Mzungu!! How are youu??

Hello from Lugazi! I love love love love love love love it here. The people are so great and it is so beautiful and I love being a mzungu celebrity. The team is awesome and I am having so much fun with them and with the ugandans that we are meeting. So I don't know if I will make it to the internet cafe that often so I am thinking I am just going to post the emails I send to my family. So you definitely don't need to read all of it because it is looong. Just be warned. It is hard emailing, blogging, and keeping a journal. BUT I wanted to tell you about my experience in Uganda so far...

First of all, everyone here is OBSESSED with obama. every time we walk down the street they yell mzungu how are you and then OBAMA and then we all have to cheer OBAMA! there is a song that they play alllll the time that goes "oooobama HEY! obama is a real african hero" and more of course. we all have it memorized. we even have a little dance to it that we made up at the local club, african paradise, saturday night. i almost bought you an obama necklace at market day yesterday dad, I thought you would really enjoy it. But he would only give me a mzungu price so it wasn't worth it. they always ask "how is my son doing?" who is your son? "obamaaaa!" it is so great.

Ok so Sunday I talked to some of you, but we got to go to church in Jinga which is one of the biggest cities in Uganda. There were probably about 50 people in the branch so half of us went to church there and then half went to the Mukono branch (where laura went). Church was really good, the building was really nice but NO mormon couches. shocking huh?! They had flushing toilets though so we all used those. Everyone spoke English in church, most people know English here its just their accents that can be hard to understand or they talk super quiet. The sister missionaries spoke and they were from Kenya and Namibia and they both spoke English also. After sacrament meeting the elders, who are both american, were introducing us to everyone and they were all so so nice and then Melissa came in and told us they wanted help in primary. So Liz, Lizzie and I volunteered to go in thinking we would just be sitting with the kids or something. We walked in and told the teacher we were there to help so she opened the teaching manual to the lesson and handed me the book and goes "Teach." Whaaat? The lesson was on the priesthood and there were probably 15 kids in there from ages 2 to 12. So Liz and I tried to come up with a lesson while Lizzie sang with them and then got up there and started to teach about how the priesthood is a power that is stronger than the wind. We even acted out the wind and windmills at one point because we were asking questions and NO ONE was responding or even moving their faces, the kids were all just staring. So we gave up after like 10 minutes and just decided to sing with them. So we taught them I'm Trying To Be Like Jesus for a while and then the teacher said that we were going to have snacks so we stopped and then she was like no no you have one more hour to teach, play games or something. So we did every hand motion song you can think of...do as i'm doing, head shoulders knees and toes, popcorn popping...I'm sure we were so loud. The kids started to get more involved but it was still like pulling teeth to get them to do anything and the teachers were no help, one of them came in, laid down on a table in the back of the room and went to sleep! Haha it was so great. But by the end the kids were totally fun and way cute. We are going to try to go to that branch the entire summer and maybe even get callings so that would be cool. The rest of the day we just relaxed. My foot was basically the size of my head from mosquito bites swelling so I just laid on my bed elevating it for most of the day. Ok it wasn't that big but it was HUGE, it wouldn't fit into any shoes, even flip flops. I forgot to take a picture of it though dang.

Monday we started finding/working on projects. We went to Hope Orphanage a played with the kids for a while but again my foot was ginormous so after a while I had to just sit down but I had a really good talk with an older girl, Erin, who told me about living in the orphanage and going to university and what she wanted to be when she grew up. The kids were super cute and SO excited that we were there. They were very well behaved too, they all take care of each other and are so nice. Then we went to a village (its basically just a "neighborhood" across the main street, but it is technically another village in lugazi called nakazide. We live in Namengo village) to do Adobe Stove evaluations of some stoves they built last year. It was cool to see the stoves in action and talk to the families about how it affected their lives--in cutting down fuel prices and improving their health and the amount of time it takes to cook. The kids were literally attacking and kept asking for money. Then one of us pulled out a camera to take pictures of some people just surrounded by kids, and then they all freaked out wanting to see themselves and scrambling over each other to get to the camera. Camera=chaos around kids. After a while some of the group left to go meet with a women's group to assess their needs and 8 of us stuck around to do more evaluations but we basically just walked around the village with a herd of kids talking to our friend Kizza who is an adobe stove expert of that area. We went home and had our delicious dinner, I look forward to it everyday. We have a cook named Mary who is from Sudan and she makes the best food. We eat beans, rice, cucumbers, avocado, potatoes, spaghetti noodles (random i know), green beans, pineapple, and this weird orange stuff with chipatti (basically just a tortilla and it is so so so good) every night. Oh my it is so good. Mary is awesome. She didn't go to school because she grew up in Sudan during the war so she doesn't know how to read or write but she sure can cook. Then we also have a guard whose name is David and he is so great. It was lightning a ton the other night when we were out at the pump brushing our teeth so I asking him if it was going to rain because of the lightning and he said that he didn't know because it was coming from the North and when it is from the North you can never tell if it is lightning or the war. It was lightning don't worry, and has been for a while now. So I started talking to him about the war and he said that his brother worked for the government and was killed by the LRA a few years ago. He got all choked up and it was really tender. So I told him about Invisible Children and the march I just went to and that people were spending their lives trying to tell people about the war in Uganda and get them help, and he thought it was so cool that people cared about Uganda. It was really neat talking to him. Oh I also went to the doctor because after walking around all day my foot was even bigger and I couldn't wear a shoe so it was also filthy and he looked at it and definitely thought it was broken it was so big and was telling me how he needed to get a bandage and all this stuff and then I told him it was a mosquito bite reaction and he was like whaaaat? a mosquito did that to you?! So he told me just to elevate it and take allergy medicine, which I had been doing and still no bueno, and to put warm water on it for the swelling. No one knows why he said warm water because aren't you supposed to put ice on swelling? Ice is in short supply here though.

