I am fine.

Here’s the experiment: to each person that I pass on the walk to work I’ll say “Hello,” then I’ll count the frequency of the responses I get. There are only three: the rare “hello”, even scarcer “how are you,” and the most common “I am fine.” That final response to any English greeting strikes me as funny, and people are always willing to smile back.

Kimberly and I walked the half hour down-up-downhill trip to town both yesterday and today. It’s good to stretch my legs and each time I walk up-down-uphill back, I’m struck once again by the sight of Fort Portal tucked in between green pastures dotted with houses and cows. Really, if they had postcards in Uganda, I’d send you one.

Last fall, our study abroad coordinator posed the question: “what’s Africa?” Eventually someone stumbled “…it’s a continent…?” That idea is becoming more real to me with every conversation about travel I have. Uganda has already provided a multiplicity of experiences: Kampala homestay, a short safari, rural homestay, numerous taxi and bus trips, and now the practicum stationed in F/P. And those headings don’t begin to cover the minute details that shape my time here: bananas and matoke, latrines and showers, chickens and cows, or bikes and bodas. Sometimes it’s hard to decide what to blog about: is it too trivial, too idealistic, too stereotypical, too mundane? My take on this semester is just one addition to the diversity of Africas being shared. Luckily there’s enough room for all of them here and they don’t have to compete; it seems like it’s just a matter of getting the most out of whatever people and sights you happen to have around you.

Today I was content to the utmost extent with the bit of the continent I found myself on. After days of rain, the sun quickly established its dominance over this Sunday. It’s amazing that at precisely 10:00 the cool morning evaporates into day. I celebrated the absence of the blue soap so common at my homestay while washing my clothes (no more residue dwelling like bruises on my yellow shirt). While most families here wash clothes, dishes, and bodies with the same type of soap, I have multiple face washes in my room: that’s the lifestyle difference I was most conscious of and embarrassed by in Kampala. With my shirts left decorating the clothesline and errands to town accomplished, I was quite happy to get lost in a book while basking in the backyard. There were a few passages in chapter two of Barak Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” describing his mother’s experience living in a foreign country that I surely appreciated more here than I would have at any other point in the past.

Except for the invasion of insects we experienced tonight, all is well. Cooking adventures have been more or less successful (always yielding something edible) and it’s been novel to shop for fresh tomatoes and bananas (or better yet the baby bananas, ndiizi) every few days. There’s thunder in the distance now, I suppose it’s silly to expect a full twenty four hours free of precipitation. I hope the walk to work isn’t too muddy in the morning. As they say here, I am fine. Goodnight!