A Ugandan Introduction - Part 2

Guest post by Heidi Angel

Continued from Part 1: Two hours later, we arrived at a small building, parked under a tree, and tumbled out into the shade. This, we soon discovered, was our chance to freshen up and wipe the dust off our faces. We also took the opportunity to relieve ourselves in the grass 15 feet away while everyone else played spectator. (Heather was unsuccessful in the battle with her bladder, but she must have sweat it all out 'cause she didn't need to go until she was back to the privacy of the Green House.) As we were milling about, Jesca nonchalantly asked if she could have some of my water; she need to take a pill as she did not want to fall ill at the Introduction. Not seeing any way around it, I handed it over. When we were all properly primped, we piled back in the van and drove a few more grueling minutes to our final destination.

Again we all tumbled out, but there was no shade this time. Instead, there was a shortish white arbor laced with baby blue ribbon, stakedd out in the middle of the driveway. They lined us up in front of it two by two, mostly males with females. We heard the music going and talking on a microphone, but the buildings were positioned such that we couldn't really tell what is going on. It slowly dawned on us that we weren't just going to walk into a living room and be introduced to her family. For a good half-hour we stood there in the blazing sun, waiting to “be invited in.” Eventually, some very cheery young teenagers came out dressed in uniforms: long black skirts/pants, white collared button-ups, a bright pink short-sleeved smock worn over the shirt, topped off with a piece of matching pink ribbon tucked neatly under their collars and secured with a piece of scotch tape. Precious. As they pinned corsages of blue curling ribbon on each of us, it suddenly it hit me that I was about to be a groomslady in a Ugandan wedding! I was last in line, Heather was three or four ahead of me on the right, and Bogere was forth or fifth on the left side. Grace was my guide of sorts - the only instructions she gave were to walk slowly, not to smile until the right time, and to kneel when they introduced us to all the different people.

I guess they finally invited us in because the processional began. As we walked past the buildings, it opened up into a courtyard where they had erected two large tents and 200-300 of her closest family were poised, waiting for us to parade in. We marched across the 'stage' to a third tent where we filed into chairs according to our positions in line, except that Bogere was 'hidden' in a back corner chair.

For the next two and half hours we were 'entertained' by two men (paid by the families to represent their side) haggling on crackly microphones over the reason why we were there. Various people were paraded on stage in front of us and on cue we'd all kneel together, crouching awkwardly in the small space in front of our chairs. Sliding out of our chairs in our satin dresses was no problem; it was getting back into them that proved a bit more challenging. All the introducing was interspersed with lip-syncing and several renditions of the Ugandan shuffle dance by endless unidentified groups of people.

All the while, Heather and I were dying. We couldn't really talk to each other because she was seated in front of me and to the side a bit. We couldn't understand a word of what was being said or sung, much less make anything of all the pageantry going on in front of us, yet we still had to sit attentively and pretend we were interested. We were under a tent but the heat was still quite intense and we hadn't eaten since 11am. Our Boy Scout list wasn't doing us any good because we had to leave it all behind in the van. Heather was hanging her head over, fighting nausea, and my head was beginning to pound. Somehow Sylvia got wind that we needed water and sent one of the guys to the car to fetch our bottles for us. When mine arrived it was promptly passed around to the rest of the wedding party (I wasn't so interested in getting the typhoid-malaria, anyway), so Heather protected hers for the two of us.

I don't think anyone knew how bad Heather was feeling when Sylvia indicated we, (she, Heather, and I) were next on stage. We were to walk to the stage, kneel down in front of the women and greet them. Then we would return to our seats. We all managed the task without any mishaps.

