First day of school, backpacks, and body image

      Natalie had her first day of preschool yesterday!  We found a small preschool right near our house and office that we think will be a great fit for Natalie.  On the first day of school, they rented a huge bouncy castle with a slide for the kids to play on – Natalie had a great time!  For now, she will be going to school three mornings a week, and coming with me to the office the other two mornings with a babysitter.  My coworkers may not agree because of the extra noise, but I love having the kids in the office with me!  Natalie always pops into my office to tell me random things, loves to help our custodian clean, and always helps get tea and cassava for Muigai and myself.  For now, I’m working in the office in the mornings and spending the afternoons at home with the kids. 
Here is Natalie looking all grown up with her big backpack
    
    I would like to vent for a minute about the difficulty I had in finding Natalie a backpack.  She wanted a pink backpack so we went to five different supermarkets in search of a backpack (here supermarkets are like Walmart in that they often have lots of household items, clothes, electronics, etc in addition to food).  The supermarkets only had a small selection of backpacks for girls, and every single one of them had a white pop star (Hannah Montana, High School Musical, etc) or a white cartoon character (Disney princess, Barbie, etc).  The worst one I saw was one that had the word “Beauty” in sparkly letters and then a generic, Barbie-like character with pale white skin, blue eyes, and long flowing blonde hair.

    When I worked at EMU, I wrote and presented a presentation on media and body image, and I touched on issues of race, globalization, and body image.  Every culture has their own standards of beauty, but globalization is allowing us to export our Western standards of beauty (thin, pale skin, Caucasian facial features, long flowing hair, etc) all over the world.  This leads to messages to women like this commercial from Egypt for "Fair and Lovely" skin lightening cream, where the woman claims that her dark skin has prevented her from landing her dream job:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIUQ5hbRHXk

   So the backpack with the generic blond “beauty” is bad enough in the US, where only a few girls will ever look like her.  But it’s terrible in Uganda, where 0% of ethnic Ugandans will ever have white skin and long flowing blond hair.  I refuse to buy a backpack for my daughter which promotes a standard of beauty that she will never be able to attain.  She will always have beautiful brown skin and tightly curly hair, and I want her growing up with the message that those features are equally beautiful. 

   It also really bothers me that this encourages young Ugandan girls to idolize American pop stars.  I wish someone would come up with a line of backpacks that feature strong African heroes like Wangari Maathai, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Leymah Gbowee – women that young girls can be proud to aspire to emulate.

   I want to be clear that my frustration is not directed towards the Ugandan supermarkets, but rather towards the corporations that mass produce these backpacks in China and ship them, along with Western standards of beauty, all over the world.  Because these bags are made so cheaply, they undersell local products and make it difficult for local alternatives to arise.  I am sure there are other places to buy good backpacks here, and some local alternatives, but we haven't been here long enough yet to know where to find them.

   Anyway, I was finally able to find Natalie a nice, plain pink backpack at the market across the street from our office just a few days before school started and she was very happy with her new bag.

Ebola and an office tragedy

        As some of you may have heard, there has recently been an ebola outbreak in Western Uganda.  Ebola is a serious and often deadly virus that was first classified in 1976.  Uganda has had a handful of small ebola outbreaks since the disease was identified in 1976. 

                As often happens, the media has sensationalized this story quite a bit, and we received several messages from friends asking if we are ok.  This outbreak carries almost no risk for our family, since the outbreak has been contained to one area of Uganda (Kibaale, about 4 hours from Kampala) and the virus is spread through the exchange of bodily fluids, which means one has to come into very close contact with an infected person in order to get the virus.  At this point, 16 people have died (9 of them from the same household), a few more who have the virus are being treated in isolation, and hundreds others are being monitored.

                We have a partner organization in this area that we are working with called World Voices.  We have just approved their proposal for an emergency response to help support the ebola effort.  The project includes food for the patients in isolation (who recently rioted because there was not enough food for them),  transportation and coordination for the Ebola Task force, and public education efforts.  At this point, the response on the ground appears to be effective in stopping the spread of ebola, and the Ministry of Health has declared that the situation is "under control". 

       We had a tragedy in our program about two weeks ago as one of our staff unexpectedly lost his one year old son to dehydration caused by a bacterial infection.  The family is devastated and we ask that you keep David, Winnie, and their 3 year old son Meshack in your prayers as they struggle with this loss.  Muigai and another MCC staff member were the first to arrive at the clinic just after the boy passed away, and the whole office has been very shaken up and saddened by this loss.

       

       Several friends have asked what exactly our job with MCC entails, and after 6 weeks I think I finally have a pretty good idea of what we are supposed to be doing!  In the next few blog posts I will give some details about what we are doing here in Kampala.