Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Life, Lately....

For anyone on a carb-free or protein-free diet, Uganda is not the place to go to satiate your culinary desires.  Traditional food is all about carbs and protein.  I hardly ever leave a meal not feeling super stuffed and heavy.  Let me describe what a typical meal for me is (note: I don't eat animals, but if you do, add something like fish, chicken or goat to the combo)......

1. a plate of carbs consisting of rice, sweet potato, "Irish" potatoes (a.k.a. regular old Russet potatoes, which were brought by the Spanish conquistadors to Europe from Latin America and spread to places like Ireland, where blight caused famine, and was taken by the British colonialists to Africa, where they became nationally identified as "Irish"), matooke (boiled and mashed bananas/plantains) and posho (cassava flour mixed with hot water and solidified into a white thick blob)

and

2. one or two "sauces", usually groundnut (a.k.a. peanut) sauce, peas in a sauce, or beans.

Usually the carb portion of the meal will have at least two of those things, or in a restaurant it could easily contain ALL of those things.  The peanut sauce is also nothing like a Thai peanut sauce, it's a light greyish brown sauce made from peanuts.  I think they roast the peanuts first in a saucepan and then mash and boil or boil and mash....not really sure.  You can buy the paste in the markets, so all you have to do is add water and heat.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, you get some greens.  They have collared greens which camouflage under a totally different name here, and some other type of red and green leafy plant that I don't think I've ever seen before.  These are usually boiled to death and not really seasoned.  But no worries, just smother it in groundnut sauce or beans.  Oh, and there's also cabbage.  Although, I wonder why they don't call the cabbage "Irish"?

This meal will cost you about $1USD.  Maybe it's more if you want meat.

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Now that I've moved into my own flat, I cook more for myself.  I've been going (as in, I've gone twice) to the market in Wandegeya.  For about 10,000 UGX (Ugandan shillings) I'm loaded with produce for at least a week....that's roughly $4USD.  Staples that you can find in the market: tomatoes, red onions, avocados, collared greens, the mystery greens, green beans, potatoes, cabbage, garlic, pineapple, bananas, passion fruit, beans, lentils and eggs (usually the most expensive part of my groceries, running about 6,500 UGX for more than 2 dozen).  That means that for less than $2 I can buy a load of veggies.....AWESOME!

A nice thing about the market is that the ladies there may laugh at my Muzungu-ness, but they never try to rip me off with their prices.  The prices are what the prices are....muzungu or mubuntu (human) or muganda (person of the Baganda tribe). 

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I'm still trying to understand the Ugandan sense of humour.  One of the things that I've noticed is that they laugh at everything.  I mean, I'm someone who laughs a lot at just about any thing and sometimes totally inappropriately, but this is a whole new level of stomach exercising laughter that I don't really follow.  Maybe it's just an expression of agreeableness? 

For example, I walk into the office (the Law Faculty at Makerere) and greet Gillian in Luganda and they all laugh, then they ask me how I am and I say Ndi Bulungi (I'm good) and they laugh.  Then they ask me about my bracelet and I say, it's just a string with safety pins and a key on it.  They laugh.  They ask me where I got it.  I say I made it.  They laugh.  They ask me what I've eaten since I've been here, so I list the foods.  They laugh.  They ask me if I like it.  I say it's okay and they laugh.  I don't understand yet why they're laughing or what's so funny about seemingly quotidian language, so I just kind of smile in confusion.

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Wandegeya is what I call the student ghetto.  It's the neighborhood just east of Makerere University, so loads of students live there and hang out there, shop there and eat there.  It's a ton of little shops and markets with all kinds of little corridors and pathways that wreak of unheavenly smells at times and can get super gnarly in the rains, but is fun to wander through on a nice dry day.  The people are friendly and will talk to you, ask you what you're looking for and where you're going.  They're super helpful about telling you where you can find things....which is crucial because the place is like a medina filled with bazaars.

