JAMBO

JAMBO!

Sorry for the short break in blogging, but my weekend did not seem interesting enough to deem its own blog. I pretty much slept and read all weekend haha. It was nice to relax a little and catch up on sleep after my hectic week of traveling and working. Ann and I did get massages for 12 dollars! It was super nice but they are not modest at all here so that got a little awkward. Last night we got to go out and feed the street kids. It was the first time that I have been allowed to go out in Uganda at night and it was really interesting to see the town after dark. Things were so much different. The street kids were all boys, most of whom had ran away from bad homes and some were orphaned. It was really sad seeing them but it felt rewarding being able to give them a hot meal. We organized them into circles and one of us stood in the middle of each circle and handed out a bad of posho and beans only to those in our circle. It was frustrating seeing the kids hide the food you had just given them and then begging for more, claiming they never got any. But it was also a little heart breaking, these children honestly have no idea when their next meal may be coming. At least we could do a little something to help, it’s never enough though.

Anyways, today was much more active. The three other new volunteers and I got up early this morning to go to Chat n Chino, the internet café close by, so we could do some research for our class that we are teaching tomorrow. The internet at the house is pretty sketchy sometimes so we thought the internet café was our best bet. We thought wrong, their internet had expired for the month and the owner had to go to the store to load more internet time. It was kind of hilarious. Then my friends order yogurt and fruit and they said we needed to wait so they could go to the market and buy fresh food. In America people would be so angry but it was honestly just funny. We sat there patiently, in an internet café, with no internet and no food. Perfectly Ugandan.

After our lacking experience, we went shopping and headed up to Miriam nursery school to finish the outlining. We are almost done and we get to start painting next week! I am thrilled by the progress we are making and the teachers are loving it. We have a serious of pictures and different stages, it’s going to be so exciting to see the before and after. This is one of the only projects here that we new volunteers get to see from start to finish and be so involved in and it’s thrilling!

We then went to Namatala to mobilize in the community to let them know about the class we are teaching tomorrow. Because there were three of us we had to split up, two people on one boda, and me on the other. Of course we ended up going a different way than usual and I almost got lost all alone in Uganda, TERRIFYING! Not to mention a little boy pointed at me saying “Mizungu, bang bang” making a gun with his fingers. It was the first time since I have been here that I felt truly uneasy. However, immediately an adult scolded him and my boda driver apologized, as did the other adults who witnessed it. Luckily my dad has passed down his wonderful sense of direction and I was able to find my way to Child of Hope without much problem. When I arrived the other girls were not there and after waiting for 10 minutes I began to be very worried. I wasn’t sure if they were just lost or something had happened to them. I was panicking a little on the inside and was very unsure what to do without a phone and no way to contact them. I waited another 15 minutes and told myself that if they didn’t show up within the next five minutes I would ask my translator to go with me to look for them, and if that failed I would go back to the house to see if maybe they had gone there. Just as I got up to find my translator they pulled up, and thank god because I was a few seconds away from hyperventilating. They had gotten lost in the slum and had to find a new driver to get them to the school.

Even though I was able to see Namatala a few times last week, my experience today was a lot different. It was not all playing with children and observing the main roads, but rather a much more cultural experience. I was able to go much further into the slum and visit with the women that lived there. Once again everyone was so welcoming and loving. When we arrived at each house, the children would greet me and try to find me somewhere to sit. It is amazing the amount of respect the people here show. The translators would tell them about the class and the women would get very excited. Every single one we talked to promised to come and said thank you and many of them hugged me. It was a very emotional experience. Here were these women, all of them with many children, living in little huts made of mud, thanking me and hugging me for wanting to teach them. I wanted to thank them and hug them for welcoming me into their world. It is obvious here that I am an outsider and yet most everyone shows me love and respect, but in America where we have much more than we need we do not treat foreigners graciously and it angers me.