Pictures!

As promised, here are some pics from the new site. Home sweet home until 2010.

This is the school i'll be working at (As a biology teacher btw...should be interesting). The building to the left is the dorms for the girls (about 27 boarders stay there). To the right of that is one of the two blocks with classrooms. There are 3 classrooms in that building, each seating about 70 students. The little building to the right of that is the "kitchen", essentially a mud hut with a firepit for cooking the staff lunch and supper for the boarders. To the right of that is the new building they are constructing. It has walls but no roof yet as they are about 20 million shillings short on funding. This is the exam room mentioned before. Then to the right of that (notpictured) is the library and lab i will be focusing on. Right now all it has is one row of bricks on the ground, which is the "foundation". The rwenzori's are in the background but it was a bit cloudy so its hard to see them.

This is my porch looking southeast. we have a nice backyard, then a cow pasture, then some hills with tea plantations and then further out would be the mountains if the weather were a bit clearer.

And finally auntie chris with some of the neighborhood kids. I don't think they had any clue what was going on here but were nice enough to play along and hold the picture while i snapped away. They like to congregate at the backdoor of my sitting room, like they are here, and pretty much watch anything i do. "So what'd you do today?" "well we watched the muzungu sweep his floor, and then he made a sandwich, and then he yelled at us and locked the door."

jk, i havent snapped on them yet.

love you all, more to come.

-eric

So long Kampala, thanks for all the stress

So in my last post I talked about how "non-peace corps" my living situation was. well have no fear, I am now living the dream. My site assignment has been switched, and I have absolutely no complaints. I am now residing in the west of the country near Ft. Portal, which sits at the base of the Rwenzori mountains ("mountains of the moon"), which also means my blog title now makes more sense and is a little more appropriate.

I have sacrificed some of the privacy I would of had in the two bedroom apartment, as I am now living on a catholic parrish with 3 priests. They are absolutely great guys and very generous and welcoming. My school is located in a small village and has about 400 students. It is a high school, which differs from a normal secondary school here in that it only serves O (ordinary) level students, which is senior one - senior 4. For the remaining two years, or A (advanced) level, the students must go on to a different school.

The campus is absolutely gorgeous. It sits on top of a hill on the parrish land overlooking rolling hills of tea plantations and on a clear day the northern portion of the Rwenzori mountains (pronounced wen-zory) can be seen towering in the distance. I will try to get some pictures up this weekend....unfortunetely the camera bit the dust, but I am borrowing another pcv's digi for the week to take some pics of the new site. But I don't have her cable to load the pics up today.

So the priests have been nice enough to offer me two rooms at the parrish house, which is a long block divided into 4 "apartments". So I get a bedroom with a sink, and a sitting room. There is an entrance on either side, one into the bedroom which you enter from the courtyard, and the outside door from the sitting room opens up to a nice cement porch with a backyard. Beyond the backyard it runs down through a cow pasture and then back up the hill. Sitting on my back porch I have a sweet view west of the mountains and tea fields. I have already logged many hours sitting on the porch or laying in my hammock in the backyard. A far cry from the apt in Kampala, and I'm feeling much more relaxed and in my comfort zone.

The school, just like the one in Kampala, has a lot of needs. It is only 3 years young, and currently has about 5 classrooms for the kids. They are about halfway through the construction of an exam room (for the national exams they have to take after each term). They also have the foundation built for a library/computer/and science laboratory. This will be my main focus for a secondary project to work on getting some funding for the construction of the building and then getting the kids some books to stock the shelves with. They are in desperate need of this facility, and many of the kids who live around the school walk up to 15km a day to attend school at another secondary school in town which is able to offer these facilities to them. That is a main reason why enrollment at my school is so low.

I will be working up some figures and ideas in the coming months on how to get these projects underway. The next term starts on the 25th of may, so the next month will be spent making lesson plans for my classes. I will be teaching biology mostly, with some physics classes as well. So I also need to peel through the biology books in the next month so i'll be ready for them. I'm siked to be getting down to business and have tons of ideas for the kids that I am ready to follow through on.

We are very close to Kabale National Forest, which has one of the biggest primate populations in the country. Chimps, monkeys, baboons, the works. It is high on my list of things to do. Theres also a collection of crater lakes near the forest, and hiking and camping in the Rwenzori's. So the options are unlimited for days trips and such and exploration of this beautiful country.

I am getting a PO Box in Ft. Portal hopefully on friday, so I will have a new address for all those sweet care packages ;)

I hope everything stateside is going well.
Love and miss you all,
Eric