After being treated to the wonderful bulletpoint email updates of my friend Jeff who’s currently fulfilling a Princeton in Africa post with Imani development in Malawi, it struck me just how many interesting and noteworthy experiences have crossed my path here which aren’t big enough to warrant a dedicated entry, but may still, in aggregate, effectively communicate the paradoxes of my temporary corner of the multiverse. Essentially, I got jealous, and so I’m taking his idea. Thanks Jeff.
And so you’ll find below a slew of novel Ugandan experiences which I felt were worth including either because they broke the way I think about something or they revealed the quirks of globalization or I found them simply delightful. I’ve tried to work in responses to some of the most common questions I’ve gotten from friends and family. I’ve also tried to organize them, but the resist a clean taxonomy. Enjoy!
- There is no catch-all word for “Hello” in Rutooro. Doesn’t exist. The standard greeting for someone you’re crossing paths with is “oly ota” which translates to “How are you?” Assuming you’re doing well, the appropriate response is “kurungi”.
- The consequence of this is that when children are learning English, “Hello” seems to get passed on and “How are you” is instead established as the way to greet English speakers. For Americans, this means when you pass by scores of enthusiastic children (as is quite common in a country where half the population is under 16), you’re greeted with a chorus of “HOW ARE YOU! HOW ARE YOU?!”
- Typically people respond to “How are you?” with “I’m fine.” I’ve only ever associated that response with a resentful teenager giving subtle lip to his/her parents, but to be honest it’s just a more accurate answer than using “I’m good” for our default state of being.
- The consequence of this is that when children are learning English, “Hello” seems to get passed on and “How are you” is instead established as the way to greet English speakers. For Americans, this means when you pass by scores of enthusiastic children (as is quite common in a country where half the population is under 16), you’re greeted with a chorus of “HOW ARE YOU! HOW ARE YOU?!”
- The more formal way of greeting someone is by addressing them with their empaako (usually translated as “pet name” or “praise name”). The use of empaakos is a cultural phenomenon unique to the Batooro people and a few other nearby cultures. When a child is named shortly after birth, in addition to their primary name and their Christian name they are given one of twelve empaako names, each of which is associated with a type of personality or character. To greet someone, you say “Ta (their empaako)” and they respond “Ta (your empaako).
- The twelve empaakos are (in very rough order of how often I’ve encountered them):
- 1. Apuuli
- 2. Atwooki
- 3. Ateenyi
- 4. Araali
- 5. Abwooli
- 6. Amooti
- 7. Akiiki
- 8. Adyeeri
- 9. Abooki
- 10. Achaali
- 11. Abbala
- 12. Okaali
- I’ve been dubbed Araali per a vote of my coworkers. It’s associated with thunder and being a generally loud person, which stands in sharp contrast to my summer camp orientation where our teambuilding exercises revealed that everyone’s first impression of me was dominated by my quietness.
- In the weeks before I got an empaako, I would joking tell people that my empaako was Embuzi, which means “Goat.” This got a laugh every time and I shamelessly milked it as much as I could.
- Oh yeah, most folks here have “Christian names.” Sometimes it’s the primary name everyone calls them, sometimes they only use it with foreigners, and sometimes they go relatively unused.
- Christian names tend to be either 1. Biblical names like Paul or Moses, 2. Names that we consider old-school in the states like Godfrey or Olive, or 3. Positive traits that parents hope their kids will have. Patience and Innocent are common choices, my personal favorites thus far are Immaculate and Success. Really hoping I meet an Integrity one day.
- Rutooro is chock full of precarious situations in which one very common, innocent word is only a letter or poor pronunciation away from a very obscene one. I don’t know how this came to be.
- Enguro means reeds. Emburo is a particularly crass way to refer to male genitals.
- Kulia means “to eat”. Kunia means “to defecate”.
- Worst (best?) of all: Amaizi is water, while Amazi is feces, AND Amizi is, as our guide put it, “female discharge.” What the hell?
- The twelve empaakos are (in very rough order of how often I’ve encountered them):
- Several friends and family have asked what my accommodations are like. Clara, Aly and I live in what KFSP calls “The Director’s House” which is a difficult property to describe. The main structure has a common room with three bedrooms coming off of it, as well as a separate hallway you have to go outside to get into with another three bedrooms off of it. Then there’s a ~15 foot outdoor space behind this structure to a second structure with the kitchen, storage room, and shower room. Then there’s a third small structure behind that which just has the pit latrines. It’s entirely made of cement (even the ceilings) and a very expensive property by local standards. The whole thing is fenced in by barbed wire and has a big loud padlock on the front gate. It feels very strange and yucky to sit at the front porch where we eat breakfast and greet people from behind a barbed wire fence.
