Food Photos (some more food-like than others)

This week I suddenly realized I have never posted anything in this blog about Ugandan food. What kind of web 3.0 American am I?  Actually, I’m the non-foodie, bad-cook kind. But for today I’m joining the more culinarily (not a word, sorry) gifted or restaurant-savvy crowd and doing the very American thing of posting food photos.

The food in this entry will be of two sorts: 1) restaurant food, and 2) home food.

Restaurant food

UCU has four canteens. Yesterday I went to the “Touch of Class” Canteen, which is distinguished by its offering not only of Ugandan-style eats like rice, mashed plantains (matoke), sweet potatoes, and various sauces to ladle over them, but also Western-style fare like chicken and chips. Admittedly one feels a little hesitant to enter a place that touts its quality so blatantly (I never did go to the “Nairobi High Class Butcher” when we lived in Kenya), but Touch of Class turns out to be pretty good. 

So Liz, our downstairs MA-in-psychology-candidate neighbor, and I ordered our food and when it arrived I photographed it. The decision to do this, may I just say, placed me in the embarrassing position of being viewed by my fellow diners as the most gawking sort of tourist. As I stood up to get a good angle on my food I could hear a couple of students walk by expressing astonishment. “What in the world is that crazy white lady doing taking pictures of her lunch?” OK I didn’t actually hear them say it but it was definitely in their tone of voice. I felt marked as a social outcast, but that is the cost of joining the strange, dark world of “food porn” I guess.

Liz ordered matoke, rice, greens, and g-nuts. She also wanted the “Stony” ginger beer bottle to be in the photo. It’s powerful stuff that my oldest son Wesley loves. Apparently it reminds some people of "Buffalo Rock" ginger ale in Birmingham, Alabama. I ordered chapatti (cut into strips for dipping) and g-nuts, with passion juice. G-nuts are small peanuts (ground nuts) roasted then combined with garlic and onion into a soup. The purplish brown color is because of the red hulls. It is delicious. And if you've never had fresh passion juice, well, you've never had fresh passion juice.

But here is the most wonderful part of the story. The two meals plus drinks cost a total of $3. Not $3 each, but $3 total. I don’t know why I even bother to cook anymore.

Home food

And now, speaking of economical dining, a story about food that came to us absolutely free. This morning we woke up, flipped on the overhead light, and found ourselves almost immediately invaded by legions of termites. They came under our door and flew about the living room before shedding their wings and crawling about strangely naked on the floor. They also clustered around Jim's computer screen and interfered with his reading of Ohio State wrestling news. We used to see termites at the beginning of the rainy season in Kenya, and with the rains having started here about 4 days ago we shouldn't have been surprised. We swatted them, stomped on them, and finally swept them up into a pile (see photo below) and threw them away.

Of course, as you have guessed, many people around here would have eaten them. In the villages, where electric lights like ours are rare, termites may be purposefully lured out on the appropriate night after the rains start by burning banana leaves, which are placed next to some sort of pit to trap them. Once they are gathered, I understand that to cook them you pull of the wings and fry the bodies in oil with a bit of onion. They are probably a great source of protein.

After our own harvest we headed out into the darkness to take our children to school in Kampala. You could see the termites swarming around every spotlight and below the brightly lit canopies over the pumps at 24-hour gas stations. It was pretty in a misty kind of way.

Twins in Buganda Culture

When my head of department Prof. Monica Chibita introduces me to people she first mentions the relevant background information one would expect—“Prof. Miller is a Fulbright scholar with us here at UCU who lived in Kenya for many years. . . .” Then she pauses for effect, smiles, and says, “AND she is Naalongo (nah LONG go)!” Typically there is a ripple of appreciation among the listeners. Naalongo means “mother of twins.”

Of course by virtue of the fact that there is actually a word for it in the language, one would guess being a mother to twins is something special here. (There’s also a word for father of twins: saalongo.) Being an American, though, I initially took this aspect of Monica's introduction as more of a mention of fun facts than a communication of critical information. Recently I have learned that I was wrong.

