Challenging Societal Norms - anywhere

I love to get into conversations with my boda boda men everytime I sit on one. Well, we are usualy yelling because of the wind, but I guess that just gives other people a chance to hear our conversations. My sister thinks it's crazy that I am able to converse with anybody. Well, I call it my gift, and it gives me a chance to pick brains from all social corners. I have been learning a lot from the most random people.

So, I got into one conversation on a 20min ride home with John, who said he has a gift of immediately teling who can become his friend. He said he saw me and knew I was a nice person and we could be friends. Anyway, the topic of the day was choosing spouses. He was disgusted by the classist system we have hear (I guess Uganda in not unique in this aspect). He said the rich want to marry the rich and the educated only want the educated. We were both in agreement that many people here don't look so much at compatibility, but at support/survival. That is why cheating, especially among married men, is so prevelent and very much accepted here - I guess people get bored with each other rather quickly. In the end, we have people who have money and/or are educated, but are so unhappy or dying of AIDS.

He concluded that if compatibilty was taken as an important aspect, you would find many uneducated guys marrying educated/rich girls and the marriages would stick because an uneducated/poor guy would never think of cheating because if he lost someone so good, no one would consider him worthy of someone else's daughter - they would think something was wrong with him. He also said that people usually think that they uneducated are lazy and stupid, whereas they are some of the most hardworking and dymanic enterprenuers - which is true. I often find that many people here are schooled, but not learned. The educated often have academic skills and the uneducated exhibit life skills. Reconciling the two is the challenge for the country, especially developing the skills of the educated. The problem is that there is an inherent tendency among the educated to extract the highest pay for the least amount of work done.

We need a change of attitudes!