Saturday, September 9: Life on the Home Front

It’s only been one full week of living and classes in Kampala, but somehow it feels like we’ve been here for months. Part of this could be that days begin at dawn and stretch late into the night, but I think it is mostly that every moment is filled with classes, research, work, or fighting Kampala traffic. And I love it—everything about it!

Last Sunday I moved in with my host family in the Kampala suburb-village of Mpererwe. I live with my host mother, Rosette, her five children ranging in age from 23 to 14, and our “helper,” a domestic assistant. The average Ugandan family has somewhere between six and seven children, so we are actually a rather small family. The oldest three siblings are all going to Makarare University and live near the campus in student hostels, so currently I share a room with 17-year old Raymond (though he too will soon be leaving for boarding high school) and 14-year old Wilbur. My host father has been in the UK studying and working for the past five years, so Rosette takes care of everything alone. From Day One I was warmly welcomed and fully accepted, and I was even christened with an African last name, Muleme, officially signifying my membership in the Leopard Clan.

It’s really hard to judge wealth here, as a lot of the yardsticks we might use in the US don’t really apply, but I would say that our family is very middle class. Our house is about a fifteen minute uphill walk from the main highway and local market. Neither Kampala nor the surrounding areas have any apparent planning and organization, and Mpererwe is no exception. Houses are densely scattered in large clusters, as if groups moved in and raced to claim their plot of dust in some sort of mad race. There are some very small houses in between the larger land plots, but we are one of the fenced in plots on a corner. Security is hugely important to everyone I’ve met; in addition to our high walls and heavy steel enforced entrance, all windows and doors are tightly padlocked each night and a guard dog is set loose to roam the property (a huge pain should an overnight latrine trip become necessary). I have always felt perfectly safe, but it is certainly better to avoid chances.

Individual families cannot really take out loans here—banks will help businesses, but families don’t have the collateral or tools to build credit, let alone solid credit-worthiness. Thus, house building is done in a very slow, piecemeal fashion, adding or finishing as money becomes available. So though our house is “under construction,” it has been for five years, and presently the only indication of such work would be the few material scraps in a heap in the backyard. The outside actually looks quite nice, with finished stones, but other than a tile floor, the inside is mostly a shell.

The 3 boys and 2 girls each share a bedroom, and there is a “master bedroom,” and bedroom/storage room where the maid lives. Our bedroom is about the size of a single dorm room at Duke, so three people makes it a bit of a squeeze, with a set of bunk beds and my bad. Mattresses as such don’t seem very common; instead we sleep on foam pallets. It may only be a few inches thick, but that would be three inches thicker than the bamboo mats in our rural Vietnamese home stays! We do have a television, though Ugandan channels have proved to be kind of a disappointment, at least with our local reception.

Right now the kitchen is just a concrete counter; there is a small propane camp stove, but most cooking is done over a charcoal fire outside. We actually do have indoor plumbing, with one very small bathroom for everyone to share. However, with no running water, this is really more of a tease. As I think most Americans do, I’ve always sort of taken for granted the infrastructure that brings water and electricity to residences. The rural areas of Vietnam didn’t necessarily have water pumped in, but there was never a shortage of rain and canal water. Electricity might falter a few times a week, but we always assumed there would be power. Here, neither adequate water nor electricity can be safely assumed, and I’ve seen the many little affects that such deficits cause.

Electricity right now is on a loose 24-hour on, 24-hour off schedule, though in general there is more off than on. The government plans this “load sharing,” which has been in place at least since the beginning of the year and is expected to last for a solid 2-3 more years. In our family, we have an inverter that charges when there is power and then uses a battery to provide some electricity when there isn’t. Basically it provides light, with sometimes enough juice for music or television for awhile. So, though we can see, the refrigerator will not work without actual power, meaning that food cannot really be stored unless it can be left out. Only a few things can be plugged in at a time and we minimize lights used, never leaving a light on unnecessarily.

Uganda is East Africa’s biggest power exporter with its huge hydroelectric damn near the Nile’s source. A draught apparently meant that half of the damn had to be closed, but even though water levels are closer to normal now, the currents are not managed appropriately, with poor workers and high corruption inhibiting production.

