Deirdre Newman
When Kelsey Long was considering her options for study abroad after
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, her family encouraged her to go to the
country she had chosen -- Uganda.
"My mom was like, 'go, hide out, you'll be fine,"' Long said.
So Long, 21, who will be a senior at Boston College in the fall,
embarked on a three-month stint in Uganda and immersed herself in the
country.
Long, who grew up in Newport Beach, said the opportunity enabled her
to focus on development studies, which is part of her major, and learn
about the Ugandan culture.
"I learned that there are so many cultural influences on health and
health care," Long said. "Now I would probably get mad at someone that
says that nutrition and malnutrition are completely because of lack of
food."
Long said she chose to study in Africa because she wanted a continent
that was not as accessible to Americans as Europe. She picked Uganda
because of the program's focus on development studies and because it is
an English-speaking country since it was a former British colony. She
also gravitated toward Africabecause she had spent time in Zimbabwe when
she was 17.
Upon arriving in Uganda on Jan. 31, Long said she was immediately
overwhelmed by the country's potent smell.
"It was like a compost heap -- dark and warm but with a burning
tinge," Long said. "There's humidity, heat and lots of vegetation. . . .
It's hard to recreate. Maybe if you were in the South [United States] on
the hottest morning at dawn and you stuck your head in the dirt and
burned something nearby."
Long was placed with a host family in the village of Nabutiti, a
suburb of the capital, Kampala. Her family included mother Ereth, sisters
Racheal and Gertrude and brother Ivan. Two of the other siblings were
away in boarding school and their father worked in a different part of
the country and only came into the village on the weekends.
Because her host family was under the impression that Americans did
not share bedrooms, they cleared out the biggest bedroom in the house for
her while the rest of the family was packed into one room. Long quickly
dispelled that misconception, she said.
"I made one of the sisters move in with me," Long said.
She also grew accustomed to differences between the U.S. and Uganda
like using pit latrines, with the occasional cockroaches creeping around,
and using a cup full of water to wash her hair.
As part of the program, she took classes in Swahili -- one of Uganda's
