Video of Kitgum

Here is what Kitgum, our town, looks like! This is a video from the front seat of a bus heading into Kitgum from Gulu. Sorry but as you can tell in the video, the bus rides are pretty bumpy!

Namokora and Kitgum Houses

This is our old home in Namokora.  We have been meaning to post this forever but haven't had good internet access for some time.

This is where we stayed from October 2011-September 2012.  No power or running water...but we managed to make it a home.  The village itself was an amazing place with extremely wonderful people.  Although we now have more amenities and have much better access to FOOD, we still miss Namokora!

Below is a video of the outside of our house and the MC compound.  It is a bit like a motel in the U.S. except there was no ice machine.  Also, it was a bit like a concrete jungle.  Outside the concrete wall was an amazingly beautiful savannah and our little village!

Eventually we moved into this gem of a place.  It is certainly a step up for us!  We love the new place but miss all our friends in Namokora.  We still work in that area and see folks from time to time.  Please excuse the excessive yelling I do in this next video.  I was excited about hashbrowns!

The Holiday Season in East Africa

The holiday season in Uganda isn’t quite the same as home.  First off, it’s hot, really hot.  In fact, the second it starts to cool off back home it starts to get hotter here and the rain stops.  By December 25 everyone is burning the grassland and it will be snowing ash on us daily.  There will also be dust tornadoes.  Those are the best.

Although we greatly miss family, friends, and snow during the holidays…we made do!  We had a phenomenal Thanksgiving celebration with friends.  We hosted several of our close PC friends and one of their visiting fathers.  It was a blast.  We put the new cob oven to the test and it passed!  The famous southern corn bread dressing was not there, but I did pull off my own interpretation of my mother’s famous rolls and we had a delicious turkey.  Mr. Gobbles was around a 30 lb turkey that we bought from a local village.  We slaughtered it, brined it over-night in local honey and salt water, and roasted it slowly.  It turned out wonderfully.  None of us were sure if it was as good as we thought.  It could be the lack of meat in our regular diet or it could be that it was an amazing turkey!  Either way it did the job. 

Before

After!

It was also great to finally host people at our place.  Our former house in Namokora was too far North for anyone to visit and hard to get to.  The new place is great and we were happy to have people all the way up from the Southwest.  Here are all the girls hanging out while turkeys were being slaughtered:

If you look closely you can see all the cards people have sent us over our 17 months here.

We also said goodbye to our good friend Russ during Thanksgiving.  It was his last hoorah in Peace Corps as he has accepted a job with Foreign Service.  We got him an appropriate going away present: a full dashiki suit with roosters on it.  The roosters are particularly significant because both Russ and I have grown to have intense hatred of them since we’ve been here.  Roosters do not crow in the morning.  They crow all the time. In Uganda they generally make the most noise from 3-6 A.M.  I don’t like being awake at those hours.  Neither did Russ.  So we got him this outfit:

Rooster Dashiki!  Every mans dream suit...

 We feel that it will serve him well in the Foreign Service.  After our Thanksgiving extravaganza, there wasn’t much going on with work.  Our organization was finalizing reports before the New Year so we had little to do.  We spent a lot of time sitting around planning and thinking about our trip to Zanzibar.

Hard at work cooking everything in our small oven

Thanksgiving success!

We headed to Zanzibar around December 21.  Taking a flight out of Uganda was quite exciting for us.  Since we got back from the wedding in America we have been in country for 6 months without time off, so it was a much needed vacation. The flight had cold drinks and cashews.  We couldn’t have asked for more!  Cashews are a welcome departure from the usual ground nuts we eat here in Uganda. 

