Nothing to see here, just a starcraft LAN party.

Into the Ugandan school system

3/10

in school based training this week and last. Five of us were assigned to Kitende secondary school, and when we showed up and were introduced during a morning assembly to all 1000+ students I had a serious how the hell did I end up here? moment. Apparently we have hilarious accents, most of the students laughed when we introduced ourselves. The idea was that each trainee would be assigned to a few teachers shadow them the first week, co-teach the second, and solo teach for the last week. During my shadowing I learned that “Uganda time” doesn’t just apply to buses and meetings but schools as well. The physics lab that I was observing was supposed to start at 10:00. The teacher showed up at school at 10:20 and naturally had to take tea and chat with colleagues. At 10:40 I ask him when we are going to class and he tell me to wait in the teachers lounge while he goes to set up the classroom. Meanwhile the students are sitting in their classroom waiting. Finally at 11:55 we start the physics lab and while no actual physics was done the students did learn how to fill out a chart neatly in pencil, (how could you use pen? And a black pen at that!) And to blindly plug values into a given equation. And there you have it, you all now understand how to derive the acceleration due to gravity using knowledge of pendulums. And this is one of the better schools in Uganda. On the plus side their tables and graphs are neater than any I've ever made.

It turned out to be too difficult to organize the co-teaching so I got a bunch of solo teaching practice. My first class was a bit of a mess, I kicked over my water bottle spilling water everywhere and dusted wiped chalk dust all over my clothes. A good start. The next day I was explaining probability tree diagrams when it started to rain, but downpour better describes it. The school roofs are just sheets of tin and it quickly got to the point where I could hardly hear my own voice. We had been told that often when it rains, class is effectively over, teachers just wait it out. I couldn’t bare to just stand there for another hour with fifty Ugandans staring at me so I wrote a quadratic 4 times on the blackboard and called up four “volunteers” to the board to race to factor them. I had been told that Ugandans love competition, but I didn’t think they would like it as much as they did. After they watched the first group, everyone was laughing and excited and wanted their turn to compete. Good to know that I have that card up my sleeve now.

Congrats to Dr. Dana!!

March 7th?

Today was a good one, we met a bunch of current volunteers and they took us to a new very awesome ski filled bar with a seemingly never ending supply of COLD beer. Our previous hangout had a very small fridge and no generator so we were getting used to warm beer. One of the volunteers informed us of some peace corps end of service stereotypes. Its said that volunteers in south America come back political activists, volunteers in Asia come back spiritually enlightened, and volunteers in Africa come back drunk and happy. I'll try my best.

I also found out today that Dana is going to be a doctor! I am so proud and excited for her, but I had to mask my excitement when I came home because Gofrey's future career had all but dissapeared. He found out today that the security job he had been diligently waiting for fell through. The job he was up for was working for the US government at an embassy in Afghanistan and had been applying for months being narrowed down from group of about 1000 to 60, he had passed all his tests and done well in training and it looked like he was going to get the job in Uganda, the government doesn’t allow private security companies and so his group had to be represented by an agent. So on the day that a contract was supposed to be signed, the agent demanded a 50% commission from the Americans. Obviously the group had no say in this and perhaps not as obviously, the Americans refused, saying that, shocker, the money is supposed to go to the people actually risking their lives, the agent could take 10%. There was some back and forth bickering and the Americans finally settled at 20%, but would go no higher. The agent wouldn’t budge so the Americans passed on the contract and 60 people went home without jobs. It gets better. The woman acting as their agent is none other than the sister in law to president museveni, not exactly hurting for money. It gets better yet. The only other person who can act as their government recognized agent is miss greed's sister. Its your basic, choose between a giant douche and turd sandwich scenario.

Homestay

2/26

I think that I’m going to learn a lot from kids here. My little bro Mathias walked me around today pointed out all sorts of plants and there medical uses. In hindsight I realize that he lies a lot and tries to trick me so maybe I shouldn’t take his word that this plant in an anti-diarrhea. At least one of the things he told me is true, there is a grass here that you put into your tea and it makes it extra delicious. I love the tea here, but more importantly I love the way they take tea. Pretty much everybody here takes break tear around 10 30 am, they stop what they're doing and chat and drink tea for half an hour and then go back to work, love it. They love sugar here and after 3 spoonfuls of granulated sugar the tea is really more syrup than tea but yum so good. Anyway, Mathias is an amazing little athlete, a wizard with with a soccer ball (I brought him to play soccer with some other volunteers and it was the best soccer we've played yet, I thought we were ding pretty well. Afterward I asked him if he had fun and he shrugged and said it was slow and boring. Nice, come to the bar with me and ill buy you a soda for your honesty). But the little shit cheats at draft, a more complicated checkers, more complicated because every time he got in a tough spot a new rule was introduced. But I learned all his rules and started using them against him and destroyed him three games in a row. Yes I’m bragging about beating a 13 year old at checkers. No, I have no shame. So he walked me around and showed me the important stuff like the internet cafe and the cinema shack where drunkards hang out, and most importantly the short through the bush that cuts my walk to the conference center from 10 minutes to 5 minutes. My grandma (i knew her name the first day but she wont let me call her anything but grandma) is a little over-protective and so didn’t want Mathias taking me to the parts of town we naturally went to right away. How did you get those grass stains on your pants? Uh, I slipped in the garden. I definitely didn’t fall in some bushes when a brick wall collapsed while I was trying to climb it because I couldn’t slip though the crack that Mathias could,saying make your body smaller isn’t exactly the most helpful thing.

