Good Morning South Sudan

Yes…we can see South Sudan from our new house but more on that later. A lot of things have happened since our last post. I also apologize because I haven’t been taking very many pictures, especially of our site because I had to wait for my smaller camera to be shipped but I have it now so there will be lots of more pictures to come!

We have been living with our homestay families while going to training Monday-Saturday which is definitely easier said than done. So…mid training just when we needed a break Peace Corps was nice enough to take us to a “zoo”.  

Pleasantly surprised to see this sign

The animals have plenty of room to roam in their confined areas…but they don’t cage the monkeys (the monkeys aren’t part of the zoo, they are freeloaders that show up and pillage on the unsuspecting mzungus).  We were harassed by monkeys the whole time.  Those little guys are vicious…and yes they are cute at first but don’t fall for their adorable act because they will steal your popcorn and eat your soul before you even blink.  Vicious monkeys.

Also…spiders that were not actually part of the zoo:

YUCK!

I don't know if you can see but all of the black dots are those huge spiders!

And an adorable otter:

And his adorable otter friend:

And we got to see a bunch on chimpanzee’s fight.  One chimpanzee took another by the leg and threw it into a pond. It was epic. They are really mean to each other but they are confined to their area by a mote.  They are hairy and loud and remind me of Snookie.  But better than reality TV. 

It was almost like watching Jersey Shore...but way better.

One Saturday we had a cooking day where each language group got together at one of the homestay house and cooked lunch. Patrick’s language group decided to make chicken fajitas. Where do you get the chicken you say? You buy it at the market and kill it yourself. Yuck. Luckily I wasn’t there to see this. After cutting the throat, de-feathering it, chopping it, gutting it, boiling it, then cooking it…you get edible chicken. I have a funny feeling we are not going to be eating meat for the next two years. Our group decided to make pizza (meatless). Definitely not the easiest thing to make without an oven though! We got cheese from Kampala (the capital city) and made the dough and sauce from scratch. Then the real trick was to cook it. We put sand in the bottom of a large pot, heat it up and put the pizza in the bottom of another pot on top of the sand. This cooked similar to an oven and it was oh SO good.  I am very surprised we got it right on the first time. Here is how it turned out:

Mmmmmmmmmmm

The day before leaving for our language immersion and future site visit in week 5/10 of training, we had site announcements where every volunteer finally found out what organization they would be working for and what district they would live in. We knew we would be in the “Acholi” speaking northern region but we weren’t sure what district. Uganda is a country split into districts kind of like how the US is split into states. We also did not know how far from civilization we would be until we started driving to our site…more on that later as well. We will both working with Mercy Corps (google it) and will be living at the field office. They have agriculture, health, and water sanitation sectors in Uganda. Mercy Corps is actually based out of Portland, Oregon and they do work all over the world. We got really lucky with our organization because they do exactly what we wanted to be doing in Peace Corps and are very well established. I could go on for days about the health topics that Mercy Corps covers but basically I will be traveling daily to different villages to teach/assess/refer issues having to deal with malnutrition. I will also be helping to train village health teams that travel around each village to assess and refer people to get further care on a variety of health issues like malaria/HIV/nutrition/etc. Mercy Corps also has what they call mother care groups where they teach pregnant mothers about nutrition while they are pregnant and also until the baby is around 5 years old. I will most likely be doing a lot of teaching of teachers also know by the fun term of “capacity building”. It’s a development catch-all phrase that basically means we will help you to help yourself to help others. You can give a give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime kind of thing. Peace Corps wants us to leave behind something sustainable since we are only here for 2 years. Patrick will be working with women’s farmer groups.  Women tend to do the majority of hard labor in Uganda so he will be working with several co-ops of women farmers to help them improve their techniques.  A big emphasis will be put on post-harvest handling and better farm to market techniques.  During our site visit we went to two of the woman gardening groups and we never walked away empty handed. It was hilarious because we were at each site for maybe 10 minutes and the farmers just loaded us up with food. We ended up with 1 massive carrot and 3 huge 10 pound cabbages bigger than my head. It is disrespectful to refuse a gift, so we got lots of cabbage. Anyways, He will also be working with water sanitation projects and stove/oven building that minimizes excess use of firewood and charcoal.  Deforestation is a huge issue here.  That among many other projects will be our next two years in a nutshell.

