I am a novice in blogging, however, I hope that this blog is both a glimpse of my travels and life in Uganda, as well as an assurance for some—yes, you mom—that I am not in dire straits…yet…

I have been in Kampala almost 2 weeks now, and am living with a host family who has been so welcoming and generous. They have friends and neighbors who are in and out of the house, so I get to meet new people each day. I am trying my hardest to remember names, but I can’t say I’ve had great success thus far. I think most people are taken aback when I walk in the house, and considering I’m the only white person, people seem to have no trouble remembering me…

The city itself is hectic, crowded, and noisy—even more so than I had imagined. However, I can tell that there is this underlying order to everything, amidst all the chaos, but I’m not yet “local” enough to pick up on it. The chaos does make public transportation hard; transport of which there are two types: a “boda-boda” or a “matutu.” A boda-boda is a motorcycle/moped type thing that takes people from point a to point b while dodging through cars and pedestrians. Considering there are no lanes on the roads, the space between vehicles is slim, slim being an overstatement. I don’t know how people who use boda-bodas regularly still have legs. I rode one a short distance, and it was the most terrifying/exciting thing I’ve done in a long while. The matutu, or taxis, are another story. They look like old school VW mini-vans and they shove in as many people as possible. They have specific routes, but they are unknown to someone like me, because they are shouted out by a conductor who is falling out of the side window as the taxi bounces up and down in pot-holes. I take a taxi home from my internship each day—today the conductor reeked of weed, and I watched the driver simultaneously bite of the bottle cap of his mountain dew, shift gears, and pass some sort of pastry looking food back to the conductor. Needless to say, getting out of a taxi alive brings about a sense of accomplishment.

I’m enjoying my internship, and have been doing mostly office work and preparation for my fieldwork and interviews in February. I will be conducting interviews with different agricultural organizations around Kampala during the last week of January, and will then conduct focus group interviews with farmers during my travels. The plans are still being solidified as to where exactly I will be visiting, but it looks like I will get a chance to see a large portion of Uganda!