I Can't Fight These Feelings Anymore (Or at least some of them)

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to attend a church service in the Jinja region of Uganda. The service lasted for about an hour and a half. When we first arrived I was overwhelmed by a flourish of young girls shouting and singing their prayers to their God. Filled with exuberance and happiness. It was an incredible site to see.

It is surprising to discover the small, unpredictable experiences you can have in the Peace Corps that make you swell with one emotion or another. In this case, it was amazement. I had never seen Ugandans so energetic and enthusiastic about something in what is my relatively short tour of the country thus far.

Someone asked me what my favorite thing about Uganda was this past weekend. I’m a bit hesitant to answer this question for a couple of reasons. First, I haven’t really been in Uganda that long to accurately answer. And second, I don’t really know. But I did have an idea in mind.

My answer is those small, crazy emotional experiences I get at different times throughout my service, this past Sunday’s church service being one of them.

But there is the feeling of accomplishment that comes when I’m standing in the back of a hot, overcrowded Ugandan classroom and the students are actually listening, learning, and performing in front of my eyes.

There is the feeling of comic disbelief when the sliding door falls off of a heavily overloaded taxi travelling at 30 MPH.

There is the feeling of incomprehensible appreciation when a random person on the street offers you a ride for free to anywhere you are going or gives up their seat so that you can be more comfortable.

A feeling of sadness and frustration when you arrive at your school at 9AM and you are the only person there besides the 593 students waiting for a teacher.

A feeling of humble importance that comes with sharing a private dinner with a new friend while knowing you are probably the only mzungu (white person) ever to visit their home and that they will be talking about it for weeks or months to come. Especially when this family gave up so much of what little they had to accommodate you for one night.

A feeling of baffling confusion when your taxi switches drivers three times in a two hour journey. The hand signals these drivers give to one another as they speed down the road is enough to bewilder any gazing eye.

A feeling of delight you get from watching your students commit themselves to try so hard even though they’ve been given so little. They make the effort each and every day to make their hands with the unfortunate cards the world has given them.

A feeling of emptiness you reach after reducing all your personal expectations for the day because no matter how much you account for, most things go wrong A LOT.

And so on and so forth.

I guess, taken together, those are a lot of different things I appreciate on a personal level. It’s not so much the actual experiences themselves that I can appreciate, but the reactions they provoke and the mental agility they build within my own intellectual capacity.

So returning back to my church experience this past Sunday. The service started out great. Then the main speaker was called to the stage and began to give his sermon. He basically began by saying that American celebrities worshipped the devil based on some arbitrary hand signal they make in public which means “I Love You” in sign language but is somehow similar to “I worship the devil” in this guy’s analysis. Then he went on to berate Obama for supporting abortion worldwide. One of Michael Jackson’s album covers supposedly represented the face of Satan. This guy covered everything with propaganda that would be sure to offend just about every Western nation. It was a little awkward being in the room, but just a little.

It didn’t really anger me though. I was actually glad that I came that day. I found it to be a revealing culture insight into why and how Ugandans have some of the thoughts they do. Afterwards, the volunteer we were staying with informed some of her students that most of what the man had said was not true and that he was just confused. I was surprised when I found out that most of the students she was talking to already seemed to have doubts and didn’t believe much of what he was saying. Pretty cool how they knew that.

This week I’ve been struggling a lot with culture change. Coming back to Kamuge after nearly four weeks away has made it ever present in my mind. We are repeatedly told that our jobs are not to change the culture, that isn’t possible they say. I agree. But I’m not sure how much I can agree with them when every ideal we seem to be working for seems to originate from the West. If it comes from somewhere else, then it’s obviously not a part of the original society. Isn’t that culture change in a way? I’m not sure on the answers, it’s just something that I’m struggling with.

I guess if you define culture as a society’s values, morals, and beliefs, you could somehow extrapolate that what we are doing here as volunteers does in fact align with Uganda’s vision.

Anyways, after being in Kamuge for almost 40 hours now, I’m beginning to feel at home again (a good thing). I should start teaching this week. My goal is Wednesday. Our teaching timetable is a train wreck. And I’ve got a lot of tweaking to do on my end with improvements from last term. But I’m looking forward to getting back to what I am here to do.

Peace.