Realization hits me in spurts
The couple of months before my departure somehow managed to become some of the busiest months of my life, and I found I had neither the time nor space of mind to reflect upon what this summer in Eastern and Southern Africa would be like. People would ask me about my project and plans and I would recount as much as I could and as much as I knew – which wasn’t all that much – as if this were some other reality and I were a third party observer to the distant upcoming events.
But spurts started to hit. Like the afternoon beer I had with my father the day before my departure. Maybe it was his questions on the logistics of my trip; or the taste of an afternoon beer; or the subtle yet persistent concern in his eyes and his voice.
Or like the last email I sent off to Jeremy on Monday night to inform him of my arrival time into Entebbe two days later; and the last time I checked email early Tuesday morning to make sure he would indeed be there to pick me up.
Or the customs forms handed to me on the last leg of my trip, that little light-blue square of paper that somehow opened the door to a whole new country.
It was night when I arrived into Entebbe, Uganda on Wednesday, and I lost all remnants of formality between graduate student and assistant professor when I saw Jeremy’s familiar face at the airport. I gave him a big hug, happy and relieved to end two days of plane life with an escort service to Kampala. There wasn’t much for me to discover on the hour-long ride from Entebbe to Kampala, but Jeremy’s promise of daily breakfasts overlooking Lake Victoria infused me with just enough fresh energy to absorb his update of the project and to realize that I was going to have to switch gears relatively soon.
I realized when I turned down Jeremy’s suggestion that I sleep in and take the half day off before fully getting on board the project that I very well might be turning down the only occasion Jeremy would ever give me to take it easy. But the realization that I had landed in a new country was slowly cementing and any common sense I may have had was quickly eclipsed by the excitement of a new place, new faces, new sunrises and sunsets, new smells and tastes, new accents and handshakes.
Between the mosquitoes, the guard dogs and my nervous anticipation, sleep found its way only sporadically into my first night in Kampala. I was up by 6 a.m. and went on my morning run, intent on shaking off two days of airplane inertia and impatient to take in the scenery: I had a sunrise to see on Lake Victoria. It turns out I wasn’t alone outside at 6 in the morning. School kids abounded and stared at the sole white girl running without a direction or much of a sense of orientation, yelled out muzungu to exclaim the strange pallor of my skin, and laughed at me innocuously. I would have laughed too had I been in their shoes. Instead, I was a little awkward in mine, spotting landmarks and dodging taxis, wondering at what point all this strangeness would become familiar to my eyes and mind.
I did go to work on this first day in Kampala; I met some of the locals on our project team; went over some of the drafts for the scripts of the experiments we were going to start running in a couple of weeks; headed off to the city with my Columbia equivalent, Alex, to change some money and buy a cell phone – apparently the first priority to get anything done in an African capital; and more or less made it through an intense day with fatigue and jetlag hovering over me.
We have a cook in our house; as well as a cleaning lady who does our laundry. We also have a driver who manages to get us to work and back in one piece – perhaps one of the greatest feat of living and operating in Kampala. We have a gate keeper, Daniel, who laughs at me when I go running at six in the morning but is always there to welcome me upon my return. We do have breakfast on the front porch overlooking Lake Victoria. And we have four guard dogs, whose hostile barks are supposed to make me feel safer at night.
I work with a truly inspiring team, each scholar with a unique work ethic and communication style that make for some interesting late night debates on experimental methodology and project management. I’ve been here only one day and I feel myself absorbing and learning so much information. It’s revitalizing, yet I’m certain I will be exhausted by the end of the summer. Soaking and poking, it seems, is a full time job and they don’t pay you overtime.
But spurts started to hit. Like the afternoon beer I had with my father the day before my departure. Maybe it was his questions on the logistics of my trip; or the taste of an afternoon beer; or the subtle yet persistent concern in his eyes and his voice.
Or like the last email I sent off to Jeremy on Monday night to inform him of my arrival time into Entebbe two days later; and the last time I checked email early Tuesday morning to make sure he would indeed be there to pick me up.
Or the customs forms handed to me on the last leg of my trip, that little light-blue square of paper that somehow opened the door to a whole new country.
It was night when I arrived into Entebbe, Uganda on Wednesday, and I lost all remnants of formality between graduate student and assistant professor when I saw Jeremy’s familiar face at the airport. I gave him a big hug, happy and relieved to end two days of plane life with an escort service to Kampala. There wasn’t much for me to discover on the hour-long ride from Entebbe to Kampala, but Jeremy’s promise of daily breakfasts overlooking Lake Victoria infused me with just enough fresh energy to absorb his update of the project and to realize that I was going to have to switch gears relatively soon.
I realized when I turned down Jeremy’s suggestion that I sleep in and take the half day off before fully getting on board the project that I very well might be turning down the only occasion Jeremy would ever give me to take it easy. But the realization that I had landed in a new country was slowly cementing and any common sense I may have had was quickly eclipsed by the excitement of a new place, new faces, new sunrises and sunsets, new smells and tastes, new accents and handshakes.
Between the mosquitoes, the guard dogs and my nervous anticipation, sleep found its way only sporadically into my first night in Kampala. I was up by 6 a.m. and went on my morning run, intent on shaking off two days of airplane inertia and impatient to take in the scenery: I had a sunrise to see on Lake Victoria. It turns out I wasn’t alone outside at 6 in the morning. School kids abounded and stared at the sole white girl running without a direction or much of a sense of orientation, yelled out muzungu to exclaim the strange pallor of my skin, and laughed at me innocuously. I would have laughed too had I been in their shoes. Instead, I was a little awkward in mine, spotting landmarks and dodging taxis, wondering at what point all this strangeness would become familiar to my eyes and mind.
I did go to work on this first day in Kampala; I met some of the locals on our project team; went over some of the drafts for the scripts of the experiments we were going to start running in a couple of weeks; headed off to the city with my Columbia equivalent, Alex, to change some money and buy a cell phone – apparently the first priority to get anything done in an African capital; and more or less made it through an intense day with fatigue and jetlag hovering over me.
We have a cook in our house; as well as a cleaning lady who does our laundry. We also have a driver who manages to get us to work and back in one piece – perhaps one of the greatest feat of living and operating in Kampala. We have a gate keeper, Daniel, who laughs at me when I go running at six in the morning but is always there to welcome me upon my return. We do have breakfast on the front porch overlooking Lake Victoria. And we have four guard dogs, whose hostile barks are supposed to make me feel safer at night.
I work with a truly inspiring team, each scholar with a unique work ethic and communication style that make for some interesting late night debates on experimental methodology and project management. I’ve been here only one day and I feel myself absorbing and learning so much information. It’s revitalizing, yet I’m certain I will be exhausted by the end of the summer. Soaking and poking, it seems, is a full time job and they don’t pay you overtime.
posted by cla at 7:45 PM
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