Post Industrial Technology

• This weekend we went rafting on the Nile, which was one of the most fun things I've ever done. All of the ISSLP students in Uganda and two Kellogg interns came down to Jinja for the weekend and we rafted down twenty miles of the Nile. On our first big rapid (class 5) our boat flipped which was awesome but somewhere in the wash cycle that followed I dislocated my shoulder . Oops. It actually wasn't too bad until we flipped again on the last rapid which, I kid you not, is just called "The Bad Place."
  
• I learned a new adjective this week. There's good job and bad job but apparently here they also have HIV job. that seems mildly tasteless.
• Some of the prostitutes I teach have told me they want me to find them Mzungu husbands and wives. They decided they'd just start with pen pals though and then try to woo people over time. So if anyone's looking for a pen pal who's secretly trying to get you into bed let me know. As a side note there's also a teacher at my school looking for one too. She's 40 and married so I think that one's a little safer though maybe not as funny.
• It turns out that I was wrong in my last post and we actually do have tests. But the teachers don't make them, they buy them from some program and I don't think they have much control over the test questions. And I know I wasn't consulted about the material. The grades on the test are also irrelevant because the students don't get term grades. So yeah, they have tests here they're just pointless. But hey it gives the teachers a few days off to sit around and not teach anything. Why teach when you can test?
• Because of the exams this week I have no classes to teach. So they have me sit in the class and proctor the exams (while they read the newspaper outside). It's actually pretty fun catching cheaters. And these kids are terrible at cheating (probably because the teachers here don't really care if they cheat) so I don't really have to work too hard. Mostly I just read more books.
• Last night we had a going away party for one of the two priests who lives in the house. But they didn't really have anything planned except to eat and to serve a ton of beer and waragi (gin). So needless to say we all got drunk with the entire religious community of the parish of Bugembe. Have you ever seen 50 drunk nuns brothers and priests dancing to Abba? Because it is a sight to see. There's a video don't worry. And when I say drunk I mean really drunk. It's almost noon and one of the priests is still snoring next to me. The normal wake up time for priests around here is 6 A.M.
• I found another excellent example of Ugandan journalism in a review of Iron Man 2. Here's the description they gave: "The Iron Man is a science fiction story about the intersection of man and post industrial technology. The central character is an average Japanese office worker who is transformed after implanting pieces of scrap metal into his body. As he evolves into a strange hybrid of man and machine he also develops a connection with another of his kind: the metal fetishist, who has been undergoing a similar conversion. The two then engage in a violent, destructive battle through the streets of Tokyo." Does anyone know what a metal fetishist is?
  

Teaching

So after four weeks I realized that I've never actually written about the teaching I'm doing. That's probably important to mention right? I think I've mentioned some of these things before but I can't remember what I've told to whom so I guess some of you can just skip those parts.

• I teach two classes, P5 math and P6 English. P5 has about 50 kids and P6 has about thirty. Math is waaay easier because I've never been formally educated in the english language so it's hard for me to explain the rules. I just kind of know what's right and wrong (sometimes). For example how many of you actually know what the past participle is? Because I had no idea until last week when I had to teach kids how to use it.
• It's pretty evident doesn't really need me as a teacher. They kind of just tolerate me. I'm not even here for a full term and they already have teachers who could be teaching in my time slots. I'm basically just giving these teachers an excuse to read the newspaper. This is most likely why I only teach on academic class a day.
• I also teach PE a couple of times a day. Sometimes it's kind of tough because I only teach PE to the younger kids who can't really understand me. Luckily all I have to do is throw out a football and they know what to do. Although football can be tough when you're playing with 80 kids at a time. 40 on 40 first grade football is a sight to see. It's the world's largest scrum of children chasing a ball back and forth across the field.
• The Ugandan education system is one of the most ineffective systems I can imagine. The only grades the kids receive are on their state run final exams at the end of the year. They don't get marks on homework or tests or quizzes before that. This is probably my biggest frustration. It means that kids have no immediate incentive to try on their homework. So most of them sort of just wing it and as long as they've turned in something they're not too bothered. The only kids this system works with are diligent kids with enough foresight to realize the value of routine practice and studying who choose to work hard for their own sake instead of playing football. You've all met plenty of elementary school kids like that right? To give you an example, once I assigned two standard multiplication problems to my 50 P5 students. Only five of them got both problems correct.
  
