Thursday, July 14, 2011
The comical nature of the language barrier
So Marissa and I were riding on a boda earlier today and we told our driver to take us to BAM Shopping Center. Well, I guess he forgot that we had said that and as we were going along he said, "Red Cross?" to which Marissa answered "yes, very close" - then we start taking this weird path off the road that we have never taken in our lives and we both start asking him where he is going. He doesn't answer, but then we pull in at the Red Cross. That is when it hit me that he had said Red Cross before and I shared the revelation with Marissa - we got a good laugh! Gotta love the language barrier!
Quote of the day
The other day I was with Rem, one of my favorite team members EVER, and we stopped in town after a long day of work so that I could buy these new sweet kicks I had been admiring. After getting them, I walk back to the boda and this exchange occurs:
Rem: So how much did you end up paying?
Me: 13,000 shillings - I tried to gamble, but... wait, is that the right word?
What I MEANT to say was "I tried to bargain, but it wasn't too successful" (they were originally 15,000 shs) ... it was slightly embarrassing as all the locals around us started laughing and I will not lie that Rem and I laughed the whole way home too!
Good times in Africa...
Rem: So how much did you end up paying?
Me: 13,000 shillings - I tried to gamble, but... wait, is that the right word?
What I MEANT to say was "I tried to bargain, but it wasn't too successful" (they were originally 15,000 shs) ... it was slightly embarrassing as all the locals around us started laughing and I will not lie that Rem and I laughed the whole way home too!
Good times in Africa...
You know you've been in Africa for a long time when...
... you find 1,000 shillings in your pocket and think you are RICH!
Let me just clarify that that is equivalent to about 40 cents in America. But hey, here in Uganda that gets you a boda ride to town and back home and we do that A LOT!!
So lets just say when I found that 1,000 shs I was one happy mzungu ;)
Let me just clarify that that is equivalent to about 40 cents in America. But hey, here in Uganda that gets you a boda ride to town and back home and we do that A LOT!!
So lets just say when I found that 1,000 shs I was one happy mzungu ;)
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Latest on Development Work
As awesome as food might be, I should probably update you on what I came to Africa to do. Let's talk about projects.
1. Babies Home: so we stopped working with the preschool, but we started volunteering with the babies. There are about 12 of them and they are seriously the cutest! I want to adopt one in a second! Especially Muwana, she is seriously the smiliest baby with the most gorgeous eyes ever! I mean, just take a look for yourself...
Makes me melt. I have so much fun playing with her and I think it's safe to say we have both grown attached to each other - I only want to play with her now and she cries whenever I put her down which results in her having to be in my lap constantly! I love it! Anyways, every morning we go from 8-11 and help bathe the babies, change them (which ends up being every 10 minutes about since they pee into washclothes which aren't very absorbent...also why I'm now doing my laundry a lot more often...), feed them, and play with them. There is one baby that has been super sick and is 6 months old, but looks like he's 2 months... see for yourself...
It breaks my heart. They feed him raw egg, probably in hopes to help him grow, but raw egg is never good so we have been trying to teach the "mothers" a thing or two about nutrition for babies. We are also looking into donations to get more colorful mats so the babies aren't playing on concrete and hurting themselves and possibly a boom box with nursery rhyme tapes. They just need more stimulation in general... Also, if anyone has old baby clothes/books/toys please let me know b/c they could use A LOT more of that stuff.
2. Volunteering at the hospital: Some of us have been volunteering in different units of Mbale Regional Hospital. I personally have been volunteering in the maternity ward b/c well, I love babies. But I bet you all know that by now! They have us shadow the nurses, cut and prepare gauze, cut string for umbilical cord ties, make cotton balls, and clean. One time I was in the sterilization room cutting gauze and it was taking forever b/c the scissors were horrible and the nurse comes over and says "let me show you.. use this book and wrap around and then cut a lot at once... faster, yes?" however, it was the visitors book that I was wrapping the gauze around that was supposed to be sterile. It wasn't really adding up to me, but luckily I found out that they put it through the autoclave after! Phew! Anyways, in my shadowing of nurses, I have seen two births - literally witnessed babies coming out of mothers with my own eyes!!!! It was seriously insane and I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing, but it was incredible.... it was all I could see in my head for the next three days after it happened... I even brought a baby over to its mother after it got cleaned off! Only in Africa!
3. Sanitation outreach: this has been on hold for a while, because we've run into the issue of lots of schools not having the funds for soap b/c they don't think it is very important/them already knowing about how to wash their hands but not caring enough to do so. We have been racking our brains as to what to do next and for this next week we have decided to continue doing the outreach with schools that really need it, but we are going to teach a segment on clean water (many of them don't understand that you have to wash hands with cleaning running water and often kids wash their hands in one big basin that ends up full of dirty water) and we are going to get the teachers more involved so they are more dedicated. We also are going to grill the headmasters about the importance of hand washing and before we agree to teach any more classes about it, we will require the schools themselves to provide the soap for us to teach - that way we will know if they care enough to provide it for themselves in the future hopefully. Development work is hard, but we'll see what happens with this....