The flight went from Entebbe, Uganda to Kilimanjaro, Tanzania.  We flew directly by the mountain.  It is amazing how it appears out of nowhere and how monstrous it is.  Someday we hope to trek it…but it is really expensive and at the moment we are saving for our India/Southeast Asia trip in September before we come home for Thanksgiving.  We then took a quick flight to Dar es Salaam, followed by a 10 minute puddle jumper trip to Zanzibar.  We were picked up and driven to our swank villa on the East side of the island.  Here’s a pic of our wonderful Christmas villa.  We spent about a week here:

Christmas Villa in Paje, Zanzibar

Plenty of hammocks and there was air conditioning in the bedrooms.  We had a blast at this place.  There was a pool and an “honor system” bar as well.  We actually were honorable…I Know my parents would be proud.  Paid for every beer, I promise.  But we also were smart and picked up quite a bit more from the Duty free on the way out of Uganda, including champagne for New Years!  Peace Corps Volunteers can always spot a deal…

The villa was about a five minute walk from the beach, which looked like this:

Not too shabby.  Although Zanzibar is a tourist destination for PCV’s and backpackers, as a whole it is sparsely populated and impressively serene.  We walked the five minutes to the beach and promptly found a spot at a small bar/beach hotel.  Ironically, the owner was from Uganda and loved the fact that we knew many of the local languages as well as the work we were doing.  Over the course of our two weeks in Zanzibar he gave us plenty of free drinks, let us hook up our own music on the beach, and let us crash at his hotel for free.  It was a great deal!  Also, the East side of Zanzibar has a tide that extends for a mile or so.  We could walk knee deep in the ocean for at least a mile.

We ate so much fresh seafood on this trip.  It was wonderful.  Aubrey even ate prawns and octopus.  That’s a pretty big deal for her.  I even got her to venture out into the ocean a few times…until our friend, Liz, got stung by a sea urchin.  That pretty much solidified her terror of the ocean for good.  In fact, we spent Christmas morning snorkeling.  Aubrey participated for a bit but then had to call it quits. I was surprised she even got in. I think the discovery channels “oceans” ruined it for her.  Oprah’s narration ruined it for me too.  

Fresh octopus...

We then spent time in Stone Town.  This is the main city on the island and the port that all the East African slaves traveled through.  Stone Town is a mess of culture and architecture.  It is filled with winding small alleys and roads that people jet through via Vespas.   The predominant religion is Islam in Stone Town, which presented an interesting juxtaposition to Uganda, which is 80% Christian.  The whole island is a melting pot of Indian, Arab, and African influences with remnants of British Colonialism.  It shines through in there architecture and food, which is spiced to perfection, unlike Ugandan food. 

They call Zanzibar the “spice Island” which is interesting because none of the spices they grow are native to the region.  That being said, I couldn’t care less if they are invasive species or not, they are delicious and much needed in East Africa.  We went on a spice tour where we saw an interesting array of tropical agriculture in action.  The tour featured cloves, peppercorns, cardamom, lychees, coconut, vanilla, lemongrass, saffron, cinnamon, and many others.  They also had a favorite fruit of mine, star fruit:

After Stone Town we headed to the Northern most part of the Island, Kendwa.  This area is more touristy, particularly for young Europeans and ex-pats looking to party.  After all our isolation in Uganda and East Zanzibar, I don’t think any of us were prepared for the party scene.  Maybe I am just getting older?  Either way, we spent more time lounging on the beach reading and eating.  We also got another free meal from a nice couple that lives in Atlanta and thought what we were doing is great.  This was vastly appreciated by all of us because our small living allowance doesn’t quite cover travelling very much.  So make a not to yourself, if you are ever travelling and without much cash just tell folks that you are a Peace Corps volunteer.  Works every time! 

You can check out many of our photos on our Facebook page.  There are a lot more but it takes a long time to post them. It was a dream vacation that was much needed.  Zanzibar would be a great place to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer, but they don’t have any.  We did meet a study abroad student from Indiana University.  She actually lived two houses down from my old place in Bloomington.  Small world I suppose.  I wish I had of studied abroad in a place as amazing as Zanzibar.  The grass is always greener on the other side, or as they say in Zanzibar: “The octopus is always chewier on the other side of the island.”  (They don’t actually say that)

