My Bleating Heart

   I was a counselor at Camp BUILD (Boys of Uganda in Leadership Development… or something), responsible for 8, 13-21 year old boys for a week.  It was a crazy week and the most memorable camper quotes were:

In reference to the entire camp experience, “You whites really know how to make funs!”

   And, in a rousing night game of capture the flag, our team mate comes running back to our base grinning from ear to ear. He looks down at his prize and his face drops, it’s as if he’s just noticed he were holding a dead puppy.  He sees the red shirt decoy that he thought was the red team’s flag and gasps,  “Ah!  I have been deceived!”

   Being responsible for the health, safety, education and entertainment of a group of adolescents is uncharted territory for me, but I got really lucky with my Ugandan Co-counselor and my group of kids.  We had a great week and I think I learned more than any of those kids.  Highlights include a massive 5 team capture the flag game on the whole college campus which resulted in a stalemate because all of the bases were too awesome and impenetrable, a bitter rivalry between me and my co-counselor/nemesis Patrick Glisczinki which lead to many unsuccessful water balloon assassination attempts and ended with a pride-shattering glitter attack on my sweet camp shirt, my teams flag being taller than Patrick’s team’s flag, riddle battles and a giant mattress fort party/extreme Olympic mattress pit jump with the 85 mattresses rented for the camp after all the kids left.  

   I bought a goat very recently and I think Django Reinhardt Goatsly is going to show a real marked boost in my life awesomeness index.  As a hooved quadruped with propensity for following, he’s proven to be a great hiking partner.  When we’re not hiking, he just chills out and eats my weeds.  It’s a pretty low maintenance, awesome thing we got going on here. 

   In other news, the next big project is going to be a Peace Corps Grant funded Mabira Forest Canopy Zip Line.  I may have bitten off more than I can chew on this one, but despite having no idea what I’m doing, it’s going ahead. 

   Camp is awesome as ever especially now it is filled with the bleats and charm of Django, and life is good.  

Forest Parties

                I’ve given up on the tiny, translucent, red ants that have invited themselves into my bread bag.  These are seriously crafty little bastards; they can slip through the seal of a Pringles lid and just when you think you’ve blown, flicked or picked them all away, one will emerge from a crevasse and crawl onto your hand as if mocking your feeble efforts to control nature.  They aren’t disease harboring and lord knows I need to pick up protein wherever I can get it, so screw it! NOM NOM NOM! Suck it hymenoptera!!

I’ve been at my new site for about a month now and my experience has, thus far, been truly amazing.  There is a lot that I can do to be of help here, but the biggest challenge is the isolation.  I’ve always been able to enjoy solitude, so loneliness hasn’t been too big of a problem so far.  I have people come visit often and I get out to Mukono regularly to see friends which helps keep me balanced.  I’ve also started to get to know some folks around my village.  What a drastic change it has been from living in Mukono. It felt so weird to be in such a busy place with everyone hustling around, trying to get some small money just to get by while I effortlessly passed the days, more concerned with avoiding boredom than anything.  If I had been with an organization for which I felt some kind of ownership or commitment or that I was making a difference, Mukono would have been better.  Then again, I had never imagined my Peace Corps experience to be located just a short walk from a supermarket and a night club.  I rationalized it by thinking that life would be such a drag if I didn’t have a flushing toilet and a shower and such readily available (junk) food.  In reality, I was living just like I had back home and those little challenges I was worried about have turned out to be the best part out here.  It’s really similar to when I worked at Mt. St. Helens.  I plan out my meals for the week and cook on charcoal (when Betty isn’t around).  

Betty has turned out to be awesome!  A few weekends ago, Craig, Alana, Zoey and Alexus came out to stay with me and it turned out that these 3 awesome UK folks had found out about the camp and come for the weekend also, so we had a bon fire at the camp site and it was awesome.  We had my faithful Boda Boda delivery guy bring us beer from town and we had a forest party.  Betty cooked for all of us all weekend while also tending to various other groups passing through.  She was a total champ.  Women here are amazing workers.

Caitlin came the next night and we had another forest party and a hike with tibbs the next day.

