Yes, we are back!

And believe me, two days before Thanksgiving we are very grateful to be back home, especially after a journey that took almost 33 hours, door to door, including a 7-hour layover in Amsterdam where we walked around the city to stretch our legs -- unfortunately in 33 degree weather with light snow falling! We were so glad to see Sarah at the airport, and to sleep in our own comfortable bed.
This was a different sort of trip than last year's, when we had the luxury of enough time to travel around Uganda so much. It was nearly entirely work this year. That was our choice, but we would build in a little more time for fun next time. Between us, we trained nearly 350 journalists at 4 different media organizations in 2 countries, covering everything from the rudiments of punctuation to the higher-level skills of enterprise reporting and newsroom management. Whew! No wonder we were tired at the end.
One highlight of this trip was that the training truly was "we." Last year I did the bulk of it, since I had the fellowship. This year, Theresa and I did most of it together, from the organization of the sessions to their delivery. That was so wonderful. Our styles complement each other quite nicely, and simply having a partner -- and such a smart and experienced one -- made my life a lot easier! This was another experiment, to see if we could make it work as a team, and my vote is definitely in: we can! Thanks, T., you are the very best.
The other highlight of the trip was seeing Eric at work training children how to use computers. Hearing about it via e-mail can't come close to describing the impact of actually seeing him with a bank of 10 mini-computers, 10 primary-age students absolutely intent on figuring out how to make the mouse work using Eric's custom-made software. And everyone we told about his work -- from drivers to colleagues at the newspaper to old friends -- was so impressed at what he is doing for the children of Uganda, and so grateful to him for it. (You will find a link to the site for his Maendeleo Foundation over in the right-hand column of this blog. Consider it for Christmas presents!) (End of commercial interruption.)
OK, everyone. Now we move on to some very enjoyable activities back home -- catching up with the nearby family at Thanksgiving; and preparing for the VERY exciting trip back east for Liam and Meg's wedding next month. And ah, how wonderful it is to have a NEW politician's voice on the radio news every day.

Until next time, Bill and Theresa (unless Theresa decides to add a word!).

What about in your village?

One day on the way home from a training, Theresa and I were chatting with Yowasi, the chief New Vision driver, who has been both a good companion and a source of insights into a part of Uganda quite different from the urban, relatively sophisticated world of the journalists we work with.

We told him I like to swim for exercise, and that Americans HAVE to exercise to stay fit, since we spend so much time at desks. We commented on how physically hard so many Ugandans work -- doing nearly everything by hand, from the daily laundry to building tall buildings and highways. In our country, we said, people use machines to do all those things. Theresa talked about watching a man digging a latrine, working in a narrow hole nearly twice as deep as he was tall, under the hot mid-day sun.

Yowasi laughed, as he nearly always did at our remarks, but he agreed. Some of those latrine holes are as much as 30 feet deep, he added -- the man needs a ladder to go in and out. And he sort of accepted the fact that in Seattle we use machines for heavy jobs. "But," he asked, "what about in your villages? What do they dig with in your villages?"

Another time, he asked about something he had heard: "In America, do you use the card to pay for goods?"

Well, yes, we told him. We hardly ever pay with cash (which is the only way most people pay for most things in Uganda -- as we did last year, for a car we bought for $8,000 -- paid in a very large stack of Ugandan bills worth about $10 each).
"But in your villages -- do they have the card there?" he asked.

It is an excellent way of triangulating on an important element of Uganda. Life is still very different in Kampala (or the handful of other major cities) and in "the village." Everyone, even in Kampala, still has a village, the place they come from and where extended family still lives. They routinely talk about things that happen "deep in the village." People who live in villages still can subside with little use for cash (luckily, since there is little way to earn it), growing their food and bartering -- but when they need money for health needs or school fees, it is a problem. No, nobody in the Ugandan village uses "the card."

Things will gradually change -- but for now, the gap between Kampala and the village can sometimes seem nearly as striking between Seattle and Kampala.

The tree outside our window

One of the small but delightful pleasures of our life here comes on those mornings when Theresa and I don't have to leap out of bed for another training session, but can take a little time, have our coffee, and watch out the window. The day starts, as it always does, like clockwork, with the robin chat's melodic song right at 6:17 a.m. -- just as the first light of day begins to appear to the east. There may be a short period of red sky but nearly no "sunrise" as we're used to it; instead, the skies are instantly bright and another equatorial day is here.

That's when the fun begins. Lying in our bed, we can see out the window to an enormous spreading tree in the neighboring lot. Sometimes it is populated with starlings -- maligned, unattractive birds back home, but a gorgeous iridescent blue in Uganda. Sometimes, we will see the bright yellow beak of a turaco through the leaves, and perhaps its trademark crested head.

