I am a muzungu.

This post was intended to be up on Monday, but the Internet in my apt building was out.

On Saturday I went downtown with Zurah, she took me to a store called Nakuamatt which is a giant department store, bigger than any I had seen at home. It was interesting to see all of the things that are the same as they are in the US, a lot of the canned foods looked familiar. One thing that surprised me was the price of furniture, there was a small glass patio table that I saw their was 300,000 USh (Ugandan shillings) or $120. I was amazed at the price; it is definitely the most expensive thing I’ve seen since I’ve been here.

Sunday was overcast and rained in the morning, all of the people that I talked to said how cold it was. One woman I talked to, Hamidah, who works in the restaurant, was so interested when I mentioned that I have cousins in Canada (HAHA @ Susan) and that it rarely gets about 0 Celsius for months at a time. She asked, “How do they grow things?” “How do they walk to school in such cold?” and “How do they do work?” It’s interesting, some of the things we take for granted other cultures are astonished by.

Sunday afternoon I whet for a walk in Kawempe, the neighborhood I live in. I walked to the police station and back, because that marks the start of the main road. Along the way, all of the children would shout muzungu and wave at me, I thought it was funny so I’d waved back. I later found out that muzungu is, literally, the word for outsider, but it has come to plainly mean white person.

Because it had rained earlier, there was a lot of mud on my walk so when I got back I needed to clean my shoes. I asked Zurah how I should do it. She went and found a boy named Ishmael. When I tried to clean my own shoes, he wouldn’t let me. In talking with him I found out that my building had a health club and that he was a personal trainer. He is 21 years old and wants badly to go to university so he is trying to work and save money. He showed me the health club and told he that a lot of younger people use the facilities, and when I asked to see what was in the first aid kit I noticed that there were no Band-Aids. I happened to have a box of spider-man Band-Aids (Thanks Brenda), he was flattered when I offered them to him. Ishmael wanted to talk more with me so he invited me to have lunch with him in the health club, I obliged. It turns out he wants to improve his English and because I want to improve my Luganda, we worked out that we would try to meet for lunch every Sunday.

Every time I meet someone new, they don’t think I am an American. This is what happened with Ishmael, he thought I was English because I didn’t sound like other Americans. We figured out that he was talking about people from the East Coast and the South who usually are hard the locals to understand because of their accents. WIN for the Great Northwest!

Sorry about the lack of photos, the wireless in my room was down so I needed to use satellite Internet to update my blog this time, that is why I couldn’t include any. I will put a ton in next time.

This week I will be at the field school from Monday afternoon to Thursday morning so I wont be around a computer as regularly as I am usually.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been here for 5 days already, my time is going to go by very fast.