Things that go Bump in the Night

The African night is not a quiet night. There are crickets chirping. And owls hoo-hooing. The buzz of moths to the outhouse light. Occasional monkey squeals. And sometimes elephants snapping trees. And the sounds of nearby farmers, beating their drums to scare away the elephants (or ‘njojos” as they’re called in Rutooro).

Sometimes the sky is clear and the Milky Way spreads out from the outhouse on one side to the elephant-fence on the other. Occasionally the moon comes out, and the few clouds catch the light and look like a scene out of the Junglebook. And sometimes, there are no stars and in fact there is no sky, but only a thick blanket of clouds and it gets very, very dark. And on those nights, if you shine a strong flashlight into the tree branches, you may find creatures that you have never seen or even heard about. There are Genets, which are like a cat with a long weasel snout. There are Pangolins, which are like anteaters crossed with a tank. The small, fluffy Bushbabies (or Galagos) sometimes sit still and wrap their tails around a branch, and sometimes bounce around, with only the red-orange reflections of their eyes to give them away. There are monkey-sloth Pottos and sometimes prowling Civets. The Chimpanzees have all gone to bed, in their nests high in the branches, and will not get up until morning. We are usually safe and snug in the mosquito net, but last night we went out prowling of these interesting creatures- Check out the photos (The Bushbaby is mostly all eyeshine up in the treetops but we had a great look at the Genet!).

The Muzungus go to church

Sunday was a happy time in our corner of the world- the Church of Kanyasohara (one of the communities we work in near the park) had a ceremony baptizing a dozen infants. We walked to the church with our friend Aleia, trying not to get shoes and pants/dresses too muddy. We purposefully arrived late, since we knew that the service was supposed to last several hours, but we forgot about how hard it is for 3 white people to be inconspicuous in a room of a hundred Ugandans. The three of us squeezed into a wooden pew in the back of the church, and as soon as we sat down a powerful wind and rainstorm broke loose and hit the church like a hurricane (it had been calm and overcast up until that exact instant). The banana trees outside were waving violently, and the rain and hail on the metal roof (which we were worried might blow off) drowned out the singing and drumming. The rain also forced half the church members to move their pews away from the open windows as it blew in. It looked so much like we had brought the wrath of god with us that we were all crossing our fingers that the locals wouldn’t think that we were bad omens or punishable delinquents for getting there so late. (But we were told that the service would last till 3pm, so 1pm seemed like a very reasonable time to get there... never mind that it started at 11.)

When the storm finally passed, half an hour later, the singing
and drumming and praying resumed. The songs and the clothes and the children
were all very beautiful. It was fun to see all the community members dressed up
in their Sunday best (really brightly colored and pretty fabrics) and they were
equally surprised by us since Andrew was in his jacket coat and tie and we
normally bump into people when we are all out in their fields and looking
pretty scruffy. The service was in the language of Rutooro, which added a
certain mystique. One of our field assistants came over to sit by us and at one
point when we thought we had just said a prayer he leaned over and informed Jess
that it was an announcement about a lady who was missing her cell phone after
last Sunday’s service. Another “prayer” turned out to be about how it might be
a good idea to plant some trees on the west side of the building to keep the rain
from blowing in so hard. Another unexpected twist was that the ‘offering’ was
followed by an auction- people who don’t have money to offer bring things like sugar
cane instead, and these are auctioned off to other members of the church right
on the spot in order to liquidate the value into more monetary offering. We
went home with a bunch of bananas and a bag of avocados. The chairman of the
village kept buying things on our behalf and giving them “to the visitors in
the back”, so we also bought him a pineapple.

Unfortunately we had arrived so late that we missed the actual baptism part, but the parents took
their children up to the front again for a final presentation. After the
service there was lots of hand-shaking and picture-taking. Then we were invited
to two separate dinners and present exchanges, in one case because it was our
field assistant’s baby, and in the other case as best we can figure, mostly
just because we are white. It is hard to blend in. We were basically the only non-family
guests at the first luncheon and Aleia and Jess were the only women sitting at
the table and not sitting on the floor (the traditional place for women, we are
told). The other gathering was for a wealthier family and half the church was
there, but even though we did not really know the family and had just met the
baby that day, we were still referenced in all the speeches and generally made
a spectacle of. But we are on the lucky side of looking different- we look
different and people automatically treat us well, which would not be the same
if we were Indian or Asian, and which would also probably not be true if we
were a Ugandan visiting some places in the U.S. Being white here is like an odd
free-pass, where you are automatically made welcome and important (despite all
historical events that should make this not the case, from colonialism to
commercial exploitation), and on the one hand we feel really grateful for the
way that people give us the benefit of the doubt, and on the other hand we feel
just very awkward- not being sure what the customs and expectations are, not
being sure how to earn the way that we are treated. We gave baby Martha a bag
of sugar with a bow of pink flagging tape and an origami giraffe. Everyone else
gave money. But I think she liked the giraffe, until she smushed it.