Best of all, though, is when the monkeys decide this is the place for their morning frivolities. Then we will see them everywhere: running along the large horizontal branches, their tails silhouetted against the morning sky; leaping for the ends of smaller branches to enjoy the "elevator" ride down to a lower level; and when the young ones are around, gathering in clumps of 5 or 6 together, wrestling and chasing each other through the thick leaves, one or the other of them popping straight up above the branch before crashing down on its siblings.

When they are around, the bird life vanishes, but no matter: the monkeys provide all the entertainment we need by themselves. If ever we had a doubt where the phrase "monkeying around" came from, our primate friends here at Salama Springs have certainly laid it to rest.

The new baby

A couple of weeks ago we went to see Prossy's new baby girl. Prossy and I became really good friends last year when she was our housegirl at Salama Springs, but this year I hadn’t seen her because she was on maternity leave and didn’t want me to see her pregnant, for some reason. So once she “produced,” as they say here, we were invited to her little house for lunch. Eric came along too, driving us there with me on the usual little 3-legged stool.

Prossy’s husband Tony is a great guy who still works at the apartments so we see him often. They named the baby Eve after Tony’s mother. (There was some talk of naming her Theresa, but I said no! Think of the responsibility!)

The baby is beautiful and Bill and I got to hold her; I think she looks like me, but no one else agrees! The family lives in one room, with a double bed that takes up half the room; the bed now holds Tony and Prossy, the baby, and 2-year-old Mark. Six-year-old Brian sleeps on the floor on a foam pad (which is better than most Ugandan kids have; they usually sleep on a straw mat).

Tony wants to get a better job, and Eric spied a book on his shelf about computer programming, though Tony has no idea what computers even do. We talked about his using some land Prossy’s mother left her family to raise pigs or chickens or something, just to give them a boost. But Tony said he couldn’t do that because her family might think he was a greedy son-in-law, so he has to buy his own land. It’s so difficult here! There are all these cultural barriers to getting ahead.

As when we visited Prossy’s home before, the entire neighborhood of kids showed up. Mostly they liked petting Eric’s hair, which is relatively long, straight, and light-colored – all apparently very exotic things. They just about knocked him over trying to touch it!

Of course we had to eat huge lunches - you can't visit a Ugandan's home without being served food. I felt bad because Prossy did the cooking, which involves a little charcoal stove, huge amounts of matoke wrapped in banana leaves, and many trips in and out of the house. And only two weeks after she'd had the baby. But Tony helped with the dishes, making him a VERY UNUSUAL Ugandan man. We felt very honored to be invited to share the meal with them. They are good friends.

Where were you when ...?

Oh, we are excited. More than excited. So excited that we got up at 3 a.m. to watch CNN and bite our fingernails until it was clear that our guy - almost-president Obama - would make it! At about 4, we went over to our friends Torkin and Charles's apartment where several other mzungu ex-pats gathered with champagne at the ready. There was a dog, a baby, and lots of sleepy-eyed, but charged-up mzungus. Bill and I were ready for anything; we remember other elections with bottles of champagne that stayed corked ...

Thank the lord for CNN! Our Internet was down and CNN was our lifeline, holograms and all. Earlier in the night the power kept going off and we panicked a bit. But all went well: When Virginia went for Obama, Bill screamed and uncorked that bottle: He remembers a "coloreds" section in the local theatre not that long ago (okay, so we are old, it is a little long ago, but still!). And then when CNN projected Obama the winner, we went wild! Screamed, cried ... I mean, now we can stop pretending to be Canadians!

The Luganda version of New Vision today had a huge headline and even bigger picture of Obama. The headline says, "Ninze ntebe" or "I'm waiting for the chair."

This is one of those moments where years from now people will ask, "Where were you when Obama was elected?" And we will remember our friends, and the robin chat singing out the window in the big tree in Kampala during Obama's spectacular speech. And our tears as we breathed, "At last."

Obama fever, Part 2

Theresa is right: Ugandans are absorbed by the the US election campaign, and especially Barack Obama.

But if Ugandans are absorbed, then Kenyans are obsessed. No, not obsessed. They are freaking out.

I was in Nairobi for one week. Every day, the main newspaper (and the one where I was training), the Daily Nation, published 4-5 tabloid pages about the campaign. They published nearly the full, very long, New York Times editorial endorsing Obama. They had columnists speculating from Kenya and from America; wire stories, their own stories. They reported on the police set up a 24-hour guard around the home of Obama's Kenyan grandmother so she would not be bothered.

Some Kenyans I talked about laughed about the extent of the obsession. Renaming your children Obama? Maybe that is a little over the top. But there is much thoughtful nuance, as well. The Nation driver who took me to the airport said he really respected Obama because when he came and spoke in Kenya, after being elected Senator, he said Kenya needed to do a better job of facing up to corruption. That honesty was what endeared the man to this driver.

