Glad I didn't!

Before we came to Uganda I went onto the Habitat for Humanity site and looked at what volunteer projects they had here. One of them was digging latrines at Habitat villages. "I can do that!" I thought.

Well, last week I went out to Mukono to the Bead for Life/Habitat village being built by and for the beaders. I was snapping pix and getting some video to document the groundbreaking. The beaders were wielding hoes to dig their foundations - it was all very exciting.

One of the first things a new village needs is, of course, latrines. I'm not talking about little holes in the ground; these are the Grand Canyon of latrines! The guys digging these were down in huge rectangular (they are two-holers) grave-like holes, tossing dirt high above their heads to the surface above. The finished latrines are more than twice the height of the diggers; they dug steps in the sides so they could get out. And it was hot above ground, much less down below.

Fortunately for me, Habitat hired some local, very muscular, workers to dig these things. It was hard to get a picture of the work, but you can get an idea. I think I'll stick to being behind the camera.

Oh! The neighbors have a visitor!

We heard a banging noise yesterday morning. Theresa looked out our bedroom window -- "There are monkeys all over the parking lot!" Yes, they were back again, and in a frisky mood. Swinging from the branches. Bouncing off the top of a Rav4 (that was the banging noise) and down to the ground. Doing their vertical jumps, straight up two or three times their own height to grab a tasty bunch of leaves. Zipping up the drainpipe to the top of the building next to us.

One of the monkeys discovered the open, unscreened bathroom window in a third-floor flat. Pretty soon he stuck his head in cautiously, then his whole body, then the only thing visible was his tail disappearing inside. Perhaps he wanted a drink.

Theresa went and alerted Chantal, the apartment manager, and one of the staff shooed the monkeys away at least from the open window. But everyone then hung around in the parking lot, watching the monkey business in the trees. They are so full of energy -- and are very close to flying, the way they move from branch to rooftop to ground and back.

A little boy in Uganda

A friend at the New Vision was telling me about her 10-month-old. He’s one of the rambunctious ones. He can’t quite walk yet, but he can get up on chairs, and when he does, he gleefully leaps off. Mom is becoming very watchful, and a little nervous.

She had told me he is adopted, so I asked if she knew who his birth parents were, and if that was ever an issue here for adopted children. No, we’ll never know, she said. He was found in a plastic bag, abandoned in a garbage can.

He is a lucky boy, I said, to have ended up in a loving home where he can jump off of chairs. Well, the first three months were a little rough, she said. But he seems to be doing just fine now.

There’s one thing she’s not looking forward to. As he approaches his first birthday, she needs to take him to be tested for HIV. She’s not exactly putting it off, but she’s decided to wait a few more weeks until she’ll have some vacation time from work, and do it then. What happens if he does have HIV, I asked. I don’t know, she said. But my father is a pediatrician. We’ll figure it out.

It’s always there. If it’s not there as a reality, it’s there as a question mark. Even for a little boy whose first word was “No!” because that’s what he hears from his mom when he’s about to jump from the chair.

Home sweet home

Bill said that to his New Vision driver one day when he arrived at our flat and the driver thought it was so funny. Several of you have asked to see pictures of our flat. It's not really as exciting as you might think - very plain and simple. It is at a place called Salama Springs -- Salama means rest, or peaceful. We have managed to have some gatherings in it, even though it is not Queen Anne Hill. The swimming pool is a big hit with us - we go in every day. And there is a small gym, where I go work out most days.

One reason we like it here is because there is a variety of people from all over: Ugandans, Indians, Brits, Italians ... and, of course, Americans (that's us and a few others). Aside from the Ugandans, most of the ex-pats work for NGOs or big international companies.

There is a little restaurant down by the pool and we can get a dinner delivered from there to our flat - I usually get the tilapia (a fish they get from Lake Victoria that is relatively tasteless, but usually pretty fresh) for 4,500 shillings (about $3).

We have cable TV, but that means BBC and CNN and mainly soccer. For entertainment we walk to one of the nearby cafes for a drink - there is one up the dirt road in a big garden just dripping with avocados - or try to go hear music. So far, we've failed - African bands that are supposed to be playing haven't materialized. I don't know how people here know when things happen - they just do. Even the plays - and there are some that sound good - are reviewed, but don't say when they start. We'll get to them eventually. We still have to figure that out.

So that's where we live!

That $8 hotel

What’s the big deal? Everyone wants to know about the $8 a night hotel. Actually, it was a “guest house,” had a bed, and a mosquito net, and an actual bathroom. The big red bug that scurried under the bed when I first arrived in was included in the price. Eventually there was light, once they got petrol for the generator. So no problems.

