True Life: I Am a Muzungu

Christmas at last! It’s hard to feel the Christmas spirit here in the tropics. Luckily for us, Christmas is celebrated here since Uganda is predominantly Christian, but it is not blown up to the proportions as it is in the States. We are currently at our homestays in the Southwest for four weeks. My homestay feels like easily the best out of all the families—we’ve dubbed my house “Posh Corps.” My family is blessed with running water and a running toilet, which is more than I can say for the other host families. No steaming night bucket for me!

My host mom and dad are super sweet and remind me of a Ugandan version of Francoise and Daniel. Their children are grown up and out of the house, and occasionally an adorable grandchild can be found tramping around the house. We also have three-week old kittens!

Waiting for our ride to the Southwest

We’ve been learning the local language Runyanchore for the past two weeks; I’ll have moments in class when I’m convinced that we’re really just learning a made-up language, because that’s what it sounds like. We learn words like omwami, which means husband, and then made Yo-Mwami jokes like “Your mwami is so fat…!” On our walk to school, the neighborhood kids line the streets and yell “Abazungu! Abazungu!” (“White people! White people!”) It wouldn’t be so damn cute if they didn’t have a song and dance to go with it. On weekdays after class, you can find us muzungus in my front yard doing plyometrics to the Insanity workout, with the kids peeking through the bushes or underneath the gate at us crazies.

For Christmas, we crammed all ten of us into a 7-seater car (including two in the passenger seat) and went to the nearest city of Mbarara to celebrate the holidays. We spent a lot of time in Nakumatt, an amazing, brightly lit grocery store that makes you feel, just for a second, that you could be back in America. Ok, maybe it’s not that glamorous, but there are actual aisles and a bakery that sells freshly made sandwiches! There are also hilarious brands of food, such as “Not Tonight, Honey” (my new favorite brand of honey), and the exotic Chadder Cheese to be found in our sandwiches. We checked into a hotel and spent Friday night anticipating December 21^st 2012, the End-of-the-World, at Club Heat, drinking Nile Special beer and listening to “Call Me Maybe.”

In Mbarara, we went out to Indian food, and it has honestly never tasted so delicious. There was so much flavor comparably to local Ugandan food, which consists of every flavorless starch imaginable. Once in a while, we trainees will reminisce about food at home: warm brownies, Annie’s mac n’ cheese, Mexican food… We’ll have to stop ourselves before we go crazy; we’ve got a long road ahead of us. At least we’re all in the same boat!

As we sat and ate Indian food overlooking Mbarara, I watched the line at Stanbic Bank ATM grow and grow. If you’re looking to stand in line and lose three hours of your day, go to a Ugandan ATM. I’m not sure what people do in the ATMs here, whether they are doing their tax returns or playing a quick game of poker, but somehow they take forever in there. My theory is that not everyone with a bank account is literate, and therefore the process takes over 15 minutes a person…no joke. This gives new meaning to our primary project: to promote literacy. I would also love to do a workshop titled “How to Use an ATM” and see if this helps.

On Christmas Eve, we cooked a big meal all together at a local PCV’s house, and celebrated with a bottle of wine donated by my host mum and homemade apple pie…. and Home Alone, of course. It was magical!

We joke that our life could be an episode of True Life: I Am a Muzungu. We walk to school alongside cows, cram 21 people into a vehicle made for 14, get called “Sir White,” and have the little kids run up and touch your skin to see what you feel like. My favorite moments are when a Ugandan tells me “I saw your friend the other day!” assuming that all white people in Uganda know each other. I also get asked a lot about Barack Obama and if I know him personally (I do not, but we do share a birthday!) Life here has its ups and downs, and every day brings new meaning to the old Peace Corps adage “Every fart is a gamble.”

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Welcome to the Equator!