tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9119621642564910622024-03-14T00:54:59.828-04:00i wish i ran moreelizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.comBlogger160125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-87491733841962402592013-04-13T13:26:00.001-04:002013-04-13T13:30:21.862-04:00Full circlePower is out, and my candles are about to be. I've done my last load of dishes and laundry, which was honestly just a handkerchief that I'd used to make cheese; the rest will be done in Kampala by hotel staff. I spent the day today sorting through my last few items and packing my little grey backpack with what I've deemed necessary for the next two and half weeks. I've included two pairs of pants, a pair of leggings, four tank tops, a tee shirt, a dress, undies, flip flops, running shoes, my planner, pertinent paperwork, shampoo & conditioner, face & body wash, face & body lotion, travel perfume, makeup, toothbrush & paste, my mini med kit that I always travel with (ibuprofen, Benadryl, melatonin, pepto, Imodium, bandaids, malaria meds, and sudafed) steripen, headlamp, travel towel, sarong, iPad, iPod, kindle, journal, stuffed elephant, rain jacket, and cameras. It seems like so much when I write it out like that... <br />
<br />
Anyway, the last week at my site has been nothing short of delightful. Never having visited Murchison Falls national park, we took a last minute, seat of our pants, impromptu trip there on Monday. It was incredible. We did very little planning and thus ended up paying way more than we should have, and taking a route that was absolutely absurd. On the drive through the park tsetse flies swarmed our car as we almost ran out of gas, so annoying. We just missed the two o'clock ferry and had to sit for two hours waiting for the four o'clock boat, but we saw a hippo so it was totally fine. We spent the evening eating our fill of the buffet and drinking boxed wine on the balcony overlooking the Nile. The next morning we drove to the top of the falls and then hiked around for a couple of hours. It was so so hot but so worth it. That was really the last place in Uganda that I'd really wanted to see. Over the past two years I've been able to visit an incredible number of places and see the majority of the country. <br />
<br />
Driving out of the park that afternoon we were somewhat late according to our pass. The pass we paid for was good for 24 hours, and we'd stayed 27. We had a little kerfuffle at the exit gate where the park warden was skirting around the idea of a bribe. I offered 20,000/- (about $8) which wasn't enough for him, so I pulled out a wad of ones and twos, conjured up a few tears and told him that was all I had (lie). He eventually let us go for free, I'm sure because of the waterworks. Success. Driving out of the park was beautiful; I absolutely love the landscape here, after the people in the north it's my favorite thing. A huge bull elephant blocked the road for a bit and I finally saw giraffes in the wild. Still no lions, but I have a lot of my life ahead of me. <br />
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The day after we returned I had a goodbye ceremony at the college. I was hoping that it wouldn't be overboard with the formality and pomp and circumstance, as some events can tend to be here. It wasn't, it was perfect. Of course it started late, but only by about a half hour. The first year students preformed some songs (which I'd tried to record but my camera battery died in the middle of it) the bishop came and made a speech about how everyone should be encouraged by my volunteerism and do things for the community without expecting to be paid for it. He studied in America and told them how much comfort I'd given up to come here. Some of the other tutors gave speeches about how I encouraged timeliness and professionalism, and how I taught one of them to be kind to animals. I gave a short speech thanking them for making this my home for the last two years, I thanked the reverend and another tutor for always teasing me and talking to me about the cultural differences, and I thanked the women from our baking club for cooking with me and sharing that aspect of our cultures. We ate dinner at the school afterwards and they made.... FRIES. And chapatti, and spaghetti, and tons of veggies, and chicken. It was delicious. <br />
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Since then I've just been hosting a couple of other PCVs, making friendship bracelets, and playing with baby goats. I leave tomorrow morning. I remember my first night here like it was a month ago, it really doesn't seem like this has been two whole years. It's scary how quickly life moves. <br/><br/><div class="separator"style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-MAel1pucPko/UWmVQqWUAOI/AAAAAAAAA1I/lqdFVjGt7GE/s640/blogger-image-1076881769.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-MAel1pucPko/UWmVQqWUAOI/AAAAAAAAA1I/lqdFVjGt7GE/s640/blogger-image-1076881769.jpg" /></a></div> <br/><br/><div class="separator"style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-gPHyVPBC7GA/UWmVNiMvZiI/AAAAAAAAA1A/63dnpcKqbi0/s640/blogger-image-679037429.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-gPHyVPBC7GA/UWmVNiMvZiI/AAAAAAAAA1A/63dnpcKqbi0/s640/blogger-image-679037429.jpg" /></a></div> <br/><br/><div class="separator"style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-b4te3758B9U/UWmVEFaueGI/AAAAAAAAA0o/7HwQ-quF360/s640/blogger-image--1220568331.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-b4te3758B9U/UWmVEFaueGI/AAAAAAAAA0o/7HwQ-quF360/s640/blogger-image--1220568331.jpg" /></a></div> <br/><br/><div class="separator"style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-ZWF9w0kqZmM/UWmVABNroSI/AAAAAAAAA0g/EyZeM5qJYvQ/s640/blogger-image--850766584.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-ZWF9w0kqZmM/UWmVABNroSI/AAAAAAAAA0g/EyZeM5qJYvQ/s640/blogger-image--850766584.jpg" /></a></div> <br/><br/><div class="separator"style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-LrlCqoSEljQ/UWmVH8fcRpI/AAAAAAAAA0w/FvIQMdSPU28/s640/blogger-image--1980539579.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-LrlCqoSEljQ/UWmVH8fcRpI/AAAAAAAAA0w/FvIQMdSPU28/s640/blogger-image--1980539579.jpg" /></a></div> <br/><br/><div class="separator"style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Nv-Nkn1enck/UWmVKkNj-cI/AAAAAAAAA04/fBG20c0v57U/s640/blogger-image-557131258.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Nv-Nkn1enck/UWmVKkNj-cI/AAAAAAAAA04/fBG20c0v57U/s640/blogger-image-557131258.jpg" /></a></div>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-24086606748217100822013-04-04T05:24:00.001-04:002013-04-04T05:39:12.182-04:00Loose endsThis post is long overdue, as Jacque was kind enough to point out in a text message a few minutes ago. It's hard to put into words the last few weeks here in my village, mostly because nothing has been happening and most of what's been going through my mind are feelings and reflections. All of the pictures, cards, letters, mementos and such are off my wall and the paint has been touched up. My things have either been sent home (thank you thank you thank you Rachel & Nora!) given away, burned, thrown down the latrine, will be packed up in my one little backpack, or left behind for the next inhabitant of the little teal house that somehow became my home over the last two years. Finishing Peace Corps service is strange and I'm at a loss of words for how to describe it. <br />
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I've thought a lot about extending in the past few months, more seriously than I have at any other time during my service. I think this was probably a result of a combination of things; the new principal at my college is making great changes and I'm sad that I won't be here to see them take effect, people who I've grown to truly care about have told me how much my presence means to them, I'm scared about not finding a job, having to pay exorbitant prices once again for a cell phone and fit in with American culture, and lastly I'm sure there is so much more I could do if I stayed. When all is said and done however, I'm done. Yes, it would be great to see improvements at the school, but my day to day would still be the same. I'd still be frustrated over having to wait till it stops raining and warms up a bit to go take a shower, I'd still be trotting out to the latrine any time I had to pee, and I'd still cringe every time a child screamed "Munu!!!" at me. And regardless of how much I love or hate my experience here, it wouldn't be more of the same, it'd be different. Am I completely ready to go home? No. Do I need to wait until I'm completely ready? Absolutely not. Plane tickets have been bought, plans have been made, and my mind is already sipping on something refrigerated, or perhaps even iced! That kind of momentum is really hard to stop.<br />
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In a couple of days Jacque and Stella will leave their sites and come live at my house for a few days until we all travel together to Kampala. This is entirely appropriate since my house has kind of been a catchall for those traveling to, from, or through Lira. Jacque and I spent a good seven or eight minutes one day pondering what our service would look like if we quantified it in terms of movies watched, jars of Nutella eaten, bonfires stared into, text messages sent, etc. All those inane things that ultimately made up our lives here. It's strange to think these will be the last. <br />
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Until I get back to America my life looks like this:<br />
April 4 - 13 - laze around the village, awkward goodbyes, try to eat all the American food I haven't gotten to yet <br />
April 14 - head down to Kampala<br />
April 15 -17 - three day medical check up to make sure I'm not leaving with anything particularly nasty<br />
April 18 - Peace out Uganda! Bus to Nairobi, game drive on a bike, and dinner at Carnivore (yes, there are two in the world, and I will have eaten at both of them)<br />
April 21 - 23 - Istanbul with Jacque and Stella<br />
April 24 - 30 - Egypt with Stella<br />
May 1 - Egypt to Florida! <br />
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After that I'll be attending a bachelorette party in Key West, a wedding in Tampa, a graduation in Gainesville, flying to Ireland, taking a train through the UK and France to Italy, flying home, driving to Chicago, visiting North and South Carolina, moving to Boston and hopefully settling easily into a new phase of a life I love. <br />
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Anyway, Nora. After the embassy we had breakfast at a Dutch bakery and walked downtown to the bus park. She was completely amused by Mountain Dew in a glass bottle and drank one while we waited. It was neat seeing things through new eyes again, like when Jamie came. I pointed out odd things that I've come to take for granted, and made suggestions about personal safety that I've come to just do without thinking. The bus ride was hot and the men sitting next to us had no qualms about spreading out as much as they wanted, shoving us diagonal in our seats and into the aisle. Then a kid vomited on the man in front of us and it splashed on our feet. Welcome to Uganda!<br />
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The next few days we just hung out at my house, the weather was unseasonably cool and I felt like a prize idiot for having droned on and on about how hot it'd be when she got here. We watched chickens and roosters, ate roast pork on sticks, I taught her how to hand wash her clothes :) It was neat really showing someone from back home how I live, not just explaining it over the phone or in a letter. One vodka soaked night she decided she wants to do PC too. I have no idea how that will actually play out, but I already promised to visit at least twice wherever she ends up. <br />
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Her last few days here we visited Jinja and the Nile River (and drank plenty of Niles) and shopped for souvenirs. I had packed my big suitcase and sent that home with her, so I threw some things in too. We bought three bolts of cloth tht will eventually be made into bar stool seats, throw pillows, curtain ties, and skirts. The bag was 53lbs by the time she had to drag it through the airport, so I have to say thank you again :) elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-47175845712028663092013-02-20T14:13:00.007-05:002013-02-23T05:58:24.502-05:0014 April, 2011<br />
Dear Future Liz,<br />
<br />
How is 2013, do you have flying cars yet? Would you even know? Have all the world's problems been solved? Did you make it all the way through 27 months? (Or, 25 now, at the time I'm writing this... Phew.) If you (I?...) did make it, I'm sure it feels like shorter than it does for me now. At this point I'm getting ready to move away from training and go off on my own and "live deliberately" in the words of Thoreau. I'm nervous about missing home, failing at my job, not being a good enough leader for Peace Corps, and generally sucking at this. The fears I have now are more pronounced than I had before arriving in Uganda, I feel because now that I'm here and know what to expect, I have more tangible fears. What are some things that have popped up during service that I hadn't even anticipated? How did you manage missing Scarlet? When did you start to feel comfortable and useful?<br />
<br />
Most of me is pretty sure I'm too stubborn to give up on this, but I hope I don't struggle through two years, being completely miserable. I hope you had fun, felt like you learned something, and grew a lot (not necessarily in size...) I hope that you feel like it was worth it to leave your friends and family and live in Africa for 2 years, and I hope that you have no regrets about doing (or not doing) anything while you were here. I know that when I'm reading this at COS I will be so proud of what I've accomplished, knowing that for the rest of my life I will be able to say, "I did that." <br />
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Congratulations on making it as far as you did, no one will ever be able to take the experience from you. <br />
<br />
💚 Liz<br />
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As you might guess, I've had my COS conference. We finally scored a nice hotel (thank you PC!) and picked our dates to peace outta here. We got a nice little load of tasks to accomplish before we can go. We said goodbye to each other. Some of us cried. We had a late night poolside dance party and sang "send me on my way" and "tell the world I'm coming home." It was another moment where I felt outside myself, watching and trying to drink in what it tasted like so I wouldn't ever forget. <br />
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My last day as a PCV will be April 17th, less than two months away. So. Weird. I'm traveling for a little bit before returning home and making my next moves. I don't have everything figured out yet, far from it in fact, but I'm excited. (Also, a little bit anxious about fitting back into America... Not gonna lie.)elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-45588475769781170392013-02-20T14:07:00.001-05:002013-02-25T12:16:36.630-05:00Parts II, III, and IV: Tanzania, Ethiopia, & RwandaChristmas Eve I bid farewell to my little brother and then boarded a plane with my friends, set off for Dar Es Salaam. My nearly two years straight regimen of mefloquine made me a nervous nelly on the flights. I've never been an anxious flier, but each take off and landing (there were six total) felt like the end of the world. Not cool. Anyway, we landed at about 4am, bought our visas, and then dealt with the fact that Ethiopian Air had again lost Jen and Jin's bags. Even at that hour, Dar was the hottest city I've ever been in and we practically melted into bed that night, sleeping in our skivvies under a terrifyingly rapid ceiling fan. Christmas Day felt nothing like it should as we wandered the empty streets of this coastal African capital. We picked up our ferry tickets for the next day and then set off in search of lunch. We happened upon cart after cart of seafood: octopus, squid, and prawns, chopped and fried. We paid a few shillings per piece and then topped it all off with some kind of tomato chili and a sprinkling of salt. Walking along the sea wall eating my octopus from a plastic bag was one of those moments in my life where I had to pinch myself to see if it was really happening. The humidity was clinging to our skin and I developed that film of stickiness so familiar to north floridians in the summer months. Christmas dinner was Pakistani barbecu; tables set up in a blocked off intersection, lights strung up, and charcoal grills fired up all around. Again, unreal.<br />
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Boxing Day found me perched at the bow of a ferry heading towards Zanzibar. The next seven days consisted of little else than laying on the beach, retreating to the fan in our bungalow, eating as much seafood curry as possible, and being constantly barefooted. I did not partake in any of the "activities" that others organized; the spice tour, the snorkeling, the dinner on a tiny tidal island... I was a complete beach bum and I do not regret one moment of it. <br />
