Apology - "So, yeah... it's been awhile"

Firstly I want to apologize that I haven't been able to update this blog and more than that I want to apologize to all the people who's letters I haven't responded to yet (Ken & Nicole, I'm going to write you emails - Michelle and Brandi, I promise to write you this week, which means you'll get it in about a month). These last few weeks have been a pretty big transition period with swearing in, moving into site, then there was a 2 week hiatus where I was at an education workshop.
I've had so much to say over the last few weeks and didn't write very much down and now I'm drawing a blank and the clock is ticking. I think I'll do another set of bullets.

New Home in Kayonza
* Pretty cool, still furnitureless except for a bed, but a bookshelf and cooking table are in the works
* Really love my neighbors and have been trading food, beans for matooke (which are unripe bananas which you cook and have about the consistency of mashed potatoes), pineapple for roasted maize, and been trading some English for Luganda.

The Last Three Days in Kayonza
* There was one day that was just perfect: Biked to the market and got food (in Luganda), came back and washed clothes by hand, played with Kenneth the neighbor boy (about grade 5) who never stops smiling, and had a good conversation with my neighbor Yeko outside in the dark under a mostly full moon (it's cooler out there than inside)
* There was one day that sucked: my cct informed me at 9 am that there was going to be a meeting of headteachers at 9 am, so rushed back, the meeting started around 10:30 and then lasted until 4:30pm at which point I was tired, disgruntled, head-ached, and famished. I didn't eat a big breakfast, had hurried to look "smart" (the prevailing term for looking nice - appearances are important here), and then nearly the whole meeting was in Luganda so I didn't understand anything. I cleaned some more of my dirty walls to releive some stress.
* There was one day that was okay: details boring.

The Last Two Weeks in Iganga at an Education Workshop
* There were quite a few volunteers staying at Chris' house (anywhere from 2-6 at one time).
* The workshop had very little information, but plenty of free food, I was amazed at how much money was thrown at this workshop compared to how much the participants actually got out of it.
* For many days of the workshop I read about Macroeconomics and found some interesting graphs.
* Played cards and games after hours and met some

New Bike
* Forgot to get front shocks, but maybe will buy and install them.
* Anyone want to send me some new v-brake pads? The ones I have are kinda crappy.

Computer
* Really wishing I had a computer so that I can
--write better things than this
--organize pictures into the content
--read all the livejournal stuff I've been downloading while at the internets
--teach peeps here some computer skills
--help out my cct
--store pictures and burn cd's
* So, I'm thinking that even though it's a risk and might cost a bit that I'd like to have my laptop sent here (man, I shoulda brought it)

Mail Situation
* At this point I have to come into Kampala to get mail, which means that I'll probably only get it every 2 weeks, so I may be "somehow" (this is correct Uganglish usage) late in getting mail.

Besides all that I can't really think of what's new. I'm excited to actually start getting into some real work next week. It looks like there's at least 2 secondary schools which I'll be helping out in Math/Physics.

(Pictures next time)
Loves y'all,
Ryan

Even More Pictures & a little update

I finally have a decently fast connection (~DSL), so I'm taking this opportunity to upload some pictures - still surprised that most computers here don't have Cd burners though. Pictures of my new abode soon to come, although it still needs a $h!t-ton of work.

Captions
(note: HSTY = Home Stay Thank You)
* Another real old picture of the inside of my homestay family's house.
* An older picture that I'm just getting up of a cool cactus thing at Nakaseke College.
* A picture of just about everybody reading a magazine from America on mail-day. A recentish (i.e. less than a month old) is like gold here.
* Me and my homestay parents in our finest at the HSTY
* (from left to right) Megan, Natalie, Cecily, Olivia, and Andrew (trainer) cutting some traditional rug at the HSTY.
* Rick & Rishi with an awesome Uganda-American medley (it was like 10 minutes long) and one of the highlights of the HSTY
* (from left to right) Aggie (trainer), TJ, Amy, Kinsey, Megan, and Katherine doing a dance at the HSTY
* Me giving my speech in Luganda at the HSTY

