Cuties

So I have been back from Uganda for a few weeks now and I am a slacker. While I was here I spent a lot of time with my niece Ali and my nephews Trevor and Phillippi so here are a few pics of us.

This was at the San Diego Zoo...she makes a very cute caterpillar.


We were having a sleepery party (she was a little confused about the name haha)


I spent a week with Trevor and Phillippi. This was outside of a pool in Bakersfield.


And finally, I made a quilt this summer out of fabrics I bought in Africa. Tell me what you think.

Taxi Day

Last week I had a very exciting/scary/annoying day. To start off let me give some background info. The taxi’s in Uganda look like VW Buses and can hold 14 people (sometimes they hold more, one time I was in a taxi with 25 people…yes I did feel like a sardine). To get a taxi I just stand on the side of the road and hope that a taxi comes by going to the place that I need to go, which could take a long time. Or I could go to the taxi park, get a taxi and wait for it to fill up. Waiting for a taxi to fill up when it is empty could also take a long time, case in point, last week.
So my day started off waiting in the taxi park, with my friend Brellis, for about 45 minutes for the taxi to fill up. Finally it did and we were on the road to Jinja (about an hour away from Mukono). About 30 minutes into our drive, the taxi started to make a funny noise and it barely made it up the hill we were going up. On the downhill we were cruising and I thought it would keep going but once we hit another uphill the car stopped completely. Someone told me that the car ran out of gas and that is when people started yelling in Uganda and a fight broke out when a passenger wanted to exit the car. Once there was a break in the yelling and fighting, Brellis and I jumped out of the taxi quickly. I tried to ask what was going on but everyone spoke Luganda and my Luganda is very limited. Now there were about 17 people walking down the road (for all I knew they were walking the rest of the way to Jinja, probably a 30 min drive from here) but thank goodness they hailed another taxi and I just followed.
On our way back from Jinja is when it got interesting. We hopped in another taxi and to our dismay it was empty again. When we tried to get out after about 10 min, the driver shut the door and held it closed. At this point we were just annoyed so we kept telling him he needs to let us out. After being trapped in this taxi for about 45 min we finally started to get really upset because he wasn’t letting us out and he wasn’t driving back to Jinja. So the two of us started to yell at the driver, use a tiny bit of force and make enough of a ruckus that finally he started driving to Mukono. Honestly, though I was starting to get worried that the driver was going to keep us there for a few hours. He probably would have if we didn’t take action haha. It was an adventure last week.
Also there were a few bombs that exploded in Kampala, Uganda by Somali terrorists but it wasn’t in my city and I am doing ok.

Doing Laundry

I only have 2 weeks left in Uganda and guess what that means? No more hand washing laundry. I love the person who invented the washing machine. It might be one of the greatest inventions. To do laundry here I have to set aside at least 4 hours of my day (and that doesn’t included checking on the clothes throughout the day and putting them away) and I have to start in the morning so that my clothes have all day to dry. First, I have to fill up three huge buckets of water and carry them to the back of the house (maybe 20 ft). Then I have to scrub at my clothes, with two different detergents, for the next few hours to get any dirt and smells out. I have to change the water every half hour because it gets dirty quickly. I have calluses on my hands from all of the scrubbing. Then comes the easy part; rinsing and hanging the clothes. If it rains that day then it stinks because I have to bring my clothes inside to dry. I’m glad I didn’t bring more clothes. Ok, I can’t complain too much because there are a few good things about laundry. First, it gets your clothes extremely clean. Second, there are no machine costs just the cost of detergent so it is approximately 10 cents to do 20 loads of laundry (it’s sweet considering the fact that in America I pay $2 for one load). I just did my last load of laundry in Africa. It’s bittersweet really.

Reaching Over 1000 People

This week was extremely busy for me so this post might be a little long. On Tuesday and Wednesday we had an eye camp for the elderly. At the eye camp we gave out about 150 pairs of glasses and medicine and the doctors performed 30 surgeries on people with cataracts. We screened over 300 people. It was awesome to help so many people. My specific job was to give patients the medicine on their prescriptions and give them their glasses. They were so excited, even this one lady started crying when she put on her glasses. I even got to see a cataract surgery, which was probably one of the coolest things I have seen. This is a picture of me checking in the people who had surgeries on the first day.


