The Fourth

And so another week has come and gone. Crazy wierd! Time's flying so fast, I can hardly believe it. If it keeps up like this I'll be home before I know it.
We get our water from the rain here; it collects on the roof and runs into a big huge storage tank. So when it's rainy, we have water; when it's dry, like it has been recently, we have to walk down the hill to get water at the well. It's become kind of a daily occurance, either in the morning or evening we all trek down with our jerry cans (5 or 6 gallon jugs, kind of like giant gas jugs) and fill up. During the course of this I've had several interesting encounters. Walked down one time with a small boy (maybe 8 or 9) named Timothy who spoke probably the best english I've heard here. He found it amusing that he spoke my language while I did not speak his. So I asked him to teach me. "I cannot teach you," he said, "for even if I taught you 100 words a day, you would forget them all!" I finally prevailed upon him to teach me one word, entay, which means cow. After I had mastered this word, he told me, "You know mzungu, I think I could teach you my language if you came and lived with me, but unfortunately you cannot." I don't know many 9 year old Americans who can use words like unfortunately, so hearing him pull it out and use it correctly threw me. Smart little guy, unfortunately, I haven't seen him since.
Another time I met a high school age guy who began by asking me about American politics. But it wasn't long before he got to what he really wanted to know. "Tell me, do you know Arnold Shwartznigger (spelling? I have no idea) or Van Damme?" Boys will be boys, whether in Africa or America.
Couple days ago I raced a kid named Kianna down to the well. Next day he showed up again, him and about twenty of his friends. As I waited my turn for the well, we started talking. Before it was over, we'd swapped songs (my country music for their Luganda songs), dances (I taught them some swing, but had to use a guy to demonstrate, the girls were too shy), they taught me some football (soccer) using a discarded margarine tub and I taught them some wrestling, using Kianna. All in all I learned alot, and even got invited back to their school to practise more football.
But I haven't just been making friends with the kids. Sambuze, one of the guys from our Giants class, is fast becoming my African brother. He even adopted me into his clan and gave me a name: Magala Ben of the Lugave clan. It's awesome. He's one of our best students, so excited and passionate and so dedicated to helping his students learn. Which includes me, he's been coming over every Sunday and teaching me Luganda, using notes he writes up and a Luganda Bible I found in one of the stores. It's great. By the time I come back I might actually know something.
All in all, it's not so much different from home. Poorer in some ways, richer in others, greener and definitely more humid, but the people are just people. There's some good, some bad. Selfishness, and then outstanding examples of self-sacrifice. Are there problems, course there are! Problems are a necessary ingredient of the human condition. And there's some people who look away and try to pretend problems don't exist, and some who roll up their sleeves and tackle them. Granted we could use some more of the latter here, just like we could in the States. But I look in the eyes of my students when they say things like "Yeah, we can change. And it starts with us." and I can't help but have hope. As long as there's people like that, there's always hope for a better future. We can change. But only when we decide to. It starts with us. Happy Fourth of July!