Computer Lab & Links

Just a quick post here to announce that my major project for the 2nd half of my service will be trying to put in a small (probably 2 or 3) computer lab at my center school. The computer training that I've done with my teachers just using my laptop has been a lot of fun and has felt like something valuable that I can bring to the table, which I really needed.

Anyway, I'm planning to get some Inveneo Computing Stations, which are pretty sweet. They're resistant to dust (because they don't have fans and use flash memory) and use extremely low power (22 watts, about a third of an incandescent light bulb), which is important because we'll be running them straight off 12V DC deep-cycle batteries (think car batteryPLUS).

So mainly, I just wanted to share that with you. You can also check out these cool little laptops designed for kids. I've played around with one and they're really neat.

Loves & misses you all,
Jonesy

In Rainbows

Just thought I'd put up this cool shot that Brad got of me at the bottom of Sipi Falls. This is dedicated to all you Radiohead fans (Jay, Dave, etc.), you don't have to just listen to In Rainbows, you can live it. For all of you interested in physics and things that are pretty, usually with a rainbow what you're seeing is light reflected & refracted in water droplets which divides the "white" sunlight into its spectrum. This happens at a certain angle from the sun and so usually we see a rainbow, which is half or a smaller arc of a circle. At bottom of this waterfall you could see the rainbow in a full circle. BTW: it was awesome!

Still Alive & Taking Pictures

Hey all, just a quick post here to assure you all that I'm alive and well despite the relative silence on the blog.

Letters Received

• Lizzy: Turns out that my friend who I used to share a P.O. Box accidentally lost this amid some papers so this I just got this letter from September.


• Tara: From Madagascar - Rock on fellow PCV!

Now that the term is out until next month I should have some extra time to write back to those above, and those who wrote before.

Beyond that, below are some lovely (altho sadly a bit pixellated) images from a nice corner of Uganda.

Lots of Random Little Notes

Shout Out: Amy Nicholas & Jack are getting married in August!⁰

Letters¹



• Brandi (about 3 weeks ago)
  
• Grandpa Dick (about 3 weeks ago)
  

On the subject of letters, it turns out that Peace Corps doesn't want anything sent to their P.O. Box in Kampala unless you're in training, so everything should be sent to my personal P.O. Box.

Cat!

I got one. He is named Katogo². He's a good little kitty when he's not being bad. Here are some pics:

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Footnotes

0 There is a possibility of me coming back, nothing for sure yet though (hint hint, Mom, offer still stands?).

1 I just wanted to start mentioning when I've sent out a letter, just to double check that people are getting them. I have a suspicion that some never arrived.

2 This the name of a mixed bean & cassava dish I like, it also means little papyrus or swamp. It also sounds a bit like the spanish "gato" and like "cat go."

Anniversary

(internet is being a bit crappy, sorry if the formatting's messed up

So, I'm not usually much of one for anniversaries and dates and
things, but one year seems like a bit of a milestone I can't ignore.
And, to be perfectly honest can't help celebrating a little. Instead
of a long eloquent expose on my current state of consciousness (I
kinda did that in the last entry) I decided that I'd revisit my
exact¹ first impressions of Uganda
recorded in my journal:

7th March 2007

So far it's been pretty awesome here in Uganda. We've gone through
a lot of seminars (i.e. been talked at), but this country is beautiful
and the Ugandans I've met so far are extremely nice. They tend to be
somewhat shy and polite, but this may be because much of them are
workers at this "retreat," Banana Village.

When we were driving here around midnight right after stepping off
the plane I remember feeling so elated, with such a sense of wonder
coursing through me. My nose was twitchinghref="#2">² and my eyes roamed from my seat
at the very front of the bus. [...] I really marveled at the
beauty of the full moon, hanging in the sky with whisps of cloud to
keep it company. [...] My eyes roamed in wonder, but this was
interrupted for a time by the thought that this elation would not
last.³ That at some point I would undoubtedly be frustrated abnd depressed in this country. It kinda brought me down a bit and then I realized I was being dumb and should strive to enjoy the feeling while it lasted.

