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A glimpse into life in Uganda.

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How’s Africa? — The Trade Fair

One of our first experiences in African culture was at the Trade Fair. We hadn’t been in Uganda long when they held one in our town in the local football stadium. Vendors from all over East Africa came to sell their wares. They even had carnival rides — if you were brave enough to try them out!

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Ever since, we’ve eagerly anticipated the Trade Fair coming to town. We start seeing banners and posters for it about a month beforehand. A couple days before it arrives, you can see people out in the stadium setting up tents and stages.

The Trade Fair was in town last week. James and I got to go one afternoon.

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Some of the booths sell hair care products, others household goods, Still others sell bulk food items or specialty products you can’t get at other times. Still others are food vendors where you can get goat on a stick and chips for only a couple dollars.

My favorite part are the vendors selling African crafts. I love shopping in these tents, choosing things I think my family or friends in America would like, and then haggling over the price until we reach an agreement. I’ve gotten pretty good at haggling over the years, especially as I’ve learned the real cost of items and the “mzungu price”. We’ve been back to the Trade Fair often enough that we’ve started to recognize the vendors who come regularly and they recognize us. 

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A dream of mine is to get a booth at the Trade Fair where we can hand out tracts and share the gospel with people, but we haven’t ever been able to figure out how or where to sign up for it ahead of time. This remains a goal for the future.

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How’s Africa? — The Dry Season

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Whenever anyone asks me “How’s Africa?” my first thought goes to the weather. This aspect is the easiest to explain and the most surprising. Most people imagine Africa as a land of intense heat and sun. While the latter is true — our sunshine is very intense — the former isn’t always.

I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. Located at the confluence of the Missouri, Meramec, and Mississippi Rivers, we had a lock on heat and humidity in the summer. Those dog days of summer where the daytime highs were in the 100s (and the nighttime lows only fell into the upper 80s) and the humidity hovered around 100% were miserable. You just hunkered down and waited for it to be over. Even swimming pool water offered little relief because it felt as warm as bath water.

I expected Uganda to be much the same. It only has two seasons, rainy and dry. I expected the rainy season to be like St. Louis summers and the dry season to be hot, without the humidity. I was wrong.

Right now we’re in the dry season. The days are usually sunny and warm. My weather app says the highs are in the mid 80s but when you factor in the sunshine, it feels more like the upper 80s to low 90s.

Naturally, it’s very dry. We don’t get any rain for over two months. We can hang a load of laundry and have it completely dry in less time than it takes to wash the next load. 

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(Isn’t that the cutest little laundress you’ve ever seen? 😀 She wanted to help hang the laundry so badly that she carried the stool out there and set to work hanging the load.)

Nighttime temps in the dry season drop into the low 60s or upper 50s. After the heat of the day, the cool nights feel almost cold. 

Little by little, everything dries up. The grass gets brown. The dirt from the roads forms a layer of dust on all the foliage lining the edges. It even forms a layer of dust on all the people walking on them. (Once, a friend and I walked to the market and we came back with a outline of dust around where our sunglasses had been on our faces. It gets pretty bad out there.) It’s usually windy during the dry season, which blows the dust around even further.

I’m always happy when the first rains of the rainy season fall because they wash the dust off everything and turn it all green again. But more on that later.

(As I write this, there is a 40% chance of rain for this afternoon. Hah! It would be nice, but I doubt it will happen!)

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How’s Africa?

“How’s Africa?”

“What’s it like in Africa?”

We’ve been asked these questions over and over again when we visit the US. While I don’t mind these questions and I understand where they are coming from (a desire to get to know and understand the place where we live) they are difficult to answer for several reasons.

First of all, most Americans view the continent of Africa like they do the United States — as a conglomeration of country/states. It is nothing like that. Africa contains 55-57 countries (depending on where you get your information 😉 ). Travel is difficult and restrictive at times as you navigate the various processes for obtaining visas in each country. We’ve traveled to several of these and each one has a different procedure. The procedures change on a regular basis as well.

Second, Africa is a huge continent. The continental United States would fit in Africa just over 3 times. The Sahara desert alone is the size of the continental US.

Third, the continent has many different biomes, spans two different hemispheres, and four time zones. Both the northernmost and southernmost extremes of the continent will get snow. If we ever got snow where we live, 80 miles south of the equator, the world as we know it would be coming to an end 😀 . That said, a couple hundred miles from here, in the Ruwenzori Mountains, you can climb on glaciers.

For these reasons, among other things, I can’t really speak to the entire continent of Africa.

I can, however, share about my little corner of it, the part that I call home.

So, over the next few weeks and months, I’d like to tell you about my little part of Africa. Whenever you see a “How’s Africa?” title, expect to learn a little more about where I live and the people that live here. It won’t be a travelogue. You can find that kind of information in the CIA fact book.

I’m hoping to make this more personal, the things I like, maybe a few things I don’t like, how things work here and why we do things the way we do. I hope you enjoy it!

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