Swearing In Ceremony

 

My good friend Courtney

 

The Lumasaaba ladies and the two most awesome Peace Corps instructors!

 

The Lumasaaba group and our instructor

Beautiful Bududa District

 

Bududa District, where I stayed a week for language immersion.

A day in the garden...

Our peace corps training also included lessons on gardening and composting - Some pictures from that training:

 

A senior peace corps volunteer teaching us how to make a keyhole garden.

 

The completed keyhole garden.

 

Yes, that's me wielding a machete - I'm trying to cut a jackfruit in half...this was not part of the gardening training, rather something a few of us attempted on the side.

Health for Youth with Parents Involved (Hey-PI)

Hey-PI is a non-profit organization in the Kampala area which we visited during training. The organization involves parents and youth and focuses on HIV testing and counseling, school outreach (including violence education, along with HIV education) and training HIV counselers, among other aims. The day we visited, the youth performed an educational skit for us, and also danced to drum beats.

 

At last! I can now upload pictures!

It took a lot of troubleshooting, but I'm finally able to upload pictures! Hopefully that means I will be sharing photos a little more regularly now. I have tons of photos from training alone, but they will probably have to be uploaded to my blog slowly by slowly.

Below is my language group - We all studied Lumasaaba/Lugeso and consequently live in the same region of Uganda.

 

Last night in America - Note the lovely sushi boat!

 

The last month! What a blur!

So I wrote a new blog this week, but then was rummaging through my belongings and found a blog that I had written about 4 weeks ago, yet never posted. And since I went through the effort of scribbling it on a napkin and everything, I thought I ought to post it before posting my new blog entry.

So this was life approximately 4 weeks ago...

It's been quite a week. Where to even begin? Perhaps I will pick up with the rodents in my bedroom. I declared war on the mice in my room and managed to catch two of them - But in the end, I think they got the last laugh because the noises they made when they got caught in my trap will forever haunt me. I also managed to catch some sort of stomach infection. I am feeling 100% now, but plan on exercising extreme caution in the future, so I will hopefully never experience anything like it again (though I know that it is inevitable that I will get sick here again...whether it be a parasite or a bacterial infection, malaria or whatever, I will get sick again). I also electrocuted my left hand - twice. It happened on a shower at our training center. I'm hoping this will only lead to an awesome super hero power and not any sort of permanent nerve damage. But anyway, perhaps the biggest news this week is that I found out my site! I am going to be working at a baby's home just outside of Mbale and I can't wait to get to site!

And here's life right about now...

It was hard to imagine that training would actually come to an end, but I am finally at site. I was sworn in as an official Peace Corps volunteer two weeks ago and now I'm working at a baby's home just outside of Mbale, which was established by the Catholic Diocese in the late 1960s. The home itself is run by several nuns and support staff: mothers (women who take care of the babies in the home), cooks, cleaning and laundry staff, compound cleaners etc. The home takes in children (ages 0-5) that have been abandoned and those whose mothers have died at childbirth or are too severely handicapped to care for the children. Some of the children have fathers and/or some relatives, others are total orphans. For most of the children, when they reach age 5, the home seeks to either resettle the child with their father or extended family, if they have any, or resettle them in a foster home.

I've been here a little over a week now, and I have already found myself very busy. When I arrived, the baby's home had made a three month plan for me regarding the work for me to do. Last week, I spent time in the home, observing the daily activities of the children and staff, and then I also went and introduced myself to the local leaders in the community. My organization also took me around to other non-profits, clinics, and orphanages in my district. This week, I taught hygiene classes to the staff at the baby's home and next week I will be monitoring the implementation of the methods I taught, as well as planning nutrition classes for the following week.

On the side of this, I am working with my mom to make a website for the baby's home. I really should say that my mom is making it because I have no clue how to make a legitimate website. I am simply providing the pictures and the information. So, thanks mom : )

In terms of adjusting to the new community, I'm getting use to things. Slowly by slowly. I know where the grocery store and produce market are and I am starting to figure out what sort of things I can cook for myself that taste okay and have at least some nutritional value. I've also located the fast internet cafe and a restaurant that serves impressive hamburgers and pizza and another that serves a good breakfast. And thankfully, now that I have started cooking for myself and eating things a little more familiar to me, my stomach and appetite are back to normal.

I'm learning how to get around here as well. It's a bit of a walk into town. Well, to be honest, it's probably not that far, but with the heat I normally don't want to do it. Last week, my supervisor showed me where to catch a mutatu and told me all the correct fees for things, like the bicycle taxis. I took one a few days ago and I have to admit, it was really fun. It was only a bit awkward when the journey home took us up a hill and our pace slowed down to that of a snails. At that point, I could have worked faster and felt a bit like a jerk.

