In the Life of Allie Muehe...

Thoughts and actions as of February 19th, 2006 mostly regarding my Peace Corps assignment to Uganda. I am leaving for Boston for my staging event (orientation) on March 2, 2006 and leave for Uganda on March 5, 2006.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

I'm going to do better!

Hi hi! Ok, so I'm really going to do better with posting things on my blog here. So, a small step, I'll tell you about my past week and hopefully I'll get progressively better and include more in-depth postings. Anyways, this past week I did 5 workshops at 5 different schools on how to create, improve, and maintain a resource center or library. Surprisingly, many of these schools do have a bunch of books but they are locked up or piled somewhere because they do not have anywhere or any knowledge on how to organize them. Since I love organizing ( (-: ), when they asked for help to develop these rooms my counterpart and I scheduled workshops for them. For the most part the workshops went well, at least after we finally got started. People joke about "Ugandan Time" but it's really true that when you say 1 pm here things start at 3 pm, or when they say they will take 20 minutes it will take 2 hours. At first this lack of punctuation was not only a huge hindrance on my schedule and what I wanted to accomplish, it insulted and annoyed me. I'm understanding and trying to work on the timing issue. For example, I had a peer group meeting today that the students were actually there on time! Well, 12 of 14 of them were. These peer group meetings consist of the teachers that are not certified but are teaching and getting their degree while they are working. But, they take the same exam that the university bound student is after studying and working for 3 years. This makes things harder because not only do the students (well, teachers...) not want to work and study, but remembering all the material is harder after such a long time. Anyways, at the first two meetings I held about 15-20 students came eventually, but only 2 came on time. I wait for about 30 minutes before I start and usually 2/3rds of the students wander in during the lesson. At the end of the meeting I pretty much guilt the people who are late and praise the ones who are on time enough so that today, almost everyone was here on time! Maybe I'm being a little premature, but I'm hoping these people are learning the value of time and punctuality. It's winning the small battles that is important here. Ha, and it's a bit funny because at home in NY I'm always rushing and being 1-5 minutes late for everything and now that I'm actually on time or early for things and because of the culture, everyone and everything is consistently late!

THANKS!

Hey Guys! First I want to say thanks so much to a bunch of people who sent me stuff, it was better than Christmas! I hope I didn’t seem to needy or anything when I gave out my address and everything, seriously, I didn’t mean for everyone to send me things. But it totally made my day, week, month! Kelley, Joy, Mark, Mike, Candi, and Pat, you guys are amazing. I will write you back, slowly but surely! So expect to see something in the mail in a good month or two, because the Ugandan postal system is stupendous. (-: