Teacher Boot Camp...Check!

I finished teacher boot camp this week! Woo hoo! This past week, I was in a sixth grade classroom with about 75 students. They were very bright and a lot of fun to teach. My favorite lesson was one where I read a "big book" to them (made on grain sacks) about finding a quiet place. Afterwards, we went outside and they wrote about their own quiet place. Ugandan pupils rarely, if ever, get to do free writing or creative writing, so it was a real treat for them and for me. (Shout out to Monica Murdock who gave me this idea which I adapted!)

I am now making the transition into language training. I will be spending the next month or so learning to speak Lusoga, a Bantu language spoken in the eastern part of Uganda. My language classes are six days a week for about eight hours a day. Pretty intense! It's very early in the process, but I'm enjoying it so far. I absolutely love playing with language, and my brain is crazy-happy to have so much new material to play with. It's also nice to have something, anything, new to learn, since the great majority of what they taught in teacher boot camp I already knew from my experience and education.

In general, everything this week was much better than last week. I took a hard look at how I was feeling and why I was feeling that way and gained some good insight. I also realized that while on the surface I'm experiencing a lot of intense ups and downs, just under the surface I feel pretty steady and calm. Also, there's hot chocolate here! How have I not mentioned this yet? I drank great gallons of it before I left (and I have the hips to prove it!) thinking I was stocking up for two years. Yet, low and behold, I've been able to drink it twice a day! True, it's not my homemade recipe with heavy cream and dark Ghiradelli chocolate (think ganache), but it's still pretty darn good. The little things, people. It's all about the little things.


 

Home Stay

I've spent the past two weeks or so staying with a lovely Ugandan family. The family consists of two parents, three children ages three, six, and nine, three visiting aunts that are in their late teens to early twenties, and a sometimes visiting uncle who is an adult. The family is very kind and accommodating, each in their own way. My baaba (father) gives excellent Lusoga lessons and lectures on how to clean and purify the local water (he is a water quality control tester). My maama (mother)attempts to find vegetables for me and tries very hard to understand why I eat so little and have such strange food preferences. (No meat?!? Only one egg for breakfast?!? You don't like matooke?!?!?!?) My little sisters love to play with me and sing with me, and basically cling to me at all times. I love it. My aunties (who are younger than me) are endlessly entertaining. When the adults are out, we talk and laugh openly about their opinions of young Ugandan men, and I ask themfrank questions about the role of women in their society, what dating is like here, and what they think of their education system. With my uncle, I talk politics and education and current events all while he's constantly quizzing me on how to say things in Lusoga. I feel very lucky to have a little bit of everything in my temporary family.

While it's still very early to draw any conclusions about Ugandans in general, I will say that they seem extremely welcoming and hospitable. Taking the time to greet everyone you know at length as you walk through the town is of critical importance. One saying here that I love is, "Feel free," meaning, "Please, be at home."

While my evenings are spent with my home stay family, my days are filled with language learning. I have two fabulous instructors who are remarkably patient and good at what they do. They call themselves "sympathetic listeners," and that is exactly what they are. I'll be feeling pretty good about my meager language acquisition in class, thanks to my sympathetic listeners, and then I walk outside. Ha! I instantly remember that I am, in fact, in a foreign land and I do not understand a word anyone is saying to me. It's very frustrating until I recall that I have only had SIX days of language instruction! "Oh, yeah," I think, "it's probably normal not to speak the language yet."

Fun Fact: In Lusoga, there is a single word to say like, love, want, and prostitute.

What I'm Reading: I thought it might be fun (for me) to report on what I'm reading. Mainly, I just want a record of what I've read since my memory for that is poor. Who knows, maybe you're looking for a good book? Normally, I'll just write about one book, but I have some catching up to do...

1. The Rithmatist by Sanderson. * * Love this author, cool idea for a plot, but dumb dialogue and a dumb ending.
2. Allegiant by Roth. * Third book in a trilogy, didn't like it at all, worst ending ever.
3. Flora & Ulysses by DiCamillo. * * * * * (My highest rating!) Holy bagumba, was this a good book! It was surprising and funny and beautiful and full of truth. I loved it! Kate DiCamillo never disappoints.
4. The Tao of Travel by Theroux. * * * This isn't really a novel, but rather a collection of quotes and excerpts by various authors about different aspects of travel. It made me remember why I travel, and why I'm here now. "Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts."
5. Language Manuals. Just kidding, but that's why I haven't done more reading. That and the fact that I somehow left my Kindle charger in Kampala. :(




 

Oh, THERE you are, Africa!

My first two weeks in country were...surreal. I ate well (mostly). I slept well (mostly). The only insects I saw were outside (mostly) where they belong. Everything ran like clockwork (mostly). The temperature was lovely and breezy (mostly). There was time to relax (mostly). There was electricity (mostly). There were flush toilets and running water (always). And the whole time, I kept thinking, "Wow! Uganda is so different from Ghana! I barely recognize this continent!"

