, but why did you put it here?” I then opened it and discovered it was actually his school notebook, of which apparently didn’t have a real cover so he had put the newspaper around it instead.

It’s interesting because all the kids here, from primary school to high school-age, are so intent on going to school and learning because it really is a privilege to be able to. We have one Ugandan youth leader who is 17 and an incredible dancer, who is taking the year off of school because his mom is sick and in the hospital so his family can no longer afford to send all the kids to school. Some of the other youth leaders go to school but pretty much have to fend for themselves and work to pay their own school fees. More so than feeling badly for them though, it makes me sad to think that so many kids in the US goof off and totally take their education for granted.

We’ve been teaching at a couple schools in the area, which is trippy because they are so incredibly different from US schools. Aside from the aesthetics ofit (peeling plaster walls, rough wooden benches, hand-drawn educational posters on the walls) the teaching methods here are SO RIGID. They basically don’t incorporate any creative/interactive learning into their schools, so even though the kids are really smart (bc they have to memorize and relay back EVERYTHING), every time we ask them to be creative or think critically they’re soooo hesitant to do so. One of the younger teachers who was a little more down with what were trying to do actually told a couple of my friends not to be offended that none of the kids wanted to share their opinion or work with the class, but that the kids were just not used to being asked their opinion about anything. Ibra, one of the youth center’s co-directors, explained to us too that in Uganda, until you’re 18 and living on your own you’re still considered a baby, and no one really cares what you think.

So it’s really interesting to see the same kids who are so timid and quiet at school come to the youth center afterward and be loud and crazy and talkative. That I think is one of the things their most focused on with their non-profit — empower kids so they don’t grow up to be passive adults like so many of the poor lower class here.

Alright I got to run — eating lunch than headed to market (like, straight up African bazaar). Another update coming soon.

WASSUP everybody I'm in Africa

Mari and I, and our friend Natalie who met us in Amsterdam, arrived safely in Uganda last night. The flight went pretty smoothly EXCEPT that there was a medical emergency in the air so we had to make an emergency landing in Rome. Kind of cool, since I’ve never been to Italy, so we got a cool aerial view of the Italian shore. (Though not so cool for the person getting medically evacuated I guess.) We ended up getting to Kampala two hours late and pretty exhausted, but we finally found our bags and got through the airport to find Divinity, the director of the youth center we’re working at, waiting for us with a VERY excited group of Ugandan youth leaders from the center. They were all super psyched that we were finally here, and shook all our hands and took a million pictures. We all squeezed into the van they had rented (SO typically African… we were practically piled in there) and drove back to the house.

The house that accommodates the youth center is in a little village outside the city, up a hill in a little neighborhood. The buildings are all stucco and the roads are a rusty colored dirt. There are clothesline hanging across the road and tons of kids running around playing ball. Our house has a big wall around it with broken glass on top to keep out robbers. The house has a couple rooms and a washroom in back for the girls, and the boys are in separate building across the yard. The washroom has shower head, which is fortunate, but less fortunately the water is COLD. I sort of stood to the side a splashed myself this morning. There’s also “toilets” in the back, which are actually latrines, so going to the bathroom constitutes squatting over a tiny hole in the floor. If there’s one thing I will miss most on this trip, it will be modern plumbing.

I’m running out of time, so I got to wrap this up, but so far we haven’t seen TOO much of the area except on the walk over to the Internet cafe. Kind of hilarious, since the whole time we were walking, the little kids we passed would get really excited and yell “MUZUNGA! HI MUZUNGA!!!” which is what they call anyone foreign. Some of them even made it into a little song. It was definitely more adorable than offensive, since they were just so excited to see someone not Ugandan.

I’ll try to post another update as soon as I can! Love you all and hope everything is well in the States, New Zealand, etc.