As my junior year of high school came to an end, my Dad announced over dinner one night that he had some news. With a twinkle in his eye, he told us we would be spending a month in Spain. My brother and I, whose only out-of-country experience had been in Canada, were ecstatic. If I was given this news as a twenty-six year old, I probably would have hopped onto my computer and googled more about the European country. Back in 2010, we looked at maps of Spain in the big World Atlas we owned, and then I believe I ran a couple laps around my house singing “la cucaracha.”
The trip blew my mind. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced. The moment we drove out of the airport, the whole world became bathed in the atmosphere of epiphany. The epiphany itself was far from profound, and went along the general lines of “wow, the world sure is big.”
But it was a different kind “big” than the kind crammed into an atlas – paradoxically, it was the little things that did it, the unexpected details that made this faraway country become a real place to us. The terra-cotta shingled architecture was mythical, and now it was simultaneously commonplace. The newspaper stands were the new CVSs and 711s. The café’s and restaurants were more lively, and at night there was music and dancing in the streets. I was immersed in the subtle novelties of my environment, from the countryside with its olive trees to the dare-devil motorcyclists weaving between the lanes Madrid streets. And in the details, I began to see the true enormity held in the world atlas, where the names of cities and seas printed on paper had revealed themselves as vivid realities.
My brother and I were enrolled in a daily Spanish class. My brother and I attempted to bait our Spanish teacher into giving instructions in English, but she continued to pretend she didn’t know a word. In our desperation to keep up, we learned more Spanish in two weeks than we had learned from the Arlington public school system in two years. Our day trips revealed ancient castles that had seen many centuries pass, and aqueducts that had seen millennium. The Spanish friends we made that summer were some of the most relaxed people I’ve ever met. They were friendly a contagious way that makes dancing come as naturally as the delightful conversation. And it was no wonder. The national ritual of the siesta, the Spanish midday, digestive nap that always followed a big lunch at home with family. Similarly, there was a consensus to routinely stay out at the discotecas until 3am. Not that I was able to do this as a sixteen-year old staying with my parents and younger brother, unfortunately. But the fact that nothing was open before 9am was evidence enough. It was a wonderful month, and time raced through it like fuel for this special feeling of newness; a cross between adrenaline, confusion, and wide-eyed curiosity.
But this isn’t a story about Spain. This is a story about how I ended up becoming a Peace Corps Education Volunteer in Northern Uganda, a place far more obscure to my Virginian worldview than even Spain was. It’s a story about the costs and benefits to throwing away what is familiar.
Six years later that memory of Spain resurfaced. It was 2018, I was 22, and I had very little direction or momentum. I’d been through too many jobs and had been too busy with a broken romantic relationship to have any sort of community worth much. I was rather lonely, disillusioned, and had nothing tying me down. Somebody mentioned Peace Corps one day and, although I wish I could say differently, I thought something along the lines of “Hell yeah. Just get me far away from here.”
Although this was an incredibly foolish and misplaced attitude, and I was lucky that it produced the results that it did. While my trip to Spain years earlier graced me with a magical awareness of the immensity of the world and of my own ignorance, Uganda gave me a second lesson; you can’t run away from your own life.
Fact number one about Peace Corps: the ’s’ at the end is silent. For whatever asinine reason, the name of this Government Agency’s name is pronounced as if it were spelled “Peace Core”. From here on, I’ll be abbreviating Peace Corps to “PC”. Volunteers do tend to be pretty politically left leaning, which can sometimes make this abbreviation a satire of itself, but if it’ll help me avoid repetition, that’s fine.
PC Fact #2: Peace Corps is currently operating in 60 countries, and applicants can either apply directly to s program in a specific country, or they may roll the dice and be assigned to wherever PC deems fit.
I rolled the dice. I just wanted to be somewhere new. I will admit, however, that if I were given the choice to switch beforehand or even several months into PC service, I probably would have chosen mountainous Ecuador or rain forested Thailand far before a relatively arid Uganda. However, I grew to love Uganda in a way that completely overcame my initial hesitance to embrace it. I am grateful that I chose to roll the dice and that they landed where they did.
But if it is a board game, Peace Corps is a long one. PC Fact #3: Normal Peace Corps Service is 27 months. I was 24 when I signed up, and I would be 27 when I was scheduled to finish. That wasn’t how it turned out, but that was the plan.
So I put in my two weeks notice at the rock climbing gym where I worked and I put a concentrated burst of my savings into the economy as I prepared for an adventure like none I’d been on before.
PC Fact #4: PC provides its volunteers with a ‘living allowance’ to pay for food, basic transportation, and other necessities. This leaves many volunteers living a lifestyle short of the luxuries they are accustomed to having in the US, such as running water, but allows them to easily live a relatively comfortable lifestyle and still have some funds left over. The allowance is calibrated to reflect the average cost of living in the placement community, which was, in my case, 8,000 bonus. At first glance, this is practically an insult to over two years of service. But after considering that living expenses and housing is fully provided by PC, it can come out to a very welcome addition to savings concluding a (often rustic) two-year adventure.
