I'm back in Uganda and back chatting with taxi drivers. In this case, I was a little thrown off because in the same conversation my Taxi driver both seamlessly dropped an f-bomb and told me "oh, that totally sucks!". My initial reaction was to ask "wow, so you hang out with a lot of Americans, huh?" It wasn't until that moment that I realized that people here don't really curse. That makes sense- cursing in your non-mother tongue is not easy-- I'm not awesome at spontaneous cursing in French or Arabic (okay, I got some good practice in Arabic)-- and perhaps marks the cherry on top of full fluency. But also, people are just way more polite here. So when I heard him swear, my instinct was "American influence". And I was right.
Apparently he served in Iraq. I had forgotten that Uganda was among the "coalition of the willing" and this taxi driver was one of the 10,000 Ugandans deployed to Iraq (I did my homework when I got home). Crazy world.
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