At camp, I live with completely renewable resources (solar power and rain water) and I’m pretty much vegetarian (except for some tuna packs my folks sent me).  It’s mostly rice, noodles, peas, beans and veggies (and bugs which are not strictly vegetarian).  Never-the-less, I’m sure I’ve never lived so sustainably in my life.  I have temporarily taken on a new comrade here, his name is Mr. Tibbs and he can be a real pain in the ass, but I’m growing to love him.  He’s my good friend Craig’s dog and he’s staying with me while Craig and Peace Corps figure out a new site for him.  One of his first nights here, Tibbs and I had a bit of a disagreement which resulted in a battle between us physically and a rift between us emotionally.  Neither of us are the type to hold grudges, so the next day we hugged it out and moved on, somehow with a better understanding of one another.  Tibbs is a truly handsom dog, a slim tridapple with a big head and big paws.  But he had a tough puppyhood, having been “rescued” by some Peace Corps Volunteers who didn’t have a great exit plan other than to dump him on a new Peace Corps Trainee and head home.  Craig, being the compassionate, dog loving man that he is, took on Tibbs only to find out that his site would fall through, leaving them both homeless.  Tibbs has since been displaced, moving between foster owners, without much stability and having never been properly trained.  He was given to Craig as a disobedient, overly energetic dog with attachment issues, so I place no blame on Craig.  Without much other choice, Craig has stepped up and done a really good job of making sure Tibbs is taken care of and being there as much as possible. But the reality is that it is very difficult to have a dog as a Peace Corps Volunteer, especially one drifting between sites.  Tibbs is spastic and neurotic, but still a loyal and good dog.  I know this because whenever he is going crazy barking at a motorcycle dropping someone off at camp, he runs to find me and make sure I’m ok. 

I’m starting a chicken project, a topic which I know nothing about, but I’m excited for it.  My village chairmen and I decided, over a pot of Malua, to start up some kind of community agriculture project.  We decided chickens would be the best.  He introduced me to a very interesting fellow who had gotten degrees in accounting and agriculture and then moved back to his home village after checking out the job market.  And it turns out that he's dating Betty!  I'm happy she didn't end up with one of the village boys that always hangs around camp.  They're good people, but I have high standards for Betty.  Anyways, the chicken project is looking promising.  I’m going to do my best to advise and facilitate while making sure they do most of the actual work themselves.  I think the key to a successful project is local involvement and ownership.

There is some animal amidst the symphony of night life forest noises that I have named the banshee death owl, though I have no idea if it’s an owl.  Someone told me it was a bat, but I’m not buying it.  Bats use high pitch sounds for echolocation, not human like, shrill death screams.  It calls intermittently with about a second in between and it sounds like a mixture of a crow call and the final scream of somebody who’s had their throat cut open (sorry for the imagery, I’ve been rewatching Game of Thrones for the 3^rd time).  It’s the only thing that freaks me out when I walk out to my bathroom before bed because I have no idea what it is.  Anyways, this night sound track still beats the tortured wailing of the tied up dogs back in Mukono Town.

Really, a lot of this first month has been me exploring the area and seeing what we have to offer around here.  Besides the cultural tour that we’re working on, I want to design a camping trip up on this really beautiful hilltop that you have to hike a couple miles to.  My idea is to use local kids as porters to carry the water and camping supplies up to this beautiful clearing on top of Namusa Hill.  A guide would stay with you overnight and make a bon fire and tell local folk tales and you could sip wine (BYOB) under the stars.  Then in the morning, the porters would come back and pack you out.  They would get some income for their families and the visitors would have a memorable experience. 

Clearing on top of the hill

Having Mr. Tibbs here has made me realize that it’s a bad idea for me to get a dog here.  So I’m getting a goat.  His name will come when I meet him, but I read that they are excellent hiking partners and they are much lower maintenance.  When you hand raise them, they follow you around and as a hooved quadruped, there isn’t any hike too intense for them. 

My parents and my sister are coming to visit in April and I’ve been planning out that whole trip.  We’re using my organization to do pretty much everything which will be great both because they are awesome and because it will give me a chance to see firsthand how my organization looks through the eyes of the consumer and search for improvement.  We are going to spend a few days at my site and then head southwest for gorilla and chimp tracking and then hitting up a safari at Queen Elizabeth National Park and maybe Murchison Falls for some giraffes and zebras.  I’m super stoked!  And then my heterosexual life partner, John Edward Campbell is coming in June and that will be an entirely different and amazing experience.  Good things to come.