Around this point, I did get a bit of commentary from Grace. Two groups of aunts had been brought out, of which the first group were all fakes. In the second group, one was the real aunt. (Somewhere in the middle of all this 'aunt business,' I guess one of the cousins got hungry...sitting on the stage, one of the aunts unbuttoned her dress and plopped her18-month-old on her boob. As if this wasn't alarming enough in the middle of such pomp and circumstance, a few minutes later the child reached up with both hands and began milking her mother!) Once the real aunt was discovered, she and the fake aunts did the shuffle-dance though the wedding party 'looking' for Bogere. They danced him up to the front and seated him on the couch in front of the wedding party. Then they had to go find the bride and dance round and round with her before she was united with the groom on the couch. They were positioned in a bunch of super awkward poses with a bouquet of flowers in their laps. One of the last questions was posed to the bride: “If the rebels came tonight, which of these families should they start killing first?” Her answer was “mine,” making the statement that they were no longer hers, that she had fully transferred over to her husbands family.

By this time the tension in the air was lessening and celebration was mounting. Sodas and platters of meat had begun to be passed around to the audience, but it took a while for them to make it to us. I'd never been so happy for a strawberry soda and a hunk of liver in my life! More pageantry ensued, but I was able to be much more patient with something in my system.

Eventually, they had us shuffle-dance back through the audience and out to the van to fetch the gifts. (Side note: The ridiculous part of the shuffle-dance is that Ugandans are fantastic, creative dancers, and yet this particular dance is reminiscent of senior citizens performing the Electric Slide...). The baskets (filled with potatoes, tomatoes, bread and margarine) were distributed from the van, and they demonstrated how we were to walk with them on our heads. I was managing so long as I stood still, but I wasn't so sure the walking was going to happen, much less in front of an audience (which had grown closer to 400 over the hours of sitting there). I think I may have asked her if she was okay, but in any case, the next thing I knew, Heather was burying her face in my shoulder sobbing, “I just want to go home.” My affirmation of it all being “too much” was only met with more tears. Everybody else was quite taken off guard and didn't know what to do, but they decided the two of us could sit in the van and they would take the gifts back in, that it would all be over 'soon.'

We crawled into the van and talked things out a bit. Heather had only taken one piece of 'meat' and knowing most of her nausea at home usually subsides with food, I suggested she try to eat something. We fished the (squished) pb & j out of her purse, plopped an electrolyte tablet in a water bottle, and soon she was feeling a little better. From the moment we crawled in the van, we had the usual set of little eyeballs staring at us from all sides. A great distraction, Heather's camera came out and the usual photo shoot ensued. The children loved seeing the picture on the screen of themselves and their friends. (Meanwhile, my camera had been confiscated back at Bogere's house and somehow made it into the hands of one of the 'official' photographers. It's thanks to him that we managed to get the whole event documented despite our strict orders to take no snaps.)

About 7:30 (an hour and a half later than we'd planned to be sitting down to dinner with Patrick), they retrieved us from the car for dinner. Heather took a moment to borrow a phone to let Patrick know that we would be late coming home, a comfort to hear his voice as she'd had unusual worries of his journey to Kampala. The tents were being disassembled and the (sparkly blue hat-clad) dj was cranking it as the dusty dance floor rocked. They set us up with plates piled high, on the outskirts of all the action. The sun had gone and the cool night air set in as we dug in with our fingers to the delicious chicken, rice, beef and potatoes. Things were finally bearable, but we knew we still had a two hour drive ahead of us...

Between 8:30 and 9pm, we finally loaded into the car with a pretty obnoxious gang, a least to the ears of culture-overloaded muzungus. The songs began as we pulled out of the drive-way and intensified with every village we passed through. Impossible to find a comfortable place to let her drowsing head topple, Heather had just settled into a cozy padded spot on my lap when we hit paved road. Praise Jesus! Why hadn't we come this way if there was a route on the main road? Who knows.

We made it to Kakoge in good time and were starting to think perhaps we'd be making it home sooner than we thought. Only, once we got there they pulled off and stopped the van. We sat on the roadside for who knows how long before we finally asked what was happening. Apparently Bogere's car had dropped behind and it was not permissible for us to arrive back without the honored groom. We decided to take advantage of the dark van to get out of our satin and back into out clothes so that we would be ready for the boda ride home. We'd changed into our dresses in broad daylight in front of everyone, so we had no qualms with disrobing in a dark van packed with people.