Hey all,
Things are going pretty well. Yesterday was my first full day at my new home in Kayonza and it went well. My major success was being able to boil some water so I'm on my way to being able to live there. I don't quite have a bed yet, so I'm sleeping on a mattress on the floor (but I'm pretty used to that kind of thing). I spent nearly the whole day yesterday cleaning the walls of what will soon be my bedroom, they were amazingly filthy and I figured they should be cleaned before painted so the paint sticks better.

I was also very lucky to have a ride from Kampala and the Swearing In Ceremony to my site in my supervisor's truck. It would have been pretty much impossible to take all of my things by public transport (they gave us a lot of books and other bulky things; lantern, bucket; during training) and I have one of the lighter luggage loads among the PCV's.

Today I'm in Kampala mostly to buy a mountain bike - Anybody have any tips for maintainance? I'm thinking that I'll want to find a cheap and decent substitute for chain oil (i.e. cooking oil?) and I'm not sure about patch kits and things, maybe I can find some. I'm also going to buy a little electric stove because the electricity has been pretty decent lately and it would be a lot easier than using my kerosene stove. I also have a plan for getting rid of the massive amounts of bats in my roof - mothballs, who would've thought.

Well, this is kind of boring and I need to go get things done, so I'll leave it here. Peace out from the Peace Corps.

-Ryan

Pictures: Mostly Birds, Clouds, and Pretty Things

More Pictures!!!

Captions:
* An amazing picture of Wes (left) and Bunza (right – look at that face!) posing back-to-back.
* “Look’t the soize of it!”
* A view through the mango tree.
* A high shutter moon shot – thought it looked neat.
* A little bird with a bright turquoise stomach that reminds me a lot of Peeps (the heavenly Easter candy), that really make me want to catch one and pop it in my mouth. Probably wouldn’t melt as deliciously though : ) And sorry this is so dark.
* A cool yellow bird.
* Neat cloud shot. I watched the top of this cloud expanding like a marshmallow in the microwave as the storm built. It’s so cool how quickly weather changes here – ‘cuz of the ITCZ I think?
* Two of the cool iridescently blue birds with stark white eyes (hope you appreciate these bird shots Grams & Gramps ;). I like the one that’s got it’s wings open just about to alight.
* Here’s a nice illustration of how incredibly dusty things get over here. It took some good scrubbing to get that shoe clean too!
* I’ve been trying ever since Philadelphia to get a good shot of the moon, and this one turned out alright – I’m not really sure why there’s a double image and that line is one of the powerlines outside my homestay house.
* I barely got this picture of one of the really neat herons that are all over and amazingly graceful.
* This is a cool shot I got when I was playing around with the shutter speed trying to take a picture of the massive downpour of rain coming down. (This one goes out to you Jizzle!)

Future Site Visit - Almost done w/ Training

Future Site Visit last week went as well as could be asked for. I left Luweero around 6:30 am with a mutatu (a van taxi) brimming with Muzungu’s (the local word for “white person”) and arrived in Kampala after some interesting and bumpy side roads to avoid traffic. A quick search through the bookstore for a Luganda-English dictionary (I was a bit miffed that I couldn’t find one) and a delicious and rare meal of mini-pizza were the only distractions on my way to the taxi park.

A big, flat, dirt lot, surrounded by small market stands, crammed with mutatu’s and people which at times will try and grab you to get into their taxis (regardless of where you actually want to go)—the taxi park can be a bit intimidating. Also, I’m really glad that I went to a big university because I gained some valuable “walking skills” there, namely “collision avoidance.” In a big crowd at UW you walk with purpose, you point your head in the direction you’re going, and must constantly adjust as you look at the flow of people around you on all sides. It’s important to have that skill in a taxi park where there’s not only people moving every which way, but also taxis navigating the throngs and impossibly small lanes.