Monkeys and envrionmental stuff

                I’m watching the dew fall in the rainforest outside of the front door of my new home as I write this.  After many delays and hang-ups, I have finally moved to my new site.  I feel lucky though, as many of my volunteer friends have been waiting months for their new sites.  In my group, a lot of the original (Peace Corps assigned) sites fell through and Peace Corps has really taken it’s time finding them new ones, so I thought it would be a better choice to find my own.  After 2 weeks of the typical Ugandan delays, MAFICO finally got the construction done on my place.  But then I find out that they hadn’t filled out the application for a volunteer!  So I went to the MAFICO office, sat down with them, filled out the application, took pictures of it and sent it to Peace Corps and got everything cleared by that night.  It was nice because I got to pretty much got to write my own job description. 

                During this impossibly long month of waiting (the 2 weeks we gave them to get shit done + the extra 2 weeks it actually took to finish), I was very lucky to have an amazing host, Alana Sutter.  She was gracious enough to allow me to bum around her home and be completely worthless for most of a month.  One of the best parts about this whole Peace Corps experience is the amazing and profound friendships I’ve built, firstly with the folks in my region (Alana, Craig, Rebecca, Caitlin and Matt) but also with the rest of the PCV’s that for which I will travel to the ends of the earth (or so it feels like as I wait for 2.5 hours in an idling, hot and sweaty bus just for it to fill up so we can start the 5 hour ride to Kampala) to see for even just a night.

The construction/miscellaneous delays at my site came at an unfortunate time because I ended up moving to my new site the day before I had to travel across the country for the new PCV “orientation” (aka Western Welcome Weekend/80’s prom) which was awesome and totally worth the 10 hour trips there and back.  It’s amazing how much further I am willing to travel for events like this.  Stateside, I would never go through 2 full, 10 hour days of very uncomfortable travel just for one night of rocking out with friends.  But in the states, it’s much less important to my mental health to have these kinds of social interactions.  One thing I’ve learned/am always learning more and more here, is patience.  I’m not even stressing about the 14 hour plane ride back to America at the end of this whole experience (mostly because it’s a year and a half away) but also because I am capable of sitting and doing nothing for vast amounts of time that would have driven the old Aaron crazy.    

Now I’m finally facing the challenges that I was expecting from this whole Peace Corps experience.  I have almost no coverage from any service provider at my site and I’m 6 miles from the nearest market.  There are a few things I can get in the village just outside my camp, but definitely not enough unless I want to live on Matooke (plantain mash) and beans.  I have a little apartment on the backside of the reception of this small camp.  My bathing and toilet situation is pretty similar to what you would see at camp sites in the states.  Fortunately I have a plastic toilet setup rather than a pit latrine and my bathing area is surrounded by the forest and the stars above.  I basically have 3 counterparts who are all in and out of the camp at various times.  The most important is Betty who is more or less the receptionist here, but also handles all the cooking and cleaning.  We’ve worked out an arrangement where she cooks and cleans for me and I teach her new dishes and basically, how to cater to Muzungus (I also pay her).  She’s really sweet and I think we will get along just fine.  Then I have Hussein who is an educated Ugandan who is a guide for nature walks and safaris.  He’s very bright and I think we can collaborate on a lot of things.  And then Gregory who is a Ugandan village person and he serves as the night watchman/kind-of-handy man around camp.  He normally sleeps here too, which is nice to have backup in the event that the monkeys break our covenant of peace and raid the camp (think: the end of I Am Legend, it’s pretty much exactly like that when they raid except with more elaborate booby traps).  In quantity, the monkeys here are like squirrels in the states.  There are pretty much no predators in these woods.  Which is lame because there are no big cats or anything but cool because you can go on hikes (day or night) and you are the biggest animal in the forest.  Oh yeah, and I was kidding about the monkey raids, btw.  The covenant the Ugandans have with the monkeys is more like: we used to poach the shit out of you but now it’s illegal. 

As far as work goes, my first goal is to make some improvements on the camp itself.  I’m gonna add a bon fire pit, level out the camp sites, maybe put in a rope swing and some other stuff.  Then I’m gonna get some online marketing going and try to hit the European and American tourist market.  I don’t know why any tourists would come here unless it’s on the way to Tanzania or somewhere else, but I think there is a market for this whole “voluntourism” thing that’s getting popular. 

