Update 5- Egypt, Uganda
Writing is hard, and an idea confronts me: perhaps I don't know what to say anymore. I know that this happens. Somehow, after foreign-language immersion, and new situations, the words don't flow quite as simply. So, for now, it's work.
I'm going to start by talking about my life right now. Being in Jerusalem this Passover has been a very hard experience, and it's not because matzah is hard to find. In the neighborhood that I'm in currently, it's actually rather difficult to find chametz, even if you're looking for it.
In a curious inversion, my friend who I'm staying with here has a strong secular identity, told me that this Passover he has been trying to fast from matzah, but that he ended up getting matzah when eating out somewhere. Last night, when my belly was grumbling, he assured me that my problems derive from too much matzah.
Last you heard from me, I accompanied a couple of folks into Tulkarem. That night, I caught a bus to Be'er Sheva, where I stayed with a friend and met up with another. The next day I meandered my way down to the Arava, and stayed at Kibbutz Lotan, where there was an 80's dance party. I hope I'll track down some pictures to share. I learned that day, a Wednesday, that you need to pre-arrange a visa in order to enter Egypt beyond the Sinai, and in the morning I caught a ride down to Eilat, and then a taxi to the Egyptian embassy. About two hours and 110 shekels later, I had a multi-entry visa for the next three months into Egypt.
I shared a ride with some fellow journeyers to the border, and walked across into Taba with very little difficulty. After waiting for a couple of hours, I made it to Cairo, where I've got two friends independently studying Arabic, for two years, and three months, respectively.
I spent two nights there, including all of shabbat. My friends were great, but Cairo is a lot to take in. It is perhaps the most densely populated city in the world (nearly four times that of NYC). Crossing the street is terrifying at first: the cars actually turn towards you, because they anticipate that you will continue crossing the street. I feel for the clumsy people of Cairo, tripping could be deadly.
I took a taxi to the airport Saturday night for a 10 pm flight to Uganda. Everything went smoothly, air travel was a lot more relaxed on Egypt Air than I'm used to. Five hours in the air, and I land in Entebbe, and make it through customs after paying $60. My friend Amanda is there to meet and greet me. We make it back to a hostel in Entebbe to finish the night's sleep, and I get my first experience with mosquito netting.
The next day, on the way to the botanical gardens in Entebbe, we pick up some bananas and peanuts to feed to the monkeys. The botanical gardens felt like a city park in Portland, a nice patch of land to hang out in nature, with picnic tables in certain areas for noshing (only this place had a restaurant there too, which I'm sure was
playing some music). They educated me about the local plants and animals, many of which were unbelievably large, like from a Dr. Suess book.
After a good long while attempting to track down the monkeys in order to feed them, we eventually came upon them, and they rushed us at once noticing the bananas we had with us. One greedy little monkey jumped on Amanda, scratching her hand, and pulled a banana out of her purse. They were less feistily passionate about the peanuts we gave them later, although they competed somewhat among each other, and came right next to us, sticking their little hands in ours. One monkey had no feet; it might have been born that way. Although it would scurry the same way as the other monkies, when inspired, it would flip itself over into a handstand and walk over a distance on its hands.
Eventually we made it into Kampala, the capital city, which is not so big actually, about the size of Portland perhaps, and eventually on to the village where Amanda stays near Bulenga. Once outside the most central part of the city, all the roads are dirt. And this doesn't seem to be a huge problem, for the most part; it's a little sketchy when it's raining, especially when riding a motorbike.
As we pass by children on the road, we are greeted by "Bye Nakalema!" (Nakalema is Amanda's 'Ugandan' name), or "Bye Mzungu!" (Mzungu=white person), or even "Bye Aaron-ee!" (Aaron is another peace corps
volunteer whose name the kids have learned at some point.) They figure I am Aaron because, well, we are both not Ugandan. And we have glasses. Besides that, he's an extra six inches taller than me, possibly skinnier, and a bit darker-skinned-- his father is African American. Growing up in Florida, many people thought of him as black, but here in Uganda, he's just another whitey, because he's lighter-skinned than most of the black Ugandan folks who live around there. They add "ee" at the end of "Aaron" because it's fairly inconceivable to them that a word would end with a consonant; I didn't mind being called that, since it's my middle name anyways. But when I introduced myself to people, it was as "Yakobo," the luganda translation of my name.
