First Impressions...

Waking up after my first day and night in Nangoro, I feel a lot less overwhelmed than I did after arriving yesterday.  The rest helped, I am sure.

First impressions.

I was met at the airport by Samson, who has a tourism agency called Shalom Safaris, and who is from the same community where I am now.  We left Entebbe yesterday and passed through the suburbs and center of Kampala in bumper-to-bumper traffic that increased our journey by at least an hour or two.  I fell asleep after that but awoke upon reaching Jinja, and the Nile River. I had seen the Nile from the airplane, and now here it was in front of me, and below me as we crossed the river on the hydroelectric damn and entered the papyrus swamps that result from the runoff from Mt. Elgon in the Eastern Region of Uganda.

The drive continued, the road always flanked by towns and villages, houses, traditional round mud huts with layered stick roofs (much cooler than the modern houses with corrugated iron sheet roofs), shops, children in school uniforms in colors spanning the rainbow, women in bright, elaborately tied dresses and headscarves or in Muslim head-coverings, men in western dress or in flowing long white kanzus.  As we proceeded, a large mountain loomed ahead of us, and began to take on the form of a large mushroom erupting suddenly out of a flat plain – this was Mt. Elgon, 2000 meters tall. Continuing, the mountain became the foreground of a long and high mountain range that extended westward.

After some time, we began gradually climbing the foothills of Mt. Elgon, and arrived to Mbale city, a bustling little city whose center square is dominated by a hot-pink clock tower (I promise to get some fotos of this in the future so you know I am not lying.).  We climbed four kilometers more over a potholed and winding road, passing houses, shaded coffee fields, banana trees, beans, and maize, and reached the house of JJ Keki, the director of Peace Kawomera cooperative.

During my first afternoon, I met most of JJ’s twenty-five natural and adopted children (not an exaggeration), whose names I promptly forgot.  I spent the afternoon hanging out with the children and talking with JJ, figuring out how to use the toilet (before JJ showed me the western-style one inside) and generally just getting used to the idea of being here.  I have to say that I was overwhelmed, absolutely overwhelmed, probably from exhaustion from the journey by air and land all the way from London.  I actually fell asleep at 7pm, but was awakened at 830pm by Stacy, one of the daughters, to eat supper.  So I sat down with JJ and ate a plantain mash, beans, rice and greens, quite filling.  Then I laid back down and fell asleep again, not waking until 9am this morning.

By the time I woke today, JJ and the older children had left for Synagogue, as today is Sabbat. I hung out with the kids until Aziz, one of the young professionals that works with the cooperative, showed up.  We chatted for a bit and then he took me to see the cooperative’s new office, which is under construction just down the road from JJ’s place.  Once it is finished, it will be complete with storage and offices, as well as a larger-capacity mechanical coffee depulping machine, which I gathered was installed about five weeks ago.  Aziz also showed me the fermenting tank and drying trays where the current harvest is busily being processed. I showed Aziz some fotos of coffee production in Nicaragua and Brazil, and we were impressed by the similarities and differences in production and processing methods between those two countries and Uganda - all producing the same product!

After Aziz left, I went to hang out with the kids again; this is a major part of my research plan, as you will probably already have noted! One of them, a young girl named Shirin, braided my hair into tight little braids.  I have to say, it looks better on Ugandans than on me.  Otherwise, I am struggling with language, as people here sometimes speak Luganda, sometimes some other tribal language, and some of them speak English.  I am putting my Swahili to work trying to understand and learn some Luganda, so we will see where that goes.  I am also working off of satellite internet here, which is very slow.  The result is that I am having trouble uploading fotos into the blog, so this post is not accompanied by images, unfortunately.  I will keep trying, however, to get some fotos up for you soon, so you have images to accompany the stories.