Day 2 of my African Adventure!

Wow. I definitely wrote a whole blog, just for the internet to fail and make me lose everything. Boo, African internet! Anyway, I'll try this again and save it to Word just in case I can't get it to work again. I missed a lot of things yesterday that I wanted to make sure I informed everyone about today!

So, the first African student we met was a girl named Lydia. She came to visit Katie and me in our room and told us her little sisters were excited to meet us. Her family lives on campus so she took us down to her house to meet the little girls. At one point, two of them came up and yanked on the back of my hair. When I turned around, thinking "What the crap?!" they giggled and ran away. It occurred to me about 5 seconds later that it must be so unusual for them to see hair like mine. Especially since it's so long.

Another girl I met was a girl on my hall named Agatha. She came to my room while I was in there by myself and brought me to her room to show me pictures from when she was in high school, I later showed her the few pictures I brought from home. It was really interesting to talk to her though. When I asked her what she was going to school for, she told me Law. When I asked if she wanted to be a lawyer, she told me no, that she wanted to be a legal advisor because being a lawyer is too risky. If you're a lawyer defending someone who’s going against the government you will be killed. She stated it so matter-of-factly I was completely taken aback. I mean, we hear these kinds of horror stories, but don't consider the young college girl who doesn't want to follow her passions for fear of being killed by her very own government!

This morning we went to the church service on campus. We ended up going to the later service at 10:15 am so there were a lot fewer people than at the earlier service. I was a little disappointed with the message because the Vice Chancellor was speaking and he didn't really deliver a message, but rather a vocabulary lesson on the Anglican tradition. Apparently, he doesn't speak there regularly, so I'm hoping the messages will get better as the semester goes on. My favorite part was when a traditional African song was sung. We also sang traditional hymns that I would sing back home, but it was odd because I felt like my heart was truly worshipping when we were singing the African songs. I guess language doesn't matter when you're praising the Lord!

We had lunch at 1:00 pm and two men, Stephen and Moses came and sat with us. Stephen was very interested to know whether I had voted and who I had voted for. I think Africans are more excited about Obama's election that Americans are. As Stephen said, "it shows that we are one people." How true! He wasn't the only Ugandan to ask me that either.

After lunch, a large group of us went into the town of Mukono with the help of our "tour guide," Ken. Two other students, Samson and Peterson joined us. I spent a lot of time talking to Peterson, who also asked if I had voted. We discussed a lot of cultural differences, specifically our different celebrations of Christmas and New Years.

I think that gets me all caught up. Here are my observations thus far:

1. Ugandans are the friendliest people you will ever meet
2. There are a hella lot of bugs
3. Even though USP forbids it, I really want to ride a boda boda, which is a motorbike type thing that everyone has that looks like so much fun, but apparently is a death trap
4. Being an American in Uganda is like being a celebrity, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of waving at the little African children who are astonished to see a mzungu (white person)
5. I'm starting to figure out what it feels like to be a minority...haha

That's all for today. I start classes tomorrow, so wish me luck! Love you all!