So I'm writing this on the eve of our departure for Nairobi from Kampala, Uganda. Not sure if you all heard, but a few weeks ago there was a bunch of unrest within Kampala because the King wanted to go somewhere and the government wouldn't let him, so the King's tribespeople started rioting and then the government just shot everyone and it stopped. Makes perfect sense, right?
I actually have an interesting story about this, but I wanted to wait until now to tell it for my mother's sake. While hiking in Southern Rwanda, we flagged down a big bus to take us back to our crappy hotel. When we boarded the bus, we realized there were no passengers because the entire aisle was taken up by a large coffin. We asked the guy in the front seat what happened, and he said that the unfortunate victim had been shot in Kampala during the riots and that they were taking him back to his family's home in the Congo. We were a little freaked because we were heading to Kampala in two days time.
But we're fine!
Anyway, Kampala is just large and dirty and EXTREMELY crowded. They have these fantastic motorcycle taxis called "boda-bodas," which obey absolutely no traffic laws, (not that there are any...I still can't figure out which side of the road people are actually supposed to drive on). They are super fast and super fun and I swear to God, mom, I won't ride one ever again.
I've become a lonely-planet nazi and have thus dragged my compatriots on suggested excursions. We went to Queen Elizabeth National Park, which we didn't actually bother reading about and then went on an accidental safari during the cab ride, running into a bunch of elephants and getting accosted by baboons. On our bus ride to QENP we met a young Ugandan teacher named Robert who made it his personal mission to show us around the place. Unbeknownst to us, he had an entire itinerary mapped out, complete with a visit to a crater lake, a visit to his school, and a visit to his friend John's house, where John wasn't home but a girl gave us peanuts and bananas. We have often run into very helpful Africans. They seem to take on mzungu caretaking as some kind of pro-bono work. Robert was the most helpful of all, though it was kind of overkill when he accompanied us on the 4 hour bus ride from Queen Elizabeth to our second destionation, Lake Bunyoni, in the south, "just to make sure we got there safe." He also drank beer through a straw, which he told us all Ugandans do, but apparently that's crap.
We relaxed on Lake Bunyoni for a few days and then returned to Kampala to go white water rafting on the Nile! Grade 5 rapids - It was fantastic and terrifying and everyone ended up bleeding but that's ok. I also randomly ran into a girl I went to high school with who is now working as a kayak instructor on the Nile. I asked her if they had any job openings, but told her I wasn't really into paddling, so I think that hurt my chances.
Uganda is great because most people speak English! We had asked a Ugandan man in Mwanza, Tanzania, if they speak Swahili in Uganda and he said, "why not?" which is the same kind of ambiguous answer we get whenever we try to ask for directions: the answer is always, "over there." There doesn't seem to be too much difference in culture between here and Tanzania, though their traditional dress looks kind of crazy, like someone trying to dress up as a birthday present with shoulder pads. Uganda is also much greener than Tanzania and very beautiful.
I will be in Kenya for about 5 days, and I fly out in 7...back to the land of hoagies, toilet seats, paved roads, common courtesy, and most importantly, shopping malls. I will try to write one more blog post before I come home and can talk in person!
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Rwanda
Since I last wrote, we've been in Rwanda for about a week. We crossed Lake Victoria on an overnight ferry, which was kind of like the Titanic, except it didn't sink. We got to the Rwandan border using a series of long, confusing and bumpy taxi and daladala rides with several stops at deserted Tanzanian villages along the way.
We crossed the Tanzanian-Rwandan border by foot, (of course). Some random guy in a hut checked our luggage for plastic bags. They outlawed plastic bags in Rwanda in 2005 because apparently they found over 1 million on the streets of Kigali and somebody got mad about it. We could have been carrying AK-47s and a kilo of cocaine but the Rwandan authorities would have just asked us to put the coke in a more environmentally friendly receptical.
We noticed an immediate change when we got on a bus to Kigali. The roads were paved, the person to seat ratio was 1:1 as opposed to 45:1 and there was no livestock on the bus. Rwanda seems much less chaotic than Tanzania. People don't scream "Mzungu" and try to touch you all the time, and nobody is running around clutching a chicken -but they stare. Jo, Ali and I will be sitting at a bus stop and within five minutes a crowd of 15 people will have gathered in front of us, just staring stupidly.
Rwanda is also incredibly beautiful. It is called "the land of 1,000 hills" which is an underestimation. There is almost no flat land. All the bus routes are curvy and barf-inducing. It's a little ironic that the country with probably the highest rate of car sickness is also the only one that has outlawed plastic bags. We are currently in a town called Kibuye, which is on the coast of Lake Kivu. It is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, but getting here was a nightmare. We went on a very un-Rwandan bus with metal seats and horrendous overcrowding. I sat in-between Jo and a woman who started puking almost immediately after she got on the bus. Besides being insanely curvy, the ride was so bumpy that you needed a sports bra. The sick woman puked for the entire 5 hour ride and kept passing out on me, even though I would push her off every 5 minutes.