Supposedly almost all of the land is owned by one guy (no idea who, but in my mind he's a slumlord with a fancy car with dark tinted windows and super polished black shoes), who rents out the little shacks and buildings.  This is partly why the place is so run down and never really improves.  Some of the land he's given away to his people and some he's sold, probably also to people he knows.  In some ways, I feel like it's a microcosm of greater Uganda.  Ruled by a slumlord who owns nearly all the principal assets, which he shares with his family and close friends, although most of it he hoards and won't let go of.  The place is run down and he does nothing to fix it even though he completely profits off of it, and the people live their lives and accept things as they are; so as it goes, life goes on.  This is my new barrio by way of domicile.

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My new apartment is nice.  It's got two bedrooms and is fully furnished.  I had to get some kitchen things, sheets and towels and things, but for the most part...it's got what a body needs.  Best of all, it's RENT-FREE!!!!  I can't believe how lucky I got.  Christine is the lady who comes and cleans it once a week.  I pay her something like $10/week, which for the laundry alone is almost worth it.  You know you have to hand wash your clothes here yeah?  I HATE doing the laundry as it is with machines and all, which means hand washing is a whole other level of torture.  So, Christine is like my new best friend. 

Christine is the single parent of Kristabela (no idea how to spell it), a young quiet child.  For some reason I thought she was 4 years old, but I must be wrong because she's already in school.  Christine is hoping that she can find someone to sponsor Kristabela's education.  I want to tell her that I'm not like the other Fulbrighters that have come through this apartment in the past (all lecturers int he U.S. with real salaries and publications to their name)....I'm a recent graduate of my 2nd law degree and have made a whopping oh, maybe $500 max, in the last 5 years.  I'm not exactly in a position to fund a child's education.  I'm not even in a position to fund my own education!  But I know that Christine wants a different life for Kristabela.  So, originally I was going to say that I didn't need a maid or that maybe she could come just every other week...but then I realized that she needs this job and I'm not paying rent, so what am I doing being such a stinge.  So deal is, I'm an expat living in a sweet apartment with a maid who cleans and does my laundry for me every week.  Bizarre.

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Yesterday, I met the neighbors...went around to the three other flats and introduced myself.  "Hi, my name is Elaine, I just moved into A2."  They'd all noticed that there was someone new and were going to come by and introduce themselves as well.  These are university flats, so most of the people are university employees, lecturers or staff, married to or the child of one of those people.  The woman on the top floor, Ann, is new this year, she teaches entymology in the zoology department.  Then there's Steven and Anni with their two children Cindy and Michael(?) and the dog, who's currently sick, who have a little garden in the backyard that I'm hoping to start a composting pile in.  Below us is Joy and her two nephews, Robert and don't know the other one yet.  Joy is the matriarch of the apartment building, she's the eldest and has been here the longest.  Steven and Anni have been here 13 years, so I can only imagine how long Joy has resided here and how many people she's seen come in and out of these flats.

It's been a year and a half or so since the last Fulbrighter, Tavis and his wife Arshiya, lived here (I know this because I met them at orientation and they told us about this place), so I think the neighbors are happy to see someone here.  There is one simple rule....everyone cleans the area in front of their door and the stairs directly below.  The other neighbors keep the front area clean and there is a whole routine with hallway lights and locking the front gate that I'm just beginning to learn.

I came home at nearly 11pm on Saturday night because I'd gone to Jinja with Shaima and her brother, who's visiting and then traveling back with her through Turkey to the U.S., and we had dinner there so it was late when we got back and the front gate was locked.  I knew there was a padlock on the gate but all the other times it just hung there and the gate was always open.  Not this time and I had no key.  Of the 4 keys they gave me, two work....one for the top lock of my front door and one for the balcony padlock.  The other two keys are useless....I've tried them on both the main gate and the second lock on my door.  So, actually, the only way to keep my front door closed is to lock it with the key hanging in the keyhole....otherwise it just pops open and stays there about 6 inches ajar.  Joy said she'd cut me a key for the front gate, so hopefully I won't have to be banging on the padlock late in the night much longer.