The bug liked to whiz out from under the bed and hide under my sandals, which was his downfall. I whacked him with a Teva and he went to that big bug heaven in the sky. (No, Sarah, it wasn’t a “palmetto bug,” just some 3-inch African bug with lots of legs.)

Oh, yes, and it had a cold shower, which was just a shower head on the wall of the bathroom, but it WAS a shower, and cold is relative. And a window that I had to have open because it was so hot inside the net, no screen, so I kept the whacking-Tevas close by. Good for intruders of all species.

I took my flashlight and went looking for bottled water one evening in the row of little oil-lamp-lit booths that make up the shopping center. Ha – you would think I had said, “Do you have any Evian water please?” They looked at me both in awe and with something like amusement, and then I saw them selling people water in little plastic bags. (We’ve seen this before, people using straws to sip water from bags; the poor man’s Nalgene carrier.)

So what was I doing in this place? I jounced along the roads with a group of people from an organization called StraightTalk that does AIDS education. My assignment was to document a teachers’ training program that they are doing in neglected districts. In this case, it was Mayuge, in eastern Uganda, about three hours from Kampala. They offered to put me up in the one mzungu hotel in Iganga, where we stayed, but I decided that would be, well, mzungu-like.

I was there for three days of meetings – out in a lovely village set in lush, flat fields. The meetings were held in school classrooms, and there was the usual crush of students wanting to look at and touch the white woman. I don’t think they’ve ever seen this color skin before. In their fuchsia-pink uniforms they swarmed around me like mosquitoes and at first it was fun, then became a little alarming because there were so many and they were all trying to touch me. Except for a few, they did not speak English (they begin teaching in English in P5, which means the fifth primary grade). They were adorable, as are all the children here: barefoot, smiling, big huge eyes just full of questions.

The school served them a breakfast of maize porridge in little blue mugs. The porridge is cooked by a woman in traditional dress in the brick kitchen in a huge pot over a wood fire. The man in the picture brought the firewood on his bicycle. And during the day the students performed lots of tasks around the grounds: dumping garbage in a pit (where it is later burned), using hoes to widen paths, cleaning the classrooms. At the entrance to the school are dozens of signs about avoiding AIDS: “Virginity is healthy,” “Delay sex,” “AIDS kills.” (Yes, this is a primary school. AIDS has touched everyone.)

We ate matoke (bananas steamed in banana leaves), cassava, rice, boiled chicken and beef for lunch, all ladled from big pots by the local women. Everyone ate with their fingers, scooping the matoke up and licking it off; me too. The leader of the workshop introduced me as a “very down-to-earth person – she eats what we eat.” I think it helped that I wouldn’t take any special treatment, including sitting on someone’s lap with my head smashed against the roof as 8 of us squeezed into a truck meant for 4 for the roller coaster ride on the red-dirt road.

Okay, so I pulled one mzungu thing. They were sending me back to Kampala by matatu/taxi. I watched the taxis on the way and thought, “Oh my gawd, this will take about 4 hours and they are filthy and crowded.” (Not to mention the carcasses of dead taxis you see everywhere.) So I pulled the age trick, told them how old I am and they insisted I get a driver home. I kind of like this being honest about age bit.

Extra, Extra, read all about it!

Eric, he of the inquiring mind, asks good questions. “Give me some details about the New Vision, the scale of the paper,” he writes. “I have a feeling it is somewhere between the Bainbridge Review and the Seattle Times. I’ve read that illiteracy is less of a problem than it used to be, but is still a big problem there. Also that nobody can afford to buy a paper, so whole villages will pass a single paper around. And you guys mentioned that mail service is kind of nonexistent. So how do you distribute the paper (piled high on bicycles, right?)? Is it mostly subscriptions or newsstand/kiosk sales?”

Well! I’ll try to keep it blog-brief. With a circulation somewhere around 35,000, I guess you could say the New Vision is somewhere between those two papers. But the numbers don’t mean as much here because, as you note, papers get passed around a LOT. So much so, that when you buy them in the grocery store, all the papers are stapled shut – because so many people were just hanging around the newrack all morning reading but not buying. The number is also a bit deceptive because New Vision also publishes a sister daily, Bukedde (meaning “dawn”) in Luganda, the primary native language of the region around Kampala. Bukedde, which has its own staff and nearly all original content, circulates to another 18,000 people – very little overlap – and according to their marketing research, 18 people read every copy. You do the math, but it makes the number more respectable. And yes, economics plays a big part in why people wait for a passalong copy. The daily papers cost 1,000 Ugandan shillings. That’s a little more than 50 cents. Or, looking at it another way, it’s the same amount the people earn for a full day’s work chipping away by hand at rocks under the very hot Ugandan sun in the stone quarry behind the Acholi quarter where Theresa sometimes goes with her bead project.

