How to Run a Marathon in Kampala

The MTN Marathon on 23 November 2014 was my first ever run and I did the 10k, along with a couple thousand other people. I thought I'd share some of my observations and musings.

First things first: Registration

There is no online registration. Where computer access, internet access, and electricity, are not aways a given, especially all at the same time, it makes sense. Also, very few events have good websites or online advertising (which makes getting information quite interesting). So registration tables get set up around the city. You show up, tell them your name, phone number, jersey size, and which race you are doing, pay your 20,000 UGX (currently about $7.41), and get your kit. The other option is to register via mobile money, which is a very convenient technology that we don't have in the US (yes, that's a thing). 

Race Day:

I didn't carry anything with me, so I couldn't take pictures. But here are some observations. I would be very interested in hearing if any of these are not, in fact, unique to Kampala (again, this was my first!). I would also love to hear from others who ran!

• Thinking of getting fancy running gear? Don't bother. ballet flats, dress pants, cut off jean shorts, converse shoes, it's all appropriate running gear for this crowd!
• An aerobics class is offered from the main stage at the starting point to help everyone get warmed up. It's good entertainment, anyway.
• For the love of everything good in the world, watch your step! Every. Single. Step. There is no such thing as a flat surface in this city. Holes, cracks, stones, bumps, dips and just plain uneven ground abound. 
• Similarly, roads are not completely shut down to normal traffic, please don't get hit by a boda, a matatu, or a car. And try not to run over unsuspecting pedestrians.
• If you're going to run the 10k, you're going to have to weave your way through hundreds of 10k walkers. 
• If you're interested in winning or trying to go fast at all, you better be at the very very very very front of the pack.
• Any person at any time can start yelling "WE GO! WE GO!" and a good number of people will join in with great enthusiasm. (This is the first half of the National Football team's chant. The rest is: "Uganda Cranes we go!" The chant gets used basically any time people get excited though!)
• There are no spectators cheering you on. But that one random American girl who was standing in the median with her umbrella cheering for us was awesome.

I was able to run almost the whole way, to my surprise. It rained all morning, which probably helped quite a bit by keeping me cool. Kampala is a hilly city, so that adds an extra challenge. I even wore by minimalist "5-toes" shoes, which I usually only wear for hiking, and they felt good the whole time. My knees, which usually give me trouble when hiking, started hurting pretty bad about the last 2 km, which slowed me down quite a bit. I crossed the finish line at 1hr 24min 04seconds. I feel like that's pretty good considering I'm not sure I've never even attempted to run more than a couple miles before!

Unfortunately, my lack of training had its adverse affects. The next day the bottom/outside edge of my left foot hurt pretty bad to walk on. After doing some online research I'm pretty sure I injured my perineal muscles. I also found that this is a pretty common runner injury, so for you runners, here's a link to a really helpful article that did a good job of compiling the info I found on several websites and after hours of research (why don't you ever find these things first?). I've done a lot of icing and stretching and avoiding running in my workouts (or anything that causes sharp pain). As of Sunday, 7 days post run, I was pain free. I'm really happy about that, and will ease back into the running. 

I had laugh out loud when I read this line in the linked article:  

"When it comes to the peroneals the thing to remember is that they are a stabilizer muscle. They help the ankle and foot keep you upright when you hit uneven/loose terrain."

As I said above, there really is no such thing as even terrain in Kampala, so these muscles are getting quite a workout on a daily basis, and it also probably made the run that much more of a strain to them.

All told, I feel pretty good about it, and it's nice to feel like you've accomplished something! I really like the idea of trying to train to do the 21k next year.  I say that without having done any training, of course. But if we can get a team together, train together, run together, and party together after, I think it can happen. I'm looking at you, Fitness 4 Life!

There's also this marathon in Kenya that goes through a wildlife park. How cool is that?