On the first night I couldn't sleep. There were so many new
noises: crickets, frogs, owls(?), monkeys(?). Their short calls or
incessant droning rhythm came into my dormitory in stereo and tickled
my excited ears under my mosquito net. With the comforter bunched up at the baseboard ⁴and my lumpy pillow at the head forced me ito curl up on my bowl-shaped cot. I tapped my feet and vibrated a little, at times trying futilely to fall asleep, at others just zenning out on the night sounds or the colors⁵ of the darkness around me.

At about 5 o'clock, two hours before breakfast, I decided to give up trying to sleep and walk around the Banana Village compound to take in as much as I could in the darkness. I slipped on some pants and my faux-Teva sandals⁶ and slipped out the door. I moved slowly without a light, strolling and stopping for noises in the bush and once to look at the moon. Not more than a couple minutes into my stroll I gelt a prick on my foot--and then another. I was confused at first and suddenly the prospect of chiggers in the grass hit me as the pains came more frequently. I ran down to the porch of my dormitory, flopping along and hoping not to wake anybody up. I sat down quickly throwing off my sandals and hurriedly brushing off the little bastards. I crushed a few of the stragglers and went to take one of the colder showers of my life before laying back down to wait for the others to wake up. Back in bed, I chuckled to myself about my first little adventure with the local wildlife.

So, that was my first night in Uganda. Loves and misses you all. Weeraba.

---

Footnotes

1 Well, actually, I corrected grammar a bit and
changed a couple words, but you can tell if you look at the
formatting. And, added the ever-popular footnotes.


2 It's interesting how much your state of mind
can influence the way that you remember things, especially your
sense-memory of it. I said "my nose twitching," which is a bit inane,
but I was just trying to stress that what I remembered most from my
first impressions were specific senses rather than huge thoughts, like

1. how the air of Uganda felt -- like Arkansas, warm and close
   
2. how clear and bright the moon and stars were -- bright blue while below in Uganda most was dark or lit by dim orange light
   
3. how Uganda smelled -- like something burning, sometimes plastic, sometimes brush, it brought me back to my time in Brazil when we saw people burning things on the side of the road (garbage cans, let alone garbage collection are about as rare here as ice)

3 Echo Metallica -- "Sad but True"

4 I almost always go to sleep without a blanket at first -- it's just too damn hot. But around 4am or so it gets cold enough (Dad & Jason would probably say, "It finally gets to a tolerable level of 'hot'.") that covering up is necessary now that I've adapted. I'm officially a cold-weather-wuss and put on long sleeves in 70 degree weather. I guess it makes sense considering that in 90+ heat I'm used to wearing pants because that's the culture.

5 No need to worry, I'm not writing about how I went crazy the first night in Uganda. I'm just talking about the colors and patterns you see when you close your eyes. If I try hard I can usually see neon green, red, and purple, but only one at a time. I believe this is called an entoptic phenomenon, which I think are really neat. Another one that you can look up is called blue field entoptic phenomenon -- if you look at the sky in a certain way you can see these bright little motes whizzing around, which are appparently the white blood cells whizzing around in the veins of your retina. Pretty sweet, huh! I'm pretty sure these are the "stars" you see when you stand up to quick or your brother-in-law gives you a good one-two to the dome. I've seen some other things like this, but barring research or corroboration I plead the 5th in order to not be labeled loony (alliteration, lules!).

6 These are my staple-shoes. They are often dirty, a little ragged, a little too big, and not exactly what you'd call "prfessional." Beyond that they are beautiful, wonderous, and superb in this damn hot country. I put on a polo shirt, tuck in my shirt, and wear a belt, but damnit the shoes are mine! Adaptation is never absolute, sometimes you gotta make a stand for comfort and sanity.

(A Day in the Life)*2

WARNING!: This is a long post. Read at a leisurely pace. Preferrably in little sections interrupted by catnaps or mindless perusing of the internet.

