Soda

Last weekend I attended a party in honour of the woman who will be the Headmistress of Timothy Girls College when it opens next year. She recently completed her Masters degree, so her friends at Kibaale Community Centre (our sister project) organized a big celebration to mark the occasion. When we drove into the compound, it looked like a wedding reception was about to take place. There were three big marquee tents, tulle arches, artificial flower bouquets, straw hats with festive ribbons atop tulle-and-ribbon-draped pillars and a head table set with bottles of soda.

This last detail is important to note. In Uganda, an event becomes an “occasion” when you are given a bottle of soda to drink. Coke, Sprite and Pepsi are readily available, as are a few local favourites that aren’t sold at home, but a bottle of any carbonated beverage is considered a real treat. So special, in fact, that crates of soda are often listed as one of the many gifts a prospective groom is expected to give to the bride’s father as a dowry. Similarly, when Paul bought a bull for the Timothy Centre workers to slaughter and roast at Christmas as a way to thank them for all their hard work, our security guards were put in charge of the soda crates at the party in order to ensure equitable distribution. (The Ugandans made that decision, not us, incidentally!)

The honour placed on bottles of Coca Cola or Pepsi may be viewed, I suppose, as an example of corporate colonialism; American soft drink companies imposing themselves on other cultures. However, no one here seems to be complaining. Perhaps the old commercial got something right...apparently, giving the world a Coke does keep it company!

The head table at the graduation celebration

The Timothy Girls College administrative team

Olympics

Despite all the technological advances that appear to make the world smaller, we’re all feeling very far from home these days as we hear about all the Olympic fervour happening in Vancouver. It all looks like so much fun from this side of the world, and we feel like we're missing out! Reading Facebook status updates from people in the stands as Canadians win medals at home or seeing photos of my nephews all dressed in red to cheer on the Canadian women’s hockey team at Thunderbird Stadium can make a (slightly!) homesick Canuck just a bit jealous!

We’re not totally cut off though. We can stay on top of the medal count and read about the events online and most importantly a restaurant here in Masaka has satellite TV. We’re eleven hours ahead of Vancouver, so nothing is shown live. However, every day at noon SuperSport 2 shows an hour long highlight program of the previous day’s events in Vancouver. Paul, Megan and I have gone a few times to eat lunch and watch images of our city projected on the wall. We’ve been the only ones there watching, but every once in a while a few curious Ugandans wander in to check it out. Once they see we’re not watching football (and snowboarding, luge and curling mean absolutely nothing to them) they don’t tend to stick around. It's a fun way to spend an hour, and it is so great to see familiar places--we always look for people we know when the cameras pan the crowd, but no luck so far!

Given that we're so far away, here’s what we’ll picture when we look back on our Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics experience:

GO CANADA!!!!!

Obama

Earlier this week we had the opportunity to attend a small function at the US Embassy in Kampala. Our project was chosen to receive a grant from the US Mission and so we were invited, along with the other recipients, to visit the embassy, sign the documents and pose for a few photos. It was an interesting experience having to go through the tight security and then, upon entering the building, feeling like you’d stepped into America.

In the lobby where we waited to be escorted to the meeting room, there were official portraits of Obama, Biden and Clinton. It made a lot of sense that on the wall of an embassy, you’d find the portraits of the Head of State and key government officials of that country. However, regarding this particular Head of State, one sees his image in all kinds of unlikely contexts around Uganda, so it was almost strange to see this portrait hanging in its proper place.

Yes, Obama is very popular here—or at least his image and name are very popular here. I’ve seen an Obama Restaurant and an Obama hair salon; a portrait painter in Kampala has used Obama’s face on the sign outside his shop; people wear Obama t-shirts and sport his image on the all-purpose kanga cloths women use as shawls, baby carriers, and head-coverings; the teachers at Kibaale Secondary School keep track of the date on a calendar poster covered with photos of the First Family. He's everywhere!

I don’t know if Obama has any plans to visit this region, but if he does, he’d be assured of a very warm welcome! People don’t seem to care much about the politics; he’s a US President whose father came from East Africa, and that is enough to have hair salons named in his honour! This t-shirt was hanging in the Kibaale village market. It reads:"Barack Obama: Two centuries ago, a band of patriots signed a document in Philedelphia. Now he's bringing it home."

Kanga cloths for sale

Insects

At one point in the movie The Princess Bride, Buttercup and Wesley have survived two of the three “terrors of the Fire Swamp”—the Flame Spurt and the Lightning Sand, when they are set upon by the vicious third terror--the R.O.U.S’s, or Rodents of Unusual Size. While the rodents here in Uganda generally tend to be of a Fairly Typical Size, we regularly find ourselves faced with the menacing I.O.U.S’s—Insects of Unusual Size.

These six-legged beasts invade our homes, attack our porch lights, lie in wait in dark corners and release powerful biological weapons such as malaria or sleeping sickness. They lay their eggs in our feet, attach themselves to our dogs’ ears and sting us (causing unsightly swelling.) They burrow into our deliciously ripe fruit, infest our rice and drown in our drinks. And how do we defend ourselves? A thin net suspended over our beds and a small bottle of Deep Woods Off. We don’t stand a chance against the sheer numbers of their forces!

Yes, insects are definitely a part of each and every day. Whenever we sweep the house, there are usually tiny ants in the dust pile that we sweep out the door. We go to sleep at night to the sound of the cicadas buzzing outside. Every morning we have to deal with all the lake fly carcasses on the floor beneath the window. Fruit flies are ubiquitous in the kitchen. Slapping mosquitoes is a regular evening activity. But all of these bugs are fairly small. Every once in a while, however, we come across an insect that is just ridiculously large.

There was a beetle in front of Paul and Megan’s house one day that was probably three inches long with a body that was about an inch and a half wide. Fortunately we don’t have them in our new houses, but where we used to live, we’d regularly see two inch cockroaches. And then I came across this one morning on my front porch:

We’ll never defeat them, so we are forced to learn how to co-exist with them. You learn that flip-flops make excellent fly swatters and that it is important to keep a can of Doom (the Ugandan version of Raid) handy at all times. No big deal. As Wesley says about the Fire Swamp, ”It’s not that bad...the trees are actually quite lovely.”