Again, sorry for failing to keep my blog up to date. I have been soooooo busy doing field work and trying to get many things accomplished in the short time that I am here. Anyways...
Sunday was a typical day, just trekking around, doing some field work, laundry, and what what. Some people from the hostel were hooting about a Bobi Wine concert that was being held at the Agip Motel. Bobi Wine is a local Ugandan musician that is very famous. We even have a poster of him at the office. He is a representative for the statement, "Be a Man," which protests against polygamy in Uganda. In any case, we have been told that concerts here are quite entertaining, so we ventured over to the motel venue later that evening. When we arrived, sure enough there were, what we thought, to be many people packed into a smallish outside area. What we didn't know was that over the course of the night, the number of people present would raise into the thousands! So we got comfortable, standing in an area with a good view of the stage. Initially, I wasnt sure what we were watching. People would come onto the stage, lip sink to some music, dance moderately well, and then be booed off the stage. Other 'performers' that remained on stage for some time actually had spectators give them money as they performed. Weird custom. Apparently that is the norm for Uganda. It turns out that these people on stage are just regular Ugandan's trying to make it "big" in the industry, but were really just serving as a form of mock entertainment. This began at 8 o clock at night. The lipsinking and dancing was ok for maybe 1 hour or maybe 2, but it went on for 4 hours!!!! This was almost unbearable for me. I had a nasty bout of illness for the majority of the weekend so at midnight, I was pretty much at my limit. But then, the "show" began. A supposedly famous Ugandan artist came onto stage. He sang one song then stopped the show for a serious moment. I did not understand what he was talking about at first, but then he changed to speak in English and stated that all homosexuals should be burned. WHAAAATTTT??????? So this pushed me beyond my limit and I was so perplexed at what this man had just said and better yet, had no idea how this was even relevant to the concert. Sick! We were so mad that we spent the next hour discussing this topic with surrounding spectators, trying to inform them that in fact this type of hatred is unacceptable. By this time, it was almost 1:30pm. Still no Bobi Wine. I had given up. I was rounding up everyone at the concert to leave when sure enough, at 1:45am, Bobi Wine entered the stage. His performance was awesome, but we were only able to enjoy 15 minutes of it. By 2am, we were spent and ventured home with wide eyes regarding the interesting music culture within Uganda.
The rest of the week has been spent in the field evaluating beneficiaries to determine their readiness to receive goats. We had a really endearing conversation with one of the ladies in a parish. Her dairy goat has been bred and is soon to give birth. She was trying to tell us that she was going to treat her dairy goat right and milk it properly unlike some people in other parishes. We were puzzled and asked her what she was talking about. Then she told us of this other woman who has a young child that gets on all fours and sucks from the goat's teats. The mother tried to punish the boy and even beat him, but he refused to listen and still suckles from the goat. The kicker came when the beneficiary said "and the boy hasn't even got Brucella yet!"...aaaaiiiiiieeeeeee. Later as we told this story we found out that apparently this behaviour is common even among some adults with cows. Talk about weird...
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