Well Faithful Reader, you are in for a treat. I’d like to present to you the first edition of He said, She said. How this will work is basically I’ll start writing and Erin will pop in with comments and back and forth. Basically this gives us a chance to write things in a little bit different way and give you all a chance to remember our witty banter. This is still a work in progress so if it doesn’t really work, you’re in luck… we’ll never do it again! Now, on with the show.
Brian: After our stay in Kampala, we drove for about 6 hours to a smallllll village called Nyeihanga. It is basically a main road, a semi-main side road (our street) and a bunch of small alleyways around. There are a bunch of farms outside of town. There’s probably around 500ish people altogether.
Erin: Hmm, okay Brian got things mostly right. I think there are more than 500 people but we agreed to disagree…He also forgot to mention that Nyeihanga is surrounded by enormous rolling green hills covered with banana farms. It’s beautiful. We’re staying in a sort of apartment in the community pastor’s house, Pastor Jackson. We have a tiny little bedroom that is 90% taken up by our very comfortable, mosquito net covered bed. We also have a living room area where there are some chairs and a table. Our apartment’s in the commercial part of the village where all of the local shops and restaurants are. This is the only part of the village with electricity. There’s no running water.
Brian: Basically, the entire apartment we’re in is the slightly smaller than our bedroom back home. The pastor’s room is right next door and his digs are the exact same size as ours. The whole no running water part has been interesting. We get a bucket of boiling water in the mornings and at night which we use to brush our teeth, take a “shower”, and wash our hands throughout the day. Showers are a little tougher than back home. There definitely isn’t the 6 full body jets I’m used to back home. There is an area in the court yard area outside our room we use for showers. To shower, basically, we take our hot water bucket, our jerrycan of cold water, a basin, and all of our ingenuity and go to town. Things get pretty interesting, and the first few tries I came out pretty sudsy. I think we’re both pros now, though.
Erin: A full shower including washing and conditioning my hair takes up about a milk jug or so worth of water. Compared to what a Ugandan would use, this is a ton of water. Don’t get me wrong, we will love to be back where we can take long, hot showers with unlimited running water. But the bucket showers do get us as clean as we would be at home. I would choose a bucket shower in warm Uganda with hot water any day over a running water shower in cold Turkey with cold water! Our bathroom is an outhouse about twenty yards behind Jackson’s home. It’s just a hole in the ground with a jerrycan of water and some disinfectant powder to keep things clean. But it belongs just to Brian and I, and it even has a lock to make sure that we’re the only ones using it. They offered us a bucket to use at night for “emergencies” but thankfully we haven’t needed it yet! There are cows, goats, and chickens roaming freely everywhere in Nyeihanga and the area around our outhouse is no exception. It is so dark here at night that sometimes you can’t see a cow or long horn bull until you are right near them. Or you will hear something moving and shine your flashlight to find that there are half a dozen long horns walking right by you. Night trips to the bathroom aren’t so bad though because the stars here are incredible. We can see so many more stars than at home that most of the constellations we’re used to hard to identify.
Brian: Hmmm…. the bathroom. The hole in the ground isn’t exactly a technology I’d like to implement in a future home, but I guess it gets the job done.
One great thing about being here is we are having all of our meals prepared for us. Meals times are a little bit different than back home though. We usually eat breakfast around 9:30, lunch is at around 2, afternoon tea is at 7, and dinner is at 8:30ish, but sometimes dinner isn’t served until 10. We eat all of our meals with Jackson, anther community leader, Enoch, Enoch’s wife Penelope, and often a few other people from the community. Enoch’s wife Penelope does most of the cooking here, though they live outside of the more commercial portion of the village where we stay. Before each meal someone in the household walks around with a basin and a jug of water to clean everyone’s hands. Ugandans love to eat and love to encourage others to eat too. They say Erin eats the amount a three year old Ugandan but by American standards we’re both eating tons (and tons)! They keep saying that by the time we leave Uganda, Erin should have a stomach the size of Jackson’s wife, Pam (who is 7 months pregnant) so that she will look like an African woman. They’re always telling me that skinny women are a sign that the husband is cruel to his wife in private. Erin always just insists that she’s just full and that I’m not really that cruel… looks like I’ve got her trained already!
