More Time In The Field

The following is an account of happenings from the month of February. Sorry for the delay in putting up posts but Amber and I have been away or have had visitors or both so we've been very busy. We recently took a trip to Zanzibar so be looking for a post on that here very soon. I promise. Until then...

More Notes on the Field.

The past few days I’ve been working for Amber helping to enroll participants in her study. Amber, her 2 research assistants Judith and Sharon, and I have been hiking all over the beautiful Ugandan countryside knocking on doors and enrolling some very friendly and cooperative people. So far we’ve enrolled some 500 people. We don’t usually get close enough to the house to knock on the door before they see us coming. They usually see us or word comes down the pipe that we are in the neighborhood. It feels a lot like trick or treating to me. We stand out not only because we are strangers to the villages but because of our white skin and foreign clothes. Add to that the equipment we are carrying to measure the participants’ body mass index and it feels a lot like wearing a costume. The people we have met are so incredibly nice. When we ask for directions we usually get a guide to go with us, usually a young kid. Sometimes the kid ends up taking us to all of our households for the day, hiking through some grueling terrain up and over ridges and down into valleys inaccessible by car. For the locals a walk like this is no problem, often doing it in oversized worn out flip flops or even their bare feet. We often draw a good sized crowd usually made up of 90% children. They always say, “How are you’” hoping for the customary, “I am fine ,” response. They’ll repeat it many, many times. So many times that you get tired and just can’t say “I am fine” anymore. It’s fun to see their shock when you ask, “How is your day?” in their language. They usually gasp and say something to the effect of, “the muzungu knows our language!” Then you have to say, “just a little” and they laugh again.

One day as we were coming back to the car to take our lunch break we found a baby goat hanging out around it. A kid. It was timid and kept crawling under the car to hide from me so I tried to ignore it. We sat in the shade under a tree and the kid eventually came and sat with us. How cute. After we had our break we loaded into the car to drive to our next house and the goat started running after us. I don’t know what it wanted. One theory Judith had was that it thought it’s mother was inside the car. This persistant kid chased us for the better part of a mile, yelling and screaming all the way. At one point it managed to get in front of us, trying to force us to stop. Eventually we got to the trading center and the goat got distracted by a small herd of cows so we managed to escape. I have a feeling some little boy got a whipping that night when he brought the goats home for the night less one kid. It’s usually the young boys chore to take the goats out to graze for the day. Not while they’re in school of course. Some kids are put in charge of the calves as a form of training for the future job of taking care of the cows and for the calves future job of being an obedient cow.

While Judith and Sharon are introducing the project to each household I have time to look around. Everywhere we turn there is something new to see. White people don’t go to the places we are going to generally and, for some of the kids, we are the first white people they’ve ever seen. Understanding that helps to understand any strange behavior we experience. At one house a teenage boy is dancing to the reggae beat on his transistor radio while staring at me blankly. But what is he doing? Does he want to impress me with his moves or his tunes? Is this some form of intimidation? All I can do is try to act normal. In hindsight maybe I should have joined him.
Once a man walked by carrying a cow leg, hoof and skin still attached, and threw it down in the grass in the neighbors yard. Right behind him was another man carrying the rear legs of the cow, one on either end of a large stick, over his shoulder. As a small crowd formed around them they set to butchering the legs with machetes. When we finished with that house Judith asked what happened to the cow. It turns out the cow was killed by a leopard nearby!


Getting a close up look at how people live is forever interesting. There are many different sizes and shapes to their houses but most fall into three categories. The first category I would describe as the traditional “nice” Ugandan house. It is round in shape with a mud floor, often covered in goat skins or grass mats, mud walls and a grass thatch, reed, or banana fiber roof. These houses are generally separated into three rooms by mud walls. The walls however don’t extend to the ceiling, they generally end at the same height as the outer walls. The roof, being vaulted, is usually a good 5 or 6 feet higher than the top of the walls making privacy nonexistent. With a typical family size of 10 or more kids I’m pretty sure the oldest kids are well aware of sex pretty early in their lives. The door on these houses is usually a standard looking solid wood door with a deadbolt on the inside and a latch for a padlock on the outside. And the windows, called ventilators by the locals, are like a porthole on a ship, small and round. Typically one would remove their shoes, or gumboots, before entering the house. Despite the floor being mud Ugandans are concerned about cleanliness. Where the ceiling meets the top of the exterior wall there is a space to let in air. This creates a natural convection current which keeps the house cool. It also serves as a great spot to store extra shoes.

The second type of house we often see is constructed with a grid of sticks and mud. Large branches are stuck in the ground vertically along wall lines and smaller sticks are tied to them horizontally every 6 inches or more. This forms a structure to hold packed mud while it dries. The sticks eventually rot away but the mud keeps its shape. Sometimes you’ll see where the rain splashing off the ground has eroded a hole in the wall or the sticks have long rotted away. In these circumstances one simply packs some fresh mud into the hole effectively patching it for another season or two. I’ve seen these houses with any of the types of roof discussed above as well as corrugated sheet metal roofs. I like both of these styles of house. They are cheaply built using local materials and are 100% biodegradable. Even the sheet metal will eventually turn onto dust. Although the floor is uneven and the walls not straight or plumb, the houses have a natural, calming feel to them.

At our first few houses I noticed a lot of chickens hanging out in these detached huts and I mistook them for chicken coops. It took three or four house visits to realize they were actually kitchens. Cooking is commonly done here with charcoal or wood fuel. You can imagine how messy this can be. I’m guessing, but this must be the reason for the detached kitchen almost every house we visited has. The detached kitchens I saw were usually a smaller version of the round mud house. With the fire out of the house it can be kept going all day and night without risk of burning your house down and without turning all the walls, and your belongings, black with soot. Amber and I both grew up with kitchens full of chicken paraphernalia so it doesn’t seem strange at all but rather convenient. When you need an egg or two or are planning to have chicken for dinner you need not travel far.

The third commonly seen house is what Ugandans regard as a “nice” house. Picture an English cottage but with the Ugandan countryside in the periphery and you’ll know what one looks like. These cottages are constructed of a concrete floor and walls and have glass windows and doors, and a sheet metal roof. I saw many houses like this way up on hillsides overlooking the vast, scrubby countryside where no vehicle could venture to crawl. The yards of concrete, the steel bars and the metal sheets were brought to these beautiful perches, by hand. I was never invited in past the main room so I couldn’t say what the house is like past there but the furnishings we saw were generally similar to what you might expect in a house where you are. There’s a couch, a coffee table and a couple of chairs in the middle of the main room. In one corner there is always the milk cabinet. As I’ve mentioned in the past, this is cow country and the people here are way into their milk. I would even go so far to say that milk is their biggest source of, well, of everything their body needs. Matoke, the common staple, is cheap and readily available but it doesn’t offer much but a few carbohydrates. Milk gives them many nutrients and the fat they need to burn while they’re working in the fields on the matoke plantations are grazing cows. I’m pretty sure they drink more milk than water.

There has been no end to the new on these days in the field. What I’ve put forth here is but a small sampling of the most interesting. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to walk with and amongst these people in this beautiful land. I can assure you that along with these writings I am producing tons of photos, videos, paintings, and songs to capture every thing I can of our experiences. I’d love to share them here but the rate at which information moves on the interweb here wouldn’t catch a slug. They will just have to wait until next we meet. I will however have much more to write about so I’ll see you next blog.