One of the reasons they have big joint baptisms here (and our
Ugandan friend Richard told us that they have 3 or 4 of them a year) is because
of the huge number of kids in Uganda. We had heard that Uganda’s population was
growing fast- so Andrew looked it up and the country has the 2^nd
highest birth rate in the world, the 3^rd fastest growing population
overall, and half the population is under 15 years old. So basically a tidal
wave of new Ugandans are coming along and it isn’t clear what that’s going to
mean for the country, especially given the current shortages of food staples
like sugar or if everyone decides that they’d like to have meat with every
meal. We were slightly encouraged by the fact that the importance of family
planning and education was talked about at both celebrations afterwards, with
the family patriarch standing up and giving a speech about it at the second
one. It seems like there are some big transitions happening here now, both in
terms of expectations and in terms of philosophies, but there is so much that
people here are up against, and the playing field is nothing close to level, and
it is really unclear to us what sort of hopeful future is available to this
part of the world where the people themselves are quite “developed” but the
country is still “developing”.

Daily Life

Monkeys surrounding the bathroom. Occasional earthquakes. Frequent power outages. Even more frequent thunderstorms. Enormous elephant footprints all around our compound. Those are just a few of the surprises that it has taken us awhile to adjust to here in Uganda. But we’re happy to have settled into our work and lives and now we would like to tell you a little bit about them.

Our 3-room, cinderblock duplex is beginning to feel like a home we could stand to live in for a few more months, especially thanks to Jess’s recent strategic negotiations to acquire art and furniture from a departing colleague. The dark walk to the pit toilet is still somewhat threatening, although it occasionally has added intrigue depending on what interesting types of moths and katydids are attracted to the single florescent lightbulb outside. The kitchen has been much better than expected, with Andrew returning to his daily egg-and-toast breakfast expertise, followed by more skillfully crafted lunches and dinner leftovers compliments of our hired local ladies, Florence and Margret, who work for us and our duplex neighbors. They provide amazing (and very rich by Ugandan standards) meals that include things like eggplant stew, pumpkin stew, tomato stew, cauliflower stew.... The second, non-stew food group includes fried things, like samosas, sweet mendazis and delicious (and ubiquitous!) chapattis, which are like pitas, but moister and better. (Probably because of all the oil it’s fried in). Beans and rice, cabbage salad, and fresh fruit like pineapple, avocado, and papaya provide the finishing touch for diverse vegetarian meals. I’m pretty sure that without Florence and Margret we would have no idea what to do with local produce and would be eating pasta every night, like we did for much of the time in Iquitos. However, we are not the only ones who enjoy their cooking, so we still have to be careful about leaving food outside of cupboards and metal containers, as the mouse population in the kitchen has gotten high enough to inspire nightly hunts by the men of the duplex (this seriously involves two guys with sharp sticks and a pan). Florence and Margaret also wash our clothes, bless their hearts. They said that Andrew is like a baby because he is all the time playing in the mud and getting his clothes really dirty (Fortunately they can’t tell the difference between Jess’s clothes and Andrews.) They also iron the clothes to kill the mango fly larvae that would otherwise burrow into the unwitting wearer and begin to grow beneath the skin. Distressingly, Jess is having some trouble with elastic parts of certain clothing items not being ironed well enough.

As for local wildlife (beyond the backyard baboons), we have discovered that geckos are very good house companions, both because they absorb a lot of Jess’s affection for salamander-y things, and because they eat bugs (which we have a lot of). Unfortunately, they eat so many bugs that they also defecate all over the place. So do elephants. We haven’t yet seen any real live elephants, but we see their poo and footprints all the time, both around the station and in the farm fields where we work. These footprints are over a foot and a half in diameter and often several inches deep. It’s hard not to imagine a dinosaur. You would think that we would see something this big running around our camp, but they are actually very sneaky and move mostly at night. That’s fine by me, I’m not sure I want to meet one too close.

After our workdays tromping through local people’s fields to measure their crops and wildlife damage, we return home and try to take a quick, refreshing (cold) shower while it’s still light outside. It gets down in the 50’s when it is dark and when the clouds aren’t out, you can see your breath, so it’s good to give yourself time to warm up again before bedtime. I saw a recent “health” article in the local Ugandan paper that warned that showering with warm water could be a harmful shock to the nerves. Which made me wonder, how many years off my life have the shocks of cold water here and in Peru already taken? (Also, how low are the requirements for writing newspaper articles? Other examples: “Health Benefits of Drinking Urine” and “Police Chief Encourages Motorcycle-Taxi Drivers to Practice Better Hygiene”). When Jess is feeling truly extravagant, she heats a couple kettles of water in the electric boiler for a soothing bucketbath. The kettle also works for making tea and sanitizing water, and, if the country runs out of propane (which it seems to be on the way to doing), it may also be our only means of cooking that does not involve locally produced charcoal.

So that’s the current state of our life here. Now that we’ve got the hang of things and have provided a bit of an overview of our setup, we can write a little more about our impressions of other events and issues going on around us. We get internet in certain spots in the yard and phone signal up the hill a ways, so when the power is on and it isn’t raining, we can be pretty well connected. But a lot of the time those things don’t converge, which is why we’ve been a little slow to get this blog up and running. But we’ve posted some new photos and are hoping to write at least one entry every week, so stay tuned for more communications from the bush!