The country of Uganda has a population of 42 million. It is close to the size of Kentucky and Illinois combined. Southern Ugandan days are about the temperature of autumn in Illinois. Believe it or not, the Rwenzori Mountains there are covered with snow year-round, mostly due to altitude. Meanwhile, the northern side of the country (where I was) swelters with the heat of a Virginian summer all year long; as Uganda is on the equator, there are only two seasons in any region: dry or wet.
We trained for three months outside the capital, Kampala, and I met the 32 other volunteers in my cohort who would be working alongside me, albeit spread throughout the country. There were already other cohorts trained and active in Uganda, making the total of Peace Corps volunteers in 2019 around 170. As time went on, I met roughly half of them in my various trainings and travels.
In training, we were taught how to properly use a pit latrine, some basic Ugandan history, how to use Ugandan Currency (1 dollar), Ugandan geography, and simple phrases in Luganda, which is the language spoken in the capital. Language is probably the first thing you have to understand to begin to understand the country of Uganda. When I was getting ready to ship off, I asked if I should be practicing Swahili, which is a language widely spoken throughout Eastern Africa, the region of the continent in which Uganda lies. The program manager laughed and told me that would be a waste of my time. I was confused.
What I later learned was that there are about 50-60 different languages spoken in Uganda. There’s Luganda, Lango, Rukiga, Teso, Lumasaba, Acholi, Karamajong, Runyoro, etc.
Unlike the US, there is no obvious majority language. If you get on a bus and travel a couple hours in any direction, depending on the traffic conditions, you are very likely to be greeted in an entirely different language than the one you were told farewell in when you got on the bus. What surprised me even more was the official national language of Uganda: English.
However, education volunteers were all sent to at least somewhat rural areas of the country, where fluent knowledge of English was not necessarily common.
Hilariously, after teaching reading and writing in English to primary school pupils for over four months, one of my fellow teachers, Patrick Obote asked me, “So, what is your first language in your place? Your local language?”
“English,” I responded, a little confused that this wasn’t apparent.
That’s when Opuo Mildred chimed in inquisitively, “Yes, but what language do you speak in your village at home?”
The local language in Barapwo, the school where I worked, was Lango. The pupils at Barapwo don’t begin to formally learn English until the third grade. In the village, these northerners speak Lango to their family and friends, replete with powerful Lango swearwords and mannerisms. However, English was the language used at the market between merchants from other parts of the country. English is the language used by government and at formal events. English is the language used at the schools, and older students were sometimes hit with a stick for not speaking in English. Outside of the deep village, formal British-English of pious Protestants is the language expected, in which swearing is literally unheard of. Paradoxically, in this East African country with so my languages, English is the only language universal enough to do business in and to address the country.
British English made its way over to Uganda in the late eighteen hundreds via British military and missionaries. The English influence reverberates to this day in many ways; even on the hottest days in Northern Uganda, you will still see Ugandans underneath their mango trees, taking steaming cups of tea with two lumps of cane sugar.
I had the “English is seriously my first language” conversation many times before my Ugandan colleagues would believe me when I said that I didn’t have another, ‘local’, language that I had spoken in my household growing up. To Patrick and Mildred’s credit, just a few months before, I hadn’t known that English was the official language of Uganda. And even though I learned a good deal of Lango as well as bits of Teso and Luganda, I’m far from a match for the polyglots I ran into whenever I traveled through Uganda, who often knew four or five languages.
I grew to love the language of Lango spoken in the brick houses and on the banana-tree lined streets of Lira, Barapwo, and Odokomit. It is more consistent and logical than any language I have ever learned, and I tell people about its structure at every opportunity I get (I advise you to skip these two paragraphs if that doesn’t sound like fun). The verbs of Lango are particularly eloquent; each verb in a sentence begins and ends with a vowel. However, these vowels are not part of the word; they are a conjugative prefix, and suffix. The first vowel always signifies the subject (the person doing the verb), while the last vowel always signifies the object (the person or thing the verb is being done to). For example, the vowel prefix ‘a’ (pronounced ‘ah’) indicates the first person, while the vowel ‘i’ (pronounced ‘ee’) signifies the second person.
Take the root word “winy”, which means, “to hear”. To say “You hear me,” I would say “Iwinya.” To say “I hear you”, you simply flip it by saying “Awinyi”. The icing on top is that I don’t need to add any further pronouns or normal nouns in this sentence. While English would require three words to say “I hear you”, the single Lango word “Iwinya” is in fact a full sentence and can often be heard by Lango people struggling with a poor cell phone connection; “Iwinya? Aye! …Iwinya?”