4. Crafts: we have learned how to make paper bead jewelry and we have set up seminars to teach it to mothers of disabled children from Prossy's organization and also women from the Namatala slum who sell alcohol for income and battle alcoholism. I am super excited for this! We also are working to set up an Etsy account with all of these women hopefully so they can sell internationally and have more of a market and we are setting this up with CURE hospital too, which is the hospital we learned how to make the beads from. Since they sell the jewelry for such a good cause, it would be nice to expand their market so that more babies here survive hydrocephalis and spina bifida. We will see how it goes!
Ok well that's all for now... thanks for reading. See you in 17 days! Did I hear that right??? Yikes!!!
1. Babies Home: so we stopped working with the preschool, but we started volunteering with the babies. There are about 12 of them and they are seriously the cutest! I want to adopt one in a second! Especially Muwana, she is seriously the smiliest baby with the most gorgeous eyes ever! I mean, just take a look for yourself...
Makes me melt. I have so much fun playing with her and I think it's safe to say we have both grown attached to each other - I only want to play with her now and she cries whenever I put her down which results in her having to be in my lap constantly! I love it! Anyways, every morning we go from 8-11 and help bathe the babies, change them (which ends up being every 10 minutes about since they pee into washclothes which aren't very absorbent...also why I'm now doing my laundry a lot more often...), feed them, and play with them. There is one baby that has been super sick and is 6 months old, but looks like he's 2 months... see for yourself...
It breaks my heart. They feed him raw egg, probably in hopes to help him grow, but raw egg is never good so we have been trying to teach the "mothers" a thing or two about nutrition for babies. We are also looking into donations to get more colorful mats so the babies aren't playing on concrete and hurting themselves and possibly a boom box with nursery rhyme tapes. They just need more stimulation in general... Also, if anyone has old baby clothes/books/toys please let me know b/c they could use A LOT more of that stuff.2. Volunteering at the hospital: Some of us have been volunteering in different units of Mbale Regional Hospital. I personally have been volunteering in the maternity ward b/c well, I love babies. But I bet you all know that by now! They have us shadow the nurses, cut and prepare gauze, cut string for umbilical cord ties, make cotton balls, and clean. One time I was in the sterilization room cutting gauze and it was taking forever b/c the scissors were horrible and the nurse comes over and says "let me show you.. use this book and wrap around and then cut a lot at once... faster, yes?" however, it was the visitors book that I was wrapping the gauze around that was supposed to be sterile. It wasn't really adding up to me, but luckily I found out that they put it through the autoclave after! Phew! Anyways, in my shadowing of nurses, I have seen two births - literally witnessed babies coming out of mothers with my own eyes!!!! It was seriously insane and I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing, but it was incredible.... it was all I could see in my head for the next three days after it happened... I even brought a baby over to its mother after it got cleaned off! Only in Africa!
3. Sanitation outreach: this has been on hold for a while, because we've run into the issue of lots of schools not having the funds for soap b/c they don't think it is very important/them already knowing about how to wash their hands but not caring enough to do so. We have been racking our brains as to what to do next and for this next week we have decided to continue doing the outreach with schools that really need it, but we are going to teach a segment on clean water (many of them don't understand that you have to wash hands with cleaning running water and often kids wash their hands in one big basin that ends up full of dirty water) and we are going to get the teachers more involved so they are more dedicated. We also are going to grill the headmasters about the importance of hand washing and before we agree to teach any more classes about it, we will require the schools themselves to provide the soap for us to teach - that way we will know if they care enough to provide it for themselves in the future hopefully. Development work is hard, but we'll see what happens with this....
4. Crafts: we have learned how to make paper bead jewelry and we have set up seminars to teach it to mothers of disabled children from Prossy's organization and also women from the Namatala slum who sell alcohol for income and battle alcoholism. I am super excited for this! We also are working to set up an Etsy account with all of these women hopefully so they can sell internationally and have more of a market and we are setting this up with CURE hospital too, which is the hospital we learned how to make the beads from. Since they sell the jewelry for such a good cause, it would be nice to expand their market so that more babies here survive hydrocephalis and spina bifida. We will see how it goes!
Ok well that's all for now... thanks for reading. See you in 17 days! Did I hear that right??? Yikes!!!
