Let's take a long walk

Hello again friends!
I hope that you enjoyed the pictures on the last post. That is my life here. Today, I walked from my village to town. The walk actually started last night after dinner at Karine's house. We then walked to my house and slept until 5am, when we woke up and walked to Josh's house. From there we took 5.5 hours to walk in the mountains the 16 miles to town. It was hard, but fun, the mountains were lovely and the company was great. Once in town, we went to an Indian restaurant and I am going swimming at Mbale resort after this. Tough life, no?
Work has been going slowly, but I finally had a breakthrough on Friday when I was able to teach a class and have a question and answer session with about 12 mothers and fathers. I had a lot of fun with that and working at this health center so it runs a little better is my main project right now. I am still looking for other things to do, but it's hard when the people I work with are all volunteers in their own right and trying to feed their families. That can be a bit frustrating sometimes, but, that's what I am working with.
I had a great Thanksgiving with some friends here. We slaughtered (actually, josh slaughetered because I wussed out) 2 chickens. We roasted one and made a soup with the other. Both turned out wonderfully. We also had sweet potatoes with coconut milk, which was delicious and I suggest you try it. It was good to be around friends and it made the holiday not lonely, like I thought it would. Sure beats a 15 hour shift at 1789 with bratty families.
I hope everyone is well, I miss and love you all!

Pictures!

One Week Down!

Hello Friends!

It’s been a long time, I know. I would say I’m sorry, but I’m not. These past few weeks have been a blur of activity and training and all of a sudden training ended and now I’m at site and everything has stopped. There aren’t many highlights from the last couple of weeks of training. I worried for a little bit about passing my language test, but I passed and I was officially sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer last Thursday.
Now I am at site and everything is completely different. I have gone from structured days in a bubble full of Americans to having to figure it out in rural Uganda. I am not alone though; there are three other volunteers close by, which I am happy about. The way that Peace Corps operates in Uganda is that they place volunteers with a local organization or school so that there is more work and less time figuring it out. Some volunteers are placed in larger, well structured organizations with a clear mission and lots of work to do. Others are placed in organizations that are less structured and the work largely depends on the volunteer’s initiative. I’m in the second type, which means that sometimes there is something to do and other times no. I have spent the last week introducing myself to important members of the community and visiting schools. I have some ideas about work that I want to do but they will take some time and planning. I think, with time, I will be able to do some good work here.
My village is beautiful. It’s in a valley between two mountain ranges and it looks like a mix between Northern Georgia and Northern Spain. The weather is cool and the air is crisp and the villages and schools that I will be working in are in the mountains so I will be doing a lot of trekking into the hills. I feel very lucky to be here. My house has been cleaned up a bit and I am getting furniture made. It is becoming more and more mine soon enough I will have a comfortable routine.
So far, being at home a lot I have been feeling a little lonely at times. Last Monday and Tuesday I did not see any Americans and I think that is the longest I have ever gone without seeing any. It’s a strange feeling and it makes me homesick for the comforts of my culture. But, that is in part why I am here is to immerse myself into another culture. I think the adjustment is going to be harder than I thought it would be.
Lastly, my village is in the mountains and there is hardly any power and definitely no internet. My only connection is when I go into Mbale and that will be once or twice a month. I will try to update the blog then and send some emails, but it will definitely be less often then before. At the same time please keep sending me emails because it would suck if I came into town twice a month and my only emails were from my parents and spam. I’m out. Later.

I am in Mbale for the day. I have a new address now. Send me an email if you want it.

The satisfying thud

Blog 9.17.

Hello again friends I hope that all is well in the world. I am assuming that everything is ok because no one has told me otherwise. Also, if someone could send me an email telling me how the UVa football team is doing, that would be great.