Part of me does feel like my first 6 months here were kind of a waste.  I put a ton of effort into getting Artivists 4 Life their contract, and it doesn’t look like it will even come through.  I guess that would validate my site change though.  On the bright side, what I really picked up in the past 6 months is getting to know Uganda and how to do business with Ugandans (with an iron fist!), which has made integrating into my new community much easier.  I got most of my embarrassing mistakes out of the way already and now I have a fresh start.

I was wandering around Wasswa (the village that my camp is just outside of) and I ran into a drunk, elderly man who told me his name was Johnny Walker.  It wasn’t long before I found out that he is actually the LC1 Chairman (which is pretty much a 21^st century village chief).  He’s the guy that people go to when there are civil and domestic disputes and he resolves them.  The overall opinion that I’ve gathered is that he is always drunk, but still a pretty effective and responsible chairman.  He’s 60 years old and has been drinking this Waragi (moonshine) and Malua (warm millet beer served in a large pot in the middle of a circle of people who all drink it with long straws) pretty much his whole life and he appears to be in very good health.  He was very excited when I told him that I also take Malua, so I spent most of my Sunday afternoon in an old health clinic (turned malua bar) sitting around a big pot of millet beer with a bunch of village folks.  It was some good conversation and integration. 

I had my first meeting with my organization to plan out what we’ll be working on in the next few months and it was one of the most professional and concise meetings I’ve had in Uganda.  They were very responsive and excited when I presented my new ideas and we have a pretty solid plan to get things going.  It’s very reassuring and refreshing to be working with an organization that is focused on solving real problems facing Uganda today.  Rather than organizing Skype meetings with Canadian graduate art students (clearly the people who need help from a PCV in Uganda the most!), I’m going to be going to local schools and teaching environmental education.  I’ll also be developing a cultural tour through the villages surrounding the forest.  It feels great to be taken seriously by my organization and to be working on worthwhile projects.  I’m very excited.

He turned to me as if to say, Hurry boy! I'ts waiting there for you!!!!

                These weeks since Zanzibar have been pretty wild.  My organization ran out of money and couldn't afford to pay my rent anymore.   The meeting in which I was informed of this was only the second time seeing my supervisor in person.  It was short and professional and ended with no bad feelings.  As I walked away from the Turkish restaurant (amazing somosa) I experienced a nice serotonin boost at the new freedom I had just acquired.  It felt like getting out of a shitty relationship.  That feeling was quickly followed by an OMF’ingGsh moment at the realization that I was going to be homeless in 8 days.  Truth be told, I was absolutely ready to move onto something else.  Relief was really what I felt more than anything else; my heart was really not into artivists 4 life. 

                First order of business was to call up Lando (aka Alana Sutter) and ask her if I could move into her place with all my furniture and everything I own to which she was very gracious in permitting.  I had been fairly sure that I was going to be put in this position for a while now, so I was keeping an eye out for good site replacements and I had found one at the place I go to hike in Mabira National Forest.  I wanted to have as much say in my new site as I could, so I went to check it out MAFICO (Mabira Forest Integrated Community Organization) to see if this place was a possibility.  It turns out that they were planning to apply for a Peace Corps Volunteer to live and work at their new camp site.  The campsite is 6 miles from their office through beautiful sugar cane fields near a small village called Wasswa.  They use the proceeds from the camp site to fund conservation and environmental education projects.  So they need a volunteer to help make the camp site more profitable and work on the other projects as well.  The camp site has solar power and a rain catching water tank and a small room in the back of their reception building for a volunteer!  It’s a 30 minute hike to Griffin Falls and has the trail heads of an extensive trail system deep into Mabira Forest.  They do all kinds of guided hikes and can take people all over the country for gorilla tracking or birding or whatever and it’s pretty inexpensive.  I think it could be marketed to young Muzungu travelers from all over.    As you can imagine it is pretty much a Katumba paradise.  Knowing that this site might be the outcome of this whole stressful situation really has made the whole process much more bearable.  So, if this all pans out, I’m going to be getting a lot more use out of my bike (and getting my ass in shape) and living in the forest hanging out with European travelers.  Peace Corps is visiting the site today to see if it can work.