Food in Uganda
So, to be quite honest I have been pleasantly surprised with the food I have been able to partake of here in Uganda. Most of it is pretty decent in taste and there have only been a couple things I couldn't choke down. The biggest difference is that a lot of the main foods are pretty bland, which is sad because I am a girl that LOVES flavor. Ya know, the one that orders a sub at subway and puts almost all the veggies on it instead of just ham and cheese. You get my drift. Anyways, here are some local delights/undelightfuls(?) I have experienced here:
1. Chapatti: this is basically fried dough and they cook it in TONS of oil - their signature. Oil. It is just like fried bread I guess, but bland in flavor and I don't really like it on it's own although a lot of people do. It is a snack you can get off the street (note the man we always buy it from in the market in the picture below) and our cook used to make it for dinner once a week with rolex... which leads us to the next food...
2. Rolex: this is chapatti with fried eggs rolled up in it. Hence the name - rolled eggs, which the people pronounce here as rolex. Mercy used to make this once a week and put plain chapatti with it and I got so sick of it I started eating just the egg out of it - shh don't tell. I love fried eggs, but for some reason putting chapatti with it takes away almost all the flavor! Which is probably why they do it!
3. Chikka rolex: Lets spice things up a bit and put beans with our rolex, as you see below. We mzungus actually invented this one - one of the team members was ordering rolex from our main man in the market and asked "do you ever serve the rolex with beans?" and the man looked at him like he was crazy and said "oh no.. no no" almost like it was forbidden. But then Dane said "well can we try it?" and he thought for a second, shrugged, and did so hahaha. For some reason I found this encounter really funny. I followed this one down with a coke to kill the parasite that may or may not have planted itself in me b/c of the dirty dish I may or may not have eaten out of.
4. Samosas: these are kind of like Japanese egg rolls. They are just pastries filled with veggies or meat - although one time I got some off the street in Namatala slum and I think they were filled with potatoes, or at least that's what it tasted like...? Ya never know. They are actually super delightful - all the ones I've had have been good!
5. Matoke: this is banana mashed up and mixed with..... something.... that makes it taste kinda like potato. You would think it would be sweet, but it isn't. It is decent, but only with other things.
6. Posho: I actually haven't tried this one, because the only night our cook made it I was experiencing the BRAT diet (Bananas, Rice, Apple Juice, and Toast) b/c I was sick and had (forgive me) diarrhea. But it is kinda like porridge with no flavor. Yum! Our guard David was eating this the other day with white ants - apparently delicious! Who wants some?? Check out the biggest pot of posho known to man:
7. White ants: David cooked us some white ants one night as a side dish to our dinner. These are not your typical ants - they are huge and have big wings, but he takes the wings off and cooks them in butter and oil so they end up tasting kind of like a salty chip. We made the second wavers eat these upon initiation into Africa - mwahahaha. If you can't eat a white ant, you can't survive Africa! It was actually pretty cruel, because all of us first wavers didn't have to eat white ants, we just chose to. Since I ate the one I did, I have been worried that other little white ants have hatched inside me.......... okay so I'm not that worried, but that would be pretty pleasant, yes?
7. Beef, rice, cabbage, and potatoes: This is a standard meal that you often get served in Uganda I have noticed. We got this at Impact Ministries Primary School during an assembly once and the rice and cabbage tasted like they'd been in a sewer and the beef was pretty fatty... lets just say Devin ended up eating a lot more rice and cabbage then he probably wanted to! Thanks Devin!
8. Chicken eggs and beak: Okay so we haven't really eaten these, but our cook Mercy and our guard David eat them! Apparently it is the part of the chicken with the best taste (which probably means tasteless). MMMM!
9. Cake that smells like wet dog: For Whit's (country director) birthday we got a lady from church to make her a cake. It smelled like wet dog, and that is not a lie. Because of this I only had a little taste after others assured me it did not taste like wet dog, but just (surprise surprise) wasn't very flavorful!
10. Rice and beans: we have started to eat at a little restaurant every now and then for lunch that sells tons of rice and beans for cheap! Although come to find out, after open communication, three groups of us have gone and been charged different prices.... haha. They are supposed to be 1500 shillings, which is equivalent to like less than a buck! What a steal! And that is why since then we all catch each other eating there a lot - in fact, one day four groups of us went there and oddly enough there was hardly any overlap!
11. Disappointing desserts: basically, no matter what dessert you order here, you are hardly ever satisfied. You order crepes with nutella and you might get crepes with brandy in them OR they might get it right, but you only get a teaspoon of nutella... :( but beautiful tomatoes on the side since tomatoes go so nicely with crepes and nutella. ;) You order apple pie and you get bread with minimal filling. You order brownies and they don't come. Which is why I have been craving brownies since week 3 haha. Although, apparently you can get a stellar brownie with ice cream in Jinja (a few hours from Mbale)!