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The next stop was Ethiopia, where none of us had any idea what to expect. We flew out of Dar at about midnight and landed early the next morning. It was freezing. By freezing I mean in the 50s or 60s, but whatever. Our group divided into two and we headed to two separate hostels since one couldn't accommodate us all. We ventured out and were pleased to see that we couldn't have picked a better location, we were practically in the middle of the city center. There were shopping malls, high rise buildings, markets, and the most adorable blue taxis zooming around. We of course ate ourselves silly night after night, sampling both national and Italian dishes. Fun fact: Ethiopia is the only African country that was never colonized. Apparently the Italians tried their best but the Ethiopians said, "Thanks but no thanks," and promptly kicked them out. Thankfully some delicious food culture was left behind and I was able to eat lasagna, mushroom ravioli, and to-diiieeeee-for gelato. One of the last nights we went out for drinks and happened upon a French speaking cab driver. I'm not sure how this came about, since France has no claim or stake in Ethiopia as far as I know, but it did and I quickly called upon my 8 years of French classes and navigated our way around. It was another moment where I had to pause, take a deep breath, and say a small prayer of thanks for the way my life is shaping up. Ethiopia was amazing and it's another country I will need to visit again. Three and a half days in the capital was not enough. <br />
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The same afternoon I flew (white knuckled) into Entebbe I boarded a bus bound for Rwanda. This was to be the last stop on my little transcontinental adventure because I knew in reality that if I didn't visit while I'm living in East Africa, I probably wouldn't make it back here to see it. Taking the bus across the border meant that we all had to get out, get stamped out of Uganda, walk across the border, and get stamped into Rwanda before we could get back on the bus. It was neat walking across a national border and another item was checked off my lifetime to-do list. The capital, Kigali, was gorgeous. The government has done some major cleaning up (like literally cleaning...) in recent years. One Saturday a month the day is devoted to a country wide cleaning day. Citizens pick up trash, sweep, the whole nine yards. There are serious penalties for littering, and they have done away with the plastic bags that line other African countries' roadsides. We stayed at a church that is both close to the city center and was the site of a refuge from the genocide of 20 years ago. In Uganda I live in an area that is considered post-conflict, there was a civil war up until about 8 years ago, but I will say that there's not really any everyday evidence of that. The people are happy and friendly and are just glad to be going on with their lives. The same felt true in Rwanda. There were memorials scattered across the countryside and an intensely moving museum in the capital, but the people we met and interacted with were incredibly welcoming and open, happy to share their country with us. We visited another church that had been a place of refuge that sadly turned into a site of genocide. Thousands of people were murdered in the sanctuary and in the surrounding village. It's now a memorial and mass grave, and we were able to walk down into the graves. It was possibly the heaviest moment of my life; descending down steep step after steep step into a little catacomb, shelves of complete and incomplete skeletons surrounding me, closing in on me. Knowing that this happened within my lifetime. I will never understand how any people who claim to have a religion that preaches peace and kindness can do this to one another. At the museum we learned of many other acts of genocide, both recognized and denied, and I'm ashamed that I only really knew about two of them. <br />
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The last day we visited Lake Kivu which straddles the Congo border. The town blew away my perceptions of what a war torn African town could look like. Goma is the town on the other side of the border and is apparently still very unstable; people we talked to said that aid workers there still come back to Rwanda to sleep at night. The Rwandan side was picturesque and quaint. Quiet tree-line boulevards winded their way along the lake shore, dotted with beautiful homes, exotic flowers, and Mercedes-Benzes. <br />
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The theme of this trip was food, and Rwanda was no exception. One night we found a pizzeria called Sol y Luna (go there. Seriously.) After a half a carafe of wine, I literally blurted out, "holy crap, I forgot I was in Africa!" The waitress placed our orders on a nifty little hand held computer, made substitutions with no problem, and even said we could pay with a credit card, though none of us did. Incredible. We also stuffed ourselves silly at an Indian place called Zaffrains, go there too, best naan bread ever! <br />
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By the end of the trip I was tired and all my clothes stank, but it was an amazing experience that I will not soon forget. I love the kind of traveling that living here has allowed me to do; the eye-opening experiences that stretch my boundaries and my understanding of what I'm really capable of. <br />
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Walking in Dar es Salaam on Christmas morning<br />
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Seafood carts line the street. The red pieces to the left are octopus, the white ones in the middle are squid, and the pink ones to the right are prawn.<br />
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Looking off the bow of the ferry to Zanzibar. I love boats. <br />
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View of our hotel from the water. <br />
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Me, Nik, Jac, and Stella with our tattoos<br />
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Someone walking along at low tide<br />
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Drinking out of coconuts! <br />
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First meal in Ethiopia, way too much injera but delicious nonetheless<br />
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Love love love these taxis! <br />
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Second attempt at national dishes, much more successful thanks to our personal guide. So. Good. <br />
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Stella, Binen, Nikki, me, and Jacque in our Ethiopian shirt dresses. <br />
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Two little girls we walked behind in Rwanda, they were incredibly curious about the white girls following them<br />
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Aditi at the hostel at St Paul's Church, Kigali<br />
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Flowers along the shore of Lake Kivu<br />
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Beautiful neighborhood in an unexpected place<br />
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Memorial site at Nyamata church <br />
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Another flower<br />
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More flowers at the genocide museum, Kigali<br />
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-7987668363738209762013-01-21T07:04:00.000-05:002013-01-21T11:17:07.141-05:00Random acts of kindness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I forgot to put this up earlier, but it completely made my day :)</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-13363856155255214302013-01-18T11:15:00.001-05:002013-01-18T11:15:13.894-05:00Part I: South Africa<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I arrived home four days ago and met a newly built poultry/goat farm in my yard. "Wonderful," I thought as the eau de goat wafted into my home. After Stella and Jacque left the following morning, I was alone for the first time in over a month. It was nice. <br />
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From Thanksgiving to World Aids Day to <a href="http://glowuganda2012.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Camp GLOW</a> (I'm much, much to lazy to write an entry on this, check out the blog that I updated every day at camp) to finally leaving on vacation I'd been surrounded by people and on the go almost non-stop. Being home and able to wash the eight items of clothing I'd been wearing over and over was a welcome event. It's hard to think back on all that happened and put it into words, but that's what this is for so I'll give it a whirl.<br />
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Our flight out of Entebbe was typical in that we were on a 2 am flight and had to wait around till midnight to check in. Of course traveling that late at night isn't the best idea, so we arrived at the airport almost 12 hours early and sat around watching Modern Family on Jacque's laptop. Copies of passports and credit cards were taken, frantic phone calls were made to family members back home who had booked tickets on behalf of the ones traveling. Ethiopian air HAD to see the physical credit card the tickets were booked with, and phooey on us if those credit cards happened to be in Pennsylvania or Colorado! I had to quickly drink a liter of water as there was no where to dump it and god forbid I go through the third security check with water that I'd gotten after the second. (This made for a very uncomfortable flight during which I had to get up despite the seatbelt sign signaling our descent into Kigali, explaining to the flight attendant that I would absolutely wet myself if she didn't let me use the toilet.) <br />
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After a long travel day, we made it to Johannesburg where the rest of the group headed to Bob's Bunkhouse and I sat around waiting for my little brother's flight to get in. George arrived with few hiccups and we made it to meet everyone just in time to set our bags down and turn around to leave for dinner. About an hour drive from the bunkhouse was a charming little place called Carnivore, where they serve you meat on swords until you literally wave a flag of defeat. We dined on delicacies such as leg of zebra, kudu meatballs, antelope, warthog, and others I can't remember. It was delicious but I was nervous about my stomach since I'm practically a vegetarian at my house and I'm almost sure my body has forgotten what to do with meat. All was well though and I made it through the next day's flight without any real discomfort. <br />
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We arrived in Cape Town the next morning after a short direct flight and quickly found taxis to our hostel, Atlantic Point Backpackers (if you go to Cape Town, stay here! Super nice, $20 a night, in the middle of a great neighborhood :) The first day was spent walking around, exploring a mall, eating delicious food (you'll see that was a common occurrence on this trip) and reveling in the fact that we were finally on vacation. We meandered over to Long Street for dinner and drinks and then tried to find a decent place to go out. The first attempt, Space Bar, went just as well as the name would imply and we found ourselves on the street again after only a few minutes. The second place was much more chill and we hung out there for a bit before I and a couple of the others retired, and the rest of the group continued to troll the streets for a place to dance. <br />
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Walking around Cape Town</div>
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My little bro made the journey! His perception of Africa is totally skewed now :)</div>
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Day two in Cape Town was supposed to begin around 8ish with a hike up Table Mountain, but the previous evening didn't end until 5 for some people so that didn't happen. We didn't leave for the mountain until the afternoon at which point I decided to forgo the hike and instead take the cable car both up and down, a decision I do not regret one bit. It was freezing and windy and gorgeous at the top, the "table cloth" of clouds being present that day but otherwise clear as a bell. The views from the top were spectacular. I got a haircut that afternoon, my first in almost two years. The last time my hair saw the business end of a pair of scissors I was standing in the bathroom of my homestay family. I allowed them to talk me into some conditioning treatment that was a fancy term for "extra head massage." I was practically drooling throughout. I'd seriously forgotten about blow-drying and straightening and all that, and what I look like with a decent hairdo. I couldn't stop staring at myself. I ruined it all a few hours later though when I plunged into the freezing waters of the south Atlantic at Clifton Beach. Oh well. How I missed the ocean! That evening was a barbecue at the hostel, and the most delicious yellow corn I've had in two years. Not maize, sweet corn. Mmmmmm. <br />
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Table Mountain with its "table cloth"</div>
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View of the beach</div>
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View from the beach later in the aftenoon</div>
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The next day brought us to Ganesbaii, where the Great White Sharks all like to hang out. We had signed up to go cage diving, crazy though it may sound. We had breakfast and a very brief introduction at the office, and were then thrust into life jackets and put on a boat headed out into the bay. We wet suited up and then plunked down into the cage five at a time. It was incredibly nerve-wracking as the sea was somehow choppy and freezing and it's really hard to stay submerged and hold your breath and listen to instructions and then all of the sudden be faced with Jaws. When my group got in the cage there was a shark almost immediately so we didn't get the "this is how you hold onto the bars, this is what you want to do, etc" we just got "GET DOWN GET DOWN SHARK SHARK!!!!!". It was incredible though, a lot less scary than I was imagining. The sharks were attracted by bits of chum and were pretty much just swimming around to see what's up. One of the coolest things I've done, by far. That afternoon also saw our first trip to McDonald's, which I'm sad to say, tasted just as good as I remember.<br />
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Countryside on the way to Ganesbaii</div>
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Yep. </div>
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Day four held one of my favorite activities of the trip; the wine tour. Our driver, Bruce, picked us up at the hostel in the morning and took us to five different wineries where we tasted countless varieties and ate delicious cheeses. At that point I wished I hadn't packed and been traveling so light because I really wanted to buy about a third of the wines we tasted. I learned how to drink brandy, saw what it takes to de-sediment a bottle of champagne, and fell in love with wine country. <br />
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love love love</div>
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The next day was one that Jacque, Nikki, Stella and I had been looking forward to for I don't know how long. Tattoo day! We each got a tattoo of our own design that will forever remind us of our time here. Mine is an outline of Africa with the words "iwot kwene?" which means "where are you going?" in Lango. It's part of the greeting, so it's one of the phrases with which I'm most familiar. I like the idea of it too, where am I going? It reminds me not to be stagnant in my life, not to let myself fall into a rut. While the other girls' tattoos aren't identical to mine, they have similar elements. Jacque's says (in Lango) "Where are you going? Infinity and beyond." Nikki's is an outline of Africa with "How far will you go?", the Peace Corps slogan. Stella's is an outline of Africa with a bible verse that means a lot to her. That afternoon brought one of my more ridiculous stories from the trip; my stomach was somehow not there and while walking around a street market with Jacque, I found myself frantically looking for a restroom. I found one in an internet cafe, but I realized only too late there was no tp. There was none in the men's room either, so I thought "I'm a PCV, I'm resourceful, what do I have that will do the job?" my undies were the only thing that came to mind, so they were called in for duty (no pun intended). If I had a purse I would had washed them out, but I didn't, so they got tossed behind the toilet because this bathroom (and the men's room) also lacked trashcans. Seriously? With their understanding of what makes a decent public restroom, they're asking to find surprises like mine. Of course I was wearing a short sundress that day, so going commando was a bit nerve-wracking. I ducked into a clothing store and bought a new pair tout de suite. Crisis over. <br />
