Up at dawn, writing by headlamp

By early afternoon yesterday my pen was gummy from shaking too many hands. I met more families, got stares from more old men on bicycles, and touched more children’s hands than I could have foreseen myself doing in two days. I have enough group-of-African-children pictures, mainly as posed by our translator Ben, to fill an album. And I’m a little sad to be leaving this morning.

Our host mother, Annah, was the sweetest woman ever and her mother-in-law was the African version of Mulan’s grandmother. We laughed a lot together, though I don’t have any idea what she said for 3 days. Tom and I got to our rural homestay on Wednesday night, had tea, and bathed (were given a basin, provided with a jerry can of water, and shown to the deserted front yard that would serve as our large shower room). We were both surprised to see a small square house with a tin roof among the thatched roof huts we had seen on the drive. We eat there, our formal goodbye pictures will be posed there, and several of Annah’s adopted children roll out mats to sleep in the main room. The set up of the family/home doesn’t afford privacy or solitude: everyone is working, moving, outside in the garden, or near the kitchen hut just behind the house.

Meeting people as a mzungu female with a male companion has been interesting. Tom gets longer handshakes and is questioned first about where he is from and what he is doing in Uganda. I’m asked if I’m tired from walking, if Annah should give us water or supper, or if I’ve ever slept in a hut before. I have now: a little round room with a thatched roof that stays dark all day and incredibly chilly at night. The cold isn’t exactly damp, but it sits on your skin and I wish I had dry socks to put on.

All of mine are still wet from yesterday’s washing, but at least they’re white again. Too much Ugandan dust turned them chocolate brown as we walked both days all over the village to do primitive research about eduation. Anna had Ben, a neighbor with great English, take us to meet the local council chairman and half dozen families. We asked about the importance of education (to get skills and build a future), the effects of Universal Primary Education (larger classes, reluctant teachers, less learning), and the challenge of affording school. We were also able to visit the closest primary and secondary schools, in the process disturbing any semblance of order or purpose within the schools. I absolutely love the bright flamingo pink uniform dresses and shirts of the primary school students.

The first afternoon’s visit to the school alerted a vast number of children to our presence. Within 30 minutes of the end of classes, 70 children were running in our front yard away from Tom in a giant game of tag. He kept the kids entertained throughout our stay with clapping games, chasing, and even basketball warm-up drills. We tried hopscotch and made a train to weave in and out of the trees lining the main path. Pictures were, as expected, a hit. The drawback was that as they held the camera to look at the screen, there was no way to capture the “eh, oh! Oh!” of their reactions (the funniest part). Whenever I tried to take a picture of Tom and the kids, the mad rush toward the camera obscured the games being played and deprived me of the image of primary chaos.

A lot of kids and adults alike shook our hands as we passed them on the roads. Ben talked a lot in Kisamai and eventually told us that, as whites, people expected us to be giving something out and he was explaining that we were only students doing research. A few times he laughed that this child or that had never seen a mzungu before. I felt a bit ridiculous from all the waving I did; I would never wave like that to strangers in the US, even in my very own Overbrook Shores neighborhood. Despite the lack of justice it does to these people’s demeanor, I will simply describe them as nice. Especially Annah who serves us enough for 8 at each meal, greets us warmly upon each return, and shares her home. She seems to be an impressive lady: local council vice chairperson, host to Friday meetings of the local savings and loan group, treasurer of the nearby nursery school, mother of 13 and caretaker of a hoard of cheerful kids. I’m impressed and grateful.

Yesterday, after more interviews and a lunch of both matoke/gnut sauce and rice/beans/tomato, Benn took us to Kenya. The paths bisected plots of cassava, skirted maize fields, and wound past a few monkeys and a little marijuana. Some were just wide enough for the unimaginably angular frame of our translator Ben, a real Jack Sprat, while others more traveled were wider and lined with yellow flowers. We arrived at the river border and waited among the watering cows and bikes crossing to go to the market. We stepped into a dugout canoe made from a “coconut type” palm and one of the boys from the secondary school used a pole to steer us 5 minutes down a narrow canal. Feet firmly planted 3 meters into Kenyan territory, we “took a snap” and were accused of trespassing into the country by similarly passport-less Ugandan. The ride back felt like being in a log flume, including the constant effort to keep my sneakers from the puddle of water at the bottom of the boat. The most interesting part was the seats: planks of wood propped between the sides that were moved depending on the number of passengers and type of cargo. So Kenya seemed nice, fields looked pretty similar to Uganda, and I’d imagine the other millions of meters are as good as the first few.