Tomorrow I leave Uganda. As cliché as it is, time has flow.
I was only here for 10 weeks, but 10 weeks in Scotland go by pretty slowly, so
I thought 10 weeks here might go by a little slower than they have. I can’t believe my time has come to an end
already. It has been such a positive experience. Everything about it worked
out. It was easy and comfortable and I learned what I hoped to learn and I met
good people I feel connected to.
Maybe this is because Africa really is a place I feel at
home, a place that has cradled so much of who I am and has inspired so many of
my dreams. Maybe this is because the more I travel the easier it gets. Maybe
this is because I was here long enough to feel comfortable and get to know
people, but not long enough to get frustrated with the many things I’m sure
would frustrate me over a longer period of time. Maybe this is because I’m
working for a great organization with great co-workers and don’t have to
struggle with so many of the hurdles that I would have to face if I was working
in a different environment. Maybe this is just because the universe knew I
needed this.
I’m so relieved these weeks went as they did. I was afraid
the Peace Corps had ruined me so to say—making me a jaded person who was overly
critical and bitter about the problems of the world. I think part of that was
the Philippines and part of that was Peace Corps. I’ve met several volunteers
here and while they aren’t as depressed and worn out as many of the volunteers
I served with, they still have their complaints and frustrations and
hardships. So, I am not trying to
belittle their experiences or exaggerate mine, but a lot of the stories that
were so common within PC Philippines are absent here. There’s something different about Uganda that
makes it a lot easier of a place for me than the Philippines was.
This is not to say that Uganda doesn’t have its problems. It
certainly does. In fact, as with every place, there are many problems:
widespread corruption, a president who refuses to leave office, unsustainable
population growth, malnutrition even though Uganda is a rich and fertile land
with excellent agricultural production (many reasons for this), poverty with
the average family earning just $400 a year, HIV/AIDS which some say is on the
decline while others say is on the rise with increasing prostitution, domestic
abuse, the commonality of rape, a lack of natural resources, dwindling water
supplies, widespread human rights abuses especially towards anyone who is
homosexual, a lack of education and the world’s youngest population, which
could be a great asset but it’s currently a problem for the development of
Uganda, just to mention a few.
I am not saying Uganda is a Utopia. But, I am saying Uganda
has been very good to and for me. I saw people who listened to and respected
each other. I saw people loan each other money and food when needed. I saw
people in the upper class of Ugandan society take time to say thank you to
cleaning staff and the staff providing tea. I listened to people discuss religion
and politics and society while doing their everyday tasks. I heard people
question the way things are and I heard people disagree and argue about the way
things should be. I saw people pet stray dogs and tell me not to fear the stray
dogs because dogs are human friends.
I’ve even seen people feed stray dogs. I’ve seen people wrestle with the
problems facing their communities, and attempt to put together solutions. I’ve
been free to speak my mind and be myself without judgment. I’ve become a friend
opposed to just a foreigner temporarily visiting.
I’ve also met some great people who are living and
travelling through Uganda.
Some of the people living here who I am very grateful for
are:
Everyone who works at the hostel—
1)
Benjamin is the manager/receptionist. Since day
one he has helped fill me in on life in Entebbe and has helped me countless
times with basic things. We’ve also gotten to talk a bit about Ugandan politics
and the future of the country. Always friendly and smiling, and always very
patient with me and the many other mzungus.
2)
Kevin is one of the ladies who works at the
hostel. I think she’s the person I was closest to. We spent a lot of time doing
laundry or just hanging out when there wasn’t much work to do talking about
life and our pasts and our goals. She said many foreigners make fun of her name
since it’s a “guys” name. Leave it to foreigners to determine what names are
right or not for people. She has a large family with many siblings. She is the
only “independent” one. Every month she takes part of her earnings and buys
sugar, soap and other household goods to send back to her village. She said if
she doesn’t buy the items then the money is wasted on alcohol etc. She loves
dancing but doesn’t go to clubs. Just dances by herself in her apartment. She
also doesn’t want to get married or have kids anytime soon and her favorite
movie, which she let me borrow but I couldn’t watch due to no cd drive on my
computer, is “Think Like a Man.” She’s strong and determined and hard-working,
and very much able to laugh and find joy in everything she does.
