Explaining America in Uganda

"So what is different here from America?" He sits forward in his chair. "I really want to know."

This is Howard, who asked to speak with me after my presentation in Mbale. I could see his interest even as I spoke, saw him leaning forward in the front row.

He wants to learn how hardware talks to software, how hacking is done, what it would take to get into graduate school in America. He has been teaching himself Assembly language, and he's excited to meet someone who listens seriously to his questions– "if my phone is plugged in and charging, but off, is it still possible to hack it? What if you pulsed a wire nearby?"

He is curious in many directions at once, so he switches tacks to ask about what's different in my country.

I think he reads my hesitation as reluctance, but I really don't know where to start. "The whole system," I try, then stop. "Maybe the buses are a good example."

At home, I explain, if you want to take a bus, you have to know what time it goes, and where to stand. "You can't just wave at a bus and have it stop for you." And you don't just show up at a bus station and expect to leave now, for anywhere. And you have to have the right coins; you won't get change.

This all is ridiculous here, where a bus will pull over just to ask if you want a ride. In a bus park, men will approach and try to convince you to get on their bus before they even know where you're going. Here, buses take as many passengers as they can get, leave when full, and arrive whenever they arrive.

Both systems work, but they work in opposite ways. One depends on prearranged information and assumes a need for schedules; the other depends on the idea that there are always people going, and therefore always buses.

The paradigms don't translate well because the base assumptions are different. Ugandans don't usually have their own cars. Population density is much higher, and the potential destinations are fewer by far. Not just one thing is different; it's the whole system. Most of the systems are different.

"When I visited Long Beach for the machine leaning conference," Irene asked me, "I kept wondering, where are the animals? You in America eat more meat than we do!"

It's another fair question, and just as hard to answer. For Americans, meat comes from grocery stores. You don't see goats standing outside the goat kebab stand, or hear the squeal of pigs to slaughter. It's set up completely differently.

I showed Irene an aerial picture of a suburb: tight-packed two story houses with empty lawns clustered in culs-de-sac. I thought maybe this would help show how Americans live: we don't even grow vegetables in our yards. But it really doesn't make sense. Where are the animals, if meat is such an important piece of our culture?

Perhaps I should have walked instead with her through the enormity of a grocery store back home. Is there anything more American than the endless fluorescent-lit aisles? Or than the mounds of wasted food in the dumpsters out back?

On the bus to Mbale, we saw trees dripping with mangos, then pyramids of mangos for sale in roadside stands. In a wide valley, there were rice paddies in all directions, then a town where every storefront sold rice: rice in baskets, rice in piles, rice in plastic burlap bags.

In towns, you can get imports: Cadbury from South Africa, packaged dates, cream crackers. But there's no plasticized meat section that I've seen, and the produce section is small and local. You would do better to get your fruits, vegetables, meats at the market stands and butchery.

The American conscientious eater asks about food miles, researches what's in season, because you can't tell by looking when you're at the grocery store.

Where are our animals? They're all kept together, I try to explain, in big close-packed farms. But it doesn't make sense here, where chickens peck between the goats and cows wander down the road.

On the minibus up to Budadiri, I count twenty-four heads in the twelve seats, not including the crying baby. Technically, it's a shared taxi, but I think of it more like a bus. What I would call a taxi would here be called a special hire car.

I share a seat with a woman who is maybe two years my junior, a university graduate. "How are you?" I greet her, nearly sitting on her lap.

She reaches over and fingers the end of my blond braid. "You have nice hair," she says when I look. "I thought it might be hard." I think she's never been touching distance from a muzungu before.

We talk: she wants to know if I'm married yet, says eighteen is normal. And how many children will I have– five, she thinks? She isn't married yet either, but she agrees we're still young enough.

We're looking at the plants out the window. She wants to know if we grow cassava, can I recognize matoke.

"Really, you don't want five children?" She presses as we approach Budadiri.

I shrug a little in the confined space. "It's different," I say, "at home."

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