My host dad is pretty awesome, hes a security expert who specializes in disarming IED's, he worked in Baghdad for 2 years contracted by the US government. Around Lweza, he knows most people and everyone knows him. I felt pretty bad ass walking around with him when he took me buy a phone. He can clearly handle himself but hes still warm and sincere and very well read. We went from stand to stand shopping for a good price and found a dual sim unlocked phone with radio and a torch for 60,000 ush. It just so happened that that particular shop was one I had visited the prior week with a few mzungus and we were told that the cheapest phone they had for us was 100,000 ush, that's the mzungu tax for you. Earlier in the week I went looking for a rice sack to store some of my crap in and when I finally found a place that would sell me a single rice sack she wanted 2000 ush for it so I tried my hand at haggling, come on its a rice sack so I offered 1000ush. She just looked at me unamused and said you're a mzungu. Cant really argue with that, of course I can afford a 2000 ush rice sack, that’s not even a dollar. So I failed at haggling, but eventually I’m going to have to get good at it because I'm not getting paid in dollars.

1,2,3 Malaria Pills!

So today medical gave us our anti malarial medicine. I go in knowing that if the name starts with an m I need to veto it because it can trigger depressive episodes, but medical seemed to be on top of their game and had read my medical history and had already decided that was not the best for me. Kinda too bad because it also triggers crazy lucid dreams. The m one is the first choice and when that was out they jumped to choice number two, the doxy one. The nurse handed me the doxy and I was getting up to leave when another nurse, my guardian angel, ran over and said we cant give him that hes allergic to minocyclin! Thank god, I vividly remember that allergic reaction and have no desire to repeat that experience. Two things occurred to methen. One that finally after years of writing my one allergy on all sorts of medical paperwork it finally paid off and two that I need to be on top of my shit because PC medical sure isnt. Best healthcare ill ever have my ass. In the end, they put me on malarone, which is by far the best in terms of short and long term side effects but it costs $5 a day so PC only uses it as a last resort. They told me to keep quiet about how great the malarone is, so they dont have everyone asking to be on it.

Finally posting stuff from training, some of it is pretty silly in hindsight, and so much has changed since, but here it is, unedited

February 15th

With few exceptions we are a bunch of nerds. Lots of engineers of the electrical, mechanical, and chemical variety some bio majors and a few fellow math majors. One business guy. Everyone is interesting and most can boast that they were the president of this or that at some point. Luckily there are a few underachievers whose resume consists mostly of number of hours logged on diablo 2 or guitar, hooray for us!

We are a sarcastic bunch and every class so far the entire room has erupted with laughter at some snarky comment. Its a lot of fun to be around people without properly working comedic filters, the only downside being that there are some truly horrific nerd-cackles that make me cringe.

There are some really bright folks here, a physics teacher named Kevin with an encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything, but most notably birds. He's in the right spot because Uganda is said to be a bird watchers paradise. There are hawks circling around our dorm every morning which are now my favorite birds because they hunt snakes and snakes suck. I told Kevin that I understand birdwatching because I've played Pokemon. Maksim is a fellow math major and pushed his bagggage weight to the limit in order to bring all the tools required to build his own full scale solar panel at his site including a power drill so I know who to go to if I need tools. And there’s Mark, the electrical engineer who was able to deduce that his power strip sparked, smoked, and ceased to work when plugged in because its set up for 140 V and here we’re at 220V, at least most of the time. The power is unreliable here and there are blackouts every day. When the power comes back on there is a surge in voltage that can fry whatever you have plugged in.

There is definitely a freshman year in the dorms mixed with summer camp vibe going on here. We're on stand fast due to the presidential election which means we cant leave our training center so we're getting to know each other pretty well, its been fun but I'm ready for some time to myself, I've been unusually social and it can be exhausting. I've made some equally immature friends and we've been having a good time. We got our med kits today and they are jammed full of all sorts of fun stuff, most notably tons of condoms. So David was helping out and carrying a bunch of med kits for people, so my response is to say, hey David you know you can just ask for more condoms right? We've been having a good time helping people not take things too seriously by interrupting deep religious conversations with comments on what our monkey butler are going to do for us once we train them. My first order of business once I capture my monkey is to get him a little tuxedo and train him to carry it in a briefcase to work ie my house and put it on. Anything he does after that is just gravy. Oh yeah, there are monkeys here. The luweza training center doubles as a monkey sanctuary so they run amok. They are pretty much awesome except that they like to steal stuff which kinda makes them more awesome. Maybe one will steal my camera and take some pics for me, that might be the only way I get pictures because I cant seem to remember to take them. Hmm, these are pretty good how the hell does he know the 2/3 rule? My body is not used to the altitude or heat yet, im also jet lagged and I think that’s the reason I felt so shitty when we were playing soccer next to the burning trash piles.

The director of secondary ed training is a very large Ugandan women with unblinking eyes and a manner of speaking so slow I was surprised by her intelligence. I had an interview with her to discuss my expectations and my future site and took an immediate liking to her, I don’t think I’ve ever been so quickly convinced of a persons goodness and wisdom before. The wisdom coming out of her mouth was inversely proportional to the speed at which she spoke them. She introduced herself to our group during a session about Ugandan culture and told a story at glacial speed of a PVC’s host family cooking him a whole chicken and he not knowing how to go about eating it as there is a very particular way to start the process. At the end of the story I look around and some of the trainees are nodding knowingly. But wait she cant be done she didn’t finish the story? So I raise my hand and ask, uh so what part of the chicken are we supposed to start with? She laughs and there is a long pause, and nothing. So the lesson was sometimes Ugandans wont answer a question you ask not because they don’t know but because they have to get comfortable with you first.