I went on a safari, I ain't LION

Sorry I haven't updated in a while, my blog skills/time are seriously lacking. But here is the latest update of my Ugandan adventures...

The last week was so awesome, I seriously love this place. This is a long one, so prepare yourself...First of all last sunday two children were attacking me all through sacrament meeting, sitting on my lap and going through my book of mormon. I was letting them draw on the blank sides of my BOM notes that I still have, and then they found our family picture aka mass chaos. First they fought over looking at it and they ran to the front row to show their parents, and then their parents passed the picture down the row for everyone to look at. After sacrament their mom, sister mariam who is a crack up, came up to me and said she saw my family and was so excited about it. She asked if she could keep the picture, and i let her because i have like 20 other copies that mom sent with me. So she got super excited and told me she was going to frame it in her house so she could remember her friends in America. So all of you are now on the wall of Sister Mariam's house in Jinga, Uganda...CONGRATS! You are famous.

So on Wednesday half of our group left for a few day trip to Gulu to build stoves because we got a grant from the hunger banquet at BYU for the project. Gulu is in Northern Uganda and was heavily affected by the war--it is where the Invisible Children documentaries are based off of. We left wednesday morning for Kampala, then took a bus from Kampala to Gulu which was about a 5 hour drive. I seem to always get a middle seat which I guess I should be used to being the youngest child, so sleep definitely did not happen. The bus ride was so bumpy and its own little adventure. When they are doing construction on the road or the side of the road they build temporary speed bumps and so at one point we went over a speed bump every 10 feet or so for 20 minutes straight. oh my, it was bad news. On the way home my friend Drew counted and we went over 175 speed bumps, but there were over 1500 that had been built and were flattened on the same stretch of road. Out of control right? Then a medicine man got on the bus in this shnazzy suit and was selling miracle drugs from china that cure whooping cough, syphillis, weak teeth, basically everything. and people actually bought it, that was the shocker. The bus stopped every hour or so in towns with vendors wearing blue vests that attack your windows trying to sell you food--chicken on a stick, fried liver (looks like the rats they cook on Shrek), fried bananas/plantains (i thought they were breadsticks the first time and got SO excited), water bottles, grilled corn (delicious), pineapples, and live chickens. Its great. The more north we got, the more deserted the villages were. We passed a lot of IDP camps, which are just clustered, very congested groups of round thatch-roof huts. The villages seriously looked like ghost towns, it was crazy. We got to Gulu and our "friend" who caused us so many problems, Lucy, met us there to take us to the hotel she had set up for us called the Multi-choice Hotel. It was full of choices. If I had stayed there in America I would be afraid of getting raped or some disease. The first night we had to share beds because they didn't have enough room for us, so it was SO stinkin hot. We had beds, mosquito nets, and a basin and water jug for our showers, and a squatter outside. Classy, right? The next two nights we got our own beds though so that was nice.
On Wednesday we split into three groups to build stoves--our goal was to build 10. I went with a group of 5 to build 3 stoves in a village called Paicho. It was a 45 minute boda ride to the village, and it was so beautiful. The North is much more savanna-y than Lugazi which is very jungley. There are really tall grasses and lots of tall trees, I could totally picture the rebel army hiding in there, the real African Bush. Paicho ended up being a village turned into an IDP camp, so there was the main street with "shops" that didn't actually exist and then tons and tons of huts. The camp originally had 18,000 people living there and now there are 11,000. We built two stoves just outside of the camp where there were random clusters of 2 huts by themselves. When we got there the guy who was helping us, Richard, talked to the ladies who we would be building for, then looks at us and goes "So, will it be a problem if we don't have bricks for you to build with?" we all just looked at each other and didn't know what to do. Ok we build the stoves by laying cement and then 4 levels of bricks, with mortar in between each layer. Then we plaster the outside, let it dry, and fill it with clay. We put banana stems in the clay where the burners, chimney, tunnel, and fuel hole is that rot and are pulled out 3 weeks later. So bricks are VITAL to the building. We were trying to figure out if we could build with rocks or something, and then I noticed a block of something brick-ish outside the huts. They told us they had a lot of those, they weren't normal baked bricks but they were sturdy, so we used those. We are learning to be resourceful here. The first stove took FOREVER because they had to go to the road and dig up the sand that covers the road so that we could make cement and then this drunk old man wanted us to pay him for digging it up so we fought about that and then the old women watching us didn't like the sand so they were yelling at us in Acholi, and then when we were pouring water to mix the cement they were yelling at us to pay them for the water we were using. So we were getting frustrated because our policy is that for the stoves we provide cement, rebar, labor, and training and then they provide the local materials like sand, banana stalks, clay, and water but these people would not stop begging to be paid. Ps Acholi is the craziest language ever, it sounds like jibberish. Anyways, finally they let it go and we got back to work, and yes it is hard work Andy haha. We only ended up building 2 because the first one was so unprepared and out of control, so we didn't even get back into Gulu until 7:00 after only building 2. We were SO dusty from the boda ride home that our hair and faces were literally orange, I will show you pictures someday.
Friday new people went to Paicho to fill the stoves and my group went to a village called Laru to build 3 more. the people in Laru were so much more prepared and so helpful, so we pounded those stoves out. I have never been so dirty in my life, but it was really fun. In 2 of the huts we built in their open fire stove was going so not only was it really hot outside, but we were building right next to an open fire so that was fun. FYI my Friday group consisted of liz, lizzie, stacey, and me so 4 girls built 3 stoves by ourselves. We are champs.
Saturday morning we went to the Invisible Children office in Gulu, that was way cool. I am the only one on our team that actually went to The Rescue so it was really cool to talk to the people there about it and their planning process and the effects of it and such. They have some great programs that are really helpful in Gulu and have really had a large impact on bringing hope back to Gulu. Then some of us went to the bus park to see where kids used to night commute. Its not a very big building, just a room with four or five long benches on each side, and almost 1000 kids used to sleep there every night. Insane right?

