Sarah in Uganda

Today my P.7 students finished reading Charlotte’s Web. The term started in the beginning of February and since then every Monday and Wednesday we have slowly made our way through all the chapters until finally today we read the final chapter and got to say “THE END” in unison. Although reading a chapter book may seem like an ordinary accomplishment for students in their last year of primary school, for my students it was much more than that. For them it was the first chapter book they have ever read in their entire lives. I’m not sure if they realize how big of an accomplishment this is or how immensely proud of them for the progress they have made throughout the term. They have gone from each student barely being able to read one paragraph to speedily reading a page and me having to cut them off so the next student can read. It has been amazing for me to see them transform into confident readers who help each other pronounce words that the others are unsure of. I am so amazingly proud of them and so grateful to BCC for allowing my students to reach this momentous milestone.

On a related note, the St. Gertrude’s Classroom Book Project has been a huge success and I can not thank everyone for their support enough! On Friday I will be picking up the last 4 boxes of books and delivering them to St. Gertrude’s on Monday. More updates and pictures to come next week!

Sorry for the double dipping but here is the article I wrote for the Concordy and appeared last week. It is lunchtime at the clinic. The nurses have seen their last patients for the morning, Resty has finished dispensing their meds, and Ritah has completed the last HIV test before lunch. We all head to the picnic tables behind the clinic where Susan, our cook, has laid out the food. Once their plates have been filled with heaping piles of rice, matoke, and ground-nut sauce, the clinic staff settles at the table and the chatter begins. Lunchtime is also the social hour for the clinic staff and the conversation always flows rapidly in Luganda all around me. For the staff, this is their time to relax, gossip, and crack jokes with one other. For me, I sit in silence eating my food, trying my hardest to catch the odd word here or there. Yet, for the most part, everything goes over my head and I am forced to just enjoy the sounds of their voices and laughter.

This is the kind of language and communication I have come to be used to during my time here. Taxi rides, walks around the village, and time in the pharmacy is filled with streams of Luganda spoken too quickly for me to pick up and as a result, I have come to have a new appreciation for the sounds of peoples’ voices as they speak, rather than the actual words that are being said.

Without the ability to communicate using language, the importance of facial expressions and gestures takes on a whole new meaning. I can show my appreciation and respect for the old woman down the road, by grasping her hand with both of mine and bowing my head slightly. Or my excitement to see the kids in the village by pasting a huge smile on my face and picking them up and twirling them in a circle. Our laughter and smiles is what bonds us rather than the actual words exchanged. Although on many levels, I find that this to be a somewhat purer form of the connection than actual words, it often gets lonely. Without words, there is no one to vent to, joke with, or spill your guts to.

I think back to all the times I have sat in Reamer killing time before practice or class, trying to read or finish some homework and all I could hear was the incessant chatting and gossip of all the tables around me. During those times all I wanted was the ability to tune out all the conversation around me and focus, but now I crave being able to understand all the talk that is going on around me. This experience has given me a new appreciation for the ease with which I can understand every word I hear while walking about on Union’s campus.

February 18th, 2011: Presidential Election Day in Uganda. The day has finally arrived. Today Ugandan businesses, schools, and farming will pause so that the citizens of Uganda can go to the polls to vote for their president. The ballots are all paper ballots, marked by either a thumb print or tick mark, next to your candidate. On the ballots, there is a picture of each candidate along with the symbol for their party in order to allow a fair election for those who are illiterate. Just know your party’s symbol and color (i.e. yellow school bus for NRM or green hoe for DP) and you’re ready to vote.

Although this sounds all well and good, there is still the issue of voter registration. There are no absentee ballots so where you originally registered to vote is where you have to vote this election (unless of course you changed your registration but no one I have talked to has done this). This means that if you registered to vote in Ddegeya but now are now working in Kampala, you would have to come back to the village in order to vote. Or like for one of the teachers that I work with, she registered in Kampala not knowing she would be working at a school outside of Masaka and due to the expense of returning to Kampala will not be voting. As a result, a whole slew of mostly young adult voters will not be heading to the polls today. 

