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!!!!