Ugandan English

Uganda was colonized by the British, so all the public schools (somewhat unfortunately, in my opinion, at least for the younger grades) teach classes in English rather than whatever the kids' native languages are. This means that everyone who's been to school can speak at least a smattering of English, which is VERY convenient when you are not a quick learner of Karamojong! Anyway, I love how Ugandan English is definitely not American English.

Here are some of my favorite words and phrases (with a little Karamojong thrown in):

A lot of the little kids know how to ask "how are you?" - only it sounds more like "howah YOU?" - but if you ask it back to them, they're unsure how to respond, because that's the only English phrase they know. It's really fun to hear them shout it at you as you're passing by.

One of the polite things to say (in English) is asking "how was the night?" or "how is home?" when you meet a friend. Losike, the donkey herder, always asked me "how was the night?", which makes good sense when you could have raiders coming through to steal your cattle, or even just drunk people fighting or cobras coming inside your house! Losike also always called me by my last name, thinking that was my "Christian name."

It also makes sense that they use a lot of verbs in the present tense - when I was taking German, that's the first tense we learned. So you hear things like "I am fearing" (if you're afraid), or something "is paining me", or one of my favorites, you are "cowardizing."

And then there was the time the schoolboys said that they were being "overtortured" at school. Things change "slowly by slowly," and if you want to drive backward, you "revance". :)

People (including missionaries) deal with a lot more sickness there than we typically do in the states, so they came up with a very useful verb: diarrheating. You can talk very sensibly about digestive troubles there...

My own Karamojong acquisition was pretty lame. It took Rose a looong time to teach me the "how are you?" greeting (which I still can't spell), but when I *finally* got it, everyone was so nice to me - every time I'd say it to people I knew (who also knew how slow I was), they would grin and say "ejok" like I'd just done something really great.

All the Karamojong I met really are generous to slow learners of their language, although I wouldn't blame them at all if they joke about it afterward! Last year I was teaching Sunday school, and one of the schoolboys asked me to pray for a boy who was sick, Aleper. I didn't realize this was actually the boy's name, so I thought I was supposed to pray for a boy who had leperosy. Oops! But no one laughed (and I think I did just pray for the one who was sick, without mention leperosy specifically). This year I got the Aleper thing down, though. It's a very common name there: Aleper Paul, Aleper Emmanuel, etc.

Joyce

Joyce teaching the Thursday kids' Bible study

One of the most exciting things for me was seeing Joyce again. She's had another baby since last summer - and in Karamoja, if you have a lot of kids, and are trying to put them through school, it can be a real struggle even if you have a relatively well-paying job like she does. But she has grown so much in the last year, both in her ability in the English language and in her love for Christ. Now she's teaching the kids' Bible study on Thursdays (for kids of the clinic staff and anyone else who wants to come). After the first few weeks, she felt comfortable working on it herself rather than relying on Amy to plan out the lessons for her; sometimes I'd go into the kitchen or living room on Wednesday afternoon and see her sitting with her Bible open in her lap. It was the coolest thing to see her teaching her own kids! That kind of involvement seems to be very rare. (That's one of hers, Aleper, in the front middle.)

Tim & Ari's Blog

Check out the posts from the last two months on this blog: Tim & Ari spent a couple days in Karamoja when I was there, then ventured on to Kenya for some medical training for Ari (they took a matatu!), and will be going back to Uganda so Tim can do some construction work with the mission in Karamoja or Mbale. Ari's written some great stuff about their experiences!

Updates

I've been missing Karamoja this week - we have a Ugandan flag hanging up in our church sanctuary (along with ones from Mexico, Bangledesh, and of course America), and looking at it this last Sunday reminded me of all the people I know there. That's one of the hardest parts: knowing that you can't just drive over and say "hi" to friends there. I'm not an especially patient person, I'm realizing. I want instant gratification, and you can't have that when you're just wanting to be in Karamoja (or Billings)!

Normally I'm not very introspective or into the "bare your soul" sort of blog, but I've just been wanting to talk about Karamoja lately.

I love Karamoja for many reasons, especially because of the church there, but it's not always a very nice place. Kris shared this in her last newsletter:

Along with the malaria we see anemia and dehydration. These two things in young children are a deadly combination, but put malaria in there also and they don't stand a chance. The malaria parasite kills the blood cells, causing the symptoms. Well when there is a count of 50 parasites per high power field, that means about 50% of the blood cells are affected. Anemia is present, weakness, nausea and vomiting and dehydration. When you are only a month or two old it can be a very tough battle, often one that can't be won.

It's true. Last year Martha and I were in the village for a Bible study, and ended up going to visit a girl who had a sick baby. I've never seen anything like it - I'm pretty medically ignorant, but I took one look at the baby and knew it was dying. The mother, who was probably still in her teens, was really upset but didn't know what to do. She said she had no money, so she couldn't take her child to the clinic. (The clinic will always see people when it's a case like this.) Martha told her the baby had to go to the clinic, so this girl got ready immediately - I think she just needed someone to tell her what to do.

We all went down to the clinic together. The head nurse saw the baby right away, and gave the mother a razor blade to shave off a section of her baby's hair so he could insert an IV. I didn't watch the whole procedure (I'd like to think it was just low blood sugar that made me feel nauseous, but really I don't think I could handle seeing them stick a needle in a baby's head), but seeing how competent Segal (the nurse) was, and realzing how we have so many medicines today that can save lives, was amazing. I'd never been so thankful for the gift of medicine before, or aware of what it could do.

Sadly, medical care couldn't do much in this case, though - the baby had been sick for seven days already and we found out later that he died in the hospital at Tekora. It wasn't exactly the mother's fault for not bringing him to the clinic sooner; she honestly was just clueless how to go about getting care for her child. I don't want to argue that education will solve everyone's problems, but there really are a lot of cases were we can be praying that God will bless the spread of basic medical knowledge, good hygiene and nutrition, etc. along with the gospel!

Speaking of good nutrution...bugs in food bother me much less since I've been to Africa. After you've picked the weevils out of flour, pasta, and rice, a little bit of residue isn't too gross, really. You can just pick it out. ;-) But I still gag at white ants, so I'm not that much less squeamish after all...