Friday, December 7, 2007

Kampala dreams

I arrived in Kampala, Uganda on Wednesday. I really like this town, although I have to admit I haven't seen anything on this trip except for a couple of hotels, the university, and our office. Still, people are really friendly and it is not as big as Nairobi or as hot as Dar es Salaam.

We're here to start discussions with different stakeholders about a needs assessment for the introduction of male circumcision as an HIV prevention method in Uganda. Several large, randomized, controlled studies have shown that circumcising men can reduce the risk of their being infected with HIV by up to 60%. So some countries (like Kenya) are aggressively promoting it. Uganda hasn't decided what they are going to do so we have been asked to do a needs assessment to see how normal people would react to such a campaign (i.e. acceptability) and if the health system can handle a large demand (feasibility). I'm in charge of this one. Unfortunately, our big stakeholders meeting with the Ministry of Health and other big guns was cancelled today because so many people were absent, largely due to the Ebola virus outbreak in the Western part of the country.

Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever with nasty symptoms that causes death in 70-90% of cases. The really scary part about it is there is no cure. Medics just try to keep the person hydrated. Nobody knows why some don't die. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports that during the last epidemic here in 2000-2001 the majority of cases were associated with attending the funeral of a sick person, having a sick person in the family, and treating a sick person with improper protection. So there is little to no risk for me staying at my swanky hotel in Kampala. Worse, though, is that there are actually three additional deadly communicable disease outbreaks in Uganda right now: yellow fever, cholera, and the plague. None, though, are causing as big a scare as Ebola.

The other event that caused low attendance for our meeting was the Chogm meeting here a week ago, which forced everyone to move their meetings to this week to get them in before the holidays. Chogm is the biennual Commonwealth heads of government meeting, which drew 53 heads of state, 5,000 delegates, and the Queen of England. Of course, the meeting was extremely important for the economy and image of Uganda so a lot of cleaning up was done beforehand. New hotels were built, roads were paved, and riff raff was moved out of town. My colleague pointed out one downside of the meeting though: a blank corner where a fine primary school used to stand. Apparently, despite protests, the president agreed to let an investor raze the building in order to build a hotel for the meeting but after they cleared the spot they backed out. That's the breaks!

On my flight from Amsterdam I sat next to a woman who was born to Ugandan parents but was raised in Germany and the U.S. Apparently, her mom bought her a ticket to go to Kampala for 2 months and sent her off by herself. The poor woman was scared stiff. She had not been in Africa since she was 5, she didn't know what her "family" would be like, and she had decided not to eat for 2 months because her relatives apparently didn't have a toilet in their house. I found myself in the bizarre position of reassuring her that all would be fine and that her relatives would be thrilled to see her and take great care of her, and I was the foreigner and she was the African (at least by birth)! I helped her through customs and waited for her seven enormous suitcases, which of course were the last bags off the band. But when customs said they had to look through her bags I gave up. Besides, she had a family member who worked at the airport with her at that point so she was doing fine.

I called her up tonight to find out how she was getting along. She said she was in the "deep, deep village with no water or electricity. The people are weird but treating me nice. Everyone is asking 'why doesn't she speak the language?'" Apparently, she hadn't slept a wink since she arrived because the house is always full of people who want to meet her: “They want you to eat all the time. I can’t do that! This is too much!” But she was laughing and said she was having a great time. I told her that she was seeing the real Africa, not the one that I am staying in. But for some reason she wants to come here to see for herself!

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

My first Duke basketball game

I had a chance to go to my first Duke University basketball game ever this week. They played New Mexico State, but it wasn't an "important" game because of some reason I never understood. See, one thing you have to understand about me is that despite living in the Triangle area of North Carolina (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) for three and a half years, I never managed to get basketball fever. I did, however, grasp the fact that basketball is as big as (or sometimes bigger) church here. And that is saying a lot in North Carolina. It is not unusual to hear b-ball mentioned in the Sunday sermons here, usually something involving "our" team winning.

Another thing I did manage to "get" was that there is not just one team to cheer on (or worship, as the case usually is) in the Triangle area; there are THREE teams that people are just as rabid about (UNC Chapel Hill, or "Carolina", and NC State. Okay, I'll admit, I had to just go ask my friends what the third team was and they roared with laughter). And all of these fans live within about a 30-mile radius of each other. And the teams frequently play each other because they are in the same league. And they don't kill each other despite being so rabid.