Really, I just wrote that to provide the perfect segue into the story of how I was forced to cook an octopus for Christmas dinner.  First off, it should be noted that no matter how festive you attempt to be in a tropical country while away from family, it just doesn’t feel like Christmas.  We played Christmas music, watched Muppets Christmas Carol, we even fastened up a small tree and wore hats.  It just doesn’t do it for me.  Not that it was a bad time… it just doesn’t feel the same nor does eating an octopus for dinner instead of a turkey or a ham.  Christmas morning was filled with Bloody Marys and a quick trip out in the middle of the ocean to snorkel.  The rest of the day we lounged, had cocktails on the beach, ate some shell fish, and enjoyed ourselves.  We had a phenomenal Christmas Eve dinner of fish tacos and hadn’t really planned out a Christmas meal.  Before I knew it we had purchased an octopus and everyone assumed I knew how to cook it.  I didn’t.  All I knew is Octopus is chewy.  So I attempted to beat it into submission in order to tenderize it.  Here is the evidence:

We

We feel

Nothing says Merry Christmas like deep fried Octopus!  It will be a new Tradition for Aubrey and me.  Not quite as delicious as my mom’s corn bread dressing…but we are flexible Peace Corps volunteers.  We make do! 

We now are back in Kitgum.  Aubrey is focusing on organizing and directing Northern Camp Glow, which stands for Girls Leading Our World.  I am planning the training for several local businesses hoping to expand into manually drilling boreholes.  I’ll keep you updated as we progress.  In a way this is my first small business…we’ll see how it goes!

Hope everyone enjoyed the holidays! Can’t wait to be home next year for both of them!

Cheers!

Patrick and Aubrey

New Home New Oven

It’s been a long time since we updated the blog.  As they say here in Uganda, “soddy, soddy, soddy” which means sorry.  A lot has changed in our life since we last updated.  So here it goes:

I’m sitting here listening to the Nebraska football game on a Saturday night with Patrick and Russ. As you may or may not know, we moved from Namokora to Kitgum town (about 1.5 hours away). That means that now every weekend from Friday at 5 to Monday morning we have another roommate, Russ, aka…Patrick’s husband. Russ also lives in Kitgum, about a 30 minute walk away and is an Econ Development volunteer at a school for kids with disabilities. Essentially Russ and Patrick spend the weekend talking about foreign policy, drinking Ugandan beer, and listening to bluegrass music with the occasional “flat footing.”  You can imagine how exciting that is for me.  That being said…unfortunately Russ is leaving us soon.  He recently was accepted into the Foreign Service, which is impressively hard to get into.  We are hoping he gets placed in Southeast Asia so we can visit him on the way home.  I guess I will have to start participating in these bluegrass music weekends now that Russ is gone.

Our new neighbors Tony and Kim.  They love to sit and watch.

 We’ve been living here in Kitgum for about a month now. One could say we “moved up” in the world. When we lived in Namokora, we would travel to Kitgum to stock up on food.  They have a decent outdoor market that always has onions, potatoes, garlic, and tomatoes.  They also have an Indian restaurant and a few places for pork and chips (fries).  It’s nice to now have most things around if you need them…no cheese though L. AND we have a toilet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Who knew that running water could make you so happy…and make life SO much easier.  We actually have a sink in our bathroom, shower (no hot water though), and also another sink in our “kitchen” for doing the dishes.  Our new house is pretty darn charming. It’s in a compound with a couple of other families and its not pure concrete like our other house. There is actually grass when you walk outside. It’s nice. Mercy Corps moved us because it didn’t make sense for us to stay in hotels in Kitgum about 2 weekends/month for meetings and other things when they could spend less money on rent per month. We do really miss the people we met in Namokora but work/life is much easier in Kitgum town. The village was nice for a year but we are pretty excited about our new house. 

About 2 weeks in, Patrick decided that he was sick of the terrible bread here so he wanted to build an oven. So we recruited some of our friends to come and help build an oven in return for some actual, REAL bread. Look up cob ovens on Youtube. The oven is made out of termite mud, sand, bricks, rocks, clay we dug up, straw, and cow manure….yes…. manure. It works perfectly and it turned out to be only about $20 to make! Here is how it turned out:

Russ and Patrick leveling the sand on the pedestol for the oven.