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There's something in the water.  Seriously, I see it.  I've been boiling my water here.....not just like, take the water to a boil and turn the heat off, but like boil for minutes straight until I'm convinced that most things in it are dead.  Then I turn off the element and let it cool and move it into a glass pitcher in my fridge.  I swear it tastes slightly better when it's cool.  Thing is though that it's never really a nice clear water color, it's always got a colored tinge to it and there's always this light film of something floating on the top with little bits of who knows what floating around inside.  It's a little unsettling for someone who's grown up with water potable from the tap; fresh, clean and clear.....even fluorided (I might've made that word up) for our dental well-being.  I've been drinking it and feel okay so far and I've asked Ugandans and they say it's fine as long as you boil it....so I know that this is totally psychological, I'm sure the water's safe.  But, I'm telling you....something's in the water.

A couple people have suggested that I just buy the bottled water in the stores.  It's so cheap here, I think you can get a liter for less than a quarter sometimes.  Thing is, I've got this thing against bottled water and it's not just about the plastic bottle, although that's a serious nightmare in and of itself.  It's everything about clean freshwater.  Think about how many lawyers, activists and citizens have struggled for potable free public water in the U.S.  For what, when you turn around and buy privatized water that's not even of comparable quality?  It's sad enough that our water has to be so heavily treated these days.  I remember when I used to take my bottle and fill it up off the springs of Yosemite and the water trickling off the rocks on the side of the trail.  Now they say we can't do that anymore.

And what about here in Uganda?  I'm taken back to the Greening of Water Law in Africa conference that I went to a week or so ago.  Most of this country is water rich, but not even here in the capital is there potable water running out of the taps.  Lots of people don't even have taps....they carry the yellow jerrycans daily to fetch water from the wells or a neighbor's spigot (and don't be confused that this is just your generous friendly neighborhood humanitarian, they are selling this water for money).  And I'm talking about Kampala, forget about upcountry in the villages where most of the people still live.  Even the rich people with their own wells find them poisoned or contaminated sometimes because fact is, world's waters are all connected.  You can build the nicest house you want with the best view in town and the highest wall and the scariest armed gunmen to keep all the rifraff out, but in the end, the rich and the poor drink from the same source. 

I guess we could take the "bandaid the problem" approach and purify and treat all our waters....but wouldn't it be nice if we could still drink the water straight off the mountain?  If our waters were clean from the source and not just from the tap?  But here, I'd be so happy if the water was just clean from the tap....

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Today I met Sophia, the pro-bono lawyer for AMANI.  AMANI means "peace" in Swahili.  It's the name of the company that Lutale, Jamal, Robinson and friends want to start to create a local peace park and peace center (research institute, interpretation center, cultural center, community center, etc.).  Lutale at some point was put in touch with Todd, who founded International Peace Park Expeditions and came down to Costa Rica and Panama with me on my field research trip to Parque Internacional La Amistad, that will soon become an experiential learning course at UPeace (just to pimp Cory's awesome new video: http://www.vimeo.com/16940715 and the upcoming course, check out the website, http://www.peaceparkexpeditions.org/)...and Todd put him in touch with me, since I was coming out here to Uganda.

Sophia and I are working on the Memorandum for AMANI and the Articles of Incorporation and I may also recruit her as a research assistant, looking up the environmental laws of Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC.  This is actually an idea from a former Fulbright student here in Uganda.  He made a comment at orientation about how the Fulbright grant money is for people to do research, but a lot of people end up kind of saving a lot of it for themselves to use afterwards.  So, he thought the ethical thing to do was to spend the entire grant in-country on research related things....like research assistants and a research manager.  It makes such sense to me, plus it's kind of like the Christine situation.  You can live off of so little here that for a period of 10 months, I actually have relative wealth.  So, why not turn some of it around and channel it through people, especially when they're helping me out anyway (whether it's laundry or research)?  It's kind of like I get a grant and turn around and parcel out a bunch of microgrants.  I may not walk out of here with anything in the bank, but at least I will have done the work and research that I want to accomplish here and maybe even have helped some other people along the way.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