- A 23-year-old fella named Richard works at the house from 7am-2pm Monday through Saturday. We love Richard. He cooks breakfast and lunch (which we reheat for dinner), cleans the property every day, does our laundry and dishes, burns our trash (people do that here), and keeps a small garden in our vacant spaces. He has a hilarious laugh and on Saturday’s we’ve been learning to bake together (snickerdoodles were our latest venture).
- Richard asked me to help him move files from his phone to a flash drive recently, and in the process I gave him ~3GB of music from my laptop. The information economy manifests in fascinating ways out here, notably in the handoff of music and movies via flashdrives between friends. I arrived with 312GB of movies downloaded on my laptop and that shit is worth it’s weight in gold. Instead of Redbox or Netflix, you bring a flashdrive to stores in town and copy movies over for a very low fee.
- Additionally, we have a night guard named Patrick (but everyone calls him his empaako Apuuli) who posts up in a chair on the front porch from sunset to sunrise. Every. Single. Night.
- Apuuli hardly spoke English before he took this job a few years ago and has very impressive English skills considering.
- He’s supposed to rotate nights with another night guard (Apuuli Adolf), but he’s been quite ill since having a stroke a few months back.
- Apuuli is also incredibly sweet.
- Because we’re less than a degree north of the equator (34 minutes to be exact), the sun rises and sets at almost the exact same time year round: ~6:45am to ~6:45pm.
- So in terms of hired help, we are undeniably living in luxury by almost anyone’s standards (there’s at least one person paid to be here 19 hours a day). At the same time, we have no running water (it all comes from a giant rain barrel with a faucet at the bottom and Richard boils and filters any water we need to drink), the power is out maybe 1/5th of the time, and we shit in a hole in the ground.
- If that sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not; one gets used to this “lack of creature comforts” with incredible ease, especially when saying we lack anything would be laughable to 99% of the surrounding population. We have no idea how steeped in wealth and comfort we are in America.
- I would happily take this tradeoff for the rest of my life. Even as someone who enjoys cooking, the amount of time and energy saved by having your meals prepared for you (plus the 10-minute-on-foot commute from work) is incredibly liberating for one’s time.
- A tremendous luxury which has only recently become apparent to me is the ownership over a majority of my time which allows me to live flexibly. I’m not super confident in my ability to articulate this… If I’m reading, and I’m feeling drowsy and unable to pay full attention, I can take a nap. If I’m at my computer too long and feel like I need to move, I have the space and time to work out or go for a meander. To an extent the freedom to do this is in fact a new element of my life — naps at USC were limited by the thousand commitments pressing on my time. But I think it’s especially apparent now because the general levels of stimulation have dropped enough that I can actually appreciate it. It sounds corny, but I feel a lot more “in tune” with my body and the flux of its being. It’s really great, and something I’m newly prioritizing in figuring out what my future life might look like.
- A 23-year-old fella named Richard works at the house from 7am-2pm Monday through Saturday. We love Richard. He cooks breakfast and lunch (which we reheat for dinner), cleans the property every day, does our laundry and dishes, burns our trash (people do that here), and keeps a small garden in our vacant spaces. He has a hilarious laugh and on Saturday’s we’ve been learning to bake together (snickerdoodles were our latest venture).
- One night I shared western fairytales with Apuuli (Little Red Riding Hood and The Boy Who Cried Wolf were my go-tos) and asked if he could tell me any local children’s stories. I got to hear:
- 1. The Rabbit and the Hyena, in which the unlikely duo is hunting together and the rabbit fools the hyena into getting crushed to death by a tumbling boulder by making him think it’s the footsteps of a prey animal.
- And then I guess the rabbit feeds on the corpse of the hyena?
- 2. The Chameleon and the Elephant, a variation on The Tortoise and the Hare in which the wise chameleon hitches a ride on the elephant’s tail.
- Apparently there are tons of three-horn chameleons in the Rwenzori Mountains just to the west. I was already considering a big trip to the Rwenzoris, but this might be the deciding factor.
- It wasn’t until I told my second story that Apuuli asked me what a wolf is. Which makes me realize a) We have a lot of fairytales with wolves in them, I guess that was a real threat in Brothers-Grimm-era-Germany? And b) Knowing that animals which live on the other side of the planet exist is a remarkable privilege and historical anomaly.
- There’s also a local variation of the Old Macdonald farm which instead catalogues the livestock of “Old Man John” who has a farm “A long way from Kampala!” No ee-ei-ee-ei-ohs in sight.
- AND ohmygod the alphabet song is sang to a DIFFERENT TUNE! The melody they use here has a considerable pause between N and O which felt very blasphemous the first time I heard it.
