Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Breastfeeding and Cockroaches? Musings from an Amateur

Some of you may be thinking to yourself, "Is there any method to Joel's blog posting madness?"

The answer is, in short, no.

My kindly dad once told me that I had the musings of an Erato, or Thalia. (I must admit most of my topics are more Dionysian.) But permit me to continue that trend.

Prior to leaving for Uganda I asked anybody who would talk to me about what to expect in Sub-Saharan Africa. I also tried to read up on the region as much as possible, hitting fiction and non-fiction with like gusto: Joseph Conrad, David Lamb, Paul Theroux, Alan Moorehead, Barbara Kingsolver, even one of my idols, Bill Bryson.

One thing I heard from several different sources that African children do not cry. This is false. The neighbor boy Emma, age two, cries twelve times each day. African children do cry, perhaps just not as frequently as Western children. Because Matooke Six-Pack has so many kids, there are millions and millions of children in Africa, and they are EVERYWHERE: riding every bus and taxi, singing carols at Christmas concerts, dining at very fancy restaurants, playing in the local dumpster, peeking through your fence, climbing your water tower and breaking the pipes that lead to your showerhead. There are so many kids all over the place that I hear, on a daily basis, way more kids crying than I ever did living stateside. One thing people should have warned me about was the popularity of breastfeeding your baby in public. If one were to espy an African mother at her home she would be cooking or cleaning or some other domestic chore, but as soon as she boards the bus she lets it all hang out. Imagine an already awkward young man going to Africa for the first time and driving to a remote village to meet with a rural group of thirty or so women. Now, imagine that young man, sweat pouring down his face because he is so nervous, getting up to make an introduction speech before fifteen breastfeeding women.

I asked my friend Nasser if he could share for me the general opinion held by Uganda’s Muslim population about public breastfeeding. In other words, I wanted to know how Muslims about felt strongly encouraging their feminine members to wear a headscarf while their Christian counterparts so liberally display their mammary glands. I don’t think I ever got an answer.

I was at East Burn public house with fellow traveler Brad sampling a local quaff in the week leading up to my departure when we met a man who had previously traveled to Uganda to do some missionary work. After the customary bullshitting, I asked him if he had anything spectacular to tell me about Uganda. Insects, he said. Beware, of the insects. Spiders so big they can palm a basketball, mosquitoes terrorizing the aspiring sleeper and carrying more disease than a 14th century European rat, murderous caterpillars, etc. Actually, I’ve found the insect situation to be quite tolerable. Sure the occasional cockroach may be found hiding in your shoe or dancing on your toothbrush, but aside from that I’ve found no big and scary difference between the insects here and everywhere else I have been, and, like I said, they are all easy to live with. We have very few spiders in our house. The termite tunnels that try and creep up the wall can be knocked down or sprayed in a flash. Bright blue wood bees the size of a human thumb are absolutely harmless, they just sound like Harriers taking off. In fact, man’s efforts to control the African insect are, sometimes, self-contradictory. I can’t tell you how many times I have had the grin wiped off of my face after pulling down my mosquito net only to find I have trapped myself with ten of the little bloodsuckers. And little they are. African mosquitoes are surprisingly tiny, I guess I was expecting the worlds greatest murderer of all time to be more substantial. Perhaps the larger, scarier insects were all killed by the enormous rats.

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