Ki kati!

Well, university strikes aside, I am one week down in data collection here in Uganda!

Tuesday morning I hiked back over to Mulago Hospital to meet with the lecturer with whom I had been corresponding and then with the head of the anatomy department; we had a good chat about my work and the university strike. The department head seemed a little hesitant to let me start, but all of the technicians were in the building despite the strike, so he introduced me to the staff and had the chief technician help me get started. The chief technician (mainly an embalmer, I believe) is the one who pulls specimens out of storage for me. He is a lovely mild-mannered middle-aged gent with five kids, and he is very patiently teaching me phrases in Luganda (the language of the Baganda people, one of the biggest ethnic groups in Uganda), which is spoken much more widely than Swahili here.The Galloway Osteological Collection, as it is officially known, is in fairly good shape overall, although some of the individuals are missing random elements (rather typical, for a dissection cadaver-based collection). What bones are there are generally complete with little breakage, which is a welcome change after the state of most of the archaeological collections I dealt with in Peru. My workspace is a room tucked between the cold lab where the donated bodies go for embalming before dissection and the storage area for all the skeletons. The technicians and lecturers tend to wander in throughout the day to see how I'm getting along; everyone is super friendly and asks me questions like "How are the States?" I admit I was initially stumped on how to succinctly describe what it's like to live in America. I finally settled on "expensive."  They also all tend to be very concerned that I'm not eating enough for lunch - I generally pick up a samosa and piece of fruit or such from the cantina to have along with my Clif bar, while they are all eating huge plates of rice and meat and matoke. I promise them I'm eating big dinners in the evening and am just having a small lunch to maximize my time for data collection, but thus far they remain unconvinced.

I am able to work fairly long hours throughout the week with the collection (around 8a-6p), so I haven't been more ambitious than showering and having dinner in the evenings. Either at breakfast or dinner, though, I've met several people staying at the guest house, including William (a young Irish law student at Cambridge) and Espern and Mette (two Danish colleagues, a social scientist and political scientist, respectively). Espern and Mette have both been traveling to and working in Uganda for the past decade and so have provided a great introduction to some local places.

Friday night, Espern convinced us to accompany him to Club Obbligato to hear Afrigo Band play; they are a large group of musicians with a few dancers who play shows there every Friday and Saturday around midnight. Given Espern’s description that the place could get “a bit rough” I wasn’t quite sure what to expect – there was a guard with an AK47 out front, we paid the entrance fee and then entered a covered outdoor patio with a large stage, central area for dancing, and tiered levels of tables and chairs. Contrary to my expectations of a crazy, riotous packed dance club, however, the place held a crowd of mostly 30- and 40-somethings calmly seated, enjoying beers, and waiting for the show to start.  The music was mostly traditional Swahili, which is very fun and upbeat, with some great complicated rhythms. Before long, Espern was jamming in his seat and soon pulled all of us up to join the others already on the dance floor. All in all, a great time.

Oldest stone tool (2 mya) in Uganda

On Saturday I decided to head out and finally explore the city of Kampala a bit. I went to the café around the corner on Wandegeya that is supposed to have internet but again did not, so had just a snack instead and then continued on to the National Museum, which is just about half a mile down the road past where I work at Mulago Hospital. The museum has an interesting collection of musical instruments fro^th century. There were even a few small cases about human evolution in East Africa, complete with hominin fossil casts.
m all over East Africa, as well as some displays of the ethnographic and colonial history of Uganda itself. One of the parts I really liked was the display of official Olympics posters stretching back to the early 20

Made some Nepalese friends at the Independence Monument

I then walked the entire stretch of Kampala Road, starting from Bombo Road, all the way down to the City Center where it turns into Jinja road and then around to the Garden City area. I had lunch at what my guide book calls one of the best Indian restaurants in Kampala. It was definitely several levels up from the fare at the guest house! I did a little souvenir shopping at a store in the Garden City mall that has Ugandan handicrafts – a lot of touristy places focus on selling more generic Kenyan carvings, etc, and it can be a little harder to find cool stuff made in Uganda. This particular store is known for selling fairtrade goods, which is always nice to support. I then walked around a bit more to find the Independence Monument, where I met a couple of guys from Nepal. After walking all afternoon I decided to take my first ever boda boda ride (basically a moped taxi) back to Makerere. Boda bodas are a ubiquitous feature of East Africa, and I would be lying if I said they had a great safety record, but if you tell the driver to go slow and to not drive crazily, it's pretty reasonable.

Saturday night the guest house crew and I decided to go back to the club for some more music and dancing, and so we had another fun evening. The place was definitely more packed last night, but it still had a great relaxed atmosphere. As one of the workers at the guest house told us, it's a place you could take your mother without shocking her. Heh.

Today Espern introduced us all to yet another great feature of Kampala: the Kabira Country Club. For a small fee, you can pay for a day pass that allows you access to the pool, gym, sauna, etc. There is free wifi (hence this blog update!), a tasty restaurant, and plenty of comfy chairs for lounging. It rained all morning so I started with a workout, but after lunch the sun came out and it was absolutely lovely to relax by the pool for a bit. The country club is definitely quite different from the rest of the city and it honestly feels a bit colonial to hang out here - the place is full of expats, diplomats and their families, wealthy Ugandans, etc - but it is a good place to recharge.

Lovely pool @ Kabira

And with that, I'm off to finish my large piece of chocolate cake and do a bit of data formatting before returning to my regular non-country club lifestyle. I haven't had a chance to download pictures yet, so I will add those whenever I'm able. The entire university network has been down since Tuesday, and with the ongoing strike no one is fixing it, so I am sadly without wifi at the guest house and the medical school for the foreseeable future.

More Ugandan adventures to follow - hopefully next weekend I will visit the source of the Nile!  Cheers!