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.