Almost a month has gone I’m still alive! I haven’t even been ill, despite everyone else having either malaria or a terrible cough. Things have got easier, but still no picnic. I’ve had more conversations with both adults and children, so feeling a little less lonely. The girls dorms are so overcrowded that I now have 8 of the oldest ones in the volunteers’ house with me. They’re desperate for help with their English as they have their final exams in November, so when I said I was hear until December I got a squeal of delight, which felt good! It is nice having some company in there, even if they do wake me up at 5.30 every morning.
I’m still teaching computer and library lessons, with varying success. The children know I won’t hit them or anything if they’re naughty, so definitely play up to it by not doing the work, not doing what I ask etc. If there weren’t so many children in each class then I’d just stop them from having a turn on the computer but the language barrier in addition to keeping track of them all makes it difficult. I’ve started colour coding the library books now, and really hope it helps. At the moment the kids come in, pick a book at random, leaf through it looking at the pictures, put it down and pick another (I’ve seen kids looking at the pictures in maths textbooks, ‘reading’ upside down and looking at baby books). Then I tell them to put the books back where they came from, get mainly blank stares or a chorus of “yes” (which means I heard but haven’t got a clue what you said), then they get up to leave, I block the doorway and yell “put the books back” and then they chuck them in a haphazard way at the bookcases. There are so many books that are obviously not that old but already well on their way to being ruined. Such a waste! So hopefully colourcoding by subject will help. I’ve also attempted to teach them the difference between fiction and non-fiction, and made them do an exercise on it. Unfortunately they did very badly, and almost every child in one class thought I’d been talking about ‘fection’ and ‘infection’ books. A significant number in the other two thought it was ‘friction’, despite me writing it for them.
The children hear are sorely lacking in creativity. You give them an exercise to do, a simple gap filling one, and they copy it out and then seem surprised when you expect them to actually fill in the gaps! You can tell from their work that they are mainly taught by copying off the blackboard, they have great handwriting but no initiative.
Today the director took me to the Tanzanian border to try to renew my visa by leaving the country and coming back again. They told me to go to Masaka, a city further north where it would be much cheaper, so that was a wasted journey, apart from seeing Tanzanian soil of course. The border was not exactly high security. It was basically a town with a road block thing that lifts up (like at a level crossing). As far as I could tell, people were just walking across without having any papers checked, it was just cars and lorries that were checked. Presumably a “muzungu” (white person) would have been stopped – I didn’t particularly fancy trying, even though the local bank appeared to have higher security than the border control point.
I went to a wedding reception! Rose, the headteacher, told me there would be hundreds of people, and there really were. There must have been 200 invited guests sitting on chairs beneath open sided marquees, plus another 300 at least uninvited people hanging about. There were stalls selling things like beer, fizzy drinks, meat, chapattis and popcorn, and so many motorbikes that as we left we knocked over a line of them like dominoes. There music was very loud, there was a sort of presenter guy that only spoke in Luganda so I’ve no idea what he said, a revolving wedding cake (yes really) and lots of parading about by different groups of guests in front of the bride and groom. Everyone was dressed up (traditional dresses with pointy sleeves or evening dresses for the women, and suits for the men), except for one guy who obviously spoke no English or couldn’t read at all because he was wearing a t-shirt that said “Fuck Google, ask me”. I laughed a lot, and so did Dominic and Rose.
I don’t think I said much last time about the food so I will now. There is a cook (one of the many ‘aunts’) who cooks all the meals for Dominic, Rose and me. Tea is in the morning and there is normally bread, hot water to make tea (no milk though, and the tea tastes nothing like ours at home, definitely should have bought tea bags with me) and millet porridge (more like semolina than oat porridge, and I like it a lot). Lunch (around 1.30) and supper (9 pm) are the same, a selection of about 5 dishes from the following:
Matooke – a kind of savoury banana that is peeled, cooked and mashed. I avoid when I can.
Posho – millet I think, made into a lump of white stodge with a similar texture to rice. Edible.
Potatoes – in one of many forms (chipped, roasted, boiled). Comfortingly identical to home.
Spaghetti – in a tomato sauce, but really salty and not great.
Squash – either steamed or roasted. Yummy.
Beans - sort of pinkish brown ones, not sure of the species because they just call them beans. A bit like baked beans, but not quite as good.
French beans – normally cut up tiny and over salted, but ok.
Sweet potato – white, not orange. Yummy.
Rice - either plain boiled or with a little tomato. Sometimes too salty but generally good.
Ground nut sauce – looks like raspberry yogurt (yes really!) but tastes peanutty. Yum.
Cabbage – fried and actually nice, one of my favourite dishes.
Aubergine – both purple or mini green. Often very bitter.
Fish stew – i.e. stew with a hacked up fish in it, bones, head and all. I try to steer clear, being the squeamish wimpy person that I am.
So all in all the food is ok, I’m certainly enjoying all the fresh fruit (passion fruit, pineapple, papaya etc.), and the emotional side of things is getting better. Hopefully things will continue to improve!
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