But the fascination and excitement are universal. There are huge electronic billboards with pictures of Obama and his wife. EVERYONE who finds out you are an American -- up to and including the immigration officer who had to check me out of Kenya, and who wouldn't let me go for close to 10 minutes -- wants to talk about it. They are concerned: will you be able to vote? (And they are a little surprised that we were able to vote early. Of course, like theirs, our country has had its share of voter glitches, so the surprise is not surprising.) They are well informed; they know the stands of both candidates, and they're familiar with the polls -- although, as in Uganda, they also are perhaps overly confident that the polls will accurately predict the results. They are a bit baffled by this Electoral College thing; despite features and graphics in the newspaper trying to explain it, I still had people ask me: "Why doesn't the majority vote in the country decide it?" I gave a short history lesson about our system, with its strong protection for states' rights, but couldn't help thinking: Yes, good question.

And that driver also told me: There will be very many people coming in to work late on Wednesday (the results will start to trickle in here around 4 a.m. local time Wednesday morning), or not at all. And the streets may be full. How exciting!

Gee, tough choice!

One of the questions that continues to surprise me and Theresa is when we order a drink – a beer, a soda, a mineral water – and the waitress asks: Warm or cold? At first this one really gave us a jolt. “Uh – let me think about it minute. Here we are on the equator, it is humid and pushing 90 degrees, and the sun is beating down on this sidewalk table. What the heck – let’s have it cold!”

But it is apparently not an idle question. When I was in Nairobi, I had drinks a few times with my friend Peter, a Ugandan now living and working in Kenya. Whether he was ordering a Tuskers Malt (the best-known beer of Kenya) or a Coke, he would order not one bottle, but two: one cold, one warm. And then he would mix them until, Goldilocks-like, it was jussssst right.

Now that is a man with a refined sense of drink temperature.

The African candidate

It is amazing to us how strongly the people here feel about Obama getting elected. Everywhere we go people ask us who we are for in the election, and when we say Obama they get excited. There is a Club Obama on Ggaba Road, there are bumper stickers and tee-shirts. And last week there was an article in the local paper about how Obama's father's town has requested from the Kenyan government that they fund an airport that could accommodate Air Force One in the event he decided to come visit.

Yesterday, the New Vision had a cartoon of a bunch of white people chanting "Obama" as they head to the polls. Obama stands in front of the "swearing-in venue" holding a Bible and an agenda. The number one item on the agenda is "Northern Uganda situation," followed by "AIDS" and "Darfur." At first I wondered if this was sarcasm - I mean, the US is in dire straights in a number of areas, and it is laughable that Obama would first turn to the problems in Africa.

But under the cartoon, the caption says: "Uganda is at the top of US presidential candidate Barrack Obama's agenda."

It is actually kind of endearing that the Ugandans (and Kenyans) feel that they are about to get a native son in the White House. They are so proud, and also almost as desperate as we Americans are for change in the global scene. Someone told me today that some Ugandans thought they would have a chance to vote because they have relatives in America. Would that they could!

Walking to the market at dusk

Two posts in one day, aren't you lucky. Once again, we are taking advantage of a better connection at the office. We ARE hooked up to Internet at our flat, but it is sooooo slow it might be worse than having no connection at all! Thanks for your long and agonized comments, Becky and Taz - maybe we should stay over here!

Very often we walk over to the market in the evening, and evening here lasts about two minutes, so we end up walking in the dark. Those of you who have been here know that “rush hour” is from 7 to 10 as people walk home from work, grabbing a meal from streetside vendors: Women squatting on the 3-legged stools and selling pancakes cooked in oil in a kind of wok, or roasting maize that smells just like popcorn (but is very tough and coarse); men roasting muchomo (skewers of goat or chicken meat), or chicken pieces at tall bbqs. Shoe vendors are especially prevalent right now, for some reason. They spread out scrubbed and sparkling black shoes on tarps or elaborate wooden shoe stands – the shoes are all used, but look amazingly new. And while they await customers, the vendors work in little sudsy basins cleaning yet more shoes.

It’s like magic – as soon as dusk falls, the vendors appear. And little tables pop up in the parking lots so people can have a Krest or Fanta (sodas) in comfort. Suddenly every nook and cranny comes alive. It’s our favorite time to go out to see what’s going on.

Vanity marketing

These signs – and more like them that we’ll leave to your imagination – sprouted one day on power poles everywhere in Kampala. Unlike in the US, big “bums” and hips are considered glamorous – I wish I had known years ago that developing such things was not only acceptable but appreciated! All those hot fudge sundaes I passed up …

Actually, the signs are causing an uproar in the letters to the editor, and on Ugandan TV. People think the ads are inappropriate. I can’t imagine there will be a “no posting” law passed as in Seattle, though. Somehow that doesn’t fit the anything-goes culture.