The Greening of Water Law in Africa

UNEP and the Government of Uganda just sponsored a two day conference here in Kampala on "Greening Water Law in Africa".  My supervisor at Makerere (currently on sabbatical with the Nile Basin Initiative in Addis ababa) has been here the last half week for this conference and got me in.  I was probably the youngest person there and definitely the one with the least expertise on African water issues.  But, I'm thinking about focusing my research here on transboundary protected areas (or peace parks) for transboundary watershed conservation and looking at issues like community conservation (community-based watershed management committees like what we're trying to do in Honduras-Nicaragua), water and peacebuilding (as an alternative to water and conflict) and transboundary collaborative environmental governance frameworks for dealing with environmental change and insecurity (including socio-political instabilities) with an eye towards how community-level transboundary collaborative conservation can strengthen resilience to environmental change, socio-political insecurity and armed conflict.  So, I was hoping that this conference would provide some insights that would stimulate some paper ideas.

It was definitely an interesting conference and I met many people who will be very helpful resources for my research here in Uganda.  One of the women I cited in my thesis in the case study on the Central Albertine Rift Transfrontier Protected Area Network, which is my research focus area here, and at least a few others are environmental lawyers working in water and environmental issues across Afrca.  I even met the environmental legal counsel to the Government of the Union of Comoros, the Government I used to work for at their UN Permanent Mission in NY.  Hassan and I took a couple photos together and I have emailed them back to the Ambassador and my other supervisors there; I just wish I could see the surprise on their faces when they discover that we have met here in Kampala of all places.  Another Comorian!  I was so excited.  Hassan even gave a great speech on the special plight of SIDS - how they have some great environmental laws, but they can't enforce them because they can't offer their people any other alternatives.  For example, if they can't remove sand from the beaches to build their homes....what do they use?  If they can't cut the few trees on the islands for firewood....what do they use?  If the water surrounding their islands and flowing through their rivers is not potable....what do they use?  Answer to that one is....they import from Tanzania.  Can you imagine....importing water from a nation with its own water problems?  How long can we depend on that?  How much worse will it get with climate change?

One of the purposes of this conference that I really enjoyed is the link that it was trying to make between environmental conservation and water management.  Water laws have typically treated water as a commodity or a public good, something for human use and consumption, industrialization and economic growth.  As with all natural resources, they forget that it is degradable and in many ways diminishable.  We forget that other Earthlings and the environment itself need water too in order to continue providing us with the environmental goods and services that we rely on.  Through our water laws, we have tried to sort out how to allocate water resources for humans - riparian users, first-come-first-serve users, industrial uses, agricultural uses, etc. - following a purely anthropocentric paradigm.  But we have forgotten the needs of other living organisms and Earth systems and our water and other natural resources are dwindling and degrading as result.

They say one should not bite the hand that feeds it....and yet when it comes to the environment, it's somehow too abstract for us to understand that the environment is the hand that feeds us.  We deteriorate it, despoil it, diminish it, defile it, destroy it....and for what ends?  Some economic or material gain for the few at the exploitation and poverty of the vast majority, not to mention the health detriment of all?  Global well-being is on the decline, global economies...not much better.  I'm failing to see the pros to all the cons.

As this conference's title argues, water laws need to be "greened".  Ecological considerations must be figured in to legal frameworks for water management so that this essential resource for all life on Earth is sustainable in quality and quantity today and into the future.  Brilliant, this is exactly what we need.

But there was one thing that was missing.  The conference participants spoke so much about water conflicts, water scarcity, water insecurity.....and yet no one mentioned peace.  That is, not until the last hour or so of the conference when I felt that it was time the quiet inexperienced young muzungu should speak.  With surprise written across many faces, I took the mic and said that I think we should consider the issue of water and peace.  We understand all the elements of water issues that contribute to non-peace, but how do we transform that?  As the Rio Declaration notes, there can't be conservation and sustainable development without peace.

Rio Declaration Principle 24:
Warfare is inherently destructive of sustainable development. States shall therefore respect international law providing protection for the environment in times of armed conflict and cooperate in its further development, as necessary.

