Interesting Weekend

We are highly discouraged from having blog titles that say, "sick", "dying", "feel like death", or otherwise. When people blog that stuff the Peace Corps gets nasty emails from parents and loved ones. So let's just say I had an interesting weekend.

I'll go even further. I'm awfully glad I have the best health care right now I will ever have in my life. This weekend I finally got some nasty food poisoning / fecal oral contamination and spent most of the day Sunday/Monday in bed, on a toilet, or over a bucket, and for those of you who read the blog regularly, yes, the same bucket.

I'm feeling fine now and had more support than I could stand the past few days. Here are some updates on what is going on / coming up.

Thursday was supposed to be the day of sight announcements but it has been delayed until Saturday. That happened today and was not well received by the 45 volunteers who have desired that info more than anything else the past 2 months.

Friday I will be presenting on strategies for waste management and also presentin

g on opportunities to advance the practice of Micro-Finance clubs by creating new opportunities for profit. The waste management was required cause thats kind of my field, the micro finance was just an interest of mine that I volunteered for. Other volunteers are mad at me and think I am a dork now. (not in a negative way though, i love the people here and they tolerate me well)

My team won at trivia last week and I am looking forward to picking out questions this week.

Next week I may be out of communication a while as I visit my future site location. I will be sure to take lots of pictures and provide a full update on where I'll be going, what my assignment will be, and what the place is like as soon as I know.

Throwing up in a pit latrine hole is not fun!

Way Too Long Since Last Post

It has been way too long since my last post, mostly because I have been experimenting with different internet providers and found that Zain is slower than your average gamecock. So here are some updates on whats going on the past few weeks. I'm going to go a little picture intensive and let formating suffer this entry. I've been told there's a lot of parents from our group reading my blog so I know the pictures will be more appreciated than text wrapping.

Cooking Day

We had our cooking day, where we prepared a meal for one of our host families. Cooking here takes forever. We met around 8:30 AM and cooked until about 1:00 PM. We had prepared a small feast when it was over, but had to abandon several items from our menu. Ultimately we served spaghetti with sauce made from scratch, chapati, fried chicken, guacamole, tortilla chips, and of course, matoke and beans. As you will see in the pictures attached, the fried chicken was about as fresh as it comes.

Immersion Week

Our groups Immersion week was September 14 to 19. We were all assigned to a volunteer serving somewhere in the country and needed to utilize the public transportation system to get there ourselves. Before starting the journey we stopped by Garden City, the Americanized shopping mall in Kampala and got a large New York style pepperoni pizza. We were off a little later and after a 4 hour ride in a mutatu with my legs propped up in the air by potato sacks and a 50 lbs backpack on my knees we were there. The week was pretty great and left me upset to be heading back to training. One of the best parts was the food, scrambled eggs, pancakes, eggplant curry, and pasta with Asian peanut sauce were some of the highlights. I'm of the opinion now that training has taken us as far as it is going to, and now they are just wasting our time. I'm ready to be at site. See pictures below of us visiting a local school and checking out the village water supply.

New Friends

One of our favorite bars in Wakiso is New Friends. It is a dump, it is a dump compared to most bars in Wakiso, but it is central and they are cheaper than the nice bars. Their facilities arent great and they had no mechanism for washing your hands afterwards so we installed a tippy-tap, a hand washing station made by stepping on a stick and pouring water over your hands. We have also instituted a weekly trivia night at another bar. The winning group asks the questions next week. Last week I won and can't wait to ask questions next week.

Other News

Site announcements are next week, September 30!!!!

Ryan is out of internet and out of town

I'm currently on my immersion week which has been great. Immersion week is a week away from training where we take public transportation to visit another volunteer in country. I ran out of internet about a week and half ago so I've been out of communication until now.

A few thoughts from the past week:

The Mutatu trip from Kampala to Kasambya was tortourous. I had about a 50 lb backpack sitting on my lap in the back seat of a 15 passenger bus that had about 16 passengers and a ton of cargo. My feet were resting on top of some potato sacks. We sat inside the cab for about an hour before it got going and then spent 4 hours traveling. The pain in my rear end afterwards was the greatest I had ever felt in my life. 3 days later I am still in pain and can honestly say I have never in my life had so much pain from sitting so long after I stopped sitting.

Warid telecom has an unlimited internet bundle that we tried to get in Kampala the other day but they were out of stock of the modems. I'm still hopeful I'll work something out that will allow some viewing or maybe just listening of the Clemson vs Auburn game this weekend.

My football season tickets seem to be selling nicely so its good to see I will be getting back at least what I paid for them.

I've got some other stuff to relay on and some pictures to post but have to get off the computer now. I'll try to have another update this weekend. Until then everything is pretty awesome here, hope the same is true for yall back home, UNLESS YOU ARE A GAMECOCK.

Random Thoughts

Just some random thoughts since I don’t have anything substantial to tell you folks.

My host father brought a movie home this week, Ace of Hearts, with Dean Cain. The kids have now watched it at least 3 times and I’m kind of starting to miss watching iCarly.

Rolexes are my new favorite food.

In Wakiso a rolex is made by mixing cabbage with a scrambled egg and a pinch of salt, you throw it on a frying pan and make a circular formation, next you flip the egg and throw a thin circular chapati on top of it, let it cook for a second then take it off the heat chapati down, slice up half a tomato down the center of the egg and throw another pinch or two of salt on it, roll it up, slice about 4-5 times and eat. Unfortunately rolexes are not served in the house.

I’m getting a little sick of the diet here. A typical meal my family, and everyone around here, serves is about 2 pounds of starches with no nutritional value, maybe some vegetable, and usually about 2-3 ounces of meat. Last night I literally had 1 pound of matooke and one pound of potatoes on my plate. Literally 6-7 small potatoes.

Saturday was wonderful. After morning language classes me and about 10 other volunteers went to a local recreation center and hung out of the pool for 3 hours, then played some Frisbee and called it a day. I came home to test out my skype connection with my parents and to my surprise was able to do about 50 minutes for just about 65 mb, real nice considering I’m paying for my internet by the half gig.

Sunday morning went to Church and we were looking like we were going to get out in a brisk 1.5 hours, but sure enough 20 minutes of Lugandan announcements, a second collection, and a couple random songs followed communion, bringing us to 2 hours even. I think I’m going to start sneaking out after communion even though I’ve kind of looked down on that practice my entire life. After church I did laundry for 3 hours. I literally scrubbed my clothes until 3 of my fingers were bleeding. People here are surprised I’m 26 and unmarried, and I have to admit, if I’d have had to do hand wash my clothes my entire life I’d have gotten married by now to avoid it.

That’s it for me. Peace.

PS: Not missing football season nearly as much as I thought I would but probably will be by the 18^th. BEAT AUBURN! I’m hoping to have a new unlimited internet plan by then and hopefully be able to watch the game, but that is a long long long shot.