Fall Fun

A few weeks ago I went to my first corn maze fair. Just a warning to all those who have never gone to a corn maze before, don't wear nice clothes. I went with a friend, Michelle, to a corn maze and I realized that I was over dressed for it. I wore these super cute flats and a nice coat (you can kind of see in the picture below but not as much). Anyways, at a corn maze there is lots of sawdust and dirt so by the end of the night I smelled like dirt and had woodchips stuck in my flats. But it was really fun. Here is a picture of Michelle and me at the end of the maze. We beat the other team.


The fair was lots of fun.


For Halloween I was Lady Gaga. I went to a stake party with my roommate, Karen, and a friend dressed up as my back-up dancers. haha I also realized that for the past 3 years I have been a diva for Halloween.


I just remembered that I never blogged about conference but it was way fun and Albert came up for it. He spent the weekend in Utah and we stayed at our aunt's house near Salt Lake. Albert comes up for almost every Conference and I love his visits so much. I am always really excited for like the whole month before he comes. This is a picture of us in the Conference Center before the second session.

What is our world coming to...

I don't know what people are thinking when they speak.

Michelle, a friend, and I went to Arby's last night. We went through the drive through and after the man told us how much it cost we did some quick math and realized it wasn't right. When I asked him how come it cost so much he replied, "Because you guys eat too much." Really? That attitude was unnecessary and he had charged us twice for a few things so the total was wrong. Then after we got our shakes (which were supposed to be chocolate) we tasted them and they were gross. They didn't taste like chocolate at all. They tasted like vanilla shakes. The man said that's what chocolate tastes like. I know the difference between vanilla and chocolate.

Then today, I introduced myself to this girl sitting next to me in class, she asked me, "What year are you in...you look old." Again, was that necessary?

Moral of the story...don't eat at Arby's and don't be friendly to people in class. haha

I'm alive

Does this animal look terrifying...I think so

(ok it's not the one that wanted to eat me last night but I'm sure it's similar)

Yesterday I went hiking up at squaw peak with 5 people and it was dark by the time we were on our way back. Somehow I got separated from the group for a few minutes and when I had just been rejoined with the group, we heard a cougar growl from about 10 ft away from us. Immediately we shined our flashlights at the cougar and froze in our places. No one really knew what to do so we just decided to walk away slowly. Then we heard another growl and decided to get weapons. 2 boys had huge knives and 2 people grabbed rocks (I don't know how effective the rocks would have been but its all we had). I didn't have a weapon because I was shining flashlights at the cougar (I think I got gypped though). Another 20 minutes later we were at the car. Scariest moment of my life.

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.