And now....a cow for Rosie

Ask and yee shall recieve. I present, an ankole cattle (his horns aren't as big as most of them usually are...around 2-3 feet each...but don't tell him [or is it her? i cant tell from the picture], he's a little sensitive about the subject). This cow is one of 10 or so the parish has. Also pictured is the parish dog, who I've dubbed Marx, because he was nameless and for reasons I won't mention for fear of a lightning strike. He just got done chasing the big black cow, who is still running from him, hence the blur.

Please forward all other requests to me via the comment link below.

Ding Ding, School's in

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ha, i wish i had a picture of this title. there is one somewhere on kel's camera i'll have to put up soemtime. so they have bells at the schools here in Uganda. They also have a bell ringer. Why you ask? well the "bell" is actually just an old wheel from a car hanging from a tree. so they have a boy (or girl) designated to hit it a few times with a stick the call the kids in from breaks, lunch, etc. just an fyi for you all.
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so i've started classes...and absolutely loving it. I think I wrote (its too slow to go back and read it now, and i just want to get something up before my time runs out) in my last blog about having a couple classes and then covering topics for other teachers. Well that has now changed...and now I have 4 of my own classes! all mine to do as i please. I have Senior 2 (east stream and west stream) physics, senior 4 biology (which i taught over the holiday as well) and senior 3 physics. BTW streams here are a way to cope with the lack of teachers. All the Senior 3 and 4 kids sit in the same class (about 60 of them) and they are the only senior3/4 class in the school. Senior 1 and 2 have "streams" which just means there are 2 classes....just like in the states there would be 2-5 1st grade classes in a given school.

ok so i've got 4 classes total, and...thankfully...mostly physics. The picture (which doesnt seem to be loading...i'll try it again in another post) is my senior 2 east physics class. Its a little dusty because, well, the class is dusty. there's no glass in the windows, and concrete floors, so you do the math. Much more to come (when i have more time) and i'll also have more pictures as i have kelly's camera on loan for the next month.

special thank you to everyone i've talked to that is putting together a care package. Bruce and Dolores thank you for the magazines! they were great, and are currently being cut up and used to decorate my walls as i have read them cover to cover twice now. Chris and Bridget/General and Woody: thanks for your emails and care package preparation. It really means a lot to know you all are thinking about me.

Oh! i will mention this before i go. Kevin asked me about the LRA situation in an email, and I'm sure others are wondering about this as well. yes, they (Uganda and Congo) are escalating their dispute with kony after the failed peace talks, but i'm totally safe. This will be occuring in the congo and in northern uganda (both areas we are not allowed to go to), and appears will be mostly confined to those regions, which i am well away from. I will keep you updated on it though.

Love you all.
Eric

Kampala

So trip to the big city this weekend. Finally got my first sweet care package that has been waiting for me at the peace corps office. Thank you soooo soo much Shay!! It's absolutely awesome. Here's a quick rundown of the highlights: ramen noodles, grape jelly, a portable fan!!, lots of crackers, pringles, a pitcher, granola bars, batteries, pretzels, etc, etc, etc....soo great! the portable fan might have already gone through 2 batteries :) but i've got more than enough AA's so it will be going strong for a while.

Went to the Uganda v. Niger football (the real football) game yesterday. Had tons of fun. They won 1-0, although we missed the goal as we were moving from the sunny seats to the shade (a diff of at least 15 degrees) but had a great time all around. The entire city was alive with fans yesterday afternoon and had a great atmosphere. There were about 30,000 fans at the stadium which was about 2/3rds full....including a young ugandan man in a bra leading cheers (so very culturally inappropriate). Here's our sweet $1.50 cranes visors we bought at the market in kampala. I also had a flag that we bought with the visors but our driver's flag fell off halfway to the game so i held one out the window which got snatched by a girl driving by on a boda.

Other than the game I've just been hanging out and eating good food that I can't get in the village, ie: pizza, chinese, salads, etc.

School is getting underway now, last week was the first week of the new term. They have beginning of term exams all week until this monday. I did not set any exams this term but I did supervise the s4's for two of theirs. Keeping watch for cheating becomes quite difficult when you've got 65 high school students crammed 4 to a desk in a dark room...but I think overall it went pretty smoothly. This week I will start teaching two streams (classes) of s2 biology, as well as finishing up the topic I was working on with the s4 physics class. I am hoping to get some more classes added to my load, but as of right now I will just be covering various topics in different classes so they can move me around to interact with as many kids as possible.

