What, are they out chasing down the chicken?

Alright enough of the downer posts. It’s time for a funny post. I’ve got a great story that I hope you’ll enjoy. 

I mentioned that I went to Karamoja a few weeks ago. It’s a region in the northeast and is entirely different from the rest of the country. While most of Uganda has gone fairly Western by now, the Karamajong take great pride in their cultural heritage, and have held on strongly to their ways of life. They’re a pastoral people, and make their livelihood mostly from cattle-herding. The area is very rural, very tribal. 

So one night, we went for dinner at a hotel that supposedly had good food. We sat there for about 2 hours before the food was served. I’ve traveled enough to not let long serving times bother me, but the next night we still attempted to have a better experience than that. 

We went to a different hotel at 6:00 and ordered dinner to arrive at 7:30, thinking we could order it then go off to freshen up or whatever and come back and it would be ready. They didn’t have a menu, but verbally told us the options for the evening. We all happened to order chicken and various sides to go with it. 

So we arrived at 7:30 with foolish hopes that our food might actually be ready. Food was served at 9:00. 3 hours after we ordered it! 

The next day we found out what had happened. We made some comment about the long wait to one of the employees, and she burst into apologies. “Oh, I’m so sorry for last night! You know, chicken was over!” (Meaning they were out of chicken) “We didn’t want to disappoint you because you had ordered chicken, so we had to go out and seek for chicken, that’s why it took so long.” 

Oy. Seriously? 

There are so many subtleties in African culture, and saying “no” is a very complicated thing. They never want to disappoint you or tell you “no.” They felt like they would have disappointed us greatly by telling us there was no chicken, so they had to find a way to get it. Really they were disappointing us by making us wait 3 hours! (And really why did they tell us they had chicken in the first place when they didn’t?) I would have been fine changing my order to whatever they had ready! But this is the culture, and in spite of having to wait so long for dinner, I can’t help but just laugh about it all.

Ok, you know how when you go to a restaurant and the food is taking a long time, you joke, “Are they out chasing down the chicken?” 

This time, THEY ACTUALLY WERE OUT CHASING DOWN THE CHICKEN!!