“Family Dinner”

I miss my family so much. I had a dream last night with me living at home and for some reason I had to leave and my parents and aunts and uncles at my house as well. I woke up so sad and missing my parents so much. Of course the anti-malarial medicine, mefloquine, gives you more vivid dreams so I felt this intense and awful feeling of loneliness and need to see and be around my family. Although I value my privacy and my Allie-time enormously, I suppose I have always known that I am a people person and I really need to be around people I like, love, and can relate to. Looking back in my life, once I got over the uber-loser phase of my life where I had no friends (maybe that is why I cherish my friends so much now and since that point… hmm) I loved to entertain people in both high school and college. I remember being the one who more often than not was the one who hosted parties, had people over to complete homework, or invited people to just hang out. I knew that the isolation factor would be the hardest for me to overcome here, but in the US I don’t think I really knew what is was like to feel completely alone and ostracized even though I’m surrounded by people. I’m not sure how close the nearest non-Ugandan is, but I have a feeling it’s a good 70 km (that is where Jinja is), there is no other PC volunteer within a good 100 km by taxi. Even with the language barrier I am able to become acquaintances with the teachers at the school that I live but there is no one that I can really become good friends with. First, purely because of background and experiences, I hate to admit, but some things that I feel and want to express only another American would understand. Second, because of culture most of the people my age are married and many with kids. Especially the women, they are all married with little babies and toddlers at their feet, how can I relate to that? I tell people here that I don’t want kids until my 30s if ever and they act like I said I want to chew my arm off. Honestly, I relate and get along with the men better than the women because I have more in common with them: I like to play soccer (women play netball here not soccer), I can drive a car and ride a bike, I fix things myself, I own and use tools, and I wear pants, just to name a few reasons. However, because of the culture here, it makes a girl seems dishonest or promiscuous if she is friends with too many men. Therefore the only people I can talk to is my 45 year old counterpart and her 16 year old niece. My counterpart is nice and relatively worldly because she has lived in Kampala for a long time and her niece is a sweet girl who treats me like a human and not like a white bag of money. I have already and am trying to keep a line with my counterpart because she is a coworker and I have to make sure to keep our friendship at a certain distance because it can affect our working relationship. Already she is overprotective of me and annoyingly motherly sometimes because her eldest daughter is also 23 years old. But tonight, since I was missing my family so much, I invited my counterpart and her niece over for dinner that we all cooked food for. Although I had to wait over an hour for them, we had a nice dinner at my house around my ‘dining room table’ which is just a table that is a little larger than the normal classroom table. I had set the table like I do in the US with plates, cups, silverware, bowls, and napkins and when they came in they were amazed and said, oh, we have to learn how to do this. It’s funny for me to hear this because it is just the way that my mom has taught me to set the dinner table every night. But it was nice to have my counterpart and her niece over because it was the closest to an American family dinner that I have had yet and that I miss so much. At training in Luweero we actually had something that was similar to family dinners but at the time it wasn’t such a distant memory and I didn’t think about it but now I yearn to have dinner and the stereotypical ‘family table.’ It wasn’t the same as home, but it made me a little happier here.