• There are almost no books here. For each subject I teach there is only one book and I have it. This basically means that I copy the notes down on the book for half the class. The rest of class I just go over examples with he kids and let them try some problems.
• The easiest way I can think of to improve education at this school would be to buy English books. Since everything is taught in English I feel like improving kids' understanding of English would help them understand the material better in every class. After asking around I found out that English textbooks cost around five bucks (10,000 shillings). With 400 kids, that means I could buy every student an English textbook for $2,000...
• Since I only have one academic class a day and a few PE classes, that means I'm only in class for at most two hours a day. But I usually try to stay until around 5 so I can play football with the kids after school. This adds up to a lot of time sitting around. at break and lunch I usually either play football or shoot the shit with the kids but when they're in class I can't really do that. And the teachers all talk to each other in Lusoga which I have no hope of understanding so I spend a lot of time sitting around and reading books. Like I mean a lot of time. So far I've read thirteen books.
  

I could spend pages and pages ranting about the issues with the Education system here but that would probably bore most of you. If any of you are curious feel free to ask me in person and I'll tell you all about it. Otherwise this should give you a slightly better picture of what I'm doing.

P.S. If there are any wealthy donors reading this who would like to save me the hassle of guilt tripping you into donating money, please feel free to just cut me a check and give some of these kids a shot at life beyond subsistence farming.

Priests and Miniskirts

So today officially marks the halfway point in my trip to Uganda. Sadly I don't have anything momentous planned for this post. You'll just have to deal with my usual ramblings.

• Doing laundry by hand sucks. It's not particularly difficult it just takes forever and your clothes don't even get that clean (luckily I don't really care). It takes forever to wash them and then it takes at least a day to dry depending on the weather. I wonder if they have laundromats around here?
• This weekend we had a Benedictine monastic priest stay with us for a few days. He had a lot to say but one piece of his wisdom seemed distinctly un-priestly so I thought I'd share: "A good speech is like a good skirt; short enough to arouse curiosity but long enough to cover the essentials." Last I checked monastic priests weren't supposed to be considering those sorts of essentials but hey, what do I know?
• The priests here really get a kick out of the whole David-Samuel biblical connection. So this week after mass they would just not shut up about it because there was a reading from the book of Samuel. It was the part where I yell at him for having Uriah offed so he and Bathsheba can go bump uglies. They spent the whole day trying to derive some significant parallels about our lives.
• Tuesday when I was teaching the prostitutes I found out that I had been very unclear when I explained to them that I was romantically unavailable. Apparently in Uganda the term girlfriend just refers to a friend who's a girl. Apparently the colloquial term they use here is "girl-lover," which has just a few too many connotations for my liking. Nonetheless I will now attempt to bring the term back to the United States because lets face it that's a hilarious thing to refer to someone as. I can just picture sixth grade boys all across the country: "Will you be my girl-lover?"
• I was offered my first wife this week. By a complete stranger no less. On my way to school some workers randomly asked me if I had kids. I told them I was too young. On the way home they asked me if I was married. I told them in the United States I'm too young for that too. But they said that here I was mature and could marry. Then one of them asked me if I wanted to marry his sister. At first I thought he was joking but then he started trying to negotiate a dowry. After the previous girl-lover confusion I just skipped that entirely and told him I was engaged...
• The nursery kids are now addicted to having my throw/spin them in the air. At first this was fine when only one or two of them knew about it. But now every time I arrive at school or walk near the nursery classroom I get gang tackled by twenty 4 year olds insisting I throw them in the air while five others use me as a human jungle gym and race to the top. In their defense though, they're still adorable.
• Apparently I'm losing weight. After four weeks Whitney claims she can already see it in my face. However I have no way to determine how much weight I've lost so far because there are no scales and the largest mirror in our house is 5 by 9 inches. So who knows. Maybe I'll come back all starved looking and emaciated. That'd be sexy right...
  

A Night at the Roxbury

So Friday night we hit the Club, Which was an experience all it's own. I honestly can't really do it justice, it's one of those thigns you really had to be there for. But I guess I'll try anyways.