In the U.S. we think it's cute when twins are dressed in identical clothes in toddlerhood, and we assume they maintain a unique bond with each other into adulthood. But to us giving birth to twins is a value neutral event. In contrast, some cultures have traditionally considered twins a curse or a blessing. In some places the understanding bass been that no more than one child should occupy the mother's womb at one time, so the second was presumed to be the spawn of an evil spirit. This was the situation over a century ago in certain parts of Igbo-land in Nigeria when Scottish missionary Mary Slessor arrived. Her influence toward stopping the killing of twins there was perhaps the greatest impact of her work.

Among the Baganda of central Uganda, however, twins are received as heralds of good luck. They are highly honored and admired and so, by extension, are the parents who produce them. According to one acquaintance here, in past years parents of twins were so appreciated that they were allowed to freely gather produce from their neighbors’ gardens. That’s a pretty big deal among subsistence farmers. Ugandan strongman Idi Amin, who bestowed upon himself a litany of grandiose titles, included "Saalongo" right up there with “Last King of Scotland” in the long list of honorifics that every Ugandan school child was required to memorize and recite.

Among the Baganda, as among some other African ethnic groups, there are specific names assigned to the twins themselves. Naming depends on birth order. Readers who know my twins will not be surprised that although we do not know which of them was born first, Joanna immediately claimed the position of eldest, and appropriated for herself the feminine firstborn twin name Babirye (bah BEE ree yeh). That relegated Luke to second-born, and the male version name for the position: Kato (“kah TOE”). It seems Joanna chose well, because popular wisdom says older twins are usually hyper. Younger twins (like Luke?) have the reputation of being sanguine and quiet.

Although twins among the Buganda were uniformly pampered, we suspect our older chldren are unlikely to be impressed. Luke and Joanna will just have to get the most out of their celebrity status in Uganda. When we get back to the U.S. they will no longer get the respect their twinness deserves, and I, alas, will have to give up what turns out to be the most impressive title in my curriculum vitae.

Twin photos below: crossing the Victoria Nile by ferry with Saalongo; Joanna lives up to her rep as the firstborn twin at Murchison Falls; 21st century Kato in safari van.

Red Tailed Monkeys

Friends who follow this blog via Facebook know that I posted just a few days ago. However, in an effort to get back onto my Monday blog posting schedule after moving my blog to a new site, I'm putting up a quick post today. My last post was long and serious. This one is short and frivolous.

One of the biggest memories of our time in Mukono, Uganda will be the red tailed monkeys that live in the woods around our house. As it happens, our rooftop is currently a stop on their regular daily trek from one set of trees to another. So every morning we hear bangs and thumps on our roof as monkeys of all sizes drop off the taller trees in the back, climb over the top of the house (can you spot it?), and swing down the small tree beside our patio in the front. From there they are off to gambol in the yard or play in the trees on the other side. En route in either direction they often hang out on our porch and occasionally observe us through the window. See photos below for part of the fun, including one of the cat that has adopted us observing several monkeys wrestling.

Pied Beauty and Shrink Wrap

Greetings all and welcome to the new location of the 2015 East Africa Sabbatical blog! Those who know me well will recognize that 1) I could not possibly continue blogging at a site that began to charge even a penny for services, and 2) having to change sites majorly challenged my technological mojo. So, thanks for your patience as I slowly got things restarted.

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For years Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Pied Beauty" has reminded me of Africa. Probably all of my readers are familiar with Hopkins, at least by name. He was a Jesuit priest at the turn of the 20th century whose breath taking poetic innovation earned him a place in poets' corner at Westminster Abbey. He is also my daughter Caroline's favorite poet, which is a nearly equivalent point in his favor. 

The poem begins, "Glory be to God for dappled things--for skies of couple-colour as a branded cow, for rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim. . . " and finishes, "All things counter, original, spare, strange. . . He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change. Praise him."

It's dangerous to try to write anything thoughtful or deep after quoting even a line of a Hopkins poem. I've now overshadowed any phrases I could possibly turn out. But what I love about that poem is the praise to our Lord for the irregular and unreliable. That's Africa for sure. 

