'Eh, Mzungu!'

   One word means the same thing in all the 100s of East Afrian languages.
   'Mzungu' [Meh-zun-goo]
   It means 'white man' or 'stranger'. When you walk down the dusty red road in Lwakhakha the excitement of seeing a white boy is too much to control for many Ugandan children. There will be one little black girl standing a few feet from you, a ravenous joy in her eyes, her arm outstretched, finger pointed directly at you and then she will scream with all the power in her lungs that dreaded word. 'Mzungu!' Then the children will come running - from out their houses, the shops and every nook and cranny in the street - a great herd charging like wildebeast right at you. There is nowhere to run. Each and every one of them will want to shake your hand, touch your legs, hug your knees and each without fail will ask 'Mzungu, how are you?'
   And from that moment on you're an instant small-town celebrity. And it's not just the children who are interested in you, the adults love a bit of mzungu too - they'll hiss and snap their fingers to gain your undivided attention. Everyone will stare at you as you go to buy some eggs or an avacado from the local stall. Then the cry will go out from across the street, from a man sitting lazily on his motorbike: 'Eh, Mzungu!' - as if that alone is great conversation and merits a response. You feel like shouting 'Congratulations dim-wit, you've worked out the difference between black and white'. But instead you smile politely and shrug your shoulders saying 'Yes, yes, I'm white. What fun!'
   It's now been over a month since I landed in Uganda's Entebbe airport, full of excitement and anticipation, and I think it's safe to say that I've settled in fine. Yes there are still a few things that surprise me like when the driver manages to squeeze one more person into his taxi or when the primary school children sing to you english nursery rhymes, but for the most part everything is now normal. Finn and I made ourselves feel more at home last week by giving the accomodation a tidy over and rearranging what little furniture we have. We bought ourselves tubs for storing food so that we could have a good selection of ingredients for cooking on our puny paraffin stove. And cook we did - pumpkin curry, pumpkin fritters, egg fried rice, Spanish omelette, potato cakes, chips and tomato salsa and my personal favourite - irish potato and caramelised onion mash with poached eggs. It's been a very veggy diet, but pretty darned successful for not even having a kitchen.
   Finn and I have been keeping ourselves busy in the rest of our spare time. Finn is a massive football fan so we've been going to the local generator-powered foortball 'cinema' to watch Arsenal games. And when I say cinema I mean it in the loosest sense of the word - imagine 100 middle-aged Ugandan men and two skinny white boys crushed into a space no bigger than the average living room, transfixed by a tiny TV in the corner.

   Other highlights of the past few weeks have included: hiking through the rainforest watching red-tailed monkeys before reaching the spectacular 'Griffin falls', paying to use a Mbale hotel swimming pool so as to use the first real toilet I've had in a month, learning to count to 10 in Lugisu, sampling the street foods in Lugazi, buying pots and pans in Mbale market, having a shower in a thunderstorm (see picture) and climbing the rocks in Lwakhakha to see the view stretch all the way out into Kenya.
   And of course there has been the teaching project, what I came here to do. We've been having some problems with which school we're supposed to be teaching at but I'm sure things will work out in the end. The education standards seem to fluctuate massively - the headmistress of the primary school gave me the shock of my life when she told me she was 19 and had 3 college courses under her belt, yet two boys in my p6 class are only a year younger than me.
   On Tuesday Finn and I finall walked the extra few metres from our accomodation, over the Lwakhakha river and into Kenya. It was exciting to make the crossing but the Kenyan side of town is almost identical to the Ugandan. One of the main differences was the bundles of clothes than lined the street. All the second-hand clothes that are donated through charities (or that clothes bin the Tesco carpark) end up being sold in Africa. I couldn't help but laugh when I saw an 8-year old girl measuring a pair of tight denim shorts against herself. On the way back I spotted a massive tree covered in what looked densley packed black figs. As I drew closer I noticed that the tree was host to 100s of bats that hung from every inch of the branches.
   I've been getting on well with my partner Finn and in the evening we just relax, chat and play rummy. We share much, like an undying love for the simplicity of a chapati. Quote Finn on smoking - 'I'm not addicted. I ask myself do I need a cigarette and if the answer is no then I give myself one as a reward.'
   Simply being in African is exciting enough without all the rubbish I've just written about. The satisfaction gained from walking twenty minutes to the water pump and back to collect water before washing is great. I still miss the luxury of my home in Turriff, but even that is slowly being taken over by the joy of living to the slow beat of Ugandan life.
   Til next time,
   Ben