Check out the New Fundraiser – Kili for a Kause

Hi Everyone!

Please check out the new fundraiser Erin and I are starting in order to raise money for the NGO we are working with out here in Uganda. In order to raise funds, we will be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in a little under a month. Please help us out by clicking the link at the top of the page or clicking here. Any little bit helps. Hopefully we make it to the top (we’re not exactly your quintessential mountain climbers). Wish us luck!!!

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So… What the heck are we doing here?

That’s a good question and one we’ve been asked a lot! Well besides lying in the sun eating bananas and playing with monkeys, we’ve been pretty busy here in Nyeihanga.

We spend time every Thursday playing with the kids who belong to the LOLGM school for orphans and vulnerable children. They’ve been on summer vacation since we arrived (though start up a new term this Monday) so we have been doing sort of outside activity days with them. This is pretty challenging considering that there is not so much as a soccer ball to use in games and that they don’t understand most of what we say so giving instructions is pretty tough. Usually there are about thirty kids ranging in age from two to about ten. We play a few local games – one that is sort of like Duck Duck Goose and another that is like Red Rover but instead of running through people’s arms, two kids try to pull the other across a line. We tried Red Light, Green Light but the instructions were pretty hard to explain with just gestures. We do relay races pretty successfully, though after a few races they get too excited and all go at the same time. Still, it is a pretty fun game! The best game to play is Freeze Tag. For those of you who didn’t grow up playing it, a few people are “it” and if you get tagged you have to freeze until someone crawls under your legs. Watching a five year old tell Brian to crawl under their legs is pretty funny. On a rainy day we brought our computer and played Freeze Dance for a few hours. It turned into Brian and I taking turns being the leader and doing goofy dance moves that the kids would copy til the music paused and we all froze. They loved it. And of course Brian represented by teaching them the Hokie Pokie!

My absolute favorite thing we do is to work with the Functional Adult Learning class that takes places twice a week. The women (and occasional man who comes) are amazing in their drive. They mostly learn English and literacy but are also learning some basic math and household budgeting skills. The teacher is an incredible and smart woman from the village who volunteers her time. They work so hard that usually the class only ends when the sun has set and they need to rush to get home before dark. Brian and I mostly help with speaking English. Especially with confidence in speaking. I have to say though, I think they have taught us as much Runyankore (the local language) as we’ve taught them English!

One of the major things we’ve set out to accomplish is starting up a microfinance initiative in the LOLGM Nyeihanga community. Microfinance is basically giving small loans to a poor individual that they can invest in a business to generate income, pay back the loan, take out another loan to reinvest in their business, generate more income, and so on. Its success comes from its sustainability and accountability of the individual receiving the loan, but also from ‘empowering’ an individual to help herself. Also, lending often takes place in groups so the whole process of microfinance fosters community involvement and support- all goals of LOLGM. So far this project has moved quickly. Well quickly in Africa time! In the past few weeks Brian and I have researched different potential microfinance organizations to partner with, contacted ones we thought would be a good fit for LOLGM, met with them, had one come give information to the beneficiaries in Nyeihanga, and now, starting this Monday, there will officially be a microfinance initiative at LOLGM Nyeihanga!

Once Nyeihanga members have access to finance, the empowerment options are endless. We’re looking into giving beneficiaries training in income generating activities along with assistance in creating a business plan once they have the skill. One activity is in making handy crafts such as woven reed baskets that are very popular here yet in limited supply. Another activity is mushroom growing. This is a good option because once trained in the growing process, returns are huge: for every dollar put in, a grower could make $4-$6. And mushrooms are in high demand yet low supply.

We’ve also been helping out with getting a barn built that will be a church/community center for the quickly expanding organization. Even just since we’ve been here, the current building has become overflowing during church services. The class size for the school for orphans and vulnerable children is doubling this term. Plus new activities like the microfinance and training for beneficiaries has really created a need for more space. Earlier this year Blake did a Crossfit fundraiser to raise money for the barn and now here we are starting to build it! Well, really this is Brian’s gig. You know, since he’s a man. He’s done a lot of sitting down with Jackson and the builders to make some semblance of a budget (an almost impossible task here in Uganda), gone around in a pick-up truck to pick up bricks, sand, tree poles (yes I have pictures). He is trying to track the costs as best as possible but again that type of accounting is a pretty foreign concept here. We head to a city near us later today to pick up more funds and look into getting more supplies. The plan is to start building next week and be finished before we leave. However, a saying here in Uganda is slowly by slowly. It pretty accurately describes the pace that everything here moves. We’ll see 🙂

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Village Living: He said, She said

Well Faithful Reader, you are in for a treat. I’d like to present to you the first edition of He said, She said. How this will work is basically I’ll start writing and Erin will pop in with comments and back and forth. Basically this gives us a chance to write things in a little bit different way and give you all a chance to remember our witty banter. This is still a work in progress so if it doesn’t really work, you’re in luck… we’ll never do it again! Now, on with the show.

