This blog is just to tell you about the set-up for our living conditions this past month, month 2 in Uganda, just to paint a small portrait of daily life here: -we live on an orphanage that has over 600 students -2 teams are together and 8 of us girls sleep in one office on the floor under mosquito nets -the 4 guys stay in another room also sleeping on sleeping pads and sleeping bags on the floor -our bathroom is a small outhouse but it has an actual toilet in it which is a HUGE blessing as opposed to your typical squatty potty (which we use everywhere else) -we bath by bucket, cold well water that is used for a splash bath…not the easiest way to get clean although just recently i had my first shower from a shower head here in uganda and it was the cleanest i've felt in weeks…its amazing the things you miss from home and realize how much you take for granted and let me tell you that everything that a shower/bath consists of in America is missed!!! -we also wash clothes with buckets and typically are corrected and it is taken over by the Africans because we are awful at it! there's an art to hand washing..and they can get our "white" shirts cleaner than you'd imagine possible! and then we dry them on clothes lines, which we hung ourselves -we eat lots of rice, potatoes (sweet and irish), ground nut soup, matooke (boiled bananas), cabbage….lots of cabbage (which has become my favorite veggie ever…weird huh mom & dad haha), pineapple (which we basically fight over because it's everyone's favorite), lots of peanut butter jelly sandwiches, buttered bread with sugar, avocado, posho/ugali (flavorless solid cream of wheat basically)…that's basically what our diet consists of. -our basic form of transportation is boda boda/piki piki which are motorbikes that are probably the least safe thing to get on but its the only way for us to get from the orphanage to town…for me to post my blogs 🙂 and we have to barter prices every time we get on because we're muzungu's so almost always we get the muzungu price but we've gotten pretty good at putting our foot down and standing our ground -we have church Sundays, a short service at 8 then the main service starts at 10 and usually goes til 2 where at least 2 of us preach and currently I've have been recruited for the dance team and I get a thorough workout in my "Sunday best" with the complete lack of dancing abilities yet no one cares and i join them on stage in front of the entire congregation and then we go back at 4 for more of a children focused service where we spend hours attempting to learn to dance from the children…unsuccessfully usually. -Friday nights from 8 til 2 in the morning there is a prayer service where no one has made it til the end…by then we're exhausted…but it's a lot of fun and there are kids EVERYWHERE! -the kids eat posho and beans everyday basically every meal -every child knows how to say "How are you?" and "I am fine." but if you word them different they don't know. Some know English but anywhere you go and any age, people know those two phrases. Or they'll say Agande…and you reply Ndeaho…which means the same in their language. -and your typical greeting on Sunday morning or at any crusade is "Praise the Lord" and the congregation says "Amen" (and this is screaming it in the microphone on the loudest volume of course) but then the speaker will say "Praise God once more" or "Praise God again" and the congregation follows with "Amen"…sometimes if they change it up a little they'll yell it a third time! Enthusiasm is all you need here! T.I.A. this is Africa!
