"what are you doing" "oh just catching a mouse...you?"

This past weekend seemed pretty tame, at first, when compared to the rest of our trip. Thursday night Mandy and I grabbed dinner at a hotel restaurant near by, partly to avoid the typical fish dinner on thursdays. Since I don’t have class on Fridays we decided to trek over to another hotel across town which has a pool that you can pay to use. After a 20 minute trek in what seemed like 90 degrees hoping all the while it would end with the pool and maybe a cold beer... the pool looked like Green Lake and wasn’t open, so we settled for the beer. Then we came back home to start of a pirated version of season one of How I Met Your Mother, only to find it was pretty scratched up and couldn’t even finish the first episode. Talk about a rough day.

Saturday started off by visiting Gulu High for an event which they have about once in every two years, Opening Day (the doesn’t seem right because the school year has been going on since January...hmmm). We were promised guest speakers, traditional dancing, tours with parents and food... what did we get you ask? Well I’ll tell you, THREE AND A HALF HOURS OF NOTHING. Typical Gulu High School. We ended up having to leave right when the opening procession began. We had to race home for lunch and a little “fun day” party that everyone was throwing for their teachers and their kids, but since mine were at school I wasn’t rushing to get back. It was fun playing with kids for the afternoon with everything from bean bag tossing, three legged racing and bottle cap snapping. Plenty of food both traditional (sugar cane, samosas) and American (Mac ‘n Cheese) were laid out for the taking and then followed by movie night at the Ethiopian restaurant next door.

Sunday we went back to the hotel in hopes that maybe the pool would be cleaned but this time it was half empty with two guys attempting to clean it. We hung around awhile and then went to grab dinner but first decided to call some people and see if we wanted to all meet up somewhere but were met with grim news in the process. The second group of teachers had gone to visit St. Jude’s Orphanage the same time that we had been at the hotel. All we were told on the phone was that one of the children had died while they were visiting. Later on we would get these details. Group two had not been there but for a few moments, around 2:06, when a woman working there came to them yelling “a child has fallen!” No one knew the urgency because it simply sounded as if a child had fallen on the ground, not something to go running for. When they followed the woman they sound realized a child had fallen in what seemed like a small well. After attempts by a worker to stick a latter down the hole, one of our own stuck his hand down the well in an attempt to grab the child. The well was once used as a latrine, meaning that it wasn’t water John was stick his hand into. He reached in grabbing what he thought felt like was a loaf of bread but was instead two year old Samuel. After attempts at CPR panic fell on the children surrounding the scene and finally the driver spoke up and asked if they could take the child to the hospital. Racing over potholes and through crowded streets they reached the hospital hoping there would be a rush of medical staff, but nothing. The hospital was overcrowded, two to three children per bed. It was here that Samuel was pronounced dead at 3:06.

The three of us that were at the pool sat in a gloomy silence trying to process what group two must have been going through in this difficult time. Dinner was quick so that we could go home and give our support. The funeral was the very next day and many of the workers at the orphanage decided to travel the long distance however that would leave the staff short handed. The next day I volunteered for a portion of the day and saw the well Samuel had fallen into. The young children seemed the same, no real change to their lives but it still did not seem like the same orphanage I blogged about a few short weeks ago.

On a much lighter note, the house has had several unwanted visitors in the past few weeks...mice. It started with what we think was just one that plagued the girls’ room, breaking into food and racing around the room. It then built to many mice prancing about every corner of the house, even chewing up one of Mandy’s scarfs. Rat traps were not enough, poison didn’t even seem to work that well and finally we resorted to trying to catch them. Mandy screamed “mouse!” from our pantry area and I leaped into action (picture me with a cape if you must). Now after grabbing two cups and trapping the mouse in the corner I raced out to show everyone what we had caught. John interrupted me and said “Here’s the funny thing, Jennifer heard you close the door and came back and said to us ‘I think Mandy and Andy are doing something in the buffet room’ and then colleen responds with ‘good for them.’” After laughing awhile John tells me “And my first reaction was ‘wait buffet room? Which one is that?’” Just catching mice, all in a days work.