They speak Kinyarwanda, French and Swahili here, so we are usually able to get by on our swahili. Apparently my brain only has room for 1.5 languages, so I've forgotten all 12 years of school and college french and have been unable to use it.
We were surpised to find that Kigali is completely modern. In fact, it looks a little bit like New Jersey! It's hard to believe that 15 years ago the streets were littered with body parts. We've been pretty hesistant to ask a lot of people about the genocide, but most of those we have asked were out of the country as refugees. Our tour guide for Nyungwe National Park, (in SE Rwanda - full of monkeys and chimps!) was in the country for the genocide but all he would say is that it was "horrible, just horrible."
That's it for now.
We will be in Rwanda for the next few days and are planning to head to Uganda. Til then!
We crossed the Tanzanian-Rwandan border by foot, (of course). Some random guy in a hut checked our luggage for plastic bags. They outlawed plastic bags in Rwanda in 2005 because apparently they found over 1 million on the streets of Kigali and somebody got mad about it. We could have been carrying AK-47s and a kilo of cocaine but the Rwandan authorities would have just asked us to put the coke in a more environmentally friendly receptical.
We noticed an immediate change when we got on a bus to Kigali. The roads were paved, the person to seat ratio was 1:1 as opposed to 45:1 and there was no livestock on the bus. Rwanda seems much less chaotic than Tanzania. People don't scream "Mzungu" and try to touch you all the time, and nobody is running around clutching a chicken -but they stare. Jo, Ali and I will be sitting at a bus stop and within five minutes a crowd of 15 people will have gathered in front of us, just staring stupidly.
Rwanda is also incredibly beautiful. It is called "the land of 1,000 hills" which is an underestimation. There is almost no flat land. All the bus routes are curvy and barf-inducing. It's a little ironic that the country with probably the highest rate of car sickness is also the only one that has outlawed plastic bags. We are currently in a town called Kibuye, which is on the coast of Lake Kivu. It is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, but getting here was a nightmare. We went on a very un-Rwandan bus with metal seats and horrendous overcrowding. I sat in-between Jo and a woman who started puking almost immediately after she got on the bus. Besides being insanely curvy, the ride was so bumpy that you needed a sports bra. The sick woman puked for the entire 5 hour ride and kept passing out on me, even though I would push her off every 5 minutes.
They speak Kinyarwanda, French and Swahili here, so we are usually able to get by on our swahili. Apparently my brain only has room for 1.5 languages, so I've forgotten all 12 years of school and college french and have been unable to use it.
We were surpised to find that Kigali is completely modern. In fact, it looks a little bit like New Jersey! It's hard to believe that 15 years ago the streets were littered with body parts. We've been pretty hesistant to ask a lot of people about the genocide, but most of those we have asked were out of the country as refugees. Our tour guide for Nyungwe National Park, (in SE Rwanda - full of monkeys and chimps!) was in the country for the genocide but all he would say is that it was "horrible, just horrible."
That's it for now.
We will be in Rwanda for the next few days and are planning to head to Uganda. Til then!
Monday, September 7, 2009
Nimemaliza!
I'm finished!
The SPW program has ended and I am no longer a resident of Mdilidili village. My last few weeks were bittersweet, but I can safely say that an African village is not the place I want to spend the rest of my life. Also, I left not a moment too soon because they found a lion in one of the neighboring villages and it was eating everyone's goats. This resulted in an unofficial 7pm curfew.
We had a big sherehe (party) on the last night and invited our favorite Mdilidilians for a little bamboo juice and some conversation. We got three chickens as parting gifts. Unfortunately, two of them were not ready to die. One kept me up all night sqwaking and then managed to escape, (he went home, apparently, because we found him there the next day acting as if nothing had happened) and the other one got really rowdy and managed to get herself stuck upside-down between the table and the wall, where she promptly fell asleep.
As soon as all the fowl was accounted for, my favorite mama killed and cooked them. We didn't actually have bamboo liquor at the party because we couldn't find any in the village. Someone had died that day and apparently they don't make bamboo juice on the days when people die. However, we scored some corn alcohol which tasted like dirt. I'll stick with the whiskey flavored gin they sell in plastic pouches.
Things got a little crazy on account of the corn alcohol and everyone put on their Obama t-shirts (a gift for the guests, courtesy of a care package from my Aunt Rosemary) and danced around shouting, "Mwinyo Kwivava!" We took a lot of pictures with everyone making the gang sign for Mdilidili. A ridiculous end to a ridiculous experience.