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Our last day was one of the best, Cape Point. We rented a minibus and drive down the penninsula. This is more challenging than it sounds as they drive on wrong side of the road in South Africa. (It's a testament to how long I've been here that I no longer remember which side is our side and which is the "other" side.... they both seem weird and comfortable when I think about it...) I took a million pictures as this was a tour that my parents had also done when they visited 30 years ago. I got some good ones of the same places my mom and dad had seen. The weather was absolutely perfect and it was an amazing way to end the trip. <br />
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St James Beach</div>
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Boulders Beach - swim with penguins! </div>
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Cape of Good Hope</div>
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The Coven (Lira girls) Me, Nik, Stella, Jac, Rach</div>
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Andrew, Nik, Jac, Rach, Stella, Galen, George, Jen, Me, Jin</div>
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Looking out towards Antarctica </div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-14491902719568115182013-01-15T04:01:00.001-05:002013-01-15T04:05:37.626-05:00World Aids Day<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In Africa, every PCV is an HIV/Aids volunteer, regardless of our primary assignments. I'm living in a country that was once considered a success story within SubSaharan Africa in terms of its fight against the HIV epidemic. Recent years have seen the numbers slipping back up, and whether it's from a sense of complacency due to past achievements or a shift in the culture to be much more conservative (thus driving behaviors that transmit HIV underground where they are less likely to be talked about and more likely to keep the virus around) no one is absolutely sure. WAD was on a Saturday this year, and the week leading up to it was spent preparing information to be shared at a booth walk, planning with members of my college's PIASCY club (President's Initiative on AIDS Strategy Communication to the Youth... basically an AIDS awareness club that's at almost every school in the country), and figuring out the logistics for how the day would run. Matt, Mary, Stella, Jacque, Rachel, and I were all gathered in my tiny home the night before hoping and wishing that some last minute items would arrive from Kampala. Taking an idea from Pinterest, we'd created two sided cards with information on the major drivers of the HIV/Aids epidemic, one side in English and the other in Lango. We attached these cards to key rings and handed them out the participants.<br />
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We started the day with a 5K run again, this time we had double the participants than last year - 100! They were almost all students at the college, fewer community members, but we weren't complaining. It was incredible. After the race, however, the tutor on duty decided that there needed to be the typical Saturday morning assembly followed by general cleaning since there was to be an event held later that day. The good-bye ceremony for the retirees was supposed to be held the weekend after Thanksgiving, but it was postponed a week due to lack of funds. This put it the same day as our WAD event... We had planned to hold the awards ceremony directly after the race, and then move into the complex hall to do the booth walk. We had six booths prepared, each with four PIASCY members teaching the information. They centered on STDs and Sexual Health, Being Faithful, Condom Demonstration (and subsequent relay race), What is HIV?, Women's Health, and Truths & Myths. The students doing the teaching were ready to go, they were excited, they were taking the lead in getting everything going... and then it just flopped. The assembly and general cleaning meant that everything dispersed and that the health fair didn't really pick up until almost two hours later. It was frustrating knowing how much work we and the students had put into the day only to see it be derailed so quickly. Eventually people did come back and sign in and walk around the booths to learn about the various drivers of the epidemic, and just like the race it was more successful than last years. Jacque and I sat chatting at the front table discussing how happy we were with the way things were going (with obvious exceptions) and how much better we could do it again if we were given a third year. Then we both laughed at the prospect of extending simply to do a WAD event again. It's strange being so far in my service and looking back to see all the things I would have done differently. It would have been amazing to get something like this organized and have my PIASCY students do a traveling health fair of sorts, instead of just focusing on one day out of the year. Afterwards, we talked to the club and told them we'd be handing over all of the materials we'd used in hopes that they would put on the event the next year. They seemed beyond excited about it all, so hopefully it'll happen. </div>
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Thanks Mike for designing our shirts again this year! </div>
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Mary & Matt registering race runners</div>
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Taking off for the loop around Boroboro</div>
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Coming into the finish! </div>
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Jacque registering a participant for the health fair</div>
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"Knowledge only grows through sharing"</div>
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Participants wrote down things they'd learned and attached the links together</div>
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Teaching about proper condom usage, then participants got to practice themselves in a relay race</div>
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PIASCY member teaching about how HIV destroys the immune system</div>
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PIASCY & PCVs</div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-41449753579633003222012-11-30T08:32:00.000-05:002012-11-30T08:39:38.581-05:00That sh*t cray<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I knew it was a full moon the other night, not because the news or a calendar or because the internet told me, but because things around my home went batshit crazy. Jacque arrived midmorning so we could start getting things together for our World Aids Day event this weekend, we broke into the box of wine, spread out the poster paper and markers, put on some TrueBlood, and proceeded to watch things go south from there. One: I went to use the latrine and was met by a tiny (like the length of my hand tiny) black snake curled up behind the door. (what IS it with me and snakes lately?). Two: Jacque let out the loudest most terrified scream I've heard from her in the almost two years we've known each other and flung a giant spider across the poster paper on which I was writing HIV truths and myths. Three: A toad hopped across our laps and into my bedroom. I scooped him out with my dustpan and grumbled about animals in my house. Four: Dogs were howling. Five: When the lights went out my cat and her kittens got into a very intense growling/hissing/spitting fight and I was pretty sure she was going to attack her children. Five things that added up to one nutso night.<br />
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Other than that I've just had constant company for more than a week now with Thanksgiving and preparations for World Aids Day. There was absolutely a second Thanksgiving dinner last night, sans green beans. It was magical. Sunday we're going down for Camp GLOW where we'll be for a week before coming back to my place for five days of laying out, patting ourselves on the back for finishing the term, being what we like to call "super volunteers", and day-dreaming about the upcoming transcontinental travels. <br />
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"Wait... wait, i'm back in Uganda?"</div>
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We missed you</div>
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Girl cat being adorbs</div>
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Pistachio pudding pies in lieu of an actual meal</div>
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Vera stocking in my favorite colors from Nora :)<!--3--></div>
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Cheesecake pudding pie, again in lieu of an actual meal</div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-70011982087072711192012-11-24T09:38:00.000-05:002012-11-30T07:27:58.666-05:00There's no such thing as too much pie<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Thanksgiving is proven to be the most important holiday to PCVs around the world. I'm extrapolating this data based on my own opinion and the fact that I'm a PCV, so perhaps that's not a totally scientific statement. Whatever.</div>
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<i>This is what I look like when I peel apples, and also what I look like after x number of days not showering. (x = 11). I'm thankful to be so charming and gorgeous.</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful I can find apples in Lira</i></div>
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I hosted Thanksgiving in my tiny home again, this time with about half the number of people as last year. No one slept on the floor and everyone had a mosquito net, almost unnecessary considering dry season has started and there are fewer bugs around. Now that it's over and time is moving faster than it was during October (longest gd month ever) I feel like I can breathe a little easier, calm down, and stop worrying if this next month will ever actually happen. </div>
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<i>I'm thankful for Jacque who cuts sweet potatoes oh so beautifully, and keeps me sane :) </i></div>
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<i>And Rachel who never fails to make me laugh</i></div>
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We have a joke in Peace Corps, "expectations... reality" which is based on <a href="http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/expectations-reality" target="_blank">this</a> website. Basically we just remind each other not to get our hopes up. I am happy to say that both last year's and this year's Thanksgiving celebrations blew that joke out of the water. With enough pots and coordination I've happily discovered that almost anything is possible. </div>
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<i>I'm thankful for hammocks and facial expressions/hand motions during stories.</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful that the kittens have learned to use a litter box without too much hullabaloo.</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful for friends who make me fudge, deep-fried snickers bars, and breaded pork chops.</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful to have a kitty to keep me company for a few months here</i></div>
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The celebration started about two weeks ago when I picked up three (THREE) boxes of food that my mom sent. Perhaps you think having food from home via mail is cheating? I. do. not. care. We poured over cranberry sauce, stuffing, instant mashed potatoes, gravy, green bean casserole ingredients, and mini pie shells for instant pudding. To this spread we added two pumpkin pies, apple pie, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese (which will henceforth be a traditional thanksgiving dish for me and mine), bbq pork chops, and fudge. </div>
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<i>I'm thankful for my mom. handsdown. period. best mom ever. & neon making a comeback. (also, how many freaking colors are in my hair?!)</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful for a boxed wine station in my sitting room.</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful for my picnic table and outdoor chairs, barbecue sauce from London, and nalgenes. </i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful for this plate of food and glass of wine. </i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful I wasn't in this much pain.</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful for just-add-milk anything (in this case, cookies 'n' cream pudding)</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful I'm somehow getting better at pie crusts</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful for canned food that lasts a year (like the ingredients in this pumpkin pie)</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful for teal walls, pictures from home, and cheeky notes</i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful for breakfast pies and my coffee press. </i></div>
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<i>I'm thankful for left-over Thanksgiving sandwiches & Amanda Pie</i></div>
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-2474517053712668792012-11-16T01:05:00.000-05:002012-11-16T01:37:05.096-05:00winding down<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Sitting here in my yard with my feet propped up, looking at a table with two basins of rainwater and a collection of clean dishes. This sometimes feels incredibly easy, being here. Then a child wanders over to stare, call me munu, ask for money, and quickly skitters away when I give her the eye. Or a brand new lightbulb literally explodes and shatters the first time it's turned on. There's a pan of avocado bread on the stove, a delicious concoction that was born of my almost painful boredom and hesitancy to toss out the quickly mushifying (yes, I did just make that up) avocado in my cupboard. Oh, and google. Though it's pretty fantastic and will surely be gone by morning (avocado french toast? I've eaten weirder) it's still runner up to pumpkin and banana. I just finished <i>The Tao of Travel</i> (Thank you Donna!!!) and it made me itch to be alone on a train going somewhere. There was one quote I loved, I'm too lazy to go find it, but it basically said the best part of traveling is when it stops being about reaching your destination and starts to just be a part of your every day life. Love it.<br />
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(somehow my internet is now fast enough to upload pictures, I'll try to add some each update)</div>
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The new group of trainees arrives in Entebbe tonight, the last new group I'll see before I peace out of here come spring. It's very odd being a senior in Peace Corps, having come not-quite-but-almost full circle and seeing the worries they have over packing and the flight and how they'll get a cell phone. One of the things I'm most proud of accomplishing here is being able to pack lighter than I ever have in my life. It's an odd thing to think about, let alone scrutinize, but to quote another PCV, "I've had every thought humanly possible. Twice."<br />
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What else? The kittens are fine, they're quickly gaining gross motor control and will soon be pouncing on one another. I'm crossing my fingers that someone at the college has a connection to someone who could possibly spay Tia, as cute as the babies are there doesn't need to be a repeat of this fun little experiment. I feel terrible that animals here (cats and dogs mostly) are almost constantly either pregnant or nursing. As long as I've lived here, that's one thing I won't ever feel differently about. It's interesting to step outside myself for a moment and think about the things I've held onto and the things I've changed. I will always value animal lives and their companionship, I will always enjoy (cherish, really) my alone time, and I will always prefer cooking for myself, regardless of money I spend on groceries. I think things that have changed are my complete lackadaisical attitude toward having clean hair, an almost 180 degree change on my belief in foreign aid and donations, and my unwavering love for powdered milk. <br />
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Today is Friday, a week from now I'll be eating Thanksgiving left overs. A week after that Jacque and I are hosting the second World Aids Day Lira 5K & Health Fair, then Camp GLOW - check out the <a href="http://glowuganda2012.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">BLOG!!!!</a> - Then back to site for a week of eating and laughing and laying out, then I'm off on a much needed, much anticpated, year-and-a-half-in-the-making vacation to Johannesburg, Cape Town, Dar Es Salaam, Zanzibar, and Addis Ababa. After that it's just a few short weeks until our COS (Close of Service) conference where we scramble to pick our dates to leave and book our tickets for another amazing international adventure. Nora is coming to visit me right after the conference and I'm so excited to show her where I live and for her to see in person that I'm not making up all of the crazy things I tell people back home. It's gotten to the point where everything I do - remotely cool or not - I think "I wonder what Nora will think of this?" Whether it's the cold water in my shower, the chickens who wander into my house, or the naked baby that calls my name as I walk by, it's going to be amazing to really share that with someone from my "real life". Then Shaun comes (yes?) and then I'm out of here. I have to stop thinking about all this sometimes and just look around my village and appreciate that it's been almost two years since I sat looking at the dukas and the market thinking "Holy crap, can I do this?" It's lush and green and beautiful and I can now practically float over the mud instead of clomping through it. I listen to the tropical birds and bugs and bats and forget that those won't be there when I'm back in America. I watch storms rolling in from the East and think about how that's Kenya. My storms come from Kenya. <br />