Today, I just heard from two other volunteers that someone¹,2 in my group will be ETing (Early Termination - a.k.a going home without completing service) at the end of the month. And that's cool. Her reasons make sense and it seems like the right decision. One of the volunteers I was talking with, however, said something to the effect of,"She's lucky, I'm jealous. I want to go home" and I replied, "I would have said the same thing yesterday. But, today, strangely enough, I really wanna stay." So, I thought the last couple days might be a good way to illustrate the ups and downs of my life here and also update my blog which has been much too neglected. So, here we go:

The "Bad"¹⁹ Day

Yesterday started out pretty okay. The night before I'd prepared a couple graphs on flipchart paper to present at the first staff meeting of Kayonza Primary (see example below).

---

³

The meeting went well, I presented my graphs and also talked about other things like the bars that I've put in the windows of the resource room to make it secure and stuff. So, here's where I'm going to talk about how my day easily turns shitty. Afer the meeting I got some lunch, washed some clothes which I would need for today and headed off to Kitimbwato get:

• 11, 38.5 inch bars to finish securing Resource Room
  
• Airtime (read: cell phone minutes)
  
• G-nuts⁴, raw, for roasting as a snack
  
• Miscellaneous vegetables
  

Pretty straightforward, right? Wrong. Airtime was got with only 10 mins waiting - no problem. Then I went to get bars from a hardware shop from which I've already bought quite a bit, including metal bars for the windows and paint. Now 20 feet costs 12,000 shillings[]. I wanted to buy 38 feet. Let's do the math:

12,000 [UgSh] / 20 [feet] = 600 [UgSh/foot]
600 [UgSh/foot] * 38 [feet] = 22,800 [UgSh]
Yet, this guy was charging me 25,000 shillings, even after we did the calculation above together, and I explained that if I buy more of something it should be cheaper than if I buy less. I was asking for him to come down to 23,000⁵, really, a piddling reduction considering the above and all I've bought from him. So, with a simmering rage I gave into frustration and just walked away.

Okay, next item is g-nuts. Went to the dukka⁶, and greeted the man, asked for the nuts, he begins measuring out a kilo for me (internal dialogue: "good, okay, at least something is going right"). Then up walks this guy, clearly drunk (at 3 pm), who flops his hand out in front of me and says, "you give me 100"⁸. Already, pissed off, I say in Luganda⁹, "no, I'm not going to give you anything," then I change my mind and say, "okay, if you can answer this question I will give you 100." "What is the square root of 2?" (accepted answer 1.41). Clearly he couldn't answer it and asked me a few more times why I wasn't going to give him money and said, "so you are very sober" and I replied, "yes, and you are very not sober." So, not exactly putting me in a great mood, at least this was entertaining to the people around, who were chuckling at the mzungu and the drunkard.

On to miscellaneous vegetables. I move on to find that the lady I usually buy green peppers and cabbage and stuff from has almost nothing on her table. Bouncing around a few times, "where can I find green peppers?" (they point, I go there). Greet the man with vegebles on a small table, and notice the green peppers are small and shriveled due to age, so I figure that the normal price of 100 is a bit too high and ask for a reduction. He says, "No" giving some excuse about sunshine and whatever, then I say, "okay, how 'bout 3 for 200?" again he says "No" with more excuses about travel costs whatever. Okay, fine. Now I point to the heads of cabbage which are respectively 300 and 200, and small enough to be 200 and 100. I ask for a reduction. "No." "Okay, how 'bout you give me this larger (orig. 300) lettuce, with these three peppers (orig. 300), for 500¹⁰?" "No." Flaring nostrils and having thoughts of grabbing a machete and going Hotel Rwanda on this guy, I buy two peppers and walk away swearing under my breath before an internally roiling bike ride home. A few things to notice here:

1. Look how ridiculously hard it is for me to buy a few simple things for the correct price,


2. Notice how small small obstacles continue to accumulate, wearing down my overall
   demeanor until,


3. I very quickly explode into a murderous rage, that, as we're about to see ruins my whole day.

So, I go home and want to do some repetitive work in a quiet place to cool myself down. I go to sweep the Resource Room. The well-meaning, but thoroughly loud and obnoxious kids that live near me notice my return and come to play in the room. I yell at them. A lot. "Stop sweeping, I don't want help." "Get out of the way." "I'm mad, if you're going to be in here I want you to be quiet." "Get out of the way." "Shut up!" "Get out of the way." "Okay, get out of the room." And eventually I close the door to keep them out and send the message with finality that I don't want to be bothered. After that, the sweeping does calm me down some.