Makin' Pumpkin Pie in Kampala

I had a proper and delicious Thanksgiving meal with the American Chamber of Commerce last week. So when the official day came around the only thing I really wanted was pumpkin pie. But I couldn't go to a bakery and get one (even if there was one that sold them I would hesitate to trust that it would be what I expected it to be). There is also no canned pumpkin. There are no pre-made pie crusts. So this was a serious undertaking. I don't know if you all appreciate how much work goes into this kind of pumpkin pie creation, so let me lay it out for you.

On wednesday I hit the markets: produce is best bought in open air markets or from sellers on the streets, so that's where I got my pumpkin. It was huge and I paid 4,000UGX (currently that's $1.48), which was probably still too much, but I haggled the woman down from 6,000 so I felt ok about it. There are no orange "pie pumpkins" here, but having eaten the pumpkins here before I knew they were pretty sweet and would do the trick, even if the taste was not exactly the same. Then to the nearest super market, where fortunately I can get things like canned evaporated milk, canned condensed milk, unsalted butter, and dried ground ginger and clove. Since I only recently moved into my house and we are still working on equipping it, I also had to buy a pie plate and rolling pin. I hit a snag though when it came to whipped cream. I expected I would not find a can of whipped cream and would have to get a carton of whipping cream and whip it myself, but the market was out of it! My first thought: it's like I really am at home trying to shop the night before Thanksgiving. It was nice to have an excuse for something being out of stock though, after living in Gulu I learned to never count on anything being in stock. I would have to try somewhere else. But not tonight, I was already walking home with what felt like 50lbs of goods to carry! Eggs I bought the next morning from one of the small shops near my house. They generally have a stack of full egg crates and you just tell them how many eggs you want.

All told, here was my expense list:

Pie Plate: 20,000UGX

Rolling pin: 10,000 UGX
cling wrap: 4,500 UGX

evaporated milk: 4,500 UGX

condensed milk: 5,000
Unsalted butter 500g: 10,500 UGX

ginger spice: 2,000 UGX

clove spice:  4,800 UGX

4 eggs: 1,200 UGX

pumpkin: 4,000 UGX

whipped cream: 8,000 UGX

Then the work begins. The skin on the green pumpkins here is like wood. It took some serious effort between myself and my butcher knife to get the thing cut up. I only cut half of it, which turned out to be more than the 3 cups I needed for my recipe. After cutting it into chunks, I steamed it. After letting it cool, I peeled off the skin (note in the picture how the pieces of skin are still whole? Wood, I tell you.) Then I mashed it up as best I could with a fork, and set it aside to be mixed with everything else the next day.

On Thursday morning I started the crust. It is quite a process. First, cut the butter into pieces and place in the freezer  for about an hour to get hard, so it won't melt when mixing it into the flour. After waiting about an hour I start working on flaking the butter into the flour. A lot of butter. I didn't have a choice but to do it by hand, but I had read that if you do it by hand and flake it (rather than clumping it which I guess happens with a food processor) that's how you get a flaky crust. Once that is done you form the dough into 2 discs, and put it back in the fridge to chill. 

While the dough chilled, I mixed the pie filling. After waiting about two hours, I pulled out one of the discs to start rolling it out. I did this on the counter top. I floured the counter top, and moved the disc several times, but by the end it still had thoroughly stuck to the counter top. Trying to get it off was a total disaster, so I had to roll it back into a disc and put it in the freezer to start over again while I worked on the second one. This time I rolled it out on plastic wrap. Much easier. Placing the crust in the pie plate is also quite challenging! You don't want it to break or fold over on itself or get scrunched up or be too far over on one side so there isn't enough dough on the other side. Seesh. But finally I got it all sorted.

Now for the baking: hoping that the power doesn't go out as it had briefly twice already. And in an oven that is barely even big enough to fit 2 pies in. I should have just done them one at a time, but I was inpatient. Since both pies were very close to the top and bottom burners, I just kept switching between them (have the top one on for a while, then turn it off and turn the bottom one on) to prevent burning. It was working pretty well until I left it too long and the top pie burned. At this point it was cooked, so I took out to cool off and left the other to cook, this time putting it on the top rack and leaving the bottom burner on. I was able to peel the burnt top layer off the first pie, but it wasn't very pretty and I wasn't sure if it would taste burnt, so I was hoping I wouldn't end up serving it to my friends! The other pie cooked beautifully. 

