July 11

July 11, 2009

Days Events: Working all morning and stressing, East of Eden, Effendy’s, Ride Home

I went to be extremely early (for me) last night but it still didn’t help. I worked for a good four hours before making myself lay down. I woke up 3 hours later and laid in bed until I fell back asleep. Getting to sleep well again will hopefully return once I get home or else I have a serious problem. Anyway, I have spent all of my day writing and typing. We have an interview tonight at six and then possible events to go to with Andrew and Joan. Both events I am not really excited about but what can you do. You can’t really chose when to work when you are “working” 24/7. Did I mention I can’t wait to be home? Things are picking up and time is winding down which is unfortunate. I think we are going to have more than enough data to keep us busy though. Got to get back to work, more later.
We stayed around the house until time for our interview of the day. We were scheduled to meet Moses, an informant that Ginger has interviewed before, at 6:00 at the country club up the road from us. He is a very interesting person. He grew up on the streets, became a part of the Rastafarian culture for a while, became a follower of “witch craft” (which is more akin to traditional healers than U.S. type “witchcraft”), and then was taken in by a preacher and is now an evangelical Christian. The interview was extremely informative especially in terms of traditional medicine/healing and his knowledge and beliefs in Christianity. He believes in predestination and healing through prayer so I was fascinated. The usefulness of the conversation changed though when he found out that I was not religious and prompted an hour long preaching session. I held my tongue versus arguing since it would not help the research-informant relationship. I just chalked this up to building reporte with him and let him tell me what he wanted me to know. Ginger did interject and say we had other plans to keep him from going on forever.
We came home, ate some dinner, and got in touch with the people that had asked us to go out. We ended up meeting up Joan downtown and walking to the East of Eden bar where Joan is a regular. Its nice going there with her since they only charge us cost for our drinks. We didn’t hang around there for very long, but did get to both observe and try Ugandan dancing. It is much easier than trying to dance “Memphis style.”
Joan headed home early because she had to work while Ginger and I headed off to Effendy’s. The place was packed and people were being really pushy so we didn’t stay long. We did make a couple of friends, and enemies, though. We met this guy, Ernesto, from New Jersey (Tulane Law) who is teaching in a village near by. There was David, a 17 year old, Secondary 6 student and Pharouk, a 23 year old Ugandan that also lives in Bukoto and gave us a ride home. I also met this bitch of a girl. It tried to start conversation asking about where she was from and mentioned that I was really enjoying learning about the country and culture and she responded “you don’t know shit about this culture white boy” at which time I just walked away. There were the 24 year old twins that dressed identically and got pissed when I told them that I wasn’t interested, and Houston who wanted to be my “special friend” because “mzungo’s have money” but she got pissed when I refused to buy her a beer and she finally left me alone. It was a very trying night. It reiterated the fact that men don’t speak to a woman unless they are interested so my “hi, how are you?”’s are mistaken as pick up lines. At this point I think that I am unlikely to find any female informants. As of right now I have three female informants and 11 male informants. Kind of lop sided but Ginger can’t even get girls to talk to her without being defensive or wanting money.
Pharouk gave us a ride home so we wouldn’t have to take a bota and after some good conversation on our reflections of the culture and some mac-n-cheese, we were off to bed for an amazing nights sleep….YAY!!!