Today

Hey everyone! How was your week? ‘Cause I spent mine in the southern hemisphere!!
First, I need to say two things: 1) this is a realllllly long e-mail, it was a week of craziness!! 2) mom and dad you know most of this, but trust me the ending bit is worth it…

My host family decided it would be fun to braid my hair…wow. They braided about half of it into tiny braids which I then slept on. The next morning when I woke up they took all the braids out and instead of just letting me walk around with crazy80’s hair, they put it back into mini pony tails alllll over my head….i left the house that way, walked to my bus stop laughing hysterically at myself, and then immediately took them all out with the help of a friend. Yea, you can imagine how I looked!!

Also, my host family calls me sharoni…so now my group does too. If you want to call me sharoni that is fine haha

Alright, my trip:

Day 1: We stopped at the equator, and I bought a crazy shirt that says that I crossed the Uganda equator…as if it doesn’t go all around the globe, just in Uganda…and then I bought a huge spear…Is it Ugandan? No. Is it amazingly cool? Yes. We stayed in a town called Mbarara. Yes that’s an actual town dad…M’s and vowels, that’s how Uganda is.

Day 2: We went to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees desk office in Mbarara. It was amazing! I think for my last six weeks here I am going to try and live/work in a refugee camp and teach English or something else. I am very excited at this prospect! We stayed in Mbarara another night, and watched “Sometimes in April” a movie about the genocide in Rwanda. It was rough, as we were heading there the next day. For dinner me and a few other girls headed out to someplace called “the chef” it sounded exciting, so when it was closed we had to walk around the three street town to find another restaurant. We stumbled into a “diner” and I strolled up to the desk and got us a table. Then the whole meal we got stared at. Not even people PRETENDING to do something else….blatantly stared at. I guess that i was used to this phenomenon though, seeing as it happens an awful lot…Suffice it to say we ate our crazy chicken and bread, then quickly and scampered home.

Day 3:
We left for Rwanda early in the morning. The scenery was beautiful, as we got into the mountains. The border was cool, we got to walk it on foot. But once we started getting into Rwanda, my brain started messing with my head….

HISTORY LESSON!
Rwanda was colonized by first the Germans then the Belgians. Under the Belgians a strict system of discrimination took place, in which the two main ethnic groups of the area, the Hutus and Tutsis, were pitted against one another. The Tutsi were the minority but were favored b the Belgians who used a system of eugenics to falsely “determine” them to be the smarter “race.” When the Belgians left the country, they reversed their policy and gave power to the subjugated Hutu. The tutsis had used their power as any human would and taken advantage of being the powerful, economically stable people group, so the Hutu wanted revenge. Since independence there have been moderate bouts of hutus purging tutsi’s. Many tutsis fled the country and a rebel army, the RPF, was formed to fight the Hutu government. In 1994 a ceasefire was signed by both parties. Then one night in April 1994 the president of Rwanda’s plane was shot down. No one knows who did it. Within an hour a Hutu militia group had set up road blocks throughout Kigali (the capital city). Moderate Hutu’s were the first to be slaughtered and then the tutsi’s. All over the country people were killed. Within 100 days over 800,000 Tutsis had been slaughtered. The international community did nothing. In fact, when a refugee made it to America and was allowed to approach congress, someone stated ”America doesn’t have friends, America has interests. And America has no interests in Rwanda.” The only way that the genocide was stopped was because the RPF made it into Kigali to stop the violence.

Now, Rwanda has been a major interest of mine since I was able to comprehend such a thing. So I knew all such things prior to this trip, as I have read a good many books on the subject. So as we were driving along we passed a river. I knew that the rivers of the country had essentially run red with blood throughout the genocide, so what did my brain do? Made the river look red in my head. We passed a truck full of men heading to or from work. I imagined it as being full of men on their way to murder their neighbors. It was a really hard day.

Day 4:
As if my brain wasn’t messed up already, day four was genocide day. We first went to Gisozi, a museum in central Kigali that was opened in 1994 as the nations way of dealing with their past. It was sad, there was footage and stories and essentially craziness. But then it got worse. We went to a church out in the countryside where 5000 tutsis had taken refuge and had been slaughtered anyways. There were shelves lined with skulls, and piles of rotting clothes. I have never really smelled anything like it. It wasn’t death per say, but decay, terror, and well death I suppose. At one point I almost threw up. One skull still had a spears ticking out of it, and many had machete marks clearly visible. The worst was the church itself. They had left much of the church as it had been found. I saw a jawbone lying next to a rosary, Shoes filled with dried foods. Pans were scattered everywhere. It was the scene of a mass murder. Then we went to a second church. There 10,000 tutsis had been murdered. They had cleaned up the debris, except a wall that was caked with blood which was used to throw babies and small children against to kill them. We went down into the catacombs, where there were shelves upon shelves FILLED with bones.

