A Cultural Symphony

           The past two weeks offered plenty of opportunities to indulge in the life and times of the people of Kabale. First, a wedding took place in the garden on the grounds which I live. Nearly 300 people travelled from within the district of Kabale and across the borders from Rwanda and the Congo to take part in the festivities. I was very excited to be able to practice speaking French with the Rwandan’s and Kiswahili with the Congolese.

           It all began on the Friday evening when I heard many voices just outside my bedroom door. I walked outside to see 10 women and 3 men carrying loads of food: 8 bunches of plantains, 25lb bags of rice, potatoes and flour, hundreds of onions, tomatoes, green peppers and eggplant, 8 jugs of corn oil, salt and spices and three live goats (I will not be talking of these goats anymore… I’d like to continue to believe they magically escaped and are currently happily grazing in the nearby pastures). Preparations began at 9pm working straight through the entire night to 5am when cooking began. Little did I know, this would be my first all-nighter in Kabale.

Peeling plantains for the local staple, Matooke

          Shortly after I introduced myself in the local language, Rukiga, I was offered a stool and handed a hefty sized knife. Over six-hundred plantains later I stood up to stretch and retire for the evening… but the catering team had different ideas for me. We began lining the biggest cauldron I have ever seen with banana leaves, making a gigantic canopy that would be later used to steam plantains. After that hour, again, I was ready to head to bed, but instead, was introduced to my next task. For the next three hours or so we sorted through rice, grain-by-grain removing tiny pebbles, chunks of clay and small wood chippings. Then potatoes- peeling and chopping. By the time we finished, the birds began to make music for us, the sun lit sky and coal fires began to burn. I could not possibly go all night and come this far just to be a dietitian/foodie who bails as the most important time- so I sacrificed sleep to be a team played and I hung around to help cook. 

Binding banana leaves to steam plantains for the local dish Matooke

 

Filling the cauldron

Making room for more!

Ready for the final layer of leaves before steaming

           By noon the guests piled into the compound, then the bride and groom finally arrived. As much as I tried to blend end, I received several confused stares “Who invited the Mzungu?” I’m sure they were thinking as I was clearly the sister from another mother! As I sat with my friends in the terrace, I watched below as a marching band exploded in, followed by the first four dancers of the evening. After their recital, a group of school girls I’m guessing to be between 12 years and 16 years old began to sing and the two more dance routines were performed. The cake was cut, dinner was served, day turned to night, than the real party began. The tunes were blaring everything from the local mix, which I can only explain as a reggae tone infused with hip hop-pop, to this past summer’s top 40 beats, to some old school Destiny’s Child, Jay-Z, Usher and Akon. I turned in my dancing shoes as the sun came up again and slept until mid-afternoon, just in time to help finish cleaning up the leftover mess. What a night- I’ll never forget it!

Marching band member

First dance performers

 

The young singers are under the tent to the left of the
man in blue and the young dancers to the right

 Adorable- nothing more needs to be said!

My little shadow for the day, Linette

           So back to work on Monday, this to be my busiest week since I arriving in Uganda. To prepare for a training session held on Thursday the 11th, I had a lengthy to-do list to tackle: completing with the team final revisions of our survey tool; finalizing the corresponding training manual and drawing the same onto flip-charts for teaching purposes; printing, photocopying and stapling 22,500 three-paged surveys; procuring 900 each of pens and envelopes for packaging; planning lunch with caterers and doing several other administrative tasks. I was quite often, literally running between errands. Of course, the entire situation was complicated by a power-outage that began Friday and lasted through to Tuesday- then further complicated by issues of project funding. Funds were not approved or transferred from Kampala until Wednesday at 4pm, leaving me with only 14 hours to complete the majority of these tasks. Labeling 900 envelopes alone took nearly 4 hours as each contained at least three names such as “Rweneyangu, Nyakashebeya and Kitoomabuyabe” names of which I am not particularly familiar. That being said, Wednesday was my second all-nighter since residing in Kabale. With two all-nighters in one week, it felt like a mixture between Frosh-week and exams in first-year University.

