![\"yoga-noi250\"](\"http:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/yoga-noi250.jpg\")
Wherever you travel in Uganda, you will meet schoolchildren.<\/p>\nWherever you travel in Uganda, you will meet schoolchildren.<\/p>\n
In Teso, they are almost always dressed, especially the girls, in the colors of their local primary school: dresses of yellow, green, blue, or purple are the most popular.\u00a0 They almost always walk to and from school on the dusty clay roads.\u00a0 They are unfailingly polite, smiling and curious.<\/p>\n
Especially when they have a chance to meet a mzungu.<\/p>\n
Mzungu is the universal African word for a white person.\u00a0 It is Kiswahili, but every tribal language I know of has imported it.\u00a0 Some say it comes from a Bantu\u00a0expression meaning \u201chere and there\u201d, which describes the impression East Africans had of their British colonizers, that they were always rushing up and down.\u00a0 Small children in rural areas of Uganda are particularly smitten by the chance to touch the skin of a white person. They have always been told white people really are ghosts.<\/p>\n
When we came off the mountain in Bugondo, we walked into the playground of a school, and it\u00a0wasn’t a\u00a0minute before I found myself surrounded by curious children.\u00a0 They ran from everywhere.\u00a0 They\u00a0couldn’t\u00a0get enough of me.\u00a0 And as they were all following me and taking my hands, I figured I would run through my entire vocabulary of Ateso.<\/p>\n
Ateso is an amazingly beautiful language.\u00a0 It is free of the hard stops, clicks and gutturals of many other African tongues.\u00a0 It has a flow that is gracious, expressive and frank.\u00a0 And it comes with a very definite protocol for just about every social situation.\u00a0 Including this one:\u00a0 Social Situation #27\u2014Mzungu Surrounded by 200 Unknown Schoolchildren.\u00a0 Language is liturgy. \u00a0So here we go.<\/p>\n
Me:\u00a0 Yoga! Yoga Noi!\u00a0 (Hello! Hi, there!)<\/i><\/p>\n
They (in unison):\u00a0 Yoga!! (Back atcha, and where did you learn that?) <\/i><\/p>\n
Me: Biyaibo? Biyaibo re\u2019? (How\u2019s it going?\u00a0 How are things at home?)<\/i><\/p>\n
They:\u00a0 Tamit! (pronounced tah MEET. It\u2019s all good! Fine! Sweet!<\/i>)<\/p>\n
Me:\u00a0 Tamit! Ejokuna! (Great! Good for you!<\/i>)<\/p>\n
They: Ebo! (pronounced, in a sort of sighing, comforting way, AY-bo. You are most welcome.<\/i>)<\/p>\n
Me:\u00a0 Eyalama.\u00a0 Eyalama noi. (Gee, thanks!\u00a0 Thanks a lot!)<\/i><\/p>\n
This is the point at which you hope you will be getting in your car and no child will have the chance to ask you a detailed question about how your goats are doing, or whether the white in your skin ever rubs off.<\/p>\n
There is one other custom that happens especially in the countryside, which Americans especially find disturbing.\u00a0 Girls, as they take a man\u2019s and sometimes a\u00a0 woman\u2019s hand in this exchange, go down on one knee in a sign of respect.\u00a0 At first I was totally flustered.\u00a0 But I have since seen it is only part of a complex web of authority and nurture that characterizes the intensely Christian Iteso society.\u00a0 The elderly, of both sexes, are at the top of a sort of elastic pyramid of esteem, whose purpose is to connect us all to each other in ways we can\u2019t get away from.\u00a0 The little girl who kneels is saying, You cannot get rid of me.\u00a0 You cannot walk away from me like a tourist.\u00a0 You belong to me, because we all belong to God.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wherever you travel in Uganda, you will meet schoolchildren. In Teso, they are almost always dressed, especially the girls, in the colors of their local primary school: dresses of yellow, green, blue, or purple are the most popular.\u00a0 They almost always walk to and from school on the dusty clay roads.\u00a0 They are unfailingly polite, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pilgrim-africa"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3rrkF-cZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":837,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805\/revisions\/837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}