16-Mile Journey…

On the actual day of Thanksgiving, I decided to go visit my lumasaaba group and spend the weekend with them. Karine and Lisandro live close to each other and about one and a half hours away from my site. I took a taxi out there to meet them, and planned on coming back Saturday the same way. However, plans changed. Instead of taking a taxi back to Mbale, we decided to walk. Kind of crazy, I know, but at first I was totally against it…I wasn’t ready, I didn’t have sneakers, and I didn’t exactly pack lightly for a 16-mile hike to Mbale. After two days of my friends convincing me, and Karine’s extra pair of sneakers, I was up at 5 am on Saturday morning getting ready for the hike. We began our journey at 5:30 am in the pitch dark. It was my lumasaaba group (Lisandro, Karine, Liz and I), two other PCV’s from the March group, and Barbara, a 61 year old non Peace Corps American who is here volunteering for the next year. Two Ugandans guided us the whole way, a father/son pair who Barbara knew from the village. Simon (the dad) was actually suffering from malaria! Talk about motivation...if this man could make this hike with malaria, I sure as hell was going to make it! Although I had some doubts during the trip...


The whole thing took us about 7 hours total, but we were only actually walking for about 5 of them (we took a couple breaks!). I thought I was going to die, and my legs are still killing me...yeah, I'm really out of shape. Despite long, tiring journey and the awful dirt uphill paths we were walking on, watching the sunrise over the mountains and the view was absolutely amazing! The pictures barely capture the beauty of it. It was gorgeus! I will definitely be doing more hiking around these mountains and hopefully getting in better shape over the next two years!!




*Happy 21st bro! =)

Are you ready for CHOGM?

That’s the question every Ugandan has been asking for the past year plus…well, ready or not, CHOGM is here! The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting or CHOGM is being held this week in Kampala. I was very tempted to go, and despite my mother’s best attempt to be the devil’s advocate and persuade me to go, I decided against it. Kampala scares me on a normal day, so when the Queen is in the city, I would have been terrified. FDNC is being well represented during the events of the week by having the FDNC Mbale Youth Brass Band play on two different occasions in Kampala. This was the main reason for me to even consider going to Kampala, to see the band perform.

The band is a work in progress. Phil, the volunteer from the UK, has this amazing vision to create the first youth orchestra in all of Eastern Africa, and possibly in all of Africa. Right now it’s a brass band composed of trumpets, trombones, tubas, and percussion. He has been working extremely hard to teach these kids how to read music and become a sit down brass band. In January, he hopes to add a woodwind and string section…he has lots of instruments that were donated from the UK, but at the moment he lacks teachers. We were talking about my previous band experience, and I think I may be the new clarinet teacher…I just hope I can remember how to play! Its been about 5 years since I have touched mine! The hope is for the band to go to Kampala, talk to people from all over the world who have lots of money and want to support the band. It’s a big vision, but I’m really excited to help him with the clarinet section of the band! Phil also plans on building a music school in Mbale.

K, just a quick little blurb about CHOGM and a potential secondary project! And new pictures!! Check them out! =)

Settling In

Its been about three weeks since ive been here in Mbale at my permanent site. So far things are going really well and I have been unexpectedly busy. Going through training and reading about Peace Corps, they really prepare you for the worse. I guess its good to go into things having low expectation because then you are pleasantly surprised when they are better! When I thought of Peace Corps, I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking, but it definitely wasn’t this.

Currently, I am working a lot with Richard (my counterpart and the coordinator of the community health department). We have been working in his office, which I now have a desk in, organizing it and complying malaria data for one of our donors. Last week we had about 17 people visit from the UK who have donated money to FDNC, they came to see where their money was going. So we were busy preparing for their visit, which was actually quite stressful to get all the information done in time, but the visit went well and they were pleased to see the work that FDNC is doing.

Ive also been going out almost every afternoon into the field with Richard and Sandra, my supervisor. We have 28 different communities with a community health volunteer in each community who is responsible for organizing the events. So we go out to the communities to do different health related projects including, fuel saving stoves, the importance of mosquito nets, HIV/AIDS, girl child empowerment, and we are currently in the process of creating a curriculum for 2008 to implement in January. I am sort of in charge of putting that all together.

During our visits to the communities, the community members are always really excited to have us there and especially happy to see me (the muzungu from America!). They usually provide us with some sort of soda, or crackers, or even they prepare a meal. Which can be awkward at times because they expect me to eat a plate of food twice my size, but anyways, we were out the other day and the community prepared a feast! Beef, chicken, rice, potatoes, beans, eggs, matooke, millet bread, seriously, tons of food! Well, I am sitting there eating, trying not to think about the food preparations/cleanliness of the utensils I am using (my germ phobie kicking in), when my supervisor pulls out a round ball shaped mass from her plate. I thought it was a potato and didn’t really think much of it until she looks at me and asks if I wanted an egg. Yes, an egg, from the inside of her chicken that she was eating. When I realized it was an egg that was cooked from within the chicken (it took me a minute to process that) we all had a good laugh and conversation about culture. How pulling out an unhatched egg from a cooked chicken would never happen in America, or at least I haven't witnessed it. One of many hilarious conversations since ive been here…

Some other projects that I will be working on in the next couple of months, that im sure you will be hearing much more of, is a sports league within the communities, a library project for the vocational school, much needed organization, and developing the special needs school. I did my first health science lesson last Monday at the vocational school to the students here. It was a little intimidating never having taught before and then doing it here, but it went well, the topic…diarrhea, awesome. Haha.

We are planning on having thanksgiving with some people in my training group the weekend after thanksgiving. Deep-fried turkey? It will definitely be an exciting adventure…ill let you know how slaughtering, plucking, and whatever else has to be done before you eat a turkey goes! =)