Hi Muzungu!!

The kids shout at me in the red dirt roads as I carefully place each foot to avoid ditches, mud puddles and rubbish.  No need to draw more attention to myself than I already do by mere visage.  Even in the darkness of night they know.  I am different.

Hi Muzungu!  Bye Muzungu!!! 

This is the greeting I get from a neighbour child of ours, but when I go over to greet him, his chin gapes open and the words are evaporated into air.  He has no voice.  Just paralysis bulging through wide-eyed surprise that the Muzungu speaks and is so near.

It's funny really.  Took me awhile to even realize that they were talking to me.  The languages are all unknown to me, so my senses are slow to pick out words.  It was relative ages before the voices had any coherence and I exclaimed to Joseph, "they're talking to me!"  Who else.

I've never been called a White Person before.

On more than one occasion I've even been told that I don't look like an American, to which all I can say really is that Americans come in all shapes, sizes and colors.  If anything, I think I look more like the first Americans than any of those from later diaspora that have brought peoples to the Americas, even if these more recent migrants have prejudicially been identified as the prevailing American aesthetic.  I don't have numbers of course, but I'm inclined to think that from North to South in the Americas, there are more people with dark hair, dark skin and brown eyes than not.  These are genetically dominant traits anyway.  So, I don't look American, but here I am White.

I think I've just instilled fear in the hearts of White Supremacists everywhere.

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It has taken me two and a half weeks to reach the land of Red Earth that people endearingly call the Pearl of Africa.  I left Los Angeles October 14th on an overnight flight where I was seated next to Gary, a drummer who has played all over the world.  It helped that conversation was easy because sleep wasn't.

The next morning I rolled into London Heathrow, where an old African American man walked up beside me and began to ask me about my guitar and whether I play for money.  Anyone who knows me, knows the answer to that.  This man, apparently, used to play quite a bit though.  He then proceeded to tell me "Honey, you're too young to know my band, but I sing with a group called the Temptations."  Ehh?!  I may be young, but who doesn't know the Temptations?!

London was cold.  I was confined to essentially two outfits over the two weeks I was there.  Hardly different variations of the same layering on of everything long sleeved I'd brought with me, altering only the sweater I wore (my black sweater from Taiwan or the navy blue sweater contributed to the cause of keeping me warm from Hamish).  It's a good thing we don't sweat much in the cold and smells are muted.  Two weeks of the same clothes day after day in tropical climes of heat and humidity would be treacherous.

After London came Addis Ababa, home of the Ark of the Covenant and the alleged origin of our hominid predecessors.  I had only three days there: one day spent planning my research schedule with Emmanuel (my supervisor from Makerere, who is now on Sabbatical and working with the Nile Basin Initiative in Addis), one day at the University for Peace's Africa Programme, and one day at Addis Ababa University (its library is a former palace of Haile Selassie) and a shopping tour around town with Tigist and two Danish scholars here for a seminar on peace and security.

On my last night, Golda took Emmanuel, Tony, Ayten and me to a nearby restaurant for injara and live traditional dances.  Ethiopian dances are a wholly other dimension of physiological movement that I can only explain as a complete disjunct between shoulders, limbs and joints.  How they move like that to those rhythms is beyond me.  Mind-blowing really, and so fun to watch.

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Kampala has been a different sort of experience.  In comparison to the cool and uber dry highlands of Ethiopia, Kampala is more than warm, low-lying and fairly humid.

My flight landed half an hour early and I was let into the country for $50USD on a tourist visa to be renewed in three months time.  A cab driver helped me locate my friend Moses and his brother Boaz who were stuck at the airport entry check point, but such great faces to see upon arrival in my residence country of the next ten months.  Thankfully Boaz knew his way to Joseph's house because I would not have found it on my own.  Once you depart Entebbe Road, which connects the airport in Entebbe to Kampala central and is allegedly the best road in the nation, it is a maze of red dirt paths and unplanned housing developments.

At Joseph's, I have my very own room and thankfully I see few mosquitoes around.  I was stubborn about anti-malarial drugs at first, but just days before leaving the U.S., buckled to social pressure and bought a year's supply of doxycycline as prescribed by the Medicaid doctor I saw in New York.  I should have trusted my instincts and waited until I arrived here to do some investigative work - ask what the local people and clinics recommend and then buy the meds here, if at all.  Really though, who wants to voluntarily and proactively put something so poisonous into their body?

The first morning, I took the doxycycline as prescribed - on an empty stomach one hour before food and with plenty of water.  Half an hour later, I told Joseph and Prossy (his niece) that they should eat first, the medicine was making me nauseous.  Seconds later, I stood up abruptly and rushed to the side door where I relieved my stomach of all the water I had drunk and probably a good portion of the doxycycline as well.  I felt terrible for the next hour and was so embarrassed that less than 24 hours upon arrival, I had returned Joseph's hospitality by throwing up on his side doorstep.  That can't be appropriate in any culture.

That evening we consulted a local pharmacist, who expressed surprise that I had even been prescribed doxycycline, an antibiotic that apparently destroys your body's natural flora (for which I am taking a probiotic), is not nearly as effective as mefloquine which is an actual anti-malarial drug that you take only once a week instead of daily, and stains your teeth yellow.

Last night I actually dreamt about that - yellow teeth.  I had become Girl With Yellow Teeth over just a few days time; not Muzungu, just Girl With Yellow Teeth.  When I checked in the mirror, it was true....in my dream, my teeth were all a long-time coffee drinker smoker yellow.  They say dreams of teeth have something to do with feelings of insecurity.  Does that only apply to teeth falling out?  What do the psychoanalysts say about yellow teeth?

Names here have meaning.  In the Baganda tradition (the people of Buganda, who are the majority in Uganda) or Kiganda, children are given a name that describes events or circumstances of their birth.  Later, they are given a Christian name, probably the local saint celebrated on their date of birth, which typically becomes their official name (you know, the one that goes on all the documents).  A name can say much about who you are and who you will become.

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Smells are wafting into the room from the cooking area.  In the house, Prossy cooks almost entirely on two small charcoal stoves.  It's the cheapest way to heat foods, other alternatives being electric or gas stoves and appliances.  Every day, trucks loaded with large sacks of charcoal parade the windy roads sprinkling black ash along the way.  Where this comes from, I'm afraid to know.

The charcoal trade is pervasive and invidious in the Kivus, the southeastern region of the DR Congo, part of my research area.  Trees are illegally logged, burned in smothered pits in the rainforest and trucked out to places like Rwanda, where a charcoal production ban was instituted in an attempt to mitigate illegal logging.  Greater effect: the illegality is outsourced and allegedly funding a dark and complicated war between so many factions they say the combatants themselves can't even follow who's fighting for what and whose allied with whom.  There was a great article on charcoal and gorillas a couple years back in National Geographic:  http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/07/virunga/jenkins-text

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In London, we watched a play about a British researcher in Cambodia trying to interview survivors of the mass killings in a small town.  Everywhere, she was told to go first to the temples.  Only then could she understand.  Here, the temples are like the stories of the peoples of this Red Earth.  Only through the stories, can we understand the cultures.  Culture across Africa: I can't explain it yet (if ever), but it seems to be a powerful thing.

They should have a word for story-learners, like the word story-tellers.  Maybe that could be my name.