Here's a microcosm of the kind of difference I'm thinking of between the U.S. and Africa. Let's say you want tomatoes in the U.S. You head to Walmart or Publix or your favorite grocery store. You walk through a door that automatically senses your presence and opens for you and your large rolling cart. You are met with gleaming spotless produce in giant well ordered piles. You can choose between roma tomatoes, grape tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, tomatoes on the vine, beefsteak tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, and maybe even some specialty tomato varieties (turns out there are hundreds). You can buy most of these either organic or, well, not organic. Every few minutes a tiny sprinkler system comes on to hydrate the vegetables. Some vegetables don't even need hydrating because they are packed for you on little styrofoam bases and covered with shrink wrap. They are firm and regular underneath the cellophane. (My favorite is the "stoplight" pepper packages that have a red, yellow, and green pepper arranged in a vertical row like a traffic light. I think it's cute but I never seem to use the yellow peppers.) The supermarket decor is bright, neat, and cheery. Tiny signs tell you exactly how much your potential purchase costs per ounce, and food labels tell you exactly how many grams of saturated fat, sugar, cholesterol, and dietary fiber you are getting in every serving of your breakfast cereal. 

You go to buy tomatoes in Africa and you usually find them along the side of the dusty road either arranged on blankets on the ground or on a wooden stand. They are also in piles--of 4 or 5, 3 in a triangle on the bottom with 1 or 2 sitting on the top, which is how they are priced. They aren't pretty and perfect like American produce (you really notice the difference with the bananas). Your choice of varieties is: tomatoes. You bargain with the woman who owns the wooden kiosk or blanket if you're smart, and then you pay with a small bill otherwise she may have to get the neighboring shop owners to help her make change. When you get home because you're not sure exactly how sanitary the handling of the tomatoes was up to the point you got them, you soak them in bleach water for 20 minutes before using them.

I actually think there's something about the latter scenario that appeals even to Americans. It's at least a small part of the reason, I suppose, that Americans who can easily go to supermarkets nevertheless frequent farmers' markets. When produce is shrink wrapped it feels like there is a barrier between it and real life. Dappled, imperfect things can seem realer.

All of this leads me to a story of human pied beauty. It's on my mind because last week I paid a visit to this very beautiful individual in Nairobi. My friend Mary Kizito was my colleague and my head of department at Daystar University. Mary is a former Catholic nun who had a high position in the communication department of the Catholic Church at the time of Idi Amin's ascension to power in Uganda. Before long it because clear that any misstatement in the Catholic communications that she oversaw might led to her death; people of all sorts were disappearing on a daily basis in those years. Eventually she was indeed arrested, together with the Catholic archbishop, for a brief comment about Israel by a guest preacher on a Catholic radio program. (Those were the days after the raid on Entebbe). The archbishop and Mary were released after waiting for 9 hours in police custody for Amin to issue an order of execution. For whatever reason he changed his mind. 

After Amin was deposed and Obote came to power Mary escaped an angry mob who were massacring members of her ethnic group by hiding under a mattress for 8 hours. For about two of those hours members of the vigilante group sat on the very mattress under which she lay, not daring to move, and discussed strategies for locating their victims. Through all of this Mary's high level job in the church took her out of the country on a regular basis. She could have easily defected but she chose to stay.

After Uganda lurched into peace, Mary obtained a masters degree in the U.S. and settled in to teach communication in Nairobi. In that capacity she mentored hundreds of students and many faculty members including me. All the while she used 40% of her small salary to support several nieces and nephews back in Uganda who had been orphaned, taking them from primary school through college and generally keeping much of her family in Uganda afloat. She also adopted a Kenyan student who had lost her mother. Mary's life was about as un-shrink wrapped as you can get. 

Mary is now in the late stages of ovarian cancer, and at this moment as I write this I'm thinking of how deeply I marvel at her pied, counter, original, spare strange beauty. 

Praise Him.

Blog Moving and Hair Styling

Hi everyone,

My apologies for being late posting this week. It turns out Postach.io is discontinuing their free blog service, so I'm working on switching platforms. Because I want to move the old posts over to the new site, it may take me a bit longer before I can get things organized.

Meanwhile, I'm posting a photo record of Joanna's hair styling appointment on Saturday. For those among my readers who aren't familiar with the process, it is a marathon beautification effort that requires patience from all concerned. At the top is the outside of the house where a lady uses her small sitting room as a salon. Next two photos are Joanna mid-do, and last, the final result (no, Joanna is not choking the cat, though it looks like it). My older daughters and I typically do this in the U.S. and our fingers are mightily enjoying the break.

Total cost for 5 to 7 hours of labor? About $11 and I actually think I was overcharged.