I go back to my house where many kids are playing noisily on the swing I put up in the backyard¹¹. Now, I've been trying to be outside my house more,¹² and the hammock brought by Dad and Jason has been a godsend (THANK YOU!) not only in relaxing, but in being more comfortable among the kids of my immediate community. Anyway, I'm still mad, but want to do a bit of reading and relaxing in the hammock and I think I can ignore all the noise the swinging kids are making. I notice that one girl who is sitting near the hammock is staring at me. I get stared at a lot. A lot a lot. And it's unnerving, especially when all of your nerves are already gone. So, I ask the girl, "please stop looking at me so much" and all of the 15 or so kids that are back there have frozen and are all staring at me. And it is too much. I go inside and study stuff on the computer¹³. A little while later, the power goes out while I'm cooking and I think I should enjoy the dark night so I get my hammock time in with the stars¹⁴.

The "Good"¹⁹ Day

(I'm a bit tired from writing out my whole "Bad"¹⁹ day, so for now I'm going to be lazy and just write what my good day was like in outline format.)

Abstract: Went to Kayunga mainly to observe the "Science Caravan" that's put on by the JICA¹⁵ volunteers at Katherine's Youth Center¹⁶. Wanted to do some other errands too.

• Woke up to a cute text from a cute girl¹⁷.
  
• Rode through a nice fog to Kayunga. Good for keeping cool. Bad for keeping clean.
  
• After bathing¹⁸, managed to go get metal bars for
  cheaper (19,000) as well as cut into pieces for less than half the previous price.
  
• Found out Internet wasn't working (two times).
  
• Nina (bottom left in pic) was upset with me for not preparing a math presentation.
  I had brought SET to teach to the JICA volunteers. So, I told her about that, that I'd had a shitty day yesterday and hadn't felt like preparing anything, and that I would go get stamps made of the SET shapes, so that pirate versions could be more easily made (I'd been meaning to do this for a while). That way, if the JICA volunteers, who are all math & science teachers,liked the game they could make it themselves.
• Getting stamps made was a success and under my planned budget of 5,000.
• Watched and participated in JICA science presentation, which included:
  
  
  
  • A cardboard box, air vortexer (ARYA!!!!! like you're gun, but lower tech, still
    worked well though.)
    
  • A number of neat magic tricks by Kimuli (next to Nina, with the crazy shirt)
    
  • A hot air balloon made from old plastic shopping bags
    
  • An experiment with cup telephones for the participants to do
    
  • Some cool exploding things
    
  • A bottle rocket using air pressure, some water, and a pump. One of the JICA volunteers was struggling a bit with the explanation, so I came up to help and showed off some skillz by explaining the physics of it mostly in Luganda. Yes. I am that cool.(Ego up.) Yes. That is maybe the nerdliest thing to be cool about. (And back down.)
    
  
  
• Taught SET to a number of the youths that stayed after the science presentation.
  
• Rode home toting iron bars. Was tired. But was happy.
  
• Final product of the day: the shining blog entry before you.
  

Also, if you followed my advice, now is a good time to come back to ¹⁹. For the rest of you that already read it, I bet you're those same breed of masochists that like to read the last page of a book first aren't you? But, I'm sure that's no one I know ;).
Loving and missing you all,
Ryan

