Week 3:
Hello everyone! We have completed our third week here in Uganda! We are officially at our halfway point.
On Monday, we went to Nakalanga and installed 40 mosquito nets—double the amount of last week. Brenda and a few of the other interns helped some of the local women with book keeping. According to Brenda, the women want us to teach them something so we will definitely look into it during the next few weeks. Even though it is was our second time going to Nakalanga, I still can’t get over how different it is from where we usually work. The houses are hut-like and most families have one mattress to sleep on. Also, some families cook inside the huts which seems to make for unsafe situations. The houses don’t have much ventilation and carbon monoxide stays enclosed in the small space. In the future, it seems like it would be a good idea to inform residents of the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning. This aside, the people of Nakalanga have been incredibly nice to us. They provided us with a tasty lunch and gave us local names. My name is “Naigaga” which is from the rich banana clan. The funniest name was given to Jinny (unsurprisingly). She’s called “Butessi” because of her stubbornness. Apparently Butessis rarely get married haha. Jinny, however, has embraced her name.
On Tuesday, we taught health education topics to very attentive students. All of us seemed to be more comfortable with our teaching styles and it definitely showed. Students asked a lot of questions about our respective topics! I think it was probably our best class yet. I love seeing our improvement as the days to by. This week, our biggest improvement has definitely been our efficiency when building the dish-drying racks. Last week, we all underestimated the difficulty of building one dish-drying rack. This week, we changed things a bit (more like a lot). We got a few more hammers and gloves to help prevent blisters. With the additional materials, we have been able to effectively split up the work and move a lot faster. We’ve also been able to improve the sturdiness of each dish-drying rack.
On Tuesday we built one rack and on Wednesday, we built two. Building two on the same day was very labor intensive! It didn’t help that a lot of us were already feeling a bit sick. Because more than half of the team was sick, Brenda and Michael gave us Thursday and Friday off. During these two days, we did not do much. We washed our clothes and just hung out at home. Yesterday, Suzanne and Jinny joined us here at Mama Sara’s home. Their room has been sprayed with poison to kill bed bugs! We played cards and watched Ender’s Game. Fortunately, we are all feeling a lot better and cannot wait to get back to work tomorrow.
Until next time,
Karen