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-39204956002761789902012-11-05T09:12:00.001-05:002012-11-16T01:29:25.228-05:00I love the rain the most... when it stops. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Sometimes really interesting or funny things happen and I think "people will get a kick out this for sure" but then power is out or my internet is slow or it's raining or something like that, and it never gets recorded. Sorry. An hour and a half ago, though, something interesting happened and it just so happens that it's lovely weather out, I just renewed my internet, and power has been on for a full 18 hours. The fates obviously are clamoring for an update today. <br />
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I arrived home from town and shuffled up to my door, backpack and tote back laden with half my month's living allowance worth of groceries, only to be confronted with a bright green snake on my stoop. A few weeks ago I came home and was in my house for a good half hour before I looked in the mirror and saw a snake above my doorway, watching me creepily. I ended up chasing out of my house and up a tree, convinced that it was a green mamba. Well, apparently it had returned, or it's twin stopped by to say hey, either way there was a green snake staring me down. I slowly put my bags down, and ignoring the desperate cries of my cat inside, picked up a huge log and started hacking at the snake like a crazy person. When I saw that it was injured enough to neither slither away nor attack I went into my storeroom, grabbed a slasher, and proceeded to try to cut the head off. My slasher isn't very sharp so the most I managed to do was bluntly cut it into sections, but it did the job and the snake was dead. Justice.<br />
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<i>See my friend?</i></div>
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You may have noticed that I mentioned my cat inside meowing to get out, and you may also remember that my last entry ended with the sad tale of the cat running off and becoming a village cat. Well, a few days after that post, she came back, typical. I feed her well enough that she knows this is home, but it's a double edged sword because it means that she stubbornly refuses to go hunt for her own food and instead yowls for a bit of whatever I'm eating, jumping onto the kitchen table and sticking her nose in the blueband (a horrible, horrible imitation of butter) A few weeks after our happy reunion however, I noticed that she felt a little rounder and that her nipples were more pokey and came to the conclusion that my kitten was going to have kittens. I kept expecting her to miscarry since she was so young but she carried them to full term and two weeks ago I watched her deliver 4 tiny babies. They are all seemingly healthy and while I'm enamored by them, I can't help think what crappy lives they are probably going to have. Two of them are black and I can't really tell them apart, so I named them Bootes and Pavo after the kittens in The Night Circus (amaaaazing!) One is a dark charcoal grey and I'm pretty sure he's going to have white legs and chest when he's older, and the one girl is calico. Those two are still anonymous. Tutors at the college have claimed them already and were insisting that I hand them over at 2 weeks of age, as if! They can't even walk yet. I told them they could have them at 6 weeks old, which is when I'll be leaving for camp GLOW, so the timing will work nicely. I'm worried about leaving Tia for December and January, when I'll be traipsing the continent, but hopefully it'll be a test run for when I'm leaving her for good.<br />
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<i>This is Africa</i></div>
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Other than snakes and kittens, I've actually been quite busy at the college, but it's mostly been a project of my own choosing rather than teaching. Back in July I met with the girls to see if they'd be interested in learning how to teach the reusable menstrual pads program that PCVs teach, and they said yes, but that they couldn't pay for the training materials (a sample pad, and a rice sack for making a visual aid of the menstrual cycle and reproductive system). I wrote a grant and it was approved, so I spent a few months opening the bank account, waiting for the funding, and getting everything together. One absurd morning I spent at the bank trying to withdraw the funds. I got there at 8:30, when it was scheduled to open, but had to wait outside while the floor was mopped, furniture was arranged, wastebaskets emptied. Opening time is a great time for all that, no? Anyway the line quickly filled and I had to wait for my friend who was the co-signer on the account. Ugandans don't really use lines the way Americans do, there can't be any space between two people, or at the front of the line between the person being helped and next up. A general lack of personal space is quite evident, and that, coupled with a lack of air conditioning and an overabundance of time waiting, got to me in a way that things usually don't get to me. Let me also add that the bank has a helper, who wears a sash and is in charge of minding the line, making sure people have the right forms, and directing them where to go. When I finally got to the front, I had this man, and the eight people behind me literally within a four foot radius of my person. The sash-wearing bank shepherd was peering over my shoulder telling me this and that, telling me I needed to go to another window when I asked the teller the balance of the account, and telling me I wasn't allowed to do that when I looked him in the eye and crumpled the paper he'd just handed me. In short, I lost my cool. In a bank. Surrounded by Ugandans. It was embarrassing, but I was just soooo over it all, the slowness of everything here, the lack of personal space, the people peering at my bank slip, watching me write out "one million two hundred thousand..." and my account number, the clicking of the tongues when something goes wrong, being told "You're not in America..." It's days like that that make me think, ever so cruelly, "I win. I have a free ticket back to America, the greatest country on Earth, and you have to stay here." <br />
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<i>Re-usable, washable, made from local materials, incredibly affordable</i></div>
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After that experience, preparations for the workshop went smoothly. I commandeered the college van for a day, justifying it by putting in $8 worth of gas, and got all of the shopping done, refusing to leave anything un-purchased for another day. Let me just say that trying to get "everything done in one day" here is a feat, and I accomplished it. The shopping at least. I cut and prepared 150 pad kits, organized a ton of information, made the schedule, prepared activities for the girls so it was interactive, basically I was not only ready, I was stoked for this workshop. Of course it's Uganda though, so it started late and barely kept to the schedule and people came and went as they pleased. But at the end of it, 117 girls had shown up at SOME point, and at least 40 were there the whole time asking questions, participating, making the pads and the visual aids, playing the games I'd planned, and hopefully got a lot out of it. I have a ton of extra materials so I'm going to chill out and regroup for a few days and then see what to do. Options I'm throwing around are offering it again, this time to the gents since they were left out the first time around, or going to the primary school and offering a workshop there. I told my girls if they want to teach it during school practice next term that I have extra pads they can use and I'll go with them to teach, but that it's up to them to initiate it.</div>
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<i>Sewing sample pads</i></div>
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Other than that I've just been hiding out in the village for way too long, trying to save money and begin some semblance of a tan so I don't immediately fry in Cape Town. Power has been awful lately, so has the weather, and Airtel got rid of its unlimited texting plan, so there have been inumerable boring days spent daydreaming about things like really good red wine, the new camera lens that Stella is bringing me from America, and melted cheese. I escaped for lunch with the other Lira girls a few weeks ago, but apart from that afternoon of pizza, I've been alone here for over a month. I think that's a record, it's certainly something I never intend to do again. Cannot WAIT for Thanksgiving!<br />
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Miss&Love</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-57524285176505347492012-08-29T05:29:00.000-04:002012-11-16T09:49:24.307-05:00jigger what? <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Being on the equator and having little to no change in seasons (other than the god awful dry season that was surely meant as a punishment from someone up above) it can feel like time doesn't really advance in the way it does in the states, where days lengthen and shorten and the weather changes cyclically. I have to stop sometimes to think about the date, and then what time of year that makes it, and what it might feel like in Florida. Summer is slowly fading into fall, but here it feels the same as it did in April, and the same as it will feel three months from now.<br />
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Term two finished a few weeks ago and I wrapped it up by painting a dorm, turning 29, and saying goodbye to the Irish teachers who were here. They were generous and left me with some tupperware, a jar of nutella, a bottle of soy sauce, and a kitten. Yep, seven months left and I got a kitten. She is super cute and friendly and I rechristened her Tia (for This Is Africa, thanks Nora and Emmy!) However, promptly upon adopting her, I had to leave her with some neighbors to go work at Camp GLOW East. The woman I left her with speaks zero English and my Lango is puttering out, but somehow I managed to communicate that I'd return in two (hours? weeks? days? who knows) and that the bag of fish was for the cat to eat. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.<br />
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<i>Tia</i></div>
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Camp GLOW was fabulous. Maggie and Bethany really did a wonderful job organizing everything and making the week flow without any major hiccups. I was in charge of media and photos, and it was fun having a legit excuse to just walk in and out of sessions and take pictures. I also taught friendship bracelets, literacy hour (where I successfully introduced Scattergories to Uganda), banana bread baking, and wrangled the campers to paint a world map, which turned out beautifully but all the head teacher had to say was "Eh! There is no compass rose!" Sorry dude. In other, fun, somehow camp related news, I got my first jigger! Apparently the Busoga region is rife with chigoe fleas that like to burrow into one's toes and lay eggs. Lovely. After my post-camp shower I noticed a little bump on one toe and knew instantly what it was, having cringed over pictures of them in training. I dug it out with my leatherman (totally safe, right?). Out popped a split-pea-sized white egg sac and I think the mama jigger. So so gross. I wasn't in the mindset to take pictures of the process, but if I get another one I'll get some snaps.<br />
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<i>Mapmakers</i></div>
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<i>James on the porch of our tent</i></div>
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I'd been looking forward to this week since about February when one of my best friends from home, Jamie, began making her plans to come see me. I finished up camp and headed to the airport with a wonderful driver named Jjuuko (PCVs let me know if you want his number, he actually called ME to confirm picking us up!!!). As soon as I knew her plane had touched down my heart was all aflutter and I was so anxious to see her! This was her first trip out of the US (Canada and Tijuana don't count?) and I can't say enough how impressed I was with how chill she was about all of the absurdity Uganda can throw our way. Bus rides with a child clinging to her? No problem. Bring pulled four different ways in the taxi park? Hakuna matata! Haggling for a better price in the craft market? Madame, you reduce! We had a wonderful trip and it was neat to see Uganda through fresh eyes again. I feel like I took in more details than I usually do on transportation just because I was looking out for things to show Jamie. The names of businesses ("Praise Be To God Butchery and Bookshop") and the absurdly wide-hipped dress models will always be images I associate with here, and now one of my "real life friends" has those images in her mind, too. It was also great for her to meet some of my Peace Corps friends, without whom I can't honestly say I'd still be in country. The support volunteers give one another is priceless and these are friendships that I truly cherish and am looking forward to a lifetime of looking back, laughing, and traveling to new places with :)</div>
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<i>No words :)</i></div>
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We were able to pull off a couple different activities despite her short time here and the Ebola outbreak that limited travel to certain areas of the country. (Note: everything is a-ok here, it's not like a zombie movie or anything, no worries!) She saw the mountain gorillas in Bwindi and said afterwards that her life was complete. We went to the source of the Nile and watched incredible sunsets, punctuated by monkeys traipsing up and down the roof of our dorm. We drank Nile beer, shopped for purses, lamented over long taxi rides and bad roads, and winded our way across this little country in East Africa. I can't say how glad I am she came.<br />
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<i>Sunset on the Nile</i></div>
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Saying goodbye sucked, but I know I only have about seven months left and how quickly that time will go by. It was strange being sans Jamie again, I'd grown accustomed to her being here. The next morning I made the drive back up to Lira in record time (thank you post bus, I was in town by 1:30 pm!) grabbed some items from the supermarket and made my way out to the village where I promptly began cleaning out the spiderwebs and dust that had accumulated in my absence. I went to collect the cat and found her dirty but in good health. I thanked the woman with a chocolate bar and took my purring bundle back home. I'd like to say that's where my story ends, but kitty went hunting yesterday afternoon and never came back. Who knows where she is. I felt like an awful human being going to sleep with her still outside last night and slept poorly for it. I'm hoping she prances out of the maize fields today, happy to see me and meowing for some fish. But if she doesn't, c'est la vie. I'd adopted her with the intention of leaving her here to be a village kitty when I'm done, so maybe she'll just get that title a few months early. </div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-37022692196692566152012-07-22T05:44:00.002-04:002012-07-22T06:05:32.769-04:00100 books<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I finished my 100th book in Uganda last night. <u>The End</u>, the 13th book in Lemony Snicket's <i>A Series of Unfortunate Events</i>. I was hooked on the series and reveled in finally getting to the last one, but was still left with a ton of questions and promptly got on wikipedia to search for all I could find. Then I realized what a nerd that makes me. Whatever.<br />
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I've relished having the time to read to my heart's content. I am tickled when a book I'm reading relates to something in another book I've read, and even more so when both of those books relate to a conversation I'm having. I am absolutely that annoying person who chimes in with "oh, that's like in this book I just finished!" Sorry about that. <br />
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Looking at the list of one hundred, these are the ones that stick out at me, though I have enjoyed almost every single one (except <u>Lolita</u>. Ridiculous book.) <br />