Now to go after that whipped cream. I went to another super market near by: again nothing. So I had to go further afield, but not too far and to a market that was huge and surely must have it. So I get on a boda after serious negotiation (he wanted 3,000UGX to bring me there, but he finally agreed to take me there and back for 3,000). Luckily, not only did I find whipping cream, but cans of whipped cream! Hooray for Capital Shoppers Ntinda.

My friends all thought the pie was delicious, and it was suggested that I not wait for Thanksgiving to make it again. Now that I've figured our how to make it happen, I just might. It took hours of labour, but my craving for Thanksgiving pumpkin pie has been satiated!

Reverance

A potential dam. The cave where prospective chiefs are brought to be received by massive pythons. The site where chiefs are crowned.  The ceremony to kick off construction keeps getting postponed by forces outside human control (eg flash flooding at the site).

A road. Trees, reportedly inhabited by spirits, that refuse to be chopped down. The man who tried, died.

Today I heard some stories at the office about conflicts between development projects (roads, dams, etc) and local populations, from a researcher who's just come back from the field. The theme is when local traditions, sacred places, ancestors, and spirits are not acknowledged and treated with respect, bad things happen (including mysterious deaths). The researcher (a man from northern Uganda) said he has always heard about these kinds of things but has always discounted them. After the stories he's heard, he's not sure he should.

ln practical terms it doesn't matter where you are or what you call it--superstition, tradition, backward beliefs, witchcraft, spirituality--it seeks to maintain reverence for everything that we don't and can't fully understand (and that's a lot), and necessitates that in our eagerness to impose our understanding of things on the world we leave space for respecting places, resources, and people. And space to learn (and preserve) what we don't yet understand, before it is lost to us. Space for us to attend to more than our immediate physical needs/desires. To maintain our sense of wonder and awe and recognise that our place in this vast universe is really small.

There is always more to learn. We shouldn't discount something just because it doesn't appear to be scientific or because it doesn't fit into the model we learned. In the US people used to believe that chicken soup was good for a cold. Then we thought we got smart and labeled that a "old wives tale." Then we decided to actually research it, and guess what? Chicken soup is good for a cold. Just because it's ancient knowledge that wasn't informed by modern day physics and biology and textbooks, doesn't mean it's not valid.

Slow down. Look. Listen. Proceed with caution. Because as I always say, good intentions are not good enough. There are lots of great benefits to roads and dams, but that doesn't mean there are only benefits, or that those benefits mean anyone can just plop them down anywhere at any time.

(P.S. This doesn't just apply to development or to government, it applies to you. It's up to you to figure out how.... Slow down. Look. Listen. What can you learn today?)

The power is not there

Ugandans use certain phrases that Americans find confusing and/or amusing. "It is not there" is a common one.  When I ask a waiter "Can I have the fresh fish?" and they reply "I'm sorry, the fish isn't there." I'm tempted to ask "Where is it?" Sometimes I do, because the more you can turn things into a joke the better you fit in. But of course they are telling me the kitchen's sold out of fresh fish today.

I'm one to quickly adapt my vocabulary, so in Gulu it's become very common for me to ask "The power isn't there?" Today, the power was not there. All day. The power goes out pretty much every day here in Gulu, sometimes for 1 hour, sometimes for 10. For some this is a frustrating experience. But if you're smart you adapt pretty quickly. You own a propane stove instead of an electric one. You don't keep many perishable foods in your fridge/freezer that you don't plan on using in the very near future (in fact the only thing in the freezer at my house is reusable ice blocks, ice trays, and a couple bottles of whiskey). You have a lot of candles and flashlights and lanterns readily available. And when the power is there, you make sure anything with a battery is plugged in.