For those who don’t know, the incumbent, Y.K. Museveni, has been in power for 25 years and is running again this election period. Most predict he will win again especially since he is running against 7 other candidates. So for one of those candidates to unify the nation to get enough of the votes will be hard. But we shall see this weekend after Ugandans go to the polls and follow Pee Diddy’s instructions to “Rock the Vote!”. 

Billboard in Masaka town encouraging people to go vote. 

“The curriculum in Uganda emphasizes reading as a core component of learning in primary schools, but many pupils complete school without touching a reading book”  (Ugandan newspaper New Vision, 06.09.2010)

As many of you know, Elliot and I have been teaching at a local primary school during our time in Uganda. While I have throughly enjoyed the challenge, I was often stumped when it came to what to do with my P.6 English class. The headmaster had charged me with teaching the comprehensive portion of the curriculum, which was supposed to entail reading comprehension and vocabulary. I attempted to teach these skills to the best way I could think of, using the one P.6 English reader the school owned. Not only was it published in the early ’90s, which resulted in us reading a story about Zaire and the Zaire River (now known as Democratic Republic of Congo and the Congo River), but there were only 6 copies for all 30 students. This meant that each book was shared between 5 students. Now add in that most of them can barely understand my America accent and you can see how trying to get students to read aloud, pay attention, and actually learn something from the lesson becomes a challenge. 

Then in November, I received an extremely generous donation from my church, Briarcliff Congregational Church— 30 brand new copies of Charlotte’s Web for me to use in my classroom! Now every student had their own book to hold in their hands and read. Once the novelty of the pictures wore off so that the kids paid attention and were reading, I actually started to look forward to teaching my English class.

Hence the idea for the St. Gertrude’s Classroom Book Project was born. I want every classroom at St. Gertrude’s to have books to read during English lessons and for each child to be able to hold their own copy of the book being read. But in order for this to happen I need your help! stgertrudes.bbnow.org is the official website for my project and not only includes more details about the project, a PayPal link for donations, but also an updated “Wish List” of the books needed to help bring reading to St. Gertrude’s. 

There are two ways to donate: you can either make a monetary donation online or purchase books you wish to donate and send to Martha Yergeau, 15 Surrey Lane, Ossining, NY 10562 or at Union College drop the books off in the Minerva Programs Office, Reamer 303. Donations can be made individually or by a group. 

Just $10 dollars donates one book and brings us one book closer to being able to give the gift of reading to the children at St. Gertrude’s Primary School! Thank you so much for your support and encouragement! 

Last Thursday, the much talked about tree ceremony occurred. We have been hearing about the ceremony for many months now so I was excited when a taxi full of people suddenly showed up signaling that today was the day for the much awaited ceremony. There are two large trees, one to the side of the clinic and another down the road, that are said to have special powers. The trees are considered twins and are named: Nalongo and Salongo or mother and father of twins, respectively. The worshippers dress in full white gowns with colorful fabric sashes around the middle while placing pots full of banana beer and other sacrifices at the trunk of the tree. Then they sing, bang drums, dance and chant obscenities in order to give respect and worship the tree. Originally I thought the person explaining the ceremony was calling them obscenities because they offended her Christian religious beliefs but turns out that no, they were actually curse words despite the large contingent of children involved in the ceremony. Many of the worshippers had come from as far away as Kampala (more or less 3 and a half hours along bumpy dusty roads away) just for the ceremony to worship these particular twin trees on this one particular day of the year. The ceremony ended as all Ugandan ceremonies do: with a huge feast and many drinks.

Another popular myth we’ve heard much about are the “night dancers”. They are much like the boogey men of American childhood nightmares. They only come out at night and dance through villages naked (hence night dancers). Recently I’ve learned that there are a number of different kinds of night dancers. There are the ones that just like to scare their victims by chasing them all over the village over and over again but never harm them other than instilling fear in their victims. The second type are the ones who eat dead bodies of villagers, these are the most common type according to the legend. Then the scariest species of all are those that lurk in the bush waiting for an unsuspecting villager to walk by before pouncing and devouring the villager as their evening snack. It may sound ridiculous but grown men and women won’t walk alone at night for fear of being attacked by a night dancer (hence the practice of escorting each other home).