I didn’t cry. I feel very inhuman. I think my main emotion was anger. But I still feel bad for not sobbing uncontrollably.

The highlight to the day (the only one haha): I had the most delicious dinner ever! It was just a crazy pizza that didn’t have any sauce…but oh man, was it amazing!

Day 5:
Kigali and Rwanda itself speak French in addition to the language KiRwanda. I speak neither of those. Lets just that most of our group did not. I followed one girl around who knew bits of French, but even I could tell she sucked at it haha. We really wanted to go cloth/ material shopping. We spent a few hours wandering around Kigali asking people…but it didn’t work out, and I had to come back to Uganda empty handed.

I was very surprised at how different Kigali was from Kampala. It was cleaner as well as prettier. Also, the people there don’t yell MZUNGU, because there is a general distrust for foreigners. Also the people look very different as well.

Day 6:
We were back in Mbarara for the night,and day six saw us leave for Queen Elizabeth National park (QE). The Ugandan landscape is really random. It went from mountains to savannah in about a mile. We dropped in elevation so fast that I was cold one minute and the next saw me peeling off my raincoat to soak in the sunshine. We got to the park, and went on a boat ride around a channel between lake Albert and Edward. I saw about 300 hippos, a crocodile, savannah buffalo, and waterbucks (which are my new favorite animal!). The we went for a game drive in 15 passenger vans. We stumbled upon some lions and I literally climbed out of the window on my van onto the top of someone elses van to take pictures. Our van driver kept freaking out and we had to persuade him to get closer every time we saw an animal of interest. Then we came across a heard of elephants! There were a few babies, and many large ones. One didn’t like us being there, so he started shaking his head (which is bad in elephant language), and we then high tailed it in reverse down a ruddy dirt road…WHOO HOO! That actually happened several times…but no one died. For the night we stayed in a “hostel” in which we were instructed not to leave our respective houses at night, because last year a ranger was eaten up by a lion…hahaha. Also, I assume I found this out as a youngster, but heres a piece of elephant trivia that I re-learned: Elephants bury their dead and then visit the graces….i find that to be really cool and creepy all at once.

We then visited a salt mine. It doesn’t sound exciting…but our guide (and by guide I mean the man we bribed to show us around…Mom and dad I think all of the fees you paid for this goes to bribes haha) 30000 people work in them, from the local run down poor area. They are very deadly. If you fall over while working you pretty much die instantly. They harvest three types of salt, including table salt.

Also, we met a peace corps couple. They were about 50, a husband and wife (hint hint mom and dad!!), and were working in one of the prettiest groves I have ever seen. The woman worked in the clinic, and the man worked as a teacher.

Day 7:
We went for a morning game drive. We were supposed to meet at 6 am…but I guess they meant 6 am Africa time, because we didn’t leave until almost 7. Immediately off the compound we ran into a heard of lions. I didn’t climb out of the van this time, but it had nothing to do with self control, instead simply the lack of something to climb on haha. We saw the head male, which is apparently rare because they are shy. We then saw some hyenas, and I even saw one stalking a Ugandan Kob (an antelope/ deer type thing). Warthogs are very prevalent, as well as ugly.

Day 8:
We went back to Mbarara. (it feels like my home there now). In Mbarara I went and got Indian food, and actually found something that had garlic in it…my Italian body had been going through garlic withdrawal…and it was delicious. Me and two other girls decided we wanted to check out the local night life and went to some crazy street party across from the hotel. The “party” was for boys I guess… I mean there were girls there, but the entertainment was a few scantily clad African women belly dancing on stage. Even though we were fully dressed, we started to attract more attention than the stage simply due to our skin color. We walked over to a bar, which I quickly determined to be a local prostitute hang out. The last straw was a sketchy old man with no front teeth who decided he wanted to talk to the whiteys. We told him we were all married, but he kept asking questions like “well do you love him?” so we downed our beers and left. We went back to the hotel and got a group leader, who is Ugandan, and went to a CD release party for a girl she went to college with. WOW! She got us behind stage, and a news crew thought it would be fun to interview us…so I am going to be on Ugandan Television on Thursday…I hope I don’t get any stalkers!

The highlight of the day was that we found cloth…a LOT of it…I bought 16 metres myself…I am coming back to America wearing some CRAZY clothes!!

Day 9:
As we were leaving Mbarara (which we nicknamed mbalala land), I was sitting on the bus waiting to go when I noticed one of the singers from the night before was coming out of the hotel. I jumped off and ran up to her and asked for her autograph…I think she was really surprised that a whitey knew who she was. But I am now going to be on TV and I have met two Ugandan pop icons! WHOO!

OK, I will write less specific stuff later…generalizations about some things…but this is three MS word pages as it is…SORRY!

I think my host family is worried about me, so I am leaving!
Bye!
Sharoni