Erin: There is SO much food! Every day is a battle between being polite by eating as much as is expected and avoiding a stomach ache. One of the first nights I thought tea was our actual dinner because there was so much food served (and it was so late at night!). The tea and dinner time conversation is usually when we have the most laughs and learn the most about Ugandan life from our hosts.
The food itself… one of the most pleasant surprises is the food. Incredible! Every meal we eat half a dozen different fresh fruit, vegetables, and other dishes. There are four different types of bananas ranging in sweetness from much sweeter than the banana’s we’re used to, to very starchy with no sweetness at all. Sometimes the bananas are mushed all together into a paste, sometimes they are mushed and cooked into a cake, sometimes they are chopped and fried, sometimes their cooked whole in their peels… There are more ways to cook bananas than Bubba cooked shrimp! (Wow… barely two months into marriage and Brian’s lame jokes are already rubbing off on me?!) Another common food is this purple paste-like substance that scared me until I tried it. It turned out to be peanut paste and it’s delicious! Millet is another common food. It is a doughy type of bread made, I think, from a grain. The ladies are supposed to teach me how to make it soon! Every day we are served these grape-sized green vegetable called bitter tomatoes that are supposed to be extremely healthy for you. They are one of the few foods we’ve been served that’s hard to get down. I am pretty sure that the reasons we are served so much of them is because they are said to increase fertility. We are served a LOT of foods that are said to increase fertility and libido. Peanuts, I’m told, are a food your wife shouldn’t eat when she is away from you. We have pineapples every single day, lots of avocado, peanuts, pumpkin, mushrooms bigger than my hands, a variety of potato-like starches we’ve never heard of. We eat almost nothing processed and almost everything comes from within a mile of where we’re living. Even the eggs and meat are what at home we’d call free range. Already I can feel the difference from eating so healthy. We might be being encouraged to be glutinous but at least it’s with delicious and healthy food! Brian, what am I forgetting?
Brian: Lame jokes? What are you talking about? You call this lame… What is E.T. short for?
Erin: Oh god, what?
Brian: He’s just got those little legs!
Erin: Is it too late for an annulment?
Brian: Whatever that’s gold. Ok the food… The meat we’re eating is amazing. We don’t eat it every day, but most days. We get all types including beef, goat, and chicken. Goat is interesting, but pretty good. Beef liver is a common dish. Erin didn’t know that it was liver until about the 5th time we had it. She said she really liked it, but had she known it was liver probably wouldn’t have tried it. I guess sometimes it’s best not to know. The past few days we’ve had some really weird food. Three days ago, a very nice lady who we’ve been eating with a lot brought over a huge bag of grasshoppers. Apparently they are a delicacy here. They catch them, rip off the legs and wings, sauté them, throw some salt on, and eat them. They are amazing. Erin didn’t like them too much, but I had a bunch. They sort of taste like Fritos. Then, 2 days ago we were invited to a family’s home for dinner. We had had most of the food they served, but they also served cow intestines in a broth as the main course. This was a little weirder tasting than the grasshoppers, but still pretty good. Erin liked this a lot more than the grasshoppers. I guess she just didn’t like the fact that the grasshoppers were staring at her while she was eating them. One thing she didn’t have a problem with though, is holding a live chicken that was a gift from a neighbor. The chicken was dinner the next night!!
Another really good food we discovered is called chapati. It is like a thin fried bread almost like a pancake, but thinner. It is a type of street food they sell all over the place. You can also get a rolex, which is a chapati with a fried egg cooked in it and wrapped up with onions. Soooo good. Chapati is the one unhealthy food we’ve eaten here.
Friday is market day in the village. They hold the market right across the street from where we are staying. It’s crazy how there is just a huge open field there 6 days of the week and then on Fridays it is packed with vendors who string up ropes everywhere to hang up tarps to cover their goods. You can buy everything from silverware to clothes to vegetables at the market. The best thing though is what they call pancakes. They’re not like what we would call a pancake though. They are these little fried discs the size of a poker chip which are a mix of bananas and a vegetable called cassava (kind of like a starchy potato). They are phenomenal and you can get a huge bag of them for like 20 cents.
Well there you have it. The first HS,SS in RAB…AG history. Let us know what you think and we may do one again, or, more likely, you’ll never have to read one again. Miss you all!
Runaway Bride... and Groom 