3)
Phyllis is another lady who works at the hostel.
She usually works in the kitchen. She’s hilarious and has a strong
personality/attitude. When people complain she just rolls her eyes. Whenever
there is a strange person (her and I usually think the same people are strange)
she looks at me, we both roll our eyes, and we both laugh. She loves watching
soap operas and dresses with as much attitude as she has.
4)
Brenda is Kevin’s pal. She’s classy and more reserved
than the other ladies. She’s got a warmth and softness about her.
5)
Kanan is a guy who works in the hostel. Since
I’ve met him he’s been smiling no matter what else is happening in the hostel.
He is sweet and nervous. Sometimes I have to switch rooms and without fail when
I get home from work he has moved all my stuff for me and organized my room
just how he knows I do it. He thinks I should already have a few children, but
not too many because people need to stop having 20+ kids (he has 22 siblings). He
thinks it’s funny that I’m so good at hand-washing my clothes. I appreciate
that he thinks I’m good at hand-washing my clothes (other than my host family
many Filipinos told me I had a very strange and not good method of
hand-washing). He also tells me I should be fatter because men like fatter
ladies. Oh beautiful Uganda.
6)
The guard, whose name I still don’t know, has a
love hate relationship with me I’m sure. Every time I ask him to help me he
begrudgingly helps me while usually mumbling under his breath. He is the one
who helped me at 4:30 am the first night I arrived with nowhere to go. I
thought he always hated me cause he always had to stop what he was doing to let
me in the gate or help me with the internet (he also is the internet man), but
when I came back from Rwanda at 2 am he was at the gate waiting for me and told
me they had missed me. He said that he was worried cause he knew my plane was
supposed to arrive at 10pm (we were delayed cause the plane was “broken” and
couldn’t fly). That’s why I think he secretly loves me even if I’m a hassle.
The guys I work with. I’m not sure they would like being on
this blog, so I wont put their descriptions here. But they’re great and have
taught me a lot.
Gertrude, who I already wrote about.
The kids who live in one of the areas I pass to get home
from work everyday. Very few people can say my name. Most people call me
Katrin, but these kids call me Klane…like plane.
Brenda is a teenage girl who works at the Ugandan version of
a sari-sari down the street from my hostel.
I met her right after I arrived. She saw me walking and asked if we
could be friends. Every time I pass the shop, which is at least once a day, we
talk. She wants to be a journalist and she had her first prom this year. She is
the oldest of at least 6 kids. She’s very curious and asks a lot of questions.
A very good skill for a journalist. Also, her English is better than mine. I
hope she’s able to achieve everything she wants.
As far as travellers go, I’ve met my fair share over the
last few months. Most I only see or talk to for a night, but there are a few
who have stayed longer and I’ve gotten to know better. Then there are also
those who I only knew for a night, yet it feels like we knew each other much
longer.
Dientje is a woman from the Netherlands, originally from the
Caribbean, who was stranded in Entebbe for a few days in the middle of an East
African trip. She used to be a VSO volunteer in Tanzania and is absolutely in
love with East Africa. She is fluent in Kiswahili (although it isn’t spoken
here) and seems completely assimilated into East African culture and society.
She lives back in the Netherlands now, but misses East Africa so much that she
became a tour guide during her summers, leading safaris throughout the area.
She is full of respect and graciousness which she extends to everyone she
meets. To her the world and everyone in it is divine and good. She is divine
and good.
Helen is a British lady who is living in South Sudan. She
spent a few nights here in Entebbe while waiting for her friend to visit and
while visiting her boyfriend whose family is here in Entebbe. She is one of the
most open-minded and pure people I have ever met. She doesn’t see bad in anyone
or anything. She loves dancing and adventure and the spirit of Africa. She has
no regard for people who try to tell her what to do and sees everyone equally.