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<u>Aboke Girls</u> - This is the story of one nun who worked at St. Mary's College in Aboke, Uganda during the war between the Goverment of Uganda, and the Lord's Resistance Army (see my friend Jacque's <a href="http://peaceofuganda.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/imagine/" target="_blank">post</a> for a much fuller, better account of it.) 139 girls were abducted and this woman worked tirelessly to bring them back. St. Mary's is about an hour from where I live. <br />
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<u>Lamb</u> - A satire, looking at the 30 years in the life of Jesus that the Bible skips over. It's told from the perspective of Jesus's close childhood friend, Biff, and gives an account of travels they took together and influences to the eventual teachings of Christianity. I'm not sure how someone much more religious than I am would see it, but I think it was done tastefully and respectfully and definitely recommend it. <br />
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<u>Molokai</u> - The story of one woman's lifetime spent in Hawaii, in a leper colony that is hardly ever talked about. (I didn't even know there was one until I heard about this book.) It's a novel, but the colony is a real place and its history is heartbreaking. I cried myself to sleep almost every night for the week it took me to read this. It weighs on you, but it's amazing.<br />
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<u>The Shadow of the Wind</u> - This is just a fantastic mystery novel written by a Spanish author which was then translated into English. Normally some of the original awesomeness can be lost in translation, but not in this case. A young boy discovers a book that he falls in love with, but when he tries to find other books by the same author, he finds that they are all being destroyed... suspense and mystery ensue! <br />
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<u>The Fountainhead</u> - Ayn Rand is a suberb author, and while her political leanings tend to lean opposite mine, I really enjoyed this book. Another book I read referenced <u>Fountainhead</u> and the boy reading it was told to "be a filter, not a sponge," which is spot on, but that's good advice in almost all cases. <br />
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<u>The Lost City of Z </u>- The account of one of the last expeditions into the Amazon River Basin when it was being mapped by Europeans and Americans. There is something magical about diving into a world where maps were only estimates of what continents looked like and where being an "explorer" was an actual career. It takes place in the early 1900's, which is all the more interesting since that's the world my grandparents lived in. <br />
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<u>The World According to Garp</u> - Not sure why this one is so good, it just is. Read it! <br />
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<u>To Kill a Mockingbird</u> - This is the only re-read I'm putting here because it's so so touching. It serves as such a good reminder of what it means to be a decent person and have a strong moral compass. It's one of those books that will stick with you forever. <br />
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<u>Guns, Germs, & Steel</u> - A long and tedious but beyond fascinating history of the world and why we ended up the way we did. So many things relate to this book when I am having conversations with people in my community on why America is different from Uganda. <br />
<br />
I have 50 books and 9 months left to reach my goal of 150 in Peace Corps. Again, I'm a nerd. Books in my immediate future include The Long Walk to Freedom (I want to read this before going to South Africa in December!) Atlas Shrugged, The Red Tent, The Game of Thrones series, Little Bee, Quiet, The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Book Thief, and any others you want to send my way :) </div>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-68851925980046490662012-07-14T09:42:00.000-04:002012-07-14T09:59:28.173-04:00There's whiskey in the jar<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It's mzungu season in Africa. By that I mean that all over the world, short-term volunteers are packing bags full of crayons, donated clothes, toys, bibles, and hand sanitizer and boarding planes bound for my home. They are buying all of the granola, cheese, and cheap powdered milk that I so viciously hunt for on my once a month shopping trip. They are hiring drivers, playing with children, drinking bottled water, and giving things out. They are making me look like an asshole. There are about 50 white people in my village currently, when I'm usually one of two, it's weird. I watch them laugh and chase the primary kids, and think to myself "wow, I really suck, I never do that" but then I remember that the primary kids usually chase <i>me</i> when they see me on my morning run. I feel like crap when they talk about building a new dorm or fixing the roof that blew off in February, but I also know the financial workings of the college better than they do and know there is no such thing as a maintenance fund and that upkeep is non-existent. I know that until those things are in place, fixing a ceiling that's collapsing is like putting a band-aid on a gunshot. I can't imagine what it would be like to have the resources and energy of a short-term volunteer over the entire stretch of the 27 months I'm here. I wonder how much either of us is actually accomplishing. <br />
<br />
Last night I cooked dinner for my Irish neighbor girls, and I absolutely left the spread outside on the table when they all left and I went to sleep at midnight. A dog got into my trash and the vodka and wine bottles were still on the table when 30 PTC students showed up to slash my grass and sweep my dirt at 9:15 this morning. I grumbled and ate my oatmeal sitting on my bed so they wouldn't stare at me, most likely silently judging me for being such white trash. I debated using my night bucket so I wouldn't have to walk to the latrine past all the girls who were in charge of maintaining my yard. It was an awkward morning. Then one of my students showed up clutching his Peace Camp application and asked if I thought he'd be accepted. I read it over and saw he'd been abducted by the LRA and was a child soldier from ages 10 to 13. All of the sudden nothing I've done here felt important, and I wanted to start over so I might actually be useful. It gave me chills to type his application to email it to the camp coordinator. His brother and sister were killed during the war. He wants to start a peace club. He isn't allergic to any foods except poisonous ones. His education was interrupted. He went back and finished his education. <br />
<br />
Most days here I read and clean and chat with the other tutors and formally greet 63 people. Occasionally I lecture and play games with the students if they're in class. I text other PCVs the silly things I see around me. Some days, however, make me rethink <i>everything</i> I know about the world and my own life. I have so little to complain about and so much to be thankful for, and I need to do a better job of conducting myself in a way that reflects that. </div>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-8613384757342784672012-06-27T18:38:00.000-04:002012-06-27T18:44:50.591-04:00scabs, scalds, and snot<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I'm extremely thankful that I know myself well enough to know when to say when. I'm also thankful that my limit is so ridiculously stretched out from this whole ridiculous experience that my line rarely gets crossed. I am infinitely resilient, but I absolutely admit to having my moments. Two weekends ago sucked. I definitely felt down, and was disappointed to realize that the ups and downs of Peace Corps still exist 17 months into service. The roller coaster that volunteers will describe is so so real and can drop towards the ground with little to no warning. My crap ass weekend was capped off by a week of physical injuries which included falling off the sidewalk that runs the perimeter of my house, instantly followed by dumping my laundry basin on my head. The kicker is that cleaning generally makes me feel better so I thought doing some wash would help me get through the funk. I ended up with a nasty scrape on my knee that would rival that of a 6 year old boy. It still hasn't healed fully and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have a silver dollar sized scar on my knee cap.<br />
<br />
I decided the next day (Monday) that I would no longer mope about the crap I'd been moping about and set out to have a fantastic week. It worked for the most part, I kind of established a girl's club with all my female students, sold a bunch of AFRI-Pads, and talked to my principal about writing a grant to host a reproductive health workshop. I started teaching a mini-class on how to make pretty posters for classroom walls. (This is a whole other story, but rest assured it ends with a quizzical facial expression and a sigh). This high lasted until Wednesday when I rushed home to avoid the rain, failed to avoid the rain, and then decided to make pumpkin bread since the weather was cool, wet, and reminded me of fall. I burned the crap out of all the fingers on my right hand lifting the <i>steam filled lid</i> from my dutch oven. Effff. I ended up sleeping with a bowl of rainwater (colder than tap water) next to my bed in which to keep my poor singed fingers submerged. They're not healed all the way either. Knowing that bad things generally come in threes, I was paranoid for a few days, sure that my bus would tip over or that I'd slip and fall into my pit latrine. You can't understand how relieved (and also miserable) I was when an upper respiratory infection took up residence in my sinus cavity and left me feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. Being sick sucks. Being sick when you're 8,000 miles away from home, in a place where you have to carry 20L jerry cans of water to your house if you're thirsty, where everyone stares at you and personal space is literally a foreign concept, where few to zero things are truly comfortable, and where hot showers are a maybe-once-a-month occurrence, brings tears to my eyes. Thankfully not a lot of tears, just enough to make my nose get even stuffier. Bother. I am currently sitting in a hostel room in Kampala, just having completed my mid-service medical exam and getting a ten-day supply of antibiotics. (The malaria test was negative). Back up to the village tomorrow, I'm seriously going to miss these hot showers, but at least I found some raspberry-echinacea tea to take back with me. <br />
<br />
My college has five Irish girls staying for two months, they're students at teacher colleges and on a summer study program. It kind of showed me how far I've come in country when they came to me asking how to catch the rats that began plaguing them upon arrival, and how to do basic house-holdy stuff that I've gotten really good at. Who knew that the skills I'd acquire and share during Peace Corps would include "how to be domestic as a westerner living in Uganda." </div>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-44727105767928411182012-06-17T05:40:00.000-04:002012-06-17T10:54:12.977-04:00One of those days<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In the year and a half since I've been here, I can probably count the number of times I've felt bored or disheartened on one hand. Being bored means you're a boring person, right? I'm usually perfectly content with myself for company and have a myriad of distractions to keep me occupied. The last three days I've felt bored and disheartened almost constantly. Maybe it's the fact that power has been out, that's it's overcast and rainy, that my neighbors are gone so it's quieter than usual, or that my students were complete idiots at the last assembly and heckled me when I asked them to not be rude and interrupt the speaker. It's never a good sign when you get a text at 6:52 am already declaring it "one of those days." At least I'm not alone. <br />
<br />
I filled out my VRF the other day, a tool we use to report to PC about our goings-on at site and what we're working on, and seeing it all down in writing kind of depressed me. I'm not doing a lot. Putting it down in writing here is going to suck too, but I'm hoping indulging for a few minutes in my little pity party will help me work through it. Two out of the three goals of Peace Corps are cross cultural, so keeping a blog, talking about the differences between America and Uganda, posting pictures, teaching my friends here how to cook an American meal, all those things count as what I'm supposed to be doing. Sometimes though, it doesn't feel like enough. My primary project is teaching at the college, but since things there are more disorganized than not and we really only teach one term out of three, I'm not nearly as busy as I want to be. My counterpart is the head of the math department and I feel a lot of the time like I'm just a free teacher for him for a couple years. He's a great guy, a hard worker, amicable, and dedicated to his job, but as far as working with me on anything other than "Here is your schedule for this term," he doesn't have time or interest. We're encouraged to find other counterparts to work with if our assigned one doesn't work, so I've talked to some of the women at the college about a few different projects where their interests and my skills match up. (There are only three others, one lives at the college and two of them live in town and commute). The one at the college is an awesome older woman who I enjoy chatting with and who has looked out for me, but she has a negative and seemingly inflexible attitude on getting anything to change. She's from another part of Uganda originally so she still views the north from an outsider's perspective and says they have a lot to catch up on. The other two women live in town and have young families to take care of, so they're not around except when they teach, and then they leave again. Getting anything to even begin, let alone be followed through on, has been difficult and frustrating. <br />
<br />
The men at the college ask me over and over why I focus on "the girl-child" in terms of talking about reproductive health and whatnot, that the boys deserve to be educated too, that they might have sisters who would benefit from this information. I get their point, but girls are <i>so much more</i> marginalized and at risk of dropping out of school because of reproductive health related reasons (i.e. getting their periods and not having sanitary pads, getting pregnant, getting pregnant then having an abortion that nearly kills them, getting pregnant then having an abortion that nearly kills them and then being made fun of <i>in front of the school assembly by the administration</i> for the experience...). I'm all for boys having strong, positive role models that show them how to grow up and be respectful, responsible men, but I'm not dumb enough to pretend that I can be that for the boys here. The phrase "you have to pick your battles" marries perfectly with what it's like to serve in the Peace Corps, as does "don't bite off more than you can chew." <br />
<br />
It doesn't help that my yard is now full of the furry, sneaky, poisonous caterpillars that make their cocoons up the sleeves of jackets, and then when you go to put it on you get caterpillar stings all up your arm (true story, not to me though, thankfully.)<br />
<br />
Obviously this is all me whining about it being hard here, which I fully expected, so I need to cut the crap. My goals today were to sew the armpits of a dress so the arm openings were smaller, to write a blog post, and to plan for a meeting with some girls tomorrow about making pads. So far I'm two for three and am feeling better than when I sat down to write this, so maybe today won't suck. </div>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-44727483449506179622012-06-11T10:25:00.000-04:002012-06-11T11:30:01.102-04:00Thank the heavens I have a new modem!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I don't remember if I've shared this, but my modem was stolen back
around New Years. I'd left it at a friends house in my hard-drive case.
Her house was broken into and long story short, I've been sans internet
on my computer since then. I made due with my iPhone for email and
facebook until April when I bought a modem off a COSing volunteer. Life
is slower here, so it took a while to get airtime on it, get it working,
plug it in to see if it worked, and then actually use it. Well, here I
am, sitting in my yard with my feet propped up typing a new blog entry
on my computer (the connection is much faster outside, and it's nice
out.)<br />
<br />
The rainy season started one weekend while I was in
Kampala for a meeting. I got texts from my friends back up north saying
how hard it was raining and how they were pretty sure it was the
apocalypse, given how dry and barren it had been for so long. Even just
two days later when I was on my way back to Lira, I could see a change
in the landscape and the air. Things looked clearer, as if the rain had
washed away the dust that had been blowing around the lower atmosphere.
