Gifts

Wow! This week has been completely all over the place! On Tuesday, it was Hero's Day (which no one seems to know anything about) so I ventured into Mukono to run some errands and catch up with the other volunteers. About 20 minutes after I got to the guest house, Jesse showed up with a rooster that he had purchased at the market and decided to slaughter. Leslie, one of the volunteer coordinators, recommended that he wait until he had a Ugandan to help him because a lot of the volunteers fail to do it right and then panic when they haven't killed it. We waited for Moses, who does the laundry at the guesthouse for around an hour before the deed was done. In that time, Jesse named the rooster Kernel Sanders...and also made the grave mistake of untying its legs. It walked around the guesthouse crowing at the top of its lungs before making a break for it and almost succeeding in jumping off the balcony. Unfortunately, the noisy beast met its end later in the day and became what I was told to be quite a tasty dinner.

I spent the rest of my week in Nsanje, having a blast with the kids. I have been playing games in P4-P6 and I've found that a good, friendly good vs. boy competition is the best way to guarantee class participation. My girls would honestly trump the boys, but I've been giving them help so they won't become too discouraged to try. I also had my P4 students doing some group work on Thursday, which I'm pretty sure confused the heck out of them, but seemed to be a generally positive experience. On Wednesday, I sat in on crafts in the afternoon and started to learn how to make a basket. It was a great time to really bond with a lot of my more reserved female students and also to get a lesson in Lugandan. They gave me way too many new words for me to actually remember them, but I wrote them down and I am really looking forward to improving on my ability to have a conversation. Joyce was teaching me words for the school, like student, teacher, and headmaster. I told her that she had become the teacher and I had become the student.

On the whole, it has been a fantastic teaching week, but the longer I am present at my placement, the more my eyes are opened to the way it is acceptable to treat children in Ugandan culture. Teachers do not do anything for themselves; they get students to do everything. So, when Madam Jannepher spills porridge, all she has to do is call outside and get the first unsuspecting student she sees to come and clean it up for her. Despite the fact that Ssebo (Sir) Herbert is much bigger and stronger than most of the students are, he feels no necessity to haul his own water. Instead, he has Jonathon, one the smallest boys in P6 haul it for him. I wouldn't be too bothered by this, but it is a standard that the other teachers seem to expect me to maintain and I just can't bring myself to do it. I'm bothered, not pleased, when my students feel they must bring me a bench to sit on when I am standing on the school grounds during lunch. I'm also struck by the method of discipline here. Everyday, the students that have misbehaved must line up during lunch to be hit by a stick. Frankly, I think this might be the reason I have problems with them hitting each other in class. I have told the students that if I see them hitting each other anymore, they may just leave my classroom because they cannot learn from me if they are going to behave that way, a solution that has proven to be (temporarily) effective.

I've begun blowing off a lot of steam by increasing my daily runs to twice a day on Tuesday and Thursday. It's provided me with a wonderful opportunity to see more of the community in the evening, while people are out and socializing. I also befriended a couple of high school girls, Eva and Mary, who have followed me on both of my evening runs this week. I don't think it would be acceptable for them to go running otherwise, but as the resident Muzungu, I am immune to just about everything and if they are accompanying me, they are just being polite. They are actually fairly good runners too. I had to sprint full out to beat them, but I might have only won because they were being polite...or because they were wearing skirts and clogs, not running shoes and pants.

I spent yesterday afternoon doing community outreach and going to visit HIV positive community members in their homes. It wasn't nearly as depressing as I expected it to be, but they were living close to the school, which means that they are very close to most of the resources available in the area. I visited 5 homes, but one of them stood out to me more than the rest. An elderly woman named Jawe was taking care of 10 orphans on top of trying to take care of herself. Apparently, she has just become a dumping ground for unwanted or uncared for children because she will take them in and try to feed them and put them through school no matter what her personal situation is. Jawe told me that she was suffering pains in the bones in her chest, but she hasn't gone to a clinic for them because she was bewitched and the clinic can't do anything to solve that. We had a fairly good conversation about health, including medication, hygiene, water sources, and diet. When I got up to leave, she insisted on giving me 5 avocados...to prove that she was eating well. My stomach dropped. Here I am in the middle of Uganda, trying my best to help those that have been less fortunate than me, and they are giving me much more than I have been able to give them. I fully plan on buying some fresh pineapple for her family while I am in town and explaining to her that, in my culture, when you receive a gift from a friend, you give one in turn.