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. 

Muzardi

Here's where I live right now! Muzardi: Mukono Agricultural Research and Development Institute

Muzardi has these adorable little gutters all around, which helps keep the path dry during the wet season. We're in the wet season right now, we've had quite a few thunderstorms so far, including one last night that caused us all to wake up and wonder if the windows were going to crash in. I loved it :)

This is in the girl's dorm. The blue barrel is always full of extra water for handwashing and such, in case we run out (which has happened a few times already), and that wonderful trough-like sink is where we do laundry!

There's this toilet, which I haven't been brave enough to use yet, since there are also a few western-style toilets.  This style toilet is what we'll most likely be using throughout the rest of the country, though. 

This water barrel is specifically for the toilet. Sometimes the water pressure is too low to flush it, so you just grab a bucket of water, pour it into the toilet, and it'll usually flush.

From what I've seen, Ugandans like to put little signs in random places, to prevent against any potential forgetfulness. 

And finally, where I sleep! Note the adorable turkey that my cousin Lucas gave me at my going away party, AND he has a matching one :)

My Life is a Chip (and that's alright)

Blinking at the daylight first thing in the morning and remembering where I am has been a beautiful experience. I even love hearing the Muslim call to prayer (broadcast over loudspeakers at a nearby Mosque) around 5:30 every morning, because every day has a new feeling about it and I'm enthralled with being awake. Today there was a beautifully powerful thunderstorm–I certainly couldn't have predicted that when I'd opened my eyes! (Maybe my weather app could have, but I'm pretty conservative about using data here, haha!)

I'm nervous and not nervous about site placement. I'm saying it that way because it depends on what frame of mind I'm in–sometimes I'm very worried... afraid of failure, mostly... and other times I'm calm, acknowledging that I trust the process. Some of these humans have been doing this for longer than I've been alive, of course I trust them to put me where I need to be.

Not in the sense that a place will "need" me–I'm sure they'd get along just fine without a 22-year-old Westerner asking them a zillion questions about what will probably be, to them, very mundane things–but rather, the place where my soul needs to be. To learn and try and fail and grow as much as I possibly can from this experience.

Site placement is on my mind (and on everyone's mind here, really) because the interviews for it were this week (I just had mine yesterday). Each interview was conducted by five people. One of those five was the Country Director himself, but most of the others were the teachers who've been guiding us through training. They asked us anything they wanted, all while paging intently through binders of paperwork. The questions they asked me ranged from "Tell me about ASL (American Sign Language, which I've taken a few semesters of)," to more pertinent questions, such as "How would you feel living with a homestay family for the entire two years?" and "Would you mind being a 'starter'?" (starter = the first Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) to ever be placed in that particular village).

I'm open. I applied, at the beginning of this process, to go anywhere and do anything. It's a perspective that's worked for me at least up until now, so I think I'll stick with it. Let  the chips fall where they may.

We get to see the two or three options of sites that the interviewers have chosen for us on December 1st, and then we have until December 5th to put those options in order of preference. Peace Corps' final decisions will be shared with us on December 9th! I'll keep you updated :)

You Are Most Welcome

Kept my memorial bracelet on throughout the flight, to keep my cousin Tony with me. "Be Strong & Of Good Courage." 

Stepping off of the plane in Ethiopia was surreal. 13 hours on a plane was actually pretty fun, the food was great and we all spent a good amount of time wandering around the cabin area, chatting with each other and stretching our legs. The food was surprisingly good, and the airplane had one of my favorite movies—The Prestige! 

We deplaned onto the tarmac, which was a first for me. As soon as we landed, we heard the news... Trump was in the lead. 

The 33 of us split up to gather around two TVs, and I watched in dismay and awe as votes kept coming in for the candidate I had thought would never win. Already in the midst of my transition to living in Africa, I'd thought I might feel distant from the American election; as if it no longer related to me. It turns out that, while I don't feel as alarmed as I'm sure I would if I were still living in the US, I still feel a sense of trepidation because I'm not sure what Trump's opinion on the Peace Corps will be. In spite of the election, I feel proud to be a representative of America in a foreign country, because I don't believe that we'll allow everything we've built together as a country—all of the steps we've made toward equality—to be undone by one man. 

I have to admit, I was a bit nervous when we landed in Uganda. We'd been traveling for a calendar day and a half—there was no turning back now. What if I didn't fit in? What if I was too overwhelmed by the cultural differences to function? Well, I decided I'd just have to make it work regardless. I felt too comfortable in America, physically and emotionally. So, here I am in Africa, waving goodbye to my comfort zone and hello to a myriad of new experiences. 

The drive from Entebbe to Kampala was beautiful. The last time I'd made this trip, as a high school senior (almost five years ago now!) it was around midnight. That time I had been seeing a new country without really seeing it—our bus windows were open, I was experiencing all of the sounds and exotic smells of a new country, while surrounded by darkness. It was much friendlier to be able to view everything illuminated with sunlight and a bright blue sky in the background! 

We arrived at the compound we'll be staying at for the next month, for our initial stage of training. Everyone was waiting to greet us with tea, bananas, and samosas (fried pastries, filled with veggies or meat). They introduced themselves and each added, "You are most welcome." Their love and excitement was palpable, and I knew I would be happy here. 

Leaving for Africa tomorrow!

Hello All!

I've been in Washington, D.C. since Saturday, preparing to leave for Uganda! While I already miss my friends and family, nothing about this decision feels wrong. I'm a bit nervous, but this path that I chose really feels right to me. I wouldn't be doing this if it didn't resonate to the very core (get it?) of my being.

"Staging" (preparation for service) has been fun! The people who are embarking on this journey with me all seem incredible, and I'm excited to get to know them better. I had promised to bring a cat carrier for a PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) who is currently serving in Uganda, but it was taking up a lot of space in my bag. So one of my fellow Volunteers here, Randy, offered to take it off my hands (after everyone laughed at me for bringing a cat carrier, of course) so that he could use it as a carry-on! Because of that, I was able to stop by a used bookstore during lunch today and pick up a few more children's books to bring with me!

Adding a few more books to my collection!

I'm especially excited to have found "The Mountain Gorilla," because it mentions Uganda specifically as one of the few places that mountain gorillas can still call home! We were encouraged to bring picture books featuring diverse characters, so I also purchased "Seeds of Change" about Wangari Maathai (the founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya), "Nelson Mandela: A Long Walk to Freedom," and "Mama Panya's Pancakes" (about a group of friends getting together in Kenya).

As you can tell, I'm overwhelmingly excited! We leave the hotel at 4:30 tomorrow morning, and from there a bus will take us quite a ways to the airport. Our flight leaves at 10:30, and then we'll get to Ethiopia at 7:15am on Wednesday (Ethiopia is eight hours ahead of Nebraska). We fly out of Ethiopia at 10:10am and get to Entebbe, Uganda at 12:15pm. Please keep your fingers crossed for safe travels for all of us! That's all I have for now, but I'll try to keep this blog updated as much as I can!

My family for the next 27 months!