Saturday, September 5

I am currently staying in a hotel in Gulu, Uganda. We will be moving into our homestay families’ homes on Monday evening, after a short introduction to Gulu.

Everyone in Gulu is so friendly! The hotel staff seemed delighted to see us when we arrived, and a few of us bumped into a group of local people who taught us a couple of Acholi phrases (or tried to, much to the hilarity of all around: apparently, we have terrible accents). However, Gulu is much less comfortable and metropolitan than Kampala. Not only is it dangerous to walk alone after dark, it seems that electricity and running water are unpredictable luxuries. When we arrived, there was a power outage, though electricity returned in the evening (a couple hours before the water stopped running in our hotel…). Apparently, they also shut the power off around 11:30 every night, except in bars and nightclubs.

I am so excited for my homestay! According to Stella, one of the program assistants, my homestay mother specifically requested someone to teach how to cook, so I’ll learn how to prepare local dishes! (Not that I’m particularly in love with the constant stream of rice, potatoes, mashed plantains and beans – I’m so used to eating a wide variety of very seasoned, flavorful food that the food here seems unbearably bland. I’m slowly learning to mix the sauces with the potatoes, etc). My homestay mother is also apparently expecting help with her digging and lifting of heavy objects, so I guess my super-strength muscles and I will be kept busy with manual labor.

The drive to Gulu from Kampala took about 6.5 hours, and mostly cut through empty, rural land. As we left Kampala, we saw a completely different part of the city from where we had been before. Kampala has a nice area that caters to the white people (with government buildings, headquarters of businesses and organizations, fancy hotels that we didn’t stay in, and fancy restaurants that we did eat at), an in-between area like where we were staying, and then parts that seem much more like what I expected to see in the city. These were the parts where the streets and sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians, street vendors and hawkers walking among the cars. The little ramshackle shops were crammed in next to each other, as far as the eye could see, and the haze of disturbed dust filled the air.

As we drove through the rural areas, it seemed to finally hit home that I am really, truly here. After wanting to go to Africa for so many years, and seeing so many pictures of the area, it was so bizarre to look out the window and see EXACTLY the same thing that I’d seen in those pictures. The landscape looked exactly like I expected: dusty red clay-colored dirt and roads, with green grasses and shrubbery and the occasional, isolated straw hut. People were always outside their homes, working or just sitting around. We passed a number of unfinished brick structures where the builder had run out of money halfway through building something. It’s also amazing how prevalent the cell phone advertisements are. Random buildings will be painted completely pink, yellow or blue as advertisements for various cell phone companies (Zain, MTN, and Uganda telecom, respectively).
That’s it for now!