Tired of Uganda

May 22, 5:27 PM

Have I been here 5 days? I am tired. The novelty is wearing off. The kids scream “Bye Mzungu!” whenever we walk by, and people stare at us. Some of the kids mock us and talk in this weird nasaly voice, saying “Hi, how are you?“ apparently that is how we Mzungus talk. Jennifer and I have joked that we are like hippos to them. They are on a boat tour of Lake Mburu, and we are the hippos they are looking at.

To add to the abnoxiousness of some (not all) of the people, there is the NGO that Jennifer is working at. the head of it sees Jennifer’s work as unimportant, he sees her as a bag of money. I think his plan is to get these volunteers from the west, have them meet the orphans and see the community, and then go back to their friends and family and raise money. Jennifer is not playing the role he expected her to play. She put in a large quantity of money for transportation, and the driver only did 6 hours of work, half the time not picking her up from the field (where she had been walking all day) so she had to walk back.

I just arrived to the apartment, and found in the back when I wanted to wash dishes that there is no water. And in the back of the courtyard there were baby wipes spread everywhere, the creepy cleaning lady shuffles through our garbage whenever we put it out. I didn’t mention that these baby wipes were covered in urine, a little neighbor boy had sweatpants on that were so wet from urine that when he climbed up onto a chair they squeegied urine onto the chair and the floor. We used at least a half a dozen baby wipes cleaning it up, and …

Ending this post to play with neighbor kids