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1 Note that I'm trying to keep these people relatively anonymous. No judging allowed!
2 Also, I'm learning a bit of html and these footnotes are now linked. Please appreciate accordingly. If I get ambitious, I'll go back and link the footnotes in my last big post.
3 These are PLE (Primary Leaving Exam) Results for P7 (~7th grade students). You can think of (Division 1)=(A), (Div 2)=(B), 3=C, 4=D, U=F, and X=absent. Notice difference in achievement by genders (sorry for stereotypical pink=girls, blue=boys coloring).
4 This is short for Ground Nuts, and they're pretty much exactly like peanuts, except that the little red paper thing on the inside tends to stay on a lot better.
5 Note that the difference of our prices is about the same as the difference between $14.71 and $13.53 (exchange rate of 1700 [UgSh/$]).
6 This is the Luganda word for "run," but also happens to mean a small store. Many words in Luganda mean many different things, example: omukka n. 1. breath, 2. smoke, 3. fog. Luckily the meanings tend to be related. 10 points for the person that can think of some words like this in English. All that comes to my mind is "too," "to," "two," but those aren't very fun.
7 I deleted this footnote later one, but I don't know regular expressions well enough yet to reorder the ones below without spending forever, so I'm leavingit.
8 Okay, test time, how many $ is 100 UgSh worth?
9 After this point, things said in English will be normal type face and things said in Luganda will be italicized.
10 Mathematical minds will notice the difference is 100 [UgSh], which, if you passed the test from above is about $0.06. So, I'm asking for old and small vegetables to be reduced from $0.35 to $0.29 - which I think is reasonable.
11 Note that this swing has already broken. After I fix it, it will be part of the next post I'm planning about shit that breaks. I built the swing after they had broken my hammock (which I repaired).
12 It's really amazing how easy it is to become a hermit here. When you are so different and constantly bombarded by kids calling you "Mzungu" it's an easy escape to just hide in your house. There are nice books there which bring you back to America where you are, if not normal, then at least accepted. At the very least more than a circus freak.
13 Which was surprisingly calming in a kind of zombifying way. I've been trying to decide whether it was good for my service that my computer came, because I've been spending a decent amount of time with it, but I think net effect is positive.
14 This was actually a superb idea (sorry 'bout the self-congratulation). My hammock is placed below a tree somewhat skimpily clad in leaves and most of the amazing number of stars were very brightly lit behind it's pitch dark boughs. I had the thought that it was really cool that the actual sky I could see was so much brighter than the dark branches and leaves of the tree and as I swung back and forth the stars moved (due to parallax) in and out, as if the whole world was swinging in the cradle of the sky. It was very beautiful, very relaxing, very deep. I recommend.
15 read: Japanese Peace Corps.
16 The Youth Center is where Katherine, one of my closest volunteers, works as the boss. She's had me come to teach mathematics and tries to hold events for kids as well as always being open with pool (billiards that is), ping pong, a little library, a TV + DVD player, a nice field, etc. Clearly, her organization has money. This is weird in Peace Corps. But, it's also really nice.
17 Although only occuring once, I can definitely say that this is the best way to start my day in the village. I even came up with a funny story as a reply. BTW: lest you all think that I'm some lecherous Romeo over here, please note that girls, in general, for me, have been more problems than they're worth here in Uganda.
18 22 [km road] + speeding trucks/cars + sweat + dust = a very dirty Ryan. Katherine and Amy let me use their facilities to bucket bathe. I appreciate.
19 you should probably read this last, even though it is referenced near the top. Okay, so I wanted to explain why I put "good" and "bad" days in quotes. It's not because I don't want to be judgemental and say all days are created equal. They're not. Some days are shit. Some days rock. What I want to point out here is how even the bad day had some rays of goodness: having a successful meeting where I was well appreciated and presented valuable information, a beautiful hammock-time under the stars. And even the best day had some smears of crappiness: making Nina upset for not having prepared, finding the internet down many times, probably being overcharged for the stamps, being called"mzungu" for about two hours straight on the ride to and from Kayunga. In the end, the difference between a good day and a bad is not just the things that happen, but how you react to them, how you let them affect the course of your actions from bad things to bed time. You can get pissed and take it out on others or you can turn around and say, "I can make this right, it'll just take a bit of work on my part." I'm sure some writer for SCRUBS has already put this idea much more eloquently at the end of episode #whatever, but hey, I'm a physics major right? : )

Computer's up - Random Trees

Just a quick post here. My computer now has an operating system - Ubuntu! The excitement comes from the fact that despite the limited functionality from running an OS from a Cd I've been able to do a lot more responding to emails and blog posting. Now, I'll be able to do more responding, more pictures and if I get real bored, audio and video too. And, magically, being able to do more writing on a comfortable digital platform has seemed to keep me more sane (notice the change to "Nerd" in blog title). That's it, here's a picture I promised Michelle: