True Life: I Am a Muzungu

Christmas at last! It’s hard to feel the Christmas spirit here in the tropics. Luckily for us, Christmas is celebrated here since Uganda is predominantly Christian, but it is not blown up to the proportions as it is in the States. We are currently at our homestays in the Southwest for four weeks. My homestay feels like easily the best out of all the families—we’ve dubbed my house “Posh Corps.” My family is blessed with running water and a running toilet, which is more than I can say for the other host families. No steaming night bucket for me!

My host mom and dad are super sweet and remind me of a Ugandan version of Francoise and Daniel. Their children are grown up and out of the house, and occasionally an adorable grandchild can be found tramping around the house. We also have three-week old kittens!

Waiting for our ride to the Southwest

We’ve been learning the local language Runyanchore for the past two weeks; I’ll have moments in class when I’m convinced that we’re really just learning a made-up language, because that’s what it sounds like. We learn words like omwami, which means husband, and then made Yo-Mwami jokes like “Your mwami is so fat…!” On our walk to school, the neighborhood kids line the streets and yell “Abazungu! Abazungu!” (“White people! White people!”) It wouldn’t be so damn cute if they didn’t have a song and dance to go with it. On weekdays after class, you can find us muzungus in my front yard doing plyometrics to the Insanity workout, with the kids peeking through the bushes or underneath the gate at us crazies.

For Christmas, we crammed all ten of us into a 7-seater car (including two in the passenger seat) and went to the nearest city of Mbarara to celebrate the holidays. We spent a lot of time in Nakumatt, an amazing, brightly lit grocery store that makes you feel, just for a second, that you could be back in America. Ok, maybe it’s not that glamorous, but there are actual aisles and a bakery that sells freshly made sandwiches! There are also hilarious brands of food, such as “Not Tonight, Honey” (my new favorite brand of honey), and the exotic Chadder Cheese to be found in our sandwiches. We checked into a hotel and spent Friday night anticipating December 21^st 2012, the End-of-the-World, at Club Heat, drinking Nile Special beer and listening to “Call Me Maybe.”

In Mbarara, we went out to Indian food, and it has honestly never tasted so delicious. There was so much flavor comparably to local Ugandan food, which consists of every flavorless starch imaginable. Once in a while, we trainees will reminisce about food at home: warm brownies, Annie’s mac n’ cheese, Mexican food… We’ll have to stop ourselves before we go crazy; we’ve got a long road ahead of us. At least we’re all in the same boat!

As we sat and ate Indian food overlooking Mbarara, I watched the line at Stanbic Bank ATM grow and grow. If you’re looking to stand in line and lose three hours of your day, go to a Ugandan ATM. I’m not sure what people do in the ATMs here, whether they are doing their tax returns or playing a quick game of poker, but somehow they take forever in there. My theory is that not everyone with a bank account is literate, and therefore the process takes over 15 minutes a person…no joke. This gives new meaning to our primary project: to promote literacy. I would also love to do a workshop titled “How to Use an ATM” and see if this helps.

On Christmas Eve, we cooked a big meal all together at a local PCV’s house, and celebrated with a bottle of wine donated by my host mum and homemade apple pie…. and Home Alone, of course. It was magical!

We joke that our life could be an episode of True Life: I Am a Muzungu. We walk to school alongside cows, cram 21 people into a vehicle made for 14, get called “Sir White,” and have the little kids run up and touch your skin to see what you feel like. My favorite moments are when a Ugandan tells me “I saw your friend the other day!” assuming that all white people in Uganda know each other. I also get asked a lot about Barack Obama and if I know him personally (I do not, but we do share a birthday!) Life here has its ups and downs, and every day brings new meaning to the old Peace Corps adage “Every fart is a gamble.”

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Welcome to the Equator!

Navigating the Ugandan School System

This week concludes our school-based training at a local school outside Kampala. We have spent the better part of three weeks doing a crash course in essentially a Masters' in Education. Ok, maybe that's an exaggeration but it certainly feels that way. And we pretty much bribed the kids to come an extra two weeks to school with the promise of a hot lunch.

We collaborated with several teachers at the school to co-teach lessons, as well as observe what the teaching culture is like here. The curriculum varies enormously from what we might find in the States, including teaching about types of poultry, human uses of plant roots, the essential parts of a bicycle, as well as endless lessons on sets (what we fondly refer to as "Sets, sets, sets, sets, sets, sets...E'rybody!!!" Think Venn diagrams meets Lil' John.)

The curriculum seems to repeat itself every year so for the older pupils it is a review at the beginning of each school term. This means they are not actually learning new material and allowing their knowledge to go deeper. This is where we come in; for example, I co-planned and taught a geography lesson with another volunteer in which we took the material and added a critical thinking activity to an monotonous lesson on African countries and capitals. We gave each pupil (in 7th grade equivalent) a role and a geopolitical factor, and they had to role-play. It was one of the best lessons I've ever taught and the kids loved it.

One of the things we struggle with here as Americans is not only the lack of girls in school, but the lack of participation on their behalf. There is an awesome girls' empowerment camp here called Camp GLOW (girls leading our world) with which I'd like to get involved.
Our role as teachers is to bring in ideas and methods to increase literacy and push the pupils to use critical thinking. This rarely happens in the lesson; students respond back to the teacher's prompts like parrots. It's incredibly frustrating to observe, but also important to see the work we can do here. Saturday we will go to our future regions to begin our four-week intensive language based training, and our home stay experience. I was recently placed in the Southwest region of Uganda, famous for its game parks, gorillas and cooler climate (and mountains! So many mountains!)

On our last day at the school they honoured us with a typical Ugandan closing ceremony. To an American, it might have appeared to be a college graduation, not concluding nine days model-teaching. But Ugandans love speeches and ceremonies of any kind. We has a tent constructed and heard from the headmistress and Ministry official, Peace Corps staff, parents' expressing their gratitude, and add a song and dance from the pupils, where they managed to incorporate each of our names into the goodbye song. And we were only an hour behind schedule!
It was hard to say goodbye, but even harder to realize how tough it will be to leave our own sites after two years.

The other highlight was the crazy-ass storm which rolled in at about 4 o'clock today, after a balmy, breezy, blue sky day. All of a sudden the sky turned black, with swarming, ominous clouds and a violent storm front approaching and an abrupt downpour. It was awesome! Apparently Uganda has the most lightning than anywhere else on earth. Your chances of getting hit by lightning are high. Add that to the list of unfortunate incidents!

Grade 4 Math Workstations

P7 Geography lesson

read-aloud with my homemade book "Kidogo"

Bulindo Primary School

Just a little update...

I thought I would take advantage of the free WiFi here in Kampala, and the ten free minutes before heading back to site to write a little update about my life here. We are currently in school-based training, week 1, at a Primary teacher's college. We're doing a crash course in teaching: methods, classroom management skills, critical thinking and how to teach Uganda style. The program is new, and we're test-driving this program that focuses on improving literacy in Ugandan primary schools. It's a very exciting time and I'm thrilled to be a part of it. Monday we begin practice-teaching at a local school, and I can't wait to meet the kids! I've made my own book out of grain sacks I sewed together, and I can't wait to read it to my second grade class.
Ugandans are lovely people, they are so warm and welcoming, and have some of the most beautiful smiles I've ever seen!
It's rainy season here in Ugandan, so the day starts off sunny until the big storm clouds roll in around 2pm and wreak havoc across the land. Yesterday we got caught in the rain after buying a favourite "Stoney" ginger beer, and had the run all the way back in the pouring rain, slipping and sliding through there muddy roads.
This is one of many "Welcome to Uganda" moments!
In a few weeks, we'll relocate again to our homestay families to learn one of 6 languages in our groups (there are over 54!)
Well, that's it for now. No malaria, and no worms...yet.

Worms, Germs and Parasites

PST (pre-service training) can be a serious emotional drain of spirit and energy. There are so many sessions on policies, procedures, and systems and goals throughout the day. What stands out most however (or what I'll actually remember from week 1 of training) is the slew of medical information.
There's a whole army of germs out there (I am in the tropics after all, a breeding ground for microbes) that can kill you, or do some serious damage. We recently learned about the vast array of worms that can infest, invade and inhabit your body, building a nice cushy home for themselves in your vital organs. If malaria or rabies doesn't get you, there's always schistosomiasis in the water. No bathing in the lakes here!

I've taken the issue of hygiene to a whole new level, and I'm newly aware of how chewing the end of my pen may have just given me a whole new pet parasite. This has inspired a budding sense of hypochondria. Things that may not have bothered me now sprout into unconfirmed fears that I'm seeing the early signs of a festering boil, a worm infestation, or TB. For instance, my top lip has been slightly swollen all week. I'm pretty sure it's nothing, and it's because I ate pineapple recently, but who knows...

Another charming thing here is the Tumbu fly, also known as Nairobi eye. It's a wonderfully small beetle-like fly that exploded acid on your skin if you squash it. Apparently some people wipe their eye afterwards, hence the nickname. Then there's the joy of the mango fly, which lays eggs on your damp clothes, the eggs hatch and burrow into your skin. Now try to imagine what happens when they hatch!
Welcome to the tropics. Just want you to know what we're up against. Parasites lodging themselves in your brain or spinal cord, and causing permanent damage or incontinence, or your everyday hemorrhagic fever. As if it's not bad enough that there are outbreaks of Ebola or Marburg virus lurking in the area, I have to be cognizant of the constant threat of mean microbes ready to wreak havoc on my digestive system.
It's a humbling experience when you poop your pants or vomit in public- you just have to accept it. It's going to happen. Having already had food poisoning within the first week, I am ready to take on the germs.