                If it does work out, I’ll still have a couple weeks to kill before I can move there which means I can travel around Uganda and see my Peace Corps friends.

My room would be on the back side of this building

Update:  Since I started writing this blog, I’ve gone to eat lunch with Alana where I randomly ran into my Project Manager, Jenny, who was on her way back from checking out my site and she informed me that it’s goin’ down!  I’ve got 2 weeks of complete, unadulterated freedom and then I move into the jungle and start volunteering with MAFICO.  THIS is what I wanted out of Peace Corps!  I can’t wait to get out of the rat race in this city and get back to my roots in the forest.  Goat and sugar can juice projects. OMF’ingGsh!

Tanzania

What an adventure it was! I had the most amazing time in Tanzania!  Most of the planning that made it such an awesome adventure was done by a few awesome people (Alana and Rebecca mostly) and I thank them sincerely.  We started out with a whole cluster-cuss of dealing with Rwanda Air (who ended up losing my bag on the way back).  They bumped back the time of our flight by some 4 hours and didn’t think to let us know that.  It was a mess, but we got through it and only arrived in Dar es Salaam a couple hours later than we had planned.  We stayed at this amazing little place right on the Indian Ocean in these little Bandas on the beach.  It was awesome and the staff were all really chill folks.  The only problem was that their wells had been almost completely infiltrated by salt water, so there was no rinsing that salt off which was.  So the pool was also salt and chlorine and that was kind of weird.  But the place was great and we made friends with other guests from all over the world.  These low budget lodging places are so much better than staying in a nice hotel because of the interesting, awesome people you meet.
  We has Christmas there and the staff put together a fantastic buffet.  The amazing food in Tanzania is really the thing that made me least excited to go back to Uganda.  Uganda is a little behind the times in using the spices that everyone else in East Africa uses to make their food delicious... resulting in non-deliciousness in Uganda. After my first meal back in Uganda, I almost regretted taking my taste buds on a vacation that made them a bunch of snobby, high nosed bitches.  But then again (to paraphrase my man Billy), better to have lobsterbated and lost than to never have lobsterbated at all.  Anyways, Christmas never really felt like Christmas.  I just don't think it could when it's 95 degrees and I'm drinking cold beers on a beach.  And I am absolutely okay with that.

  The day after Christmas, we hopped on a ferry (with AC!) and cruised to the island of Zanzibar.  The first 3 days in Dar were awesome, but Zanzibar was even cooler.  We landed in Stone Town which is this beautiful, Greek looking town where most of the roads are too narrow for cars.  We stayed about 45 minutes away on the east side of the island where the awesome beaches are.
   I didn't have a cell phone or a watch for this entire trip so the days really blurred together.  Having no sense of time and no means of communication allowed me to just go with the flow and see where the tides would take me.  One of these blurred together days, I went with my good buds, Mark, Kirk, David, Michelle and her brother Mike into stone town with the intention of going on one of these spice tours that I'd been hearing all kinds of awesome things about.  I never did end up doing that tour, but I think we had a far better time checking out Stone Town.  I had the worst public transit experience that I've yet had in Africa that morning, which almost resulted in me puking on all over some sweet, old ladies Burka.  We got into Stone Town and Kirk had somehow found a guide who was going to show us around.  The first thing he did was brought us to buy these fruits (very similar to coconuts) that we drank from and it totally cured my motion sickness/hangover.  It was at that point that I knew this guy was awesome and it was going to be a good day.  We asked him how much it costed to have him as our guide and he told us we could pay whatever we wanted.  That was a really amazing thing I saw in that country is how people don't expect to get paid for every nice thing they do.  I got so many free rides, even from taxi drivers, throughout the whole trip.  I hate to say it, but you would never see that in Uganda.

  Our guide, Sa'id, was the coolest.  He knew all the history, from Freddy Mercury's birthplace to the slave market, he was knew his stuff and the cool places to go.  We even checked out the Sultan's old bath house built in 1870 that had hot water.  It was really great and it ended with the most amazing street sea food market.  Cheap lobster and shark skewers, pizzas (calzone style) filled with sea food, octopus and this fresh sugar cane, lemon and ginger juice all with the freshest, most exotic spices and spicy mango salsa.  After filling our stomachs with sea food and our minds with the rich history and culture of the west coast of Zanzibar, we headed back to the beach for an awesome night with new and old friends.