We pulled into Bogere's driveway, met with a surge of excitement from the 100+ people waiting there to greet us. Prearranged on the ride home, Lourie was there with his boda waiting. We glided home, wearing our sweaters, welcoming the freshness of the cool night air on our faces. The clear starry sky was above us and we had a whole new understanding of the word “Introduction.”

A Ugandan Introduction - Part 1

Guest post by Heidi Angel

Dictionary.com gives six definitions of the word 'introduction' and none of them give much of any insight into what Heather and I experienced last Friday. A week before, we had been approached by Sylvia and Jesca about attending Bogere's “Introduction.” Several attempts at prodding to discover what exactly we were getting ourselves into left us with the general concept that we would be taking gifts to his fiance's house and they would introduce us to the family. We were all about an adventure, a cultural experience, supporting a staff member in this exciting life event, but we had no idea it would turn into a 14-hour nightmare that Heather would deem “a day from Hell.”

All of the arrangements had been made. Jesca had borrowed gomesis (traditional Ugandan dresses with pointy sleeves, pronounced go-MAZ) for the two of us. We were all to be dressed and ready to leave Bogere's house by 10am. It was made very clear by several individuals that this was not African time. They emphasized that we should leave Bogere's house at 10am, not our own houses at 10am. And we were told we'd be done by 4pm, so we added a buffer in our heads of 6pm, thinking we'd be back in time to do dinner with Patrick, who'd be returning from Kampala.

Ali arranged for Lourie to pick Heather and me up on the boda at the Green House at 9am. We'd gone through our Boy Scout list of what we might need for the adventure: water bottle, pb & j sandwiches, bandannas to dunk in water if the heat was unbearable, T.P., hand sanitizer, sunscreen...a sweater and a headlamp just in case the 6pm buffer was not enough. We picked up our gomesis from Jesca and scoured the house for three “strings” they told us at the last minute we would be needing to hold them up. Our Boy Scout list, along with the gomesis and strings (cut strips of fabric), were wrangled into bags we could sling over our shoulders as the two of us climbed on the back of Lourie's motorcycle about 9:30am.

After rides to various villages over the bumpy, crevassed, dirt roads in the back of Wayne's white truck, I was pleasantly surprised by the smoothness of the ride with Lourie. I was still glad that my mother wasn't there to see Heather and me bouncing bare-headed behind the helmeted driver. After about 15 minutes, a fairly slow and graceful navigation of all the ruts, Lourie delivered us to Bogere's house and our suspicions, that our 10am departure would not be happening, began.

We were the first of the girls to arrive, but as we had no clue how to clad ourselves in gomesis, we began taking photos of the village children who inevitably show up when there are muzungus around. All of the action was happening in the compound next door where they were tying together a log frame for a tent that would provide a covering for the wedding the following day. We eventually wandered over and were welcomed by a couple of familiar English-speaking faces a midst a sea of kind African matrons, busy with wrapping gift baskets, peeling sweet potatoes and preparing food, along with the group of men (one of which had troubleshooted their lack of a ladder by standing on the rear rack of a bicycle that was balanced by a trusted friend) puzzling together the structure of long skinny poles, tying them off with rope.

Introduced to several of the women, we knelt as we shook their hands and greeted them, “Waasuz Ottia.” We were returned with beaming smiles as they appreciated our attempts to show respect. Wanting to join in the action somehow, I was eyeing the women peeling potatoes around a giant pot. My wish was his command - one of our English-speaking friends had us set up with knives and secured with spots in the circle lickety-split. There was lots of laughter as the women watched the muzungus wield a knife. Not like it's something we don't do at home... Heather did get reprimanded for not shaving the potato down to a golf-ball-sized smooth whiteness, but she pushed past her training against wastefulness and the knowledge that all the vitamins are in the skin, and dug that knife down deep. They laughed at me as I missed the pot every time I tried to toss in my peeled potato, it tumbling to the dusty ground below.