Dripping, in more ways than one

It is the rainy season here and we are learning just what that means. One minute the sky is a blue blue – not a cloud to be seen. Then suddenly tall blowsy clouds reach high into a grey sky. “Where do they come from?” Bill asks every time. And it’s true, they just appear.

Then the wind starts blowing and soon there is a torrent of rain as if someone in the sky has dumped a bucket over the whole city. It is so loud you can’t hear anything else, and often lightning and thunder rock the city too. And not rolling thunder but cracking, window-shaking thunder, the kind that makes you want to run for cover.

In about an hour it is all gone and the sky is blue again. A half hour later everything has dried up and we are back to dripping – this time sweat instead of raindrops. We are pretty much always dripping and soggy – it is 80 degrees and humid until that cool wind sweeps through. (We also drip Deet, since we slather it on like lotion. Mosquitoes and rain seem to be partners.)

The downpour happens daily, or at least every other day. The Ugandans predict the weather with absolute certainty. We like to ask them if it will rain or not just to see what they will say – they all have very definite opinions about it. One morning when it was hot I asked a Ugandan guy if the heat would bring rain. “It will rain,” he said very seriously, nodding his head. “It will rain this afternoon, or tonight, or tomorrow.”

And he was right – what a weatherman!

By the way, we still have no Internet at Salama Springs. The residents are up in arms about it and there are promises, but no action so far. So if you don’t hear from us via email, and if the blog is a bit slow in coming, that’s the reason.

We're here!

Sorry, everyone for lack of posts since we arrived. We have NO internet connection at good ol’ Salama Springs, but we are hoping they get it fixed next week. But we are fine.

After the looong flights (9 hours to Amsterdam, 8 hours to Entebbe, and 4 hours layover), we were met at the new and improved Entebbe airport by Eric and Asia. Of course it was great to see them.

In typical Uganda fashion, the car and driver they’d hired to get us didn’t work out and instead Eric was driving in his retrofitted Rav 4. The back seat has been pulled out so that his mobile computer setup can fit in, but he’d installed two three-legged stools for us to sit on. Since he’s somewhat night blind and doesn’t usually drive in the dark, he had Asia sit in front to navigate.

Perched on our little stools, which are one-size-fits-all-bottoms (except ours) and clutching the handholds above our windows, we learned that Eric has turned into a Ugandan driver. That means swerving past slow(er) but speeding cars, hitting potholes that sent us flying, and generally alternating between making us laugh and scaring us to death. My head hit the roof more than once, and the little stool spilled me out; I finally figured out that maintaining your balance is kind of like skiing moguls (which I was never good at).

Our jetlag disappeared as we sped down the darker-than-dark Entebbe Road, past the little markets and rivers of (also dark) people, into Kampala center, wound by the clock-tower and zoomed to the new intersection (which used to be a roundabout). Then through crowded Ntinda to Eric’s apartment, which is HUGE, quiet and extremely nice. We had some of the fresh juice Asia prepared for us, which took the edge off a very adventurous and adrenalin-filled re-entry.

We stayed at Eric’s for two nights, then to Salama Springs, where our old friends there met us with huge greetings.

Cranking up the blog again

What is that saying about how you can’t go home again? We’re going to test the theory somewhat as Bill and I return to Uganda this week, this time for two months.

We’ll be training journalists at various newspapers, mainly the New Vision in Kampala. And seeing son Eric, who is now living there running his non-profit, the Maendeleo Foundation.

We’ve been back home for a year almost to the day we leave. It’s funny how Uganda has stuck with us during this whole time. If I close my eyes I can see the red dirt roads, the kids running out to stare, the little paraffin lamps lighting the markets at night. We have kept up with friends we made there, both Ugandans and ex-pats, and of course have a connection with the place because of Eric. The people we met there are certainly interesting and stimulating people!

Also it’s been front and center even while we’ve done the things we missed in our nine months away from home. We’ve hiked in our mountains, where we end up comparing grizzlies to gorillas, and imagining how zebras would look on a mountain prairie. We’ve taken road trips and 9 hours in the car in the US doesn’t seem so bad after 6 hours bouncing on the Ugandan roads.

And yet, I have to wonder how it will be to return. We are more cynical, certainly, than before, having seen the imbalances for ourselves, and the difficulties of making a sustainable difference. And for some reason we expect things there to be the same, though we know that they have changed, and we might not like that.

I guess we’ll see. We’ll be keeping the blog going (by popular demand!), so check in now and then to see if, in fact, you can go home again.

(And, yes, we have voted – go Obama.)