Monday, July 11, 2011

"we're 3 years to 30...weird, right?"

happy crazy ugandan birthday!

i love you to the moon and wish you so much joy. keep living it up.

and here's a good reminder from rilke:

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet

love of the forever and always kind,
karis

Thursday, July 7, 2011

stay hungry, stay foolish

stay hungry, stay foolish

"I’ve seen people come and go, I’ve shared my dreams with them, I’ve given my all to see the companies grow and blossom, even at the expense of “a life”, but somehow, everytime, at the end of the day, it’s just God and I left standing. I know He brings people in our lives for a purpose, and when that purpose is fulfilled, they leave. Their work in your life is done, and your work in their life is done.

But, like I told some team members at Node Six, it is a very lonely place, being at the leader of any organisation. You watch the tides turn, you watch the storm come in and you watch the waves rise. Everyone else is allowed to react naturally, to flee the impending disaster, but not you. Nope, like the captain of a sinking ship, you stand at the bow, and face the storm. You stand your ground, and let the maelstrom destroy everything around you.

When it’s all over, you huddle in a miserable water-drenched pile in a corner and cry a bit.

And that’s when God taps you on the shoulder and says, 'Dude, whatagwan? I’m still here.'"

Whether there is a God, or there isn't, and there are undoubtedly lots of gods to choose from, they're either here or they're not, and believing they are, or believing they're not, is just a choice. You choose beliefs, for as long as those beliefs serve a purpose, and when that purpose is fulfilled, you choose, that choice is still (and always) there.

taxi strike and nursery rhymes

Yesterday, I worked in the morning, but then I blew off work had some things to do in the afternoon, but there was a taxi (matatu) strike. I got a call from Alex, through a surprising (because we both have MTN, a giant telecom in Uganda) and yet unsurprising (because MTN is a giant telecom in Uganda) amount of static, saying that I'd have to take a boda to Makindye. The cost of a taxi is 2,000/=, and the cost of a boda is 4,000/=, and while neither are expensive, boda rides can add up, and they're more dangerous. But danger being relative, when I got off the boda, to my right just down the street were about 15-20 men banging on the sides of the empty and unmoving taxi, and by that time it was around 1pm, so I don't doubt they were not only angry, but some of them were probably also drunk. Makindye is a suburb south of Kampala, and it has a little bit of everything, from impoverished slums and crowded orphanages, to lower class Ugandans, up to middle-upper class Ugandans, and all the way up to (relatively upper class) muzungu families. But Ugandans heavily rely on taxis, so a day without transport means a day without work, and a day without work can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people, so when taxis go on strike, it is something that is truly felt.

Luckily, taking a boda on a day when there is a taxi strike means there was no (traffic) jam. The extremely ambitious plan (for an afternoon in Uganda) was to go and meet a lady --- who knows Sapheen, who is Ramadan's mother, who is Alex's friend, who is my friend --- who works at a bead factory. When I arrived I found Alex, Gerald, and Jamil as I usually do, Alex listening to music on my iPod (and singing or dancing, often both), Jamil scrawling in a notebook, often writing a letter or drafting a document to raise money for the Makindye Ultimate Frisbee Club or in hopes of starting a business, and Gerald, today looking on as Jamil wrote, but often aligning himself with one or the other according to his mood. I was greeted by being enveloped in a hug from Alex, continuing to dance and persisting to sway me with him before he let go to tell me that because of the strike, the woman at the bead factory might not be there, and the bead factory might be closed. I felt stupid for not connecting the dots (no taxi, no factory, no beads), but that being just 1 of 3 things planned for the afternoon, I told Alex's mom for months, who runs a kindergarten, nursery school, & day care, that I would visit her class and teach the students some new songs, we headed over to Alex's house. I had thought the night before about what to teach such a developmentally broad range of kids (ages 1-5), but capacity building is such a core fundamental at IDI, and in Uganda as a developing country, that I didn't worry too much as some of the older students that learned more quickly could teach the others and the younger ones. It made me think of summer camps songs I used to sing, as a microscopic sting of sadness swept through my consciousness that I don't really remember any songs that I used to sing back when I went to nursery school. (Note to self) I remember more the songs that my parents used to sing and teach to me, and even more the ones that my grandparents used to also sing to me, like the one involving my feet, and going toe by toe (technically called fingerplay by the experts) singing: "This little piggy went to the market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy had roast beef (you know you've been in Uganda for too long if, when you fail to remember the words roast beef, you substitute gold teeth), this little piggy had none, and this (the pinky toe) little piggy went wee wee all the way home." I didn't want to deal with feet though, so I settled on 3 songs: I'm a Little Teapot, Johnny Whoops, and The Princess Pat, the last song of which I could only definitely remember the first 2 verses, which equals a total of 4 verses, but the first 2 songs proved to be more than enough material, and so that was my injection for the day, steeping some Ugandan children in some American culture with nursery rhymes!

