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