12. The best pineapple, mango, and avocado on earth!
This list doesn't include the 50+ peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I have consumed for lunch nearly every day since I have been here... rest assured I will not be eating those when I get home!!
Anyone hungry?
1. Chapatti: this is basically fried dough and they cook it in TONS of oil - their signature. Oil. It is just like fried bread I guess, but bland in flavor and I don't really like it on it's own although a lot of people do. It is a snack you can get off the street (note the man we always buy it from in the market in the picture below) and our cook used to make it for dinner once a week with rolex... which leads us to the next food...
2. Rolex: this is chapatti with fried eggs rolled up in it. Hence the name - rolled eggs, which the people pronounce here as rolex. Mercy used to make this once a week and put plain chapatti with it and I got so sick of it I started eating just the egg out of it - shh don't tell. I love fried eggs, but for some reason putting chapatti with it takes away almost all the flavor! Which is probably why they do it!3. Chikka rolex: Lets spice things up a bit and put beans with our rolex, as you see below. We mzungus actually invented this one - one of the team members was ordering rolex from our main man in the market and asked "do you ever serve the rolex with beans?" and the man looked at him like he was crazy and said "oh no.. no no" almost like it was forbidden. But then Dane said "well can we try it?" and he thought for a second, shrugged, and did so hahaha. For some reason I found this encounter really funny. I followed this one down with a coke to kill the parasite that may or may not have planted itself in me b/c of the dirty dish I may or may not have eaten out of.
4. Samosas: these are kind of like Japanese egg rolls. They are just pastries filled with veggies or meat - although one time I got some off the street in Namatala slum and I think they were filled with potatoes, or at least that's what it tasted like...? Ya never know. They are actually super delightful - all the ones I've had have been good!5. Matoke: this is banana mashed up and mixed with..... something.... that makes it taste kinda like potato. You would think it would be sweet, but it isn't. It is decent, but only with other things.
6. Posho: I actually haven't tried this one, because the only night our cook made it I was experiencing the BRAT diet (Bananas, Rice, Apple Juice, and Toast) b/c I was sick and had (forgive me) diarrhea. But it is kinda like porridge with no flavor. Yum! Our guard David was eating this the other day with white ants - apparently delicious! Who wants some?? Check out the biggest pot of posho known to man:
7. White ants: David cooked us some white ants one night as a side dish to our dinner. These are not your typical ants - they are huge and have big wings, but he takes the wings off and cooks them in butter and oil so they end up tasting kind of like a salty chip. We made the second wavers eat these upon initiation into Africa - mwahahaha. If you can't eat a white ant, you can't survive Africa! It was actually pretty cruel, because all of us first wavers didn't have to eat white ants, we just chose to. Since I ate the one I did, I have been worried that other little white ants have hatched inside me.......... okay so I'm not that worried, but that would be pretty pleasant, yes?
7. Beef, rice, cabbage, and potatoes: This is a standard meal that you often get served in Uganda I have noticed. We got this at Impact Ministries Primary School during an assembly once and the rice and cabbage tasted like they'd been in a sewer and the beef was pretty fatty... lets just say Devin ended up eating a lot more rice and cabbage then he probably wanted to! Thanks Devin!
8. Chicken eggs and beak: Okay so we haven't really eaten these, but our cook Mercy and our guard David eat them! Apparently it is the part of the chicken with the best taste (which probably means tasteless). MMMM!
9. Cake that smells like wet dog: For Whit's (country director) birthday we got a lady from church to make her a cake. It smelled like wet dog, and that is not a lie. Because of this I only had a little taste after others assured me it did not taste like wet dog, but just (surprise surprise) wasn't very flavorful!
10. Rice and beans: we have started to eat at a little restaurant every now and then for lunch that sells tons of rice and beans for cheap! Although come to find out, after open communication, three groups of us have gone and been charged different prices.... haha. They are supposed to be 1500 shillings, which is equivalent to like less than a buck! What a steal! And that is why since then we all catch each other eating there a lot - in fact, one day four groups of us went there and oddly enough there was hardly any overlap!11. Disappointing desserts: basically, no matter what dessert you order here, you are hardly ever satisfied. You order crepes with nutella and you might get crepes with brandy in them OR they might get it right, but you only get a teaspoon of nutella... :( but beautiful tomatoes on the side since tomatoes go so nicely with crepes and nutella. ;) You order apple pie and you get bread with minimal filling. You order brownies and they don't come. Which is why I have been craving brownies since week 3 haha. Although, apparently you can get a stellar brownie with ice cream in Jinja (a few hours from Mbale)!
12. The best pineapple, mango, and avocado on earth!
This list doesn't include the 50+ peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I have consumed for lunch nearly every day since I have been here... rest assured I will not be eating those when I get home!!
Anyone hungry?
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