  The place we stayed was a short walk from the beach, but cheaper than the big resorts on the beach.  With all the walking and swimming I did, I think I came back in better shape than when I left.  Peace Corps Volunteers from all over Africa were on this beach including about 20 from Uganda.  I don't know if I actually met an American that wasn't Peace Corps.  Lots of Germans and Swedes who were all awesome.  I met these German girls that were super awesome.  I spent a lot of time with them and hope to someday visit them in Germany or wherever their travels land them.  We spent new years together and, after dancing all night, ended up swimming in the ocean as the sun rose.  Probably the best New Years I've had.
  On the way home, Rwanda Air lost my bag and I was sure it was going to be a pain in the ass to get back. The customer service was non-existent when Alana was getting hung up on while trying to figure out our flight out of Uganda, but a saint of a man named Rogers (AKA Mr. Rogers because of his helpfulness and boundless altruism) was the one who had saved the day and gotten us to Dar only a few hours late (when our friends who had dealt with someone else from the same airlines had to wait another 2 days).  I was getting nowhere with the person I was talking to about getting my bag back, but Alana still had Mr. Rogers personal number.  So I call him up and within 5 minutes he's located my bag and got it on it's way to Kampala.  He even offered to get it on a bus to Mukono so it could be delivered to my house.  We both decided it was not worth tempting fate with Ugandan transit, but they are going to cover my transport to go get it in Kampala.  I realize that something like this in the US would be looked at as awful customer service but believe me, this is above and beyond in the UG.
  As I sit on my couch writing this blog, itching to the point of insanity from sand flees and mosquitoes (and hopefully not bed bugs), flat broke, without most of my worldly possessions, realizing that sea food comes out much less elegantly than it goes in, but having just been visited by my good friend Maurice to wish me a happy new year and ask how my trip was, I find myself on a peak of this emotional roller coaster.

On Colonialism

    I think that movies play a huge part in the colonization of the minds of Africans.  Since they are very young, the majority of African children's exposure to white people, is through movies.  I have coined this idea the "Indiana Jones Complex."  So what they see, for their entire childhood, is an incredibly glorified and unrealistic representation of white people.  American movies are very common here in restaurants and on the street and they are translated into the local languages  (sometimes they are Indian movies that are dubbed into English and then again into Luganda and it's just one guy reading the vocal parts for all the actors.  It's really chaotic).  I see huge groups of kids gathered around TVs on my street and I've noticed that most of the western movies I see are action movies and romantic comedies (which are the worst as far as making white people look way more awesome than they are).  Lots of Nick Cage.  I wish there was a way to get them to watch historical documentaries on the many horrible failures and abuses of power that white people have exhibited throughout history.  Instead they see Vin Diesel kicking some (African or South American) drug cartel in the crotch.   As they get older, they start to become aware that these are movies and not reality, but I think it is still engraved in their subconscious.  I notice it on taxis when the conductors give me a better seat (often resulting in the discomfort of other Ugandan taxi riders), or when I get service before a Ugandan that was waiting longer than I was.  I notice it with the Mukono artivists, when they are arguing and talking over each other, but as soon as I speak up, they get quiet and listen and take what I say as fact.  It is an unwarranted power that can easily be misused and do damage.  At our In Service Training, my PCV friend, Matt told us a pretty interesting method to combat this “Muzungu is always right” mentality among youths.  The idea is to make outrageous proposals like, "let’s make cell phones and sell them as an income generating activity!"  And the act really excited about it and start taking steps to make it happen: “Alright guys, I’m going to go to Kampala and get some computer chips we can use and we’ll put the casings together with plastic.  Does anyone know a place where we can make plastic cell phone cases?  No?  We’ll just have to design a way to melt down old plastic and reform it…” etc.  You keep pushing until someone finally musters up the nerve to tell you that it is a stupid idea!  The idea is to both encourage Ugandan youth to be assertive and confident and to show that white people are not always right.  He said he doesn't even tell them that he knew it was a terrible idea all along.  It’s kind of a crazy way of making the point, but it’s better than any other suggestions I've heard.  

