On Summer Nights in Kampala: The Sound of Drumming and Chanting

PriscaTanz. About Me: After finishing my first year of law school, I am spending the summer working for a human rights NGO in Uganda.

There are six of us living here together—a girl from Belgium who works at an NGO, a Dutch student who is taking a year off before university and teaching in a juvenile prison, a guy from India who works for a corporation, two American doctors—one is working for a year with children with HIV and the other is here for a month doing something similar—and me. I managed to get to sleep around 8:00, but at 11:00, I awoke to the sound of drumming and chanting outside my window. It was very beautiful, but it also made it impossible to get back to sleep. Plus, I thought I might be missing out on some fun. I finally decided to just get dressed and go out since I wasn’t sleeping. The power here runs in shifts with 24 hours on followed by 24 hours off, so about 12 folks were sitting out on the porch drumming and singing with tiki torches and candles for light.

Most of the visitors were Bahai students who are here for three months volunteering with the local temple. I know almost nothing about the Bahai faith and ended up having a pretty interesting conversation with two of the students—one from Greenland and one from Canada.

Caz, Monday, June 19, 2006, PriscaTanz's Xanga Site