from armchairs to jungles

Fiona apple: slow like honey

My two week home staycame to an end this morning, my last night with my Kisitu family last night. I have been named Nanteza and I feel I will keep the name at least as long as I am in Africa. Nze Nanteza. Nze Alli. Nze Spartacus. Nze loca. (a rose by multiple names maybe smells sweeter?)
My sister Racheal painted my nails HOT PINK last night…I've decided to just be ok with it since the robust colour reminds me of Hannah :) And to top it off I painted my toenails crazy blue today. When all your skin starts to own the dust and sweat and burning peanut smell of Africa, you have to jazz yourself up somehow to still feel like you have some control over your appearance, especially when you don't have a mirror anywhere around to even have an idea what you look like. (I find it shocking to walk past car windows that reflect the sun just right to catch my image… the thought usually goes through my head "oh that's what my hair looks like today?!" and then is gone as soon as I hear a boda honking for me to move or be crushed)
I'm going to miss my dirt path walk home past the hostels and cows and children yelling "Bye Mzungu!" at the top of their lungs, walking me hand in hand half way home. I'll miss tea time waiting for me at the table with Mommy and Racheal - boiled milk with tea and veggie samosas. I'll miss evening prayer time and Hidden Passion. I will not miss the screaming puppies, the screaming baby, and the screaming next door neighbors at all and every hour of the night that has prevented me from sleeping for the past 2 weeks. For those reasons, I am very excited to return to campus.

Campus sightings:
- A monkey ran across my path yesterday between classes. Commonplace.
- My elephant and giraffe doodles have gotten nearly professional looking, for all the zoning out in class I do.
- African professor's skin plus white chalk dust equals the most absurd, wonderful contrast for my artist eye. Another distraction from notes in class…
- Honours College birthday tradition states clearly that birthday boy/girl is to be "showered" on his/her birthday. Thus this morning was the showering of Erisa; drug from his bed by about six or seven other HC men, carried kicking and fighting to the front lawn, and drenched with about 5 buckets of soapy water. Happy birthday, Erisa ;)
- Quote: "I'm the chairman of the shower club"- Joel
- Mark made a Tony's mom comment in class…in Luganda…and we all understood enough to laugh :)

Without a piano, a Jeep, and a swimming pool to blow off steam/center myself/retreat and relax, I have been forced to get creative in seeking an alternate "outlet" here. I now even more fully support "creative" downloading routes for music as I have only found true solace in my hefty music collection when the moments hit that I just need to be away and get lost in something. Today, I'd like to thank the academy, as well as Jeff Buckley, Fiona Apple, Björk, Mazzy Star, Iron & Wine, Cat Power, Beck, Wilco, Feist & Imogen Heap for pulling me through with clear head, even breathing and calm spirit.

I've been reading the Primal Vision by John V Taylor for one of my classes here, and I have to say- as outdated as some things seem to be in the book from the 60's, there are other parts that are standing out so profoundly in the book:
"Let Western minds make their inductive and precious generalizations; Africa, if she is true to herself, remains stubbornly inarticulate."
---this has been ringing in my head ever since class last week when we discussed the quote as it was brought to the conversation. In coming here, I knew the typical perception of Africa that Americans in general had, and I tried my best to reject it (pretty successfully, I think). And in coming, I was encouraged by one Ugandan student to write home and work to dissuade that perception; by another the other day I was encouraged to not write home often so as to allow everyone else the same opportunity I now have to develop my their own views. The second told me it was their responsibility (you readers) to travel here yourselves and discover what is true, what is bogus, what is unclaimed. I'm also finding that even my African professors, in trying to convey their lessons to our class, give sweeping generalizations of East African thinking, EA lifestyle, traditions, typical behaviours- and each professor seems to have a vastly different idea of "the norm" than the next. In light of these incidents, I am falling ever in love with this piece from Primal Vision in finding that Africa, in everyone else's attempts to articulate her, is "stubbornly inarticulate" in her uncanny ability to evade description, explanation, and even common observation among people of her own nation, to people of every other nation; from armchairs to jungles she remains mysterious, evasive, confusing…and therein lies her beauty.

And…
"The isolated individual self is an abstraction. We become persons only in and through our relations with other persons. The individual self has no independent existence which gives it the power to enter into relationships with other selves. Only through living intercourse with other selves can it become a self at all."
--- Here, here! And I raise my glass.