Some Things Just Take Time

This week has been an intensely difficult one for me. I couldn't seem to get out of my own head, away from my homesick thoughts. I hadn't struggled with homesickness here until our big Pre-Service Training (PST) group separated for 3 days, for future site visits. Before that, I'd had moments where I missed my family, but it was much more contained—easily taken care of with a phone or video call with my parents. 

This was different. Keep in mind that I've wanted to join the Peace Corps since I was in 7th grade, and have been seriously working toward it as a goal for the past 6 years. But this past week, I was questioning everything about my decision to be here, so far from home. 

It was nothing about Uganda or my site (my future home!) that brought this on. I love this country, many things are different here but I love getting to know the myriad of cultures and people here. I think my crippling homesickness was brought on by suddenly having time to be alone, with a great deal fewer things to keep me busy. At my future site, I had time to rest, to read, to think. And, as it is holiday break, there were few people to get to know. Just the sheer unfamiliarity of everything was also a bit overwhelming, as well. 

After my future site visit, I traveled to language training, which is in a town about 30 minutes from my site. I got to meet up with the three other Volunteers who are also learning Ateso, but I still could not shake this incredibly homesick feeling. 

Believe me, I was trying everything. I truly had to spend time every waking minute reminding myself of my reasons for being here:

I want to live in Africa, to learn from the people here. 

I have committed two years of my life to the people at my future site. They sincerely want someone to help teach the children there to read and write, and Peace Corps has given me the skills I need to be able to do my best at that task. 

I get to study language here, and use the languages I'm learning every single day! And studying language is one of my absolute favorite things to do. 

It sounds silly, but another reason I am here is to answer the call that Kennedy made in 1960, while he was still campaigning to become President. At 2am in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he greeted the crowd of 10,000 people who had waited up to see him—people he'd thought would have long gone to bed, as he was late arriving. Inspired, he veered from his usual speech, and instead said "How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete." (source: https://www.peacecorps.gov/about/history/founding-moment/)

Even with all of these things running through my mind, and the determination within me from years of hard work... I missed home. I couldn't convince myself to snap out of it. It wasn't even the comforts of home that I missed, the Peppermint White Mochas or the hot baths... I just wanted to hug my mom and dad. 

But don't worry, I'm alright now! Because what finally made this all better for me was coming here and finding a beautiful, incredibly loving homestay family waiting for me. They call me their daughter or sister, I call them my mother or aunt or siblings, respectively. They have welcomed me into their home and have already spent hours teaching me about the language and culture here. It's so nice to have a familiar place to come home to after a day at school for language training, and to have people to spend my time with who really care about me.

 I facetimed my parents at home to introduce them to my family here, and everyone loved meeting each other. My parents showed them our Christmas tree, and my host family spontaneously burst into singing "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" which was amazing because, if you know my family, you know that that's our song. I feel like I belong here, and I have a renewed strength in my commitment to spend 2 years of my life here. And I know that my family is supporting me from far away, with their loving arms open for me when I return. 

Me, Myself... and 32 Other Trainees

In a few days, I'll have my own room for the first time in almost a month and a half! I've only had a few moments alone these past few weeks—when you live in a group of 33 people, there is always someone to talk to. If you're walking back to the dorms, someone else is going as well. Want to walk the 20 minutes it takes to get to the supermarket? I can guarantee you're not the only one who wants to go get yogurt. We've all had multiple roommates, and almost all of the girls have been living in the same dorm building together at both of the places we've lived so far. And not only are the walls thin, but the space over the door to each room is just a screen, so even if you're physically alone you can most likely hear someone else talking, haha! 

I've started waking up around 6 so that I can be in the dining hall around 6:45 and have time to drink my tea and eat my breakfast (a hard boiled egg, bread with margarine, and a banana) before most people are there. It's nice to sit quietly for a little while with the other people here who appreciate mornings. 