Our fellow PCV Erin Morrison and I "exfoliating" our feet while mixing the cob,
which is made of clay, sand, and straw

Muddy hand print Sneak attack on Russ' short shorts.

Working with cow manure!

Patrick utilizing the "professionally" welded pizza peel!

You have to burn a fire for 2 hours in the oven to get it extremely hot.  The layers of cob insulation then hold in heat for about 8-12 hours.  It can get up to 700 degrees!  Perfect for pizza!

Rain cover still under construction

So far we have baked bread, banana bread, coffee cake, breakfast casserole, baked ziti, pizzas (when we have cheese), and cinnamon rolls. Nothing has failed us yet…fingers crossed. AND GUESS WHAT?! It wasn’t just Patrick who made all of these things! I am actually cooking J! Crazy…I know.

Anyway, since our last post I also had the amazing opportunity to take part in Peace Camp. It is a camp for youth affected by the 20 years of war in Northern Uganda. If you haven’t read it already read the poem in my previous post from one of my campers. I don’t feel comfortable telling their stories on our blog but will gladly talk about it in person when we return.  I actually learned a lot from this camp too…about the power of forgiveness, faith, and how resilient people can be. The people in this part of the country are some of the nicest, most welcoming people I have ever met and it is still hard to believe something so terrible happened here not too long ago. We just watched War Dance, a documentary on the war in Northern Uganda and this group of primary school kids who go to a dance competition. I think everyone should watch it. Patrick says it is on Netflix. It takes place not too far from us and it gives a great look into where we live (the first shot of the movie is in our original village) and what the people here have been through. They speak Acholi (the language we also speak…somewhat J) in the movie. There is also some awesome dancing in the movie, which the kids here have tried to teach me how to do here but I’m convinced our bodies are made differently. They dance “The Bwola” dance which we have actually seen in person on several occasions!

Drinking Nile beer on the Nile River.

Patrick’s turn to write:

We just had our mid service training, which means we are now in our final phase of Peace Corps.  We've been here a total of sixteen months here and eleven more to go.  Our mid service training didn't teach us much, but it did help us reflect on the past 16 months and look to the future.  It was great to see our cohort of volunteers.   We started with 46 and have now dropped to 35.  Some folks have been sent home for breaking rules (mainly riding motorcycles), the rest have either gone home for medical reasons (plenty of strange diseases here), and others have chosen to leave.  We started a betting pool on how many we will remain with at the end of service.  My birthday was at MST and Aubrey surprised me by packing all 35 people into a small hotel room fully decorated for my birthday.  It was an impressive surprise and a better present then the live chicken I received for my birthday last year.  There was plenty of Ugandan “Bond 7” whiskey, balloons, and these weird creepy masks.  I think if someone had of told me a few years ago that I would celebrate my 26^th birthday in a cramped hotel room in Uganda with a bunch of folks from all over the U.S. while drinking the worst whiskey ever…I most certainly would have been psyched!  Also, we are 8 hours ahead here so I spent the morning of my birthday watching polling results which was fun.

Creepy masks for Patrick's birthday and the world famous Bond 7.

Reflecting on the past year has been beneficial. I can tell you that we have accomplished some important things that are hard to convey without experiencing them yourself.  It is hard to talk of tangible outcomes, which has been a struggle for me.  I like having projects that have an end goal that is visible.  Development doesn't always work like that, yet most organizations attempt to work that way.  They focus on how many dollars are spent, how many training's are giving, how many water wells are put in place.  These are realistic quantifiable inputs, but they don’t properly measure outcomes.  In all honesty, this is a drastic improvement from the hand out development mentality that existed for such a long time.    Our organization has done a good job of changing the culture of typical development work, which has been a beneficial experience for us to be a part of.  But I am tired of talking about the short-comings of development work.  I have come to realize that international development is not the field for me.  I think that in itself is a valuable outcome of Peace Corps.  I have come to accept that learning what I don’t want to do with my life is just as valuable as learning what I want to do.  This is in no way a negative assessment of development as a whole; it is just where my head is at right now.