One of the expectations of every Peace Corps volunteer is that they will become violently ill at some point in the next two years. I have been 85-90% most the time and am ready for my body to explode suddenly. Medical does a good job every week of telling us all of the diseases and bugs that we can possibly get in Uganda. There are parasites, amoebas, diseases, and the three days of uncontrolled diarrhea that can’t be explained but you survive and hope doesn’t happen again. Usually it’s just food poisoning so it passes pretty quickly. So far mostly everyone in our group has felt ill at some point. Two people have been treated for Giardhia and two people (not including myself) think they have it. Fun! In the past few weeks my bowels have made themselves present more than I am used to or appreciate. I like to know that my GI tract is working, but lately it has been reminding me almost every moment of every day. My stomach is constantly rumbling and gas is constantly coming out of both ends (though I have yet to have the “Big D”).
I think that this is a good time to talk about waste management in Uganda. In Uganda there are two acceptable places to use the bathroom. There is the popular and widely known pit latrine for every day use. That was a big obstacle for me as the hole is only 8 inches by 4 inches, a lot smaller than I expected. Squating and aiming is hard but the “satisfying thud” has been one of Uganda’s most pleasant surprises, especially since it's a 30 foot drop (though not hearing it is one of the most horrifying things that happens). At night Ugandans (and therefore me) do not use the pit latrine because they are outside and it is incredibly dark and most people do not have flashlights. So let me introduce you to the susu, which is just a bucket with a lid that you use the bathroom in at night; mine is a purple pitcher. In the morning you walk out to the latrine and empty it out. I think that if you ask any volunteer here, they will have a susu story to share. There are two problems with the susu and therefore usually two types of stories. The first is that a lot of people knock them over which is messy because you have to clean it up, which is its own problem. Families here don’t have paper towels or conventional mops so most people end up using their clothes and you have pee-soaked clothes in your room until you can wash it. On top of that there is usually no electricity so all the cleaning is done in the dark or by headlamp. The second problem is when people get violently sick in the middle of the night and all you have is a bucket. Not pretty (not that it has happened to me, but there have been some stories) but a part of life here.
The food here is great! Actually not amazing, but full of potential. The staple food here is Matooke, which is made from mashed plantains. Basically, the plantains are wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed for hours, then mashed. This is served almost everyday for lunch and dinner. To give it flavor, there is ground nut sauce, which is ground peanuts mixed in boiling water and stirred until enough water evaporates and it becomes a thick sauce. That is the main course. Usually on the side there is a combination of cabbage or eggplant, avocado, papaya, pasta, greens (kale, I think), potatoes and a number of other things that you can plant here. Mostly, the food prepared for me is edible and pretty good, but I am really looking forward to getting to my site and playing with new, fun ingredients. In my next entry I will talk about jackfruit and other foods.
On Saturday we went to jinja to see the source of the nile and explore the east a little bit. It only makes me more excited beacuase the east is beautiful. This is getting long. Later.

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.

Things are great!

Right now and for the last three weeks I have been in Luweero training to become a Peace Corps Volunteer. As of yet, I am not officially a volunteer, but a trainee. It’s a distinction that I don’t usually make, but the trainers make sure to constantly note. The big question seems to be what we are training for and how is the training conducted. Well, honestly, I don’t know. That is not a criticism, it just seems like the point of training is to prepare us for an unknown, possibly bad situation. At times, that can be frustrating, but I think that’s just preparation for future frustrations. And isn’t that the point?
Training is six days a week from 8am to 5pm (except Saturday when it’s 8am-1pm). I wake up at 6:45 and get two buckets of water from the tank outside for my bucket bath. Actually, in the morning I just wash my face and wet my hair and leave the second bucket for the next person. I then have breakfast which is coffee and an omelet three days a week and bananas or other fruit the other days. Then I cram a little language for fifteen minutes and leave at 7:30 to meet Megan and Karine for our walk to our training site. Language is from 8-10 then we have a break for tea and usually bananas. We then either have medical or security or some other technical training until lunch at 12:30. The afternoon is more technical training, usually in health, which is good because we are all health volunteers. We have been on a few field trips to some local NGOs and other facilities around the communities. If anyone wants to look to work for a great organization I recommend looking into “The Hunger Project”(www.thp.org) based in New York. We got to see the work that they do in Uganda and it’s pretty incredible.
After training we have been trying to do some activity to unwind on most days. As I mentioned earlier, we have a Journal Club but that’s just an excuse to go to the bar and get something to drink before we go home to our families. It reminds me a lot of the end bit from “Bigger and Blacker”. We head home around 6:45 when it starts getting dark. When I get home I usually take a full bucket bath (when I’m good I only use one bucket) then I study or read until dinner which has been exactly at 8:30. I think that my next entry will be about the food and diet here. It’s something I am very excited to play with once I am at site.
Now I feel like I’ve gotten some of the general information out of the way and I can get into some of the other things we have been doing around Luweero. This past weekend was the best one thus far in Uganda. It started on Friday when I was able to get meat on a stick for lunch during training. I think that meat on the stick is and will remain my favorite thing about this country. For 500 shillings (30 cents) you can get a kebab of goat or beef and it’s delicious. I think that once I am at my site I will live on meat on a stick. Anyways, back to Friday. After training Diana and I decided that we would try to share a bike. That is not as weird as it sounds, it’s common here. Here you can grab a ride on the back of a bike and you can find up to four people on one Hero bike (made in India). The plan was that I would ride and Diana would sit on the back side saddle (because she has to wear a skirt). That didn’t work, it wasn’t even close. So we switched and I was on the back and we rode down the main drag of Luweero to the bar. At the bar the whole group got together to make and eat chips and salsa which Diana had a hankering for since Philadelphia. That worked out wonderfully and everyone was happy until the bar ran of beer. Yup, that happens here and it sucks. Most people went home and a small group of us went out to a bar/hotel out of town a bit. We stayed out until 10 which is unheard of during training. That was the most we have been able to let go since we got here and that what made it such nice Friday.
Quickly, the past week has also been a hoot outside of two scary incidents that I wrote about separately. We had a bbq yesterday with hamburgers and other great american foods. I don't realize I miss them until I get them. Here's hoping everything is well at home!

