A Week in Kapchorwa

I’ve been gone for around ten days now. I must admit, it’s good to be home, back with my family in Mukono, near the university. But it was a good week in Kapchorwa (I found out we were indeed going to Kapchorwa for the week, and not “Captura”). Kapchorwa is a rural region in east Uganda near the border with Kenya. It’s beautiful there. The point of the trip was to live the rural lifestyle for a week. So we were all placed in various host families to survive in the bush for a week, learning about the people and their culture. My family was from the Sabine tribe, and spoke Kopsabiny (potentially that’s spelled wrong). It was a difficult language to learn and I only picked up a few phrases. It was interesting to live with a different family after having had two months to adapt to my regular host family.

We left on a Friday for Kapchorwa, driving 6-7 hours before reaching our destination. They dropped us in our families on Friday night immediately. My family was Mama Miria, Papa Felix, and a sister Lillian. My parents had other children, but all were away at school. Lillian is their oldest child at 23 years old, but she is at home recovering from a bad car accident involving the notorious matatus (taxis that are like small minivans and carry up to 15-20 people). The matatu flipped over, killing all but 2 passengers, so my sister is quite the miracle. The accident was over a year ago, however, so it has been a long recovery. My family lives on a farm with chickens, cats, dogs, goats, and cows. They also have multiple pieces of land spread throughout the region where they grow bananas and matoke (in the banana family) as well as coffee and a few other things. Different families live on and take care of their various plots of land in exchange for food and school fees for their children. My family is considered quite rich in the region, because land and livestock are wealth.

Besides farming, my dad has a job in Kampala (the capital of Uganda, an hour from the university I attend) working as a security office for the President of the country! So he is in between the country and the city, but much prefers village life and is looking forward to a quiet retirement in Kapchorwa eventually. The cool thing is he will be going to Kampala soon, where it won’t be hard for me to visit, so I’m one of the few lucky students who will get to see their families again after the week long homestay.

I had a challenging week living in Kap. The way they live is very different from my Mukono life, let alone life in the US. The differences are hard to put into words. It’s really like two worlds. Life pretty much revolved around farming, receiving visitors, and paying visits. Often we would just sit quietly in the shade in the yard, not saying anything, just being present to one another. It’s hard not to be twiddling your thumbs (or biting your fingernails) in extreme boredom. Americans don’t know very well how to sit still. Sometimes visitors even came just to sit with us. We would drink milk tea (basically a lot of whole mile, straight from the cow, with a little bit of tea) and sometimes eat small sweet bananas. I spent a lot of time staring out at the landscape, watching the movements of the small and entertaining kitten who was around, and roving through all of the sociological differences between Kap and the US (I am doing my fieldwork while here…).

When we conversed, it was always fun. They would ask tons of questions beginning “In America, do you have…” and generally the answer was yes, but it’s different in some way. I assured them we do indeed have cats, dogs, cows, goats, farms, trees, and countless other everyday things in the US. Different worlds culturally, but same planet earth, and same humans created in God’s image, just with different skin colors. We talked about dowry, a tradition still much alive in Kap. In the old days, I would have been worth around 400 cows as an educated white woman. These days, I would go for 15-20. They were fascinated at how different marriage in the US is from their expectations. Female circumcision is only recently becoming less common—I found out my mom was circumcised, but not her children, and the government is trying to make the practice illegal all together because it can go very wrong and is often considered “mutilation.” But not everyone thinks it’s a bad thing, and it’s a longstanding tradition of their tribe that many old people are loathe to give up. One of the visiting men asked me what happens in America if a man touches a girl’s breast (yes, you read that right—I certainly had to ask if I heard right). Apparently back in the day in Kap it could start a clan war, and even now is considered a horrible offense. It’s rude in the US, but I haven’t heard of very many wars starting because a middle school boy stumbles and “unintentionally” grabs a girl…

I spent Friday night and Saturday with my family before becoming terribly sick on Sunday. During church I had to leave to vomit in the outhouse. I thought it was just because my family was seriously overfeeding me. For breakfast that day I had four pieces of bread, two bananas, two boiled eggs, two muffins, two slices of avocado, and two cups of milk tea, and every meal was much the same: me forcing myself to eat until I felt like throwing up, and then my mom exclaiming “Oh, but you have eaten very little.” Let me say, Ugandans certainly can hold their food. I wouldn’t recommend facing anyone here in an eating contest. At any rate, there I was, puking outside the church. Then came the diarrhea, and more vomiting. When the vomiting didn’t stop, I figured it was safe to assume it was something other than the food. After church (which began at 11 and ended at 2:30 and was a short service for them), they drove me home in our program van (puking out the window the whole way).

I was half carried to our yard, a short distance from the road through a matoke tree field. There I lay on a mattress in the shade of a tree, looking out across the landscape, and it could have been picturesque except for the vomiting and frequent trips to the outhouse part. I also had a bad fever. Just about that time four of my American friends and their host families decided to pay us an after-church visit (there’s a nice view of a waterfall from my family’s land they wanted to see). In the African tradition, they set up lawn chairs around my mattress, and about 15 people sat around to chat and watch me throw up. Even some of our chickens and dogs were interested, though more for the vomiting part (yummy) than the chatting. I was what I guess could be called “sick in style,” though sick in a very different way then I have ever been sick in the US. Here, it would be rude to leave a sick person alone.

My family took excellent care of me. Truly, I love the culture here and how well they care for one another. I’m coming to love community and communalism. It’s the love of Christ and the church in action. No one is ever left out. So being sick here (now twice) has given me a special appreciation for the African culture and family. My mom even pulled a mattress into my room and slept over, waking each time I began to be sick again. I vomited for around 12 hours, and had the fever for 48 or so. I didn’t become fully well again until Wednesday. And being well is always such a blessing after being sick. On Wednesday and Thursday my family took me out walking as much as possible (sometimes 6-8 miles at a time) to see their property and visit friends in the area. It was incredible! I loved every minute of our long walks, talking, enjoying the land, meeting random villagers. I took a ton of pictures, some of which I will post on facebook in the next few days for all to see.

Ok, this has really possibly been my longest post yet. I could say so much more, but will save you the time of reading it, and me of writing it. I better begin to do some homework…we are back to classes this week after a nice break, and have lots to do! I’m at the half-way point of my experience here. This is week 8 of around 16. Time is going by so fast and I am learning so much. I miss many of you from home. Thanks for praying and thinking of me!