Exercise 2a: boys playing

The first two days of the trip to Uganda were the best. We did an “immersion”. This - in ActionAid jargon - means being hosted by a family in a village, living the life of our hosts, to get an insight of what “living in poverty” means. I lived with Veronica, her husband and 10 children.

Lot of chatting: when sitting in front of the house, when walking through the villages, and also in the evening, while the radio was broadcasting the Africa Cup matches.

I also helped her to farm and to fetch water; and I learnt to cook the traditional “matooko”. Unforgettable hospitality. I had also had the opportunity of talking loads of pictures, including a few for the exercises. The first set I took looked at the interactions amongst children in the family playing their favourite game, "draft". The board is drawn on the ground, and coffee beans are used as pawns. It is a game of reflection, it is slow, with few sudden movements to place the beans on the board after some thinking, tryign to align them; and ephemeral expressions of joy or disappointment following a move. It was quite difficult to get the timing right, to capture the full extension of a gesture or the funny expressions of the boys. It was also quite challenging to capture the context so that it could be an non intrusive background.

This picture (as the other ones I will upload) belongs to the third set I have done on the game, with different players. By then the novelty of their guest "musungu" (white person) taking pictures had wore off, and they were oblivious (or pretended to be!) of my presence.