I really don't mind when the power goes out at home. Granted, at my office there is a generator, so that reduces a lot of possible frustrations. But at home, it just opens space for me to do things not associated with the internet or technology. Here's what I did today when I woke up and the power was out.

• I made breakfast
• I put the reusable ice blocks from the freezer into the fridge to help keep the milk and leftovers from spoiling
• I went to a yoga class
• I went to the market (and discovered carrot powder! It's so pretty)
• I stopped on the way home for a rolex (which was cooked on a charcoal stove, smart vendors don't depend on electricity either!)
• I laid in my hammock and took a nap
• I picked flowers from the garden to make the dining room table pretty
• I cleaned the kitchen
• I took a cold shower (cause no power=no heat, I'm more grateful for these on hot days, which today was not, but nbd)
• I used mobile data on my phone to check in with my friend via viber
• I talked to my housemates
• I wrote a letter to my sister

It's now 10pm and I'm at the hotel down the road from my house where they have a generator. Charging my laptop (which I didn't plug in last night so it already had very little battery life when the power went out) and phone, checking fb and email, and looking at plane tickets for a trip I'm planning to Zanzibar. While I eat dinner. Not sure if the power will have come back when I get back, if it is I get to yell "The power is there!" just cause. If not, I'll probably read until I go to sleep.

All in all, I feel like it was a pretty good Saturday. This is the first time I've ever sought out power when it wasn't there, and today it was mostly only because we need to get those plane tickets booked for Zanzibar! Other times when the power goes, I may watch a movie on my laptop (if I was smart and had it charging while the power was there), or go for a walk, or find someone to talk to, and I do a lot of reading. I feel like I do a lot of cooking in the dark, too. Point is, there is always a way to entertain myself that doesn't require electricity. And if I'm not immediately grateful for the disconnect, I usually remind myself to be pretty quickly.

peanut butter cookies that I baked while the power was not there

Trust in Africa--the mefloquine story

I was having a conversation with my dear friend Rachael the other day, who is in Colorado but lived in Nairobi, and after telling her a story she said, "You just gotta Trust In Africa, it's the new TIA!"

I love Rachael. And I love this reformulation of TIA.

Things don't often work out the way you planned or hoped or wanted, but if you give it space and time, it does work out. That's true anywhere, but for an expat in a place like Uganda it's just more in your face. The story I had told Rachael was about my quest for Mefloquine/Lariam, a drug taken once a week to prevent malaria. Which is pretty great. But it has its downfalls. Common side effects (which can happen at any point, even with the first dose) include bad dreams, depression, suicidal thoughts, and psychosis (which I fortunately have never experienced while taking this), as well as fever, nausea, vomiting, headaches (which I have experienced on occasion and suspect Mefloquine to be the culprit), and a very very long list of other things. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish the side effects from the symptoms of an actual malaria infection, which happened to me just after I left Uganda the last time. Taken long term it can also cause liver damage. Awesome.

Taking all that in consideration, I don't plan to take mefloquine long term (although I have not decided yet how long I will continue to take it). I can take other measures to prevent mosquito bites as much as possible, and to keep my immune system strong so I'm in a good position to fight off a possible infection. I basically equate malaria to the flu (for which I have never been vaccinated): take care of yourself, take obvious precautions, and get treatment if you get it. Malaria is very common here (although I sometimes question the diagnosis as I think it's often times a default diagnosis, especially because diagnosis can be tricky if antigens from previous infections are present, and a host of other complications). And it's ugly. But if you do not have a weak or compromised immune system and you get treatment right away, you'll recover. I've read that 90% of the deaths caused by malaria are in children, and I suspect a large percentage of those children were probably malnourished or otherwise compromised, and many of them probably couldn't access adequate treatment quickly enough. I don't mean to downplay how serious malaria is, I just want to put my decision making process in perspective for those of you who would worry about my wellbeing.