So, then we were off to language immersion to practice our language skills or lack there of on native speakers. We are going to be speaking Acholi most of the time at our site (or trying to) which is an interesting language. Patrick claims that it sounds like a mix between Vietnamese and Arabic? I don’t know but I can tell you that it is not a “romantics” language by any means. Our first 2 days of language immersion were spent in Gulu aka NGO city. Two words: cheeseburgers and pizza. There are enough white people that live in Gulu to put a pizza/cheeseburger place in business. Jackpot! Only problem is that we don’t live there. Our future home is in a small village an hour from Kitgum town which is in Kitgum district in the northeastern part of Uganda bordering the brand new South Sudan. Kitgum town is a 3 hour MISERABLE bus ride from Gulu. Good thing Patrick and I are two of the most motion sick people I’ve known. I had to ask this poor old woman if I could switch her seats so I could puke out the window. FAIL. This was after the kid next to me sitting on the bus floor puked everywhere. Luckily being by a window prevented me from actually getting sick. African public transport = fail of epic proportions/terrifying. We definitely took for granted those good ole American roads even with the occasional pothole.  Moral of the story is that we have to go through hell and back just to get a cheeseburger…send Dramamine if you love us so we can have American food every once in awhile. On a happy note, there is “cheese” in Kitgum. On a sad note, there is nothing in our town (except spaghetti noodles). Our town probably has about 400 people in it. All of whom I’m sure we will know very well by the end of 2 years. But really…there are probably more goats than people. We are also the first white people to actually live there. Our counterparts from our organization found it hysterical that we were “breaking a record”.  They said that they will probably name a road after us, or should I say “the” road. We were walking in our town past this large group of people and we were talking to one of the councilmen and he decided to introduce us and proceded to tell the large crowd of like 100 people that we will be living here for the next two years and we need food so that they should bring us chickens. This was all in Acholi so we just smiled and nodded.  Woops. We will see what happens. On an awesome note, we live about an hour away from the best game park in Uganda. They have elephants, lions, cheetahs, antelope, zebras, rhinos, and maybe giraffes. Don’t worry mom…no hippos. On a crappy note: we are not allowed to go due to Peace Corps policy (for good reason)L. Lame! Maybe a friendly elephant will wander its way into our backyard. Found my new ride into Gulu! The drive to our site is absolutely gorgeous. Most of Uganda is rolling green hills. Towards the south it is very green and mountainous. Up north it’s flat and dry, more like the stereotypical African savannah…but a bit more greenery. We are far enough North that there start to be huge mountains in the distance. And yes, one of those mountains seen from our site is actually in South Sudan. On the drive to our site there are also tons of sunflower fields (used for their oil). Its amazing. But… It. Is. Hot. The one night we stayed there it was 90 at midnight. Yikes but we hear you get used to it.  We live at the Mercy Corps field site in a compound with the workers while they are there for the week. We have 3 small rooms to ourselves with no running water, a pit latrine, and SOLAR ELECTRICITY! SCORE! And by that we mean we can run a fan, have lights, and charge a computer! WOOHOO!!! We will probably not have internet very often though because our village is small enough that the internet company’s tower shuts off half the time. We do have some other volunteer friends staying in Kitgum town and we can go to their houses sometimes on the weekends to use their internet (and toilet J).

Peace Corps has officially been around for 50 years. No better excuse to have a party! The US embassy made the mistake of inviting over 150 starving Peace Corps volunteers and trainees to the 50^th anniversary party. Not all went but since we are all in training, all 46 of us went. This was about week 7 and by this time we were all really needing some good free American food/drinks. They had hors d’ouvres that they were trying to pass around but once we saw them we swarmed the servers without even thinking twice. They started getting tricky and walking around our crowd but we were definitely all about ready to just tackle the servers and steal trays at a time. I’m pretty sure the Embassy workers will think twice before they decide to invite 150 starving Peace Corps Volunteers to any event now J. In Uganglish (Ugandan English): “Soddy…” aka Sorry.

As of now we have one more week of homestay! We leave homestay, swear in at the Embassy, then stay in a hotel for a couple of days before we are all off to our sites! In the meantime we are studying for our language! Another blog about training will be up soon now that we have internet again. We will let you know how our language test goes…wish we actually knew Acholi! Wish us luck! 

Our homestay brothers and sisters

Hanging out with Joy

    

PS… I buzzed Patrick’s hair today! Muahaha