We woke up the next day to wonderfully hot showers and a huge breakfast, which we will be eating every morning at the hotel. We walked for 25 minutes to the Ashinaga Rainbow House and met almost the entire staff, made up of Japanese and Ugandan employees as well as the college-bound students that grew up in the program that now lead the younger children. We also met two American interns: Ryan, an International Relations major from Princeton, and Julianna, an English major from our very own Vassar College! They only just arrived last night, which explains the blank stare they gave me when I yelled, “Hey look, more mzungus!” the minute they walked through the gates.
Yuka gave held an information meeting explaining the history of Ashinaga as well as the programs at Rainbow House. (Please refer to the “About” section for general information.) Although we knew most of this information from our research of the Ashinaga Foundation, it was wonderful to go through all of their programs and understand the immensity of their work. Meanwhile, the children singing and clapping in a nearby classroom attempted to drown out Yuka’s history lesson, and then Kei, his dogs, and a string of young boys entered, clanging baseball bats and trailing mud into what was our preliminary information meeting a minute ago.
When Yuka lived in Nasana in 2006, it was only a modest village. Now, its population is roughly 20,000, due to more and more people moving nearer to Kampala, forcing more people to move outside of the city to its surrounding sort of “suburbs” like Nansana. Yuka emphasized how valuable our electronics are and warned us of how often people steal. It is also wise to avoid large gatherings of people such as riots or even celebrations that get out of hand because tear gas is often used to break these up, and we would not want to get stuck in the middle of that! The most recent outbreak occurred in Kampala when one of the newspapers criticized the government, resulting in a forced shutdown. (There are only two newspapers in Uganda, one private, and one government-issued, known for its censorship.) Fortunately, the private newspaper was reinstated on Thursday. Another danger is the multitude of bodabodas (small motorcycles) that zip around the streets at frightening speeds (but think of that cool wind against your face when you go that fast – how refreshing!). Yuka says a doctor told her that 90 percent of his patients came from bodaboda accidents, which is enough to convince me not to ride one.
We went to lunch at Zamzam with a few of the college-bound students who showed us some different routes around Nansana (none of which I will remember tomorrow). We ate a traditional Ugandan dish: white rice, matooke (steamed plantain), a purple yam, an orange yam they call pumpkin, cassava (starchy rice meal), a few steamed leaves of something similar to kale, and beans – it was impossible for any of us to finish, not mention it was served steaming hot! I also had a delicious (and almost-chilled) drink called enanas, made of crushed pineapple, tealeaves, and ginger – delicious.
During lunch, Christine got a pronunciation lesson from Hilda with our new Luganda phrasebooks, Malinda participated in both Japanese and Ugandan prayers before eating, and I quizzed Joseph on the origin of each music video that come on TV. He explained to me that you could tell which country a song is from depending on the particular beat… I guess I’ll need to study some more before I can hear the rhythms myself! He also told me about the more popular genres of music in Uganda: R&B, Afrobeat, Dancehall, and hip-hop (which focuses more on political and social behaviors here, unlike the popular hip-hop at home). During my conversation with Joseph, he suddenly burst out laughing. Startled, I turned to see Christine and Hilda repeating the same Lugandan word over and over again, while Hilda and Joseph tried to restrain their giggles. Apparently, Christine was learning how to order water, but instead of saying “Mwuattu, njagala amazzi” she said “Mwuattu, njagala ammazzi” which means something entirely different… we’ll leave it up to your imagination to fill in the blank. We could barely hear the difference but apparently it was enough to set them into a fit of laughter. Other fun words we learned today are tunaalabagana (see you later) and museka (smile for the camera). We are on a slow learning curve, but we’ll get there!
On our walk back, we learned about religion, tradition, politics, sports, and the challenges of SATs and English. We will create separate posts with extensive information on all of these topics, so we’ll hold off on blogging about them right now. Tomorrow we are traveling to Kampala to run some errands with Ryan and Julianna, and hopefully we will go to a market to practice our bargaining skills. The Japanese students also invited us to dinner on Sunday, and Malinda and I are looking into going on a three-day safari to Murchison Falls next weekend, so we have a lot to look forward to.
– Sam