One day I rode on bodas (motorbikes) to a number of different schools in a particular region, to encourage them to send teachers for an HIV/AIDS curriculum training for secondary and vocational school teachers. My second day in Uganda, and I was already acting as if I were an official representative of Amanda's organization. They bestowed a great deal of respect upon me as I visited each school and explained the program to them. In Uganda, there is a high level of English fluency; if I want to speak with someone, I need to slow down a whole lot, and change my emphasis and word choice a little to reflect "Uganglish," but I can still make myself understood more or less.
One funny moment from this experience was when one particular headmaster asked me what would be covered in the curriculum. I can't be certain, but I considered that he might be concerned about the perspective. I explained that my organization was a Christian organization, and that he could expect everything covered to be appropriate. This, while I was wearing my kipa.
A number of people would ask me, when wearing my American-style kipa, what religion I was. Often, after I would try to explain what Jewish was, the closest people came to is "something like Catholic." This was an interesting contrast: for better or worse, everyone in the middle east knows what Jewish is.
Amanda and I went for a trip to the eastern part of Uganda, centered around a town called Mbale. The first time I passed through Mbale, I met up with Israel, a man from the Uganda Jewish Community known as Abayudaya, at his simple hardware store. He explained to me how to get the Jewish community when I returned for shabbat.
Then we went to Sipi Falls for two nights, whose geography and climate was slightly reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest during summer, with a few nice waterfalls to hike to. On our way to each falls, we would walk through mountain villages; towards the end, a group of children followed along with us until the falls. Our tour guide picked some aloe vera to take home, and wrapped it in a bundle with a banana leaf, and one of the children carried the package for him.
The hostel we stayed at was very nice, I could imagine happily living there for a month. The man who ran the place was quite accommodating, a German ex-pat who appreciated the things that life brought him in Sipi Falls: drinking a beer and watching the sunset, having a chat with those who passed through. Some people worked at the hostel whose sole job was heating water for showering; they would light a fire and heat a vat of water, and an hour later it would be ready for showering. This didn't work very well. Sometimes it would take hours to get the fire going. Sometimes they would heat the water too much and it would come out scalding hot. It mostly was just a funny social interaction to negotiate, it didn't bother me much.
Two days later, on Friday, we caught a minibus back to Mbale, and caught motorbike-taxis to the village of Nabugoye. Nabugoye is the "headquarters" of Abayudaya, and we checked into the guesthouse there, and I met with the spiritual leader of the community, Aaron Kintu Moses. Several days before we arrived, the power and water connections to the village were severed, so we got the real village experience, using water that had been hauled from the well nearby.
He gave me an aliyah to read the next day, which meant that I had to learn 12 lines by the last hour of daylight that day, and to wake up with the sun to complete learning it. We walked up together with Isaac, who runs the guesthouse, to the synagogue for Kabbalat shabbat services. It was similar to many kabbalat shabat services I have been to, only many of the psalms we read were in luganda, and because it was dark I couldn't really follow along. They tended to use fairly simple tunes that repeated often. There was separate seating, but no
mechitza. During "lecha dodi," I, along with most of the men in the congregation, walked around the bima counter-clockwise chanting and marching together with the song.
That night we had dinner with Israel's family, and ironically talked about money in Uganda: about work, about the economy, about jobs, that sort of thing. I had my first dinner that was typical Ugandan fare: rice, posho (a mashed root), matoke (boiled plantains), fish, perhaps lentils. Unfortunately, the new foods were a little hard on my system.
We got to sleep, and I succeeding in learning my reading just before synagogue, and I was really happy with how well I read. I was sad that I didn't get a single yasher koach (essentially, "you did the right thing"); because they often have visiting Jewish scholars or rabbinical students, I don't think they are all that impressed by Jews that Got Torah. The food caught up with me by the end of the torah service and I laid down and took it easy the rest of the day. After shabbat, a group of us bazungu walked into the local town, and bought some food. One thing I really liked in Uganda is that they have real ginger beer everywhere (unfortunately, it's a Coke product).