The week before I left I also attended a goat roast which was hosted by a Peace Corps volunteer who lives in a village about 50 km away from Mdilidili. I got to hang out with a bunch of Peace Corps, who are quite the fun-loving bunch: expats in Tanzania clearly take a cue from the village bibis in their hard-partying ways. We slaughtered the goat in the backyard. It was quite sickening. The man who killed the goat used a dull knife, so it took a long time for the goat to die. Eventually Brian, the Peace Corps volunteer who lives in my village and is a hunter-gatherer mountain man from Minnesota, jumped in yelling, "We have to sever the spinal cord!" and starting hacking away at the poor goat. I almost threw up. Anyway, my threshhold for watching things die is getting higher and I'm working my way up to a human sacrifice! Also, for anyone who hasn't tried it, goat is delicious. I'm going to open up a restaurant in the US that sells bacon and cheese goatburgers.
The day after the goat roast, with my judgement and vision still clouded by whiskey-flavored gin, I decided to start walking back to Mdilidili in an attempt to catch a ride. Unlike in America, where hitchhiking is reserved for the criminally insane, it is pretty common here. Besides, I had no other way home. Luck was not on my side because I barely saw another human being for 3 hours. After 10 or 12 miles I was hot and delirious and about to die when I saw a pikipiki (motorcycle) and basically jumped in front of it. There were already two people riding, but they were nice enough to sqeeze me on the back and give me a "lifti" (ride) the rest of the way back.
I'm writing this post from Mwanza, Tanzania, which is in the north or the country and on the southern coast of Lake Victoria. Two other SPW volunteers, (Jo and Ali) and I are making our way through Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya. We traveled from the southern city of Mbeya, TZ to Mwanza in four days, via two 15 hour bus rides. We stopped midway in the capital city of Dodoma, to visit my friend Alex, (Kyler's Tanzanian partner and resident of the neighboring village) where we proceeded to be introduced to everyone in the city. As Ali says, the Tanzanians love to show off their white people. Also, Tanzanians refer to everyone as brother, sister, mother or father, which can be confusing when you're trying to figure out how people are related. Alex introduced us two four of his different mamas and no less than six fathers, non of whom were actually his parents.
The bus ride from Dodoma to Mwanza was horrendous. The driver treated the bus like a daladala, stuffing people into the aisles. I finally hit my breaking point when the requisite chicken arrived on board. I had a man sitting on my armrest and nodding off on top of me for four hours. There are police checks every 100 miles or so, whose sole purpose is to stop this kind of overcrowding. Yet every time we passed a police check, the driver would yell at all the people standing in the aisles to crouch down and hide. Then the policeman would mount the bus, survey the situation, shake his head and tell the driver that there are too many people on the bus, then turn around and get off the bus and wave the bus driver on his way. The driver was also extremely unsympathetic to those who had to go to the bathroom. Every time I got off the bus to go, I would return to find the bus pulling away and I would have to run after it screaming. Also, most pit stops consisted of the bus pulling over to the side of a deserted road in the middle of a desert. The ladies room was one side of the road and the men's was another.
Another couple of random observations on Tanzanians:
It is perfectly acceptable to pick your nose in public. You'll be talking to someone and they'll just start digging in. It's not just a little wipe, but oftentimes a huge double-finger pick, often requiring observation of the findings and then a little flick to get rid of the booger. This is all done without losing train of thought in the conversation. Because I've adapted so well to my surroundings, I apologize in advance if I come back to the US and start picking my nose while you're talking to me.
Cell phones are extremely important to Tanzanians and they never ever reject a call. During meetings, the village officers would be talking to a crowd of 50 people and their phone would ring and they would pick up the phone and have a five minute conversation while the crowd waited patiently. Teachers often pick up their cell phones in the middle of the class and leave for ten minutes and Rehema regularly got calls at 4am and picked them up, oblivious to the fact that I was trying to sleep right next to her.
Anyway, as I mentioned before, I'll be in East Africa for the next six weeks or so and will continue the blog. I will definitely miss this part of the world, mostly because at least 700 crazy things happen every day. I'll keep everyone updated on the inevitable wacky things to come.
The SPW program has ended and I am no longer a resident of Mdilidili village. My last few weeks were bittersweet, but I can safely say that an African village is not the place I want to spend the rest of my life. Also, I left not a moment too soon because they found a lion in one of the neighboring villages and it was eating everyone's goats. This resulted in an unofficial 7pm curfew.
We had a big sherehe (party) on the last night and invited our favorite Mdilidilians for a little bamboo juice and some conversation. We got three chickens as parting gifts. Unfortunately, two of them were not ready to die. One kept me up all night sqwaking and then managed to escape, (he went home, apparently, because we found him there the next day acting as if nothing had happened) and the other one got really rowdy and managed to get herself stuck upside-down between the table and the wall, where she promptly fell asleep.