And then, at 7:30 (Uganda time, so 7:30ish, haha) we're all packed onto a bus to head to School Based Training and teach a classroom of 60+ students all morning!

Teaching my lovely P2 pupils

I'm surrounded by so many beautiful souls, and I've loved getting to know everyone. All who know me know that I am an extrovert (ENFP, to be more specific)... and that has been stretched to the limit here. But I have found a way to cope: I remind myself a few times every day that I will only be around this big group for a limited amount of time—we are all about to travel to different parts of the country. 

My language training group is small; there are only four of us. On Sunday we are headed to the East, while everyone else goes to their own regions—eight to the Central region, seven to the North, and so on. We won't be together again until the end of homestay, when we have a special workshop with our counterpart from site (the Ugandan teacher who will be working with us most closely), and then we will have Swearing In and become official Peace Corps Volunteers! After that we will part ways again, and meet up at our In Service Training (IST), which will be about three months after Swearing In. 

So, as overextended as my extroversion feels right now, I know that I will soon be missing these humans quite a bit. Luckily, our "burner phones" from Peace Corps allow us to call all of the other PCVs serving in our country for free! I'm grateful for anything that makes this easier, because the list of people in my life who I'm trying to "keep in touch" with is getting quite long... and I haven't even met my homestay family yet, or anyone at my future site! I love having so many wonderful people in my life, and I'm excited to meet so many more soon! 

On Saturday, our supervisor from our future site will travel here, to the Teacher's College we all currently live at, and there will be a brief workshop where we can get to know each other. On Sunday, we will leave with him/her and travel to our future site! I've heard it's about 6 hours to my site, by taxi (van that fits 14+ people) or coaster (large bus)—the main forms of public transportation here. We'll be there for three nights, but it's the break between terms, so we won't likely be able to meet many of our fellow teachers. 

After that, I will travel by myself to the town (also in the East) where the four of us will be learning Ateso. We will be living with homestay families while we do our intensive language training, and start the next chapter of this journey! 

I love these humans

Inside a taxi!

Getting down a jackfruit... our group gets into some random shenanagins :) 

School Based Training!

I had my first week of teaching this past week! I taught P2, which is about the equivalent of first grade back in the US. It was a whirlwind of coordination (between me and my fellow Peace Corps Trainee (PCT) teachers), crafting, and stories—so many stories! We used Bah Bah Black Sheep for our fluency passage all week, we read a different book each day out loud to the class, and we each took a small group of students for 45 minutes at the end of the morning and read another fluency passage (I chose "Pancake" by Shel Silverstein) and another book (a few pages each day, so we could really put the focus on comprehension). I never thought picture books would be such a prominent part of my adult life, haha!

There were five of us PCTs teaching this P2 class together, but never more than two of us were teaching at one time. The rest of us would be observing PCTs teaching in other classrooms. We taught a few lessons in pairs, we each co-taught a lesson with the Ugandan classroom teacher, and some lessons we taught as individuals.

One of our lessons was describing uniforms in English, and these were kind of like paper dolls. We had the pupils tell us the name of each part of clothing, and then they got to come up and tape it to the stick figure! :)

The P2 classroom we taught in had about 60 students in it. Some days a few less, some days a few more. This number of students in a classroom on the average to low side for a Ugandan classroom. There can be 70 or 80 students in a primary level classroom, or 170 in a class at a Teacher's College. So, please, take a moment to reflect on how amazing these Ugandan teachers are, to be taking on the responsibility of the education of 60, 70, or 80+ learners every day. 

The classroom teacher for P2 is Teacher Joyce and she is lovely. She's everything I aspire to be as a teacher. She's enthusiastic and encouraging, and she holds her students to the standard of behavior she has set for them. She expects them to be attentive, respectful, and participate—and from what I've observed, they hang on her every word. 

The way we taught this week, to get the best variety of practice possible, we coordinated our lessons. We started with phonics, and then one of us would teach a vocab lesson with words from the book that another of us would read later that day, for the read-aloud lesson. Before the read-aloud, one of us would teach a reading strategy (predicting, sequencing, making connections, etc.) which is what would then become the focal point for the read-aloud lesson.

