eat the damn fish

I’m somewhat used to food recommendations: You simply must try the goat-cheese-&-olive-stuffed chicken breast! Or, more likely given my socioeconomic class: You simply must try the Chicken Grilled Stuft Burrito Extra Value Meal!

In Uganda food recommendations are much less commonly made than back home, mainly because there’s never the guarantee a restaurant will actually be stocked with arbitrary things like food, water, waiters or other such predictable lavishes so very standard in America. You learn to ask “Is there food?” the moment you sit down, a question that’s usually met with a thoughtful expression, followed by a furrowed brow, followed by your waiter disappearing for ten to twelve minutes, followed by the disappointing news that “Food is not there. But I can offer you a selection of room temperature beers and an arrangement of three to two Ugandan pop songs played on repeat at a volume guaranteed incompatible with human conversation. If you’d like to further reduce your conversation risk, as you’re still in danger of being able to lip-read your dining companion, we can pair tonight’s pop medley with the deafening dialogue and distracting images of a homemade Nigerian film.”

I recently had the opportunity to stay in an upscale lodge in Queen Elizabeth National Park, the sort of mythical place I’ve heard about where food is always “there”, where beer is served at a temperature colder than my mouth and where one bottle of water costs about the same as my weekly food budget. For the average Peace Corps volunteer, the word ‘upscale’ can be used loosely to mean a variety of things: The mosquito net was virtually hole-free! The rats in the ceiling were really quiet! I was easily able to incorporate the 5 a.m. call to prayer into my dream! Yes, I did happen to be dreaming about teaching sign-language to gorillas inside a Muslim mosque. What about it?

Call me a snob but I try to reserve the word ‘upscale’ for the rare occasions when the toilet is actually connected to the hotel room, toilet paper or not. That is, that was my definition of upscale until my weekend at the lodge, a charming world where wake-up calls involve hippos splashing outside your window and honest-to-goodness brewed coffee brought directly to your door, a world with the sort of water pressure you long ago forgot existed, a world with a convenient turn down service that saves you the overwhelming trouble of removing decorative pillow after decorative pillow; a world where decorative pillows actually exist.

My second morning at the lodge a man brought tea to my door instead of coffee. I was pissed.

Rewind just one week and I’m back in Queen Elizabeth National Park with my sister, this time in a hotel with no electricity, an inadvertent flush-to-activate, Bellagio-style fountain in the bathroom caused by a broken toilet pipe, an interactive bedspread comprised of hundreds of ants and a single menu option of: fish. To be fair, we were told we simply must try the fish; we just didn’t realize we actually…MUST try the fish. Ever tried eating an entire whole tilapia in the dark? How I would have killed to wash down my fish bones with an overpriced bottle of water or mistaken cup of tea.

that tylenol i took might kill me? huh. how's chris brown doing?

According to Yahoo’s highly specialized team of highly dedicated and no doubt highly paid Trending Now Data Analysts, the following is a list of the fascinating subjects trending right now:

1. Mariah Carey
2. Judge Judy
3. Kevin Federline
4. Chris Brown
5. Credit cards
6. Infection outbreak
7. Jennifer Aniston
8. Diabetes
9. Tylenol recall
10. Mega Millions winner

As a nurse I’m not entirely comfortable with the image of a brittle diabetic, on the verge of diabetic coma, checking out Judge Judy’s fan page before Yahooing proper injection techniques. And I’m not positive but I feel like Jesus would be upset he’s been significantly out-trended by a woman who can sing a measly seven octaves. Please. Try creating seven seas, Mariah. This is the man who turned water into wine, and though I wasn’t there I can safely say he never once had the urge to close his eyes or inexplicably wave his left hand up and down as if affected with Parkinson’s in order to do so. Unless he was making the sign of the cross. At any rate, Yahoo’s got me thinking about what my trending now list might include if my highly specialized trending now brain centers, which I believe to be located in the trendiest of all brain locations, the temporal lobes, could automatically stream onto a website for all to enjoy.

Trending Now Now*
*not a typo but a delightful way of saying “now” in a culture where “now” means “just as soon as I win Mega Millions”.

1. Monkeys
2. My next meal
3. Sleep
4. Anderson Cooper
5. Not dying in Uganda
6. Gastroenteritis
7. Travis Hasler
8. Blueband
9. Lava rock
10. Computer viruses

I’m hoping, perhaps naively, my boyfriend will be happy to see my temporal lobes find him trendier than Blueband, a synthetic East African butter/miracle fortified with vitamins A and C. Fortification is very in right now, as are night vision and not having scurvy.

a most peculiar mademoiselle

I’ve always considered Beauty and the Beast to be my favorite Disney movie but the other day, after watching a particularly bad pirated copy in which the sound moved at twice the speed of the animation, thereby leaving the second half of the film silent and might I say a great deal more poetic, I realized the plot is essentially an argument in favor of bestiality. Sure, Beast is actually a slightly effeminate man who was turned into an animal when he turned away a creepy old woman with unusually long fingernails, but “quite different from the rest of us” Belle doesn’t actually know that when she falls madly in love with him. Fingernails have been shown to harbor the human papilloma virus. That prince was no fool.

