My latest piece is up at Global Voices Online:
Growing up in Uganda
For the blogren, this has been the week to remember their childhoods. Their posts — touching, witty, inspiring — give insight into the diversity of Ugandan youth.
Category: global voices
GVO: Uganda: Bloggers Respond to Controversial Daily Monitor Articles
My next piece is up at Global Voices Online:
Uganda’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community has gotten a lot of press recently in the form of a number of articles written by Katherine Roubos, a 22-year-old Stanford student from the United States. Most recently, Roubos covered the first ever LGBTI press conference, a story that prompted an anti-gay rally in Kampala.
GVO: Uganda: Happy hour unrest, Blogumentary and Sam Cooke
My next piece is up at Global Voices Online:
Ugandan blogger/hip-hop artist Saving a Generation Endangered (S.A.G.E.) stirred up controversy this week when he lashed out at Uganda Bloggers Happy Hour (BHH) attendees in a Blogging a Blogger interview conducted by Country Boyi:
He (S.A.G.E.) further lashes at the Blogger Happy Hour logo that describes Ugandan bloggers as “intelligent, witty, sexy and occasionally ridiculous.” He finds an alternative description for the Ugandan blogging scenario.
“I’ll just call it the theatre of the absurd,” he says, “because the ‘best’ bloggers are the same guys that have been setting themselves the goddesses and gods -the idols they worship. They don’t want anyone to make negative criticism about these goddesses/gods; the whole thing is basically absurd!”
blogger hates me
Well, not exactly. But I did get flagged as spam, which shut down my ability to post until a “human” (I’m quoting the Blogger notice) reviewed JF and gave me the green light.
Thanks, human.
And, now that I’m back, I’ve been tagged by Glenna to participate in the 8 Random Things meme. It feels a bit hypocritical, given my last Global Voices post about the blogren being all fun & games.
But then, what’s the matter with fun & games? So here goes (I’m skipping the rules because everyone’s already been tagged except for Josh — your turn):
ONE.
I hate these. I think they’re a waste of energy, pixels and kilobytes. (Grumble, grumble, arrrgh…. 27th, I’m turning into a pirate already.)
TWO.
Until three years ago, my biggest aspiration was to work for the CIA. In my defense: they teach you languages. For free. And they pay you for the ones you already know.
THREE.
I was supremely relieved (and thoroughly amused) today when I noticed that I’m not the only one who edits local media in my head.
FOUR.
In my book, barbecue sauce is its own food group and should be applied to most other foods, including mashed potatoes and omlettes.
FIVE.
I read so much that as a kid I could never clean my room without constant parental prompting — I’d get caught up in the copyright tags attached to toys, old homework and the backs of cereal boxes.
SIX.
I never travel without my pillow.
SEVEN.
For all the times that I’ve sheepishly introduced myself as a Russian major attempting to work in East Africa, I wouldn’t trade my degree for the world.
EIGHT.
I bought a ticket home this week. Talk about mixed emotions. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have hated this experience, the number of times I have curled up on my bed and cursed everything: corruption, poverty, the Anopheles mosquito, incompetence, bureacracy, misplaced deference, war, rain, matooke.
And then there are the wonderful things: Breakdance Project Uganda, the Nagenda Academy and the visionary behind it, watching the sun rise during the early-morning bus rides north, the French-speaking owner of Maq Foods in Gulu, the youth leaders I’ve met working for GYPA, my 27 housemates (and counting), the blogren.
My good friend Chris recently left Uganda after a year in Gulu. I’ve been reading his blog a lot lately as he grapples with returning to the States, and this post made me miss Uganda already. In the words of Locus Amoenus: “Funny then, how Uganda always seems to redeem itself when you want to lay under the mosquito net and sob.”
GVO: Ugandan bloggers all play, no peace talks
My next piece is up at Global Voices Online:
At last month’s Uganda Bloggers Happy Hour, I took an informal poll of why the blogren do what they do. My favorite response came from Carlo, who said that blogging is “just like Facebook,” the social networking site that’s currently sweeping the young, internet-connected world. Every blogger present declared blogging in Uganda to be a purely social exercise, evidenced by the recent “8 Random Things” meme circulating among Ivan, Magoola, Magintu and others.
Perhaps that’s why hardly anyone has mentioned last week’s one-year anniversary of the beginning of the peace talks between the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a “sadistic rebel militia which ha[s] made a hell out of the north of the country for two decades.”