I am happy to greet you and welcome you and hope you will sleep at my home.

In case you decide to come to Uganda, which you absolutely should and probably will, here are some things to expect.

You will get into pretty serious conversations with people that result in invitations to sleep at their house.

I have met at least three people this week who are involved in some sort of community development project. Ugandans are out to save the world, and given the incredible energy they have, they’ll likely succeed.  Maybe it is the dozens of various types of bananas everyone eats.

One Ugandan I met explained his banana-fueled project to educate the marginalized Batwa minority. Some still eke out a furtive existence in the forest, others are relegated to sharecropping for land owners, others are simply beggars in the towns. The common denominator is that almost none of their children go to school, learn to read, or have many skills in the modern world.  This particular fellow I met had a sort of religious epiphany up on Mt. Muhabura, which led him to decide to build a school for the Batwa. I think he is also interested in saving their souls through religious conversion, but I did not ask much about that.

This fellow and I exchanged numbers and email addresses, and he tried to get me to come see his school. I did not have a huge amount of confidence in him, and wanted to ask around a bit, and do some investigation before exposing students to an un-explored experience, but it was hard to shake him He has texted me at least 4 times, called me, and suggested that I visit his school, and then come sleep at his house.  That last part sort of caught me off guard.

Anyway, I have been invited to sleep at other people’s houses since then, so apparently this is not uncommon.  I always decline, because I think that this is a kind of overboard hospitality probably really taxes the very kind people here, and because it inevitably leads to some commitment that I may not want to make.

Another question I have had to field four or more times is something along the lines of “do you have these crops in your country?” or “what crops do you grow?” or “do people dig in the USA?”  I reassure my interlocutor that we do indeed dig, though much of our farming is done by machinery. “Tractors?” he will say, excitedly. “Yes, tractors.”  I get the sense that John Deere would go over favorably in Uganda.

I also explain the seasons as best I can. In June it is very much like here. 20 degrees (Celsius), sunny, but it sometimes rains and sometimes doesn’t. It is hot in July and August 35 degrees or more. In October it is again like this, except the leaves on the trees change to yellow, red and orange. Then from December to March it can be below 0, and sometimes we have up to a meter of snow. “How do the plants live?”  Good question.  Later I thought of making analogy with the lungfish—when its river or pond dries up, it sleeps in the mud until it rains.  The best I could do is to say that some die, and need to be replanted—tomatoes, for example. Others are dormant all winter, like apple trees.  They bloom in April, grow fruit in the long days of summer, and then the apples ripen very sweet as the weather gets cold.  I explain that in my region we grow corn, but not sorghum, apples but not oranges, avacados, mangoes, etc. And that there are cattle, mostly for milk cheese and butter, but few goats.

One advantage I have is that I have experienced Spring, before. And it seems to be always Spring or early Summer here.  But the people of this country have never experienced Winter, so explaining it is like trying to explain “Red” to someone who was born blind.  A common reaction to the whole idea of winter, is “So you store up your food for this time?” How do I explain that most of my food comes, via a supermarket, from California or Mexico or Florida?   “People used to preserve vegetables and fruit for winter, and smoke meat and fish, but now we transport a lot of food from one place to another—so in the cold season, we buy our food from the warm places”

These explanations are met with skepticism. I think that the burning questions are “why would someone live in such a place? Why buy food, when you can grow it? These are valid questions, and gazing at the verdant hills and towering mountains, I wonder what sort of answer I could give.