Having recently turned 25, I felt a bit weird watching Beauty and the Beast in my underwear with the curtains drawn but in my defense, I like watching movies in my underwear with the curtains drawn. I suppose I could have put on some pants and invited my closest friend in Kisoro over to join me but I was worried about the possible long-term psychological effects of such a movie on a four year-old boy, especially in a four year-old boy whose favorite activity is pulling grasshoppers apart piece by piece, presumably as a means of unearthing their deepest secrets before moving on to the more extreme tactic of water-boarding. Children here aren’t taught to play nice with animals, let alone encouraged by motherly tea kettles to fall in love with them. Tea kettles are there to make tea, candlesticks are there to supplement the rough realities of shoddy electricity and young women aren’t likely to give that lion with the standoffish personality another chance, regardless of his ballroom dancing abilities.

I’ve been told kids who abuse animals grow into adults who abuse people but if that’s really true, every primary school class in Uganda is actually a Future Batterers of Uganda convention. Americans are quick to cite cruelty to animals but I think I’d rather watch a grasshopper be disfigured than watch one more innocent dog be forced into a Christmas sweater. I’d venture to say the grasshopper retains more of its dignity. When you think about it, there’s really nothing more mysterious than a missing limb. In fact, an injury like that might be just enough to entice an attractive French bookworm with a romantic inclination toward misunderstood animals, which should make any Disney-loving American quite pleased indeed.

uninformed choices made easy

Today I sat on a bench outside the hospital and spaced out for forty-five minutes, which is another way of saying: Today, I supervised a group of nursing students while they educated a group of patients on the perils of malaria in the local dialect, which is another way of saying: Today, for all I know, my nursing students facilitated a heated discussion on the latest Manchester United game while I, with my toddler-like language skills, daydreamed about Peanut Buster Parfaits. Or is it Parsfait? Damn the French and their confusing pluralization rules.

After the Man-U debate, I gathered my students for a debriefing. In nursing school I hated debriefing but now that I’m the teacher, I get to ask those types of annoying teacher questions which have many possible answers but only one acceptable answer, i.e. the answer that I want to hear. And so I asked my little Man-U fans, “Why do we, as nurses, health educate?”

Fan #1: “Because it’s part of our job!”
Me: “No. Well…yes it is, but no.”

Fan #2: “Because we have the information and they don’t!”
Me: Ah. “Good point, but…no.”

Fan #3: “Because…it’s part of our job?”
Me: “Really? No, no….the correct answer, the only possible answer that could possibly be accepted by anyone important, meaning me, and I’m the teacher, is: To empower our patients. I would have also accepted: To empower the patient; English has some confusing pluralization rules.”

Why do we, as nurses, health educate? Why, to empower our patients of course! Empower them to what? To take control of their health! And how do we go about health educating our patients? By giving them just one small piece of the story, a small sample of confusing and sometimes controversial information related to one extremely specific health topic and then sending them out into the world, freshly Empowered, to Empower those around them!

Was it just me or did you also go out and eat an entire garlic lover’s pizza the very second CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta mentioned garlic was good for your health? I’ve binged on red wine for the age-defying flavanoids, drank my pre-Peace Corps weight in Starbucks Gingerbread lattes to reap the memory-boosting benefits of ginger and eaten entire family-sized boxes of low-fat Wheat Thins in one sitting with the assumption that multiple servings of a low-fat food can’t possibly equal a high-fat food. Plus the tiny green man on the label assured me they were one of many Smart Choices Made Easy. Tiny green men don’t lie. They just don’t.

I once heard that a handful of peanuts effectively suppresses appetite when eaten twenty minutes before a meal and the first thing I thought was, Hmmm…they didn’t specify the peanuts should fit into my tiny hand, per se. And that’s how I came to discover an entire jar of peanuts eaten twenty minutes before a meal will indeed effectively suppress appetite. Empowerment feels a lot like a stomachache.

never shop stupid

I sometimes crave corn. Corn chowder, candy corn; any corn manifestation would probably do but in my wildest daydreams the corn is slightly sweet, warmed but not roasted and safely tucked inside a Chipotle burrito alongside hormone-ranked steak slices, chemically-ripened tomatoes and cage-free lettuce.