Then there are the ghosts who live in trees. I’m not totally clear on their powers since every time we ask we’re told not to worry because they don’t chase mzungus.

Witch doctors and herbal medicines are still very prominent here and that is often the first line of health care treatment for many, many people in villages. Often a patient will come in only after the witch doctor has failed to cure them of their illness. The use of therapeutic scarring on the abdomen to rid the demons or other bad spirits infecting the body are often seen on patients.  Or a patient with mild anaphylactic shock from a bee sting insisting that it was a curse set upon her by an enemy. Who knew such myths were so alive and well. 

Step 1: Decide on a menu that includes foods found in Uganda but still in line with the Thanksgiving tradition in America. This is what we came up with: Turkey, Stuffing, Gravy, Green Beans (or as they call them here, French Beans), Mashed Potatoes, Pumpkin, Cajun Rice (this tradition was passed on to us but our mzungu friend Amanda who grew up in Louisiana. Plus we figured it’d be good to have some rice ready in case all the other food was inedible), and last but definitely not least, some sweet bread rolls.

Step 2: Search near and far for a turkey that is for sale. John took care of this step for us (for which I was eternally thankful) and after 2 days of searching found us a turkey to cook for the feast!

Elliot and Eddie with our turkey!

Step 3: Travel to Masaka market for all the ingredients needed. Then make your way home with 5 bugling plastic bags, one rucksack of potatoes, and one overstuffed purse of food and supplies in a Toyota sedan with 10 other people in the car. Only to realize we forgot a whole bunch of important ingredients and repeat the process again the next day.

Step 4: Thanksgiving Eve: kill the turkey. Our friend, Eddie, took care of this step for us since he’s Muslim and we wanted him to be able to eat the turkey with us. De-feather and de-organ the turkey while preparing the brine for the turkey to sit in overnight. The tricky thing about leaving the turkey to brine in Ddegeya is that there isn’t any refrigeration. Thankfully it gets pretty cool at night so by sitting the turkey in cold water and putting it in a dark corner we were able to avoid giving our guest food poisoning.

Step 5: Build an oven to cook the turkey in. All cooking is typically done over a charcoal stove but seeing as how this wasn’t really going to work so hot for cooking a full turkey, Elliot came up with the plan to build a brick oven. We found some bricks and stacked them 6 high before mixing up some mud and plastering it on the outside. Elliot also hammered out some sheet metal to serve as a makeshift top. We set 3 bricks inside to serve as a rack to hold the pot containing our turkey and then built charcoal fires in each of the corners. Having never really built a legitimate charcoal fire before, especially not one inside a make-shift oven, keeping the fire going for almost 6 hours turned out to be a challenge. It also becomes harder when every kid in the village wants a peek at this funny cooking contraption the mzungus have made. But we eventually got the hang of it and built up some good heat inside!

Oven pre-mud sealing

Step 6: Figure out how to cook the rest of the food over 3 charcoal fires. Thankfully, Rose, one of the nurses at the clinic, came to our rescue and helped us keep the fires going and prepared some of the side dishes.

Step 7: Take an emergency trip to Kinoni for an important forgotten part of the feast: wine! And also sodas for the rest of our guests.

Step 8: During our second trip to Masaka we spent a good portion of our time looking high and low for a meat thermometer. We finally gave up after asking the butcher where we could find a thermometer for cooking meat and he responded “Those exist?!?! No. You’re lying…. That can’t exist”. So yeah, we were left to guesstimate when the turkey would be cooked. At about 6 and a half hours of cooking in our wonderful oven, our turkey was finally done!

 Fresh out of the oven!