Frustrations of International Research

International research regularly takes longer to accomplish than domestic research, but the project that colleagues Will Kinnally, Nancy Achieng' Booker, Hellen Maleche and I are trying to accomplish in Nairobi right now should win some sort of prize.

We are trying to study Kenyan youths' media use and their response to sexual content. The plan was to begin with a survey of students from several local high schools, after which Will would arrive from the U.S. to work with Nancy and Hellen to get a few students started with keeping daily media diaries.

When it came time to do the survey in January, the teachers at all of the public high schools across the country went on a two week strike. We couldn't even contact the schools to arrange any meetings, much less conduct a survey. About the time Will arrived, and while we were still figuring out how to catch up from that debacle, the Kenyan government shut down access to all non-cable TV stations in a strange move toward migration from analogue to digital platforms. That was two weeks ago and the TV stations are still not available. So right at the critical points of our data collection on youth and media we have: first no youth and then no media.

le sigh.

So You Want Me to Bring my Husband. . .

Sitting in on a class in the masters of public health leadership programme I heard this story, which I think is a great example of how the best laid public health plans can have unintended consequences. 

In recent years clinics involved with antenatal care have apparently begun to urge pregnant mothers to bring their husbands to their appointments. Makes sense, right? Get the father involved from before the birth, get his support for preventive care, increase father-child bonding, and so on.  In fact, many clinics refuse to give certain aspects of care if the mother comes alone. The only problem with this is that for a rural woman who spends her days working in subsistence farming and caring for multiple children, the visit to the antenatal clinic may be her one chance to get out from the house and have some time alone. Many women don’t want to bring their husbands.

Such women are faced with a dilemma, but humans are creative. Here I must break the flow of the story to explain that in Uganda we have boda bodas, what you might call a poor man’s taxi. These are motorcycles that the owners use to carry people around, sometimes two passengers deep, for short to medium distances. With traffic around Kampala as bad as it is, these boda guys do a hopping business weaving in an out of lanes as well as transporting people to remote homesteads that are inaccessible by public transport. It’s crazy dangerous for everybody including pedestrians, but you can see it’s meeting a need. Now back to the story: expectant mothers get the boda drivers to go one step further, and come in to the antenatal clinics to pose as their husbands. On occasion clinic personnel may notice the same man coming with different women, but after all, Uganda has a history of polygamy. Sometimes the “fathers” looks extremely disengaged from the medical proceedings, but then again some fathers are like that. How is a doctor or nurse to know? The only somewhat effective solution to this problem from the healthcare provider perspective we heard was one agency’s incentive of free t-shirts for accompanying husbands. Women were unwilling to let the free clothing go to the hired transport, so they came in with the real deal. Oh the complexities of providing healthcare to real people!

Photo 1 below: Boda with passenger in front of roadside furniture store and Kampala skyline

Photo 2 below: Waiting for business at a roadside produce market

Photo 3 below: Boda with cargo

Mosquito Nets

Mosquito nets remind me of ads for hotels in Sumatra where the furniture is made gently gleaming teak wood and there is a massive steamer trunk with ornate brass hinges at the foot of the four poster bed. Tropical and exotic. I love them.

But for our lives at the moment they are an entirely practical matter. Our windows here at UCU have screens, but a number of the screens have holes, so everybody sleeps under mosquito nets. Of course the problem with the mosquitos here is that they carry malaria. In our family only our oldest son Wesley has had a case of malaria, and that was after visiting a heavily malarial area on the Kenyan side of Lake Victoria. Malaria is definitely something one wants to avoid. 

Mosquitos can smell your blood in your little safe haven under the net, and they try their best to get in. If they are doing that near your ear you will hear this buzzing that goes in cycles as they approach the net and bounce off and approach again. At certain seasons there will be multiple ones outside the net, and the sound is truly symphonic, though I find it uncomfortable to think that a chorus of predators is singing for my blood just inches away. You have to be careful that you don't rest a hand or foot against the net as you sleep or you may wake up with red dots all over a tiny portion of your body where the mosquitos were able to bite you through the net. (I have no biological information on this, but it's clear to me that mosquitos in east Africa are a different species or sub-species than those in North America, because when they bite you it doesn't raise a whelp, and if you can refrain from scratching it for the first few minutes it won't itch again.) If you get up in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature, in addition to fending off the mosquitos that follow you to the toilet, you have to lift up and replace the net very quickly so none of them slip under and get you later. 