So, back to my story. I was out of mefloquine and went to a pharmacy here in Gulu to get more. They were out. I was surprised, but ok, there's lots of pharmacies, I'll just go to another one. I did, and they were also out. I asked what's going on and just got a vague answer about there being a shortage everywhere at the moment. It's not uncommon to not be able to find something in stock at the supermarket that was there a week ago. There is little consistency to the things that get shipped into town. But I somehow expected this drug to be readily available and in stock. Obviously I should not have waited until I was out to look for more! I went to another pharmacy, they also didn't have any. I asked if they could recommend a place that might be more likely to have it (since until now I was just walking around and going into any pharmacy I came across). They recommended a place but it was not nearby and I still needed to go to the market, so I decided I would check another day. The decision about how long I should take mefloquine may have been made for me. Lack of supply may mean now is the time I stop.

Later that week on my lunch break I just happened to walk past the pharmacy that had been recommended to me, so I go in to ask about mefloquine. Turns out they have it! So I guess that means I'll continue taking it for now.

I have another great Trust in Africa story about termites and power outages, but I'll save it for another blog.

"Ideas worth spreading..."

So I was enjoying the satirical humour on Gulu4U.com, when I found my way to the blog of TMS Ruge. While indulging in his intelligent criticisms, I was struck by how awesome it would be to have a TedX event in Uganda, which was fully Ugandan (the speakers, the sponsors, the organisers, etc). So I started googling. Not only have there been several TedX events in Uganda, but there are 2 coming up in June and August! I'm so excited :)
Check them out here.

HappY!

I catch people humming or singing to themselves ALL THE TIME ... unfortunately, they usually aren't really displaying great musical talent, ha! But they are truly enjoying themselves and that always makes me smile.

Pharell Williams' song "Happy" is a global pop hit it seems, and people all over the world are making their own versions of the upbeat music video. So, since these videos keep popping up on social media, I'm going to share with you these glimpses into cities all over Africa. The "Happy" video below from Brazzaville is thus far one of my favourites. I haven't seen one from Uganda yet, which is actually surprising. Kampala is a 24-hour city that loves to have a good time! I think I've been out till after 5am more often in 7 weeks in Kampala than in years anywhere else.

Follow this link to see the full playlist on YouTube of Happy video remakes produced all over Africa. And of course from there, you can tour the world!

TIA

Downtown Kampala, from the top of the Gadaffi Tower

"This is Africa."
I'm not sure when this phrase came into use. It's usually used by non-Africans in response to a situation they wouldn't expect in their home countries. It's kind of like saying "that's how it is, get used to it." Power outages. A new package of batteries that have all been drained of power. Roads that are more pot hole than road. Waiting ages for over-packed public mini-buses to depart. Waiting ages for anything.

What I've realised is that the phrase is never used in a positive context. All of the things I just described are certainly a part of daily life for a large part of this large continent, but they do not alone define Africa. There are a lot of things that I encounter here as part of daily life in Africa that are actually fun, or amusing, or strangely interesting, or fascinating, or awesome. And sometimes those things that people find frustrating are great lessons in questioning what our expectations are, why they are such, and if they actually benefit us.

So, I'm re-activating this blog (it's been over a year since my last post, and they have been very infrequent for much longer) in a project to reclaim and redefine the phrase "This is Africa." I didn't move here because I love it when the power unexpectedly goes out for anywhere from 5 minutes to 5(+) hours, or that it goes out every time it rains, or because I prefer my roads gouged and bumpy, or because I've always wanted to hear someone say on the phone "I'm coming" and have no idea what-so-ever when they will show up. More importantly--very, very importantly--I did not move here so I could "fix" it. Sure there are problems, everywhere in the world there are problems. I think that I have something to offer to help people live happier, healthier lives, but I believed that to be true in Colorado too, and that's what I want for my life no matter where I am.

I moved here because there is beauty and laughter and creativity and a whole lifestyle which has benefits that, for me, outweigh the frustrations. We all have frustrations, no matter where we live in the world. Africa is more than frustrations, war, poverty, and chaos! Let me show you.