Learning your way around in a new country is hard, so enjoy some of the laughable situations I’ve encountered along the way…
- After calling my coworker “Godwin” for three weeks, I found out his name is actually “Gordon”. But in the Rukiga accent I’m still convinced it sounds like everyone is saying Godwin.
- The first time I saw the food posho, I asked if it was mashed Irish (Irish potatoes) because that’s what it looked like. Jenet just laughed at me. Definitely not mashed potatoes.
- I couldn’t remember which road my house was on, especially in the dark, so I had to tell the boda driver to turn around twice to try to find it. Finally I could recognize the road next to ours, so I just had him drop us off there so we could take a shortcut, but found out after that the area we had walked through really isn’t safe at night and I had unknowingly put myself and a friend in danger.
- A few days after arriving I saw a gecko scurrying across the ceiling, so I froze. The little guy then proceeded to fall off the ceiling and land right in front of me. I developed a new appreciation for mosquito nets that have a side benefit of protecting me from geckos falling onto my bed.
- I brought some movies from home with me and realized that I had left one of the discs at home. Nice to know I carried an empty case half-way across the world with me.
- I tried to cross the street in a busy place and managed to get in the way of a guy on a bicycle. He ran into me (which left a nasty bruise for a couple weeks), and lost his momentum as he was going over a series of small speed bumps. He didn’t look happy while he struggled to get his bike going again, stuck between two speed bumps and in a lot of traffic, and with a heavy load on the back of the bike. All I could do was yell “I’m so sorry!” over my shoulder as I ran the rest of the way across the street, and hope he understood my English.
- We made a field visit to a place that, while still in Uganda, you have to cross through part of the border crossing with Rwanda to get there. On the way back the officials decided to ask us for our IDs, and I got really scared because I didn’t have my passport with me. But apparently showing them my expired driver’s license was good enough.
- As I was buying milk packaged in a plastic bag and then placed in a small grocery bag (called a cavera here), my cavera broke. The bag of milk inside fell on the ground, broke, and splashed two liters of milk all over the floor of the shop and a lady had to come mop it up for me.
- I needed to rinse off my toothbrush but the water in our area of town had stopped working for a few hours, so I decided to use some from a flask where we usually keep some hot water that we’ve previously boiled. But that day someone had switched flasks with the one where we keep hot milk, so I ended up pouring hot milk on my toothbrush.
- I was trying to greet someone in Rukiga and wanted to say “Orir’ota?” (How was your night?) but accidentally said “Ori oha?” (What is your name?) which sounds very similar, and was confused when he responded by saying “I’m Damien”.
- The first time I tried to buy a rolex (similar to a breakfast burrito), I was trying to buy one for me and one for my roommate, but because communication is hard I ended up with one rolex made with two chapati instead. Two months later it came full circle when I was trying to buy one rolex made with two eggs and ended up with two rolexes.
- I really struggled to understand my friend Jenet’s accent when I first came, so when she was telling me about her brother-in-law who does nursing, I thought she said “He does nothing” and was confused why she was telling me this but didn’t seem upset about it.
- Someone told me that taking a boda from home to the internet cafe would be 2k, which I took to mean “it’s 2 kilometers away” not “it costs 2,000 shillings” (like he had meant). I couldn’t figure out why he was confused when I proceeded to ask how much it should cost.
Lindy in Kabale 