After getting my visa and grabbing my bags, I braced myself for the relatively small, yet still intimidating, mass of Ugandans waiting in the one and only lobby of the Entebbe airport holding signs and yelling names in broken and almost recognizable English. Lacey (the coordinator from Notre Dame) and Galvan (the director of the UPFORD program, which is the partnership between ND and Uganda Martyrs University (UMU)) had not yet arrived. As I roamed the small 20x20 foot area designated as our meeting spot for about 30 minutes, I was only slightly nervous that there had been a mix up in our various email exchanges prior to my arrival. I told the many Ugandan men who approached me to offer me rides as confidently as I could that I did, in fact, already have a driver. And thankfully, Lacey and Galvan arrived shortly thereafter.
We hopped in the white UMU pick up truck, and Lacey explained that I would be accompanying them to a couple of meetings they had to go to in Kampala before we headed back to campus. She apologized for dragging me along on my first day after so much travel and said she'd take us to a quick breakfast before we started our day's activities. She chose a quaint hotel called the Gately Inn, which quite obviously targeted Americans travelers looking for the more upscale African vacation. We chose a table on the outdoor patio surrounded by rather comfy couches with animal-printed upholstery. Various tribal vases and other African decor (which an American tourist would both expect and be satisfied to see) surrounded the patio, as did greenery and bright flowers of all sizes. I ordered yogurt with granola and fruit and coffee with African spices, which Lacey explained included a tasty milk/cream mixture of sorts. The food tasted surprisingly similar to a typical American yogurt parfait, and after three cups of the delicious coffee, my naive self was convinced that maybe my Ugandan dining experiences wouldn't be as bad as I had been warned. This rather optimistic thought lasted only until dinner later that night...
I spent the majority of my first day wide-eyed, absorbing as much of the Ugandan way of life that I could through the backseat window of the UMU van. We first drove through Kampala (the capital city of Uganda) and a number of other supposedly "large" towns for about an hour until we reached the more rural areas. Not including the two stops we made for the meetings, the ride to campus was about a three hour drive. Street vendors, selling everything from bed frames to fruits and vegetables, were set up along the road throughout the ride. Farms growing bananas, mangos, avocados, and corn, among other produce I could not even begin to identify, were also in abundance. As we passed through villages, I was stricken by a poverty, which I have never before experienced. Children, who should have been in school, were running around in ratty clothes without shoes. Homes and storefronts looked as if they had been recently struck by a terrible natural disaster, with tin roofs that appeared to be sliding off and dirt floors covered by a sheet of fabric in the corner that served as a bed for the entire family. Although these observations, along with a number of other experiences I have had over the past five days, were incredibly heart wrenching, they continue to remind me why I am here and give me the willpower I need to carry on.
Upon my arrival at UMU, Lacey gave me a short tour of campus while we waited for the other three Notre Dame students (Katie, Dominic, and Curtis) to return from their day's work in the field. All of them were incredibly welcoming and helped me carry my luggage back to the room that Katie and I would be staying in for the next six weeks. I barely had time to catch a breadth, much less unpack, before it was off to our daily Luganda lessons to learn the local language. I quickly learned the routine of these lessons: we arrive the staff pub (UMU's version of a campus café) around 5:30pm, order some sort of soda (which is 10x better than American soda, as it is made from real sugar), and sit on picnic-style benches under a tree to take notes from one of our two Lugadan teachers. This first lesson was a particular challenge, as I had not yet become accustomed to the Ugandan accent and often misunderstood even the English words our teacher was pronouncing.
I was definitely still in the honeymoon stage during my first dining hall experience that night. As I stood in line with about 100 other people, I patiently awaited the server to slop on a huge mound of rice and a blob of corn starch called posho and proceed to cover both helping of carbs with an oversized serving of beans. Sure, the food was a little bland, but I could not yet appreciate the flavor-withdrwal the other students, who had been eating this food for a week, were experiencing. After day five, I most definitely have arrived at this appreciation. Usually instead of posho they serve matoke, which are the cooked mashed bananas that I prefer, but still, we have learned to add flavor to our meals in any way we can (i.e. by adding chopped avocado or hot chili sauce). On days when they serve meat instead of beans, I began to enter an even more extreme food coma from starch-overload and have learned to resort to my quickly-dwindling stash of granola bars and nuts.
Although I was fading quickly that first night from my second wave of jet lag, I put on my rally cap after dinner as Katie, Dominic, Curtis, and some of the Ugandan students were headed to a local bar in celebration of the next day's national holiday, Hero's Day. We stayed at a small bar, which consisted of a patio covered by a wooden overhang, for an hour or two before we approached some street vendors who were selling a food called rolex. The other ND students had been raving about them for quite some time, so I figured I'd give it a try. A rolex stand consists of a small counter, behind which a street vendor stands with circular grill atop an open flame, where he cooks two eggs. On the counter, he chops up tomatoes, onions, and peppers and adds the mixture to the eggs to make a sort of a flat omelet. When this is done, he rolls everything up in two tortillas to make the equivalent of a breakfast burrito. Compared to our bland meals at the dining hall, rolex are a burst of flavor and well worth the 1000 Ugandan shillings (or US $0.40).
