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.