My Tentative Job Description

Hey Everyone!
So I have been at site for a week. From training, I am supossed to be holding teacher improvement workshops, monitoring and imporoving primary schools and the headteacher (principals) and other teachers who work there. As of now, I am scheduled to teach to the school that I live near (I live within their teacher housing) and some surrounding schools about composting and how to manage waste. In June I am also spending a week helping my counterpart conduct training sessions on PIASCY (President Musevni's movement for teaching of healthy living, pretty much just about AIDS). I am also hoping to help with starting tree nurseries in a couple of the surrounding schools. My counterpart and I met with the district education officer and the district environmental officer. Both meetings went well. The district education officer wants to focus on the national movement towards integrating children with mental and physical disabilities into the classroom and would like me to help the teachers figure out how to make learning and teaching aids specifically for the handicapped students from locally availible resources. Coincidentally enough, the district education officer did a foreign exchange program in 1968-69 in Phelps, a school about 35 minutes from where I grew up! After I got over that shock, my counterpart and I visited the environmental officer to decide with him to start the nurseries at the school and teach the school how to get seeds from trees, nurture the seedlings, and grow trees to complete the tree life cycle. Anyways, so luckily I will be pretty busy in the next few months. I will let you know how it goes!

PS thanks to those who have sent me emails and letters! I miss you! And for those who have lost it, my current address:

Allison Muehe, PCV
C/O Peace Corps
PO BOX 29348
Kampala, Uganda

My New Site!

Hey guys! I'm here in Jinja for my future site visit and they have internet (yay!) I don't actually live in Jinja, I live about a 40 minute taxi ride in a village called Kangulumira. First impression: work and environment are awesome, my house is ridiculously unfortunate. It was really fun, I walked for about 50 minutes and I reached the nile river and saw one of the most amazing views I have ever seen. Although I cannot go in the water because I will get sick from the bacteria in it, it is still really nice to be close by and apparently the falls that I can see are the last stop of the famous nile rafting that begins in Jinga. (Side note: many of the PCTs are planning on going rafting in June, you supposedly think you are going to die and they are class V rapids or something, but I'm SUPER excited to go) Anyways, the teacher's college that I am associated with is in Kampala which is awesome because it's right in the middle of the city, but it's also an hour and a half taxi ride away from my site. As usual, every great thing about my site has a catch to it and I suppose everyone's place is like that so I feel like in some ways I'm lucky but in other ways I got the short end of the stick. So, I will hopefully be able to keep up the postings every few weeks!

Mike Hartwell is AWESOME

I know he will hate this shout-out, but I just wanted to publicly thank Mike because he is the first person to send me anything other than my mom and it was the the best and nicest thing EVER. It was a note and a book and candy, simple and sweet and it came right as my giardia set in and it meant so much. I read the book in two days while lying in bed and his words of home, etc. was so great to hear. Anyways, I have 2 minutes on the internet left and I don't want to say everyone has to send me a book, but just the letter itself was SO great because I'm missing all of my friends so much.

Thanks again Mike!

Giardia and the Police

haha, ok, so this is going to be an out of order posting, but whatever. Anyways, so this past week I got Giardia, which I won't get into the gross details but it's a parasite that is in your stomach and it just give you realy bad gas and bathroom trips. Even though it sometimes goes away on it's own I had really bad cramps and broke down and took the medication this past Wednesday night. It takes 48 hours to work and Thursday night was super aweful, moreso because I am not allowed to use the pit latrine at night for security reasons. So yes, I'm back to the good old days of using chamber pots and I filled mine and had to use another one. I left it right outside my room and it was the middle of the night so I decided to not wake up my family (there are no ceilings, just walls so you can hear everything all the time) and just use my watch indiglo to reach my door and reach outside. Hoping to be quiet and quick, I just opened my door, it creaked of course, I did my business and got into bed. Before 7 am I hear strange men's voices in the house (yes, you really can hear everything) and then I hear my homestay mom calling me and asking me if I'm sick. And if you have never been around me when I'm sick I'm a bit cranky. I answered her yes and she ordered me out of my room. In the PC they are very strict about American's sense of personal privacy and since there is none in Uganda, our room is our only haven of rememberence of home. So, I was like, what? get out of my room, I'm sick, I don't want to move and my room is stinky, just...no. But she yelled that men have to go in my room and I have to get out. I had no idea what was going on, so I got dressed and emerged from my room to find two policemen. I greeted them in the nice ugandan way and asked what was going on. One of the policemen informed me that it was reported that someone was trying to break into my room at night. I assured him that being sick I was up ALL night and that there was no one trying to break in. My homestay mom and sister rushed in my room with flashlights and started looking in corners and everything, I'm like, what is going on here. Then they told me that they heard someone opening my door last night and they thought it was an intruder so they sat outside my door all night long waiting for him to come out. I was like "IT WAS ME", and the best part was, when I asked why they didn't ask me during the night what was going on, they said that they did not want to disturb me because I was sick.

This country is amazing.