This morning I woke up to find a mosquito had been inside the net overnight and, judging from red dots all over my ankle, feasting rather well.

Photo 1: Traditional Mganda religious shrine to river spirit at a waterfall down the road. You can see the calabashes for offerings of traditional beer if you look really closely.

Photo 2: Mosquito net

Washing Machines

One of the most striking differences between the “developing” and “developed” worlds is how much more time it takes people in the former just to manage everyday life.  You don’t have a car, so you walk everywhere or ride public transportation. You can’t afford pre-cut or prepared foods, so every meal is a time-consuming production. But what we residents of the wealthy West may never have thought of is how much time people in the developing world spend washing clothes.

In East Africa most people wash their laundry by hand, either their own hands or those of someone they hire for the job. If you’ve never washed a pair of jeans by hand, let me tell you it is hard work. I remember two decades ago in Kenya when I had three small children, including an infant in cloth diapers, I found myself for a period of weeks without someone to help me do laundry. I spent at least two hours a day washing clothes. When that brief phase of my life mercifully came to a close my husband Jim declared we would never go through that again. The physical labor had made me terribly grumpy.

So for university students here in Uganda, no dropping quarters or shillings in the Laundromat. Guys and girls alike scrub their clothes in a sudsy bucket of water, wring them out, and hang them up on the communal drying lines.

(Below: laundry lines outside the men’s hostel at UCU on an unfortunately windy afternoon. There's often at least one student outside of the frame of the photo to the left bending over a plastic laundry tub.)

Of course the most important outcome of washing all your clothes by hand isn’t physical exhaustion—African women aren’t as wimpy as I am. As Swedish professor of public health Hans Rosling points out, the hours women all over the world spend hand washing every day are hours not available for going to the library, training their children, educating themselves, and engaging in a whole range of creative pursuits. For this reason Rosling calls the washing machine the greatest invention of the industrial revolution.  (See the link below for his TED talk on the washing machine plus other marvelous videos on public health. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/)

So, if you’re at home when you read this and you’ve got a washing machine, walk into your laundry room right now and thank God for it. It's revolutionizing your life and you didn't even know it!

Cultural Differences in Sex and Media

My research project addresses the association of the increasing level of sexual content in East African media with youths’ sexual attitudes and behavior. Most previous research on that has taken place in Western nations, so for the past three weeks our research team has been working to contextualize our material to the Ugandan context. Here are a few examples of differences we’re adjusting for:

Parents and “the talk” 

Researchers sometimes delve into how messages on the media about sex differ from other sources of “sexual socialization” in youths’ lives like parents, schools, houses of worship. In the U.S. it’s the parents’ job to give “the talk” to their kids, and it strains the imagination to think of explaining sex to your nieces or nephews. In many Ugandan societies, though, the opposite it true. Traditionally parents didn’t explain sex to their children. That was the job of same-sex aunts and uncles. 

Types of media used among youth

American youths watch huge amounts of TV, so studies in the U.S. about the effects of sexual content in entertainment media have historically centered around TV.  Parents also worry about their children running into pornography on the Internet, or sending nude or semi-nude photos out over Instagram or Twitter. In contrast, only 40% of Ugandans have ever watched TV. 11% of Ugandans have ever used the Internet. Ugandan youth may, however, go to “bibandas” (film halls) which are tiny little businesses, just shacks really, where you can pay a few shillings to come in and watch videos of TV shows and movies ranging in subject from sports events to sitcoms to pornography.  This is what parents worry about. (These places are also called Play Stations in some areas, which confused me mightily for about a week!)

Sex-related behaviors

“Friends with benefits” —the practice, most often on college campuses, of having sex with a friend without any expectation of romance—has been a phenomenon in the U.S. for some years now. No use asking about that here, though; it’s not a familiar idea. A different type of arrangement for obtaining sex without expectation of romance is common in Uganda: sugar daddies (and, occasionally, sugar mommies).  

All that is to say I’m reminded of what I’ve learned in the past: when you do cross-cultural research you can usually get answers to your questions. The problem is that you may be asking entirely the wrong questions.

