Category: crazy

reality TV comes to Kabale

What do you get when you mix eight British multi-millionaires, three weeks in Uganda and a mission to improve the living standards of an African village?

Disaster, mostly. And also a new reality television show sponsored by World Vision, a non-profit known mostly for its child sponsorship program.

Ugandan bloggers have reacted strongly to the show, calling it “preposterous” and “another naïve thing from the West.” World Vision’s official line is that the show “explor[es] the complexities of development work and the causes of poverty,” which sounds very noble, but I’m going to side with the blogren.

Let’s recap: eight millionaires with no real knowledge of Uganda. $240,000. Three weeks. Granted, they have a “mentor” and a handy-dandy World Vision quick guide to sustainable development, but I have a hard time believing they’re going to accomplish something in three weeks that countless other professional aid agencies have failed to do in decades.

Even more than that, Millionaires’ Mission seems to trivialize the problems in Uganda, turning an entire village into an experiment. What role do the Ugandans have in this? So far, they’ve been filmed waving machetes at their supposed benefactors. Way to propagate Conrad-era stereotypes.

Tumwijuke argues that Millionaires’ Mission showcases the “humiliation of Ugandans” and criticizes the show for being just another excuse to watch rich westerners run around Africa. I think she’s absolutely right.

I couldn’t resist: World Vision tells viewers to “Forget the jargon and get a quick guide to some of the key development themes…. sustainability, aid, trade, participation….” In other words, “jargon, jargon, jargon, jargon….”

culture shock

Yesterday a man stopped me outside the subway.

“Miss, how much money do you spend on your hair every month?” he asked me.

I stopped and thought about it. “Why?”

“Well, I’m doing a salon promotion, and I bet you we can save you at least $10 per month on hair cuts and more.”

“The last time I got my hair cut was in April,” I told him. “Of 2006. And it cost me $5.”

I watched his reaction for a second, just because his speechlessness was so amusing. And then I got on my train.

modes of transportation

When I was three years old, I had this long-sleeved shirt covered in pictures of planes, trains, boats and automobiles. I called it my “modes of transportation” shirt (did I mention I spent a lot of my free time at that age practicing the differences between adverbs and adjectives and count and non-count nouns? Guess whose mom was an English teacher?). I loved that shirt, and in honor of it, I’ve started a new label on Jackfruity.

The modes of transportation category currently includes such Jackfruity favorites as:

I doubt this category will receive too many more Uganda-focused entries. However, almost as if it could sense I was leaving, the country decided to give me a parting shot.

About thirty minutes in to my flight from Entebbe to Dubai, the Ethiopian woman next to me tugged on my sleeve. She didn’t speak any English (and my Amharic consists largely of words like injera and kitfo), which made understanding her concerned expression as she pointed to the ceiling somewhat difficult.

I tried to reassure her, assuming she was jittery about the flight, but as I reached my hand up to mimic a safe landing, something dripped on it.

I looked up. There, on the crack between two overhead bins, was a leak. Now I was worried. Together, my Ethiopian Buddy and I rang for a flight attendant. By the time he reached us, the dripping had gotten so bad, and was accompanied by so peculiar a smell, that EB had wrapped a shawl around her head and was considerably more disgruntled than frightened.

“There seems to be something dripping on her head,” I told the flight attendant. “Is the plane leaking?”

The flight attendant scoffed, as if to say, “How dare you suggest that the airplanes of this reputable airline are anything less than superb?” What he actually said was, “The woman behind you has a pineapple in her carry-on.”

“Could we perhaps take her bag out of the overhead bin?” I asked. “She’s getting…dripped on.”

EB nodded and pulled her shawl more tightly around her head.

“Why don’t we move you to another seat?” he suggested, drawing EB away by her elbow and leaving me with the pineapple juice.

And that was it. He never came back, the woman behind me was utterly unperturbed when I asked her to take the bag down (“It will hurt my feet,” was the explanation for her refusal), and I got to spend the next seven hours next to a growing puddle of pineapple juice.

Today I flew from New York to DC. We hit turbulence right as the woman next to me was about to take a sip of water, and she ended up spilling some of it on her tray table. The flight attendant came and wiped it up for her.

so long, and thanks for all the matooke

Since I last wrote, I finished work, slept in a geodome, climbed a volcano, wore a tie to a goat race (where I met Andrew Mwenda) and left Uganda. Yikes.

I haven’t been home (by which I mean lovable Lawrence, KS, home of indie scenesters and dozens of locally owned coffee shops and more banks per capita than anywhere else in the United States*) yet because I’m hanging out with old friends on the East Coast. So far my culture shock has consisted of my amazement at drinkable tap water and skinny jeans.

Right now I’m sitting in the Edwin Ginn Library pretending to be a student at the Fletcher School. Fletcher is currently heading the list of graduate programs I’m considering, making this particular moment simultaneously exciting (I could be here in a year!) and terrifying (I could not be here in a year!).

The future for me consists of grad school applications, making espresso for thirsty, caffeine-addicted grocery shoppers, and traveling around the country catching up with people I haven’t seen for a year. I’ll be blogging, but it remains to be seen how much of Jackfruity will be dedicated to Uganda and how much will expand to include other parts of East Africa, general comments on technology and development, and the occasional cupcake recipe. I also hope to start a new blog focused on the former Soviet Union. (I’ve gotten as far as the name and the template, but content-wise, I’m a little short right now.)

I’ll be paying close attention to what happens to Uganda Bloggers Happy Hour at the end of this month — I hope someone else will make it near and dear to their heart and keep UBHH alive, but the dearth of Ugandan participants last month (27th Comrade being the lone exception) makes me doubtful.

The plan is to return to Uganda within a year, mostly to say hi to friends and chill out in the equatorial sunshine, but for now: so long, and thanks for all the matooke.

*So widely rumored to be true that I didn’t bother looking for a source.

horror, in pictures

My strongest support goes to my friend Katherine Roubos, whose courageous coverage of the GLBT community in Uganda has garnered this:


I went to the rally to be a part of a team of white female decoys (Katherine’s editor sent her to cover it, which theoretically gave her some sort of journalistic immunity, but the purpose of the rally already nullified that. Better safe than sorry, not so?) and to exercise my own curiousity: the event was organized by Martin Ssempa, a conservative Ugandan religious activist with whom I recently exchanged words.

Wow. Martin Ssempa is undeniably charismatic. He is also undeniably creepy. For all you Lawrencians: imagine Fred Phelps shaking your hand. I came home and took a very long shower.

P.S. Aga Khan, if you fire her, that’s it. We’re done.