I washed a potato!

Micheal Vick is going to jail? Someone let me know. Is superbad as good as I hoped it would be? Did I miss anything major?

So, unsurprisingly, there is a lot to talk about. I’ve been in country now for two weeks and though a lot has happened at the same time not much has. As some of you may know, my very first day in country was also my birthday. There was an attempt to get an announcement made on the airplane and to send me champagne, but Air Brussels flight attendants are not as reliable as they pretend to be. I was getting my passport stamped in Entebbe as the clock struck 12 on August 9. It was a very long day because we drove from the airport to our hotel/resort where there was tea waiting for us. We stayed up until 1:30am then went to bed only to wake up at 7 to begin training. We went to bed around 11 pm and by the end of the day we were all ready to stop caring about me specifically. It was a good day. After a few days in Entebbe we went to Luweero to begin our official training. So far so good, it’s been two weeks and all I will say about that is that I am learning a lot, both about Uganda and about the US. I am learning Lumasaba which is a Bantu language spoken in districts near the border with Kenya. I’ve been told that the language manual that we are given by the Peace Corps is one of the only places you will find the language written. I think that’s pretty neat, though may not be useful later in life. Or maybe it will be, who knows.

In Luweero I, with the help of my friend Diana, have begun our first secondary project. It’s a journal club for those of us in our groups that want to be good a journaling but find that we don’t do it. Mostly it’s an excuse to go to a bar and have focused conversation. And no, there are no Ugandans in the group. Baby steps.

Now I am in the southwest in a village near a town call Bushyeni in Mbarara on my volunteer. Every step of the trip has increased my faith in cars and the ability of people to fit in small places. From Luweero to Kampala we were in a cab that looks like a VW bus. We managed to fit 16 people in that. I thought that was pretty impressive, but it was nothing like what I just rode in to get to this town. The taxi driver fit 9 peoplein a late 1980s or early 90s Toyota corona we traveled on a road that I would have been uncomfortable taking a Range Rover on. The cabbie drove fast and it was a hoot. It seems like if I am ever bored here I can now know a cheap way to get a thrill.

This place is very nice and it many parts of it feel familiar. Luweero is not the nicest place in the world, but it reminds me a lot of Argentina. There are many parts of Uganda that remind me of Argentina. In the southwest it looks like northern Spain, which is my favorite part of that country. It is green and lush with rolling hills. I took pictures of that and of the car we fit nice people in but I don’t think I will get to put that on now. The windmills are missing, the roads are not as nice and the people look a little different, but the countryside it familiar and that is comforting in a way.

Also, not everything is great. The kids here have a habit of shouting "Hi Muzungu" everytime you walk by. At first you feel like a celebrity and everything is gravy, but lately it's been frustrating. Diana (whatareugandado.blogspot.com) described it perfectly by comparing it to kids in america shouting "cow!" everytime you pass a cow. But instead of that cow being in a field in the country imagine it alone by a freeway. Uganda's median age is 14.9 years so there are a lot of kids shouting. I'll get used to it I know, but it makes me want to move to a remote village rather than a city. That, and the beds are uncomfortable.

That is all for now. If you were waiting for that entry, sorry. I get frustrated with dialup and people always seems to be ahead of me. I will try to do it more, it just takes a lot of effort. I don't have pictures up yet, but there are pictures of me on Renee's blog. go to www.peacecorpsjournals.com/ug.html and look at the "living life and loving it" blog.

Para mis tios, primos y mis abuelos: lo estoy pasando muy bien y conociendo gente nueva. Uganda es muy lindo y hay parted que me hace recorder Argentina y Restistencia especialmente. La clima es casi lo mismo y las calles son peores que de los Argentina. Me encanto cuando me llamaron y cuando colgamos sali de mi dormitorio y la familia me estaba esperando para comer. Oops. Siguen llamando y por favor manden correo,electronico y en papel.