Don't Worry Hippo I Too Have Been Hungry Hungry

Before I begin this blog entry I want to start off by saying that I am safe in Gulu and that IC is doing everything they can to insure our safety both here and when we begin our travels home. I want to talk about a couple things first and then I will address the bombings and everything that has been going on. Feel free to skip down to that section.

Conference

Every year Invisible Children holds a conference in which all of the teachers, both American and Ugandan, gather for workshops, discussions and other random activities. The theme this year was centered around a new curriculum designed by Invisible Children called Knowledge of Behavior and Self (KOBS). The curriculum is designed to “improve the emotional, social and behavioral development of secondary school students.” Each classroom is filled with students who have been effected by the war in varying ways, some were pushed from there homes, others have mothers who were raped and have no given birth to ‘rebel babies’, some are now orphans, and still others were abducted. At the conference we discussed the many long-term effects of children who have witnessed war: constant alertness, guilt about surviving, social withdrawal and haunting memories just to name a few. The trouble comes when these signs are seen in classrooms and inhibit student learning. KOBS is designed to give a space for students to come to terms with their emotions and also the emotions of their peers.

The conference discussed the seven different themes which KOBS addresses; Self esteem and friendship building, thinking feeling and behavior, conflict avoidance and conflict resolution, motivation and goal setting, understanding ourselves and others, dealing with bullying and, dealing with stress and worries. This curriculum has been five years in the making and just came into being this January and students seem to be very engaged by the lessons. The main thing about the KOBS lessons is that they seek to give students the tools to better interact with their peers and understand their emotions as well as their own. So when it comes to asking questions in a KOBS lesson, there are no wrong answers, making students less fearful to raise their hand and speak up (in normal classes no one answers questions for fear of being wrong). The conference was dry at times but informative about a brand new curriculum that Invisible Children has helped to implement. It went all day friday and then until noon on saturday and once we finished we booked it back to the house to leave for our safari trip.

Safari

The drive to Murchison falls (where the safari was) took about 3-4 hours on one of the worst roads. At first it was comical how our beat up passenger van flung us from one side to another while going into potholes the size of houses but after awhile some people weren’t feeling it and had there windows open ready to hurl. I myself had a great ride, chomping down on Ugandan cheese balls (bad chetoes) which probably didn’t help the nausea of the people around me. Finally we got to our campsite and checked out our sweet two person tents complete with some pretty luxurious beds (by luxurious I mean cots, which are really a step up from what we’ve been sleeping on). We headed over to the bar and restaurant, grabbed a beer and enjoyed the scenery. Not long after sitting down a family of warthogs walked through the bar like it was no big deal. Prompting a series of jokes starting with “Only in Uganda...”

The next day we woke up at 5:00am, stars still out, to get an early start at our safari. After catching the sunrise on the Nile river we headed out in hope to see some lions, apparently the only time we would have seen them would have been in the morning... we saw no lions. We got back in the beat-up passenger van to trek around the massive reserve but this time we got to ride on top of the roof (pretty sweet except when you’re drive is going 40km/h around turns). Animals we saw: giraffes, elephants, heartebeasts (kind of looks like a horse with horns) kobs (not knowledge of behavior and self, looks like a deer...with horns) water buffaloes, warthogs and dik diks (minature deer). About two hours in we switched spots and opted to hang out the windows while others got the chance to sit on the roof, which made for some good pics and also a lovely burnt auburn tan...aka dirt.

After stopping for coffee and lunch we had the river portion of our safari. Animals we saw: hippos (prompting someone to say to the hippos “don’t worry hippo I too have been hungry hungry before), crocodiles, baboons, monkeys and a random assortment of birds (including a bald eagle). We moved up towards Murchinson Falls, took a few pics and headed back but right as we turned around we saw a massive heard of elephants along the water. There was a canopy on top of the boat which we could get on top of if we wanted so I raced up there to get some shots of the families of elephants. After that I wasn’t planning it but took a nap for the rest of the boat right (probably about an hour in the african sun, yum). After that we headed back to Gulu hoping we could catch the world cup final.