Step 9: Serve the turkey and other dishes, explain why we cooked all this weird food (the explanation went something like this: Well these silly mzungus went to America a long time ago and then it got really cold and their crops died and they were about to die but the Native Americans came and saved them and now we eat all this food to commemorate the Native Americans teaching us how to hunt and grow crops. The End.), share our thanks for all the wonderful people we have met during this experience and finally stuff ourselves silly with delicious Thanksgiving food!  

Recently I have been having the worst luck with taxis. I’m not sure if the luck we’ve encountered so far—considering the conditions of roads and/or taxis—has run out or if my bad luck in the transportation department gets saved up for one long stretch and things will go back to normal for another 3 months before I have another week of 2 extremely lost boda bodas, one melted flip flop, and 2 broken down taxis within the space of 5 days.

The trouble all started this past Friday when the free shuttle from our hostel to Jinja for Nile River white water rafting was a no show. After waiting half an hour past the time we were supposed to be picked up (hey it is Uganda time, you never know…) we finally called, only to find out they had lost our reservation and didn’t have time to come get us but would wait for us at the other mzungu hostel across town. We stepped outside into the pouring rain, hailed a boda (motorcycle), and asked him if he knew Red Chilli’s, which of course he knew, he told us. Now it’s not too uncommon to be reassured by a boda man that he knows such and such a place only to jump on and find him stopping at every corner to ask other boda men where your destination is located, but this guy seemed very sure so we got on without many worries. Well about 20 minutes later we ended up at the outskirts of town at a mall called “Garden City” and were told to get off an pay up. Too bad we asked to go to Red Chilli’s Hostel not Garden City Mall… We did convince him to take us to Red Chilli’s (after we stopped to ask no less than 3 boda men where it was located) and we arrived an hour after we had left our hostel. Thankfully the rest of the trip to Jinja was smooth sailing until our return journey the next day.

Another fun fact about transport in Uganda, it’s pretty common to find bodas and taxis with missing and/or broken crucial parts. Speedometer no longer works on your taxi? No problemo since the rest of the car works fine and can still carry as many passengers as you dare to squeeze in your backseat. Well this next boda we took was missing the back foot peg for the passenger, which didn’t seem like too much of a problem when I thought I was facing a 5 minute ride into town and I could handle resting my foot on the muffler for that short amount of time. Well that 5 minute ride was actually a 30 minute ride that has resulted in the bottom of my Old Navy flip flop being completely melted and deformed. Sweet dude, thanks for the souvenir. Other than the boda mishaps, in the last 2 of 3 taxi rides I’ve also encountered a flat tire and a totally broken down taxi due to the driver accidentally pulling out the whole ignition starter rather than just the key when he stopped to cramp 4 more passengers than I thought there was possibly room for. Both times I found myself wondering, “where do my loyalties lie?” “can I get into a new taxi or do I have to wait this one out?”. Turns out I think it’s basically up to your discretion since I stayed with the flat tire taxi but ditched the broken down taxi. My last taxi ride home to Ddegeya from Kampala went smoothly so here’s to hoping my luck has changed for the better.

When I refer to taxis, I’m actually referring to matatus, which are white, 14 passenger vans with blue-checkered pattern around the side. They are the easiest and cheapest way to get to destinations further than is advisable to travel on a boda to. Often drivers have personalized either the windshield or back window with some type of message. Most common are references to the Glory of God or Allah, depending upon the driver’s religion, or the declaration of their allegiance to either Manchester United or Arsenal football clubs. My favorite religious quote so far is that taxi that had “God is de Best” proudly proclaimed across the back window. Then there was the taxi where under the “Emergency Exit” sign it said “Try Again”. I am sure the driver means it as a remainder to try again when things get tough but the irony of it being directly under the Emergency Exit sign made me smile. And my very favorite so far was found on the windshield of a taxi making its way into Kampala. The driver was proudly displaying a tribute to the one and only Sean Puffy Combs with the words “Pee Diddy”. I am sure Diddy will be happy to know that he has one adoring fan in Uganda telling everyone how much he loves “Pee Diddy”.