Brian: After our stay in Kampala, we drove for about 6 hours to a smallllll village called Nyeihanga. It is basically a main road, a semi-main side road (our street) and a bunch of small alleyways around. There are a bunch of farms outside of town.  There’s probably around 500ish people altogether.

Erin: Hmm, okay Brian got things mostly right. I think there are more than 500 people but we agreed to disagree…He also forgot to mention that Nyeihanga is surrounded by enormous rolling green hills covered with banana farms. It’s beautiful. We’re staying in a sort of apartment in the community pastor’s house, Pastor Jackson. We have a tiny little bedroom that is 90% taken up by our very comfortable, mosquito net covered bed. We also have a living room area where there are some chairs and a table. Our apartment’s in the commercial part of the village where all of the local shops and restaurants are. This is the only part of the village with electricity. There’s no running water.

Brian: Basically, the entire apartment we’re in is the slightly smaller than our bedroom back home. The pastor’s room is right next door and his digs are the exact same size as ours. The whole no running water part has been interesting. We get a bucket of boiling water in the mornings and at night which we use to brush our teeth, take a “shower”, and wash our hands throughout the day. Showers are a little tougher than back home. There definitely isn’t the 6 full body jets I’m used to back home. There is an area in the court yard area outside our room we use for showers. To shower, basically, we take our hot water bucket, our jerrycan of cold water, a basin, and all of our ingenuity and go to town.  Things get pretty interesting, and the first few tries I came out pretty sudsy. I think we’re both pros now, though.

Erin: A full shower including washing and conditioning my hair takes up about a milk jug or so worth of water. Compared to what a Ugandan would use, this is a ton of water. Don’t get me wrong, we will love to be back where we can take long, hot showers with unlimited running water. But the bucket showers do get us as clean as we would be at home. I would choose a bucket shower in warm Uganda with hot water any day over a running water shower in cold Turkey with cold water! Our bathroom is an outhouse about twenty yards behind Jackson’s home. It’s just a hole in the ground with a jerrycan of water and some disinfectant powder to keep things clean. But it belongs just to Brian and I, and it even has a lock to make sure that we’re the only ones using it. They offered us a bucket to use at night for “emergencies” but thankfully we haven’t needed it yet! There are cows, goats, and chickens roaming freely everywhere in Nyeihanga and the area around our outhouse is no exception. It is so dark here at night that sometimes you can’t see a cow or long horn bull until you are right near them.  Or you will hear something moving and shine your flashlight to find that there are half a dozen long horns walking right by you. Night trips to the bathroom aren’t so bad though because the stars here are incredible. We can see so many more stars than at home that most of the constellations we’re used to hard to identify.

Brian: Hmmm…. the bathroom. The hole in the ground isn’t exactly a technology I’d like to implement in a future home, but I guess it gets the job done.

One great thing about being here is we are having all of our meals prepared for us. Meals times are a little bit different than back home though. We usually eat breakfast around 9:30, lunch is at around 2, afternoon tea is at 7, and dinner is at 8:30ish, but sometimes dinner isn’t served until 10. We eat all of our meals with Jackson, anther community leader, Enoch, Enoch’s wife Penelope, and often a few other people from the community.  Enoch’s wife Penelope does most of the cooking here, though they live outside of the more commercial portion of the village where we stay. Before each meal someone in the household walks around with a basin and a jug of water to clean everyone’s hands. Ugandans love to eat and love to encourage others to eat too. They say Erin eats the amount a three year old Ugandan but by American standards we’re both eating tons (and tons)! They keep saying that by the time we leave Uganda, Erin should have a stomach the size of Jackson’s wife, Pam (who is 7 months pregnant) so that she will look like an African woman. They’re always telling me that skinny women are a sign that the husband is cruel to his wife in private. Erin always just insists that she’s just full and that I’m not really that cruel… looks like I’ve got her trained already!

