Settling In

Hello America. How are ya?

It has been a long time since I have written and I’m sorry. Sadly you won’t hear all that has happened to us in this post, simply because today was awesome/challenging/interesting and felt that I should share it.

I would like to call this post “Settling In”.

This morning I woke-up while it was still dark outside (before 7am). I woke-up to the sounds of my neighbors starting their day and about 50 roosters making their crows. I mean we do have over two hundred chickens between 20 and 50 feet from our back door. You know, the usual.

I then proceeded to get up and join Tony in the other bedroom because at the moment we do not have a mattress big enough for two and we need to sleep under mosquito nets. Hopefully sometime this week we can travel 20km by public taxi to Mbale to get said mattress. This would be approximately 45 minutes by taxi with Tony and I sitting on top of our closest friends. The taxis have 15 seats but on our last ride there were 20 adults and under the seats were as many chickens as could fit; they were being sold at the market. I digress.

Breakfast was pancakes and honey. No homemade passion fruit juice this morning but I’ll make more later. Then after getting ready (aka business casual and me in a skirt) we headed over to Tony’s school St. Theresa’s to catch up with everyone. Last week their one month break started and this week they are reviewing material with the seniors before their tests. No real break for these students or teachers.

I went over to my school St. Mary’s and met with Jane, my counterpart. She was creating a workshop schedule (the morning the workshop started) because the facilitators hadn’t arrived yet. She also had tests from last term on her desk that she didn’t know if she would get to grade. No worries though because there is no real set deadline. Now this sounds worse than it actually is because truth be told a schedule couldn’t be worked out unless everything was finalized/confirmed, and well, who finalizes/confirms anything these days?

After tea, I met up with Tony and his counterpart, Deo, to head into town and see the market. Our schools are not in the town of Bukedea but are about a 30 minute walk outside of town. It is a nice walk because it is very flat compared to our training site, Wakiso, but on a hot day there is no shade.

Every Monday is market day and this market is Huge! It is the largest in the district and so tons of venders come in from the major towns and sell produce, meat, dry goods, soap, toys, hardware, animals, bikes, beer, you name it they have got it. And the people are really nice too. They saw us “musugots” (white people/foreigners) and once we started speaking Ateso they smiled and laughed. They were very patient and helpful as we tried forming sentences and explaining what we wanted. This also helped us get the real prices of items. Here is a reason to be jealous of us, we bought a sigiri grill today for 4,000 Ush. That is, we bought a local mini charcoal grill for $2! Yea you’re jealous.

Then Tony and I decided to head into town to buy a 120 Liter water jug. On the walk in we followed to old railroad tracks. The Chinese built up the railroads in Uganda but soon after they handed it over to the Ugandans it slowed/stopped. Not sustainable sadly. On the walk in we had one child walk with us. Sadly our Ateso isn’t great yet to carry on conversations beyond 10 minutes.

Town was full with so many people coming and going from the market. It was cool to see one woman on a bicycle taxi carrying a stock of sugar cane that just had to be 8 feet tall. Walking down the street we decided to get lunch at a local restaurant. Their goat was amazing! It has to be my favorite meat here. We don’t have it in the states (at least where I live) and it is really tender and delicious. Plus the restaurant didn’t chop it up into small chunks so the meat had texture and only a few bone fragments.

Purchasing the tank was easy enough, only 18,000 Ush, and we spent time with the motorcycle and bicycle taxi drivers. The Boda-Boda’s. Now sadly boda-boda drivers have good and bad raps. They are often reckless young men trying to earn a living. However, there are a number of boda-boda drivers that are educated unemployed men with families to feed. It is hard to go beyond the stereotype but talking with them helps. We were practicing Ateso and today began talking about forming community projects with them. I see great potential here.

Once we were back at home Tony went over to his school to make lesson plan outlines. I stayed back and read. I am almost done with my second book since we have arrived in Bukedea nine days ago. It’s awesome!

Then in an effort to actually settle into our house I went at cleaning the bedroom. However, after noticing a hole in my screen I decided to create a messy project. You see, in Uganda windows often do not have screens. This can be for many reasons but our problem is that our windows open and close funny. They open like shutters and close with a metal bar latch inside the window. If you think about it, that means we have one of two options; either have a screen or have the ability to open our windows.

So you may be asking yourself what screen did I actually fix. Well, have you ever seen fancy cinder blocks or bricks that people use to decorate their landscape with? They often have holes in them. Well in Uganda homes have these “holie bricks” as a type of ventilation system and they put screens over these.

I went outside and with the help of Julius, my three year old nephew (he calls my auntie), I cleaned and screened the holie bricks. They were gross with lots of dust and a few old wasps nests. My neighbors must have thought I was crazy because after dusting I cut up a mosquito net and stuck it to the bricks using flour and water. A perfect homemade glue actually.

Then a sad thing happened, I went to the bore-hole (water well) at around 5:30pm. That is prime time for water collection and lots of people were there. I talked with one guy for a while and practiced language. I have so much to learn! But while I was practicing language I put my jerry can jugs in the “line” to wait my turn to fill up. However, the concept of a line is really arbitrary because my jerry cans didn’t move for over an hour. I didn’t mind waiting my turn but then obviously I was being skipped over by kids (and adults) filling their own jerry cans. I didn’t have the heart to cut in front of people or be rude so I decided to come back later. I felt sad though. It reminded me of elementary school and how upset I got when people would cut in front of me…

Back at home, Tony was working on tapping our 120 Liter jug. He took the tap and placed it over the gas range flame to heat the metal and melt a hole into the jug. It worked very well but then I had to crawl inside it to put plumbers tap around the end (sorry dad I forgot what it’s called) to create a better seal with the nut. Awesome timing after the bore hole but you know it is great that we have more water storage. 320 Liters at once! How many gallons is that? To be honest I have never been more aware of my water use than I am now because I have to carry the stuff!

Tony went with me and we got water after the masses had cleared out. I then proceeded to bucket bath, in a bath tub no doubt, using about 10 liters of water instead of my usual 5. It made me feel better!

Dinner was stuffed green peppers and chips. (Mini green peppers)

Since this weekend we have tuperware and the ability to store left-over food. Ants may still be a problem though. They somehow found their way into our fried white ants tuperware container. I told Tony I didn’t mind that the ants were in with the fried ants but he decided he didn’t want any.

To roast the peppers I made on oven with three pots. One large pot was the base, a second smaller one held the food inside, and the third formed the cover. It worked out well. Also we found cheese that can be stored at room temperature (I know it is very fake but we like our fantasy world cheese)! So we topped the peppers with that and fried slices of potatoes to make chips.

We ended the night by watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother. It seems that even though we are away from the states, having little reminders of home is really refreshing.

So now you find me here. In Uganda at 12:49am writing a blog post and uploading pictures onto Facebook. Happily we can stay connected with all of you but I find it fun that I have only been on the internet 6 times in 3 months. =) Good Night