Hello friends and family,

The days are going so quickly, already a week has passed!

On Thursday for breakfast I was served small silver fish soup.  These fish are maybe 1 inch long, and they are caught in Lake Victoria.  They are dried and then sold at the market.  Mama Judith prepared them as a soup, so they became partially rehydrated.  We’re talking whole fish here, even if they are small.  So with each scoop of my fork, I raised a small mound of rice with a little fish on top, it’s eyeball staring up at me…  it was not very appetizing and really just tasted fishy.  Mama Judith was telling me that at about my age women start to fatten themselves up, in preparation for marriage IE childbearing.  They must be very strong when they marry as in when they start giving birth all the time.

She served me some steamed greens as another example of important things to eat.  One was supposed to protect the skin from the sun.  The other was cleome/Spider Flower!  She steamed it by wrapping it in banana leaves and placing it over the matooke as it boiled.  It is supposed to help purify the blood.  It tasted better than the other one, but both were quite bitter.

Also I helped to weed one of the fields last Thursday, Labor Day.  One of the main weeds that encroach upon maize and bean fields is Wandering Jew.  I said, oh, I know that plant, we grow it in pots inside as a decoration.  This morning I helped to plant sweet potatoes in mounds under the banana trees.

My last email emphasized amenities so I want to clarify a little.  At work I have been reading the Masaka District Development Plan which was written by the local government council and lists the issues facing this district and the plans for the future.  So some interesting statistics:

-75% of the citizens of Masaka District depend on agriculture for their income.
-72% are engaged in subsistence farming.
-Cash crops are coffee, bananas, maize, beans, vanilla
-A little under 6% of the population of this district has access to electricity, and most of those are in Masaka Town.  All the electricity in Uganda comes from the hydroelectric dam in Jinja, and there are frequent power outages.
-The population density according to the 02 Census is 248/sq km.  For comparison, Iowa’s population density is 20/sq km according to Wikipedia.

For some more personal information, we completed baseline surveys at ten farms last week.  They owned ½ to 2 acres of land.  They had an average of 8 children in their families, some their own and some orphans, children of family members or friends who have died of HIV/AIDS.  Basically no family has been untouched by HIV/AIDS here.  One sister and one brother of Mama Judith died from the disease.  It is thought that the disease was brought to the area by the Tanzanian soldiers during the war against Amin.

Hm.  On a happier note, last weekend I went to Kampala with my host sisters Agnes, Nakirya Monica, her husband Vincent and one of their friends.  We stopped for gonja on the way, which is a type of banana that is only eaten after being roasted.  It is bad luck to eat it as a meal.  It is often eaten on long journeys.  When in transport, gonja bananas must be carried alone or an accident will occur.  The best story about gonja is a proverb:  “Ensayu lyolina lya mwoki wa gonja, aba tanajja mga akuba mu ngalo” which you can say when you are extremely happy – it means something like “to have happiness like the person who roasts gonja, clapping hands to brush away the ashes from roasting.”  …difficult to translate, but according to my host brother the idea is that when Ugandans clap they are so happy – the act of clapping is brushing away the ashes from roasting the gonja, because the happiest person in Uganda is the person who roasts gonja.

We stayed at a family member’s house near Kampala after the wedding; the bedroom Agnes and I shared had it’s OWN BATHROOM!  And then, I saw… A SHOWERHEAD!  I was pretty excited… until I turned on the faucet and it was only cold water.  Ah well, it was a running water I could stand under none the less.  The wedding itself was quite similar to an American wedding, though at the reception they had traditional Bugandan dancers.  Everyone made a big line to present their gifts to the bride and groom, and later each side of the family went over to greet the other side.  The dinner was, drumroll please, matooke!!  I think I’ve gone only three days without matooke this whole time here.  It’s never just matooke, but matooke, rice, with a bean sauce, or matooke, sweet potato, and a sauce made from groundnuts.

Yikes better get on to the photos, this is becoming a novel!
-Brothers-Beans is just that, two of my brothers or hmm grandsons of Mama Judith, Katende at left and Sseru at right, shelling beans for the sauce.  In Luganda beans are called ebijanjaalo, one of the best words I’ve encountered.
-Sugar-cane is me having a snack provided by one of the farmers I visited with Heifer Project veterinarians.  This sugar cane stick started out at about the length of my entire arm.  You slowly bite away at it, suck the sugar out of the fibers, and then spit out the fibers.  Quite refreshing except hard work for the jaw.
-my-office is also self-explanatory, except that’s not just my space but the entire United For Development office…  quite small, they are in the process of getting a new larger space.  There is a computer but power is out often enough that I am glad to have the laptop — there is power just often enough to charge the battery.  What’s nice about this place is that even if I am stuck at the office I am still practically outside.

I have been hearing about the lovely spring that has reached Iowa!  Hope all is well at home.

stephanie

shelling beans

Eating Sugar-cane

the local office