Culture Shocks

“’What am I doing here? I am giving nothing to Africa. I am merely swirled around by it,’ I wrote in my diary, and my letters home had become less informative about what Uganda was really like. I just could not find points of reference that my family and friends would understand. Life in Africa was very very different”
Richard Dowden. Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles. 2008

We wake up around 8am on Tuesday morning, meaning we have around six hours to kill before our meeting at the university, and so we wonder what on earth we should do with our time. We wanted to come to Mbarara to work, and therefore any entertainment we have brought with us is pretty limited, and so we sit in bed having our daily discussion on how well we’re actually coping here. We are coping well. This is a very extreme environment to be thrown into without any sense of purpose. Any sort of home comfort is a pretty distant memory at this point; for us both to have gotten through our first week here without any major freak-outs is quite an achievement. I challenge any of you to do the same. Nevertheless, we are determined not to spend much time being negative, we’re in Africa after all, and so we decide to treat the morning as if it is a holiday. As many people know most of my family holidays involve a serious amount of sun chasing and sun bathing, so I decide that my morning should take a similar form. Fortunately, being two hours away from the equator, there really is no need to chase the sun any further than the front lawn, and so I put on a summer dress and laid out on my towel for a couple of hours.

Once thoroughly roasted through Sacha and I decide to explore the garden surrounding the house. Now don’t get excited, our garden is very very small, but the house is right in the middle and we hadn’t made it around the back yet. At a first glance we decide that the back garden really is no more special than the front garden, however, as we turn to leave we notice that one of our trees is an avocado tree. Avocados have basically been the staple food in our diet since we arrived here, and so this is a very exciting discovery for us. Unfortunately the one avocado on the tree is just out of reach. Undeterred by this we find a ladder to get a little closer, and when that doesn’t work we go feral and shake the tree until the avocado falls. Unfortunately it isn’t ripe enough to eat, but we still feel as though we have achieved something with our day.

It is then time to get ready for our meeting at the University. We had been promised that after this meeting we should expect to have a better idea of what we should expect to be doing each week here, so Sacha and I are hopeful that today is be the day that everything turns around. After all “we’re so smart!” (quote Sacha), why wouldn’t they want our help…? We really should learn not to presume things in Africa.

When we arrive in Viola’s office Primrose is already there and ready

to greet us. We learn that Viola is caught up in another meeting and so Primrose, Sacha, and I get talking about how we’re finding it here. She is particularly interested in how we react to being called Muzungu everywhere we go. You see the word ‘Muzungu’ doesn’t carry racist connotations; rather it is a way to indicate a person from ‘the other world’. So it’s like a personalised ‘hey there’ for people with white skin who appear out of place, a very accurate description for us at present!

Viola eventually appears an hour later, after her colleagues have made multiple jokes about how “the white people have the watches and we have the time”. During the meeting we discuss our interests and the various projects that are currently being undertaken at MUST. Sacha and I decide that we would like to participate in one researching the cost effectiveness of interventions initiated to strengthen the potential and capacity of female survivors of violence in Uganda, and another looking into the migration routes of various refugees to Uganda. We do this with the hope that we will be able to get a lot of first-hand experience conducting interviews in refugee camps; during our time at AUC our professors continuously stressed the importance of getting into the research field and hearing individual stories and we’re eager to apply what we have learned. Fortunately for us Viola and Primrose seem keen for us to experience refugee camps as well, and we agreed to work on getting permission to enter Nichevale, the refugee camp close to Mbarara. Unfortunately for us, that’s about all that came of our meeting and they ask us to produce a timetable of our activities during our stay in Uganda so that they can work around us. This is despite our countless protests about how flexible our time is and assertions that we really are actually here to work rather than holiday. I guess it needs to be in print to be real! Nevermind, luckily we have all the time in the world and our ‘timetable’ takes all of five minutes to complete, leaving us only with the small problem of how to fill the rest of our time… Oh Africa, maybe you’ll be a little more straightforward tomorrow.