Erin: There is SO much food! Every day is a battle between being polite by eating as much as is expected and avoiding a stomach ache. One of the first nights I thought tea was our actual dinner because there was so much food served (and it was so late at night!). The tea and dinner time conversation is usually when we have the most laughs and learn the most about Ugandan life from our hosts.

The food itself… one of the most pleasant surprises is the food. Incredible! Every meal we eat half a dozen different fresh fruit, vegetables, and other dishes. There are four different types of bananas ranging in sweetness from much sweeter than the banana’s we’re used to, to very starchy with no sweetness at all. Sometimes the bananas are mushed all together into a paste, sometimes they are mushed and cooked into a cake, sometimes they are chopped and fried, sometimes their cooked whole in their peels… There are more ways to cook bananas than Bubba cooked shrimp! (Wow… barely two months into marriage and Brian’s lame jokes are already rubbing off on me?!)  Another common food is this purple paste-like substance that scared me until I tried it. It turned out to be peanut paste and it’s delicious! Millet is another common food. It is a doughy type of bread made, I think, from a grain. The ladies are supposed to teach me how to make it soon! Every day we are served these grape-sized green vegetable called bitter tomatoes that are supposed to be extremely healthy for you. They are one of the few foods we’ve been served that’s hard to get down. I am pretty sure that the reasons we are served so much of them is because they are said to increase fertility. We are served a LOT of foods that are said to increase fertility and libido. Peanuts, I’m told, are a food your wife shouldn’t eat when she is away from you.  We have pineapples every single day, lots of avocado, peanuts, pumpkin, mushrooms bigger than my hands, a variety of potato-like starches we’ve never heard of. We eat almost nothing processed and almost everything comes from within a mile of where we’re living. Even the eggs and meat are what at home we’d call free range. Already I can feel the difference from eating so healthy. We might be being encouraged to be glutinous but at least it’s with delicious and healthy food! Brian, what am I forgetting?

Brian: Lame jokes? What are you talking about? You call this lame… What is E.T. short for?

Erin: Oh god, what?

Brian: He’s just got those little legs!

Erin: Is it too late for an annulment?

Brian: Whatever that’s gold. Ok the food… The meat we’re eating is amazing. We don’t eat it every day, but most days. We get all types including beef, goat, and chicken. Goat is interesting, but pretty good. Beef liver is a common dish. Erin didn’t know that it was liver until about the 5^th time we had it. She said she really liked it, but had she known it was liver probably wouldn’t have tried it. I guess sometimes it’s best not to know. The past few days we’ve had some really weird food. Three days ago, a very nice lady who we’ve been eating with a lot brought over a huge bag of grasshoppers. Apparently they are a delicacy here. They catch them, rip off the legs and wings, sauté them, throw some salt on, and eat them. They are amazing. Erin didn’t like them too much, but I had a bunch. They sort of taste like Fritos. Then, 2 days ago we were invited to a family’s home for dinner. We had had most of the food they served, but they also served cow intestines in a broth as the main course. This was a little weirder tasting than the grasshoppers, but still pretty good. Erin liked this a lot more than the grasshoppers. I guess she just didn’t like the fact that the grasshoppers were staring at her while she was eating them. One thing she didn’t have a problem with though, is holding a live chicken that was a gift from a neighbor. The chicken was dinner the next night!!

Another really good food we discovered is called chapati. It is like a thin fried bread almost like a pancake, but thinner. It is a type of street food they sell all over the place. You can also get a rolex, which is a chapati with a fried egg cooked in it and wrapped up with onions. Soooo good. Chapati is the one unhealthy food we’ve eaten here.

Friday is market day in the village. They hold the market right across the street from where we are staying. It’s crazy how there is just a huge open field there 6 days of the week and then on Fridays it is packed with vendors who string up ropes everywhere to hang up tarps to cover their goods. You can buy everything from silverware to clothes to vegetables at the market. The best thing though is what they call pancakes. They’re not like what we would call a pancake though. They are these little fried discs the size of a poker chip which are a mix of bananas and a vegetable called cassava (kind of like a starchy potato). They are phenomenal and you can get a huge bag of them for like 20 cents.

Well there you have it. The first HS,SS in RAB…AG history. Let us know what you think and we may do one again, or, more likely, you’ll never have to read one again. Miss you all!