- 1. The Rabbit and the Hyena, in which the unlikely duo is hunting together and the rabbit fools the hyena into getting crushed to death by a tumbling boulder by making him think it’s the footsteps of a prey animal.
- Most of the vehicles that you see around here have some little tidbit of wisdom or Godly praise painted on them somewhere as both an identifying feature and an open statement to the world, I suppose. Boda bodas (motorcycle taxis) have a little plate above the front wheel, matatu vans have them along the top of their windshields, and larger trucks have them pretty much anywhere in front or back they feel like. They sayings tend to be things like “FORGIVENESS IS THE WAY” or “LET PRAISE RING” but sometimes the English can get clunky in an interesting way. Personal favorite so far is “TOO MUCH OF ANYTHING IS ALWAYS BAD.”
- This is a thing Clara and I have repeatedly brought up and chuckled over.
- A few weeks ago I overheard a Ugandan man on an extended phone call with somebody regarding the managing of a farm. He was explaining why a particular field hadn’t been planted and said “First we need to use the medicine that burns the grass… RoundUp!” The Environmental Studies major in me lit up.
- Sometimes farms identify themselves as “organic” which seems a little silly here. Pretty much the only distinction is that they don’t spray pesticides, which some larger plantations do.
- Most families feed/supports themselves largely by growing crops on their relatively small plot of land. When you get a view of a landscape it looks like a patchwork quilt of crops dotted with an occasional tin roof and draped over rolling hills.
- GAAAAAH there was another fascinating little globalization sentence like this that I overheard shortly after and it has frustratingly escaped me
- I was chatting with Richard last week and made a reference to McDonalds. Upon further investigation, I discovered that he was unaware of what McDonalds is. He was confused at why I was happy about this.
- This weekend we took a guided hike out to a beautiful site in the Rwenzori foothills where a glacial river bumps up next to a natural hot spring. The locals had engineered little channels to feed the hot and cold water into sitting pools.
- Our guide was explaining that the pools are traditionally gender segregated. “The men’s pool is very very hot!” He said. “And the women’s pool… it’s kinda warm.”
- Clara and I made eye contact and had a good, sustained, dark laugh about this. Needless to say this is my favorite manifestation of the heavily established gender roles here.
- On a less fun note, on multiple occasions we’ve been sitting on the front porch and had a boda of rowdy guys drive by when one of them yells “I wish to have sex with you, madame!” The frustration of experiences like this is nothing special, but the uniquely polite twist perplexes the mind.
- Our guide was explaining that the pools are traditionally gender segregated. “The men’s pool is very very hot!” He said. “And the women’s pool… it’s kinda warm.”
- Last Tuesday I joined our health team for a “mobile clinic” in a trading center thirty minutes south of here. The main health issues people came to us for were…
- 1. Hypertension and related cardiac illness. This surprised me because most people are in good shape until old age out of necessity, but our health coordinator explained that this is a recent development due to the popularization of sweet foods and sodas. Add “diabetes” to your list of American exports.
- 2. Reproductive health issues, by which I overwhelmingly do not mean STDs or STIs. There’s a whole bunch of health and hygienic concerns that can affect that region of body that they never mention in your 7th grade classes. I asked our coordinated what PID stood for after recording it several times – “Pelvic Inflammatory Disease”.
- Many of the questions I’ve gotten from friends and family are variations on “How bad/good are things in Uganda these days?” This is both a. A very legitimate question that I myself sought answers for before coming here, and b. An idea that completely breaks down under even a mild amount of scrutiny.
- We’re getting into the paradox of development here which is probably owed its own entire post somewhere down the line. For now I’ll leave you with these questions:
- 1. Your family lives on less than a dollar a day, because you grow most of the food you need right there on your property. Is that “bad”?
- 2. Every member of your family (but mostly your children) have to walk a considerable distance on a regular basis to fill up jerry cans of water at the nearest bore hole and carry them back. A jerry can is designed to hold 20L, which (because the metric system is dope) converts to 20kg, aka over 40 pounds. But hey, because your kids grow up doing this from about 8 years old, nobody need a gym membership. Is that “bad”?
- Side note, when we think of “tools” we usually picture hammers and wrenches, maybe a shovel and hoe if you’re oldschool. But if living here has taught me anything, it’s that the world runs on jerrycans.
- 3. You struggle to afford primary school for all (or any) of your children. But because they start helping you work the land from a young age, and that knowledge is really the main knowledge your family has needed for generations, they get everything they need to make a living down pat by the time they’re teenagers. Yet, their options are limited by our standards. Is that “bad”?
- We’re getting into the paradox of development here which is probably owed its own entire post somewhere down the line. For now I’ll leave you with these questions:
Zach
photo by Meital Kupfer