Had an interesting trip back from fort portal one day last week. The matatu's are always a great source for stories. This particular one I was on ran out of gas about 20km's from my village. So we pulled over on the side of the road and the conductor took a jerry can and ran down to the gas station at the next town which was about 2km's away. They had no gas. So the driver flagged down a boda driver who drove up to the next town to look for some. Took about 20 mins before he came back, this time with gas. So the conductor poured it into the tank (using a piece of cardboard as the funnel) but then wanted to also put a little into the fuel line for good measure. So how does one get gas into a fuel line from a jerry can without a funnel?? well you use your mouth! Next thing I knew he had tipped the jerrycan up and took a big mouthful of it, then leaned over and spit it into the fuel line and spit the rest out onto the ground and we were off! Never a dull moment, and there is absolutely no such thing as impossible. There's always another way to do something.

I got nothing but pictures

So not much of an update...yet again, been playing a lot of yahtzee this weekend. I'm trying to get into a habit of posting something whenever i'm at an internet cafe....so here's some more pics for your viewing pleasure.

I did recently have a "madman" (which the father likes to refer to the drunks as) come up on my porch in the middle of the night. He pushed over anything that was sitting on my window sill (my window was cracked open) and also dragged my stool to the other side of the porch and sat there and drank my jerry can of water. I didn't hear anything but woke up the next morning to find my stool arranged next to the empty jerry can and a few things on the floor that had been on my window sill the previous night. The father informed me of the happenings of the night.

anyway, here's some pics.

this is a street on one of the many hills in Kampala, this one is a residential section. Actually just down the street from the vice president's residence. on the opposite hill on the left is a school for deaf children....very cool location and architecture

bowling in Kampala...we had to buy the red socks since we both had sandals.

....she beat me

...painting windows in Kampala

...class at Kitebi Secondary School (my original site in Kampala), not sure where the teacher is....you can see the netball goal to the left (basketball hoop with no backboard) this is a game played by the girls and is similar to basketball but has rules kind of like ultimate frisbee instead of dribbling

...fellow PCV's prior to swearing in ceremony. From left: sabrina, melissa, baxter, kel, me, and sunshine. (i'm in a kanzu which is a traditional formal wear for the buganda tribe)

stay tuned....
love and miss everyone,
eric

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy mother's day to my mom, grandma mag's and helen, and any other mom's reading this blog!!

Not much update from here as of yet. We are wrapping up the holiday term with the S4's this week, and I have gained an english class and a physics class. So I am now teaching 3 physics classes (same class but 3 80 min sessions), a biology class, and 2 english classes. So needless to say I am staying quite busy during this "holiday". The Senior 4's (equivalent to sophomore's in high school) have stayed around school for extra classes as they prepare for their national O-level exams this october. The rest of the school (S1-S3) will begin classes on the 26th of may. I am not sure what my schedule will be like, as the timetable has not been decided on, but I'm sure I'll be extra busy with more classes for the term. I'm excited to start teaching the S1's and S2's, as these are a little younger kids and will be excited to have me teaching no doubt.

Things are going well at the parish, I have a new PO box! which I've added to the right. So anyone holding a sweet care package, wait no more :) In all seriousness thank you all for these, I have not received any yet (although there is one in Kampala waiting for me to pick up at the office) but I have heard of many being prepared or sent....so thank you from the bottom of my heart. It means a lot to me knowing you all are thinking about me and will surely be an exciting day when I get them!

Also thank you to anyone who has sent emails. I am trying hard to respond to them as quickly as I can....I have found a new internet cafe in Fort Portal which is substantially faster...which is where I am blogging from now....(btw, there is a american pop country song playing on their radio right now...kinda strange...made even stranger by the ugandan who is running the cafe singing along to it ;) never a dull moment.

btw, this picture to the left is from the end of training. We did a Homestay Family Thank You Day, where our language groups put together skits and local dances for the families that hosted us during training. This is the Luganda group doing a traditional dance. From left is Vance, Tim, Me, and my adopted peace corps dad John (who also served in Malawi and who I traveled with for our PCV visits during training). We were dancing for the country director (in pink at the table), some other peace corps staff, and the Local Council Charmain for Luwero district....who later joined us. There's a video of this to :)

And speaking of non-dull moments, since I don't have much as far as news from here i'll give a few of the more non-dull ones i've had recently:

1) washing clothes at the parish...which I do by hand in wash basins...and am not very good at. They have this stuff called omo here, which is like a laundry detergent with a really strong stain removing chemical in it...which wreaks havoc on my hands if i don't wash it off soon after...so i know its strong. My strategy is to soak the clothes in a bucket of water and omo over night to lift out the stains, and then i rinse a couple times in different basins of water. If need be i'll scrub a little if the stains are taken care of by omo. So one day i was washing clothes and I went to hang up a shirt on the line which is nearby and when i turned around the calf that likes to graze in my backyard has proceeded to empty both of my basins in two big slurps. Probably not the best water for a cow to drink, but it gave me a laugh, and i had to drag him by his rope out further into the yard. (this sequence of events was repeated several times until i finally dragged him to the other side of the house). Like i needed anymore challenges while washing my clothes.


2) I broke my matatu record recently. I talked about the minibuses in an earlier post, which are supposed to carry up to 14 passengers. On one of my trips to Ft. Portal we hit 28 people! now granted, 3 were babies, and a couple of younger kids also made up the total, but I still don't see how this one is going to be broken. On my row there were me and 3 adults across the seat, then 3 babies in laps, then the conductor was standing (essentially was in my lap) in front of me and leaned over the seat back in front of us so he could fit under the ceiling.

3) Not as lighthearted of an event, but definitely not dull, and gives me a chance to outline one of the struggles the Ugandan's face...and reasons they say "we are living on borrowed time". The other night a house near the parish caught fire. The "house" was a small building which was rented as apartments, much like the parish i am staying in, and apparently a candle had caught fire in one of the rooms. Now, there is absolutely no form of a fire department in the country, and very few people have fire extinguishers, and this house didn't even have any running water. So about 10 people from the community were helping empty all of the furniture from the apartments in order to salvage what they could, and remove any fuel for the fire (ie: mattresses and wooden furniture). There were also about 10 people helping to carry basins of water from a nearby shop to extinguish the flames. 2 bodas (motorcycles) positioned themselves on the street and shone their headlights on the house to give the people some light. And then about 40 or so onlookers (including me) watched and speculated as to what had happened. Very sad, luckily no one was hurt, and although I didn't stick around to see, I am told the fire was put out after a couple hours. The police never showed up while I was there, but supposedly were coming sometime to investigate the cause. It is a very tough life here sometimes, and they truly are "living on borrowed time"

a sidenote to this: one of my immediate projects, in light of this event and the recent fire at Budo Primary School in Kampala which ripped through the dormitory and killed many students (20 or so), is to get fire extinguishers and bells for the two dormitories at our school. I am currently writing a grant that will be presented to the Rotary Club in Ft. Portal to hopefully get the funding for this. I'll let you all know how that turns out. Oh and the picture below here is of my other project. This is the exam room during one of the many gorgeous sunsets i get at the parish. I was told it was hard to see this building in the previous post's picture, so i'm hoping this is better. My real project is a library for the kids, but the exam room has to be completed first, and still needs a roof and a lot of other work to it. I'm finding out the total estimated costs soon, and have a few ideas for fund raising but am most definitely open to suggestions.


Also, I'll mention one thing about how my life has gotten a bit more challenging since moving here, just to give you some perspective. Now, this is not even close to the same category as the fire, but has been something I've had to get used to. The parish has solar power, which is used to run the lights in the apartments at night, but that is all the batteries can handle. And they actually don't work in my room, so I used kerosene (parrafin as its called here) lanterns at night. So one of my activities about ever other day or so is to take the 5 km walk into town and drop off my cell phone and ipod at the "charging store". There is no electricity in our town, but they have certain shops that use generators and about 15 surge protectors (talk about a fire hazard) and you pay 500 shillings to have them charge the batteries in cell phone and other electronics. So i bring my ipod (which the guys are finally understanding what it does....or at least they remember its called an ipod and plays music somehow) and 2 cell phone batteries and drop them off. I usually hang around town and go have a soda or beer and 3 hours later pick up my fully charged toys, then make the 5km walk back to the parish. So when you plug your cell phone in tonight in the kitchen or next to your bed, think about how convenient that is and how lucky we are in the states to have such crazy things like home electricity.

I think that's about it from here for now. I'll keep the updates coming, and keep your comments and emails coming my way, it really brightens my days to hear from you all.

Love and miss everyone.
Thank you moms!
-Eric

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