Now in America people will tell you never to grocery shop while hungry, that it’s just too risky, the argument being you’ll inevitably return home with sixty dollars worth of delightful impulse buys ranging from an economy pack of trans-fat-free* gum to peapples, the charming pear-apple hybrid which takes geneticists away from the less important task of curing cancer and which, let’s face it, makes indecisiveness a lot more fun. The irony, of course, is that hunger often does correlate with running out of food, and once you’ve run out of food you’re essentially forced to: grocery shop. Back home I’d mainly avoid the whole ‘no grocery shopping while hungry’ rule by journeying to my local Taco Bell drive-thru several times a day hungry, which, as far as I know and according to the stand-up folks from the Food and Drug Administration, is completely risk-free. Besides, of course, the inherent danger of those annoying yellow concrete posts which majestically line drive-thru lanes like modern-day maple trees and like to take advantage of my hungry, hypoglycemia-induced shaky state by scraping the paint off my car as I ricochet toward the drive-thru window.

If it’s risky to grocery shop in America hungry, it’s flat out stupid to shop hungry in a country where impulse buys might include a severed cow head and hoof pieces from an unidentified species. I make an effort to boil up an extra banana to eat on market days but the extra 18 calories are often expended come market time, usually around the same time I open my front door and am pummeled by one of my energetic neighbors, who range in age from four to forty. On one of the rare occasions I did make it to my local market with a full stomach, I noticed a beautiful woman selling corn. When I saw the woman my corn craving began almost immediately, so much so that I actually stopped to wonder whether I hadn’t been craving corn all along. A more likely scenario is that like most Americans, I’m perfectly susceptible to the marketing powers of pretty people. Back home I’d sometimes see a Coke ad with a beautiful woman and think, what a coincidence beautiful woman, I totally wanted to go spend $1.25 on a can of Coke! Thanks a bunch for reminding me- this when I very well know Taco Bell serves Pepsi products exclusively.

I approached the woman where she sat, my stomach now inexplicably growling, and she looked up vacantly in my direction. I stared back in an equally vacant way until I realized she was waiting for me to tell her to do her job. In Uganda the consumer usually has to initiate the sale, which is difficult to get used to. It’s not uncommon that your waiter will approach you, pad and pen in hand, and simply stare until you ask him if you can order; I imagine if I were in the market for a car I’d probably be forced, after a long and awkward silence, to ask the dealer, “So…what would it take to get me into this car today?” I finally mumbled something to the woman along the lines of “You, to buy corn I want,” in Rufumbira and she gave me a look as if to say, “Why didn’t you just say so in the first place? Also, I speak perfect English, and am highly insulted by your dismal Rufumbira baby-talk.” Yes, it was quite a loaded look. I ended up buying a kilo of corn, which seemed as good a unit to me as any- particularly since, brainwashed by the metric system, I still have no real concept of what a kilogram is and therefore get excited, then a bit alarmed, then excited again every time I hear my weight in kilograms.

By the time I left the market I’d purchased what I thought to be a kilo of corn and a bushel of spinach; by the time I arrived home I realized I’d actually purchased a kilo of dried maize chicken feed and a sickly looking cabbage plant, roots intact and ready to be planted in the garden I don’t possess. No matter, I thought to myself, as I plucked the bitter leaves off the cabbage plant, placing them into my salad bowl. No big deal, I thought to myself, as I attempted to soften the chicken feed in boiling water until it became fit for human consumption. But after discovering boiled chicken feed does not equal human food, no matter how much care and attention goes into the boiling process, I threw the whole mess out and boiled up three bananas, all the while dreaming of majestic yellow concrete posts and a land where shopping hungry ends in a very different kind of stomachache.

and they saw that they were naked

It seems unfair that Adam and Eve, in a fit of rebellion and with all the different patterns and sizes and styles of fig leafs to choose from, condemned the rest of us to a seemingly never-ending struggle to clothe our bodies. Fig leafs are hard to come by in Uganda. My stand-in Eden is a place called Owino.

Owino is a clothing market in Kampala, a sort of Goodwill meets mudslide, a magical place where the poignantly named and fun to watch “pre-grabby-grabby-warm-up-time” is necessary preparation for buying Diesel jeans that cost three dollars and are 100% guaranteed to fit depending on how much weight you’re willing to lose or gain. Peace Corps Volunteers emerge from Owino like children from an underwater breath holding competition. I lasted three minutes! Oh yeah? Well I lasted FIVE minutes! AND I kept my eyes open!

The pre-Owino warm-up basically consists of a friend grabbing at you until you become physically unaware you’re being grabbed at all. I think it’s designed around some principal of psychology, the same one that says you stop feeling the sensation of your t-shirt a few minutes after putting it on. Which is actually a useful phenomenon until you suddenly panic and think, hey man, did I forget to put on a t-shirt or what? Because I’m noticing a definite lack of t-shirt sensation.