            Overall, the training session was a success. Of the 70 Health Centre In Charge’s and Health Assistants (equated to superintendents) whom were invited, 62 completed training. With bags under my eyes, sans shower, breakfast or my morning tea, I stood at the front of the government boardroom with my flip charts and began the session. I was lucky enough to have the assistance of the District Health Educator who intermittently translated my sentences into Rukiga and emphasized important points by saying: “What? The (objective). What? The (objective).” We managed to complete the training in a little over three hours, after which the floor was opened for questions. In the afternoon, we were even graced with the presence of Dr. Tusiime, the District Health Officer of Kabale, who delivered an empowering and motivating speech to the attendees.

          By days end we had confirmed a way forward for the survey. With the help of the driver, I will be dropping off the remaining surveys in each of the six sub-districts of Kabale between Tuesday and Thursday next week. During these visits, each of the health workers will be responsible for training the Village Health Teams within their Health Centre so they may accurately complete the surveys at the household level. During this visit I will be using a GPS tracking device to pinpoint the coordinates for each Health Centre. I will be sending this data to one of our team members based in Michigan who will be geo-mapping the facilities for use by the Ugandan Ministry of Health. We will also use these geographic locations in conjunction with the health survey data outcomes to map the most prevalent health issues within each village. In turn, this data will be further used in order to better design and implement health promotion and disease prevention interventions with targets specific to each area being served. Two weeks from now, I will again return to each health unit to collect the completed surveys, after which I will be travelling to Kampala to recruit the assistance of AMREF staff for the daunting task of data input.

            On Friday, I took the day a little easier since feeling slightly sluggish and sleep-deprived. I cancelled my morning run with my friend Joshua, my running partner since my third day in Kabale. We began running together after he noticed the compound gate was open in the morning after I arrived. He saw me enter some time later. On that morning we made a deal and since, have been meeting at 6:45am every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning. I thought he would take it easy on me and just agree with this first and only cancellation request, but instead, I received an ultimatum- either we were to keep our Friday morning run as-is or we must trade our regular route for a run over 24km in distance to Lake Bunyonyi…

Joshua, my running friend / drill sergeant

           I think I should elaborate and maybe even justify this ultimatum as I must admit that I may have brought it on myself. Over the past week and a half I have been doing “add-ons”, slowly increasing the distance him and I run in the mornings in light of my overly ambitious, fly by the seat of my pants decision to register for the MTN Kampala International Marathon which will take place about one month from now. Initially, we began by running a 7km route, which has now evolved to the current 10km route. This past Wednesday after I added-on another kilometer, we pushed the biggest hill (for the Around the Bay runners, I am describing a hill that is certainly at least equivalent to “Heart-break Hill” up the escarpment in Hamilton) quite hard. I was turning up the final stretch, the last ~350m hill on our route, when he turned his head and said “Neda”-no- and lead me through what I am estimating to be a little over 1.5km’s worth of trail running ending with an impossibly steep hill on extremely rough terrain. My lungs really could not take it anymore, I’m just beginning to get used to this altitude and so my pace slowed drastically to an almost walk. At this point, he looks at me from meters ahead as he effortless floats up the hill like a mountain goat and says to me “EKIKUMI!!” which translates loosely into “RUN FASTER!” I signed up for a running friend and somehow ended up with a hard-core training coach! Anyway, I have a long run to look forward to tomorrow morning so best I end this post here.

           By my next entry I should be back in Kampala and hope to be writing about the exciting task of data entry. Also, I forgot to add, the pictures this week are courtesy of my friend Bruno. He works on the compound where I live and borrowed my camera for the wedding as he would like to be an event promoter. He used the camera, I got to keep the pictures after he copied them- definitely a win-win situation.