Let me tell you a little bit about Gulu and the people...it is really quiet and peaceful up there. The people are WAY more reserved than in the south, they don't shout hello to anyone or even shout really. They were still really nice people, except for the crazies screaming at us in Acholi, just not as open I guess. They seemed a little hardened by the war, and it seemed like the younger generation was also raised that way. Gulu has been safer for about 3 years now, but it is still pretty quiet up there. One of my boda drivers told me that during the war there was not a single boda or car anywhere in Gulu because if there was, the rebels would just steal it. He told me that the only time you could safely travel on the roads were from 12-2 in the afternoon, when the LRA were eating lunch. Now there are tons of bodas everywhere, but they all have to wear helmets and can only take 1 passenger, and there are no taxis anywhere. The market is not as crazy as here, but Andrew at invisible children told us that in the 3 months he has been here it has gotten even more crowded, that every month you can tell more people are coming back and going back to a normal life. A boy named Job helped us with the stoves in Paicho and while we were waiting for sand he was telling us about his experiences as a boy during the war. When he was 6 years old his family moved from Paicho to town because it was safer. Sometimes he still had to night commute to the bus park or schools because it was not safe for him to sleep at home. He told us that his cousins were abducted but escaped after a few months. One night his next door neighbors home was raided, the parents were killed and the boys abducted, and he didn't even know it until the morning when he woke up. He said he hasn't seen his neighbors since. Richard told us of the "great atrocities" of the LRA and what a scary, unsafe time it was. The LRA is out of Uganda now and they are hopeful that they will stay out permanently. I can't even imagine the things those people have seen and gone through, its so crazy. Lucy failed us this time but when the rest of the group goes up in 3 weeks to finish the stoves they are going to set up a lecture with someone who was formerly abducted. That should be really cool, I'm bummed it didn't work out for us.

ok SAFARI...I will make this quick because this is really long. Sorry I write such long novels. We went on a safari 2 hours south of Gulu, so kind of in between Kampala and Gulu, by Murchison Falls. We had to drive through the game park for like 40 minutes to get to the lodge/campsite and it was sunset when a lot of the animals came out so that was basically a safari on its own. We saw giraffes, elephants, warthogs, and antelope just in our taxi. It was awesome. We stayed in tents that had four beds in each, which were nicer than our beds at home. Then there was an outdoor lodge thing overlooking the Victoria Nile where we ate and hung out. Sunday morning we left at 6 AM for the safari. We were in big van things where the roof came up so that we could stand up. We saw a huge group of baboons to start off, there were lots of babies in the group and they were so so cute. Our driver/tracker spotted lions in the distance so we totally off-roaded it until we got seriously 20 feet away from the lions. They were 2 juveniles so they didn't have manes yet, but still so cool. We saw a ton of giraffes, a bunch of hippos in the river, and lots of elephants including little babies. then we passed this tree that had 3 lions just chilling under it. It was getting later, about 10:30 so it was already really hot, and you could hear the lions panting to hard to stay cool. They really were just on the side of the road, it was crazy. We were so close to them. We saw some Jungle Book style vultures and some really pretty red and blue birds, tons of antelopes and warthogs and water buffalo. We went back to the lodge for lunch and then at 2 we went on a boat cruise down the victoria nile. We saw tooooons of hippos in the water and elephants on the side of the river, and probably 7 crocodiles. Creeeeepy. Then we rode up to murchison falls which are so so gorgeous. Monday morning we hiked up to the falls which was way cool. It isn't a waterfall with a huge drop, its the kind that it rocky and goes down for a long time, kind of like the one we went to in Winter Park last summer. Its crazy though because the nile goes from being super super wide and then all the sudden squishes down to 4 meters so the water is super super super powerful. We got to walk right up to them, it was so cool to feel and see the power of the water. You would not want to get caught in that waterfall. It was so beautiful looking out from the top of the falls to the huge Nile at the bottom and in the distance. Uganda is gorgeous.

This week we are starting the construction of another Mushroom Farm, but it is going to be at the HIV/AIDS clinic. Time for the machete skills again, I'm excited. The first wavers left yesterday so that was sad, but the newcomers are great. Congratulations if you read all of this, I'm proud of you. Hope all of you are doing well, I miss you guys! I can't wait to show you my pictures and videos, don't worry there are plenty to go around :) gwagala (not how you spell it at all, but its how you pronounce it...it means I love you in luganda)

arrry (no one can say the L in my name these days)