As soon as all the fowl was accounted for, my favorite mama killed and cooked them. We didn't actually have bamboo liquor at the party because we couldn't find any in the village. Someone had died that day and apparently they don't make bamboo juice on the days when people die. However, we scored some corn alcohol which tasted like dirt. I'll stick with the whiskey flavored gin they sell in plastic pouches.
Things got a little crazy on account of the corn alcohol and everyone put on their Obama t-shirts (a gift for the guests, courtesy of a care package from my Aunt Rosemary) and danced around shouting, "Mwinyo Kwivava!" We took a lot of pictures with everyone making the gang sign for Mdilidili. A ridiculous end to a ridiculous experience.
The week before I left I also attended a goat roast which was hosted by a Peace Corps volunteer who lives in a village about 50 km away from Mdilidili. I got to hang out with a bunch of Peace Corps, who are quite the fun-loving bunch: expats in Tanzania clearly take a cue from the village bibis in their hard-partying ways. We slaughtered the goat in the backyard. It was quite sickening. The man who killed the goat used a dull knife, so it took a long time for the goat to die. Eventually Brian, the Peace Corps volunteer who lives in my village and is a hunter-gatherer mountain man from Minnesota, jumped in yelling, "We have to sever the spinal cord!" and starting hacking away at the poor goat. I almost threw up. Anyway, my threshhold for watching things die is getting higher and I'm working my way up to a human sacrifice! Also, for anyone who hasn't tried it, goat is delicious. I'm going to open up a restaurant in the US that sells bacon and cheese goatburgers.
The day after the goat roast, with my judgement and vision still clouded by whiskey-flavored gin, I decided to start walking back to Mdilidili in an attempt to catch a ride. Unlike in America, where hitchhiking is reserved for the criminally insane, it is pretty common here. Besides, I had no other way home. Luck was not on my side because I barely saw another human being for 3 hours. After 10 or 12 miles I was hot and delirious and about to die when I saw a pikipiki (motorcycle) and basically jumped in front of it. There were already two people riding, but they were nice enough to sqeeze me on the back and give me a "lifti" (ride) the rest of the way back.
I'm writing this post from Mwanza, Tanzania, which is in the north or the country and on the southern coast of Lake Victoria. Two other SPW volunteers, (Jo and Ali) and I are making our way through Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya. We traveled from the southern city of Mbeya, TZ to Mwanza in four days, via two 15 hour bus rides. We stopped midway in the capital city of Dodoma, to visit my friend Alex, (Kyler's Tanzanian partner and resident of the neighboring village) where we proceeded to be introduced to everyone in the city. As Ali says, the Tanzanians love to show off their white people. Also, Tanzanians refer to everyone as brother, sister, mother or father, which can be confusing when you're trying to figure out how people are related. Alex introduced us two four of his different mamas and no less than six fathers, non of whom were actually his parents.
The bus ride from Dodoma to Mwanza was horrendous. The driver treated the bus like a daladala, stuffing people into the aisles. I finally hit my breaking point when the requisite chicken arrived on board. I had a man sitting on my armrest and nodding off on top of me for four hours. There are police checks every 100 miles or so, whose sole purpose is to stop this kind of overcrowding. Yet every time we passed a police check, the driver would yell at all the people standing in the aisles to crouch down and hide. Then the policeman would mount the bus, survey the situation, shake his head and tell the driver that there are too many people on the bus, then turn around and get off the bus and wave the bus driver on his way. The driver was also extremely unsympathetic to those who had to go to the bathroom. Every time I got off the bus to go, I would return to find the bus pulling away and I would have to run after it screaming. Also, most pit stops consisted of the bus pulling over to the side of a deserted road in the middle of a desert. The ladies room was one side of the road and the men's was another.
Another couple of random observations on Tanzanians:
It is perfectly acceptable to pick your nose in public. You'll be talking to someone and they'll just start digging in. It's not just a little wipe, but oftentimes a huge double-finger pick, often requiring observation of the findings and then a little flick to get rid of the booger. This is all done without losing train of thought in the conversation. Because I've adapted so well to my surroundings, I apologize in advance if I come back to the US and start picking my nose while you're talking to me.
Cell phones are extremely important to Tanzanians and they never ever reject a call. During meetings, the village officers would be talking to a crowd of 50 people and their phone would ring and they would pick up the phone and have a five minute conversation while the crowd waited patiently. Teachers often pick up their cell phones in the middle of the class and leave for ten minutes and Rehema regularly got calls at 4am and picked them up, oblivious to the fact that I was trying to sleep right next to her.
Anyway, as I mentioned before, I'll be in East Africa for the next six weeks or so and will continue the blog. I will definitely miss this part of the world, mostly because at least 700 crazy things happen every day. I'll keep everyone updated on the inevitable wacky things to come.
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