Fast Times at Gulu High (tales of sunburns and volleyball)

Yesterday I checked out my school for the first time and it was pretty impressive. Gulu high is a boarding school so the campus is fairly large for Gulu. Its about a 20 minute ride there in the morning, which will sometimes be 7:30, so thats going to be rough. Interesting things that are included on campus are things such as a mill (used to produce the regulars meals of something similar to piaya, I know for certain thats not how you spell it), a couple dorms (including a teachers dorm) and a cafeteria that was bumping Jay-Z when we walked in. I got to take a look at the classroom which I will be teaching in. Upon first glance the only thing I noticed were the chickens surrounding the classroom door (reminds me of 4th street). As it turns out I'll be teaching about 70-100 kids in EACH CLASS. The classroom definitely doesn't have 100 desks so I'll be interesting to see how they cram in there. The school also has a special building for the deaf and blind, hardly any schools have this because it is already expensive to send your children to school and if you have to make the decision between sending your blind child or your healthy child, without doubt the families in Uganda will only educate the healthy child. We walked into this classroom and heard a remarkable sound, turning the corner to reveal that three blind students were playing the keyboard and producing this music.

As for adventures outside of school, we've watching a few of the world cup games at some of the bars. One night we watched one for awhile and couldn't catch the second half because our curfew (yes we have one) was fast approaching. The Boda ride home was freaky for a number of reasons. There were two of us on the same Boda, going about 20mph, in the dark for about 15 min. About one block away from our house our Boda came to a standstill because we were in a pothole, he decides to stop and make a hairpin 180, which promptly causes us the topple over pushing all three of us off the motorcycle and the light goes out. Now we are lying in the middle of the street in pitch black. Fantastic. What we didn't realize is that the Bar owner had a dog which followed us the entire way home. We couldn't bring it into the IC compound so it whimpered outside the fence for the entire night. The owner said he was going to pick it up in the morning. the next day the dog was nowhere to be found.

Last night we caught a bit of the Cameroon game and another bar/pool hall. We asked if there was a deck we could sit on, and the owner took us upstairs to the roof where we got a private viewing of the Ugandan skyline, granted there aren't many lights but hey it was still cool. Upon riding back to the house from the bar, Mandy (the girl that was on the boda when we fell off) and I were dropped off about a block away from the house when it went from dry to monsoon rains during a single clap of thunder. Amazing experience and all in all one of the best nights yet. If you're not singing "The Rains Down in Africa" yet, I will end this blog now so you can youtube it.