The worst part about Owino is really not the grabby-grabby time. Who couldn’t use an extra bit of human touch? It’s not the slipping around in mud or the intense feelings of claustrophobia or the people yelling “Baby muzungu (foreigner)!!” or “Ireland!!” or “Michael Jackson!!” in my direction. I didn’t really mind that time a stranger/reverse baby snatcher suddenly handed me his baby and then disappeared for half an hour. I smiled when a vendor told me, No Germany, you’re too fat for that one….try this one. I really was too fat for that one. I blame the hearty, carpe diem diet of my German people. No, the worst part about Owino is when you actually find something you like, meaning, at least for me, something that’s stain-free unless the stains enhance the pattern, hole-free unless I can think up a good use for the hole, and not made for children or life-sized dolls. Of course if the life-sized dolls were especially stylish, that’s another story.

The problem with finding something you like in Owino is you can’t let on that you like it and you have to be willing to walk away from it. The problem with me is I need Botox, not just because 17 months of living on the equator has created quite a storyline on my face but because when I like something it’s completely obvious and I absolutely have to have it. So while other volunteers walk away with good deals, I find myself paying ten or more dollars for a dress with an authentic $1.99 Goodwill tag and a hole that, fingers crossed, will holster my Pez dispenser. Ten dollars! Keep in mind ten dollars can buy you a lot of great and useful things on this side of the world, be it ten pot leaf belt buckles or twenty hair extension ponytails in whatever shade of black your heart desires. Like I said, useful. Oddly enough, upside down pot leaf belt buckles do resemble fig leafs. Maybe this is Eden after all.

what ever happened to predictability?

When I was ten or so there was a certain television commercial which mainly aired during Full House breaks when all you really wanted to know was how Uncle Jesse was going to get himself out of yet another crazy antic and what tender lesson he might learn in doing so. I guess you’d call the commercial more of a public service announcement because it seemed to be commissioned by no one and didn’t make me want to purchase anything except perhaps cable, where I’m told public service announcements with shoddy camera work and poor lighting are less prevalent. If you’ll allow me to set the stage, the scene opens with an unattractive older man in a clean button-up holding an important looking file. You the viewer, whether by design or a simple lack of plot development, receive no clues as to the file’s contents. For our purposes we’ll say the file holds confidential photos from a recent double homicide involving the man’s first grade teacher, Mrs. Farley. As the scene progresses you notice the man laughing about something, apparently able to keep his sense of humor even in the face of tragedy. You pause to reflect on the resiliency of the human spirit. There’s some witty banter among the men of the office, the sort where you can’t actually hear what’s being said but you just know it’s funny and you wonder why you can’t be in on the joke. You’re reminded of that time you ate by yourself in elementary school because Alicia made fun of your nail polish and all the other girls were eating laughing without you. The man turns his attention to a female colleague and refers to her as sugar pie or hotcakes or some other nickname that inevitably makes you feel embarrassed yet hungry. You lose focus for a moment as you consider making your way to the kitchen in search of a hot or even room temperature cake when suddenly the woman, outraged, loudly declares, “THAT’S sexual harassment, and I DON’T have to take it!” End scene.

A few days ago I was being eagerly molested by a female security guard outside a mall in Kampala and I, outraged, thought loudly to myself, ‘THAT’S sexual harassment, and I’m going to stand right here and take it because you, lady, have a small scowl and a large rifle and I really want the coffee served on the other side of that door, but I DON’T have to like it!’ I walked away feeling somewhat strange, not ashamed really but similar in feeling to the time last November when I was slapped on the butt with a metal detector outside my hotel. Taken aback. Maybe even a bit amused, though my counselor says this is a defense mechanism. Is sexual harassment in the name of safety still sexual harassment?

Things have changed in Kampala since the September bombings. Bags are poked and prodded, butts are slapped, and untrained german shepherds lick strangers and pee outside buses prior to departure all in the name of highly fallible safety. Everyone knows a strategically placed pair of women’s underwear on the top of your bag is enough to embarrass and deter even the most rule-abiding of security guards from digging deeper. I’ve heard the same is true of condoms. True, someone who carries both a deadly weapon AND an inordinate amount of ladies underwear and/or condoms runs the risk of looking like one of those really weird, creepy criminals but I suspect this is a risk the individual would be willing to take.

German shepherds are Kampala’s most recently adopted safety measure and frankly the most amusing of all, though my counselor would say this is a probably a sign of my resentment for any and all German ancestry. The overly-friendly german shepherd outside my bus a few days ago was brought in to sniff bags for either bombs or Pringles but, tiring of this no-doubt tedious task, had created an entirely new game for himself out of cleaning his private parts. Is there such a thing as sexual self-harassment? In any case, I imagine the little guy would have taken a break from his escapades to help me assemble a bomb piece by piece in exchange for a pat on the head. Hopefully safety is a mindset.