Before making the half-mile walk back to campus, we all sat on a stone wall to eat our rolex and stare up at the stars, which I had been fixated on since the beginning of the night. As the others pointed out constellations that I never even knew existed, I was amazed by the clarity and brightness of the stars that stretched across the entire sky. It was the perfect way to end my first night in Uganda. Yes, I was reminded of my smallness as a single person in this huge world, filled with people I will never meet, food I will never try, and places I will never visit. Even more importantly, however, I found that by allowing myself to learn from others, I can appreciate, on an even larger scale, the beauty of all things larger than myself.
I spent the majority of my first day wide-eyed, absorbing as much of the Ugandan way of life that I could through the backseat window of the UMU van. We first drove through Kampala (the capital city of Uganda) and a number of other supposedly "large" towns for about an hour until we reached the more rural areas. Not including the two stops we made for the meetings, the ride to campus was about a three hour drive. Street vendors, selling everything from bed frames to fruits and vegetables, were set up along the road throughout the ride. Farms growing bananas, mangos, avocados, and corn, among other produce I could not even begin to identify, were also in abundance. As we passed through villages, I was stricken by a poverty, which I have never before experienced. Children, who should have been in school, were running around in ratty clothes without shoes. Homes and storefronts looked as if they had been recently struck by a terrible natural disaster, with tin roofs that appeared to be sliding off and dirt floors covered by a sheet of fabric in the corner that served as a bed for the entire family. Although these observations, along with a number of other experiences I have had over the past five days, were incredibly heart wrenching, they continue to remind me why I am here and give me the willpower I need to carry on.
Upon my arrival at UMU, Lacey gave me a short tour of campus while we waited for the other three Notre Dame students (Katie, Dominic, and Curtis) to return from their day's work in the field. All of them were incredibly welcoming and helped me carry my luggage back to the room that Katie and I would be staying in for the next six weeks. I barely had time to catch a breadth, much less unpack, before it was off to our daily Luganda lessons to learn the local language. I quickly learned the routine of these lessons: we arrive the staff pub (UMU's version of a campus café) around 5:30pm, order some sort of soda (which is 10x better than American soda, as it is made from real sugar), and sit on picnic-style benches under a tree to take notes from one of our two Lugadan teachers. This first lesson was a particular challenge, as I had not yet become accustomed to the Ugandan accent and often misunderstood even the English words our teacher was pronouncing.
I was definitely still in the honeymoon stage during my first dining hall experience that night. As I stood in line with about 100 other people, I patiently awaited the server to slop on a huge mound of rice and a blob of corn starch called posho and proceed to cover both helping of carbs with an oversized serving of beans. Sure, the food was a little bland, but I could not yet appreciate the flavor-withdrwal the other students, who had been eating this food for a week, were experiencing. After day five, I most definitely have arrived at this appreciation. Usually instead of posho they serve matoke, which are the cooked mashed bananas that I prefer, but still, we have learned to add flavor to our meals in any way we can (i.e. by adding chopped avocado or hot chili sauce). On days when they serve meat instead of beans, I began to enter an even more extreme food coma from starch-overload and have learned to resort to my quickly-dwindling stash of granola bars and nuts.
Although I was fading quickly that first night from my second wave of jet lag, I put on my rally cap after dinner as Katie, Dominic, Curtis, and some of the Ugandan students were headed to a local bar in celebration of the next day's national holiday, Hero's Day. We stayed at a small bar, which consisted of a patio covered by a wooden overhang, for an hour or two before we approached some street vendors who were selling a food called rolex. The other ND students had been raving about them for quite some time, so I figured I'd give it a try. A rolex stand consists of a small counter, behind which a street vendor stands with circular grill atop an open flame, where he cooks two eggs. On the counter, he chops up tomatoes, onions, and peppers and adds the mixture to the eggs to make a sort of a flat omelet. When this is done, he rolls everything up in two tortillas to make the equivalent of a breakfast burrito. Compared to our bland meals at the dining hall, rolex are a burst of flavor and well worth the 1000 Ugandan shillings (or US $0.40).
Before making the half-mile walk back to campus, we all sat on a stone wall to eat our rolex and stare up at the stars, which I had been fixated on since the beginning of the night. As the others pointed out constellations that I never even knew existed, I was amazed by the clarity and brightness of the stars that stretched across the entire sky. It was the perfect way to end my first night in Uganda. Yes, I was reminded of my smallness as a single person in this huge world, filled with people I will never meet, food I will never try, and places I will never visit. Even more importantly, however, I found that by allowing myself to learn from others, I can appreciate, on an even larger scale, the beauty of all things larger than myself.
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