excess

I walked into a sign a couple days ago. I was walking by the hole I fell in a few months ago and thinking too hard about how I'm so clumsy and I don't like the way I make a spectacle out of my injuries because it doesn't feel honest when I walked into a sign and had to sit down for awhile. Light concussion. Nauseous. Fuzzy. Irritable.

It sucked, but it was useful in making me stop. Walking home, I noticed how people sit alone by the side of the road under trees. A woman roasting white 1/2 corn cobbs to sell for cars and the sweat over her face.

I sit with my roommates and talk about their plans. Stella wants to open up a shop where she employs people to sew who don't regularly have access to income. She talks about her time visiting prisoners and the effects of their imprisonment on their whole family. She talks about girls in underpriveleged areas. How can her fashion business position itself to give back to her community (how to define her community)?

(I am interrupted here by the two young girls I live with. One is 5, the other is 3. The 3 year old only speaks Luganda so the 5 year old translates for me. The two like to pretend they are lions and they jump out from behind my bed and growl at me when I enter my room. The 5 year old says she is asking - muzungu, do you also have children who are three years?)

We watch tv here. Badly dubbed soap opera from south america or india. Dubbed into english with cartoon voices. There's one I like thats east meets west set in developing India and Brazil. There's a character who is schizophrenic and his family is ashamed about his disease and then other members of society have to sensitize them to his condition as an illness that can be treated medically. All the men are in love with Brazilian women but have arranged Indian wives. The rapid switch from incense and robes to sky scrapers is fascinating and makes me think about what people are navigating here. The sitting under trees by the road. The prevalence of cell phones with no real mail system and undependable email - extension of oral culture.

One of the things I do with my time is to work as a guest artist at Makerere, the local University. The one that Obama's father attended. The students make skits and I throw a couple of basic drama concepts on the table. Today the skit was about a woman who marries a man in her clan, even though it is against culture and then they have a baby which is a stick, or maybe a chicken. In the skit, one of the characters prays to rid the father of the curse of his daughter, and this young man's performance is amazing, a 3 minute chant ending in gutteral sounds. Get out.

(I am interrupted here by the young woman who works in our walking in with a plate full of fried grasshoppers. For reals. They're really good. Like crunchy fish. Salted and cooked with onion.)

There's also reality TV here. Where contestants come from various African countries. The country to country gets fierce. In Africa Big Brother, the man from Zimbabwe was voted off as the runner up and then (according to my friend) the president of Zimbabwe gave him some large sum - like $200,000 - as a consolation prize.

Concussion, Monday, anyway. I spent the night in some sort of cathartic tantrum. I can't remember content. But I woke and started writing. All of a sudden: writing.