Our family has lived in Uganda for almost 9 years, and we are still learning things about the culture, language, people, and different perspectives. In the past, we have shared funny and not so funny mistakes we’ve made in language and culture. It has been a fun journey (most of the time) and we love learning new things as we continue to dive deeper in relationships with people.

With our return after a 2-month visit to the U.S., we have learned even more lessons these past few weeks. I was sitting in the car with a couple of the mission staff, Grace and Peter, while we waited on Leland to visit a church we all couldn’t get to. (That’s a story for another time.) As we were talking, I asked what card game the kids next to us were playing, and Peter said “matatu”. In my understanding, I always used the word matatu to mean “taxi”. As we were talking, Grace and Peter both said that in Uganda, they do not call taxis “matatu”, but that’s the name of the card game. I was surprised and asked them why they never told us, and they said “matatu” is a Swahili word for taxi, so they assumed that’s what we were referring to whenever we would use the word “matatu.” But Ugandans simply call them taxis. After all these years, we just learned that we have been calling the taxis by the wrong name. [FACE PALM]

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