List 1

Beware of the man who won't be bothered with details.
-William Feather

It’s hard to know how to give an accurate description of a place so unlike your home, and to be sure, there is really no such thing as an “accurate” description. The stories and thoughts that I post on here tell things to some extent, but so many times, I feel like the details are lost. So, I have decided on an additional method of conveying my experience: a list of random facts. These are things that have struck me as odd, things I have found interesting, unusual, extraordinary…



While the Luganda language lacks specificity for some things (particularly science-related things), it is very specific in other regards. A while ago my tutor taught me 16 words for the different parts of a banana tree. There are more than 16 parts, of course, but we stuck to the basics.

I live a little bit south of the equator.

The main form of shorter-distance transportation is boda-boda (motorcycle taxi). The Peace Corps does not allow volunteers to ride boda-bodas; if you’re caught, you’re automatically sent home, no excuses. Most volunteers occasionally take the chance of getting caught; in many cases it is extremely inconvenient NOT to ride bodas, and Ugandans don’t really understand when you say you can’t. It would be like saying you can’t ride in a car in America. I think that volunteers should be properly informed of the risks, and allowed to ride bodas if they choose to. However, I personally don’t ride them. Bodas (particularly in busy areas) are dangerous; that’s why there’s the rule. In the six months I’ve been here, two of our nuns have been in semi-serious boda accidents, and our carpenter, a really nice man who helped me hang my mosquito net, died in one.

While the thought of contracting malaria is awful to foreigners, getting malaria is not a big deal here- everyone gets it, multiple times. You take 4 pills morning and night for three days, and it goes away. It’s kind of like having a cold in the States.

My nuns run a primary school for deaf students. After mass let out the other day, some of the students were racing each other, running full-speed back to their school. It occurred to me that they can’t hear the crunchy slap of their shoes on the packed dirt road. I love that sound.

To get to town to check my mail, use the interenet, and buy food, I walk about 2 miles to the main road, then flag down “public transportation,” a car. The car is usually a very old, very small Toyota. There are usually about 10 people plus a baby or two already in the car when I squeeze in. Luckily, it’s only 7 or so miles to town.

Students here all wear brightly colored uniforms, which look amazing on their dark dark skin. Everyone in the whole school wears the same color. Imagine 500 little kids, all in turquoise. (Or bright pink, or purple, or green, or sky blue…)

It is very important to dress nicely here. I wear an ironed skirt (always below-the-knee) and an ironed collared shirt most days of the week. It is also important to wash and shine your shoes. Who would have thought I would ever own a shoe brush and tin of shoe polish? I do. It is good to look “smart” (well-dressed) at all times. (If you want to say that someone is intelligent, you would say “bright,” because “smart” always refers to appearance.)

Goats, cows with really long horns, and chickens roam everywhere, and somehow everyone knows whose animals are whose. Nothing runs away, nothing gets lost.

There is a lot of trash on the ground. There aren’t so many trash cans. It is not wrong to throw an empty water bottle out of your taxi window, to drop a wrapper on the side of the road, to dump your plastic bag of rubbish wherever is most convenient. If trash IS collected, it is burned. A lot of the trash is plastic, so I can’t decide which way is worse for the environment; despite the unsightliness, I think it actually might be better just to have it on the ground.

I never cook meat for myself. I still eat it when it is served to me or when I go to a restaurant, but I would never buy it. If I wanted chicken I would have to buy the chicken and kill it and clean it myself. (Which I have done, once, under the helpful supervision and guidance of my host family. I wouldn’t do it myself.) If I wanted anything other than chicken, buying it would involve going up to a hanging carcass and having them chop off a kilo for me. I don’t want meat that badly.

It is not rude to comment on someone’s acne/pimples/zits, a fact which PCVs can find very annoying. Given the fact that most volunteers, myself included, have breakouts as bad as when we were 13, there are a lot of comments. (I attribute my breakouts to the fact that I slather on sunscreen every morning, then sweat all day long…) Many Ugandans, however, think we have been surreptitiously attacked by a million mosquitos; perhaps we don’t know that we should sleep under a net? So, in addition to having your blotches pointed out in the first place, you further have to explain that, no they are not mosquito bites, and despite the fact that you thought you were done getting pimples about 5 years ago, they are, in fact, pimples. Yes, pimples. No, not mosquito bites. Pimples. Really.

You have to boil water before you drink it, always. I am among a very small percentage of people in Uganda who have running water, and even after I boil my water, I let the dirt particles settle to the bottom before I drink it. I don’t think running water is necessarily cleaner than water from a borehole; in fact, it might be dirtier. I brush my teeth with straight tap water, though.


More random facts to come in the future... stay tuned!