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 :)
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