Okay, so we went to this game. Not a very big stadium and it wasn't full because despite the fact that noone in Durham (where Duke is located) can get tickets to any Duke games, there are often empty seats because the season ticket holders frequently don't show up when there is a game that is not "important." I was able to go because my friends have season tickets.

So we walk in and take our seats just as they are striking up the National Anthem. For you heathen, unpatriotic foreign friends of mine, this is the tradition at EVERY SPORTS GAME THAT IS EVER PLAYED IN THE UNITED STATES, even peewee baseball. So its routine. And IMPORTANT. But I have to say that for someone who has not routinely attended any sports events since she played girls softball in Fremont, California in the 70's, the experience is just surreal. You stand in a crowd of 5,000 people with your hand over your heart and you listen to someone on the court sing the world's most difficult song (or, in more embarassing cases, you sing along) and you try to look patriotic. But of course, I can't help looking around me to get the looks on people's faces to see if anyone else looks/feels uncomfortable. They don't seem to but I do notice that some people don't have their hands over their hearts. What is that about, I wonder? I mean, are they doing this out of some symbolic rejection of patriotism, or because they are uncomfortable like me, or because they just don't feel like it? The researcher in me wants to go up to them afterwards and interview them about that moment and why they made the choice they made.

But I digress. And that is the point. Throughout the next 2 hours all I could do was to watch the spectacle around me and wonder about all of the interesting/insane/inane things going on around me and, oh yeah, there was a game going on too! One that a very large number of people would have paid good money to see. So I know I sound ungrateful. But it really was fascinating. I felt like a visitor from Mars, or from another country. And I'm American!

So now you know that this blog is not going to be a play by play account of the Duke-New Mexico State game. And maybe you are relieved or maybe you think I am an idiot. And perhaps you are right. But its my blog so I can write whatever I want about the game!

So what else? Oh. The cheerleaders. You can't help notice them. There they are, about 12 of them. And they look incredibly young and pert and, above all, in REALLY good shape. They look like they are in better shape than some of the great, lumbering giants on the court. So why are they jumping around with ridiculous smiles on their face waving confetti on sticks? What do they get out of it? They certainly aren't paid like the athletes (the best freshman player gets $60K a year, which is more than most teachers in America), if they are paid at all. So is it status? I used to always envy the popularity of cheerleaders when I was in high school. But is it that rewarding that it would incite someone to do 20 backsprings across the court during time-outs? I mean, what does that do to your back in 20 years? And why doesn't anyone talk about that when the topic of aging, broken athletes is pretty common? But I guess they are not considered athletes. Again, all very interesting and I wish I could interview some of them...

And finally, there are the fans. The students have the benches down by the court where there are no seats. And, amusingly, they separate the graduate students from the undergraduates. That cracked me up. I mean, what do they think? That they are going to attack each other? Or is it because the graduate students have more sophisticated chants and stunts to pull that they think they should not sit with the hoi polloi? Like "lederhosen guy." This is a grad student who dresses only in lederhosen and stands a few rows behind the basket. When it is time for the opposing team to shoot a penalty shot (which they do annoyingly often, breaking the rythm of the game, in my opinion. But I guess it also gives the poor guys a chance to catch their breath), someone lifts up lederhosen guy so that the person shooting the freethrow will be distracted. As if he wouldn't already be with 5,000 people pointing at him shouting things or all of the 500 students shuffling their feet or waving their arms yelling "miss!"

The funny thing is that the students (who are obviously limited in time and space by the fact that they are usually only at the college for 4 years) seem to pass on the chants from one generation to the next. So, for example, when one of the Duke players, who is large and unwieldly named Marty makes an obvious foul on a member of the opposite team, they all start chanting "Marty doesn't foul!" This is obviously an inside joke so I ask my friend who tells me that this is a loving reference to a Duke player named Marty from the 70's! Similarly, there is "towel guy" who the students start calling to about 3/4 the way through the game "Towel guy! Towel guy!" And so towel guy does his stuff. he wraps a white towel around his fist and waves it very vigorously around the air. I am told that he has been doing this for 15 years and the students noticed it once and have decided to make him an act.

The funniest part about the students' chants is that they frequently start chanting something that none of us middle-aged fuddy duddies in the upper seats can understand. So everyone is going "what did they say? What did they say?" Apparently sometimes they have decided on chants in advance and other times someone just starts chanting and they all pick it up amazingly quickly. Reminds me of the wildebeest we saw on the Tanzanian savannah who just start running all at once, with seemingly no communication between them. Fascinating. Would be fun to...nah!