Climbing Back Into Student Life

          My previous post mentioned a lot of differences about life in Uganda vs life in the US. While I noticed those differences I never really noticed how those differences changed me. This is a window into my experience getting back into the swing of American life and discovering just how much I had gotten used to the Ugandan culture.

          Let's start at the airport. I was flying from Entebbe, Uganda to Nairobi, Kenya to visit my brother who was working for a stove manufacturing business. We arrived at the airport 5 hours early. Before my stay in Uganda, that would have been a vast amount of time. I would need to bring something to do, check emails, solve Rubik's cubes, play games on my phone, anything to fill the time with countless activities. 

          Now, I wasn't thinking of any of that. I was just glad we made it to the airport before my plane left. My phone had stopped working, and I didn't have the parts to fix it since there aren't any iPhone parts where I was in Uganda. But even without my gadgets to constantly occupy my mind, I was content. The wait didn't seem too long. I was used to letting time slip by, and just experiencing what was happening around me. In Uganda, there could have been any number of things that would cause a wrinkle in our schedule, and have us arrive at the airport too late. There, time is fluid.

          I met my brother Ben at the Nairobi airport and immediately noticed a change in tone. The air was less humid. There were more cars, more people walking with purpose instead of strolling around the street. It felt as if I was no longer wading in water and my legs could once again move quickly - almost too quickly. We arrived at the house Ben was staying at after everyone had already gone to bed.

          The next morning, I got up at 7 to leave for the stove factory at 7:30. The first person I met was a bright-eyed college design grad from Michigan. He was bustling about his morning making a tropical fruit smoothie for breakfast (The mangoes are really impressive in East Africa). I noticed a few things. He reminded me instantly of what I imagined all working class people were like. In about two minutes he had made himself breakfast, introduced himself, had a conversation with me about Uganda, sent a few text messages, gotten ready for work, and started to drink his smoothie. This guy radiated productivity--much in contrast to everyone else I had met in my last two months. Where I had been in Uganda it took two minutes to get the water to wash your hands for breakfast. 

          This was a similar theme throughout my gradual acceleration into american culture again. I felt slow. My mind didn't make connections as fast as it used to. Yes, some of it may have been that I was just used to conversing with people who learned English as a second language, and was overwhelmed with the speed conversations were going. But I still felt like a spectator witnessing all of the cool action going on around me.

          There were other aspects of american culture that I was less excited for. My distance from American culture gave me a good vantage point to view American Capitalism. Maybe we don't need another product for every tiny discomfort that will just get thrown out at the end of the day.
          People here get worried about the littlest things! Coming through security, there was someone at the airport who was complaining about everything he could possibly complain about. The line, the people, the temperature, his bags. When the security official asked him to examine his bag, he replied "I think you've given me enough trouble already." While this is an extreme case, it does expose that developed worlds don't usually embrace humble values.

I think the most important change that I noticed in myself while returning is my understanding of my personal values. Personal connections with people around me are now much higher on that list than they were last spring, and productivity much lower.

Building Guitars With Youth

By August, I was scrambling to find people to build guitars with. The youth in Bobo never showed up, despite showing interest and enthusiasm. Maybe the summer had more interesting things to offer. So after several weeks of trying to make it work, Tarra, Coahoma County's Culture and Arts Coordinator, and I decided to try to gather some youth in Rena Lara instead. Rena Lara is a small community about 20 mins southwest of Clarksdale, Mississippi.

 

Four girls showed up interested, which was comforting. I was in a rush to build the electric guitars since I only had two more weeks in town, but a part of me was uncomfortable. The girls were not in our target audience. All of them were under the age of 14 (we are trying to reach high school aged students), they were pretty well off, and two of them were not local. I knew I would not be able to rally any more young people, so we jumped right in.

The first day, they broke off into two teams. One team for cutting out the body of one guitar and the other team for drilling holes on the other. They enjoyed the activity, and we planned out the meeting times for the upcoming days. I was a bit naive. I learned a big lesson the following day.