Tuesday we went back to Hope Orphanage and played with the kids. They love love to dance and play the drums so we taught them little sally walker and the hokey pokey and the macarena and such and played soccer with them. A few of the girls taught me some Jesus songs and they were super cute and waaay good singers. And they are super good dancers. One girl, Noel, stuck with me the whole time, she is going to be trouble when she is older. She is 11 and almost as tall as me and soo gorgeous. She is an awesome dancer and singer and all of the kids love her. I didn't go back to the orphanage on Wednesday but the people that did said that she told them to send Aly her love. so cute! After that we went to a meeting for Persons With Disabilities but it was a lot of waiting around and moving locations for the meeting so I'm not really sure what got accomplished but I think it could be a cool project. They go do home visits to people with disabilities because they can't go to school so it is definitely really needed. Then we went up to the hills to meet with an HIV/AIDS support group. It was absolutely amazing. They were the most inspiring people I have ever met. When we walked into the building, which is beautiful by the way and very well kept unlike a lot of other things here, they stood up and started clapping for us, we all wanted to cry. They were super prepared and had a whole agenda that they passed out and a packet on ideas they had for the summer and were just so welcoming and so grateful that we were there. Everyone that is in the group is HIV Positive and the focus of the group is learning to live positively even if they have the virus. There is such a stigma here for people with AIDS so they try to show people that they can still live normal lives and encourage them to take care of themselves so that they can prolong their lives. One lady, Agnes, who the chairperson described as a "very vibrant lady" just kept saying we are to live, so we should live as much as we can, until the day God set aside for us. They were all so awesome. We want to build a mushroom house with them so that they can sell the mushrooms and have that as an income generating activity, teach them square foot gardening and nutrition along with it, and build an adobe stove so they don't have an open fire. We also want to do a youth outreach program for youth who have HIV/Aids and do some goal setting/empowering activities with them so that they feel like they have something to live for so that this virus doesn't ruin their plans for the future. Its interesting because I came here thinking I was going to focus on orphanages but after that meeting I just feel so passionate about helping these people and working with them. Last night we had a meeting and I am going to be the project lead for HIV/Aids with my friend Lizzie, specifically in chare of the youth outreach. I'm way excited about it, we have a lot of work to do with them.

Yesterday I went with a small group to build 2 adobe stoves and it was so fun. The people were SO excited about the stoves and the whole neighborhood was gathering to help and watch. The stoves really do save them so much money and time and they really need them. It was so so hot outside and we were all dying and now today we are so sunburnt. I had braids in and my scalp was like scorched. We all had tons of sunscreen on and put more on like every 2 hours but the sun is just so much more intense here since we are so close to the equator. It was fun though and we got to play with the kids from the first day of stove evaluating because it was the same village and they taught me how to count to 20 in Lugandan and some other random words. They think it is so funny when Mzungus try to speak their language because we cannot get the accent right. Later we went to the hospital to meet with Josephine about Public Health. She talked to us about all of the projects the hospital needed and where we could help, which is basically everywhere. She told us about home visits where we take medication to families who live far away or are too sick to come to the hospital themselves and so when you go you give them the medicine and then you also teach them like hygiene or sanitation or nutrition or something. Cool huh? So stacey and I got super excited about that and we are the leads for that project, we did something else with josephine today and we set up a meeting with her for monday to get the list of families and talk about transportation and translators. I hope it works out, we still have to do a project proposal for it and work out the details but it sounds so awesome. The hospital was so so sad. It looks like a run down hospital that hasn't been used for 10 years but it definitely is. The bathrooms the patients have to use are behind the hospital UP A HILL and they are SQUATTERS. how do they do that?! I don't get it. The windows don't have nets so bugs can get in and only the pediatric ward had mosquito nets. The delivery room was basically a hallway and then the thing you put newborns in looked like a card board box with plastic walls and two holes, they said it was given to them in 1964. It was just really sad to see, and also made me really want to stay safe and healthy while I am here haha. I wish we could just build a nice, clean hospital for them but if we did that they would have no resources for maintanence anywhere in the country and no idea how to use it. It is just crazy to see the differences between here and back home.