Anyway, no real problems, I just pulled out some basic “Kayonza Stage eri wa?” [Where’s the Kayonza Stage?] and some “Saagala (amazzi, emere, omugaati, amawulire, etc…) ssebo” [I don’t want (water, food, bread, newspaper, etc.)] to all the vendors that circulate the park. After deflecting that for two hours—you often have to wait for a taxi to fill up before it leaves, there’s not a set schedule—it was smooth sailing to Kayonza.

Kayonza is a pretty small town about 24 km north of Kayunga on a bumpy dirt road (the district, like a county, has the same name). It has roughly the same environment as Luweero because it is only about 50 miles to the east and the thing I noticed most about it is how quiet and tranquil it is. The main road runs through the town, but when a mutatu drives by you can hear it when it is far down the road and draws your attention with all its noise. During the five days I was there I didn’t do too much beyond visit nearly 20 schools by bike, but at most there was nobody or maybe a teacher or two because it was in between terms. I also talked more with my counterpart and he was very nice in accommodating me in his house. Currently my house has a few problems (bats, no furniture, dirty walls, and massive spiders), but I should be able to iron them out in the first couple weeks or so. I also realized how spoiled I am here at the Mukiibi home where they have battery backup and I got to experience bathing, eating, and reading by lantern light because of how infrequently the electricity actually works. One night we also had tea outside by moonlight around 8:30, which was almost surreal and pretty friggin’ sweet.

Not much more to report there, except that I managed to get my cell phone stolen on the way back through Kampala (sorry to all those that didn’t even know I had it, I didn’t call the States because it’s so expensive, I was mostly using it to keep in contact with other PCT’s)– pretty big bummer, but I should get a new one soon and whoever wants the number should just let me know (I don’t want to post it here on public domain).

This week has dragged a bit because there’s just a lot of things to do, and my mind has been a little divided: we present our Qualifying Projects, must pass the Language Proficiency Interview, and dance / sing (and in my case, give a speech in Luganda) at the Homestay Thank You. As of today, the first one is thankfully done.

Next week, we’ll be in Kampala getting everything finalized before we’re sworn in and shipped out to our sites on Thursday (the 10th). That’s all for now.

Love & Stuff from the other side of the world,
Ryan (a.k.a. Migadde)

P.S. One problem I’m running into is where to put all my pictures. I’m starting to think I probably should’ve brought my computer as a place of storage and also so I can write these blog entries without having to pay for the internet time. If I get lucky, maybe I’ll find a computer with a CD-burner nearby Kayonza or at least in Kampala and I can start putting pictures on those (and I say “lucky” because I haven’t seen one yet).

End of Week 7: Counterparts and Capture the Flag

Met Counterpart
I guess the biggest news is that this last Wednesday there was a workshop where everybody’s counterparts (at least for education the person we’ll be working with most closely for the next 2 years) and some supervisors (a.k.a. bosses) came to get some more information and meet us. My counterpart is a stocky man, I’d guess somewhere in his 50’s, who’s named John Mutuuba. He seemed really cool, although not terribly talkative, but I’m not exactly a social butterfly either. He actually comes from a Lumasaba speaking region (over in the east), so Luganda isn’t his first language. When I asked him how long he’s been teaching he said, “Since about 1980,” and I replied, “Oh, that’s a long time, I was born in 1983,” which elicited a nice chuckle from him. One surprising statistic that he gave me was that there are about 90 primary schools in the cachement area of our Coordinating Center School. That means that I’ll probably have plenty of work if I want it which I think is good. It would be harder to have nothing to do.