We left the next morning and spent my last few days near Kampala. I bought a couple of drums, a reed mat, and an amazing painting on cloth. I enjoyed my time, and took a regimen of antibiotics to fight off giardia. I went on a series of home-visits with Amanda, meet with people who have HIV/AIDS, and to be able to offer them support, or answer questions they might have. One of my checked bags to Uganda was entirely filled with clothing to give away (all of which I had gotten for free), and we gave each family four or five pieces of clothing, until it was all gone.
Overall, my time was idyllic, I got to live like a rich person, and focus on taking care of myself during the days. I learned a lot about the contextual nature of racism, and the construct of race. I thought a lot about the kinds of poverty people are facing there, and brainstorm about how to intervene in some small way. When flying back, I walked right onto the plane with my large drum, well over the size limit for carry-ons. The plane was only about half-full, and I strapped it into two seats of its own, using a seatbelt to hold it in place. Once in Cairo, I handed it off to a friend, who will enjoy my drum while in Cairo and get it back to me hopefully in the Pacific Northwest.
I got back to my friend's apartment in Cairo fairly early, and equipped with the key he had left me, chilled out the whole day, waiting for people to get home from work or school. I caught up with some friends for dinner, and then attempted to take the late bus from Cairo to the border. It was a trial for me: it took me much too long to find a taxi, because I headed the wrong direction, then I ended up with a driver who 1. didn't know where he was going and 2. didn't have a meter, even though I went a huge distance out of my way to try to
get one of the few taxis with a meter. In the end he charged me 3 times what he should have, and I ended up missing my bus. By the time I got back to my friend's apartment, I was on the verge of tears.
I made it back to the bus station for the 6 am bus, and crossed the border mid-day. After hitching for a couple hours I caught a ride to Be'er Sheva with an Argentinian man (with whom I spoke Spanish), and then took a bus back to J-Town, where I oriented myself, feeling every bit like I was "brought forth out of Egypt" for Passover.
Who knows? Maybe you'll hear again from me soon.
Chag Sameach, Shabbat Shalom,
Jacob in J-Town
I'm going to start by talking about my life right now. Being in Jerusalem this Passover has been a very hard experience, and it's not because matzah is hard to find. In the neighborhood that I'm in currently, it's actually rather difficult to find chametz, even if you're looking for it.
In a curious inversion, my friend who I'm staying with here has a strong secular identity, told me that this Passover he has been trying to fast from matzah, but that he ended up getting matzah when eating out somewhere. Last night, when my belly was grumbling, he assured me that my problems derive from too much matzah.
Last you heard from me, I accompanied a couple of folks into Tulkarem. That night, I caught a bus to Be'er Sheva, where I stayed with a friend and met up with another. The next day I meandered my way down to the Arava, and stayed at Kibbutz Lotan, where there was an 80's dance party. I hope I'll track down some pictures to share. I learned that day, a Wednesday, that you need to pre-arrange a visa in order to enter Egypt beyond the Sinai, and in the morning I caught a ride down to Eilat, and then a taxi to the Egyptian embassy. About two hours and 110 shekels later, I had a multi-entry visa for the next three months into Egypt.
I shared a ride with some fellow journeyers to the border, and walked across into Taba with very little difficulty. After waiting for a couple of hours, I made it to Cairo, where I've got two friends independently studying Arabic, for two years, and three months, respectively.
I spent two nights there, including all of shabbat. My friends were great, but Cairo is a lot to take in. It is perhaps the most densely populated city in the world (nearly four times that of NYC). Crossing the street is terrifying at first: the cars actually turn towards you, because they anticipate that you will continue crossing the street. I feel for the clumsy people of Cairo, tripping could be deadly.
I took a taxi to the airport Saturday night for a 10 pm flight to Uganda. Everything went smoothly, air travel was a lot more relaxed on Egypt Air than I'm used to. Five hours in the air, and I land in Entebbe, and make it through customs after paying $60. My friend Amanda is there to meet and greet me. We make it back to a hostel in Entebbe to finish the night's sleep, and I get my first experience with mosquito netting.