Teaching about "making connections" before Ren's read-aloud lesson

I think I can speak for my cohort in saying that we all put out our hearts into planning these lessons. We got on the bus to the primary school at 7:30am, taught all morning, had mandatory Peace Corps classes to attend ourselves in the afternoons (topics like medical or culture), then an hour or so of free time before it gets dark around 6:45pm. After dinner, many of us remained in the main hall working on lesson plan materials until 11:30pm. 

So when I wasn't teaching, I was observing my fellow PCTs and they were STELLAR. I am blown away by how engaging each of them is as a teacher, and how creatively everyone has incorporated literacy into their content lessons. I observed 17 lessons this week and taught 5, and I feel so much more comfortable in the classroom now. I definitely need more practice, but I'm so happy to get to do this for the next two years! 

Busy busy busy

Another of Shel Silverstein's poems that I used for fluency

Our One Month Anniversary

How to say "Thank you very much" in just a few of the 50+ languages spoken in Uganda. Our group is divided into quite a few language groups, we have at least a few volunteers learning each of these.

I've lived in Uganda for one month today! 

It still doesn't feel real, that I live in East Africa. This has been my dream for so long, and I look around and here I am, with no return flight booked. 

We're kept very busy here with our training, so I don't have much time to think. But there are some things that just make me stop in my tracks and realize that I moved halfway around the world. 

Seeing my name next to a different phone number—especially one that begins with +256—in my contacts is strange. My Verizon phone number is suspended, I have an Africell SIM card in my phone. Data is bought on an as-needed basis here (instead of a monthly plan, like in the USA). Way back on November 14th, when we went to the mall to get our new SIM cards, buying two gigs of data to use for the next month made me feel a bit more settled. Data seems like such a small thing, but it's something tying me here—and it prompted a realization that for the whole next month, I'll be here, using this data to call my loved ones back home. 

We also received a "burner phone" from Peace Corps. It's a Nokia phone where texting is still done by pressing each number a certain amount of times (it actually reminds me of the phone that my dad stubbornly kept using until recently, when he finally agreed to get a smart phone so that he could communicate with me while I'm here, haha!). The point of this phone is that it can be used in crowded areas without fear of it being stolen. We're instructed to keep it charged and near us always, in case Peace Corps needs to contact us. So here, I have two phones, two phone numbers—neither of which I've had time to memorize yet. 

We also opened bank accounts here, and I have a fancy no-fees passport (different from my personal passport) with a diplomatic visa inside it, and a Peace Corps ID. I'm really here! 

I found out today that, for the next two years, I'll be living in Eastern Uganda, teaching at a Catholic school and living inside the Catholic compound in a house next to the house that the priests live in. My house was built in the 1930s, but I've heard that it has both electricity and running water, which is exciting because there are several sites that don't have these luxuries! Also today, we started our month of intensive language training. I'm learning Ateso, a Nilotic language spoken by the Iteso people. "Yoga noi! Ejokuna, aria ijo?" That means "Hello! All is well, how are you?" 

For the next week we will be teaching in the mornings, studying language in the afternoons, and lesson planning at night. Then, in two weeks, we have our future site visits! I will travel to my future home in the East, and be able to see the area briefly and hopefully meet some of the teachers. After that I will travel to my homestay family, who I will live with for the next few weeks to gain more cultural knowledge while I continue language lessons, as the other PCVs learning Ateso will be at with homestay families nearby. 

This past month has gone by so fast! But I don't feel pressed for time... It's slowly sinking in that I live in this country now. Of course, I feel like I want to observe everything... But I also have the feeling that if I don't quite notice every detail of what's around me, that's alright too. I have time. 

My favorite tree at the last training center we lived at! We moved last week to live at a teacher's college near the primary school where we're practice-teaching.