One of my favorite stories is she dated a homeless heroin addict—not that I
like that he was a heroin addict, but it shows she sees the value and
importance of every person and doesn’t pass anyone by. It’s evident that she is
loyal to the people in her life and she has an underlying feistiness about her,
which made for good stories as she’s a missionary for a pretty conservative
sounding organization.
Sofie and Gyanesh are a couple I met on my Nile rafting
trip. They’re great people, both individually and together. Gyanesh is from
Nepal and Sofie is from Norway. They met on a biking trip in Japan. The world
works in pretty great ways. Gyanesh is already a doctor and Sofie is in
med-school doing an internship here at the largest government hospital in
Kampala, Mulago Hospital. They were great people for me cause they were laid
back and struggled with a lot of things that I did associated with the rafting
trip, the place we stayed, and the relationship between the tourism industry
and the local communities. Sofie thought about the world in a similar way to
me. It was refreshing to have some of the conversations we had about
dependency, aid, and development. Both were interested in water issues, which I
enjoyed talking about as well. While they were in a group of ten they spent the
night after rafting with me and the group of guys I hung out with at the hostel
(more on them later) and then when their friends went biking the next day they
went into town with me. It was a nice two days with them. It’s always
refreshing to be around kindred spirits. One of my favorite things about them
though was that they were as amused by the next set of guys as I was.
I spent two nights and three days in Jinja for my rafting
trip. The first night I got there I obviously didn’t know anyone. The main room
was an open-air room that overlooked the Nile. Absolutely gorgeous, and very
cliché-backpackers hostel type of place. Lots of couches and lots of beer and
lots of people just hanging out. I sat alone and was soon called over by this
group of kayaking guys. They had all just met at the hostel, but for my time
there they were always together and they soon adopted me into their group. Let
me just say these guys were something. Each of them had very strong
personalities and then the way they interacted with each other was thoroughly
entertaining. I think I was so amused by these guys cause they reminded me a
bit of older versions of my neighborhood growing up.
I shared a room with the two American guys of this group.
When I first went in to put my stuff down there was a guy in bed. It was the
middle of they day. He said he was very ill. He had a giant bucket beside his
bed. This guy, Andy, was sick for the entire three days I was there. He seemed
to be a trooper though. He was on a white water kayak trip with his friend,
Ted. They had kayaked the Zambezi and then come to kayak the Nile.
Ted’s an energetic guy. Loves kayaking. Seems to love life
in general. I guess people who take time to go on kayak, or similar types of,
trips typically do enjoy life. Everything excited Ted, but I don’t think he was
very aware of a lot of things. For instance one night he was talking about
kayaking to a village a ways down the Nile. He met a 19 year old guy there who
was telling him about the circumcision ritual that takes place when guys in the
village are 18. This blew Ted’s mind. Everything about the ritual and practice.
He was so animated in telling the story about this guy and in telling his own
thoughts on all of this. He also really wanted to eat food that wasn’t prepared
at the hostel. So one night he went out to the street to eat some stew from one
of the nearby food stalls. You would have thought this event of getting stew
was better than striking gold. Ted made it sound like the greatest event of his
life. Ted took everything with stride and seemed open to things and curious,
but didn’t hesitate giving his opinion, which was often very loud and very
American, on things.
Then there was Pierre. His father’s French, but he grew up
and still lives in London. He’s an orthopedic surgeon and was treating Andy.
This guy was something. He’s the one who first brought me into this motley
crew. Pierre was vulgar and shallow and almost impossibly superficial. He had
no care about being culturally sensitive or respectful. He was the ring leader
of the group, uniting guides and guys rafting/kayaking the Nile for the first
time. I think he was also a really good person though. I think a lot of his
image was a front. He told me he wants to retire soon and do something that
lets him spend more time in nature skiing and kayaking. He likes politics and
international relations and is beyond opinionated when it comes to social
issues. Most of the time he would mock various women for being fat or obnoxious
or stupid or dull. This included his girlfriend who he referred to as “boring.”