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Ugandan Generosity

After our Middle East adventure, we headed to Uganda where we are volunteering for two months. Many of you may know Blake Shubert, a friend of both Brian and mine from high school. Blake has been the director of global operations for an international Christian service organization called Light of the Lord Global Missions (LOLGM) for more than a year and a half. This organization is especially cool, in my opinion, because they strive to make their aid projects self-sustaining through small business. Their Kampala branch, for example, launched a successful dairy enterprise that funds its projects. When we decided we wanted to have a volunteer component to our honeymoon, we first thought of Blake and the good work we know he does with LOLGM.

Our flight from Istanbul got to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, early morning the Sunday before Easter. We stayed in a pretty nice hostel on the outskirts of the city that met my standards because it had hot showers and monkeys roaming around the ground! (Mention of monkeys is probably a dead giveaway that it’s Erin writing this post. Not surprisingly, monkeys have quickly ousted camels to resume their position as my favorite animal). After spending Sunday catching up on sleep, Monday and Tuesday we were shown around Kampala by two guys from LOLGM, Stephen and John, who do a lot of the on the ground management of LOLGM projects in Uganda. They took us to get phones and an internet stick to use in the village, took us to a zoo and to the “source of the Nile” – the point where Lake Victoria starts draining into the Nile. The conversations were pretty interesting with a lot of lost in translation moments where Brian and I had no clue what was going on. But we had a great time in Kampala with Stephen and John. Somehow we managed to find out that they worked in Iraq for the same company I had worked for in Virginia right up until our wedding. This is especially crazy because the portion of the company operating in the U.S. is tiny, maybe a hundred people, and they (and a LOLGM guy from the village) are probably the only Ugandans my company ever employed. Small world!! Kampala is surprisingly small for a capital city but it is full of people and sprawling, with bad enough traffic to make us miss our old commutes up 495 (not).

Wednesday we headed down to Nyeihanga, the village in southwest Uganda, five hours from Kampala, where we are spending about 2 months helping out. The LOLGM branch in Nyeihanga is really new – it began in late 2010 and already has some great projects going such as a school for vulnerable children and orphans and an adult literacy program. We’re going to be working with these and also with getting some sustainable businesses going. A highlight of the drive up was that when we would pass through towns, where traffic would slow, dozens of people in blue vests would run up to your car and shove all sorts of foods, drinks, and other things for sale into your window. Then, as soon as another car would go by, they would take off and sprint towards that car. And then sprint to another car, and so on. I guess with so many vendors, competition was fierce and you had to be fast to make a sale. Brian tried some skewers of grilled meat but I thought it was safer, and more appetizing, to stick to roasted bananas.

Thursday was our official welcome ceremony by the community. It was one of the most amazing experiences of both of our lives. The event took place on the grounds of a building that doubles as a church, a school for kids and adults, and a center for other community activities. First, we were welcomed with songs by the kids from the community school, then songs by the adult education participants, and then songs by the church choir. These songs were beautiful and personalized to welcome specifically me and Brian. They were all choreographed with dances and accompanied by drums. We took some short videos and pictures that don’t do the performances justice but at least give a bit of a picture. We’ll post when we have fast internet again. Next, some of the kids and adult learners recited various poems they had written. Finally, the kids and the choir each performed plays they wrote for this occasion. We didn’t understand everything that went on in the plays, but they were seriously funny and Brian even said his cheeks hurt by the end from all the smiling and laughing. As if all of this wasn’t enough, the people of the community all brought gifts to personally welcome us. We ended up with an enormous pile of fruits, veggies, eggs, even two sugar cane stalks two feet taller than Brian! Now, two weeks later, we are still getting daily gifts of fruits and veggies. Even today we were brought a bushel of sugar cane stalks, a big bag of guavas, and a bag of local berries! After the presentations, we found out that we were expected to make a speech (this is something we end up having to do at every community event we attend – so at least five times weekly!). It really wasn’t hard to find words to say after so much generosity! Brian said some great, heartfelt words and we passed out some measly candy and coloring books we brought for the kids. The community spirit here and the kindness of the people are humbling. We hope during our time here we are able to give back something more substantial to the amazing people here.

Over the past two weeks we have attended events ranging from Easter Baptisms in the local stream to the school kids’ term graduation. My favorite thing is definitely the adult literacy classes where we get to work with some incredibly motivated women.  Mostly we are just trying to get involved in everything to learn more about how things work here. There are about a billion adorable kids that we get to play with, we’re working to get a microfinance program started … the only thing that could make me happier is if there were more monkeys roaming the village streets!!

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