Then on Thursday we had a football tournament in a rural area about 2 hours away from where we are staying. The tournament included 6 primary schools and 2 secondary schools came just to play a game against each other. In between each tournament game we had trainings for things like Leadership, HIV/AIDS prevention and saving for the future. It was so fun how much the kids like football, every time a goal was even blocked they went wild. When someone made a goal they went crazy. Everyone would run onto the field and do flips and cheer for like 5 minutes at least. Also our HELP team played a game against a local woman’s group at the end and it ended in a tie. Afterwards, we gave each of the schools at the tournament a football because they cannot afford them but they love football.
Lastly, on Friday we had a dental camp at a primary school. We screened almost a 1000 children and extracted about 900 teeth. The children would get checked on by a dentist assistant for any obvious cavities and then sent to a room to wait to be numbed and then be numbed on the other side of a slab of wood separating the numbing room and the waiting room. After they were numbed they would be sent to another building to get their teeth extracted. I was in the room with the children waiting to be numbed and it was horrible because the children being numbed would scream at the top of their lungs because the needle hurt. So it was my job to distract the children by entertaining them. It was probably the hardest thing I have done here though. It basically broke my heart hearing the children screaming. I think I did a good job of entertaining the children by singing and dancing. Even some of the children that didn’t have cavities were trying to sneak in the room, they did not realize what those children were waiting for.

The Nile!

The festival went fantastic; the students loved the interactive lessons. We are going to have one this week too. On Saturday I went to Jinja, It is the city where the Nile starts. Mostly we went for souvenir shopping but there were also a few sites. We were supposed to go to a monkey reserve but time would not allow for that. The taxi ride on the way there was the most ridiculous taxi I have ridden so far. By the way, a taxi in Uganda isn’t like the ones in America. They look kind of like a Volkswagen bus but they are Toyotas. One time when I took a taxi they fit 21 people and a chicken in it. So anyways the taxi on the way to Jinja stalled halfway there. After like 10 min the driver finally got the taxi started again and we continued to Jinja going slower than I could have walked for about 20 min. Finally there was a downhill so the taxi just cruised down it and from then we were cruising at a normal speed, except at every uphill the taxi jerked like crazy. Once we got to Jinja we decided to see the source of the Nile, which was pretty anticlimactic but it was still fun cuz technically we went into Tanzania while on Lake Victoria.

This is a picture of me at a bonfire that one of the primary schools had for us.

Festival for kids and running

We are starting a new project this week. Every Friday until the end of the summer we will have an after-school activity for elementary schools to teach them through fun activities. It's called the Do-It-Yourself Festival (We had another name picked out but this is what the District Education officer wanted it to be called.). So we set up 6 booths (aka we stand with posters on the ground) in a school field and each booth has a subject like nutrition, environmental safety, life-skills, etc. The kids have a half an hour at each booth and then rotate around for 3 hours so that they see every booth and have time to play games and learn about each subject. We have our first festival on Friday and we hope it goes well. I will let you know how it turns out.

Also it is a national Holiday today Heores' Day so all the schools were out on holiday but since the schools are mostly boarding schools all the students were at the high school. So we went to visit one high school that we are working with because they had a track meet. And somehow we got roped into running a 400 meter race. I won but that's besides the point. It was so funny. As we were walking to start the race the announcers were like "It's the race of the century". They were so excited to see us Americans racing in their track meet.

Nile

Just chilling on the Nile. Our guide, Tabani is in the back.


This is an action shot of my raft.This actually is not the time we flipped. I am wearing the blue helmet,you can see it through the splashes.

On Saturday I rafted the Nile. Let me say that again...I RAFTED THE NILE. It was so awesome/crazy/scary. I loved it. We rafted 30 km so it took most of the day. It was so sweet because the part of the Nile we rafted had class 5 rapids. And many of you know that I am not what one would call a "daredevil" actually I am probably the biggest chicken ever so this was big. I was really scared at first but we had an amazing guide and there were kayaks all over to pick up people who flip so I was never in any real danger. Our guide's name is Tabani and he was awesome. He has been rafting longer than I have been alive so he is very experienced. There was one time that we got stuck on a rock at the top of about an 8 ft waterfall and he jumped onto the rock pushed us off the rock and then jumped back into the raft while we were going down the waterfall. There was a strom in the middle of the trip which made the rapids worse about 2 hours and I was cold for the first time since I have been here for but then it went back to being sunny. Our raft also did flip once but I think that Tabani flipped us on purpose. It was awesome, we were going down some huge rapids and we flipped so we rode down the rest of that rapid on our backs in our life jackets and then the safety kayaks picked us up. And the food was so good. We got fed breakfast and snacks on the raft, which included the best pineapple I have ever tasted, and a barbecue afterwards for dinner.