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i spend roughly 75% of my time in uganda in kampala. kampala is the environment and culture i know best in uganda, so tropical fish: tales from entebbe, a novel set mostly in kampala and some in entebbe and los angeles (i still don’t get why the sub-title is : tales from entebbe), gives me a great opportunity to use scenes from the book – as experienced by the main character who is a twentysomething ugandan woman – to highlight some kampala idiosyncrasies. this isn’t a real book review per se; rather, it’s disconnected commentaries on my kampala life.

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page 106: a danish man was visiting, one of the usual aid types, who peter had just met. these expats quickly made friends with one another; being white was enough.

there’s a strange expectation in kampala that you are supposed to acknowledge another white person wherever you go – as if to say “we’re in this together.” i walk by white strangers and they smile, make eye contact…looking for some sort of empathy that i don’t share. the connection and familiarity is based solely on the fact that we’re both white, so obviously we must have similar backgrounds, interests, opinions. as it turns out, i have small desire to talk with most of them and even less in common. i’m tired of the typical expat 5-minute introductory conversation: where you from? what do you do? how long you been here? how long you going to be here? it’s the same every time. the 5 minutes is a straightforward weeding out process – if you’ve been here years, then you know places, people, things, you’re a great fount of information maybe even a networking opp; if you’re only here for a few weeks, then no need to invest time or energy, you’ll soon be leaving anyway. no expat lives in uganda just for the hell of it (okay, maybe a few); we’re all here for a reason. you can live in minneapolis just because you want to live in minneapolis, but you can’t live in africa without a purpose. so, we’re all “one of the usual aid types.” we come here for our 6 months or 3 years to save uganda from itself, then move on to the next aid-dependent country or move home. i imagine this constant influx and turnover is exhausting for most ugandans. and for us, it’s totally draining.

it’s hard to cross the divide, though, to make ugandan friends. i would say the cultural divide, but i don’t think it’s that – i think it’s the economic divide. what do you do on a friday night with friends? maybe go out for dinner or drinks, or maybe have people to your house for dinner? us too. to invite our ugandan friends into this scene, though, is tricky – splurging $15-20 on a meal isn’t a luxury most can afford regularly, if at all; inviting them to our home, which is nice but not extravagant, makes us self-conscious about the things we have and the decisions we make. to go for a long weekend at a nearby national park means money for fuel, park entrance fees, accommodation, food and drinks. we consider inviting our ugandan friends to join us, but to invite them either means paying for them or feeling guilty that they’re spending so much money on something we asked them to do. so, our social interactions are relegated to those things that don’t cost money – open mic jam night at the national theater, house parties (we choose to ignore our self-consciousness in favor of having fun), city league basketball games, frisbee practice, dancing, holidays at entebbe beach.

maybe intentionally, we haven’t sought out too many expats for friends. we go to the tuesday night free movie at bubbles (irish pub, an expat mainstay in kampala) regularly and have yet to talk to anyone we don’t know. we’re not antisocial, we’re realistic. why assume a superficial connection because we’re white people living in uganda? i wouldn’t go to the riverview theater in minneapolis and start talking to white people there just because we all lived in minneapolis. there’s always this uncomfortable sense of familiarity among expats in uganda, that if you don’t know each other, you should.

we do have, and have had, some very good expat friendships, though. almost all of which were made thru ultimate (ultimate is a natural social link for us). but, the tiring aspect of our social life here is its instability and short shelf-life. i’m sitting at home on a clear sunday afternoon wishing i could call someone to go to a movie, but my list is empty. emily, swiss sarah, lindsey, chris, kristy, laura, astrid, stuart. they were here and we were friends, now they’re all gone. people come for their 6 months, 1 year, 2 years then they leave. it’s why it’s so easy to write someone off during your 5-minute conversation when they say i’m here for 2 months. why go through the effort when you’ll have to do it all over again so soon? before cynicism sweeps me away, i will admit that one of the greatest things about living overseas is all of the very talented, very passionate people you can meet. we have some good friends who will be here the whole time we are (even longer), while other good friends have been those who were here for just a short time. the rotation continues; it’s the beauty of the expat social merry-go-round: when friends leave there are bound to be more coming in.

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page 126: in america, we are nothing but africans: lumped together, generic, black. our voices get whiny and nasal too, but we can’t erase the african lilt. our children are american, though: noisy, demanding, insolent, confident, and fat.

you read about the starving, disease-infected african kids with flies eating at their scabbed faces in national geo and you think that’s the only truth. yes, those kids exist, but they’re not the only ones in africa. more common is to see happy kids laughing, playing, shouting, singing and being, well, kids. before they can play and shout, their on mom’s back in cloth papooses being toted everywhere – to the field, to the market, to church –close to mom always. you never see them crying or fussing; they’re content to be tied to mom checking out the world from her back. kids in villages make toy bicycles out of wood scrap and wire, or sleds out of an old jerrycan and rope. a plastic bottle is as entertaining as anything. from the outside, you say “how sad, that child sitting in the dirt has no toys and is so neglected!” from the inside, you see a proud child finding happiness in his simple, self-made toy.

a refreshing aspect of uganda is the generally pragmatic approach to parenthood. ugandan parents aren’t overprotective or overindulgent; often because they can’t afford to be, but more likely because the ugandan parenthood culture takes a hands-off, kids-will-be-kids approach. if the child falls off the step and hurts himself, he’ll learn that next time he probably doesn’t want to do that; there’s no need to rush to save him from a harmless tumble.

ugandan kids start contributing to the family’s survival at a very early age. it is not uncommon to see a string of children – aged 3 to 8 – walking along the roadside, each with her own proportionately-sized jerrycan of water on her head, or maybe it’s a pile of firewood. although i feel strongly that kids should be kids, i see the merit of this early exposure to responsibility and real life. ugandan kids learn from a very early age that milk doesn’t come from the grocery story (it comes from a cow) and water isn’t endless (it can run out if you’re not careful).

contrast this to today’s stereotypical american child – noisy, demanding, insolent, confident, and fat – who thinks all food comes wrapped in plastic either from the grocery store or the fast-food chain, feels entitled to and dependent on all the best toys, suffers from attention-deficit disorder in the classroom because he’s spent his young life surrounded by television, video games, and high-speed internet; and who through it all is oppressively managed by excessively anal parents. a gross generalization, of course, but evidence of one reason why it’s so refreshing to be in uganda.

