Sarah in Uganda

So I wrote that first blog post a few days ago but didn’t have a chance to post until now. Since then we have had been busy learning more Luganda and helping out in the clinic. On Sunday we went to visit the secondary school where we may teach and where all the previous fellows have taught. Although Tom describes this journey as a walk in his blogs & presentations I would really classify it as a trek. It took us over two hours on the way there (granted we took the long way and stopped often for the architectural design team to snap some pictures of different buildings) down the valley and then up through the next ridge and then back into the valley again before reaching the school on the other side. Classification of a trek aside, it was great to see more of our surroundings since I really haven’t had the chance to explore too much. We saw many different types of homes and crops and I feel like it gave me a better feel for what life is like in rural Uganda.

Monday a bunch of the other volunteers went into Kampala for a few days so Elliot and I decided to jump on the taxi with them in order to explore Masaka for the afternoon. Masaka is the nearest good sized city and it was great to spend some time getting to know it better and get out of our Ddegeya bubble. We went to the market and got an idea of the large variety of things they sell there. It was late in the afternoon so not many people were around and we could move freely about. The many fragrant fish sellers reminded me why I don’t particularly like fish. What surprised me most was how much attention we still attracted in Masaka for being white. I think that’s been the hardest thing to adjust to in general. Everywhere we go, or even just sitting on our porch eating breakfast, the calls of “Hi mzungu!”

resonate everywhere. I’m being to think that I respond more rapidly to mzungu than Sarah. The kids especially are almost mystified by us and love to grab my hands, touch my hair, or just sit near me. If we sit outside for any time at all you can bet within a few minutes there will be at least 10 kids around waiting for the mzungu to play with them. On the first day of our Luganda lessons, we discovered found the question “Why do you make children cry all day?” in our phrase book.

At the time we thought it was an absurd thing to include in a basic Luganda-English phrasebook but now it makes sense. We actually make little babies cry whenever they see us. It’s a lot to get used coming from a culture that is mixed with so many races it is not uncommon to see people of many different races on an hourly basis. I’m sure as we send more time here, we’ll get used to it and the kids who hang around the clinic often will stop being so excited to see us.

One of the elderly patients at the clinic passed away today so the whole clinic staff went to the burial this afternoon. Unfortunately we missed the actual burial but sat around for in a semi-circle in front of the woman’s house in order to pay our respects to her. In Uganda when people die they are buried somewhere on their land, typically in the back of their houses. I guess later in the week they will have a funeral type service where the heir of her family will be decided.

It’s hard to believe a week has passed already! It’s nice that we’re settling into a routine here and getting to know our way around the Clinic a bit better.

P.S. Special thanks to my wonderful sister Claire for posting this for me. Can’t get Tumblr to load on our internet here but hopefully I’ll figure something out soon. My Union Blog is loading so I may switch to that. I’ll keep you posted! Thanks for reading!