On to the future of our Peace Corps experience!  In the last 11 months we have here we fully intend to enjoy ourselves and worry less about outcomes of projects that are out of our reach.  We certainly intend to continue to work hard (we do have some great projects going on), but we will get less bogged down in the politics of development work.  We have made some amazing Peace Corps friends that will most certainly last us a lifetime.  We intend to enjoy our time with them in this beautiful country and focus less on the things we miss and more on the opportunities in front of us.  There are aspects of Peace Corps life that we will not experience anywhere else.  Sure the transport and food can be terrible, but we get to raft down the Nile River anytime we want (considered the best rafting in the world).  We get to fly to Zanzibar for Christmas with friends.  We go on safaris in our backyard.  Things could be worse.  So although we have had ups and downs, and miss family, friends, and America in general…we are trying our best in the last year to cherish the fun we can have here.  We can’t wait for people to visit! 

Mid-service reunion with PCV's

Before our mid service training, we went rafting on the Nile. The next blog post (which I promise will be soon) will include lots of pictures from this amazing near death experience J. 

aubrey and patrick

New address

I know...its been awhile. Sorry to make a lame, not exciting post about our new address. I promise there will be a long overdue blog post soon. We were having issues with receiving packages at the Kampala address so this one will be much easier to get to and we will get things faster:

Aubrey and Patrick Woodson

P.O. Box 326

Kitgum, Uganda

Thank you to all of the AMAZING people that have sent us things (packages, cards, letters, etc)!!!!

Peace

We have been fortunate to grow up in an environment where people can argue about politics, the validity of eating at Chik-fil-A, Kony 2012…etc. None of them matter without peace. I know my campers learned a lot this week at Peace Camp but I also learned a lot from them about the power of forgiveness. It was truly inspirational to see the resilience of the youth, who have been through so much, and their willingness to learn about living in peace with themselves and with one another. I will post more later on my experience at camp but for now here is an amazing poem from one of my campers at Peace Camp 2012:

Peace Peace Peace

Who are you?

Where do you stay?

Where were you born?

Who has ever seen you?

Some people say that

you are love and joy.

Others say that you are happiness.

Others describe you as unity and respect.

To those who have read extensively

and widely, they think of you as a situation

or a period of time where there is

no war in a country. Yet others think of you

as a state of living in friendship with somebody.

How special are you?

You are too unique.

You are needed in our world now.

People are suffering and crying because you are not there.

Armies are fighting because you are not there.

Police are deployed where you are absent.

In the Greater North, many people were killed,

burnt, hammered and hung because you were absent.

Our children of this generation don’t know you.

Many people have lost their lives in the process of searching for you.

Many are still in the bush looking for you.

Many weapons were made to bring you back.

Married men and women have separated because you are nowhere to be seen.

Nobody can be comfortable without you.

It seems love is your father.

Happiness is your mother.

Joy, unity, and respect are you relatives.

Confusion and fighting are your greatest enemies.

Killing can chase you out of a country.

We cry, pray, and request

you humbly to stay in the

Greater North of our country

forever and ever.

-Omodo Boniface 

Back to living the Ugandan dream!

Oh America…It was fun.  And we miss you.  But now we are back in Uganda after a month long trip back home to the wonderful States.  We got to see many friends and spend plenty of time with family.  We celebrated my sister Samantha’s wedding in Chicago, which was a great time.  The Woodson’s always know how to throw a big party.  Samantha did a phenomenal job of making us feel at home…she had the wedding at the zoo.  Both Aubrey and I gorged ourselves on the wonderful food and enjoyed plentiful amounts of cold drinks with real ice cubes in them.  We got to see both the Wynne family and the Woodson’s, including my grandma, who just turned 80!  It was a great time! 