Loving Africa

One of my colleagues wrote saying that it sounds like we are having some comfort issues, but otherwise we are enjoying ourselves. I should probably clarify that any comfort issues I write about are in the way of reminisces you might have about your childhood home--maybe the kitchen door squeaked, or, like in It's a Wonderful Life, the knob at the bottom of the bannister always came off, but that's part of what you love about going home. It's the familiarity that endears it to you. We are very happy to be back in the red dirt (though there's definitely more of it in semi-rural Mukono than in Nairobi).

One thing I love about Africa is that the higher levels of need here call forth higher levels of human creativity. I never cease to be amazed at the dedication of innovative East Africans to meet the needs around them. For example:

--Here at UCU three obstetricians--two Ugandan and one Canadian--saw in their own medical practices that the maternal mortality rate in Uganda was 150 times higher than in Western nations. So they envisioned starting a multidisciplinary masters in public health leadership program that would train graduates to go out and influence society toward lowering maternal mortality, and they are dedicating mother-and-child-friendly hospitals that do simple things like put up a curtain in the delivery room for privacy, and have a dedicated free mobile phone system for trained birth attendants. Have a look at http://www.savethemothers.org for more information.

--In Kenya a member of our church who had many years of experience with National Outdoor Leadership Program recognized that traditional rites of passage were not only dying out but did not provide appropriate socialization for youth to become strong Christian adults. So he started an intensive ropes and outdoor course for kids before their first year of high school. See http://www.tanari.org.

--A friend who was interning at our local church in Nairobi realized that little was being done for HIV-positive women in nearby Ongata Rongai so she started an income-generating ministry with a small clinic that has grown into a beautiful facility that now addresses health, education, economic empowerment, and issues related to youth. This is "Beacon of Hope" (http://www.beaconafrica.org/en/).

These are just a few examples from a very long list. It is a privilege to be in mother Africa just to watch and learn. 

Freedom of Speech, Dirt

On January 7, 12 members of the staff of Charlie Hebdo magazine were massacred in Paris by Islamic extremists. Political leaders from all over the world as well as ordinary Parisians responded by marching for freedom of speech 4 days later. Less than a week after the massacre a violation of freedom of the press took place in Uganda. A senior Ugandan police officer was arrested last week and accused of beating several journalists as they covered a protest march against unemployment. Ten reporters in all were injured and two ended out in the hospital. Last I heard one was still there, though I may have missed news on his condition. When I was in Kampala to attend a required security briefing at the U.S. Embassy the next day, we passed a crowd surrounding what appeared to be the release of the police officer into the public on bail.

Journalists have been beaten to death in Uganda as recently as 2010. However, this sort of action has become uncommon of late, according to my colleagues in the mass communication department here, and indeed, there was a public outcry afterward. The beating does serve as another reminder, though, of how fragile the linchpin freedoms of speech and the press can be.

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And now a note on a more mundane topic: dirt. If you reside in the U.S. you may not realize how  important sidewalks are to your life.  It’s dry season here in Mukono, and what with no tarmacked roads or sidewalks within about ½ mile of campus, everybody trudges through piles of red dirt all day long. This dirt is persistent stuff. It creeps up the sides of buildings as if to envelope them from the bottom up in watery red-brown. 

The dirt leads you to engage in all sorts of rituals. When my research team came over to the house for a meeting on our front porch the other day, I noticed one of my team members carefully take out a tissue and wipe off the chair she was going to sit in. In the U.S. you might think such a person was OCD, but in fact she was taking actions any reasonable person would take to protect her clothes. Ugandans are always prepared with tissue to wipe off their shoes when they reach their destination, because whatever color the shoes started they will have transformed into a dusty burnt sienna. Slow-on-the-uptake Americans like me never remember to load our pockets with tissue and walk around looking unprofessional. And if you’re wearing sandals . . . well let’s just say the need for Jesus’s disciples to have their feet washed at the end of a long day on the roads around Jerusalem now resonates with me. The dirt also dictates that you can't wear clothes twice before washing or the dirt might set. No more of that "Just wear your jeans again tomorrow" stuff.

In about two months the rains will start and the dirt will turn to sienna-colored mud. At that point I expect we will need to adopt another practical East African habit: leaving our shoes at the front door.

Photo below: Rural Uganda