[insert video here]

Dream, Child

Dream, Child by Solomon King

Dream. Like never before.

Dream, child. More fiercely and wondrously than the dreams of yesteryear. Dream and listen not to the taunting voice of careless mistake past, but rather, heed the cheer of lessons learned and a path well troden.

Dream of the impossible. And dream of the insane. Dream of crimson skies blazing with a thousand cold suns. Dream, the fiercest heats of numbing cold. The blinding clarity of the scent of zero.

Dream.

The kaleidoscope dances of midnight rainbows. Dream the whispers of thunder and the roar of silent laughter.

Remember the dreams that filled and gave purpose to your yearning soul. Remember the dreams that woke you up to furiously scribbled midnight epiphanies.

Remember those dreams, and remember well. Gossamer wings and scarlet flight. Inky space and time’s turbulent ordered chaos. You remember don’t you?

Those fleeting dreams, child… those dreams that you rejected so carelessly… they were the first rays of a brilliant dawn.

So. Dream, child.

Again. Like never before.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

These are my names in Uganda

14. Susani (pronounced Suse-ah-knee)

15. Susana (Luganda for Susan)

16. Suzela (as in vuvuzela)

zits in Uganda

If its not dairy, then its drugs, and if its not drugs, then its dust.

Oh, and if its not dust, its deep fried.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

wasting water

"We've started to run short of water, for instance, because there are 6 billion of us who want to drink it and wash in it and use it for irrigating crops in places where they wouldn't otherwise grow (and where we need them to grow, precisely because there are 6 billion of us)." -Bill McKibben, Deep Economy, pg. 22

So this morning, I took a bucket shower. I know myself, I take long showers, and I waste SO MUCH water, here, at home, in hotels, the world is my water wasting oyster. I filled a small bucket, used about 3/4 of it to wash everything, and used the rest to wash my feet (they get so dirty here!).

Pouring a cup of water over my head created a surprisingly adequate amount of water pressure, making me question the extent to which people spend so much money on expensive plumbing, and here's my simple advice, grab a cup and pour, finished. If you're doing dishes, do them with a friend, you pour while they wash!

Now if I can just figure out how to deal with cold water...

Monday, July 4, 2011

muzungu 3rd of july, ugandan 4th of july

I coughed up 25,000/= (~$9.25, using the crazy recently inflated exchange rate) and watched as muzungu expat families communed over hamburgers, hot dogs, popcorn, cotton candy and fireworks Sunday night celebrating July 4th on July 3rd at the American Recreation Association (ARA). I grabbed a hamburger and a Coke right as the fireworks started, and plopped down on the grass with a German friend I was surprised to find there, but then again, I wouldn't be surprised if non-Ugandan holidays celebrated by Ugandan expats get lumped together into a set of "expat holidays," and this seems even less surprising being that Uganda has one of the world's highest per-capita consumption of alcohol, so more holidays means more reasons to party.

The fact that the ARA even exists made me realize that Kampala is a really expat-family-friendy African capital city (weird). A lot of female expat senior management I work with at IDI are married with kids, and I catch myself wondering about what their life is like to be a wife and mother abroad, on top of living and working abroad. Also, among the crowd there were definitely 2 stereotypical expat families: the broods of Christian missionary expat families, and the adopted Ugandan children expat families. But I was nonetheless curious about what had brought everyone to Uganda, and I only wish that I had gotten there a bit earlier before the sunset and the fireworks to make it a bit easier to meet and talk to some new people.





Being around such a small, dense gathering of muzungus, at a place like the ARA, satisfies a curiosity I'll always have about an expat community if I'm abroad, and a need to touch base from time to time with it, but day to day, its like when I go out and find myself at a club where its "80s night" and I think, wait, didn't I fly halfway around the planet to Uganda? Yeah, I thought so, too. The whole thing also randomly made me think of Shell, WY, a microscopic US city my family passed through on a road trip out west. We stopped there to eat dinner and gaped open mouth in disbelief as the waitress talked about growing up in such a small place and described her K-12 class consisting of 5 kids total, and 1 of which I think she said was her brother. The expat community can often feel really small, and dense, but also really isolated and disparate, with different pockets of expats within the community, although everyone, of course, loosely knows each other, or knows someone who knows someone, and so on.

Its a community I've embraced for building professional networks, as I've realized how important it is to have a professional network to share successes and struggles with, and especially with ICT in Uganda being new and different from ICT in the US. Back in Boston I was so spoiled, I was immersed in an office and I was never short on people that I could talk about code and life with in the same sentence. But it made me really complacent, perhaps even lazy, and I didn't venture out nearly enough to meet the hundreds of other software developers in the Boston area as I've done here in Kampala. In Boston, work and life had lots of overlap, which has its perks, but here in Kampala those two things don't, which has its perks.

