Crazy Week, Birds, and the Bush

Hello! I hope this finds you all doing well. This will be my last entry for a little while because I am leaving tomorrow to live with a family in Captura, a rural area of Uganda, for one week. These are called “rural homestays.” Each student in the Uganda is given the opportunity to spend a week in the bush experiencing the village lifestyle. I live in a village around the university, but it is not a rural village. Captura is a 7-8 hour drive away from the city into the hills. I’ve heard it’s beautiful, so I’ll probably take lots of pictures while I’m there. Most students will be placed alone in a family. This kind of makes me nervous. I live alone in a host family near the university, but I see my friends every day when I go to school. This will be one week by myself in a very new cultural setting. I am sure it will be challenging, but I also expect to learn a lot. And I think that is the important thing in just about any cross cultural setting—always go with the expectation of learning and growing. It’s impossible to leave unchanged.

We’ve been asked to take very little with us to Captura, because the families do not have many possessions. I am allowed a backpack…so I suppose it will be entertaining tonight when I try to pack a week worth of clothes, toiletries, mosquito/bug repellants as well as my rain boots, portable mosquito net, rain coat, Bible, and journal into my backpack. We’ll see how that works. It might take some magic. The rain gear is because at the end of the week, we are all going to be picked up and spend the weekend debriefing at Seepy Falls, a hiking resort. So I’ll have the opportunity to do some pretty cool hiking, but that means extra clothes (pants of some kind) and rain gear. We will not be allowed to wear trousers of any kind in the village. The modesty rules will be stricter: skirts have to go to the ankles, shoulders must be covered at all times, no visible tattoos, no dangly earrings, no makeup, sit with legs together (not crosses or apart) at all times…that’s a hard rule for me to follow. Being accustomed to sweat pants, I have the habit of sitting like a boy, legs wide apart gangster style, which is startling and rude here. Not to mention sometimes in long skirts you just need a bit of a breeze and it helps not to have to be squeezing your legs together the entire time. Haha.

Ok. That’s all beginning tomorrow. But here’s some news of the week. This week has been crazy stressful. This happens at least 2-3 weeks every semester it seems. All of the sudden everything is due at the same time and it’s crept up on the procrastinating student who suddenly has ten assignments and two days…ok, it hasn’t been that extreme, but close. I had a paper due on Tuesday, a paper and two presentations due today, and I have an exam tomorrow! It will be my first exam here in Uganda, so I have no idea what to expect. But with all of the other assignments, I haven’t had time to study until today…so that’s rough. But as the French say “c’est la vie.” That’s life. And the week is nearly finished, and we won’t be attending classes next week, so the rural homestays will be a chance to relax a bit. Sort of like a spring break, except instead of tanning on a beach I’ll be sleeping in a grass hut and squatting over holes to…

Sometimes I’m amazed at how well I’ve adjusted to the lifestyle here. I just don’t really have time or energy to freak out about things most Americans would freak out about—it’s desensitizing in a way. For instance, bugs and outhouses are just a part of my everyday here, along with the lack of toilet paper—and I don’t even flinch anymore when I pee on my foot/leg, which happens about every day. But lots of the things are the same here as well. African people are people too, just like us. There are cultural differences, sure, but people are people everywhere. We still eat three meals a day, live in houses, sleep in beds, go to college, put off assignments, hang out in the dorms on campus…they’ve encouraged us not to romanticize Africa in our blogging and messages home. I hope I haven’t done that. I hope reading my blog that you get some sense of the differences, some of the similarities, and that you are able to share in the lessons with me. God’s Kingdom is incredibly diverse. All people are created in his image and have unique things to contribute to the Kingdom.

So this is random. But I keep forgetting to mention it and it’s something sort of funny. Sitting in class the first couple of weeks, I thought I was going insane. I kept hearing this beeping noise. Beep, beep, beep. Were other people hearing it too? Where did it come from? I asked around and discovered that people did indeed hear it, and like me, were utterly distracted by it in class. It’s hard to focus in class here anyway, because the classrooms are practically open air and thus don’t shut out any sights, sounds, or noised from outside, but the beeping was especially aggravating. So we asked someone who’s lived here for a long time. The source of the mysterious beeping/ticking noise (this is a reference to a youtube video some of my friends might know of and enjoy)? A bird! Yes, that’s right. And while we don’t know its official name, and I’ve never been able to actually see it, we call it “The Catch Phrase Bird” because if you’ve ever played the game of Catch Phrase, that’s exactly what the bird sounds like. And there’s one camped out somewhere near my house right now as well…thank God for earplugs! If only I could find some way to block it out in class. And just once I want to see the bird.