A cast of characters.

I write this entry with a puppy half on top of my computer. Alejandro, Emily's puppy, has decided that he loves me, and he spends a lot of time these days biting my fingers and licking my face. Lucky me. He is an adorable little imp, and even though he poops and pees all over the apartment, I find that I really like having him in the apartment.

But enough about Alejandro. It occurred to me this evening that it might be interesting for me to describe the people I spend my time with on a daily basis here. This is somewhat difficult at this very moment, because Alejandro has my right thumb in his mouth and he is chewing away. However, I remain determined.

The concept for this entry started with my boda driver, so I'll talk about him first. His name is Sam. Boda bodas have "stages," which are sort of like home bases for where certain boda drivers go when they're not on a job somewhere. Sam's stage is right outside the driveway that leads into my work building's complex. I took him randomly the first time, but he knows my bosses and everyone in my office, and he used that to get me to take his number. I didn't use him for a long time, but I pass him at the stage almost every morning, where I say "good morning" to all the drivers who hang out there. There are a few others at the stage who I recognize and have chatted with -- mostly while I was waiting at the stage for Sam to come pick me up. Until this week, Sam was the friendly boda driver with the nice smile who gave me rides for free sometimes when he found me nearby the office. This week though, he's become "my" boda driver. He called me on Monday to ask if I wanted him to take me home after work. I decided sure, okay. I waited for him at the stage to come back to drive me home. It's easy with him, because he already knows where I live, so we can just chat on the drive home instead of me giving him directions of where to go. He drove me home yesterday too, when I discovered the perils of liking one's boda driver. He usually drops me off at the bypass that's about a 5 minute walk from my flat -- sometimes boda drivers add an extra thousand if I make them drive too far beyond Kabira Country Club, so I try to head it off by getting dropped off a little bit earlier. It was cold and rainy yesterday, so I asked Sam to drive me all the way to my flat -- and I felt obligated to pay him 7,000 shillings (instead of the 5,000 I should pay, and do pay every other boda driver) because he drove me the extra little bit. He didn't ask for it or anything, but I felt like it was the fair thing to do because I like him so much.

I was planning to take a taxi today, but he was right outside the office, and he smiled his stupid charming smile at me, so I decided to let him take me home instead. I really like him; he's a very sweet guy, even if I don't know him that well because conversation is difficult on a boda. It's made even more difficult by the fact that he's relatively soft-spoken, and he wears a helmet. In fact, he wasn't wearing his helmet today and I fretted until he put it on to make me feel better. I know people who have really close friendships with their boda drivers, which I'd like to have with Sam, but I don't know if we can get over the helmet barrier. He actually offered to let me wear the helmet today, but we were already driving, so that didn't happen. Sorry, Mom and Dad. But he's a really good, careful driver, and I trust him to get me places safely.

So let's see, who else can I talk about for the sake of posterity? I am getting to know both of my supervisors, who I really like. There's one mzungu co-director and one Ugandan co-director of the organization -- I won't use their names for the sake of anonymity, but I can tell you about them.

The mzungu co-director is a lawyer, but she's also very academic-minded -- she thinks about concepts like identity and citizenship in the way a professor would (in fact, I think she might teach sometimes at the local university), but she approaches the topics with a very sharp legal mind at the same time. I feel really comfortable telling her what I actually think about the work I'm doing, and I feel like I can communicate with her pretty candidly. I think it comes from being two lawyers (or an almost-lawyer, in my case) in an office of non-lawyers. She also really encourages me to take days off and explore Uganda, which I'm hoping to take advantage of more during July than I did in June. She is personally involved in so many different projects that my organization works on, I don't know if she ever stops working.

The Ugandan co-director is a journalist by training, and he is sassy. I don't know how else to describe him. He's very vocal about controversial topics, very frank, and very intense. For example, at a conference I attended a few weeks go where he was speaking about the role of the media, he said to a room full of people that Mouseveni is stupid. It wouldn't be a big deal to announce that the President is stupid in the United States (something I did many times during the Bush presidency), but it's gutsy to do it here. At the same time as being very uninterested in displaying tact in some ways, he's also very gregarious and personable, and he has great working relationships with a lot of people involved in Darfur in a lot of different ways, including Darfuri rebels and movement leaders. I was really intimidated by him at first, but after spending a few days working with him on research and interviews, I discovered that we actually get along pretty well.

Other people at my office include the guy I share my office with, who works specifically on refugee policy in the Great Lakes region, and the woman who cleans the office and makes us lunch every day. Debbie, the woman who makes us lunch, is a darling and always brings me coffee and water in the mornings. Her food is also excellent -- although I personally suspect that I got Giardia from something that wasn't properly washed in one of her meals, the food is always high-quality. She even makes matoke in a way that I like it, which is rare indeed. My co-worker who I share the office space with is a really nice guy as well. He's Ugandan, but I think (from piecing together disparate information) he spent some time as a refugee, possibly during the Amin years. He has lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi, so he speaks French in addition to Luganda and English. I don't know his whole story (sort of hard to ask, "So, when were you a refugee?"), but I think he's only been at my organization for about a year.

I don't think I've properly talked about my flatmate, Emily -- also known as Alejandro's mommy. I emailed with Emily quite a bit before I got to Uganda, because she interned to my organization in its New York office a few years ago. I got the impression from the emails we exchanged (her answers were always prompt, detailed, and incredibly helpful) that she was the nicest person basically ever. I have not been disappointed in person. From my first day here, she has taken me around Kampala, given me insider tips (she's lived here for a year), and introduced me to her circle of friends to help me feel at home. I honestly don't know what I would have done here without her. Our organizations work really closely together, so I spend a lot of time all day emailing her, badgering her about information that I need to do my own work, and bugging her on Skype with random questions. And she takes it all in stride! She is incredibly generous too -- when I first moved in (and still to this day, if I'm honest), she let me eat all her food and use her shampoo and toothpaste. As a case in point: she's sick right now, and when I offered to make us both dinner last night, I somehow got talked into letting her make me grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. Which were delicious, by the way. She is a very good mommy to Alejandro, and deals with the smell of her room much better than I would if I had a puppy.

Oh, randomly there is a woman at a water and snacks kiosk who I see pretty much every day. I promised my mother I would start drinking more water, and this stand is on the way from where the taxi drops me off in the morning on the way to my office. I started going every day because they always have changed for 20,000 //= (shillings/UGX), which makes it easy for me to stay hydrated, eat breakfast (usually a chapati or a little bag of groundnuts), and get small bills so I can continue to take taxis and boda bodas. It's a win-win situation. One of the girls who works there is always really happy to see me, and we have a sort of anonymous, business-y friendship blooming.

There are various other people I'm friendly with and spend time with on the weekends -- Abhi, Sonakshi, Ben, and Sharifa, for example, and of course Bruno and Diane (who I haven't properly discussed!) -- but these are the people I encounter on a daily basis. Maybe I'll do another entry like this for everyone else later.

This will probably be my last blog post until after I get back from Rwanda. I leave on Sunday for 4 days in Rwanda, during which time I will go to Musanze to see the mountain gorillas, tour Kigali, and visit the genocide memorial museum there. I will have LOTS of pictures and things to talk about when I get back, I'm sure. Happy Independence Day (the day I'll actually be with the gorillas)!

To end this post, Alejandro is licking the bottoms of my feet. Appropriate, given how we started the entry.