It was fun to feel to camaraderie that came with joining in with such a mundane task, but along about 11am the rest of the girls had arrived by bicycle or boda and we were pulled away to eat breakfast, a generous portion of plantains topped with mystery sauce. Squeezed into the shade outside the outdoor kitchen, we visited with Jesca and she shared that she had malaria. When we inquired as to whether she'd been to the clinic, she said, “They have given me tablets. They think it is typhoid.” We are often discouraged with the quality of healthcare here...

Heather and I were both taking photos of the children and other random things, just hanging out when Jesca gave us a lecture - “When we get there you must be polite. And no snaps (pictures)!” It seemed sort of out of the blue. How are we to know what it means to be polite? So we tried to get them to tell us what being polite meant in Uganda, as Jesca herself was sitting sprawl-legged in skirt rocking back and forth on her stool. “Walk slowly slowly and do not smile. Kneel when you are supposed to kneel and do not talk. Sit up straight and do not cross your legs. No Snaps.” It was as if our grandmother was afraid ``to take us out in public.

Maybe 11:30 or so they all pulled out their compacts and lotions, picks and combs. They looked at us and urged, “Aren't you going to organize your faces? How 'bout your hair? Aren't you going to organize your hair?” Heather and I looked at each other and snickered. Like it would do much good in this heat. And where would we plug in the curling iron? What they see is what they get.

There we are, still standing in the middle of all the action when they tell us it's time to put our dresses on. With no suggestion of exactly how or where to accomplish this task I buttoned the gomesi around myself and wiggled out of my shirt beneath it. I'm sure there was some skin peeking out, but what do you do? They did some fancy accordion folding of the large flap of extra fabric on the gomesi before they tied one of the strings around my waist and covered it with the giant sash, secured by a huge knot at my front. One of the older ladies had stepped in to help tie me off, but was having trouble communicating to me how to make the dress work. She rattled something off to a man nearby and the next thing I knew, his hand was inside my dress, tugging on a piece of fabric. Well, ok then.

Shiny whales we were. Adding injury to insult, when the other girls dressed themselves, they wrapped their lower bodies in tablecloths, tied with a string and doubled back over to create a ballooning effect to “shape” their dresses. Simply put - in Uganda, they like their booty big!

The van to transport us finally arrived around noon and we piled about 19 people into its 12 seats. The majority of the female passengers were wearing their floor length satin dresses with high heels but for us, flip flops and Keens were the fashion. Who brings their high heels to the bush? And as if we weren't packed tight enough with just people, we each had a gift basket to hold in our lap.

Whew, we were all in. Finally, we could be on our way...or...we could sit in the driveway for another half-hour. The music was going and all the matrons were whoopin' and hollerin' doing the booty dance around the van. They scrimped together short pieces of tulle to tie to the van and the car Bogere was riding in, also tucking little tufts of greenery under the windshield wipers.

About 2.5 hours behind schedule, we finally departed. We soon realized that our Boy Scout list was incomplete. They all pulled out giant pieces of fabric and draped it over themselves. “Aren't you going to protect your gomesi and your hair?” Well, maybe we would have if someone had told us to bring such an item! We did the best we could to shield ourselves with our bandannas. At times we closed the windows when the dust got too bad, but we couldn't breath for long with that many people packed into a van in the hottest part of a 100+ degree day.

After maybe 20 minutes, we came to a stop, the door rolled open, and they squeezed in another passenger. Thinking that perhaps this last squeeze would only be a short distance, we asked Sylvia how much further, only to find out that “the journey had just begun.” We settled in, trying to make the most of the situation. Loud whooping and hollering erupted every time we bounced through the tiniest village. In between, though, we were driving through the bush. Literally, branches screeching across both sides of the van as we plowed down 3-ft-high grass in the middle of the road, dodging goats and cows along the way, doing a little rock of the clutch to get the weight of the van up and over the humps. Let's just say that I was closing my eyes trying to think happy thoughts about my stomach, so I can't imagine what the little bean was telling Heather as it swam around in hers.

to be continued...