Living in a mud hut

Saying from North Uganda:

 "If you refuse to eat the first food you are given you go the whole day hungry"

Pakwach is one of the towns next to the highway from Kampala to South Sudan and Congo throughout the country. According to 2014 national counting, its population is about 23000 people. Electricity came to town in 2015 and is still on and off in the dry season. Pakwach itself is also a new district just 3 years old with a new district office just about a kilometer away from town. The main street is full of permanent one-floor buildings and the street down are the village huts with grass roofs. Maine business for people is selling fish to tracks passing by on the highway.

I am living in a local family about a half of a kilometer away from the town center. I have my own grass-roofed mud hut.  There is no permanent electricity or running water. There is a small solar that gives dim outside light at nights so people sitting together in the evening can see what they are eating also it powers the cd reader so that it possible to watch Nigerian soap operas before and after the dinner is served.  Water is collected to jerrycans at night time from a neighbor's tap.  Jeri cans are heavy. It is the work of the two daughters in the family to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Clean the parent's hut and fill the jerrycans with water and lift them to the shed where is a place for cooking and storing things. Girls also have to bring the water for washing hands before every meal and as a respect to men and older women, they kneel down while pouring water for washing. It is the most embarrassing for me seeing someone kneeling in front of me and though it happens every single day I never get used to it. The women in the North have little self-confidence. Just about ten years ago they were not allowed to eat good food like chicken or eggs to keep them in a lower position. Also, women could not own any land and until now it is still the custom in more traditional families. As men could have many wives or lovers for a woman having a lover outside the marriage would be the death penalty by the community. Mostly men cant cook and it is considered even embarrassing for a guy to go to the kitchen since it is a woman’s job. So it is necessary to get a wife because otherwise, one would struggle with getting food.

The day starts early around 6.30 everyone is up and my host father is putting on some loud gospel music or just news from the radio. Everyone has a task. Children run to school before seven without eating. If the host mother is at home she is preparing the charcoal stove lightning it with a piece of plastic bag. My host father is the one for compound cleaning and he is swiping of the leaves fallen from trees during the night and bird shit from pigeons and ducks that freely roam around the compound. Cooking takes time because the charcoal stove is slow. First, it takes about an hour to get it hot and then the water for tea is prepared. Meanwhile, I peel the sweet potatoes or cassava depending on what has been brought the previous evening. Generally, white people are considered to be helpless considering housework. My skill of peeling potatoes gets a lot of attention, but while trying to boil the potatoes I fail, because I don’t know how to do it right. Every potato, cassava or jams is boiled with little water and covered with a transparent plastic bag, to keep the fumes. Plastics bag is the most important tool in the household besides using it for lighting fire, cooking it is also used to tie around chickens wings with a purpose to keep the chickens healthy. There is no logical explanation of how a plastic bag around a chickens wing will keep it in good health but the community, where Christianity was introduced just a century ago, the original beliefs and superstitions are still strong.

My family is very religious. Every Sunday morning they go to Born Again church and every meal is started by a prayer. I find it beautiful to appreciate food with gratitude and sometimes I am asked to pray for food, though i am short as: "Thanks for the food, Amen!" I appreciate the habit and miss it after. Another tradition that comes with serving food is washing hands before eating. It looks like follows: almost always the lady comes kneels in front of the person washing hands and pours water on the hands holding the basin and also the jug. It is almost like in the Bible. I understand the respect that is given to the people served food to and the need to wash hands because of hygiene, but sometimes its 70-year-old ladies who have big trouble kneeling, but still it is the tradition and they do it. Every time I feel embarrassed because I never see men doing it. Another observation is that women, when eating are always seated on the ground and men sit on chairs. This is also happening in all the meetings. Even if I try to tell women to take seats on the chairs it is not going to happen because of this is how things are done here.

The usual breakfast is boiled sweet potato, or a mix of beans and corn fried in oil –, lunch posho, porridge from cornflower, and beans and for dinner fish or meat with calo, porridge from cassava and millet flour.  Fork and spoon are not used, people eat with their hands, taking a little piece of porridge making it into a ball between the fingers and pushing a little hole into it and dipping it into the sauce. The consistency is very strange for me and I can feel pieces of sand in the porridge until after a couple of months I don’t chew the porridge anymore but swallow it straight. It is very healthy food because there is very little processing evolved but no one ever eats anything raw except mangos. Tomatoes are considered a spice inside the food. Though there are delicious avocados I don’t see people eating them. It is because of possible diseases that you can get from food and people don’t have money to go to the doctor, so it is much safer to eat only hot food and this is a rule. There are no sweets. The only sweet thing is tea. For a cup, my host father is adding about three spoonfuls of sugar.  To accompany tea, one can have mandazi - it is a deep-fried piece of bread similar to a donut. But there has to be something called "escort" or the tea won't go down. It can be several things like potatoes or even pasta or just peanuts but has to be something. Mandazi is my favorite and is really a treat as it is the only somehow sweet food available.

Dinner is around ten in the evening and I struggle with the lack of sleep from waking up early in the morning and eating very late.  Ugandans definitely don’t sleep eight hours a day as it is thought in Europe. Sometimes my family goes to sleep one am or later, but always waking up before seven in the morning so estimated sleeping time is about 5 hours.  The endless differences in our life setting and possibilities of living are one of the most amazing things I experience and also it brings understanding why people struggle in poverty, why life is so much slower and how much easier and faster is life in developed countries just because women don’t spend the whole day in the kitchen preparing food, so there is space for other activities. Usually, all the families have some little land to grow crops and to feed on it , there is a lack of money. If there is no money there is no education and the land inherited from father to sons is getting less and less. The climate change is chasing the farmers and the fish is overexploited.  Wood for charcoal is ending up and deforestation is chasing the next generations among many other problems.