Bombings

We were running on fumes by the time we got back home, getting up at 5:00am and a full day of safari can take it out of you, go figure. We watched the game a hotel nearby knowing that if the power went out they would have a generator. After the ridiculous number of yellow cards and struggling to keep my eyes open, I was riled up when that Netherlands player cleated a guy in the heart basically. We ended up watching all of regulation time and walked home. I pretty much passed out without knowing who had won or what had happened in Kampala.

The next morning I woke up and began the day like every other Monday (I don’t teach on Mondays so I wasn’t running around like many of the other teachers) and had some breakfast. Mandy got up a few minutes later and told me that someone had called Julie (another teacher) and said that there was a terrorist attack in Kampala but no one really knew anything. I called up Courtney back in the states and she gave me a briefing on what had happened. News moves pretty slow in Uganda so the North did not seem to panicked. At about 9:00am many of the teachers ha left for school when our three directors came back to the house and said they had news for us. The five teachers who were still there all gathered in the living room as they briefed us on what had happened as well as telling us the someone from Invisible Children had died in the attacks (see www.invisiblechildren.com for more info). This is the first casualty that IC has ever had. They did not know much about our own situation and what would happen but assured us they would do everything they could to make sure we were safe here in Gulu as well as when we leave. We ended the meeting with a prayer followed by an erie silence as each of us was trying to piece everything together.

I walked into town to grab a paper and check the internet. The front pages of the papers showed the gory images of bodies lying still in blood stained white chairs. The images worsened as we read more. After posting the brief message via facebook we tired to find every article we could online to figure out what was going on. Check out http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/africa/index.html for more details. Later in the evening we had a meeting with the entire group to discuss everything. The two biggest changes to our daily lives are that: 1) we have to be in the IC compound by dark and 2) we can’t advertise ourselves in town and thus need to keep a low profile (part of the reason why I’m not elaborating much on certain subjects). We ended the meeting with just simply sharing our thoughts on everything. In what would be the last comment of the evening I said something along the lines of “When I was reading up on Nate (the IC member who died) I found an article that mentioned that this was the first time he had been to Uganda and just how excited he was to be here. Apparently his facebook status was ‘thank you to everyone for making my dreams of coming to Uganda true’ and later he said ‘I’m living out the best days of my life.’ And knowing that he can’t live out what he had been looking forward to for years, its a reminder of how privileged we are to be here doing what we are doing in our classrooms. From what I gather we can’t do much other than what we are doing right now. So lets just keep giving it all we’ve got, maybe not necessarily for Nate but just as a reminder of how lucky we are to be living out whatever dreams we have.”

No I'm not dead... just had some power outages...

So there have been a lot of power outages and issues with wireless internet so here are some things I've written about but haven't been able to post, enjoy.

So its been awhile since my last blog, mainly due to power outages, wifi not working and my general laziness (I hope one of the guys just did a salute to that). But here is a jam packed update. This past weekend we spent our time a a rhino sanctuary in the blazing heat. For about $60 we got to roam around the sanctuary, check out 3 rhinos (the youngest of which was named Obama), spend the night and have dinner and breakfast. All in all an amazing weekend with a side of volleyball and yet again sunburn. In our room there were four of us: Mandy, Nathan, Jenni and myself. However the trick with the doors was that each door had a deadbolt which could only be opened with the key. So as Mandy and I are packing to hear Jenni locking the door (ie locking us in the room) the Conversation goes as follows:

Mandy - ...Ummm Jenni why are you locking us in?

Jenni - I’m not locking you in...I’m locking everyone else out.

(I look at Mandy just to see if she did in fact say what she said)

Nathan - (whispers) ummm yeah you have to leave them a key...

Jenni - Wait why?

