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i was in the field all week for community health worker training. the mihv field site in ssembabule has a dormitory, so the 30+ villagers that we trained got to spend a whole week as residents with us. for most, that’s a really big deal - food, tea, water, mosquito nets, and time to ask the muzungu anything. each night after training, we stayed up late by the paraffin lantern talking. them asking the questions, me answering. a sample of some of their questions…
101paige 101africa
what is a credit card? how does it work?
no one had seen a credit card before, so we started with the basics. i got out my amex and started with my name, the signature, the number. then moved on to what happens when i give my credit card to a store clerk.

do americans farm? where do americans get food?
all they know about america is new york city - skyscrapers, pavement, crowded population. no land for farming there. when i told them about the bread basket in the midwest, the fruits/vegetable industry in california, and the cattle in texas, they were impressed.

how much is bride price in america?
phil didn’t get any goats or cattle for you as a wife? blasphemy!

where do you bury people?
again, new york city and its lack of space.

do you drink coke in america?

why do americans talk on such big phones?
they’ve never seen landline phones (no telecommunications in rural africa until the mobile technology revolution), which are huge compared to cell phones. they see landline phones being used in movies and think that americans must be really rich to have such big phones.

sylvester “stallion” gets shot and falls off cliffs, but he never dies. why not?
easy explanation - movies aren’t real, which was news to them. sad to think that hollywood is perceived as reality.

where do you get firewood in america?
new york city really throws these guys for a loop. in their minds, the u.s. has no space, no forests, no wild animals. i explained that we don’t need firewood because we cook on gas/electric stoves. bukenya replied, “how smart!” clearly impressed that we’d figured out a way to use electricity to cook food and that we even had electricity in the first place.

do you have load shedding?
in uganda, electricity is rationed around the country through what’s known as “load shedding.” basically that means while one part of the country has power another part doesn’t…everyone gets electricity some of the time, no one gets it all of the time (unless you live in bugolobi close to the president’s daughter, like us). the power outage in new york city in 2003 was a disaster making headline news for weeks and and costing nyc over 1/2 billion dollars in lost revenue. power outages in kampala and all of uganda are everyday happenings. i cannot begin to calculate (but i’m sure some expert has) the amount of potential revenue lost by uganda because of its power crisis.

if americans do not dig and do not own cows, how are they so rich?

how do fly-over highways work?
it took me a while to figure out they were asking about overpasses found in big cities. my physics is somewhat rusty, so i just stuck with the basics again.

hanging in our field office are 3 maps – the world, uganda, and the united states. each night’s q&a centered around the maps and in-depth geography lessons. some of their geography-related questions included…
- where does bill gates live?
- if england is so small, how come they are so powerful?
- why are some countries pink while others are green, yellow, orange?
- what continent is madagascar part of?
- where else in the world are there black people?
- why do black people and white people look different?
- what color are asians?
- (they saw north america and south america on the map and asked…) president bush is president of all of this?

only a handful of the villagers had ever been to kampala, and most have never been outside ssembabule district. imagine your whole world being 2,000 square km with no electricity, no running water, no mass communication except the radio.

each night we all gathered around the one radio to listen to the evening news. i didn’t understand any of it of course, but they did their best to keep me up to speed. i was impressed with their english (average education level was 4th grade), and they got a kick out of my accent and really enjoyed practicing their english with me. in turn they taught me more luganda.

the biggest treat of the whole week was firing up the generator wednesday and thursday nights to show videos on the old tv/vcr. we only had random videos to show - a malaria video, a family planning animated video, a uganda MTV recording. but, no one cared. people were just excited to have something, anything to watch. it wasn’t what they watched, it was the fact they were watching.

it’s hard to grasp what life is like without electricity until you live without. i’m not talking about going on a camping trip and sleeping when the sun sets, waking when it rises, getting by with your coleman lantern and petzl headlamp. that’s idyllic, romantic even…but when the trip’s over you go home to your lights, stove, hot water, television - your electricity. think about life without electricity. james, one of the trainees, came into the office while we were hooking up the generator for the movies. he didn’t say a word, just sat down in front of the tv and waited. it took us a long time to get everything working, but he didn’t complain. he just patiently waited. watching him watch a blank tv was when i realized how novel and special and lucky it is to have electricity. the movie eventually started and james watched all the movies all night without saying a word except thank you when it was over.