----- Breaking point around here
All Lango verbs follow these same rules. It’s beautiful. In many ways, so are the people of Northern Ugandan. Africa is often spoken of as a country, with a single way of life, instead of a continent with 54 countries, each with their own unique traditions, languages, and political situations. It was that very set of expectations that led me to believe I should be preparing to speak Swahili, not English, and left me unprepared to deal with the pious, and surprisingly familiar, Christian culture around me. Uganda defied the generalizations I’d heard of “Africa Countries”, as well as my own expectations.
Having been there, I can’t help but develop a bit of a pet-peeve of hearing these inevitable general statements, such the common, “Finish your plate - children in Africa are starving!”
I’m not even going to say it’s not true. It’s such a ludicrous statement in so many ways I wouldn’t even know how to approach the assessment of its validity. After all, there were pupils at my school who would constantly raid the mango tree behind my concrete house in order to get a meal that day besides corn-mush and beans. But on the other hand, in the height of mango season, big ripe two-pound mangoes cost the equivalent of 14 American cents. In addition, they are absolutely delicious. This enormous red-orange fruit is essentially free five months out of the year to anyone who can wield a relatively long stick, and tons upon tons of mangoes rot each rainy season because they are simply more than 40 million inhabitants of the country can eat. This is equally true of jackfruit, passionfruit, papaya, tugu, and a few others I have eaten but have no name for.
I have never eaten more food than my time in Uganda. The hospitality is unreal, and sometimes even a bit uncomfortable in its intensity. I have essentially gone unconscious more than once because an aggressively generous Ugandan host told me “No please, you have not eaten enough! Your mother at home will think I am starving you!” and I didn’t want to be rude.
The truth of that matter is that Uganda is an agrarian country. During most of the year, when crops thrive in the rich Ugandan soil and the prodigious watering of the rainy season, you can simply pick produce fresh off of the plant with a wave to its distant farmer. When the cob and husk of corn is thrown away, it is inevitably consumed by goats whose rich meat will provide a hearty feast.
But when conditions are poor, food can become scarce. Uganda doesn’t rely on the ever-roaming network of refrigerated trucks that more developed countries do. Instead, they rely on the ubiquity of food production. Everyone owns at least a couple chickens. Everyone plants peanuts, and once they’ve been harvested, everyone plants sweet potatoes. Most of the time, they eat far more and far healthier than American.
I might have already wasted my time describing this amazing country by spending my words on food culture and linguistics, but I’m just not sure where to start. It’s a country with nearly as many cultures as the United States, even if Americans might see as Ugandans as simply “Africans”. It’s a country with a culture of enormous hospitality, powerful piety, and strong community unparalleled by most parts of the US, most obviously urban areas. And, to throw some salt in, it is also a deeply politically corrupt place, where democracy and trust in the government are thoroughly impoverished to an extent that would cause even contemporary Americans to feel grateful for the system that we have.
At this point I might admit that this isn’t a story about Peace Corps; it’s a story about where Peace Corps took me. The story of training and working as a Peace Corps education volunteer is for another time, but I will say this: my service to this agency allowed me to meet some of the most adventurous, driven, and oddball people I’ve ever met, and I continue to feel lucky for the relationships my service has given me, including my girlfriend, Katie Pollman. Greenville is her home town, and although she is not a Peace Corps volunteer (many of the expatriate friends I made in Uganda were not) she knows volumes more about Uganda than I do. She lived there for four years to my 1.5 and perhaps you’ll read her story in the next issue of the Owl Gazette.
In March 2020, we both were evacuated due to the pandemic; we couldn’t trust the medical care we would receive or our prospects of leaving the country in an emergency. And indeed, days after we left, the first cases were discovered in Uganda and the country quickly shut its land and air borders. It wasn’t the way we wished to leave the country. Peace Corps went from presenting evacuation as “optional” to announcing that it was “mandatory” literally overnight, and giving PC volunteers throughout the world only 36 hours to say our goodbyes and pack our possessions.
The possessions were easy; I was enjoying a pretty simple life. The goodbyes were impossible. I am grateful to have been accepted with such open arms as a member of the Barapwo Community, in my school and neighborhood. I made friends I could rely on and laugh with that I had to leave behind. The classrooms I taught during weekdays were enormous, each with one hundred and fifty kids, but there are still many faces and names that stand out to me that I would like to have continued to teach. These are pupils who loved to draw and to read and who would surely have benefited from the library improvements I was working on with the help of Peace Corps grants and the school administration.
All that said, I couldn’t handle another big transition this year. Evacuation itself was an exhausting epic of airports and hotels from Rwanda to Ethiopia that crossed more hours, time zones and heartbreaking goodbyes than I could relay here.
I am visiting Katie in Greenville now, and I think the epiphany that I had in Spain has reached its first full circle. I am still in awe of the things that I will never know about places I have never been. And I am grateful for the places I am lucky enough to have lived.
Most importantly, I am grateful to be where I am now.
I wrote this for Creekside Journal in Greenville Illinois on request, but they never got back to me! So here it is on the internet