June 6
I was up with the sun this morning, and a little disappointed that I didn’t sleep a little longer. Nothing gets going around here till ten o’clock anyway, so there isn’t very much use in waking up too early. However, I do like to quiet. This is the first morning I’ve woken up and it’s been quiet. No loudspeakers, no crying children, no nothing.
Andrew Muhumuza was supposed to come over today, but he has a cold, so I think he will come by tomorrow instead. It is very nice around here that if you are sick, you can just take the day off. It isn’t like in America where you have to be really sick before you can even think about taking the day off. People really value their health here, I imagine because it isn’t as easily attainable as it is at home.
This morning we also had two black and white horn bills in our yard. A male and a female, I got a great picture of them, but we are having some technical difficulties with uploading pictures. Dustin brought two cameras and one video camera, and something is wrong with all three. With one camera, the computer isn’t recognizing it because he doesn’t have the software. On the other two, he doesn’t have the right cords, so we are trying to figure out how to get the pictures on the internet. All that to say that I got some really great pictures of the birds. I had to walk into our neighbors yard to get them, and now I’m not sure that we will be able to share with everyone.
The reason I know that they black and white horn bills is because we went to the Uganda museum today. We were able to walk there comfortably. We aren’t brave enough to take a taxi by ourselves yet. The difficulty is that we don’t know the names of everything or how much it costs. There is a set price for the distance you are going, people just have them all memorized. I supposed we will probably get cheated once or twice while we are figuring it all out.
It’s funny that people think they are cheating us, but they only try to get 1 or 2 hundred extra shillings out of us. The exchange rate is somewhere between 2100 and 2200 shillings to 1 US dollar. So 100 shillings is somewhere around 5 cents. People think they are being clever, but in the long run 200 shillings doesn’t even really matter to us anyway, and if they really need it then they can have it.
Back to the museum, it was wonderful. They had exhibit after exhibit on the different traditional cultures. For all of the anthropologists out there reading this, they had all of the similar items matched together, like all of the headdresses together, all of the masks together, all of the bows together, ect. Instead of having them grouped by tribe. It does make it very difficult to distinguish the character of one particular tribe when they’re items are spread all around. I can see Boas’s point.
However, it was very exciting to see everything anyway. There were some very interesting items, like a trap for hippos and elephants. They would dig a hole, and get them by one foot. Then they would let a heavy stone with spines come falling out of a tree above, and smash the hippo. There were remains of a very important person who was a warrior legend. When the traditional religion was still prominent, they thought the soul resided in the jaw bone, so they had his jaw bone in a beautifully decorated case. They often use a specific type of shell to decorate things. They also had his penis and testicles in a case, which made me blush a little. It certainly pushes the boundaries of my open mindedness. But also a cheetah skin, and all of his war gear.
After going through the museum, we stopped in the adjoined restaurant for some lunch. It clearly catered to foreigners of all types. There was American food, Indian, European, and Chinese. I got vegetable bajiya, which I think is Indian. It was like hush puppies with vegetables on the inside. Dustin got a cheeseburger and potato salad. We also got one of the local beers, Nile. A beer costs about 3,000 shillings ($1.50) but the alcohol content is much higher, 4.5% I think. And they come in bigger containers. So drinking one is almost like drinking 3 at home. I always feel pretty fine after drinking one of those, but I have to be careful because I’m not drinking nearly the same volume. The food was good. All of the meat here tastes a little different, so far we’ve had both chicken and beef. I can’t do the chicken, but the beef is tolerable. I imagine the difference is in what the livestock consume.
It was interesting the people that sat beside us were also researchers working on an evaluation. They were evaluating a midwifery program. A wedding party also came into the restaurant. I think it was a reception. But everyone was dressed just like in a wedding in America. The bridge had on a white gown, there were flower girls, bridesmaids and groomsmen, and a ring bearer.
We stopped at the grocery store on the way back. I’ve been fixated on making banana pancakes and I needed baking powder. I’ve never made them from scratch before, but it doesn’t seem too hard.

June 7, 2009
Today is Sunday, and so everyone is at church. I can hear several different choruses in Lugandan. It sounds like they are all competing for loudness.
I think we’ve made a friend. Andrew came over again today, but just to hang out with us and socialized. I made him try banana pancakes, but I couldn’t tell if he liked them or not. Ugandan’s are not very emotional people. Anyhow, it’s been a relaxing day just writing and reading. I even layed out on the porch for a little while. This coming week things are going to start becoming a little more busy. We are going to meet with several different people from the SAS foundation. Tomorrow we are also going to try to take the taxi by ourselves for the first time. Which us luck!
We made it into town by ourselves! I think we are starting to get the hang of things. Dustin and I are considering going halvesies on a modem thing for his computer so that we can have internet all the time. We will have to see how things play out today.