The reasons for the water shortage are a bit more mysterious though, as we are not in what is considered a drought anymore, but the taps have been dry for a month. Apparently periodic interruptions of water were common, but this is one of the longest lasting breaks. Thus, we have to trek to holding tanks or taps that do still have water, paying for each container we fill. The closest source dried up towards the end of the week, so it’s at least a quarter of a mile trudge to wait in line for a turn for the low-pressure tap to eke out enough water to get through the day.

Without water, the bathroom is rather useless, but there is a pit latrine away from the house that we use. I’ve also gotten very good at bathing with a basin, mastering the art of hand-cupping and rinsing without polluting the rinse-water with the dust that cakes my body each night. It does get a bit frustrating when hand-washing or a morning splash requires a trip outside to the water bin, but I’ve quickly gotten used to it.

At first I thought that having a domestic worker would be a sign of wealth, but actually it is apparently more of an indication of middle class here. The rich have the technology that makes life a lot less labor-intensive, including generators, microwaves, ovens, and maybe even washing machines. Doing everything by hand and being subject to the whims of power schedules requires an enormous amount of time. My host mother works at the East African Development Bank as a computer systems administrator, with a work day that begins at about 8:00 each morning and has stretched to after 10:00 some nights this week. For the middle class with steady jobs, it’s practically impossible to finish it all! It is not uncommon for family members like my father to be working abroad, and remittances are important to Uganda’s economy, but for a lot of people without special skills, life abroad (especially in the UK) is so expensive, that really remittances are minimal if present at all.

I’ll admit that I was a tiny bit overwhelmed when I arrived at the house last weekend to a “small gathering” of more than forty people (not for me—it was a church party), and was promptly summoned to stand and introduce myself and explain exactly what I was doing with this family that I actually had not fully met yet. However, it couldn’t be a more relaxing environment to stay with. Everybody in the family has a great sense of humor and is really nice, so going home is always relaxing and fun. Wilbur is perhaps the best informed 14-year old I have ever met, watching local and global news regularly. He loves to talk African politics and is always teaching me something. Raymond is also a lot of fun and goes out of his way to help me anytime he can. Every night he has a new assortment of questions ready for me about life in America, ranging from geography to the richest cities to famous people to university life. Though she’s usually exhausted, when my mom gets home, she’ll chat about the news and work and my life at school and relax with us.

The lack of “family time” is sort of a mixed blessing, but definitely was not what I was expecting. I guess I’m not sure why I assumed that family bonds and time together would be so culturally significant. Family structure and roots are quite important here, and many family units are a lot more than the nuclear family, but the amount of time the family spends together is more like a busy American family where everyone does his or her own thing. Dinner is eaten really late, usually between 9:00 and 10:30, but my host mother is usually still not home, so we kids eat together. Part of the reasoning could be that the snarling traffic jams make more than one trip from home to the city each day prohibitive. Yet, after work my mom generally goes to visit a friend or check up on an extended family member before she gets home, the kids in school don’t really visit home that often, and I haven’t seen any sort of group family activities outside of the party last week. Since I get home around 8:00 each night, it means there is a relaxing environment to chill and chat and work a bit before eating and sleeping. I love the low-key chats and I always look forward to coming home, where I feel really comfortable and open. However, it does also mean that there seem to be few opportunities for family activities or excursions.

Regardless of what each family structure is like, maintaining personal connections in the village is very important. Every morning when we are leaving, my host mother exchanges long greetings with all of her neighbors. In Luganda, the Baganda group language that we are learning and is the first language of natives of this part of Uganda, greetings are elaborate rituals that include asking series of questions asking each other about the people at home, the animals at home, the news, people away, and whatever else comes to mind until one side gets tired of returning the greeting. Because of this contact though, it seems like everyone in the village area knows each other, and as a Muzungo (white person), I stick out and am easily recognized (though I am called the name of the previous SIT student who stayed here two years ago because I am told that white people all kind of look alike).

It really is nice that I can look forward to going home each day and that the atmosphere is so open, relaxed, and welcoming. The conditions are basic, so life is a bit simpler, but it is by no means uncomfortable, and the difficulties of adapting are quickly fading. In fact, it’s a lot harder now to imagine living back in my comparatively plush room at home than it would be to imagine just staying here!