We enjoyed time in Indianapolis with Aubrey’s family and ate plenty of Aubrey’s mothers lasagna…I gained 15 lbs.  Seriously, I weighed myself when we landed and the day we left.  A full 15 lbs…It was all worth it.  I also got to work on my hop farm with Aubrey’s dad that will be fully in bloom by the time we return.  We also were fortunate to have a wonderful lunch in Avon with Aubrey’s grandma…a cook rivaled by no one! I also got to drink several of my high gravity homebrew beers that I had been aging in my parents basement (A huge contributor to the 15 lbs I gained).  I even got to drive a Uhaul across country for 13 hours (your welcome Chloe).  Good times were had and we fully miss everyone…but we are happy to be working again.  We have grown to love our friends we’ve made here, Namokora, and our work.  At times it is frustrating but it always seems to be rewarding in the end.  So…now on to all the fun we have had in the past month and a half back in Uganda!

When we arrived back in Namokora we found our garden was fully stocked with arugala and cabbage.  I was excited about the arugala...but now I am sick of it!  We need some lettuce!

I realize this photo is sideways but it took forever to upload so you are gonna have to deal with it.  We had a lovely package upon our arrival back in Uganda from my good friend Dave Vetraino.  He sent us homemade granola with a hand drawn photo referring to us as the "dream team."  Really good granola...until the ants got it.

We got back to find everything just as we had left it…except everything was flooded.  The rainy season is intense in Northern Uganda.  From late November to late March it is completely dry and the average temperature is around 90 degrees F.  The rest of the time it rains excessively.  It usually downpours for at least a few hours twice a day.  This means little work is completed during the rainy hours.  Most Ugandan’s utilize this time to nap.  Many bridges have been flooded over for brief periods of time.  Fortunately, Mercy Corps vehicles are equipped with snorkels so we are able to travel to most areas and get home fine. 

This is the first broken borehole we fixed with out handpumps.  It took several mercy corps WASH employees and my friend Jake Carpentar to get our PVC pipe 40 meters deep. 

A successful handpump installation

I have recently started a large pilot project for Mercy Corps.  With the help of a fellow PCV I have started the preliminary research on creating a manual borehole drilling business.  In a previous post I mentioned this project.  It has finally fully come to fruition and we are under way with our feasibility study.  This mainly has consisted of traveling to various extremely rural areas, finding broken down wells (there are thousands), and testing our homemade pumps on them.  Thus far, we have had great results with our technology and terrible results with Northern Ugandan weather (torrential downpours constantly). In the past month I was fortunate enough to attend a valuable training on manual borehole drilling and hand pump fabrication.  The training was hosted by World Vision, a large scale NGO that operates all over the world.  The training focused on teaching hand pump mechanics and interested entrepreneurs how to utilize these simple technologies.  My fellow PCV Jake was there.  He is an engineer currently pursuing his M.S. from USF.  I have been assisting him in his M.S. research and he has been helping out with my pilot project feasibility study.  Things are going well and the project is keeping me extremely busy, which is a nice change!  A few photos are posted below:

Aubrey and I were amazed with this local harp.  The body of it is an USAID vegetable oil jar made in INDIANA!  The kids are creative here

Aubrey has recently traveled to Gulu where she has worked as a camp counselor for Peace Camp.  This is a camp run by PCV’s that works as a leadership development and peace and reconciliation camp for former victims of the Northern War, as well as former child soldiers.  Pretty heavy stuff!  I am sure she will post about it soon with photos! 

On another note, we are moving!  Our time in Namokora has been wonderful but it is coming to an end.  We have made great friends in the village and thoroughly enjoyed the peacefulness and absolute quite of our small town.  Mercy Corps has decided to relocate us to Kitgum town so we can be closer to their main office.   This will increase our efficiency and ability to work within a greater number of areas.  We are excited about the move but it is a bit bittersweet to leave the small place we have made a home.  

Cow crossing all the time...

Local kid with a slingshot made out of condoms...Not sure what to say about this?

Our local cheerleader!  This kid followed us for two days straight sporting his nice looking cheerleader sweatshirt in 95 degree heat!