• The OLMs invited us to join them for an evening of Ugandan Clubbing. The guest list included David and me, The Olms: Terry, Whitney, and Derrick, Whitney's parents who are visiting for two weeks, and Derrick's five german friends, affectionately (not really) known as Der Germans. This was probably the largest gathering of Muzungus (white people) the Ugandan social scene had witnessed in maybe a decade.
• One shocking revelation is that Derrick and Der Germans liked to spend a lot of time outside, smoking and chatting. We settled on describing it as very "European." I personally preferred a word starting with D and rhyming with Pouchey, but I kept that one to myself. Apparently Africa has given me some semblance of tact and restraint.
  
• Anyways I'll start from the beginning. The club is called Sombrero. The Mexican connection is unclear, because we didn't see any Mexican cultural influence or Mexicans. But apparently there wasno other place two muzungus would be expected late on a Friday night, because without even hailing one, a boda driver pulled up next to us saying "Sombrero?"
• The place is actually pretty big and the disco lights were in full effect for oldies night. But in Uganda Oldies means 80's and 90's. There were maybe two songs from the 70's. Reflecting later I realized mainstream music probably hadn't reached Uganda in the 50's and 60's.
  
• When we walked into to this rather large club what did we find? Maybe 30 dudes... that was it. There weren't really any girls there, we counted three the whole night. We had stumbled on a good old fashioned sausage fest. The guys were seemingly just there to dance with each other. And these weren't good dancers either, they just kind of awkwardly swayed to the beat. It was like Hitch (Will Smith) had taught twenty guys to dance and they all hit the club together.
  
• Terry introduced David and me to Ugandan Wine coolers, called Redd's. They don't have Mike's Hard Lemondade, instead it's like alcoholic ginger ale meets sparkling cider. Talk about our new guilty pleasure. So armed with several of these in our stomachs, and to finish off my Hitch reference, we made like Kevin James and hit the dance floor. For anyone who hasn't seen maybe the greatest guy film masquerading as a chick flick ever, this means we danced like white idiots with no rhythm.
• We were just dominating the dance floor. All the Ugandans were now pushed to the outskirts to watch the embarrassing spectacle that is white people on a dance floor. The disco songs were particularly bad with shopping carts, lawnmowers, and sprinklers all over the place. It was just 12 Muzungus looking like fools out there (or at least so we thought).
• Along the night somehow I managed to pick up two dudes. Twice during the night somebody sauntered up to me and just started dancing with me. Homosexuality is a capital crime here so I don't I was being hit on, I really think guys just like dancing together here. Although to be blunt, one guy introduced himself to me and then pulled out his vocational ID card to me proving that he had a trade and could provide for me... So yeah that one I can't really rationalize away. I think I may have been hit on there. But the other guy said nothing, he just sort of copied whatever I was doing and we danced the night away. (Five minutes later I felt weird and ran away to get another drink. What can I say, after Joab proved to me that he could bring home the bacon I was a little uncomfortable with the whole thing)
  
• Later we found out why I was so successfully picking up dudes. Whitney herself managed to snag herself one of the three girls in the place. This girl, later introduced as Christina, just walked up behind her and they started doing a little Bump n' Grind. Christina later said to Whitney, "these ones (pointing to all of us), they are not so good, but this one (I kid you not she pointed to yours truly), he is a very good dancer." Apparently my truly appalling, imitations 70's dance moves rate as good dancing in Uganda. Wow. I guess that's why these guys were getting all hot n' bothered.
• Finally I should mention the decor of the place. It was neither Mexican or Ugandan influenced. On the wall there was a delightful fresco, depicting a battle scene between an army of robots and The Predator. Like straight out of The Predator movie. You cannot make this stuff up, that was the decor they chose for their club...
  
• Later David and I raced Whitney and Terry's home on Bodas. We won by the way, our driver hugged the rail on a turn to shoot past them and got himself 500 extra shillings for getting us home first. We actually never asked him to race but it was fun it wasn't That unsafe. I mean everyone was wearing their helmets after all... To clarify for those of you that have apparently never heard me speak and couldn't pick up on this one, that was sarcasm. I don't even think they sell motorcycle helmets here.
  