Today we went back to finish the stoves and we got to stomp on the clay to mix it, it was so fun. My feet feel great because it feels like they got a mud bath. My swelling finally went down and I can wear my chacos again! It is still fatter than normal though. We also went to a school called the Sanyo School to talk about what we could do with them this summer and the teachers were so nice. They had a lot of great ideas for gardening and stove building and teacher training. We got to play with the kids and stacey and I got them so riled up haha it was hilarious. By the end we were doing a congo line with like 30 kids around the "playground" and then taking shakey face pictures with them. Everything we did, they did. So I'm sure there was a lot of obnoxious yelling and clapping but it was so funny oh man I was dying. They just all want to be with the Mzungu and touching them and feeling their arms. They are all amazed by gary, my big mole, and everyone touches it and just stares at it haha. We had another meeting with Josephine to talk about a youth outreach program some university students started and it was so awesome. Wilson and Robert are the students that started it and they are so passionate about it and about helping the youth. Wilson is probably my favorite ugandan so far. They have a lot of great ideas for going to schools and teaching abstinence and hygiene and stuff so we are meeting with him next week too. We went to another meeting with a man named John about helping with his women's group and the rest of the team didn't show up at our meeting spot because only some of us went to meet josephine and the rest went home to work on project proposals, so it was just me, stacey, alexis, and our country directors melissa and kristen that went. Oh man it was so funny. We were all so tired from working all day and from the hot sun so we just sat in the man's stinkin hot house totally delirious. He was really funny and was showing us his group's consitution and bank membership haha it was great. He basically just wanted money though so I don't think we will work with him much. But at the end he gave us each an avocado. and one egg each haha. The avocados are huuuge and green. I'm so excited to eat it, they are delicious. But at the end he goes I pray you don't forget about us and we were all like yeah totally pray about it and then he just burst into prayer right then and there. We all were dying, it was like at home when we can't stop laughing during the prayer and dad has to take over. But we were just trying to hold it in the entire time, I couldn't do anything but shake his hand when we left because I would have burst out laughing. I don't know why it was so funny. It was just such a weird meeting slash an avocado and an egg? oh i love uganda.

This place is beautiful. I wish you could see it. It is so green and lush and I love it. I feel so comfortable here. Well our beds aren't comfortable because we sleep on mattresses that are like our camping foam things but just really hard foam. But the people are so friendly and so welcoming. I rode a bota bota for the first time yesterday, its just a motorcycle that you pile two people on in the back behind the driver. It was so fun and I fell in love with uganda all over again. I did get burnt by the exhaust pipe getting off though and yet again, no cold water. It will be fine though. We still don't have running water so we use the squatter latrenes and the pump outside for everything. I have showered 2 times, meaning I have washed my hair twice. Haha everyone else showers like everyday or every other day but there are 5 of us that never shower. Some of the boys shower more than us even. Its great.

OH I bought a sim card and it won't work in the phone kris gave me. It says that the phone is locked and the boys tried to explain it to me, that it is because the service that the phone used before doesn't work here or something. The guy at the phone store tried to rip me off telling me he could fix it by hooking a cable up to it if i paid him 10,000 shillings and I said hook it up where? and he got the phone and definitely showed me the headphone jack. So I am going to google it to see if I can find a code or something but if not 5 of us are just going to go in on a new phone because we already have the sim card. So I will tell you what that number is so you can call me on my birthday. totally kidding but I will try to get the number to you soon if we buy one. Woah this was so long, sorry. I just have so much to tell you about this place! I will try to send pictures at some point but the comps are so slow and the power is so unreliable so we will see. Ps, i finally like mangoes because I have now had a real one, not a gross US one. we also discovered ice cream and potato chip type things yesterday so i am in heaven. yum. I love this place