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page 165: …an older woman in a faded bussuti of cream and blue flowers came in with a tray and two cups of tea. she placed the tea on musozi’s desk, then knelt down and greeted him in the lengthy luganda way, with lots of questions, pauses, and sighs. she asked after his wife, the children, the other relatives, the farm, cows, and groundnuts. … christine wondered why musozi let the old woman kneel through all that. in the office!

1st: tea is routine in ugandan daily life. offices have scheduled morning and afternoon tea. if you host a meeting, you are obligated to provide tea and bites (finger food, usually samosas). if someone comes to your home, it’s customary to offer tea. and, being a former british colony, tea is drunk with milk. i recommend african tea, east africa’s version of indian chai.

2nd: greetings are the single most important thing in ugandan communications. to not ask about a person, his family, his livelihood, his health is to offend; to ask is common courtesy but essential. ugandans have a special handshake grip (horizontal, vertical, horizontal) and a knack for continuing to hold hands for much longer than any american would normally tolerate. ugandans don’t register the idea of “personal space.” in america, you are insulated from people in your home, in your car, in your office – you travel from one compartment to the next. in uganda, you’re never isolated from others; the connections with people are constant and personal. here it’s standard to walk into a group of people and individually greet everyone – an en masse, generic “hey guys” doesn’t suffice – including shaking and holding hands with each person.

most ugandans who are in regular contact with expats, especially those in the city, pare down theirs greetings to a more westernized standard, but listen to them in luganda and they can talk for minutes without getting past asking about the family goat. i can hold my own in english and pass convincingly in lugada, but as evidenced above, i haven’t applied the uganda greeting style to my expat interactions, mostly because we’d both be laughing at the cultural disconnect of it all and because i’m not so interested in hearing all about the life of a stranger (how very western of me). but, i do no notice catching people off-guard in the u.s. when i initiate a business phone call with “hi, how are you.” my colleague’s mind is already well into the topic at hand and has to momentarily pause to consider such an incongruent and unexpected question before they can respond surprisingly, yet appreciatively “fine, how are you.”

like tropical fish’s christine i feel uncomfortable when ugandan women kneel to greet me. it feels like a throwback to colonialism. it is culturally standard for baganda women to greet while kneeling, by kneeling for me they are greeting me as they would someone from their tribe. to ask the woman to stand would break cultural norms and make her even more uncomfortable than me, so i choose my awkwardness over hers and protest nothing.

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page 169-170: she, luckily or not, had been to a “good” school, where she had been taught to speak english properly, that is, like an englishman, which, of course, was impossible for her to do. not that the english themselves spoke their language in one “proper” way. nor was it theirs alone anymore. english was no one’s and everyone’s now. or so the unloved step-children to the english tribe insisted.

i’m not a linguist, so i cannot intelligently comment on this, but i do wonder if there has been any re-evaluation of or shift in the definition of english over the past century. the number of former british colonies (the heads of government of which will soon be descending on kampala for CHOGM, but more on that later…) around the world is massive, but not a one of them speaks with the same accent, vocabulary or rhythm as britain, home of proper english. so what’s english and who owns it?

the official language of uganda is english, but it’s not an english an american would necessarily recognize or understand. most languages (all?) spoken in uganda are bantu languages, so the pronunciation of spoken english here often has a heavy bantu inflection and sentences can be delivered in bantu grammar. the “properness” of a ugandan’s english increases with education level and exposure to native english speakers, but the average ugandan speaks a purely (and sometimes maddeningly) ugandanized english that includes:
- “ok, please”: interchangeably used for yes and no
- “i am on my way coming”: estimated time of arrival anywhere from 5 min to 2 hrs to never
- up/down instead of left/right when giving directions
- “very fine”: if you’re more than fine, aren’t you good?
- pick and drop, not pick up and drop off
- “excuse”, not excuse me
- “you cannot miss it”: the death of me when it comes to directions; if i knew where i was going and it was that easy to find, i wouldn’t be asking how to get there
- “you are lost!”: not to be confused with actually being lost, but meant to ask why i haven’t seen you in a long time; equivalent to: where have you been all this time?

when we first arrived in uganda, we spent a lot of our time saying “come again?” – to say “i’m sorry, what did you say?” is too complicated and isn’t understood anyway, so completely defeats your purpose of trying to figure out what’s being said – to ugandans who spoke perfectly good ugandan english. in fact, we still do just not as much. the british vocabulary (boot, bonnet, lorry, jumper, football, boots, etc) and thick accents don’t help the cause any. i know that we’re both speaking english, but inexplicably there’s no comprehension on either side of the conversation.

a few weeks ago, phil commented that i’d developed a convincing ugandan english – i took that as a compliment. now, 1 year+ into uganda, i can seamlessly switch between american english and ugandan english and i can talk to peter (a fast talker with a heavy accent) and follow 90% of what we talk about. granted, the phone is still a nightmare, but you can’t win all the time.