I'm also learning what it means to live next door to a Catholic church. As for living next to a Catholic church, at least the church I live next to really wants to make sure that no one forgets to go to mass. On Saturday evening, the church blasts old hymn music for a couple hours. It's so loud that I can hear the song lyrics crystal clear in my house and Saturday nights I have a bit of a sing-along with the church's loud speakers. So as for as Saturday night music goes, I don't mind it much, the old school stuff doesn't get on my nerves. But come Sunday morning, starting right around 6 a.m., the church blasts contemporary Christian music, ensuring that I will have music that I don't enjoy stuck in my head for at least that day and that I will never sleep in on a Sunday for the next two years. Maybe God is trying to tell me something...

The Countdown

Seven weeks of training down! Only two full weeks of training left and only 1 week until I find out the organization that I will be working with! Training has been really helpful but I am eager to get to site. I'm ready to live on my own again, to begin integrating into my future community and to start work in the field. While I am momentarily in the dark as to what kind of work I will be doing, I am at least comforted to know that I will be living in a beautiful part of Uganda. During week four of training, I was able to visit the Lumasaaba-speaking region of Uganda and was struck by the contrast between central Uganda (where I am currently training) and Eastern Uganda (where I am going). While it took only 4.5 hours to get from training to the site I visited in Eastern Uganda, the weather and the climate were completely different. The region I am going to is tropical, and much cooler and wetter than where I am now - but seeing as I am from Washington, I should feel right at home with all the rain.

Though I am anxious to get to site, I am enjoying what time I have left in training. I love spending time with the other PCVs (and I know soon enough I will be seeing a lot less of them) and enjoy the fact that I am able to do many of my hobbies here. Most mornings I go running with a PCV that lives next door to me. Those of you who know me know that I am not a morning person, but as it gets dark here by 7:30, I tend to fall asleep pretty early and can get up to go running at 6:00 a.m. without a hitch. It also helps that the PCV that I run with also doesn't seem to be much of a morning person either - So we both just put in our ipods and run for thirty minutes, generally without saying more than a few words to each other. Works for me.

I'm fortunate in that not only is there a PCV that lives next door to me that is willing to go running with me at ungodly hours of the morning, but there is also a huge hill behind my house (when you get to the top of it you have a terrific view of the town of Wakiso), which I have gotten in the habit of hiking a couple of times a week as well.

Boredom is a real issue here. Seeing as I've spent a significant amount of time in the last couple of weeks under house arrest due to the riots in Kampala (30 min. from where I live) and that I struggle paying attention during training, much of my energy lately has gone to finding ways to kill time. Sometimes I write creative stories (my most recent work was about the mouse I saw in my room this week) or letters home. Or I help my friend Krissi with the important task of keeping and maintaining the PCV quotation list.

A related quotation:

Ashley: Will, do you ever find yourself doing things simply for the sake of killing time?
Will: Huh? Oh ya, well I stare out my window everyday for an hour and a half, and there's nothing to look at.

End quote.

Case and point.

While there are many things I struggle with (learning a difficult African language, my food options here, the sexism in this culture), there are many things that perk me up as well...things that I look forward to. My morning run, for one. I also enjoy seeing my favorite farmer on the way to school, reading my horoscope and the other volunteers horoscopes during tea time everyday, tea time itself, phone calls from friends and family, and getting into bed at night, completely exhausted and falling asleep to the soothing music radiated from my iPod (maybe the best part of the day).

As you might have gathered, nothing especially important is happening at the moment (Life here seems to fluctuate between being really boring and extremely exciting) The biggest news right now is the furry friend in my room...

How did I discover it? What furry friend, you might ask? Well...

I was sitting in my room on Monday, getting ready for school, when I heard something clawing up my drapes. My stomach tightened at the realization that this could not just be a large insect - they tend not to have claws, as far as I know. In a rare moment, I hoped to only find a giant cockroach in my room - and not what I knew was laying right behind my currents - a rodent. But, wishful thinking did nothing and the mouse exposed itself, running out from behind my curtains and under a chair in the corner of the room. Not only was I helpless to do anything because there was no way I was going to touch the mouse or try to kill it, but I had to leave for training. All through training, I was distraught by the thought of the mouse in my room and immediately after training went and bought rodent glue to try to trap the mouse if it was, in fact, still inside my room. Then I went home and scrubbed my floor with bleach and reorganized my entire room so my clothes would not be available to the mouse to burrow and reproduce in. One of my PC friends said I am OCD, there may be some truth to that, but one thing I do know is that I don't do rodents. I haven't caught him yet....but it's war.