And then, my friends, the third week came. We moved from our little training sanctuary to a Primary Teacher's College a couple of hours away. We are here to apply the teaching skills we acquired in training. We teach at either the teacher's college or the nearby primary school (elementary school) every day from about 7:30-1:00, We then we come "home," eat lunch, have training sessions in the afternoon, meet with mentor groups, eat dinner, and prepare to teach the next day.

It's hot here. It's, "Oh, yeah, I live on the equator" hot. The water only works every other day or so, which makes bathing and flushing tricky/non-existent. The toilets where we sleep are Turkish (squat toilets) and the toilets during the day at the school are pit latrines (a cement hole in the ground). The schedule is, well, on Ugandan time. Meals are sometimes an hour late and quite a bit short of food. The little things in life that I took for granted at our last locale, like the ability to put salt on our food, are gone. Instead of one roommate, I have six. All of us share one outlet, and sleeping has become a difficult endeavor. The other day, a cockroach fell from the table and onto my lap. I'm one of the lucky few who does not have cockroaches and/or ants crawling all over the clothes in
my closet.

There's been an emotional shift this week as well. I've been teaching in a P2 classroom, which means teaching students who are at the end of first grade. Typically, students in Uganda don't learn English until the fourth grade. Luckily, these students are advanced and understand some of what I've been saying, but it has definitely been a challenge. The days have been long and exhausting. Another one of us chose to go home this week.

It's been a hard week. I've found myself chuckling and saying, "Oh, THERE you are, Africa!" I knew it couldn't hide for long.

Help Wanted!

So, here’s a crazy statistic for you: 83% of Ugandans are under the age of 30. Translation: there are a TON of kids here! With the staggering number of children and the problems this country is facing, it’s no wonder they’ve requested help from the Peace Corps! In a nutshell, this is my general job description…

1) To promote world peace.
2) To share U.S. culture with Ugandans, and Ugandan culture with U.S. citizens.
3) To do at least 16 hours of in-service trainings with teachers every 3 months (to improve teaching practices).
4) To create a school library.
5) To do reading intervention with fourth grade students (remediation for students who aren’t yet reading on grade level).
6) To promote and participate in extra-curricular activities (not sure what this will look like yet, though my little heart is dreaming of a Scrabble club, which is apparently popular here).
7) To implement positive behavior systems in my school. (Caning students is still widely practiced here, though it has been outlawed. Teachers need help in knowing what to do instead of caning to manage student behavior.)
8) Submit reports, participate in a national Drop Everything and Read day (DEAR), and prepare students for a national spelling bee. What a great job I'm about to begin! 

Gryffindor!

I am really lucky to be in Peace Corps Uganda! One perk to serving in my country is that we get to bid on our site. This means that, 1) we get a say in what our job will be, and 2) we get a say in where we live and what school we will teach in.

Basically, there are two jobs available in the education sector in Uganda. There are PTC teachers and literacy specialists. The PTC teachers teach content and typically have regular classes teaching math, science, or computers. They also train teachers in how to teach literacy across subjects and work with 17 and 18 year old students who are training to become teachers.

Literacy specialists work in elementary schools and focus on doing reading intervention with fourth grade students. They also train current teachers on how to teach literacy. I asked to be a literacy specialist.

I also got to list my top 3 choices for schools and my bottom 3 choices for schools in which to be placed after reading descriptions about each one. The descriptions included what the general living conditions are like (water sources, how far from town they were, etc.), what region of the country they are in, and specifics about the job at that school. PC reviews your requests, interviews you, and looks at your resume when deciding where to place you.

At the end of the day on Friday, PC said they were going to announce what our sites were "Harry Potter style." I literally squealed with delight at this announcement and exclaimed, "The sorting hat!" It. Was. Awesome. We were called up to the front of the room one at a time and sat on a chair. A hat was placed on our head, there was dramatic music in the background (okay, it was from The Lion King), and the hat told me what language group I belong to and what school I was assigned to (okay, okay, it was a person, but still!). I was assigned to learn one of about 50 languages spoken in Uganda called Lusogo. My assigned school was my first choice, so basically, I’m in the Gryffindor house! I’ll be living and teaching in the eastern region of the country. I’ll be paired up with a nearby PTC teacher and be able to collaborate with at least 2 other volunteers. I’m so excited!

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One Potato, Two Potato...

What’s the food like in Uganda, you ask? It’s a lot of pretty good, albeit bland, carbohydrates. A typical day (at least in training) goes something like this:

Breakfast: a hard-boiled egg, a piece of bread with honey or ground nut paste (peanut butter) or jam that tastes like beets, and some fruit (usually watermelon or mangoes or pineapple).