It was a wonderful relief and all of my neighbors hurriedly began
planting the gardens that they had prepared in the weeks leading up to
the deluge. I am noticeably behind the rest of them as I just planted my
"garden" yesterday. I just did some herbs and peppers and lettuce, so
we'll see what comes up. I have a black thumb, but playing in the dirt
and watching food appear from my blisters has been more fun that I'd
realized, so I figured I'd give it another shot this time around. <br />
<br />
A few weeks prior to this I had a fun experience with
home break-ins. I came home one afternoon only to find that my outdoor
kitchen was open (my fault, I hadn't locked it) and my main house was
open as well (this was not my fault, I most definitely HAD locked
that). I did the opposite of what you're supposed to do in this
situation and entered my house to peek around. Nothing seemed out of
place until I realized that my camera was broken, my headlamp was
missing, and a mango was gone. Bitches and hoes, that was the first
mango of the season and I was really looking forward to it. A
suggestion from the Peace Corps Safety and Security Coordinator (Fred
you are awesome!) led me to check the pictures on my camera and sure
enough, some jerk of a child had broken in (still don't know how), taken
my camera around the village all afternoon, had a ball from the looks
of it, and then replaced it when it was no longer useable. Ass. I have
almost 100 pictures of this kid's joyride, including one black and white
of a cow drinking from a borehole drain or something. I printed that
one and hung it up, it's kind of funny and I actually like it. I'm
incredibly thankful that this was my break-in experience and that it
wasn't much much worse.<br />
<br />
I went home for a wedding and to
visit a few weeks ago, and I got a lot of questions about my safety. I
really have never felt unsafe here. Granted there have been a few times
where I've tread carefully; my first time walking back from Nikki's at
night (literally less than 10 minutes), any time I've been in Kampala at
night, during dry season when my yard is extra crunchy and any stray
animal wakes me up... but I promise that I do not feel unsafe here. I
find it funny, but also kind of sad, when people back home exclaim that
I'm nuts for being here. Most likely they have no clue how it really is,
but more importantly they're generalizing that Africa is unsafe, that
it's different, that it's all around, inherently bad. I will be the
first to admit that I complain about things here, that things are slow
moving, that customer service is non-existent, and that public
transportation makes me want to cry occasionally. However, my experience
here has been that <i>most people most of the time</i> want to go out
of their way to make sure I'm ok. They are kind and generous, they smile
and laugh, and they seem genuinely happy to see me and hear how I've
been. <br />
<br />
Going home was an adventure in and of itself. By
the time Nora and Emmy picked me up in Jacksonville, I had been awake
for 48 hours and was still 2 hours away from getting into a bed. That is
far, far too long to be awake. The wedding I went home for was the next day, and somehow I was not only awake for the whole thing, but I was coherent and even lively in some instances. Spending that day with my friends was priceless, and I knew there was literally no where else on Earth I'd rather have been. America was amazing, it's incredible
how my perspective has changed while I've been in Uganda. I didn't have
any freak-outs in the cereal aisle, but I think part of that was that I
was preparing myself to completely feel like a martian, so the small
things that threw me off were more humorous than anything else. I stood
staring at a wall of running shoes, not sure where to even begin
selecting a pair to try on. I eventually had to leave the store, giving
my apologies to the clerk who'd offered to help me only to be told "um, I
don't know..." I walked around target (TARGET! <i>best store everrrrr)</i>
for two hours and marveled at things like employees working hard rather
than sitting in a corner slowly wiping the dust off of anything in
arms' reach, the quiet radio playing rather than some sort of foreign
(to me at least) music blaring, how nothing really smelled of anything
in particular, how clothing hung on a rack, ten of the exact same
dresses so you could find your size... I could go on forever. It was
amazing. A lot of my readjustment worries were alleviated, things I'd
had in the back of my mind for the last 16 months. Would my dog remember
me, and more importantly, want to be my dog again? Would my cat? Would I
remember how to drive? Blow dry my hair? I feel like having these
questions answered (yes, yes, yes, yes, no) will make it a little easier
to relax this year, knowing that going home again won't be as hard as
I'd built it up in my mind.<br />
<br />
Other things that blew my mind about America: <b>Driving</b>...
alone, in my car, going to where I want to go to do things that take
however long, that is a freedom in and of itself. Well done. <b>The wastefulness of packaging</b>...
everything does not need to be surrounded by three layers of plastic.
Bottled water? Really? You know the water is safe over there, right?
(for the record, water fountains blew me away, too) <b>The diversity</b>...
I was expecting to be surrounded by a sea of white people. Not so! It
was really awesome, considering that the homogenous-ness of Uganda is
one thing that really bugs me. <b>How we still can't get gay rights right</b>...
why am I on the other side of the world sharing our culture and trying
to teach people "a better way" of doing anything if my home still hasn't
gotten it right. It makes me want to come home and work for that
instead (or after, I'm almost done here anyway) <b>My family & friends</b>... I
knew they were awesome, but it was beyyyyond amazing to see everyone
again and be reminded of all the positive influences in my life that
constantly push me to be better. If I saw you while I was back (and
unfortunately there are a couple people I didn't get to see, too, you
know who you are) you are one of the ones whom I truly value and miss
and appreciate! <br />
<br />
After going back to the states, I got
to take a trip to Jordan to see Petra, the Dead Sea, and the Red Sea,
all of which were incredibly humbling. Being in a place with the history
that it has (well documented, far-reaching history I guess, everywhere
has history) made me feel very connected to civilization as an entity.
That sounds weird, sorry. In simpler terms, it was really, really cool.
We floated around in the water-so-salty-that-it-was-oily, smeared black
mud all over and laughed about how people pay hundreds of dollars for
that crap in spas. We drove on a highway that has been a trade route for
thousands of years and is mentioned in the Bible (it was beautiful and
completely understated.) Those will be some of my favorite memories for a
long time. Thank you Claire for hosting us!<br />
<br />
Now I'm
back, settled back into my routine of brushing my teeth in the yard and
trotting out to the latrine (which smells of margaritas since I just
opened the second air freshener that Laura had sent last summer!) I'm
back to eating my one plate of beans for lunch, unfortunately the beans
have been also coming with a side of little worms recently. It's
incredible the things you can get used to... </div>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-34860991383369145592012-02-15T07:56:00.004-05:002012-02-15T08:04:34.863-05:00A year in<style>@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">Life on the equator is still trucking along.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> This should be some poignant seminal entry about how changed and amazing my life is, but the truth is that my "normal" now is more mundane than not, and it would be disingenuous to tout my life as more than what it is. Basically </span><span style="font-size:85%;">it’s hot as all get out and my feet are filthy.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> Most days I try not to make too many faux pas. </span><span style="font-size:85%;">Some students have shown up but there’s not teaching going on yet.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span><span style="font-size:85%;">I laugh a little to myself when the other tutors talk about needing to make a timetable for classes so the students know we’re serious.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span><span style="font-size:85%;">Hmm.</span></p><p style="font-family: arial;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">I spent last weekend shuttling back and forth around Northern Uganda.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> </span><span style="font-size:85%;">I had gone to Iceme to stay with Jacque a night before heading to Gulu, but got a call from my principal that our staff meeting was scheduled for the next morning (after having been put off for two weeks and no one knew anything about a new time for it) so I jetted back to Boroboro to attend the meeting and then zipped back up to Gulu to celebrate the close of our first year in Uganda.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"> We layed by the pool, ate lots of Ethiopian food, got super dirty on transport to Stevie's house, and drank "non-alcoholic celebration drink". <3 magical.</span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p style="font-family: arial;" face="georgia" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">There are screens on my bedroom windows now, as it is too stiflingly hot to close them at night, but I’m still freaked out about malaria and little hands reaching in to take my shit. Not that screens offer much protection against the latter but at least I’d wake up and be able to scream something (or lay there in a terrified silence…)<br /></span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" face="arial" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" face="arial" class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">Not much else, I’m just trying to be better about writing consistently. Xoxo. </span></p>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-25637476931869390522012-02-06T01:59:00.005-05:002012-02-06T02:30:13.250-05:00You have some pulp in your hairSchool is supposed to start today, but somehow, like everything else I’ve experienced here, things aren’t going as planned. At the end of last year my students took tests set by the ministry; the first years took promotional exams to determine whether or not they can go on, and the second years took certification exams, to determine whether or not they can become teachers. The ministry is in charge of grading the exams and then giving the PTCs the results so we know who among the first year students is allowed to come back and continue, except that we are still waiting on the results.<br /><br />It’s funny when people back in America swoon over things I’m doing here and the life I’m living… yes, it’s an adventure just buying vegetables sometimes, and yes I’m pretty stoked to be able to say I did this, but when it comes down to it, my days are very slow and I read a lot of books. I have acclimated to the laid back lifestyle, probably better than I care to admit, so when I walked up to the college last week and meandered around and chatted with people, I wasn’t too surprised or disappointed to hear that no one knew what was going on. This morning, the first day of school, I guessed that I could take it slowly getting to the college, so I went for a run and ate a papaya off my tree before worrying about going to work. However, when I finally walked up at 9 and found the college empty, I was a little confused. (Teacher friends in America, can you imagine?) Only Bensy and Jasper – the school secretary and assistant – were there so they alone reaped the benefits of my boredom last weekend (read: some effing delicious banana bread that I’d brought to share at tea time) It tickled them to be the sole recipients of something Liz cooked, Liz who can’t cook to save her life, look at her, there’s no way she can cook Skeris. Oh ye of little faith, just wait till you taste that bread.<br /><br />Yesterday was spent sitting in the sunshine, reading a book, and trying to get my Florida on. I picked some limes from my tree, and figuring they’d make a decent substitute for lemons, squeezed them into my hair to try to speed up the blonde process that is already taking place. At about four, the flies were way too happy that I had fruit juice in my hair so I had to call it a day and go take a shower. I am super conservative with my water here and don’t usually shower except once every *grumble grumble* so I don’t really want to repeat the lemon-lime hair-do today and have to wash it again, two days in a row. Blasphemy!<br /><br />On a closing note, my friend <a href="http://disheveled-ilse.blogspot.com/2012/02/back-to-school.html">Ilse</a> does a much, much better job of describing what it's like at the beginning of school here. Except that she apparently has some students and I still have zero.elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-33769811374822689712012-01-29T08:35:00.004-05:002012-01-29T09:40:15.331-05:00WanderlustI have less than 15 months left. I know this because the countdown on my wall tells me so. In two weeks I will mark my one year anniversary in Uganda and marvel at all I've done and how quickly this is really passing.<br /><br />I got my iPhone unlocked back around Halloween (I know it was then because I was laying in bed with my umpteeth stomach issue and missed the party, I was supposed to have been a cat.) Since then I mainly use that to check facebook and email, so updating the blog got pushed to the back burner, as did almost every other internet related thing. I honestly can't remember what I used to spend hours upon hours at my computer for. I'm sure I'll remember when I get home and have wifi again, but for now it all seems like a waste. Both book and wish lists have been updated, so check them out if you want :) Anyway, tons has happened since my last update so I'll do my best to recount the last three months, by far my busiest in country.<br /><br />Thanksgiving was spent at my house, my tiny, two room, 240 square foot house. Nine people were here and it was the best Thanksgiving I've ever had. The night before was spent drinking and laughing, as it should, but Thanksgiving was spent proctoring exams and fretting over lost packages. We decided to wait until Friday to cook, hoping that my mom's three (THREE!) boxes of traditional food would make it here in time. Knowing that there was cranberry sauce on the way helped make the decision. It was definitely a good one because for one thing it rained all day Thursday, for another power was out, for a third not everyone was there, and for the last, the packages arrived Thursday evening :D Friday morning began early, around 7, with the Ugandan greeting that replaces a knock on the door - "Kodi!" which translates to "Hi! I'm outside, are you home? Can I come in?" (The response is "Karibu" which means "You are welcome".) The assistant secretary at my school, Jasper, was standing there with another gentleman and a giant live turkey strapped to the back of a bicycle. We were elated to see that he had come through (Jasper, you rock!) and got to work on killing and dressing the poor bird. The askari (guard) who takes care of my compound helped us clean it out. The day was then spent eating pancakes, cooking pie, deep frying the turkey in my yard, and swooning over everything my mom had sent. The meal far surpassed anything we had been expecting; we had turkey, mashed potatoes (with ranch!), sweet potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, beer bread, individual pumpkin pie jello pies, and apple pie that spelled out "Peace Corps" with the crust. With everything that we've experienced this past year, spending a holiday with friends and amazing food was all any of us could have asked for. It was delicious and we were thankful.<br /><br />A week later a few of us reconvened to put on a 5k race and health fair in commemoration of World Aids Day. Rewind a month to a site visit by my assistant program director where he asked Jacque "so what are you planning for WAD?" Um. In the time it took him to drive from Jacque's site to mine, we collaborated on the phone and came up with an answer for me to give him when he arrived. "We're thinking of doing a 5k race and health fair, how does that sound? The grant was due a month ago? crap. Well, I am confident that we can do this." We wrote a grant for $500 and planned an event to take place at my college the day after term ended. We had shirts made, got a radio spot, advertised, and planned for a 7 booth health fair that was open to the public. 40 people came and ran, and at least twice that came to talk about issues surrounding HIV/Aids in Uganda. We talked about other STDs and how those can both increase your risk of contracting HIV (open sores!) and be ten times worse if your immune system is already compromised. We demonstrated how to use a condom on a "toilet paper holder" that we had made by my carpenter the day before. We gave a quiz to see how much people already knew, and we played a game to deomstrate how quickly HIV can spread through a community that has a "sexual network" like many in Uganda tend to have. Though there were definite things that we were like "oh, oops" about, it was a total success and I felt amazing at having pulled it off. Next year will be even better.