Rio Declaration Principle 25:
Peace, development and environmental protection are interdependent and indivisible.

To me, it seems so straightforward and obvious.  To the conference members, I was an alien.  Why was I talking about something as abstract as peace in a meeting of policymakers and water experts trying to figure out tangible ways to make water laws more green?  I don't know, am I so far off?  I hope not.  And if I'm not, then I can see that whatever research I do here will have to address some of these seemingly ambiguous links so that even the experts will not be confused. 

I'm currently thinking three words: gorillas, water and peace.  I think that's what my research here will be about.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

When Worlds Divide

Ex-pats in Uganda live a wholly different lifestyle than most Ugandans and a wholly different lifestyle than they might in their own home-countries.  I think that I knew this in theory, but it didn't become a reality for me until this week.  Maybe I was slow to realize this because I came here knowing a handful or so people, all of whom are Ugandans.  I've yet to see another Muzungu in the neighborhood that I'm staying in.  And I have yet to see a Muzungu in a taxi or in the car park.

This Monday, I went for my orientation briefing at the U.S. Embassy and I have yet to see so many foreigners in one place.

Going to the Embassy was my first venture out on my own.  Joseph got one of the boda boda (motorcycle) drivers that he knows to come by the house and take me there, Mr. Kigozi (pronounced Chi-gozi) is his name.  He drives nice and safely, no crazy weaving through traffic or speeding recklessly on bumpy potholed muddy roads, just nice and safe.  It was sprinkling a little bit and I was wearing a dress, so I had to sit sideways, but I probably didn't even need to hold on, it was such a steady ride.  Mr. Kigozi is also one of my Luganda teachers now.  From him I learned how to say, "How are you?", "I'm good," and "goat."  Well, I learned goat because he wanted to know what the animal is called in English, so naturally, I had to learn what it's called in Luganda.

The funny thing is that in both my orientation briefing and my security briefing, I was strongly advised to never take boda bodas.  I didn't have the heart to tell them that I had arrived in a boda boda and was planning on taking one home.  Apparently, the boda bodas are so dangerous that we're never supposed to take them at night and if we absolutely have to, we can maybe take them during the day.  Thing is, unless you have a car in Kampala, you're going to need to take a boda boda at some point.  There are many places that the taxis (minibuses or matatus) just don't go.  So you either get on the back of a bicycle.....or the back of a motorcycle.  If you're looking for some speed or are carrying anything even kind of heavy, I'd recommend the second option.

Thing is, many of the ex-pats that I've met here have cars...hence, they are not commonly found in taxis.  Everyone at the Embassy that I spoke to drives themselves around.  I didn't ask what kind of cars they drive, but I'm guessing parecida a (similar to) Barney.  Barney is the big purple dinosaur that Robby and I were driving around in this summer.  The one that John in Maine totally called me out on when he said, "Elaine, I didn't expect to see you driving an SUV.  I thought you'd have one of those little environmentally friendly cars or something."  All I could say in my defense was, "Well, I don't have a car.  This one was offered to us for the roadtrip, so we took it."  But John was right.

Another thing that I'm learning is that ex-pats tend to hang out with ex-pats.  This is obviously coming from the limited experience or small sampling of ex-pats that I've come across in the past week and couple days, but even the people at the Embassy mentioned that a lot of U.S. citizens who come here to do Peace Corps or other programs find that they make very few Ugandan friends.  Money is a dividing issue that has repeatedly been cited as a reason.

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Kampala (and maybe this is one of those generalizations that you can appropriately make about all of the African continent) is one of those places where you really see development/aid as an invidious globalized industry.  There may be some ex-pats here for business, but a large number of them are here working with an NGO or some international organization.  I've been in places in Central America where there are a good number of international organizations driving around their giant shiny SUVs with the organizational logo painted on the sides and signs up everywhere lauding the work of whatever whatever organization funded by whatever whatever donor in whatever whatever North Atlantic nation doing whatever whatever great thing in this whatever whatever poor town.  But Africa....

