A short update

Life in Uganda is incredible.  Everyday includes adventure, usually some triumph and some defeat, exchange sof currency, a new word or phrase in Luganda, and plenty of reddish colored dirt.  The last several weeks have left me feeling that Kampala is a new home, and Uganda is gorgeous and extremely complicated.  I'm reading a book that our upstairs neighbors for several weeks, Honey and Tony, generously left with us.  It's called, "The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Will Never Forget."  It details the complicated story of Ugandan history, particularly the Amin presidency chapters and their impact on an individual family and the psyche of the whole country.  I often feel like there are layers coating many of my conversations and interactions.  I can relate to the title of the book; it's hard to know what the smile is hiding, what the true motive is and what history and experiences are fueling it.  Everywhere I go I am verbally, audibly (sometimes via shouting) labeled "muzungu," white person.  What is attributed to my character, my people, and my pocket in that proclamation?  It is an un-American phenomenon, at least in my experience of America, to be publically described in such a way.  I can't imagine shouting, "Indian!  European!  African-American!" while pointing at the accused on a street in the states.  I have been told the label entails a degree of excitement (which usually connected to a hope for resources from my wealthy, American wallet).  I also wonder if there is some degree of resentment entertwined with the exuberance.  In addition to having my race acknowledged, I've also been solicted for relationships of all kinds, told how beautiful I am, and even had love professed to me.  I guess those three little words are more expendable then I would have thought.

Today Shira and I bought permits to do gorilla tracking in the southwestern corner of Uganda.  I'm thrilled.  It should be beautiful and incredibly unique; we'll get to see gorillas living in the wild!  Darker, hairer versions of ourselves living in families in the jungle.  I'm stoked.  Our other big adventure so far was to the eastern part of Uganda, to an area called Mbale where three groups of Ugandans, ranging from a community of 150 to one of 1000, converted, on their own instincts and judgment, to Judaism.  They live amongst the Muslim and Chrisitan communities also inhabiting the area, and their Judaism has a raw, convicted element to it. We met many other young visitors, most of whom were Israeli.  They recommended a good, cheap campsite, which allowed us to sleep with the sounds of rushing water as lullabyes and open our eyes onto the multiple waterfalls that comprise Sipi Falls.  If going west brings an iota of the raw, natural beauty we witnessed in and around Mbale, we are golden.  My pictures of that adventure are in a picasa web album: http://picasaweb.google.com/JoyFriedman/MbaleSipiFalls02#. The end of the album is a tribute to another Ugandan phenomenon: second hand clothes!  Markets are overflowing with them, every store sells them, and they bear the tags of stores from across the globe.  Most people here dress like the people they see on MTV and in soap operas, which is actually pretty familiar.  They use a lot of British vernacular here (makes sense, the Brits were their colonizers), and that includes their term for well-dressed, "smart."  I love it when Flavia, who went shopping with me and is in some of those final pictures, tells me I'm "looking smart."  She says it with great approval and admiration.  She is now accountable for the great boost of my Ugandan wardrobe...on which I've spent about $25 American dollars and includes 2 new pairs of jeans, 8 shirts, 5 skirts, and 3 dresses.  I don't know how I'll pack when I leave!  I didn't bring enough smart clothes here, thinking I'd need long, modest skirts and outdoor clothes, not super smart work clothing, so the armoire augment seemed warranted. 

I'll end with a few pearls of Ugandan gourmet information.  First, the special snack that many of my native friends enjoy:

From far away, it looks like a bunch of snow peas, right?  But take a look up close:

There are too many scales on those for them to be beans or peas!

As you can see, they are dead and dried GRASSHOPPERS.  Not what I consider food usually...but I am constantly informed, but the people hawking them and my friends, that they are very good and sweet.

Shira, my fabulous roommate, actually tried a grasshopper.  As you can see, they are usually so drenched in oil that she said they just tasted like fried anything.  I still can't bring myself to put one in my mouth...but if they are easy to store maybe I'll bring some home for my more adventurous friends to try.

A more foreign fruit that I've discovered and actually tasted is the jack fruit.  It comes in an enormous shell, almost like a watermelon with a bad case of acne.  Here I am with a jack fruit I bought for about 80 cents at the fresh food (and fresh chickens) market near my home.

Check out this behomouth fruit! I knew how sweet it would be, so I picked up a knife and started hacking.  What I discovered inside was a travesty--between me and each delectable bite of jack fruit were curtains of goey, sticky, tapestries of pulp.  

This puppy took me two hours to tear apart.  I had to stop twice and poor cooking oil all over my hands and arms to de-stickify myself long in order to continue hacking.

Case in point: here is just one tiny piece of fruit, hidden among strings of impenetrable stickiness. After working myself to the point of exhaustion, Flavia came by to check on me.  She laughed at my predicament, and told me that I was just like children at schools who get in trouble for eating jack fruit during recess.  You can never hide a jack fruit binge, she said, because you wear the remains.  This must be the first form of superglue found naturally.  She took ten minutes to expertly slice the remaining jack fruit so we could pluck the fruit right out.  Here is a look at what this monstrosity could produce:

I also discovered a more familiar fruit, but one I'd never seen in its raw form: coffee.  Coffee grows on bush-sized trees inside berries. 

They are plucked of the branch and put through a sieve-like machine that separates the bean from its berry shell. 

Then they lay the beans out to dry in the equatorial sun, and what you see at this point is much more akin to a coffee bean you'd find at home before it's been roasted. Our guide on our hike said eating these beans as they are will make you stay up all night long.  I took his word for it and left them alone. 

So that's a bit of flavor from Uganda.  I will do my best to write more.  There is so much to capture and share.  Just today I was riding in a taxi back from the very fancy Ugandan Wildlife Authority office and my driver put on his seat belt by pulling it down from above his right shoulder (remember, they drive like the British) and looping it over the emergency brake.  He then proceeded to drive so quickly and closely behind the car in front of us that when they stopped suddenly he had to throw the vehicle to the small shoulder alongside them to avoid crashing into their vehicle.  Needless to say, his looped seatbelt didn't stay on its precarious hook for long.  

I'm off to work, where we'll be meeting with eight women who received scholarships from an NGO to attend secondary school (high school, which is often too expensive for lower class Ugandans to attend).  Since them, many of them have been accepted into college but can't afford to pay (the goverment provides very few scholarships and loans are hard for orphaned young women to secure). They are each incredible in their own way--all have faced tragedies beyond my comprehension and yet they persevere.  Last week we invited them to the office and asked them to serve on the founding board of my NGO's nascent Girls Empowered to Empower effort.  All of them agreed, and many declared with passion and sincerity that such an effort was their lives' dream.  I am looking forward to another inspiring afternoon with them.