<br /><br />With term being over and my community basically deserted, I had few qualms about leaving for a week to be a counselor at Camp GLOW Uganda. We hosted 150 girls at an <span style="font-style: italic;">amazing</span> school down in Entebbe. The sister (nun) who runs this school needs some kind of award or recognition not only from the ministry but from the international community too. Her primary boarding school is home to girls from 6 to 14 (roughly, some are older due to issues that prevent girls from starting school on time) and they are all treated as family. The compound is immaculate, the food is delicious <span style="font-style: italic;">and varied</span>, and she treats everyone she encounters with an amazing amount of respect. The week was spent with classes and activities focused on empowering girls to set their own goals and make decisions that will keep them healthy and happy. We talked about gender roles and how biologically speaking, there is very little one sex cannot do that the other can (the exceptions being producing sperm, giving birth, etc). I talked about how sex is decided by nature (or God, for those more religious) but your role as a woman or man is decided and dictated by culture. We played team building games and did arts and crafts. The girls had questions to think about each day and were able to journal each night after group reflection. It was a really cool experience and I'm looking forward to doing both Camp GLOW Northern Uganda in April, and the national camp again next December.<br /><br />After camp, I went hiking with some of my friends and got to once again experience how beautiful this country can be, when it's far away from the pollution and litter that plague many of the bigger towns. There were a couple time when I was on my own, some people ahead with the porters carrying the food, and some behind with the guides, that I felt absolutely tiny. There was not a house or a road or anything within a day's walk and the silence was deafening. From the peak we could see the ridge that divides Uganda and Kenya, and it was one of those moments where I had to pinch myself to see if this is really my life right now. After descending, with sore knees and even sorer feet (um hello blisters!) we spent a weekend in Kampala and stayed at the home of a guy who works in the embassy. I took a hot shower and (wait for it... waaaait...) did laundry NOT BY HAND. Amazing. I just sat there watching TV while my clothes were getting washed and dried, all on their own! Magic! We ate copious amounts of delicious food and saw what life might be like in the foreign service (minus the actual work part, we just hung out). Pretty tight, and I'm again rethinking taking the Foreign Service Exam.<br /><br />Christmas and New Years were spent in the company of other PCVs, even though neither of them felt like the real holiday. It was stiflingly hot, and while we dressed up, ate a really good meal, and exchanged gifts, it felt nothing like Christmas at home. It was my first Christmas away from home (my older brother has spent many away from us, my younger brother hasn't yet) and I'm almost sad to say that I think it was ok... obviously I'd rather be with family, but having made such good friendships here I didn't feel at all down or sad that day. One down, one left.<br /><br />That brings me back to home, and finishing up the break from school. In true fashion, I'm only partly sure what's going on in terms of starting the school year. I know students are supposed to come back on February 6th, but I haven't been told anything definite other than that. I'm looking forward to teaching again, but also trying to get more done with the projects I'd started to start when the school year ended (the school year here is the calendar year, not August through June) I'm hoping to get more involved with PIASCY (HIV/Aids), and hoping to go a little further with teaching reusable menstrual pads (and more importantly, teaching my students to teach it...)<br /><br />It's dry season now, in full swing, and hot as all get out. It hasn't rained in well over a month so everything is brown and dead. The bushes around my house were somewhat burned (I think in an attempt to burn piles of leaves gone awry) so I'm hoping they grow back. I have tons of privacy at my place, but only so far as the bushes are there, I realized. My house and compound feel totally secluded, but I quickly realized that I am smack in the middle of it all. I bought a fan too, but oddly enough I haven't used it all that much. Power has been ridiculous lately, and I don't like sleeping with it on, so I've kind of gotten used to laying on the couch in the mid-afternoon just lamenting how hot it is.<br /><br />In fun news, I have my ticket back to the states for Danielle and Blake's wedding! I get in around midnight the night before, so I'm crossing my fingers for smooth travels and nothing resembling the plot of a hairbrained movie. I'm visiting Jordan on the return trip and am incredibly excited about seeing the ruins at Petra and the Dead Sea. Also, Jamie and possibly her sisters are *planning* on coming to visit in August to go see the mountain gorillas! I feel like having people come visit makes this whole thing more real, because when I get back and am describing how utterly ridiculous/disgusting/beautiful/delicious/stinky/hilarious something is, someone will be able to back me up and say "yep, she's not lying."<br /><br />~Happy 2012~elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-67503691244505591592011-10-26T03:46:00.005-04:002012-11-25T03:56:55.803-05:00omg the ants<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
There are maybe a bazillion species of ants on this earth, I don't know, I'm not a scientist. I would guess that about three fourths of those live in Africa, and up until last week, three of them were battling it out with me over control of my house. Now, only two are.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Safari ants</span>. If you have read <span style="font-style: italic;">Poisonwood Bible</span>, you may remember a part where the ants come in the night and they have to escape across the river lest they be eaten alive. That is not too far from the truth, though my experiences have been thankfully less dramatic. The ants are migratory, and blind. Meaning they march right on through without a care to what they're marching through. Or, maybe they do care, I don't know. Either way, a few weeks ago I was finishing up doing a CRAP TON of laundry (it had been like a month and a half, at least) when I noticed that creepy spiders were swarming out of the rock piles near my door (totally safe to have rock piles around my house, nothing scary lives in those at all...) and up on to the sidewalk that runs the perimeter around my house. Confused by the sudden odd behavior, I went to find out the source of their terror - a basilisk perhaps? I was greeted by no less than 398,235,822 ants marching towards my house. My neighbors had spread ashes around their house that morning, so I should have known something was up, that's the traditional method for keeping ants out. Anyway, I got out my flip camera and started filming, though I don't think anything would be able to accurately portray the sheer numbers and determination with which these ants move. The single file line soon branched into several, which branched off even more. My yard was soon a black moving carpet of ants with jaws that can draw blood (not being dramatic) I sprayed Doom (Uganda's version of Raid) in front of my doors and hoped they wouldn't come in. Apparently they clean as they go, but I had just spent all day sweeping and mopping and wasn't in the need of a million army cleaning crew, but thanks. Of course, then the clouds rolled in and the temperature dropped and the wind picked up. It was about to storm. Can I pause here to remind you that my month and a half worth of laundry was on the line, almost dry? And that vicious biting insects were carpeting my yard? I quickly fashioned some waders out of garbage bags, taped them around my knees, and shuffled out into my yard, looking like a crazy person, to rescue my clothes. Upon returning to my steps, I saw that there were no less than 50 ants clamped onto the plastic bags. For the next week or so, the ants stuck around, though not in the same ferocious craze. They mostly stuck to the edge of the yard and my garbage pit, which means that walking around took careful planning and a watchful eye. About a week later, I saw a long line of them marching away from my house, each one of the billion ants was carrying an egg. Weird.<br />
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millllliiiions of ants. I wanted to see how fast they'd clean the jar</div>
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Trails of ants through my yard</div>
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Trash bag leggings!</div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Little red ants</span>. These things are the bane of my existence, they are invasive to my life and they are ruining everything. Ok, that was all exaggerated, but I am super annoyed. Somehow, for the first 5 months I lived here, there were no ants. Then, all of the sudden, there are ants in everything. EVERYTHING. I brush my teeth, I have to pick ants out of my toothbrush first. I go to put on my retainer, I pick ants off that. I look at pictures on my wall, I see a line of ants marching up the wall. I shake amazing American Parmesan cheese that my mom sent me on to my pasta, and 50 ants come out with it. This morning I found that they had some how gotten up around the threads of my nutella (my NUTELLA!) over the top of the jar, and were stuck in the chocolaty goodness. What do I do when I find ants in every delicious food I have? I eat them. I am like a mean giant. Ants in my brown rice? Hang them in the sun, kill them, and eat them. Muahaha.. (Fe Fi Fo Fum?) I don't know if I could munch down as happily and with such gusto on the giant white ants that were brought to me upon my arrival, but the tiny red ones that are the most f*cking annoying things ever in my entire life? Yes. I will eat those. And I will do it with glee. (I don't pick them off the walls and eat them, just so you know, only if they're in the food already. I'm not that crazy...)<br />
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Little red ants in my american food. Of course I ate this. </div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Regular ants.</span> Lastly there is a colony or something of the normal black ants in my yard. They're not as organized, annoying, or invasive to my life as the safari ants or the little red ones, so I kind of just watch them sometimes if I'm on the phone outside and they're scurrying along the edge of the table. I think they were in my house a few weeks ago, I noticed a bunch that were all carrying a larvae. I quickly moved some furniture, sprayed, and swept, making sure to let them know this was not a place to set up home. They got the message and I haven't seen them inside since. Every now and then I'll watch the red ants marching up the wall outside meet a line of the haphazard black ones. They do battle sometimes and it's like the nature channel right on the wall of my house, it's a 15 minutes well spent, watching them go at it. Sometimes a spider gets involved and I have to text someone about it :)<br />
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*Edit* this evening when I was doing my dishes, I noticed an inordinate number of these black ants... <span style="font-style: italic;">doing a kung-fu battle royale on my steps</span>. They were all scattered hither and thither, and were literally slinging one another around and clamping down with their jaws of death when they met one they didn't like. It was one of the oddest things I've ever seen ants do, I tried to get pictures but the battlefield and its warriors were much too little.</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-18455942202875425152011-10-10T03:39:00.005-04:002012-11-25T03:43:19.865-05:00I haven't fallen in the Nile<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Holy long time without an update. To all those who have been bugging me about it, I'm sorry. I have no excuse other than... I am lame? Either way, here goes.<br />
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I've been back from IST for a little over a month now. We wrapped up the time off with a trip to Mbale and then an all-volunteer conference in the famed Ryder hotel, complete with <strike>hot</strike> tepid showers and tile floors. (I'm not sure why tile floors are such a big selling point for me, but I love love love them.) Being back was not as traumatic as I was expecting it to feel, being totally spoiled with all the company of my fellow PCVs. I was expecting to feel lonely and sad all the time, not unlike it felt when I first arrived. That could not be further from the reality of coming back up here. It felt really good sleeping in my own bed again, opening up my house and enjoying my yard, sweeping all the spiders out and making it clean again. People in the village and the college were happy to see me back, and the askari who keeps the compound clean told me "apoyo dwoggo", "thank you for returning". Someone told me she thought I had gone back to America, so I think they were a little surprised to see that I'm here to stay (at least for a while, haha.) I felt like a member of the community rather than an outsider, I don't know how to explain it other than it just felt like a change or a new phase of service had started. I go running now in the village and am less self conscious of being seen doing something so totally out of the norm. I am lucky in that my community in general seems to stare less and be less invasive to my privacy than other volunteers' are. I also fixed my issue of eating lunch at school :) I've received a lot of packages from home with taco seasoning, so I decided to pack a small zippy bag with envelopes of taco seasoning and taco bell sauce packs (thanks James!) and add them to my beans. I just use a spoonful of the seasoning and one sauce pack and instantly I have Mexican flavored posho and beans. I am an idiot for not having done that sooner. It was incredible the impact it made on everyone I work with. The comments the first few times were a bit embarrassing - "You're eating our food?!? We are SO happy, you have made us delighted to be breaking bread with us, we cannot express how happy you've made us!" Jeez. My principal asked what the seasoning was, and I explained and showed him. He asked if I just added water, if I'd get the tacos that were pictured on the front... I wish. (Someone, please invent that. Instant tacos complete with cheese, sour cream, shells, and lettuce.) Anyway, I now eat a plate of taco-flavored beans for lunch every day and all is right in the world of Canon Lawrence PTC. I still don't take tea though, which is unbelievable to them, but whatever.<br />
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I've spent the last few weeks preparing and then monitoring second year students on school practice. They had two weeks here at the college working with a co-teacher (another student) making schemes of work and lesson plans based on topics that were given to them by the classroom teachers. Then, the next three weeks were spent in surrounding communities, teaching in pairs. The tutors went out and observed them daily, making comments and giving feedback. Apparently the feedback I gave was very different from the other tutors... my comments were "very serious" while the others "joked around"... I'm not sure why jokes were made on final school practice feedback forms, but I guess they were. On Friday we went around and did a final "mop up", telling students to hang their posters higher or lower, to underline the subheadings in the lesson plans, make sure the time and dates are written across the tops of lesson plans, important things like that. A little part of my soul died when a student teacher was actually pulled from teaching a lesson to be lectured on the neatness of his handwriting. I tried explaining to the school practice officer that the things focused on in America are very different from the things focused on here, so it's not always easy for me to give feedback. What I have to say isn't necessarily understood by my students, because it might be addressing things they've never heard of or been taught. What they want feedback on seems irrelevant to me a lot of times. I drew a poster the other day, illustrating Bloom's Taxonomy and higher order thinking, to show that most of the assessment here only touches the "remember" level. The other tutors that watched me draw it could only comment on how straight my lines were, how neat my handwriting is, and how I must teach students to draw posters like this, so that they can become good teachers. Hmm.<br />
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Primary students greeting me on my observations </div>
