Hello family, friends, and anyone who has wandered here.
I am an anthropologist working on my Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky, focusing on medical anthropology and humanitarian aid in Sub-Saharan Africa with Dr. Erin Koch as my advisor.
I'm a month and two days away from traveling across the Atlantic Ocean to Amsterdam for a week, from which I will move on to Kampala, Uganda, where I will live for 2 months.
Never having been to Africa, I am beyond excited, but I'm also worried about falling into the traps I critique colonial travel-logues for. Its bound to happen, but I think a good start is making some resolutions of what I want to do with this blog/summer, and we'll see how well I hold up to them!
1. I hope I don't describe Uganda in terms of what it lacks in comparison to what I'm used to.
- So when I want to complain about my apartment not having air conditioning, you will have to read between the lines of me saying its 85 degrees out and I can't stop sweating :)
2. And this is the toughy - I hope I don't romanticize EVERYTHING.
- It is too much to hope I don't romanticize anything, so lets hope I don't paint everything as rose colored. I've heard toilets don't have seats. Surely I won't find a silver-lining to THAT.
- Also, I just broke my first resolution.
3. I pray I recognize and question my fears, limitations, ignorance, and confusion.
- I have an odd relationship to fear. I have a family motto that even "reasonable" fear must go. By putting reasonable into quotes my family and I challenge that fear is never reasonable. It only paralyzes you beyond making good decisions. Also, informed by my faith, fear is the faith that bad things have more chance of happening than good things. So/but...
I don't want to ignore fear, the limitations fear presents me with, or my inability to rationalize things. Firstly, because I will be a(n) (visually obvious - aka PALE girl with an American accent) outsider and honestly will not understand many things that will happen. I will have to submit to my friends' knowledge (who have been to Kampala before) and to people from Kampala that tell me "No," even though I will want to question their potentially fear or stereotypically-based responses.
Nor do I want to make room in my life for fear. I don't know what that means for my time in Kampala. Not that it is a place that should be feared more than other places. I had someone from Lexington tell me a graphically violent example of how dangerous Memphis was before I moved there. After talking I found out that person had never been there. After moving to Memphis and living there for two years I couldn't recognize the story told to the reality of Memphis at all.
So, I mean "I pray" literally in reflection of my faith, and I mean "recognize and question" as a way of balancing the challenges of questioning the reason-ability of fear and the reality of safety on the ground, which is a concern everywhere and not just in Africa.
That is all for now. To be honest, this has served as a means of procrastination from final papers and what-not. But this will probably be the format of future blogs: self-reflective, self-deprecating, and a good bit anthropologically-nerdy. Also, be prepared for many dashes - - -
Take care all!
NS
