I promised a story from "Muzungu vs. Mutatu," but since I am quite literally about to leave for a weekend in Jinja (rafting & bungee jumping!) I am going to copy a conversation I had with someone earlier via email... (Pardon any editing errors!)
Friend - When you get a chance you have to send me a full account of your adventures in Uganda. I expect it to be lengthy, verbose, and full of adjectives. Ok, Go!
Me - Ha! A full account??? That would be impossible. I can't even keep up with everything that happens in one day let alone the past month and a half. But I will give you a story from one of our walks home... well, I'm getting ahead of myself already... Our walks to and from school take roughly 40-50 minutes. (I decided to live with a family instead of in the dorms this semester and it has been a BLAST!) Okay, walks... the university is at the top of this cliff so it's a barge to get up and down everyday. We start off by walking through town, then behind a back road, and finally up a cliff. The thing is though, the road is SO dangerous that we have to make sure to keep track of how close we are to traffic or else we would get run over and not even be looked at twice. There are absolutely no rules of the road here. Whoever is biggest gets the right of way... meaning pedestrians are basically goners if they get distracted.
But this one day in particular we were walking home after classes and were on the last leg of our journey through town when all of a sudden this HUGE branch comes flying at my face! I was like "what the!" and started looking around to see who had thrown it. It turned out to be this haggard guy across the street. He had no shoes, torn up clothes, and a ticked off look on his face. I just looked at him with a 'what's your deal man?' look on my face and continued walking because if I made a scene this guy could have likely been killed-- I am one of thirty muzungus (white persons), or one of fifteen female muzungus in Mukono right now. So if I had made a scene it would have drawn immediate attention. And the men around here are either very inappropriate of very protective, and if I displayed a sign of distress in any way, they would "fix" the problem without thinking twice. So I kept walking, but I continued to look back to see what this guy was doing when I noticed him beginning to crouch down on the ground (totally inappropriate! Oddly enough Africans are very picky about staying clean). He began to drag himself across the road, the MAIN city road -- no traffic laws remember -- towards his stick. I then realized that he had never thrown it at me, someone else had! Here, if someone is suffering with AIDS, or appears to be unhealthy in any way, they are treated SO badly -- superstitions with bad spirits and all. So this man had had his walking stick taken from him and thrown across the street in a gesture of disgust and here I was blaming him. There was nothing I could do as I witnessed cars honking and barely missing him, because if a woman reaches out to help a man here, especially a muzungu woman, it would be looked at as completely inappropriate. Finally, a man did help him, but I was so certain that I was about to witness this man get run over. There are so many humbling and mind blowing experiences just like this every single day. Everything that I know from home is completely useless here. I am relearning how to interact with people and basically live our life here in Uganda. We have no running water, no electricity, and a language barrier that I am just beginning to break through. Truthfully, I wouldn't trade any second of any day for anything though.
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