End of Week 6

Easter
Happy Belated Easter to everybody! After being frustrated with excellent internet in Jinja and a pretty long ride home I hurriedly washed my best clothes right after taking a bucket bath, because I had figured that it was Easter and we’d probably be going to church. Also, I was crossing my fingers that they would be able to dry overnight in my room and had Tim (the youngest of my 4 host brothers) help me wring out my pants (that’s trousers here – you’d like it, Matt). By morning, they were only a little damp around the pockets, but there was no electricity to iron them and they were wrinkled to hell and gone-thanks to our wringing efforts. So, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to make it on this important day, but was rescued by my host dad who borrowed the neighbor’s charcoal iron and ironed out the wrinkles so we could make it to the English service. I started wondering when it was 5 minutes before the service started and my host-dad was still ironing, "Why isn’t he getting ready?" I found out on the way out the door, that he wasn’t coming and I’d just over-assumed the importance of Easter—I had thought most families were quite religious here in Uganda.

A tangent: Actually—although we pray before meals (sometimes in Luganda and sometimes in English) I haven’t ever noticed my family going to church. Maybe they are more liberal? I think this must be the case as "Taata" and I have had a lot of interesting and enlightening conversations on some touchy subjects like capitol punishment, abortion, and quick touch on homosexual marriage. That he didn’t launch into any tirades for either side has really convinced me of how thoughtful he is.

Anyway, this story is getting long, so I’ll wrap it up quick. It turns out that we were wrong about when the service started and instead of being 10 minutes late, we were 45 minutes early. The actual service was good and fairly interesting with a fair amount of standing and singing, not too different from what I could remember from the states.


Site Assignment
The day before yesterday was pretty exciting as they finally announced our sites with names of counterparts & supervisors, the town, and even for some a picture (I took a picture of my new house and hopefully I’ll be able to upload it - well, maybe tomorrow). It was pretty cool how they did it: first they made us wait to the end of the day, then they built tension by having us draw our hoped for sites, then informing us that each step of the way was meant to decrease our expectations, and then they unveiled a map with all of our names covered, and one-by-one had us uncover each name and call the next person in Game-Show-fashion to much fanfare.

Anyway, without further ado, my site is in Kayonza in the Kayunga district, which is just East of where I am now (in Luweero). The house looks pretty big – I would say too big, but quite nice with a yard and maybe a view in the back. When I asked my language teacher, Ameria, about Kayunga the main thing she said was that there were no "balalu" (crazy people) there. But, some other people also got weird answers from her. So, it was exciting to know, but now that I do I don’t really feel like I found out that much. I’ll definitely know more by Wednesday when I meet my counterpart and even more next week when I go for a week-long site visit.


Buddhism Class
The most interesting thing I did this last week was to teach a little (~45 min.) class about Buddhism to some pre-service student-teachers at Nakaseke Primary Teachers College (PTC). You might ask, "Why Buddhism?" My best answer would be, "That was my best choice." As a whole, the college was reviewing for exams and the choices of subjects to teach that particular week were Religious Education, Physical Education (which was Soccer, which they almost undoubtedly know more about that me), Art (drawing and stuff, could’ve done that too), and Music (Classical and Romantic Periods). Many of us were disappointed that they didn’t have any math or science, but I saw Buddhism and decided that sounded pretty cool. Unfortunately, we didn’t have much in the way of resources – a book that had two pages on Hinduism and two on Buddhism, which I also somehow managed to lose (I felt very bad about it and said that I really want to pay to replace it if it isn’t found), and that was it. Luckily, my family has a computer—upon which I’m typing now—with Encarta, which managed to save both me and Mark who was doing Islam.

We arrived at the college to find that the ~150 students that we were teaching hadn’t actually studied the material that we were going to cover in our "Review Session." "Oh, well," was maybe the best answer that fact could be met with and we divided our students up into groups as we had planned. My 30 or so pupils led me to a classroom, where I nervously broke them up into two more groups to brainstorm everything that they knew about Buddhism. I hadn’t prepared more than two pages of notes the night before and I didn’t have a flipchart, or markers, and there was no chalkboard in the room. Somehow, I also managed to lose every writing implement I’d come with. I was stuck. I bounced between the groups listening and asking a couple questions and after 10 minutes brought them back together.

Both groups presented and briefly described some key elements without using the terms like Karma, Enlightenment, and that Buddhism is structured around the individual, not a God.
Oop, the power went out last night... let's see if I can pick up where I left off. Anyway, I then fleshed out the topics they'd come up with a little bit more after having congratulated them that together they knew quite a bit without having studied Buddhism formally.

Then I said that one thing the missed was the first "Noble Truth," which is that "All life is suffering." I asked them, "Do you think that is true?" and almost everybody either said yes or nodded their head. With surprise, I said that it was one of the tenets of Buddhism that I had the most trouble with and we had a good little discussion on why life might be suffering: pain of birth, wanting things we cannot have, having to toil always to feed ourselves, and suffering when we are unable to.

Then near the end, I wanted to bring out some more differences between Buddhism and the Christian religions they're more familiar with so we had a discussion on the differences between prayer and meditation. The former is focused outwards on a god, and the latter is focused inwards. Lastly, I had them practice a little bit and led them in some breathing exercises, which seemed to work fairly well.

As an ego booster, Venn (one of our Ugandan Education Trainers) came up to me and said, "The students came to me and said, that this one will make a good teacher here," which I took with a grin and a "Kirungi" (that's good). Even though we were supposed to be teaching them these different religions, I thought it was better that they get more of a taste of it then just facts.


AIDCHILD
I also went to an awesome place called AIDCHILD - it's a really cool organization helping kids with AIDs. No time for more.

(Sorry, I'm a bit short on time here - internet is expensive when they're running on a generator).

That's it for Now,
Loves You All,
Ryan


P.S. If anybody would like to send me a copy of either The Mezzanine I would love you forever (and if you do, you might want to reply to this post so I don't get multiple copies - not that that would be terrible). Blank Cd's on which to store my photos would be sweet too. ; )

P.P.S. Lizzy, I just got your letter and I'm mailing a reply today.