Africa is a whole other level of development/aid intervention.  It's the epitome of everything about international development/aid that I detest deep down from the marrow of my bones.  That book "Dead Aid" by Dambisa Moyo is something I really want to read, because I have a feeling she's going to say all the things that I think about aid and development in a much more eloquent and coherent way.  I just see so much more bad than good coming out of this stuff that telling me that the intentions are good, just doesn't fly.  I'm sorry (not really), but the ends do not justify the means.

When a person gets involved in some job that poisons the Earth, exploits people and natural resources, perpetuates some harmful institution or system and then tries to buy back their soul by "giving back" through charity....I'm sorry mubuntu, but it's just not the same.  You can't expect to repay the damage that you never should've done and think that the universe is going to be right again. 

I wouldn't be so quick to write it all off....because there are movements like Anti-Development, New Development or Alternative Development, maybe even Integrated Development that hold some promise.  The ones that talk about what I call "Local and Organic" development.  Problem is.....good examples are few and far between.  When I was working on my thesis, I was really struggling to find examples of community development that did not involve a single external intervention.....no outside organization or expert trying to tell a community what they think is good for them.  All of the professors and practitioners that I quizzed for examples were at a loss to come up with examples themselves.  Most of us are meddlers.

I'm currently involved in the development of a proposal to facilitate the organization of community-based transboundary watershed management committees in the peace park area of Honduras and Nicaragua.  I'm worried.  I'll tell you why.  Key is, they want the big dollars (a.k.a. WB/IMF kinda shady deals) so they claim that this means you need the big int'l experts who are used to dealing with big bank money and handling big scale projects instead of trying to promote the capacity-building of local actors and leaders who really know the situation on the ground and are used to getting things done there but no big bank would trust to manage a project or believes could do anything at the level of intelligence, efficiency and professionalism of a North Atlantic suit.

I can't help but feel all kinds of against it and have tried to promote local people, named a bunch of more-than-capable and deserving individuals, but instead, they want to bring in a bunch of North Atlantic experts who have never been to this place (the proposed peace park territory on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua) and don't speak the language or know anything about the local dynamics except for maybe what they've been briefed on.  Every attempt I've made to have indigenous peoples mentioned explicitly has failed to make its way into the text. I'm sure that these experts are wonderful, genuinely nice, intelligent people with great expanses of experience in doing this kind of work.....but sometimes, it's nice to give someone else a chance, especially when so many of the problems of widespread and pervasive poverty are linked to limited access to opportunities.

What's even more disturbing is that I know that it can be done without all that fancy shmancy external aid.  I did the field research last semester, I know how the systems work and I believe that they can work.  The social and political mechanisms already exist for village-based transboundary conservation (including for watershed management and protection)....the patronatos, gabinetes del poder ciudadano, alcaldias and asociaciones de municipios, mambocaures, etc.  All they need is a small amount of financial support - food at the meetings and transportation for the people to go.  Maybe they already have all that available in their budgets already.  When I spoke to the municipalities, no one said they needed a $5 million WB loan to start work on this.  They just asked for a date and contact info.  They could begin the organization so easily on their own.  When they begin targeting technical issues beyond the scope of their knowledge, I'm convinced that in-country experts exist....and those are the people who we must support.  Otherwise, why would in-country experts in "developing" nations ever have the incentive to stay in-country.....they would have such better career opportunities if they just abandoned their communities and moved "North".

If community-based means the communities themselves get together and discuss the issues and pinpoint actions or ways forward on their own, why is a whole team of international experts necessary for any of that?  Maybe they will need to access international funds to execute the actions they want to take, but if that's something they can't do on their own, then it's the development banks that are failing to provide the services they were created to provide.  There is no reason why a middle-person broker type must be coerced into the equation for "poor" people to get access to money set aside to help develop "poor" communities.  I refuse to believe that international experts are the only people capable of doing these jobs.  Every one of those international experts was at one point an uninformed inexperienced non-expert.  Somehow, they were trained, taught, informed and given opportunities.  Why should the local people of the Choluteca and Madriz mountain forests be any different?

I rant.....I meddle

Saturday, November 6, 2010

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.