Two highlights from the day:
There was a small session where the different groups (volunteers, counterparts, supervisors) wrote down their expectations of the other groups and I was “voluntold” (a.k.a. forcibly volunteered to present the posters that the trainees had come up with. I didn’t really want to present, but there wasn’t much I could do when no one else was standing up and I was the closest. Anyway, I got up and presented fairly well, trying to radiate good intentions to our future bosses and partners. When I sat down again I was congratulated and Stephanie said, “Maybe if you don’t want to present anymore you should screw up really badly instead of doing well.” Well, that really made the ego glow for a bit and hopefully it will help with nervousness in presenting in the future.

And I was quite nervous for a little presentation I, and 4 other PCT’s, were going to give to the whole group (~120 people) on the EAP (Emergency Action Plan).
…. It was a disaster…
Near the beginning, rain started to fall on the tin roof above, which makes this lovely static noise which drowns out all other sounds created by presenters, microphone systems, and otherwise. We took a small break to see if the rain would stop and then the Country Director said we should just go on so that we just shouted very ineffectively into the microphone. What made it especially bad was that I’d spent about 2 hours making my flipchart nice and pretty and I was going to have the crowd guess and then peel away papers to reveal aspects of the “Site Locator Form” (exciting, I know! :). I knew that wouldn’t work so I just read them off and got it over with. It was silly. Many of the other PCT’s congratulated me afterwards, which was very nice and just goes to show you how well we all support each other.

Capture the Flag
Yesterday (Saturday), after an exciting “Language Immersion Day” in the morning, most of the PCT’s got together at the Diocese (our training center), to play a big game of capture the flag. It was a bit funny trying to get all the rules set up with so many strong, individual personalities, but after a little bit we got started. Running, dodging, and leaping through the midday heat (which was surprising with how cool it’s been the last week), many of us became sweaty and doubled-over, out-of-breath within the first 5 minutes. I hadn’t realized how out of shape I’ve become without a daily 20 minute bike ride to and from work and the occasional game of ultimate. I should probably take up running or jump roping or something. I guess that’s all I have to say about that.



Sorry, that kind of trailed off into boringitude. This next week should prove quite exciting and be a good source of stories as we’ll be heading off to our Future Site Visit. We all have to make our own way there by public transport and I’ll be staying in my future house as well. It’ll be for 4 days, so stay tuned – good stuff to come!

As always, loves you all, keep in touch, I will answer emails offline and copy-paste them next time I can get to the internets,
Ryan

PICTURES!!!

I figured out that the pictures I was trying to upload were just too ridiculously huge for the computers here to handle (~3MB each), so I used my host family's computer to make them smaller first : ). Enjoy!
Captions:
* A cool leaf I saw in the farm attached to Nakaseke College
* A neat shot after the charcoal stove has been lit in the kitchen at night.
* A photo of the yard to the east of the house showing my clothes drying on the line and our garden, which seems to mostly consist of aloe plants. Sometimes on Sundays when it's hot we nap under the mango tree which you can see part of in the top right.
* Here's a few of our enkoko (chickens).

* A crazy lizard thing I saw while sitting under the mango tree.

* Here's a picture of the "bush" taken from Nakaseke college to give you an idea of what the terrain here looks like (a.k.a green and jungly, and not really any mountains - probably will be similar in Kayonza).* A sweet sunset. * This is the kitchen where every night my host mom cooks a feast on three charcoal stoves ! Amazing she be.

* The picture of my house for the next 2 years (I will see it next week), supposedly it has electricity!

* The Mukiibi House - Home Sweet Home. It's fairly small, but the boys sleep in a different room (the one behind Dan) , which is separate and attached to the kitchen
*Me and my host Father, Wilson Mukiibi, chillin' at the homestead.

* My 2nd oldest brother staying at the house, Dan. He's taught me how to make juice, sometimes helps me with washing clothes (which I've caught him doing now), and I help him with physics and math homework.

Will try to get some more on next time.
P.S. Let me know with a reply or an email if anyone has any requests for pictures. There are a lot of cool birds here that I'm going to try to get "snaps" of. Also, I'm keeping the bigger versions (may have to start writing them to CD or something soon though).

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.