I got in on Wednesday morning (that is… Tues night for all of you – 7 hours difference). I landed in Entebbe, Uganda which is about an hour from Kampala (Uganda’s capital). I was picked up at the airport (with all my baggage!) and drove (on the “wrong” side of the road) to a “guest house” aka hotel in Kampala. It was nice because Dr. Val wasn’t arriving until that evening so I got to take a nice long nap. AND a shower! They even had running water and electricity :-D. So I’ve been doing pretty well and jet-lag hasn’t been too bad. Thursday we stuck around Kampala because Dr. Val’s niece and friend had been visiting for a month and they flew out that night. I heard mannnny entertaining stories from them. I got the inside scoop on Dr. Val’s tricks of things she tries to get you to eat and all sorts of fun stuff. Anyway, it was really fun to meet them… I won’t make things boring for you later on by telling you all their stories… I’m sure I’ll have similar ones soon! So anyway, on Friday Val and I spent the day driving to Karamoja. This took 12 hours. And you have to try to picture the roads on that drive. Karamoja is located in NE Uganda (Kampala is in the South) in the MIDDLE of NOWHERE. It was a great drive. Once we passed Seroti… about 3-4 hours from Karamoja, the roads (which had already been quite holey) turned into the Rocky Mountains on miniature scale. There were peaks and valleys and rivers and lakes… okay, it was actually pretty dry, but I don’t think I’d ever gotten whiplash from a car-ride before! Oh and also… on our way, we passed some people selling chickens and guinea fowl. Val has wanted guinea fowl for a while so we decided to check them out. After QUITE a bit of bartering (which Val demonstrates great skill and practice in) we left with four new pets! They tried to sell them to us for 75,000 shillings each (about $40) which is absolutely insane… by the time we left we had two pairs for 60,000 total! Now they’re my new project… hopefully they’ll start laying lots of eggs soon but we’ll see what happens. They’re living with our chickens.
Yesterday (Saturday) we had a day of cultural training and some language learning (ha!). Dr. Val was saying that her first year as a missionary, people told her that her only goal should be to be the people’s entertainment. Basically, she was supposed to form relationships… and what better way to do that is there than to make a fool of yourself and make them laugh?! Haha… so I attempted to speak some Karamojong this morning. There’s a lady (Joyce) who works doing some cleaning and taking care of the animals for us. She doesn’t speak much English so this morning I said “Alakara” (meaning thank you) to her for feeding my little guinea fowl and got quite the chuckle - she found it funny. So eventually maybe I’ll be able to expand my vocabulary. There isn’t exactly any similarity between Karamojong and English, German or Latin… so it’s gonna be a slow process!
Well now we’re going to be heading to Iriiri for a while. We’re there for four nights with a medical team that came in a couple days ago and we did the training with yesterday. There are two doctors and two nurses from the US who are going to hold some medical training for local health workers. I’ll let you know how that stuff goes, too! We’re hoping to be getting more internet access soon… Val is trying to modernize by using a new wireless router thing. So far it has backfired… but we’re hoping to get it working shortly!
Yesterday (Saturday) we had a day of cultural training and some language learning (ha!). Dr. Val was saying that her first year as a missionary, people told her that her only goal should be to be the people’s entertainment. Basically, she was supposed to form relationships… and what better way to do that is there than to make a fool of yourself and make them laugh?! Haha… so I attempted to speak some Karamojong this morning. There’s a lady (Joyce) who works doing some cleaning and taking care of the animals for us. She doesn’t speak much English so this morning I said “Alakara” (meaning thank you) to her for feeding my little guinea fowl and got quite the chuckle - she found it funny. So eventually maybe I’ll be able to expand my vocabulary. There isn’t exactly any similarity between Karamojong and English, German or Latin… so it’s gonna be a slow process!
Well now we’re going to be heading to Iriiri for a while. We’re there for four nights with a medical team that came in a couple days ago and we did the training with yesterday. There are two doctors and two nurses from the US who are going to hold some medical training for local health workers. I’ll let you know how that stuff goes, too! We’re hoping to be getting more internet access soon… Val is trying to modernize by using a new wireless router thing. So far it has backfired… but we’re hoping to get it working shortly!
