With our second week in the books, we continued to meet with many different groups in Oyam district that we will be working with throughout the next several weeks. With our repeated visits we have started to develop relationships with some of the community members, recognizing faces and learning names. Some of our favorite field visits we especially enjoy going to are the local primary schools. We started teaching lessons on sanitation and hygiene to large gatherings of students. They listen eagerly and enjoy trying to pronounce our names correctly. One school even performed a “welcome song” for us!

Also this week, we began some manual labor work on the piggery sites. At each of the three locations, we moved huge piles of bricks off the building area and cleared the grass with hoes and slashers, which took a little getting used to. We’re looking forward to making a lot of progress on the construction of the piggeries with the expectation of completing 80% of the work this coming week. Since we are wrapping up our lessons on sanitation andhygiene and financial literacy, we also plan to get a start on working with the women’s groups on the production of reusable sanitation pads this week. 

With our projects successfully underway, we are enjoying our stay here, including activities outside of work. Last Saturday, we ventured on a grueling four hour hike at Sipi Falls. It left us sore for many days after but the sights and physical activity were worth the pain. We also had a day off on Wednesday of this week for the public holiday Martyr’s Day. People from all over walk to a shrine in Kampala and many spend the day praying. We took advantage of the free time to explore a little bit of the city nearby, Lira. We spent this weekend in Gulu, and while we were there we were able to do some shopping and had a lot of bonding time as a team. We are so grateful that we have been able to do extra exploring and are looking forward to seeing even more in the coming weeks of what Uganda has to offer!