I saw Ghandi!!!

This weekend was absolutely marvelous. I spent the weekend in Jinja on a retreat with the USP students and the Honours College Ugandan students. We ate great food, relaxed by Lake Victoria, swam in the pool, played card games, and really got to know each other better. I took a boat ride to the source of the Nile, which was pretty unimpressive on the surface, all you see is bubbling water, but apparently if you looked underneath the water you will see what was once a waterfall. The neat thing about the area is that some of Ghandi's ashes were spread there.

I am really feeling at home here. Things are becoming not so different and I'm getting used to Ugandan living, though the food could always improve. I am making more friends both Ugandan and American and it's so awesome to hear all their different stories. I have a sneaking feeling though that time will go by so fast. So, I'm really trying to be in each moment. Unfortunately, I'm also here to do schoolwork, which I have to keep reminding myself. I would much rather be making memories than writing a 6 page paper on East African history (I'm supposed to be doing that right now). But all the students are in the same boat so I'm hoping once I get some structure to my life here it will be easier to do my studies.

Below is a reflection paper that I had to write for one of my classes. I'd thought that I would share it with you.



Prior to coming to Uganda and even prior to my home stay I maintained two primary stereotypes. First, I believed that all Africans live in destitute conditions. Second, I believed that sanitation and hygiene are lacking from African daily life. Through my experience at my home stay my preconceived notions have been challenged and validated.

A child in a government camp from the documentary “War Dance” articulated African poverty well “not everyone in Africa lives this way.” The images of shanty towns, forlorn children, etc. saturate the Western view of Africa. While there is undoubtedly severe poverty in African, it does not permeate every village in Africa. The people of Mukono, for example, enjoy a comfortable life. However, if I were back in the United States viewing their lifestyle including simple daily chores like bathing, sweeping, or cooking, I would have been deeply disturbed by their apparent poverty. Now having personally lived in an African village, I realize that Africans simply have a different way of doing things. It is neither wrong nor right, it is just different. For Americans, we view our life as “normal;” we can not imagine life without our modern conveniences and pity the people of the world who do not have same technology. Conversely, Africans who have not experienced living with modern conveniences can not imagine the American “normal” lifestyle.

Furthermore, the idea of economic classes existing in Africa never entered my thoughts prior to coming here. I had always viewed Africa with no middle class, just the rich and the really poor. From speaking with other USE students, I have noticed that each family is in varying economic classes just like the United States. For example, my family had meat three times while I was there, but another family had not eaten meat for five years due to the cost until their host student made them hamburgers. The USE students living across the road from me stayed with an affluent family. The family enjoys a widescreen TV, three cars, a house girl, and a personal manicurist that comes to their house to do their nails. What is even more surprising is that both parents are teachers. As I have come to learn, teachers and preachers are well-paying, prestigious jobs, which drastically contrasts from the United States.

The sanitization and hygiene in Africa has surprised me both positively and negatively. First, it was pleasing to learn that Ugandans prize personal cleanliness and bathe up to twice or three times a day. However, cleanliness, in my opinion, stops there. I struggled a lot with sanitization on my home stay. Dishes were cleaned in cold dirty water, gnats hovered and ants crawled around the food, mice frequently visited the sitting room, dirty rags were used repeatedly to wash and dry dishes and used for messes, children didn’t wash their hands before or after they ate and became sticky messy instantaneously after bathing, garbage and food built up on the sitting room floor during meals and throughout the day and was left to be cleaned up after the meal or in the morning, and the list goes on. The lack of sanitization is blatant to me, but I am learning in my Health and Wholeness class that proper cleanliness isn’t taught in primary or secondary school; the Health and Wholeness course at UCU is the first formal hygiene and sanitization education many Ugandans receive.

Needless to say, my experience on my home stay has been revealing and enlightening in so many ways. I have learned that Africans are more than capable of making a comfortable living. Their way of life is different from the American way, but it is not wrong. This observation convicts me to question the presence of Westerners that insist Africans must become westernized. There are numerous benefits to technology, but by forcing Africans to adopt Western ways demeans their way of life, which as I have mentioned is neither necessary nor appropriate. However, I have gained a much greater appreciation for health professionals that educate and set up institutions to promote hygiene and sanitization. I believe that proper education is the building block for a bright future. Something as basic as proper cleanliness can save thousands of lives and ensure the health of the future generations, which can ultimately lead to development.


I'll blog soon.

Love,
Kristen