• Even though we told everyone to leave the front door open since we were going out, of course nobody here was listening to us and the house was locked down when we got back. This was where we fully realized that every single opening to this place has bars on it. Well except one. After calling everyone inside several times to no avail and several exploratory laps around the house we finally found a barless window, shimmied it open and climbed in. Of course the second we were inside somebody got up to open the front door and see if we were outside. There's the Ugandan sense of urgency for you...

Anyways that all I'd care to say about the evening for you. Ask me in person and I may have a few more stories that I've saved. Guess you'll just have to wait an see. Also this weekend Father Pascal wants to take us to a club with some of his friends. That's right next time we're clubbing with holy men. That experience should defy description.

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. The internet/power has been a little unreliable lately and quite frankly I've just been lazy a lot of the time (big surprise right?). Anyway there's plenty to catch you all up on.

• They feed us like kings here. Each meal has at least five courses. (David and I actually have a huge problem with how much food they serve and just generally with what the money here gets spent on but that's a long rant which I don't feel like going in to right now) the problem is that the 5-7 courses are all the same. We've eaten the same meal twice a day for three weeks now. I've eaten the same meal pretty much 40 times in a row. I'm gonna go nuts if this continues for the next 5 weeks.
• I would commit murder to get my hands on a turkey sandwich. I can't explain why that's the one thing I want more than anything in the world but it is. And I can't understand why I can't have one. They have turkeys here. They have bread. Hell they even have mayo and bacon. Why can't anybody put those thigns together for me.
• If you remember from my last post Indians run things around here. No surprise then that to escape the food we went to an Indian restaurant. We got pizza... Not sure what kind of cheese it was, there wasn't really tomato sauce, and the dough was sort of just... there... but it was better than another round of mashed bananas for dinner... Yup, I said bananas.
• My P6 class was well behaved on Monday so as promised I had to rap for them. I dropped Eminem's til I collapse like it was hot. They loved it apparently. Of course then they wanted to compete so now I have a video of "DJ Kisame" rapping in Lusoga. Can't understand a word of it but it's hysterical.
• If you're picking football teams in Uganda, you want the kids wearing blue on your team. Don't ask me why but they seem to have color coded football talent here. The blue kids just run circles around everyone else.
• Last Sunday we played football against some guys from the village. My kids ran train on them. Well not really, we tied 1-1, but for us that's pretty good. Because these guys were MEN. like a couple of them were at least 30. One guy (high school age I think) showed up and then changed into cleats, high socks, nice shorts and a Fabregas football jersey. Alright bro let's chill out here, you're playing elementary school kids who are barefoot. Who are you Christiano Fucking Ronaldo. No surprise he played like a douche too, just sitting offside waiting for the glory ball. I kicked him in the face... Whoops.
  
• Apparently David and I are loaded. We get a $1,000 stipend for two months. The OLMs get $100 a month and they have to pay their own bills too, we don't. When Terry heard how much money we make he told us we should start "Jerkin off into fuckin Rubbahs." I guess that's one way to spend the money...
• Uganda has four seasons. Two rainy seasons and two dry seasons. Before we left everyone told us it would be rainy season. When we got here everyone told us it was dry season, that it would barely rain and everything would get really brown. It's poured rain three times a week and the whole country is still bright green. So we have no idea what season it is. We're pretty sure everyone we've spoken to has been talking out of their asses. We're calling it Gecko baby making season because our house is swarming with baby lizards.
• I have officially found my favorite thing about Uganda. Nothing beats this. In america summer is marked by ice cream trucks playing classic children's songs and kid's freaking out. They have ice cream Boda's here. Basically a cooler of ice cream strapped to the back of a motorcycle. The difference is that these guys don't play children's songs. They play My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion... I am not making this up.
  
