Week 3

Hello once again,

This week has been the most challenging by far. On Friday I moved in with the family who I will be staying with for the next 2 weeks. Monica is the mom, who has two adopted children who were abandoned as babies. Her children are Festo (10) and Priscilla (8). Prossy, who is 20, but still in high school, also lives with them. Monica says at any given time they may have two to five other children living with them, and when I first arrived her ‘nephews’ Martin (16) and Jovan (12) were both living there as well, but today Martin left for boarding school and Jovan leaves next week. Monica is a librarian at the university I attend here, so she is able to give me a ride most days, but later in the week I may have to walk the two miles to school by myself. The home consists of 4 separate buildings: one with the living and dining room and indoor kitchen, one with two bedrooms, one is the garage, and one is the latrine (a hole in the ground on one side, and a curtained bathing area). I have my own room, but there is no indoor plumbing, so bathing is done out of a bucket, and most cooking is done outside on a small charcoal stove. Meals are eaten when they’re ready, which means lunch is usually around 1pm, but supper can be anywhere from 7pm to 11pm. Luckily Monica is one of the time-conscious Ugandans, and usually keeps supper around 8 or 9.

Anyone who knows me well knows that my biggest fear in the whole world is bats. Well, on Friday night, Martin and I were sitting in the living room watching a soap (Ugandans LOVE their soap operas, but they are awful!! Usually they are Spanish or Asian soaps with a voice over in either English or Luganda), and a bat flies out of no where, and is frantically flying around our heads trying to find a way out!! Prossy said it is the first bat they have ever had, and I was lucky enough to get to experience it with them! Thankfully, I haven’t seen any since.

Yesterday I went to my internship at Off Tu again. The children living there have been on Christmas break with their extended families, and I got to go with to pick them up yesterday. The roads everywhere here are nearly undrivable, but especially in the part where we were picking them up, so we parked and had to walk through a slum to get to them. There was trash everywhere, naked babies crawling around with their brothers and sisters watching them (who couldn’t be older than 8), and houses thrown together with tin and old pieces of wood. It was pretty much what you would imagine a slum to look like; but the children were so happy to see us, and couldn’t wait to hug all their ‘aunties and uncles,’ which is what they call the staff there. So my new name: Auntie Taryn.

So this is Africa. With lizards crawling on the walls like they were nothing but spiders, with sun so hot you could melt, where there is always time for tea, and where people always take a couple minutes to talk and ask each other about their families. At times it is rough, and there are definitely times I miss home, but it’s feeling more like home here, everyday.