super-white-stars

After our first real big day in the field we are all tired, dirty and smelling of goat, but satisfied from a great day of hands-on good-feeling work. We set out in the morning in a convoy of two vehicles along with the Global Vets crew who will be joining and assisting with our efforts over the next three weeks. Their help was much appreciated as we realized today how big of a mission will be to vaccinate (twice 3-4 wks apart) and tag all of our 1600 goats. If this many goats were all on one farm as is often the case with livestock in Canada, this could easily be done in a day. However, there are only a few goats owned by each beneficiary and each family seems to live down a distant, barely passable red dirt path. Then, when we arrive at where the goats ought to be penned we learn that we are to wait while the goats are gathered up from surrounding pastures. So, although we accomplished much of what we hoped to, even with the extra crew, we still fell short of our goal and realized that vaccination will take an extra few days longer than planned.
During our rounds throughout the parishes we’ve been greeted with openness and generosity by the locals. Often, the amount of attention that we get here in Uganda, especially in rural areas, just because we are white is not only a little overwhelming, but also mystifying. The children especially go wild every time we ‘Muzungu’ drive by. It often feels as if we are Hollywood stars driving past a crowd of screaming fans. Except we have not acted in any movies or had any records go platinum. We just happened to be born with lighter skin pigment and are fortunate enough to be born into a stable, wealthy nation. If a real, famous and black celebrity like Micheal Jordan or Morgan Freeman were to drive by these same children, there would be no response from the kids at all as they would probably just assume them to be fellow Ugandans, instead of the white-skinned average westerners that they get all riled up for. Francis, our local interpreter and FAOC accountant, put it well today by jokingly asking whether he would receive the same response from children were he to visit Canada. More likely to a Canadian child he would just represent another adult that all their parents have warned their kids not to talk to, not because he is black, but because he is a ‘stranger’.