 

LESSON 1: BE CLEAR WHERE THE GUITAR WILL END UP
Only two of the four students showed up the next day. The two who showed up were sisters. I learned that the others quit because they did not know where the guitars would end up. It seemed unfair to just give it to someone else. I propose we try to auction one and give the other to the library. That did not seem to sit well with the sisters, but they agreed that the activity was fun on its own and decided to continue forward.

The two sisters were self-driven and focused. No matter the task, they were confident that they could complete it. I found that confidence incredibly soothing since there were moments when I was uncertain of how to finish the guitars. They learned to solder, spray paint, drill, saw, and sand. Each day, they asked to stay longer. They really liked building the guitars, and proclaimed that if the workshop did not exist, they would be at home watching TV.

 


LESSON 2: BRING THE PARENTS ON BOARD
Their father was a huge supporter. He was responsive, and brought them in each day. On the first day, I made sure to get his contact information, and we agreed phone calls and texting were the best way to reach other. He also had some extra tools, like a jigsaw and drill, that he let us borrow.

 

After Jodie and Marria finished soldering and painting, all that was left was assembling the guitar. The activity lasted a week, approximately 30 hours, a bit faster than expected. Given, the necks were pre-fretted which took away about 80 hours.

LESSON 3: DO INTERVIEWS AND TAKE PHOTOS UNTIL IT FEELS GROSS
I have always been bad at photographing, but this time I made sure that I took photos of everything. Every time Jodie or Marria were moving to the next step, I took a photo and a video. It felt obscene. But looking back, I am really grateful. Having so many action photos makes it 10X easier when I show other people what I did for this summer than if I tried to explain it to them. I also took video interviews of Marria and Jodie separately about their learning goals and feelings about this curriculum. Not only is it incredibly useful to have user feedback and insights that the team can show others, Marria and Jodie also felt special being asked to do interviews.

Right now, Jodie and Marria are back in Texas with their mother. They definitely wanted to come back next summer to do it again, or even teach others. One guitar is with them, and the other one is on display at the Carnegie Public Library. There is still a lot to learn and iterate on, but it is a good place to start.

Transitioning Back

I’ve been having difficulty writing this final blog for a while now. It’s been about a month since I’ve returned from my home in Soroti, Uganda. As the days pass by, I wait for passively for a solution for all the problems in the world to appear. But unfortunately or maybe fortunately, the world is not black and white. There is no simple revelation from my time abroad, no easy epiphany that will rid the world of problems.

Our last day in Soroti

When I first got off the plane from Kampala, Uganda and entered the Amsterdam airport, I immediately thought that everything was so clean- from the sparkly white floor, to the plethora of lights making impossible to tell whether its day or night, to the rows of stores begging passersby to buy the highest brand purse or watch. The first store on the right had a red sign declaring that Lola by Dior was being sold for only one hundred and fifteen euros – more than Betty’s sheet metal workers make in a year.

Despite my efforts, I couldn’t help being disgusted. As I walked by each high end boutique with advertisements designed to propagate insecurities and create unnecessary desires all in the interest of making money, I wasn’t sure if I was in a dream. A toddler was crying about not being able to play on his dad’s iphone, a young teenage girl was pouting to her mom, two men tried to make their way to the front of the security line by cutting anyone they could. Voyagers looked tired, parents had a short temper, and children wanted more. I don’t mean any of this with reproach – traveling is very tiring.

But the combination of stores telling me to buy, buy, buy and families with Gucci bags and Swiss watches complaining about waiting for their plane, really emphasized that the disproportionate wealth distribution is a terrible problem and one that is so difficult to solve. That’s definitely one of the worst part about culture shock- really realizing that you are living in excess wealth but that you can’t just throw money at a problem. Now I don’t even think that throwing time and education will solve anything either.

There is no simple solution to helping underprivileged communities in Boston, or in the United States or around the world – I think everyone can attest to that. In fact sometimes I now think that helping people around the world is not a solution, which is very difficult for me to accept. But this does not mean I think we should allow ignorance to be our bliss. We should be very aware of all the privileges that we all have. But other than that, I have no idea what we should all do.