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