Over the Hump

I am now in the middle of my fifth week of training, that means only five more weeks! Hmmmm, don’t really know what I feel.. This is the week that we find out specifically where we are going and I think that I will try to update again next week to tell everyone. Details are nice, but I have no idea what to expect because I do not know what the East is like so to give me the name of a town/village won’t really change anything. I don’t know if that is the right emotion to have, but it’s what I feel and I can’t change that.

Right now my primary concern is what the hell I’m going to do when I am out there. I’ve realized that my political science degree is not as useful as I had hoped when I was in school. We have people in our group with real skills that are immediately useful like nutrition, Health Education and engineering and I feel like all I do sometimes is ask questions. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I just worry that when I get out to my site I will have to do a lot of assessment before I actually dig in a do something. The trainers tell us that it is going to be frustrating and difficult; I’m really hoping that it’s not. To steal a line from Diana, I have to hands and hopefully for the first few months that’s enough. Also, I am going to be working for an organization so hopefully will have some direction there.

This past week has been fun and we visited some great NGOs that are doing wonderful work here. The two I can think of off the top of my head are AMREF and Family Planning Association of Uganda. We got to see first hand the work they are doing and I was very impressed and it’s motivating to see.