Reading about the mouse in my room may or may not have been a total waste of your time....but the only other news with me is that I have begun working on my qualifying project for Peace Corps. All of the trainees must do a qualify project at the end of training, which is basically a proposal for a project that you would be interested in doing at your future site. So basically, the first part of my project is to write a book of songs for youth that are educational (mostly health oriented messages) over the course of my PC service and make my book available to other volunteers to use in their communities. The second part of what I want to do is help children to perform such music and thus enable them to be peer educators. I am collaborating in the presentation of my project with another PCV who is working on something similar. While we have separate project ideas, we are presenting together because we have teamed up to build musical instruments out of found and/or cheap, locally available materials. We both want to make make music with youth, so our projects share a common thread of trying to make instruments accessible to them. So basically, building the instruments in the fun part of the project. This week, I built and decorated a maraca, we'll see what else I cook up by next Friday....

Made it to Uganda

It took more than a day to get here, but I have made it to Uganda! I, along with all the other Peace Corps volunteers, arrived late on a Wednesday night and jumped right into training, bright and early the next day. Our first stop in Uganda was the Lweza training center, not far from the Entebbe airport, where we stayed for four days. While at Lweza, we had a crash course in Luganda (the most widely spoken language in Uganda), met with the Peace Corps medical staff (who administered our malaria medication and the beginning of a variety of series of shots) and also interviewed with the Ugandan Peace Corps staff, who are still working on selecting organizations for us to work with post-training. On our last day at Lweza, we were assigned to our language groups. While all of the volunteers were excited to find out what language they would be speaking for the next two years, there was the added perk of getting a general idea of where we will be placed after training. While some of the volunteers will continue learning Luganda, there are about 5 or 6 other languages that the volunteers are learning. I am learning Lumasaaba, a Bantu language spoken in Eastern Uganda. While I don't know exactly what village I will be working with, I know that I will be living outside Mbale, the third largest city in Uganda.

So, after finding out our language groups, and after only four days in Uganda, we packed up our stuff at the Lweza training center and moved to Wakiso, a village about 30-60 minutes (depending on traffic) away from the capital, Kampala. There, we nervously met our host families. While one of my biggest fears was not getting along with my host family, all things considered, I would have to say that the living situation at my house is pretty good. I am living with a Muslim family in a very comfortable house. There are three children in the family, who are fascinated by everything I do and like to hover around me, but manage not to drive me totally crazy. And the host family also has a house girl, who I really enjoy hanging out with.

So when I am not at home with my host family, I am at training. Training started the day after we arrived in Wakiso and I am currently beginning my third week of training. Training is good, but the days are long, and I like to remind myself of how far I have come when each week is said and done. I have training 5-6 days a week and a typical day for me looks like this: I wake up sometime between 6-6:30, whenever I can get myself out of bed, I take a bucket bath, brush my teeth and then have tea. I leave my house no later than 7:25 and walk to training, which begins at 8. I study Lumasaaba from 8:00 to 10:00, at which point we have a tea break. After tea, we usually have training on something related to field work, then have lunch at 12:30, then have more field-work based training. I finish training at 5, then either walk home, or go into Wakiso and hang out with PC friends, shop at the market, or use the internet. It gets dark at 7:30 here, so I am virtually always home by then. I take tea around 7 p.m., have dinner at 8 or 9 (Ugandans eat dinner much later than Americans, actually normally they eat even later than this, typically at 10 or 11) and then bathe again. The rest of the night I generally spend studying or hanging out with my host family. I go to bed around 10 or 10:30 and then I do it all over again.

So, as the majority of my time is spent at training, perhaps I should elaborate a little more on what exactly we are learning. Training covers a wide variety of topics. We learn practical things that we need to know for surviving in Uganda, like how to clean our drinking water or cook, and then we learn about topics related to our field of work. Our group is a mixture of economic development volunteers and community health volunteers. So some days we split up and the health people study one thing and the econ people another, but most days we are together. Our training so far has included sessions on malaria, HIV/AIDS, addressing American diversity in Uganda, Ugandan history/economy/government/education, agriculture etc, etc. The training has been highly informative and has also has given me a plethora of ideas concerning projects I might try at my future site. Today, we learned about gardening, composting and solar drying. We spent most of the day outside, where we planted a variety of vegetables and also built a keyhole garden. I took a lot of pictures of the construction of the keyhole garden, which I am hoping to post on the blog soon. I was really excited to learn about gardening and composting because I hope to have a home garden at my future site. We also learned how to build a solar dryer, which can be used to dry fruits and vegetables. I also want to build a solar dryer once I get to site, so hopefully I will be enjoying some dried pineapple and bananas in a few months time!