Tea Break: Ugandans have tea twice a day that is served with a snack. The snacks today were doughnuts for morning tea and popcorn for afternoon tea. Sometimes the snacks are little cookies or meat pies.
Lunch: at least three carbohydrates such as rice, matooke (plantains), plain noodles, potatoes, ground millet (brown paste), or posho (white paste). Also, there’s some protein like goat or catfish and there’s almost always beans or bean paste. I’ve chosen to turn my wannabe vegetarianism into actual vegetarianism here, so I don’t partake of the meat. Lunch is served with some bitter greens or a cucumber and tomato salad or squash or (once) eggplant. It also comes with some fruit, usually watermelon.

Mango, pineapple, and...carrots.

　
Dinner: see lunch.
Are you beginning to see why women PCVs tend to gain weight here? Other than the carbs, the only problem I’m having with the food is the lack of variety. Before I left, I was cooking 5 meals a week and I didn’t make the same thing twice in over 2 months. That’s how much I love variety! Some days I think, "I’d rather go hungry than eat rice again"…and then I serve myself up some rice. Some things here are extra tasty, like chapatti (a homemade tortilla) and the famed rolex (I haven’t tasted it yet, but it’s legendary). I’m sure new food adventures are coming soon when I move in with my host family!

Fun Fact: both the pumpkin and the orange are green here.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

 The Good

Who do you picture (besides me) when you hear about Peace Corps volunteers? I had always pictured a bunch of 22 year old hippies who dressed in hemp clothing and talked about recycling (or something). The reality is much different. Basically, Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) are a really diverse group of people. There are 22 year olds, but only about 6 of the 44 in my group graduated in the last year. There are old volunteers and young volunteers and everyone in between. PCVs are also come from a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds and are a wide variety of ethnicities.

We do, however, have a lot in common. For one, we are a very well-traveled group of people. Many of us have lived abroad before and almost everyone has traveled. Collectively, I think we’ve seen the majority of the world. We are also a well-educated and ambitious bunch of people. There are a surprising number of engineers in my group. And we have dreams, people. Big dreams. PCVs also tend to be idealistic do-gooders. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been talking to a fellow PCV and he/she says something like, "I just want to do MORE. I want to look back on my life and feel like I’ve done something meaningful." It’s weird to hear my thoughts coming out of someone else’s mouth. Lastly, PCVs are nerds. I mean hard core (corps?) nerds. I fit right in.

After training every day, we play volleyball and ultimate Frisbee. We do yoga. We jog. We play Bananagrams and Settlers and Hearts. We watch The Lion King. We have talent shows and trivia nights and dance parties. For someone like me, it’s a dream come true.

Training is long and intense, but usually informative and helpful. We learn about cultural norms and the politics, geography, climate, and monetary system of Uganda. We also learn what to expect when we get into the field physically, psychologically, emotionally and in every other way. We practice washing clothes by hand with a bar of soap. We watch (clothed) demonstrations of how to go to the bathroom in a pit latrine. We learn how to use a charcoal stove.

Johnson demonstrating how to take a bucket bath.

Susan showing us how to use a charcoal stove.

The Bad

There’s only one thing on my bad list so far. Mefloquine. It’s the Malaria prevention medication I opted to take. The problem is that I reacted badly to it. Very badly. I had horrible, vivid nightmares and woke myself up screaming. I felt restless and anxious for no reason. I just didn’t feel like myself. Rest assured (?) that these side effects are normal for this medication. After taking it, I found out that it has been "black boxed," that the military stopped using it, that the FDA says it shouldn’t be taken for more than 2 months, that, basically, it’s bad news. A PCV that’s been here awhile said that while on the drug, he vividly dreamt that he beat his mother to death. Another PCV woke up choking herself. A staff member came to check on me after I had fallen asleep one night, and it took me awhile to stop screaming when she woke me up. Yikes! Needless to say, I am off that medication! Never again, my friends. Never again.

The Ugly

Fun Fact: Did you know that Ugandans (and PCVs who live here) need to iron all of their clothes so that mango flies that get on the clothing while it’s drying don’t burrow into their skin?  

The Farewell

My last week in the country has been great! I've felt an outpouring of love and support, for which I'm so grateful. One of the highlights of my week was what I called my "Stephasbord." My family and friends brought something to dinner that I love. It looks disgusting all sitting next to each other, but it was yummmmmmy.

Sushi, pizza, chicken tikka masala, a gyro, stuffed mexi tots, and a lime drink (in case you're wondering).
 

Between the Stephasbord, the pre-Thanksgiving dinner my family threw, and every other "Treat Yo' Self" moment, I'm looking pretty plump. At least I'll be going on the crash diet known as "Ugandan Cuisine" very soon. If it's anything like the Ghanaian Cuisine diet, I'll be back to fighting weight in no time.