    I read an article called "Hair Imperialism" and it discussed something that had confused me up to that point: What's with the huge obsession with artificial hair here?  It talked about the huge amount of energy and money that is put into making African women have hair that looks like white people (and smells like baby powder).  Almost all women here have one kind of artificial hair or another.  I'll see a 16 year old with an identical hairstyle as a 45 year old woman.  It's another perfect example of a colonizing of the minds of African women and it is self-perpetuating in that having this fake white person hair is socially encouraged among African women and can even be an advantage in getting a good job.  

    Another observation/theory that I've developed is about why Ugandans (Africans and really, any culture located around the equator) seem to naturally have a very different work tendency than western society.  It occurred to me when I was thinking about that old folk tale (maybe you're familiar with it) in which there are 2 squirrels and one of them spends his summer playing and enjoying living in the moment, while the other is gathering nuts and preparing a home for the winter.  When winter comes, the first squirrel isn't prepared and the second one is happy and warm in his home.  I forget how the story ends or even why I was thinking about it, but it made me realize that this story would make no sense to people who have no experience with seasons.  It got me thinking about the west (more realistically, the north) and how their society has always, by necessity, been a society of preparation and looking forward (planning for winter).  Compare that to a society with very similar climate year-round and some of the most fertile soil on this planet.  Whenever they need food, they just plant it and it grows in a very short amount of time.  Historically, this society’s needs have always been met without having to plan too much into the future.  My theory is that this mentality lead European nations to the various revolutions (industrial, agricultural and technological) and places on the equator never had a need to develop in such a way.

  So (whether or not the reasons above are actually accurate) we are now living in a world where these western revolutions have really taken off and created a global economy that is very focused on planning ahead, maximizing profits, competing to stay on top, etc. This global system is has no room for societies that don't compete or plan strategically.  And this system is showing no signs that it's going away any time soon.  

    I think the overarching question that is most relevant to the challenges today is:  How do we get Africa on board with this seemingly permanent system that is very unsympathetic to traditional African ways of doing things without destroying their identities, heritage and culture?  This is an infinitely complex topic and one that needs to addressed before we can move forward with the whole idea of "development."  In an ideal world, I think that the best thing would be to let Africa work it out without the "help" of muzungu.  They seemed to be doing alright before we showed up anyways.  But unfortunately, a global economy doesn't allow for that.

  The people making the decisions on how to combat these problems (and fully believing that they are doing a great service) are of the mentality that we can just dump a ton of money and resources into Africa and train them to be western and wear suits and ties and have fake western hairstyles and everything will work out.  These are people who are never on the ground level to see the effects of their actions.  They sit at desks in big cities and look at numbers and papers that are so far removed from the people that they represent and are intended to help.  

  The other big issue is if we are doing more harm than good in our efforts.  Are we creating a foreign aid dependent society?  I think the answer is yes.  But how do we create a society that doesn't depend on handouts while also getting them up to speed and able to compete and be successful in the global economy?  I DON'T KNOW!!!!

World AIDS Day Event

On Friday November 30, 2012, Alana and I organized a World AIDS Day Event at the Youth Center (Alana did way more work than me).  Artivists 4 life performed some promotional and informative entertainment in the form of 2 traditional dances (the Baganda and the Runege) and a skit about HIV that I did some acting in.  I played the role of the Muzungu (white person) boss who engages Mashakalugo (my good friend from Kaunga) in a carpet interview (a job interview that you do adult things to get the job) and gives her HIV.  She goes on to sleep with 3 guys who turn out to know each other (PLOT TWIST!) and then they meet up and discuss why Maurice got HIV and they didn't (condom use, circumcision, etc.).  Anyways, jam packed with HIV messages!  Here's some dancing and drumming from my artivists:

All those guys are my good friends.  My friend and professional artist/artivists 4 life member, OJ, designed the t-shirts that were given out to the first 120 people who got tested for HIV.  Him and some Mukono Artivists crammed out all 120 in a day and a half of screen printing.  Then Peace Corps showed up and brought like 150 more shirts and then people started getting crazy about the shirts and were flooding the testing aarea and Alana (with the backup of some guards) locked it down before rioting started.

Rebecca and her shirts being protected by armed guards

It was a wild day and we tested 375 people.  We proceeded to celebrate our victory at Casablanca.