I took lunch away from the PREDICT office today to have lunch in town with Becky Sylvester, a vet who graduated from OVC in 2005. Amazing how you run into people in the damndest places. She and a classmate are on an extended tour - they took an overland trip from Spain to Cape Town, through West Africa, spent some time helping out at a vervet monkey and a baboon sactuary in South Africa, and Becky was passing through Kampala visiting friends here before flying on to Ethiopia to catch up with the overland tour and travel back up to Europe with them. How fun! She showed me a bunch of pictures of the sanctuaries in RSA as well as several they visited in West Africa, with chimps and drills and some other primates. There is an amazing circle of non-Africans who travel through these countries, settle down in one, and set up a primate sanctuary, funded primarily by donations from abroad and volunteers who pay to come and labour.
On Television and Soap Operas
Ugandan television includes channels and programming from here, Kenya and Nigeria. There are a lot of music videos, and a lot of soap operas. The music videos look on the surface very much like some of the ones at home, lots of rapper type guys, scantily dressed women but the music is quite different and apparently a lot of the messages are as well. Betty was translating for me - a female singer doing a lot of what we would refer to as “bump and grind” type moves, singing about how Jesus loves us all and we need to love him back. There is a significant disconnect to what the western mind sees and what they are singing about. Traditional Ugandan and Kenyan dances have a lot of what we might call suggestive moves in them, so I guess the dancing doesn’t have the same implications that it would in North America.
Soap operas, are a whole new genre here. There are Nigerian ones, which we haven’t watched as much this visit, which have themes like selling your child to the witch-doctor for child sacrifice so your business will prosper and you will get a new young girlfriend (not kidding - although the ghost of the wife murdered trying to protect the child came back and got all of them in the end). We seem to be on a South American theme right now. Attractive well dressed women scheming behind each others’ backs with the most convoluted schemes as to who is after who’s wife/boyfriend/children/business/farm or whatever. Plus a lot of surprise geneology - “ what do you mean I am engaged to marry my half brother by my fathers secret thought to be dead fifth wife?”It totally boggles the mind. And of course they are dubbed from Spanish into English in a variety of sometimes highly inappropriate voices. There is also an Asian one dubbed into English and then redubbed into Luganda. It’s really hard to follow as the Lugandan dubbing is all done by the same male who shouts everything. So one hears the Lugandan interspersed with what sounds like a skipping record in english. Rather distracting to say the least!
Tonight our session was cut short as the power died once and for all. It had been skipping on and off but eventually packed it in for the night and so did we. The water has been pretty unreliable as well, but I have an emergency plastic garbage can full in the bathroom and we keep jugs of boiled water in the fridge.
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