But, when the issue of circumcision came up he went on a giant rant about how
terrible female genital mutilation is. And when no one was looking he’d be
playing with the local kids and petting stray dogs.
There were also a few raft and kayak guides. These guys are
everything you imagine raft/kayak guides to be. They were from Canada and the
U.S. They loved adrenaline, beer and were tired of drunk girls puking all over
the place after the hostel’s famous booze cruises. These guys, along with Ted,
Andy, and Pierre loved recounting their most epic rapids. They’d been
everywhere in the world rafting and kayaking and working in hostels. Living the
life. There was also an Australian guy who wasn’t a kayaker or rafter. Just
hanging out. He seemed in awe of everything the kayakers were talking about. He
was more reserved and mostly just looked as stunned as I felt by some of the
conversations.
My two nights with these guys made me feel at home. I was so
entertained by the way they all interacted with each other and the way they all
approached their time in Jinja. I felt like I was back in Erie on a summer
night for a bit. While many of the things these guys were saying and the way
they were talking about various issues was offensive and upsetting, there was
something comfortable and inviting about them. I felt like I had known them my
entire life and was glad they let me crash their club for a couple nights.
The last set of foreigners I met who were particularly
significant to me are two stranger ladies whose names I never learned. We only
had one night together in Entebbe, but I think they shared a bit of my soul, or
at least they are on similar journeys to the one I’m on right now. I had a
mini-life break down unsure of what I’m going to do in L.A. or where I will
live or how I will adjust to being back in the states again after being away
for so long. And they were great. They had similar breakdowns at the same
point. After that we spent a lot of time talking about how lucky we are to have
such patient people in our lives who support our wanderings and encourage us to
keep doing these things that we do and who are able to calm us down and handle
our constant rollercoasters of emotions and new ideas and uncertainties.
The one girl is a PhD student from Davis. She is studying
something about agriculture and is specifically looking at bean seed storage in
a region of Uganda. Her research is so specific and seemed really complicated
to me, someone who knows nothing about bean seed storage. It was impressive
though and she was so passionate about bean seeds. She loves Uganda and loves
beans and seeds. She spent three years before this in South Africa studying
some sort of agriculture. She is going back to the states for a few months then
will come back to Uganda for two’ish years for 6 months at a time to finish her
research.
The other girl is a PCV who is about to COS and head back to
the states. I think every PCV ends up going back to the states significantly
stranger than when they left. I also think every PCV changes pretty
drastically, so the process of getting back into your old lifestyle is quite
the process. You have changed, but you don’t know exactly how. And so many of
the people you go home to haven’t changed. They are still doing the same things
in the same way with the same friends. They believe the same things they did
when you left and still think in the same way. Meanwhile you’re no longer really American or
the nationality of your host country. You’ve adopted this third nationality
sort of attitude and persona. So, she was preparing for that transition as well
as trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life.
It was the perfect night for me to meet both of them. Just
what I needed. People who understood my anxiety and concern, while also sharing
the sheer excitement and joy of moving back to the U.S. to be close to people
we miss and love.
It’s amazing how people come and go from our lives. Each
person leaving their mark on us. I was talking to a friend who has spent the
last two years travelling and working odd jobs wherever he finds himself. We
were talking about this idea that who we are is really just a series of
different people we’ve met throughout our lives. The more people you meet, and
the more people you let affect you, the more you simultaneously lose who you
are while also building and gaining parts of yourself. When we meet people we
shed a lot of the preconceived notions we have of ourselves, and we take bits
of with us. We do this by learning from them and trying to carry their stories
with us. It often makes me wonder who
I’d be and what I’d be like if I haven’t met all the people I have over the
last 25 years. I’m grateful I’ve crossed paths with so many good people who
have challenged me to live freely and fully.