The next day, on the way to the botanical gardens in Entebbe, we pick up some bananas and peanuts to feed to the monkeys. The botanical gardens felt like a city park in Portland, a nice patch of land to hang out in nature, with picnic tables in certain areas for noshing (only this place had a restaurant there too, which I'm sure was
playing some music). They educated me about the local plants and animals, many of which were unbelievably large, like from a Dr. Suess book.
After a good long while attempting to track down the monkeys in order to feed them, we eventually came upon them, and they rushed us at once noticing the bananas we had with us. One greedy little monkey jumped on Amanda, scratching her hand, and pulled a banana out of her purse. They were less feistily passionate about the peanuts we gave them later, although they competed somewhat among each other, and came right next to us, sticking their little hands in ours. One monkey had no feet; it might have been born that way. Although it would scurry the same way as the other monkies, when inspired, it would flip itself over into a handstand and walk over a distance on its hands.
Eventually we made it into Kampala, the capital city, which is not so big actually, about the size of Portland perhaps, and eventually on to the village where Amanda stays near Bulenga. Once outside the most central part of the city, all the roads are dirt. And this doesn't seem to be a huge problem, for the most part; it's a little sketchy when it's raining, especially when riding a motorbike.
As we pass by children on the road, we are greeted by "Bye Nakalema!" (Nakalema is Amanda's 'Ugandan' name), or "Bye Mzungu!" (Mzungu=white person), or even "Bye Aaron-ee!" (Aaron is another peace corps
volunteer whose name the kids have learned at some point.) They figure I am Aaron because, well, we are both not Ugandan. And we have glasses. Besides that, he's an extra six inches taller than me, possibly skinnier, and a bit darker-skinned-- his father is African American. Growing up in Florida, many people thought of him as black, but here in Uganda, he's just another whitey, because he's lighter-skinned than most of the black Ugandan folks who live around there. They add "ee" at the end of "Aaron" because it's fairly inconceivable to them that a word would end with a consonant; I didn't mind being called that, since it's my middle name anyways. But when I introduced myself to people, it was as "Yakobo," the luganda translation of my name.
One day I rode on bodas (motorbikes) to a number of different schools in a particular region, to encourage them to send teachers for an HIV/AIDS curriculum training for secondary and vocational school teachers. My second day in Uganda, and I was already acting as if I were an official representative of Amanda's organization. They bestowed a great deal of respect upon me as I visited each school and explained the program to them. In Uganda, there is a high level of English fluency; if I want to speak with someone, I need to slow down a whole lot, and change my emphasis and word choice a little to reflect "Uganglish," but I can still make myself understood more or less.
One funny moment from this experience was when one particular headmaster asked me what would be covered in the curriculum. I can't be certain, but I considered that he might be concerned about the perspective. I explained that my organization was a Christian organization, and that he could expect everything covered to be appropriate. This, while I was wearing my kipa.
A number of people would ask me, when wearing my American-style kipa, what religion I was. Often, after I would try to explain what Jewish was, the closest people came to is "something like Catholic." This was an interesting contrast: for better or worse, everyone in the middle east knows what Jewish is.
Amanda and I went for a trip to the eastern part of Uganda, centered around a town called Mbale. The first time I passed through Mbale, I met up with Israel, a man from the Uganda Jewish Community known as Abayudaya, at his simple hardware store. He explained to me how to get the Jewish community when I returned for shabbat.
Then we went to Sipi Falls for two nights, whose geography and climate was slightly reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest during summer, with a few nice waterfalls to hike to. On our way to each falls, we would walk through mountain villages; towards the end, a group of children followed along with us until the falls. Our tour guide picked some aloe vera to take home, and wrapped it in a bundle with a banana leaf, and one of the children carried the package for him.
The hostel we stayed at was very nice, I could imagine happily living there for a month. The man who ran the place was quite accommodating, a German ex-pat who appreciated the things that life brought him in Sipi Falls: drinking a beer and watching the sunset, having a chat with those who passed through. Some people worked at the hostel whose sole job was heating water for showering; they would light a fire and heat a vat of water, and an hour later it would be ready for showering. This didn't work very well. Sometimes it would take hours to get the fire going. Sometimes they would heat the water too much and it would come out scalding hot. It mostly was just a funny social interaction to negotiate, it didn't bother me much.