The ARA has a trampoline, and yes, I jumped on it, and then after I climbed down, I realized my phone fell out of my pocket, and when I climbed back up to get it, I jumped on it some more.

The next day, I celebrated July 4th, and in the morning, slept in, drank tea, learned (for like, the millionth time) how to make a Rolex, learned (for the first time) how to cut a Ugandan's hair, (a Ugandan male's hair, as I'd need months if not years to learn how to do anything aesthetically pleasing with a Ugandan female's hair), and worked in the afternoon. Then, in the evening I watched a few episodes of The West Wing, drank a Nile Special Lager, and ate half of a Mumbai Special pizza from Zinello's, a takeaway that sells pizza and ice cream (and the lack of dairy in my diet, well... you do the math).

I had a conversation over the weekend with a friend from frisbee, Sheila, who moved from Uganda to the UK when she was 9, and stayed there until she graduated from university, and then came back to Uganda to work. I asked her why she came back, and before I could even finish she said, because this is my country, its as hippie as that, this is my home.

Happy birthday, America! (aka 'merica aka my home :)

bathroom etiquette

Have you ever proposed to someone while peeing? Yeah, me neither.

Have you ever been proposed to while someone was peeing? Didn't think so.

unbecoming muzungu dinner

It was 10pm. We were all hungry. We sloped down the street to grab some cheap pork, but it was late, and pork was finished. They had the usual stuff, but because it was a popular pork joint, it was at the usual jacked-up prices. We walked a bit further and found a small unbecoming restaurant & takeaway, presuming unbecoming meant the food would be cheap. It wasn't, or at least, they were attempting to bank on their proximity to the pork joint, which we should have known. But it was late, and Alex and Gerald easily bargained down my plate of "chips chicken" (a plate of chicken, fries, and in this case, rice) from 8,000/= to 5,000/=. Then they got quiet. They weren't ordering. They weren't eating. I asked them what food they were getting, no answer. I asked them then why are we here, no answer. After a short pause, Gerald said, because you need to eat.

I said I could eat anything, we could go anywhere. When we left the pork joint with no pork, I said let's go somewhere else, somewhere that's cheap. I squinted to conceal my anger in silence for a few moments before speaking. I told them they should know that I'm not OK with getting food, if they're also hungry but can't get food. I told them they were treating me like some muzungu they had only known for a few days, and not a friend they had known for 7 months. The latter felt worse.

They only had 2,000/= to share between the two of them. They said they wanted to buy chapati off the street, but it was late, and chapati was finished. I asked them, why didn't you just tell me, why don't we just do that, no answer. After a shorter pause this time, Gerald said, because you need to eat, because a muzungu taking chapati for dinner was an ironically "muzungu" concept to them, even after I'd spent the past 7 months eating everything they'd been eating, and with abandon, or maybe the chapati was a lie and with only 2,000/=, they already knew they'd have to go without taking dinner. Which is why I was surprised when Gerald, out of some unfounded feeling of obligation, ordered 2 sodas, 1,000/= a piece, with Alex rolling his eyes in disgust at Gerald wasting their money. My plate of chips and chicken followed the sodas. I told them what's worse than getting food, if they're also hungry but can't get food, is having to eat it alone in front of them. They mustered two blank stares, but with a flicker of mild amusement concealing what I really knew to be hunger.

I had almost no appetite, but I poured the chicken broth onto the heaping plate of chips and rice, and forced myself to eat half of what was on the plate, attempting to convince myself that I was hungry, that it was my dinner, that I was paying for it, that it was respectively, their choice, my choice, that they were OK with it, and that I was making it worse by not just also being OK with it. And while some part of me wanted to believe all that, I didn't, because it was based on the idea that we could both afford "choice" that night, or that this food was "mine," and the fact that this food "wasn't mine" was not entirely untrue.

By then it was 11pm. I felt like an idiot. I know Alex and Gerald have gone many uneventful nights without taking dinner, but without any hesitation or reluctance, they walked with me for over half an hour to the pork joint with no pork. They continued walking with me, after discovering there was no pork, looking for a restaurant where we could eat. Then they bargained down the price of what I wanted to eat, speaking for me to the waiter in Luganda, and shaving 3,000/= off the cost of the plate. So the price now being 5,000/=, was it not true that 3/8 of the meal they had technically paid for, or at least, 3/8 of the meal that I wasn't having to pay for? And the sodas, shared, was another 2,000/= I wasn't having to pay for, making for a bill which would have originally totaled 10,000 shillings: 5,000/= of which I paid for, 2,000/= of which they paid for, and 3,000/= for which they bargained and none of us had to pay for. Did I mention that I felt like an idiot? I slid the plate across the table, and I told them, gwada (have), because you need to eat.