All my strangest stories seem to happen when I leave Kampala. Perhaps it’s because the way of life outside the city just lends itself to more mishaps for foreigners based on a lack of light, foreign languages, and unique situations I’ve never experienced before. Whatever the case, there have been enough great moments today and yesterday, I felt the need to blog.
The other intern and I have really been getting an in-depth cultural experience the last few days because, this time, my supervisor Phoebe is staying with us in the office in Iganga. Normally, the rest of the staff go home after hours, and it is just Karen and I fending for ourselves. This time, we have Phoebe, and we tend to ask her a lot of questions, which we never have anybody to answer when we are on our own. We walked to the main road last night to get some dinner, and along the way we had her teach us numbers in Luganda. She taught us this nursery rhyme to try and help us. Now, in the evening, there are a bajillion people walking around the streets, so there are always people listening and walking near you, even in this small town. Well we started singing along with Phoebe, and proceeded to have everyone walking near us snickering at the mzungus who were learning to count. At this point though, I think I’ve just accepted that I will never be able to walk around inconspicuously and we might as well sing nursery songs to pass the time.
Then after we picked up some mangoes in the market, and headed back in the dark. There are no street lights in Uganda. This makes walking around at night fairly exciting, though not so exciting as in Kampala where there are 10 foot deep potholes. As we were walking, I kept my eyes glued to the ground intent on not falling in a pothole. The ground is darker in some areas from the rainstorm earlier, and all of a sudden Phoebe starts yelling “That’s water, that’s water, THAT’S WATER!” But rather than turning auto-pilot off, stopping, and really judging if I know where I am walking, I continue briskly forward and, amazingly, am still surprised when end up up to my ankles in a muddy puddle. Phoebe and Karen were not capable of walking for about two minutes as they laughed at me. I blame the mirage of mud and dry dirt as hiding the puddle, but apparently, I was the only one who didn’t see it coming. Oh well, I already had to shower when we got back to prevent jiggers, and at least it wasn’t a sewage puddle; that would definitely have made me cry, not laugh.
After spending all day developing the health curriculum that we are going to teach the women, 5 of us from the office: myself, Karen, Phoebe, and Roveinah piled into Roveinah’s car and headed to the market. We buy water jugs from the grocery store in town, but they are like the water-cooler style ones, and way to heavy to carry back by walking, so that’s why we had the car. Well first we headed to the market, and Karen and I hoped out to get ourselves some pineapple. Then we drove to the supermarket just down the road and went in and got some other assorted things. While we paid at the counter, one of the store helpers loaded the jugs into the trunk (it’s a station wagon type car). We hoped into the back seat and Phoebe hit the gas to back up. Then a sound arose into the evening air unlike anything I’ve ever heard before; I thought we hit a kid and Karen thought we had hit a goat. We flipped around, and to my absolute horror, there was a live chicken laying on it’s side with it’s legs strapped to another chicken pinned under one of the water jugs that had fallen smack onto the chicken. The chicken was howling it’s brains out, and I completely lost the capability to move or make life decisions. Phoebe starts yelling, “help the chicken! HELP THE CHICKEN!” and I just sat there staring at my lap about ready to burst into tears. Then all of a sudden, I realized that though I didn’t want to look at that chicken pinned under the bottle again, I also didn’t want to endure listening to it being tortured. Roveniah and I ran around to the back and sat there howling about whether to move the water jugs or just leave them with the chickens. The chicken is still howling by the way, and all the while, the store attendants and everyone within half a block is laughing their blatantly laughing their **** off. Roveniah kept saying we should leave them both back there, and I kept yelling that they would die as soon as Phoebe touched the gas again. Roveinah finally gave in, and that’s how the chickens got to ride in the front seat for the five-minute trip back home. On the ride back Karen and Phoebe were laughing uncontrollably, while I went between crying with tears of laughter and absolute horror.
They are not going to slaughter the chickens until tomorrow, which is partly why I found the whole thing rather upsetting. I just hope that chickens really do have short-term memory, and that poor chicken wont be stressed all night. They just put them in a box (while still bound together), and the box is now sitting out in the shed. I am probably going to have such bad nightmares about chickens tonight.
For dinner, I ate the entire pineapple and I am now suffering form acute loss of taste buds due to the acidity, but it was so worth it. We also ate roasted maize and bananas (the bananas are delicious roasted), and we watched thousands of bats fly across the sky in the last light of evening.
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