The Ugandan Wedding Crasher

Right after I posted my last post I found out the apartment building that I live in also hosts weddings. I was sitting in the restaurant of the apartment building using the internet and a wedding party walked by and as they were passing they invited me to their wedding. What an experience! Ugandan weddings are so different than the ones in the U.S., the only similarity that I saw was that the bride was in a white puffy dress.

The first part of the wedding, which I didn’t see, was the wedding party going to the house of the parents of the bride, where they would present the groom with a dowry. After that they have what is called an ‘Introduction,’ which is basically a hybrid between the ceremony and the reception. First they had a procession down the center aisle of the room with the bride and the groom being first then everyone else following. The wedding I happened to go to was for a Muslim couple, so they started with a prayer in Arabic. After everyone was seated they started the speeches, which was made by two people, the best man and then the brother of the groom. Then the music started, they really love old country and R&B here…I’ve heard enough Phil Collins and Celine Dion to last for a while. Funny enough, it was mostly the men who danced while the women sat and talked; much the opposite of the American weddings I’ve been to. While everyone was dancing they took the bride out of the room and everyone went to hide behind the curtains and under tables, everyone paid special attention to where the groom was hidden. When the bride came back into the room she had a different dress on and had to find the groom, everyone cheered when she found him.

When they cut the cake the groom was seated in a chair an the bride was kneeling in front of him. The bride then fed the groom and all of the men in the wedding party made sure that his back was against the chair the whole time. After that, the groom then fed the bride. Then, more dancing. Everyone is so happy here, all of the time, its really fun. Lastly the food was set out. They had all of the Ugandan staples, most of which are very good. Matoke, (which are under-ripe bananas that are mashed like potatoes), rice, green veggies (similar to spinach), and a meat stew. I’m feeling a little guilty because everywhere I go people give me food and wont let me pay for it. Haha Here food is often wealth, and they all want to share. I went to thank the bride and groom when I was leaving, I thanked them in Luganda they were shocked. Whenever I try to speak Luganda here people have two reactions; either they are speechless or give me a hug. I had a lot of fun at the wedding, and who else can say they’ve crashed a Ugandan wedding. J

Monday at work I started to work on my projects that I would be doing for my time here. We got an e-mail about a grant proposal over the weekend and another intern and myself started to work on that, it was very tedious.

Tuesday we headed to the field school, as per usual. On they way we stopped by several small villages to observe their farms and how they were practicing what they learned at the field school. We visited four and there ever we went they gave us so much food. By the time we got to the forest school we had maybe 40 avocados, as many mangoes, 3 jack-fruit and some things I had never seen before called Jambula or Java Plum. During one of the village visits we were driving through one of the farms and one of the Ugandan interns yelled “Enjaga!” It turned out that there was a marijuana plant in the field that that woman was hiding from the police. Pot is very illegal in Uganda, and I later found out that the woman slept in her fields so that the police couldn’t come find her. Everyone in the car laughed very hard.

The training on Wednesday was fun, I ended up observing Class 1 in which they talk about the value of tradition medicine and the value of learning about the different plants that are in the local area. Each of the classes are a year long, and that they end of that year the healers need to sit for exams to move on to the next class. Class one needed to know the purpose and use of some 340+ different plants by the end of the year. In the after noon I was observing in the clinic, where I would be doing most of my work. This week there was a little girl there who was fascinated with my pen and drew me a picture of a lion. My main project will be to help develop a better way to track patients and their outcomes in the clinic. The forestry and agriculture interns from the local university worked all day on building a green house by the nursery that they had constructed last week. They started calling it the “Black House.” Their reasoning was that the U.S. has a White House so why shouldn’t Africa have a Black House. Haha After all of the work was done at the forest school, we headed back to Kawempe.

Thursday at the office, I got feed back from the grant application from some of the staff at ProMeTra and I also helped to reconcile the budget that the application needed. My first grant application is submitted, fingers crossed!

Another week done…wow time is flying!