Back to New Vision. In addition to Bukedde and the daily/Sunday New Vision, the company publishes three weeklies in rural areas of Uganda, each reported and written in a different language that even most of the people who work in headquarters don’t understand. Plus they publish three or four entertainment/sports-types special publications, and various one-shot projects. So it’s a pretty big operation, with their own presses and an editorial staff I think around 200. (Whose total salary probably equals roughly that of one high-profile American sports columnist, but that’s another story.)

Bingo: you’re right, Eric. With no home mail delivery, subscriptions don’t really work here. Nearly all the sales are in places like our grocery store or out on the street – in little wooden news sheds (not quite kiosks, and just specializing in selling one of the 5 or 6 newspapers available here), or simply kids wandering around with armsful of newspapers. It is very personal! New Vision circulates all around the country, so it has to be taken out there every day on trucks. Bukedde is just Kampala. And people in the newsroom like to reminisce about the days before cell phones. In those days, news from outside Kampala had to be written up out there, then put in an envelope and in the hands of one of the matatu drivers who you HOPED would actually not only not be killed on the trip to Kampala but would also deliver the goods. Ah, those were the good old days!

It is also a bit of a mystery to everyone – people at the paper as well as at the university journalism school – why, considering that literacy is improving and the economic situation is somewhat improving, total circulation of the main papers has stayed pretty flat. Well, we’re working on that! One big clue: When you give people something they really want – like, for instance, the test scores on the big national exams, along with pictures of dozens and dozens of successful students – they buy the paper. Those editions are kept on the stands for a couple days and sell more like 60-70,000 each. Hmmmmm.

There, does that help a bit, Eric? And to everyone else: Sorry about the brief pause in the blog. We were away for the weekend to Jinja, home of the Source of the Nile, and stayed in a lovely place where our outdoor shower had a view right over the rapids of the Nile, and the many exotic birds that flock to the place (plus a small group of, and there is no other way to describe them, blue-balled monkeys; bright blue). After Jinja, I came home, and your regular blogstress stayed “upcountry,” as they call everything here that isn’t Kampala, where she is spending a few days working on another of her projects. More from her later, including, I’m sure, details of what it was like to stay in an $8/night hotel room immediately after the “luxury tented accommodations” overlooking the Nile. I think it was different.

Happy Women's Day?

Yesterday was Women's Day, a national holiday. Many jokes all day, obviously the men are a little nervous about it. Some of them said that meant the women should do the work (like they don't anyway) and others said that they have to at least cook that day because men can't do that - it's not acceptable.

Well, it made me think about something that we find very strange here: co-wives. See the woman in the picture? Her name is Pamela (pronouned Pam-EL-a), she is one of the beaders from the Acholi Quarter. Those are the women who were chased from the north because of the war there. She saw a relative killed right in front of her in her house, and then she ran. She has 4 children, and then 3 more that belonged to her husband's co-wife, who died. (Also living with her are her sister's 2 children - that means 11 people in her house that is the size of our bathroom at home.) Pamela is pretty typical; you marry a man, and then at some point he decides he should have another wife, and you don't have any say in it. He just gets one, and that one is called a co-wife - sometimes there are several of them. One woman I met said her father had 24 children from 3 wives! Another friend of ours is the daughter of a co-wife, and she said her father sent all his children to the same boarding school so they had to be with each other; she didn't think much of that!

Two co-wives showed up at the same time last week at the bead sale and they sat next to each other reluctantly; there was ice in Africa then! But the typical attitude is that it is better to just accept the co-wife than rebel and be left without anything. The young women I have met disagree in their attitudes about it. Most say this just happens in the villages and not in middle-class Kampala, but some say they would have to accept it if their husband made that choice. And even when they say it won't happen, you can tell from their attitude that it might. Yes, it's 2007.

It's also curious that if you want to get divorced, you just have to say it to your partner (presumably, your wife) three times in front of witnesses and the deed is done. The men have the right to the kids, so sometimes the kids go with him and the wife is just left out in the cold.

One of the sad thing about this whole co-wife thing is that the children sort of get bunched up in it all. Many, many of these people have HIV/AIDS so there is a lot of death, and a lot of women who take care of other women's children. And then they can't afford to educate the children, and the kids look unhealthy, because, of course, they are.

So on Women's Day I was thinking of Pamela. I really, really doubt she had a holiday.

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We want to hear from you!

Do they look trendy to you?

This sign in the market seems a little unlikely, though stylish local women DO wear very trendy shoes with high heels that make you wonder how they navigate with the lack of sidewalks and extremely uneven roads. Looking at the sign you kind of want to say, "I'll bet." And unfortunately, you would win the bet: the store itself has bare shelves ...