And it just goes downhill from there, she eventually got the idea. On a similar subject, let’s talk Ugandan beer and alcohol. Uganda has a HUGE nationwide drinking problem due in part to many thinks but here are my ideas. 1) Any country that sells straight alcohol in packets is in for trouble. Imagine a Ramen Noodles packet (I figure everyone can picture the dimensions) filled with your choice of vodka, gin or whiskey. Too lazy to get a flask? Just get a packet. 2) Beers here are twice the size of beers back home and sometimes a bit higher in alcohol percentage. so if you are four beers in chances are you’re having a pretty good night. 3) You can buy glass flask-size containers of alcohol anywhere, they litter the streets basically. Which for those of you who know how the gin and tonic was created, lets just say I’ve been doing my best to fight malaria.

As for school I’ve noticed one thing that separates the US from Uganda... getting stuff done. Now granted I’m probably going to make a request to HNA that they have a 30 minute tea time complete with doughnuts instead of the absurd 10 minute snack-less excuse for a break we have. But the pace of life here is sooooooooooo incredibly slow that it produces an environment where very little seems to get done. There’s a tv in the staff room which takes away from any work being done. The other day a BAD Jean Claude Vane Dam movie was on (Sudden Death for all you Van Dam fans) and out of 28 people in the staff room, only 15 were actually doing some form of work. The other day Speed was on and I couldn’t help but watch a bit.

My first lesson was pretty boring but the kids seemed to be a bit more awake than usual. We talked about the problems the Apostles faced in spreading Christianity...wooo! I was scheduled to teach again yesterday but there was a student teacher, and again today but they decided to have mass instead of the morning classes. So still I have only taught once. I’m trying to fill my time with going to the orphanage and finding other teachers to help out so hopefully soon I’ll have some new news for you.

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This past weekend we celebrated the fourth of July with some style...on the third of July. But before we get to the actual party, getting ready for it was a hell of an adventure. Mandy wanted to get up early to skype her parents so we walked to this cafe that normally has wifi, but for some reason at this early hour did not (the main reason why I haven’t blogged in awhile). We had to pick up some things in the market because we were on the “snack committee” for the party. The two main things we were trying for were guacamole and mango salsa (Joanne you’d be proud). The market here is really eclectic with a number of older women trying to sell you everything from shallots to handmade knives. On another occasion some people from the group were walking through the market a Jenni says “oh look Africa has read eggs!” The group walks for a moment and then another girl says “ummm Jenni....those are tomatoes.” So all in all the market is a pretty funky experience.

So after racing all around town we ended up making all the food, huge success all around, and could finally enjoy the actual party. We had a performance of traditional Ugandan dancing in the early evening followed by a more western DJ following. But perhaps the highlight of the evening had to do with bottle opening. The night before this we had been sitting in this cafe where Jacob (one of the boys in the Rough Cut IC movie) works when we ordered another beer. We asked for a bottle opener and he says “should I open this with my opener or my teeth?” Instantly I shouted back “TEETH!” He did it like it was no big deal and I was in awe. Now going back to the party, I thought I would see how difficult this process was. Sure enough if you get it in the right spot its pretty easy so when I did it for the first time only one person saw and I was screaming only to have the majority of the party stare at me wondering what the hell I was doing. Now for my parents reading this and worrying about the well-being of my teeth which they invested in, I only did this two or three times and didn’t hurt anything, so I’m good.

However, on the same night that I saw Jacob open the bottle with his teeth, I went to pay for the bill but Mandy said she would cover this one. We walked down to another cafe with the intent of meeting up with people before the Ghana World Cup game. By the time I got there I realized I didn’t have my wallet. Raced back to the 1st cafe, and nothing. Looking back on that it seemed pretty shady, there was a little bit of money, both US and Ugandan so I think once they saw that they snagged it. Regardless Mandy and I went looking for it in the shady street next to the market and couldn’t find anything. I ended up canceling my debit card and everything seems to be all fixed up. The weekend was filled with mixed feelings but I guess thats Uganda for you.