Two days later, on Friday, we caught a minibus back to Mbale, and caught motorbike-taxis to the village of Nabugoye. Nabugoye is the "headquarters" of Abayudaya, and we checked into the guesthouse there, and I met with the spiritual leader of the community, Aaron Kintu Moses. Several days before we arrived, the power and water connections to the village were severed, so we got the real village experience, using water that had been hauled from the well nearby.
He gave me an aliyah to read the next day, which meant that I had to learn 12 lines by the last hour of daylight that day, and to wake up with the sun to complete learning it. We walked up together with Isaac, who runs the guesthouse, to the synagogue for Kabbalat shabbat services. It was similar to many kabbalat shabat services I have been to, only many of the psalms we read were in luganda, and because it was dark I couldn't really follow along. They tended to use fairly simple tunes that repeated often. There was separate seating, but no
mechitza. During "lecha dodi," I, along with most of the men in the congregation, walked around the bima counter-clockwise chanting and marching together with the song.
That night we had dinner with Israel's family, and ironically talked about money in Uganda: about work, about the economy, about jobs, that sort of thing. I had my first dinner that was typical Ugandan fare: rice, posho (a mashed root), matoke (boiled plantains), fish, perhaps lentils. Unfortunately, the new foods were a little hard on my system.
We got to sleep, and I succeeding in learning my reading just before synagogue, and I was really happy with how well I read. I was sad that I didn't get a single yasher koach (essentially, "you did the right thing"); because they often have visiting Jewish scholars or rabbinical students, I don't think they are all that impressed by Jews that Got Torah. The food caught up with me by the end of the torah service and I laid down and took it easy the rest of the day. After shabbat, a group of us bazungu walked into the local town, and bought some food. One thing I really liked in Uganda is that they have real ginger beer everywhere (unfortunately, it's a Coke product).
We left the next morning and spent my last few days near Kampala. I bought a couple of drums, a reed mat, and an amazing painting on cloth. I enjoyed my time, and took a regimen of antibiotics to fight off giardia. I went on a series of home-visits with Amanda, meet with people who have HIV/AIDS, and to be able to offer them support, or answer questions they might have. One of my checked bags to Uganda was entirely filled with clothing to give away (all of which I had gotten for free), and we gave each family four or five pieces of clothing, until it was all gone.
Overall, my time was idyllic, I got to live like a rich person, and focus on taking care of myself during the days. I learned a lot about the contextual nature of racism, and the construct of race. I thought a lot about the kinds of poverty people are facing there, and brainstorm about how to intervene in some small way. When flying back, I walked right onto the plane with my large drum, well over the size limit for carry-ons. The plane was only about half-full, and I strapped it into two seats of its own, using a seatbelt to hold it in place. Once in Cairo, I handed it off to a friend, who will enjoy my drum while in Cairo and get it back to me hopefully in the Pacific Northwest.
I got back to my friend's apartment in Cairo fairly early, and equipped with the key he had left me, chilled out the whole day, waiting for people to get home from work or school. I caught up with some friends for dinner, and then attempted to take the late bus from Cairo to the border. It was a trial for me: it took me much too long to find a taxi, because I headed the wrong direction, then I ended up with a driver who 1. didn't know where he was going and 2. didn't have a meter, even though I went a huge distance out of my way to try to
get one of the few taxis with a meter. In the end he charged me 3 times what he should have, and I ended up missing my bus. By the time I got back to my friend's apartment, I was on the verge of tears.
I made it back to the bus station for the 6 am bus, and crossed the border mid-day. After hitching for a couple hours I caught a ride to Be'er Sheva with an Argentinian man (with whom I spoke Spanish), and then took a bus back to J-Town, where I oriented myself, feeling every bit like I was "brought forth out of Egypt" for Passover.
Who knows? Maybe you'll hear again from me soon.
Chag Sameach, Shabbat Shalom,
Jacob in J-Town
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