Playing footsie with a chicken

The past week has been a whirlwind of traveling, taxis, crowded places, buses and people yelling from all different directions.  Last Saturday, we were finally allowed to visit Kampala, which is the capital of Uganda.  For the past 5 weeks, it's only been a short 20 minute drive away, but it can be dangerous, especially during elections, so it's definitely been off limits during training.  We broke up into small groups of 4-5 trainees and a leader- yeah, thank god.  Can you imagine what it would be like with 44 of us running around Kampala all at once, all together?  Bad idea.  But, we covered a lot of ground!  Unfortunately, Kampala is NOT a grid city, so you've got to have a great sense of direction or landmarks to get around.  We visited the post office (not that exciting), the cool places to buy pirated dvds, the second hand market, an awesome spot to get Ethiopian food, a magical place called Garden City, which is essentially an American mall.  Basically, you can find almost everything here, especially if you're willing to pay for it.

Let's talk about the taxi park though, seeing I've just arrived from there.  You can't even imagine, and sadly I don't have any pictures to show you.  Maybe it wouldn't be so daunting if the park wasn't in a bowl, so you couldn't stand above and see the madness and chaos that is the Kampala old taxi park.  Let me try my best to explain what I mean.  When you think of taxis, you're probably imagining one of the luxurious (it may not seem that way to you, but believe me, it is in comparison) yellow town cars that drive around New York.  It's a little different here.  The taxis are 14 passager vans called motatus - there are 4 rows that should seat 3 people each.  And in the taxi park, there are hundreds of these white vans, and their respective conductors.  Once you walk into the taxi park, the conductors start yelling at you "where are you going", "let me help you", etc. and grabbing at your arm or bag to lead you through the park.  It's so overwhelming to try to navigate between the strangely parked motatus and people trying to sell you snacks, even when you know where you're going!  One cool thing is, once you get onto a motatu, after which by the way you must sit and wait until it fills up with people that are going to the same place, people walk around selling things to you through the windows.  Granted, it can be annoying sometimes, but it was really convinent today when all we wanted was a water and some chips.

So, motatus in Kampala are fairly regulated and there is definitely rhyme and reason to everything that goes on in the park.  There's an order to how motatus are filled, where they are parked, and they never fill it past capacity.  Once you go "up country" (which means anywhere outside of a big city), forget it.  Conductors just want to make as much money as possible in one trip, which results in packing people into the motatu like it's a clown car.  I seriously didn't quite believe the other volunteers when they told me how packed they can get, but I think I have a taste of it now. 

For the past 5 days, we visited our future regions for language immersion, and obviously we had to get there somehow.  The bus ride to Mmbale was perfectly fine, although it was strange that someone was selling products on the bus for about an hour.  The motatu to get to our final destination on the other hand was a different story.  "Madame, you extend" is how a conductor will tell you move on over because he wants to shove one more person in if he can.  Remember, the van is meant for 14 people, so why in the world would anyone think it's a good idea to pack 27 people in there, I have no idea!  But, at one point, that was our total.  Because people get on and off pretty frequently, it kept me entertained to continue to keep track.  Although it does scare me if I ever had to get out in case of emergency, but it's something I try not to focus on while I'm physically crammed inside.  And, it's not just people that  get in the motatus!  Goats and chickens are also welcome.  This morning, on the two hour taxi ride to Jinja, something brushed up against my feet.  I nearly jumped out of my seat, but I had nowhere to go!  Only then did I discover the woman in front of me had shoved her chicken under her seat, and now I had to figure out where to put my feet so I wasn't kicking the chicken.  I just kept imagining that it was going to get angry and peck away at my toes, and I wouldn't be able to escape.  I know, a little dramatic, but it was early and I was tired.  For the rest of the trip, I tried my best to tuck my feet under my seat, but every once in a while, I'd feel that stupid chicken and shutter.

Lunyole has at least 10 greetings, all kind of sounding similar, but usually require a different response.  Sometimes we'd just guess and mumble, Kaale, wesi, which usually works.  Other times, shop keepers would start rambling on and on.  It's terrible, but my response was always to just smile, and then you know they want you to say something, anything, but I usually would just look around for a little bit, and say sitegere (which means, I don't know) because let's face it, I had no idea what was going on!  Despite the initial feeling of failure, I did feel like we learned a lot on our trip, and I know we'll pick it up once we get to site in a few weeks.

We spent one afternoon wandering around the nearby villages with our language trainer and a young local man, just greeting everyone we could find.  We eventually came to what they called a swamp, but I would probably call a rice paddy and field.  It was the first time we got to stand in a wide open space since we've been here.  With the breeze and the sun, we could see for slightly rolling green fields for miles.  As we walked along, we sang a local song that goes like this:

Fulya tonya, fulya tonya
Fulya tonya, hulya amaido

It means rain drops, rain drops, rain drops, we eat peanuts, but you can fill in that part with any food.  It did finally hit me that, whoa, I'm in Uganda now.  I feel like for the last 6 weeks, we've been in such an urban setting, which yes, is different from America, but this field just made it feel so much more real.  It shouldn't be a surprise that wandering around in the equatorial sun turned me a little red, but hey, I did have on sunscreen!