• Butcher shops here are pretty unappealing. They don't really refrigerate the meat. In fact they don't really do anything. It just kind of sits there in the open, crawling with flies. Our favorite is "Highway Hygienic Butcher." It's basically a shack which has half a dead cow hanging outside in the sun next to the highway. Adds a nice diesel flavor to your steak...
• I'm going to make a mildly sexist cultural judgment in this bullet. In America girls don't go in for contact sports too much. Even at young ages when they're bigger than the boys, the boys usually have the edge in America. I brought a rugby ball to school to play with the little kids expecting this to be similar. The boys were literally terrified of the girls. None of them even wanted the ball because in three seconds a girl would put them on the ground. girls here are tough... I'm hoping to get a video of a girl here pancaking a boy with a rugby ball. It's a sight.
• Have you ever played a serious game of football while a herd of goats grazed on the same field?

That's all for now. I think I'll wait a day to tell you all about my experience clubbing in Uganda last night. that one deserves its own blog post.

P.S. I don't need anybody more people telling me to pick two or three courses at each meal and then alternate to get some variety. We've already thought of that. We're not stupid.

Malaria: It's the New Strep Throat

• So last year the person in Jinja from my dorm never got sick once. Not even some indigestion from the new food. So of course I came into this summer hoping to have an "iron stomach" like him. Sadly this was not the case. I like to refer to this time in my life as the jejunum rebellion of 2010. I've had about a months worth of toilet visits in the past 4 days. My thighs are literally bruised and purple from the amount of time I've spent there.
  
• Anyways when the drugs I brought with me weren't cutting it so I decided to try out the doctors here. When you're a kid in America if you go to the doctor with pretty much any of the standard symptoms they check you for strep. Why not right? Well apparently they do that with malaria here. Headache? Malaria test. Upset stomach? Malaria test. Hell if you break your arm I wouldn't be surprised if they test you just to be sure. Anyways long story short they tested me too. But apparently the malaria prevention drugs I'm taking confuse the test so it's impossible to tell if i have malaria. So based on my symptoms and my fever apparently it's fully within the realm of possibility for me to have malaria right now... So regardless of the disease they gave me a big bag of drugs and sent me on my way. And hey I'm feeling better so I guess they know what they're doing.
  
• The government run hospital system is a disaster here. It basically a full day to get something done and that's if there's a doctor on staff that day. But the private clinics here run like clockwork. I walked in the door, saw the doctor, went to the lab and got tested, saw the doctor again, got my drugs at the pharmacy and got out of there in about twenty minutes. No joke twenty minutes. Whole process cost me $18.50. (I'd round to twenty but $1.50 buys two 16 oz. beers at a bar here so that's big money to round off around here). I'm not sure if all private clinics are like that or if it's just because we went to an Indian one.
  
• Little known fact: Indians freaking run this place. The government is nominally in charge but if you want something done right you find an Indian and everyone knows it. They have the only reliable grocery stores (aka clean, cheap, and food with an expiration date), they apparently have the only hospitals worth going to, if you need sandals that will last more than a month of African walking you find one of their stores. And most importantly, they are the only people in the entire country who will sell you a bacon cheeseburger. If that's not power I don't know what is. (Out of fairness to other races and cultures I should mention that an Australian runs the only restaurant I've heard of that will grill you a steak. So that guy probably has a lot of political clout too)
  
• The kids here are adorable. Every morning now the ones in nursery and P1 (preschool and kindergarten) run out shouting "mistah sam mistah sam!" The first two grab a hand and the stragglers kind of grab any free arm space they can find. Some kids don't mess around, they just go straight in for a hug. And then on the way home I usually
  
• I've often complained that Hitler's second greatest offense was that he forever made a great mustache style unwearable. (Crimes against humanity holding a clear and obvious first place for anyone living under a rock who couldn't figure that one out). So imagine my delight when I found out that the Hitler Stache is still going strong in Uganda. Even the priests wear them and most of them are western educated to some degree. I have a picture of a priest fully dressed for mass shaved like Adolf Hitler himself. Possibly my crowning life achievement to date.
  
• My P6 english class really wants me to rap for them. I told them if they behaved on Friday I'd give them they're choice between Jay-Z and Eminem. They also specifically requested that I sing Shakira for them so of course I did a quick rendition of Hips Don't Lie complete with a booty shake at the end. I would have sung She Wolf but I decided I couldn't justify shaking my ass for 35 fifth graders with that song...

**As a disclaimer to any overly concerned adults out there I should clarify that Malaria is easily treatable given the small possibility that I actually have it. I'll be fine**