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Other things: My garden is somehow... there. I planted American sweet corn, zucchini, cantaloupes, lettuce, spinach, hot peppers, and watermelon. I feel like the dad in <span style="font-style: italic;">Poisonwood Bible</span> who plants all these American things and doesn't understand why they're not all fourishing. I don't know if it's a lack of sunshine (there's a giant papaya tree in the middle which shades it all) or just that my seeds have no idea what to do in Ugandan soil, or that I have never gardened anything in my life, but I'm somewhat flummoxed by the lack of progress. I have a toad named Trevor who comes in my house almost daily. I'm not sure what his deal is, but he seems totally devoted to me and has taken to hiding in my dirty laundry. Gross. No matter how forcefully I sweep him out every evening, he always comes back for more. Rachel has convinced me that tossing him down the pit latrine would be cruel and heartless, so for now I just chase him out and yell at him. A stray dog also took up part time residence in my yard for a few weeks, but she has moved on to other homes, I think, as she doesn't come around as much recently. I'm fine with that as I really don't want a dog here. It was kind of nice having an animal to talk to, but she didn't really talk back (anyone who has a dog knows that, yes, they do talk back, in their own way. Eye contact, facial expressions, tail wags, interest in your movements, etc. She obviously wasn't that attached to me.) I've submitted my application for vacation leave to Peace Corps and am waiting to hear back so I can finally buy my plane ticket :D I'll be home sometime near the end of April through the middle of May, so everyone needs to start making plans to hang out with me! I'm excited beyond excited and counting down the days! (Odd, since I wasn't even planning on coming back to the states during my service.) It's almost the middle of October and the weather feels the EXACT same as it did when I arrived in Lira back in April, and the same as when I arrived in Uganda in February. The lack of change makes it feel like time isn't passing, so it's alarming (in a good way) to cross off months in my calendar and realize that things are moving along.<br />
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I have to check to make sure I don't squish him when I go running</div>
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Sad but totally true story: For my birthday back in July, my family (mom, brother, sister-in-law, and two adorable nephews) sent me the most glorious birthday box ever complete with preppy potholders, dark french roast coffee, and s'mores ingredients to act as a birthday cake. I hoarded the s'mores ingredients, knowing I was going on a camping trip and wanting to savor them around a campfire with my PCV friends. I thought it would be more enjoyable that way than me, alone, over my gas stove's flame. I trekked all over the country with a bag of the heaviest chocolate bars ever (how do you do it, Trader Joe? I'm impressed) marshmallows, a box of graham crackers, and a blueberry cliff bar. Every time I picked up my heavy as all get out backpack, I'd complain to whoever would listen that all I wanted to do was camp so that I could eat the food and not have to carry it around anymore. Well, the time finally came to set up camp. We pitched the tent and unloaded some crap, including a bottle of rum, sleeping bags, a the bag of goodies. We dragged the rest of the stuff up to the lodge and then came back to light a fire. The bag of candy and goodness was gone. Yes, gone. The bottle of rum was still there, along with the sleeping bags and thank GOD my stuffed elephant, too. We are pretty sure that vicious, cruel children stole it, given that they left the alcohol. I swore a lot, double and triple checked all of our bags, and then bitched incessantly for three days. To all my friends who were with me that weekend, Jacque, Stella, Rachel, Mike, and Chen, I apologize for not being able to get over it. I know that it was just s'mores, but I was REALLY bummed, and I still am. I hope those kids got the worst stomach ache of their lives after eating my delicious birthday s'mores. The End.<br />
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(I promise to be better about updating!)</div>
elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-62452212275312797542011-08-25T10:34:00.007-04:002011-08-26T16:03:53.389-04:00we are who we areIST is somehow winding down, and we are getting ready to move on to the next phase of this fantastic vacation on Saturday morning. It has been a little hilarious reconnecting with all of my PC friends, most of whom I had not seen in four months. A large chunk of the girls have some version of the same bracelets, shoes, and purses that we've bought at various markets around the country. Our bracelets are braided leather with seed beads sewn in, our shoes are flat flip-flops with amazing beaded designs across the top of the foot, and our purses are all beautifully colorful cloth hobo bags. We wear scarves and look like peace corps volunteers. It's nothing short of fantastic. All four things I want to buy for everyone I know back home, they're so much fun. We have the same Ugandan phrases that we've picked up, partly from living in the culture and actually picking them up, and partly because we find them funny and are being ironic. We joke about getting back to America and having no one understand that when we say "mzungu, how are you?" in an obnoxious nasally voice, it's actually in the top five funniest phrases ever. I'm so thankful for these people :D
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<br />In rebellion of our accommodations, we've been walking and taxiing to delicious restaurants in the surrounding communities. We've had legit pad thai, some sort of heavenly pasta bake, pizza, calzones, burgers <span style="font-style: italic;">with</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic;">fried eggs on them,</span> a buffet that literally brought tears to some peoples' eyes, red wine, tiramisu, and key lime pie. My bank account is not happy with me.
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<br />The actual training has been interesting. All of our counterparts are here, so a lot of what we are talking about is how we're dealing with the differences between our cultures. We have addressed being called "mzungu" when walking around (which I don't think most Ugandans will ever understand why it bothers us), corporal punishment, and who is to blame for HIV transmission in the case studies we're reading (the wife who handed her salary over to her husband who then went and got drunk and slept with prostitutes? apparently yes, she is to blame for not being more responsible with her money... and then obviously the woman who had a drink with a guy, she's definitely to blame.*) Josh and I coordinated the session today on Women and HIV that sparked one of the more heated discussions we've had so far. Several people came up to us afterward and told us how much they appreciated the frank discussion on such a sensitive topic. It's a hard reminder of what we're facing when the honest opinions of our Ugandan friends are shared. That condoms have never been used, that women are to blame for rape if they drink alcohol, that godlessness within a marriage is the main cause of domestic abuse.
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<br />*note the sarcasm.
<br />elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-911962164256491062.post-48800977245466668582011-08-19T12:24:00.008-04:002012-11-25T03:26:10.541-05:00next purchase: hiking shoes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Still here, going strong. Myself and the other 43 volunteers in my group are currently stewing in annoyance at the venue for our In Service Training (from hereon out known as IST). Three months into service (four for us, to coincide with the break in school terms), PC Uganda holds this training to reconnect, process what we've done at site, and figure out where to go from here. Traditionally, it's held at a nice hotel outside Kampala to give us a little tiny bit of luxury in our otherwise grimy and besmirched lives. However, our group is staying at the same place we stayed at for PST; we live dorm style, eat food that keeps us from starving, and have no access to a pool. The hotel we had been originally promised had self-contained rooms, bread pudding, and tile floors. Needless to say, we were all a bit crestfallen when we received the text confirming that the venue had been changed. I need to stop complaining though, because there is hot water (sometimes) and monkeys that roam around and try to steal our food, which is entertaining if nothing else.
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True story: last weekend I climbed a volcano and ended up in Rwanda. I traveled down through Mbarara and stayed with Jen a night, and then we made our way down to Kisoro with a decently sized gathering of our training group. We argued with a couple different conductors in the bus park, trying to get a fair price all the way to Kisoro, where a van from the hostel had agreed to pick us up.<br />
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Annoyed at a pitstop</div>
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We had to make a pit-stop in Kabale (get a map) to "grease the brakes" (warning sign #1). The road from Kabale to Kisoro is all through the mountains and absolutely breathtaking, and about half of it is still under construction.<br />
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Beginning of a seriously treacherous road, Sabinyo is the third mountain you can see </div>
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At one point we all smelled something burning so the driver stopped to check the brakes and saw they were smoking (warning sign #2). In the typical "it's ok, we go" fashion that I've become so accustomed to (but still find hilarious) we continued on our way until we came to a small trading center where we stopped again and the guy sitting next to me blurted out "Oh my god, the wheel is on fire!" and we all skittered to get out of the flaming matatu (final warning sign). Some of the locals who were standing around threw sand and mud on the wheel to put it out, but obviously we refused to get back in to continue down the mountain.<br />
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Flaming brakes</div>
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We payed the driver for taking us, though not the full fare since we didn't actually make it all the way to Kisoro and had been in danger of being burned to a crisp. It was a slightly terrifying three minutes as he tried to rally the crowd against us in protest of our reasoning. We got it solved and no punches were thrown (thank GOD.. I was more scared of that than I was the flaming vehicle I'd just been sitting in.) The Ugandans standing around started shamlessly requesting money from us for helping put out the fire and keeping us company (seriously?). I have so many fewer qualms about flatly refusing these requests and calling someone out on their manners than I did six months ago and firmly told them to go to hell. Josh called the hostel and had them drive up the mountain to pick us up as our matatu went speeding off into the darkness. I have no idea how far they made it with burnt, mud filled brake pads, but we didn't see any evidence of a wreck on our way back a few days later.<br />
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Kisoro was freezing. We arrived suuuuper late at night after having been traveling for a good 45 hours or so (I left Lira at midnight on Thursday night, and this was now near midnight on Saturday night). There was a fireplace in the lodge and I felt like we were on a ski trip rather than a hiking one. We quickly ate what had been prepared for us and then settled down into our huts for a cold, brief night's sleep.
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We woke up early and I tried to figure out exactly what to take on an 8 hour hike up a volcano that had been described as nothing less than gnarly by two incredibly athletic PCVs. These are the things that made the cut: a liter of water, little camera, big camera, two Clif bars, headlamp, steripen, roll of TP, change of socks, PC ID (to get the East African Resident park discount), a packed lunch, and a ziplock bag. Of these things, this is what would make it if I do the hike again: small camera, water, Clif Bars, maybe the socks.<br />
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Hiking to the base of the mountain took like 3 hours</div>
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I got some amazing pictures, but the giant camera was definitely too cumbersome to bring again. I did an awful job packing for these three plus weeks away from site and didn't bring my camera cords, so you'll have to wait to see pictures (but since the internet is so slow here, you'd have to wait anyway, so whatever.) The hike was gorgeous but difficult and I only made it to the first of three peaks, but still, I climbed a really big, 12,037 foot high mountain and I'm super pumped about that fact. Next time I'll have to be faster because there's no way I could have made it to the third and then back to the base before dark. The first and second peak straddle Rwanda and Uganda, the third wedges the DRC in there somehow. We sat and laughed and looked at the nonexistent view from inside a cloud and took the requisite "look I'm in two countries at the SAME TIME" pictures. There were some ridiculously precarious Ugandan ladders (read: tree trunks nailed together) leading our way up the ridge, and they were only more daunting when we had to descend them backwards in the rain. We stayed on the peak until it started thundering and lightning and we realized that we were indeed on the highest point around, so it wasn't smart to stay. The guards (yes we had guards, with guns.) were convinced that we'd be fine and wanted us to wait for the rest of our group to come back from the third peak, but we ignored such requests and started making our way down. It was terrifying, but a fun quote I read recently succinctly states that if you want to lead an interesting life, you should be prepared to spend half of it terrified, or something to that effect. The hike down took what felt like a miserable 7 hours (but was actually only a miserable 4), mostly because we kept having to stop in the freezing cold rain to wait for everyone. The guards told us that sometimes elephants or buffalo come out onto the trail in the evenings (oh how I wanted to see an elephant!) We made it back, soaked and worn out and sat again by the fire, drinking Nile beer. Life is good and my only regret is that I put off ordering a new rain jacket until last month and it hasn't arrived yet. That would have been nice. <a href="http://www.thenorthface.com/catalog/sc-gear/womens-footwear-filter-category-casual/women-39-s-hedgehog-gtx-xcr-iii.html">These</a> will be my next purchase as I have now cemented in my mind that hiking up mountains is something I'd like to continue.
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Seriously steep!</div>
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View of the second of three peaks from the first (where I crapped out)</div>
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The next three days were spent making our way slowly up to Lweza for IST. Nothing was dry for several days and it sucked having to pack up wet things and tote them all over the country, but whatever. We ate some amazing food and slept in an amazing hotel along the way, completely spoiling ourselves, knowing full well what our accommodation would be for the next two weeks. Jacque, Stella, Leah, and I are all sequestered in a dorm on the other side of the compound, away from the ruckus and fraternization that is going on in the big dorm, but we're moving tomorrow or the next day, so maybe we won't be so antisocial anymore. We walked up to the mall (yes, mall) today and got pizza and ice cream, and are going back tomorrow to get burgers because I found one with bacon and fried egg on it. I also ate macaroni and cheese pancakes at my hole-in-the-wall-Italian-place that I visit when traveling. There is a culinary genius somewhere out there who obviously sends me his love.
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In catch-up news, I went to a malaria training, finished my first term of teaching in a Ugandan college, turned 28, painted my nails four times because people love me and sent me amazing packages, decided one of my goals here is to become a phenomenal packer, graded appallingly maddening exams, and got more than one glimpse of the incredibly brave and capable person I am, that this experience is slowly but surely revealing.<br />
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I miss and love you all, but it feels like time is finally starting to pick up and move more quickly. I've been here six months already, and it kind of feels like nothing most of the time, so I'm much less concerned about getting through than I was a few months ago. It's a test of my patience sometimes, exhausting and frustrating others, but mostly it's amazing and I have to pinch myself to see if it's real and then congratulate myself when I realize it is, and I'm living it.
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elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16062781252872432184noreply@blogger.com0