Week 1

My first week at my placement in Nsanje has been a completely mixed bag. The location is absolutely beautiful and fairly rural with a lot of cows, goats, and tea farmers. The people that I have had the chance to meet so far have been fairly excited to see a Mzungu so I have received countless warm welcomes during my stay so far. The family is an absolute joy to be around. The younger boys, Sam and Mark are fascinated by my hand-crank radio and camera. I don't think that Mark has ever seen himself before because when I showed him his picture, he pointed at himself and said, "Sam." The girls, Especioza and Tina were shy at first, but opened up when I offered to help them work, hoeing weeds. Edward, the oldest family member is not actually a relative, but a boy they are helping to put through school. He is incredibly bright and showed me around Katosi, a neighboring village. I enjoy his company and the fact that he can speak English rather well. I plan on asking him to teach me some Luganda while I am here.

On the other hand, I have been somewhat bored this past week. I think this was mostly due to the fact that my work will not begin until Monday so the combination of having nothing important to do with myself and not knowing the area well enough to get around on my own put a bit of a damper on my spirits. The parents of the host family I am staying with weren't around the house very much and since the kids aren't strong English speakers and the only thing I can say in Luganda is "I don't speak Luganda," I felt a bit lonely. Finally, on Wednesday night I realized that I had to take more control of my own happiness. I walked across the street and visited a woman named Caroline. Caroline is from Kenya and is a wife of one of the teachers at the school. She is an incredibly welcoming and talkative woman with an adorable baby gir and I ended up staying at her place talking until the mosquitos were biting. I learned about her transition from Kenya to Uganda and that she converted from being Born Again to Seventh-Day Adventist in order to be involved at the school. I am very excited to have a new friend and I have the feeling that I have a lot to learn from her when we spend time together in the future.

The next day, I had David, my director, show me the CODEAPS office where I will be volunteering when I am not teaching. They have some awesome programs, but David feels like they are going to need a lot more funding to really get off the ground. For example, they provide goats to families with HIV positive members, but are unable to provide any to over 45 of them. They also sponsor orphans to go to school, but can only cover the expenses of 7 out of 93 of them and the numbers continue to grow. It is clear that I have my work cut out for me. After visiting the office, I headed to a neighboring town to spend some time with some of the other volunteers, Kendyl and Spenser. I accompanied Kendyl to local clinic where she plans to do a majority of her volunteering and was lucky enough to actually get put to work in the maternity ward. It was amazing. I was taught how to determine how far along the pregnancy was, whether the baby was properly positioned, and how to listen to a baby's heart. It blows my mind away how women go through pregnancy here. They have far fewer accommodations for a woman's comfort here than they do at home and carrying a child is considered to be a difficult task even in the states. One woman was on her 7th child and wants to get her tubes tied after that one because she thinks 7 is definitely enough. While that same woman was there, we had a hard time getting a heartbeat from the baby. One of the more experienced nurses spent what felt like an eternity trying to find it and the entire room was paralyzed. I can only imagine how hard it would to lose a child...even a child that you weren't necessarily planning on.

Despite how difficult pregnancies seem to be out here, I was also to learn a few things that absolutely lifted my spirits. I think the best thing I have heard since I got here was from one of the nurses. She said that she has delivered 500 babies to mothers who are HIV positive. Out of those 500, 3 of them have had HIV themselves. This small bit of information gives me hope that those children can have a much better future than I think most would expect for them.

I also went with Kendyl and Spenser to work on a village health survey. Their program director, Festus, is trying to encourage the community to live a more healthy lifestyle by surveying the surrounding area on their living conditions and encouraging them to make improvements. It was frustrating work because most of the work seemed to fall to our translator. However, it seems that they have more success when a couple of Muzungu are around. It makes it seem more important to actually clean up your latrine or to get a mosquito net for everyone in the house.


I hope to post pictures of my home-stay family soon, but this will probably not be possible until next week at the soonest.