First Days in Uganda

While I already have some phenomenal pictures, I won't be able to post any until I get home due to the resources I have available here. However, I will update hopefully weekly with the things going on.

I have been here two days now and am loving it, although it is quite different than the lifestyle we are all used to. I live at a house that is smaller than my home at in PG, yet is sleeping 25 HELP volunteers. We have three bedrooms and a garage. I sleep in the garage with 7 other girls. Yes 7... We have four sets of bunk beds set up in the garage with one little aisleway in-between.

We have two cooks named Eve and Rose who cook our dinner on charcoal out on the back porch each night. They are so great. We are trying to get them to bend at the knees when they lean over to cook. All Uganda woman bend only at the waist to do anything and it causes them all kinds of back problems. We also have a guard that stays up all night watching the house with his gun each night. His name is Morris and he is great. Some guys tried to climb over our fence a few nights before I got here and Morris had to shoot his gun to scare them away. They say to always shoot one as a warning before they aim at the person... Oh boy...

I already spent time in two different schools, one of which we did some teacher training. It is amazing the types of things they do with the resources they have. The little kids rushed at us yelling "Mazungo! Mazungo!" (which means white person) and they are fascinated with us. Every time a kid sees us as we walk down the street, they yell "Mazungo!" and wave at us. I love it. They often run up and want to hold our hands, but we have taught them "Bongo", which is sort of like "knuckles" in the states. It's so cute. Some of them just come at us with their fists so we can give them a "bongo."

I showered for the first time this morning in 4 days. I know, gross, but our house only has water on half of the time (if that). We fill up reserve buckets and bucket shower when the water is turned off. A shower has never felt so good as it did this morning. It is hot, but we are very grateful for the clouds on overcast days.

It is beautiful here. I took my first boda boda ride (their form of transportation, which is a motorcycle) through the sugarcane fields no our way to an orphanage yesterday. It was exhilarating. Riding a boda boda is doing everything we were always taught not to do... talk to strangers, ride a motorcycle without a helmet etc., but the rides are so fun and we get to see the landscape.

Really Lugazi, which is the town I am in, is everything you would picture of a remote Africa town... women walking down the road with huge water jugs on their heads, men riding bicycles carrying more than we can carry in the trunk of our cars, children running through the streets without pants or shoes on. It's crazy and it's hard to believe I am really hear, but I love my team and am so grateful for this opportunity. I hope to hear from many of you! I will try to update weekly! Sorry if there are grammatical errors, but I don't have much time to edit and the internet connections are kind of sketchy...