Packing was a nightmare. Here's attempt number four:

 

Please note that both suitcases and the backpack are FULL and there is still all of the stuff on the floor.

All of the current PCVs told us to bring food. Lots and lots of food. I was more than happy to follow that instruction, but I got a bit carried away at Costco! My back was killing me after just the walk to the first terminal.

3 lb. bag of Swedish fish, chicken noodle soup, instant cheesy mashed potatoes, beef jerky, stuffing, cinnamon roasted almonds, chips, cookies, dried apple slices, tons of granola bars, chocolate covered berries. Not pictured: 4 bags of chocolate chips, mints, more cookies, sour patch kids. Hmmm....what was I just saying about losing weight?

 

Saying goodbye at the airport was tough. Really tough. Especially with these two little beans crying and screaming for me I went through security. I'm not sure how I'll survive without them. One day at a time, right?

           



This morning, after the Icy Hot patch kicked in, I walked around Philly for a couple of hours and the world felt.....big again. Training was, surprisingly, awesome. I already feel comfortable around my new "family," who is nicer than anyone could ask for. Do you know what my mission as a PCV (Peace Core Volunteer) is? To be an ambassador for world peace. To help create more understanding between different cultures. To help meet people's basic needs. What an amazing job I've signed up to do! I can't wait to get started.




 

 

 

Why the Peace Corps?

I’ve spent the past three years of my life getting paid nothing to do one of the best jobs in the world—education development work in Ghana, West Africa. In many ways, Ghana saved me. Developing curricula, traveling, and building strong relationships with the Ghanaians I worked with gave me a sense of satisfaction and a challenge that I desperately needed. I love teaching, and I’m confident that I will always be a teacher in one way or another. I just needed a new, creative outlet in which to teach. I had also had a life-long dream to go to Africa. Along came World Joy, and everything fell into place.

With my amazing friend, colleague &
photographer, Heather Leeflang

 

     

International development work is hard. Really hard. Crying buckets of tears and feeling like giving up hard. But I L-O-V-E it! There’s something about this work that brings out the true essence of me. I feel more alive and more like myself. My first few trips over, I would cry on the plane ride home because I knew that some important part of me didn’t know how to BE anywhere else. I would put it in the closet and anxiously await the next time I could take it out and feel complete again. I’ve since figured some things out and I’m out of the closet (so to speak), but I know that this work is good for me, and, I think, I’m good for it.

One of my Ghanaian training teams

As far as the Peace Corps itself, I guess it started with a dream. A literal dream. I’ll keep the specifics to myself, but suffice it to say that Peace Corps gave my heart a little tug. Soon afterward, my life changed in a way that allowed me the opportunity to apply. When I got my invitation to serve in Uganda, I was sooooooo excited! It felt right. 

 The biggest hurdle came when I spoke to World Joy about my decision to join the Peace Corps (and therefore leave them). They offered me the amazing chance to live in Ghana for two years and do development work with them. It seemed perfect and perfectly logical. But, for reasons I do not completely understand, it didn’t feel quite right. It was extremely difficult, but I decided to stick with my original decision to join the Peace Corps.

 Now I’m on the verge of leaving (less than two weeks!) and I have days that I feel confident in my decision and very peaceful, and days when I wonder what in the world I was thinking. I cry about leaving the people I love. I feel homesick for Ghana. I miss the classroom. I guess I’ll just keep putting one foot in front of the other, holding on to that dream with a Gollum grip.

Peace Corps Timeline

If you are applying to join the Peace Corps, be sure to view timelines from 2013 or later since the procedures have changed. For example, I had no medical paperwork or requests until after I had accepted my invitation.

2/18/13: Started application
2/23/13: Finished and submitted application
2/25/13: PC requested transcripts; emailed transcripts immediately; PC requested interview
3/8/13:  Friendly web interview that lasted 1.5 hours; recruiter stated that I would be nominated by the end of March or the first week of April
3/15/13: Officially nominated in education for September 2013 departure
3/24/13: Received fingerprint request
3/25/13: Mailed fingerprint cards and background information request
4/10/13: Legally cleared
4/23/13: Received email from placement specialist with 12 questions about how I plan to deal with various difficult situations, etc.; sent a response the same day
5/9/13: Checked my application status and discovered that I was invited on 5/2; emailed my placement specialist and was told an email was sent; no email anywhere to be found
5/13/13: Placement specialist resent invitation to a different email address; invited to serve as an Education Officer Primary Teacher Trainer in Uganda; departure date 11/11/13
7/15/13: All medical and dental forms completed and submitted
7/31/13: Received a message stating that I was missing several items needed for medical clearance
8/8/13: Fixed missing items and resubmitted medical forms
8/15/13: Medically cleared! 
11/10/13: Departure for staging!