Random

First let me tell you why I love Uganda. I love Uganda because of the way things are named. The country is Uganda, the language is Luganda, and the region of the country that Kampala is in is called Buganda. Ok, so I haven’t come across any other words that rhyme with Uganda, but I feel like I’m on a pretty good roll.

I actually have frequent episodes of amnesia, and after Farsi, French and Swahili, adding another language on is too much for my apparently geriatric brain to handle. So I’ll take what I can get. Words that rhyme help, ok? So far, I’ve picked up one word in Luganda, I think, which I’ve gathered means “ok.” There are some Swahili (ok, Bantu) words that I pick out every now and then, which is exciting, until I realize that that was the only word in the sentence I understood.

Also, I’d like to lodge a formal complaint about The Last King of Scotland. First of all, Kampala is not that clean. Second of all, Swahili is not spoken nearly as often as the film makes it out to be (in the film, Idi Amin speaks Swahili with everyone…which I haven’t heard that much here). Third, why would a doctor who came to work in a village decide to work in a palace?

And about the whole Swahili thing. I feel like Samson after his haircut. Not that my wife plotted against me or anything, but it’s like I’ve lost my special power. You see, I love haggling. I was raised to haggle. I spent years training under my father, the master of this art. I poured an otherwise unsuccessful year in Tanzania learning to do it in Swahili. And now, here I am, ready to give these taxi drivers and crafts vendors a run for their money when, bam! they blindside me with English.

No. This is not how this game works. My haggling in Africa is completely dependent on my ability to throw my victim off with Swahili they didn’t expect to come out of an mzungu. [The trick with successful haggling is that it requires a charm specific to the situation; I accentuate my identity as a student, a female, a young person, a ½ foreigner, etc——essentially, whatever works, to win this game]. But now, I’ve put myself in a country that looks like Tanzania, smells like Tanzania, is next door to Tanzania, but doesn’t talk like Tanzania, and I’m completely thrown for a loop. I get taxis down to 10,000 shillings (from 15 or 20) that I know I should be able to get for 8,000. But I look and talk like every other mzungu here, so what can I do? I pay full price for newspapers on the street. I’ve only gotten one hotel here to give our group a discount. It’s all very distressing.

Now, if The Last King of Scotland had actually portrayed this country correctly, I would have known how crucial it was to learn Luganda. [Although, that’s not really true, since nearly everyone here speaks English. And also since I was here a year ago and discovered this whole English thing and only watched The Last King of Scotland yesterday. But that would ruin the flow of my whining so shhh.] But no. Here I am, stuck in Kampala, where my very mechanism of self identity has been ripped from me without so much as a consolation prize. Actually, that’s not true either. I’ve never had a per diem in my life until now. It’s actually quite a magical thing. But it’s made me lazy! And even though I know I’m not really paying for these mzungu taxi fares and hotel costs, I still have a rotten feeling in my stomach that I could be doing better.

Thanks Dad.

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