Saying Goodbye to Easy-Bake Ovens and other Rural Uganda Amenities

This week is to be our last week staying with Boniface’s family in rural Uganda. While we will miss the hospitality of our host family and their lovely food, there will be a certain charm in getting back to URDT where we will have all the luxuries of Ugandan big city life such as toilets and running water and straw roofs that make the bedrooms less like a convection oven and more like a broiler oven. It’s the little things. All kidding aside though, we will certainly miss our host family. They are some of the kindest, happiest and most hospitable people I have ever met. Their compassion and eagerness to take the world head on with a smile is contagious, and, unlike other contagions I might accumulate in Uganda, is one I hope to take back to America and share with my friends and family.

 

Laying Bricks so the Children can $hit Bricks

Seeing as last week we finished digging the 50 foot hole for the latrine, it only seemed natural for the next step to be to complete the foundation and subsequently build the brick structure up this week. So we set out to do precisely that. And ***spoiler alert*** we did it!

The brickwork for this latrine at the Kanywamiyaga school went much the same way as the brickwork for the other latrine at the host family: Mix water with cement and sand to make mortar, put mortar in desired spot, put a couple bricks, align bricks, fill with mortar, repeat for three days.

Before working on the brickwork though, we had to finish the foundation. This is because the foundation goes below the brick housing, not above it. Fortunately though, the foundation is comprised mostly of brick and mortar as well, so the two days we spent on it we’re not too significantly differently. But for some of the steps we had to add gravel to the mortar, making the process slightly more nuanced.

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LUCAS NEEDS TO GO THE HOSPITAL ASAP!!!!

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Aaaa-OOOOH OOOOh, Oooo!!!

They dance to one song and one song only. Riptide by Vance Joy played to the strum of a ukulele. The first time I played the ukulele for the Kanwyamiyamawagawaga primary students, they were star struck. Presumably from my shear talent. They loved the song and gathered around me by the dozen. Their particular favorite part is right before the chorus where I let out a lively “Aaaa-OOOOH ooooh, Oooo”. They would sing along to this part during the song, and later anytime they see me. I now understand Radiohead’s aversion to playing “Creep.” But, unlike Radiohead I give the people what they want.

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“Visiting” a Lake

One of the main attractions that the locals have been raving about has been going to the local lake. We later found out this lake to be named Lake Albert, and it is on the border of Uganda with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now that we have had a free weekend, we took the opportunity to drive to this lake, expecting to take an hour and a half drive and then to face an arduous hike down from the trail to be greeted by a fleet of crocodiles.

After leaving on Ugandan time (roughly two hours behind schedule), we found ourselves driving on a slightly longer drive of three and a half hours. This gave us the opportunity to appreciate the roads of Uganda, from the rollercoaster bumps, dips and cracks in the dirt road to the occasional confrontation with another vehicle trying to share the just-barely-two-car-wide roads. Eventually though (but with the added bonus of a stop for Rollex- a classic Ugandan street food of egg wrapped in a “taco” of chipote bread) we made it the lake. Our envisioned dream of the lake transformed upon our arrival, where the arduous hike became more of a walk through a well-littered and exceptionally poor Ugandan lake-village and the fleet of crocodiles were more like a fleet of small children spazzing out about seeing mjungu and demanding money!

Our lake visit became slightly shorter than planned because of this, but we did get the added bonus of briefly visiting the surrounding national park: Wide open plains with a picturesque mountain backdrop that every bit lived up to my highest expectation of an African Safari: Gazelles with their heads poking out and blending in surprisingly well with the beige top of the high grass, Baboons doing baboon things on the side of the road, packs of cows swarming through the road with a complete indifference towards any car trying to pass along it.

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