Ridiculously Sad

I had the best and worst days of Peace Corps this past weekend. On Friday morning I found in my rabbit hutch this tiny, red, squirming being. I didn’t even know my rabbit was pregnant. Previously, I had been waiting for the female rabbit to get pregnant so I could move her away from the male and put her in the section of the hutch that has a more solid flooring (the bigger part of the hutch has branches nailed together as a floor but there are gaps between the branches). When I only found one baby rabbit I figured that she didn’t have many and the others must have fallen out and been ate by one of the many wild dogs in my area. All Friday and Saturday I brought the baby to the mom to feed it because the female rabbit wanted nothing to do with the rabbit yet. On Saturday I went to another PCV’s events and arrived home about 7:30pm. Upon arrival, everyone told me my goat gave birth that afternoon in the rain. I ran to my neighbor’s house to find my goat with her two twin babies. But they were all soaking wet and crying. The babies just lied there in a basin with clothes to keep them warm. Again, one of my animals gave birth and doesn’t want to be a mom. Between my neighbor and I we can’t hold down my goat long enough to get milk from her. We leave her with her babies in a storeroom to sleep and stay out of the rain. At this point I thought everything was going great. It was so exciting to see the newborn goats (SOOO cute) and have my rabbits give birth, even though only one. I was so happy and energized, thinking about the next few weeks when my baby animals would grow.

The next morning everything started going downhill. First, I awoke at 6:30am by my neighbor bringing my goat back to her shack (she didn’t stay there at night because of the cold and the threat of wild dogs eating her babies). At that point I found that my rabbits escaped because in the original hutch the builder made the floor out of branches and mud, but he didn’t nail the branches down. So the rabbits dug up the dirt and clawed away the branches. So now I had this 2-day-old rabbit with no mom. I had to turn my attention to my goat for the moment. I tried all day to get milk from my goat, feed the babies with a straw, teach them how to walk, keep them warm, and generally keep an eye on them. When I tried to feed the baby rabbit the goat’s milk it didn’t want it and it was so small I couldn’t find a way to force the milk down it’s throat, like I had been doing with the baby goats. Well the baby goats weren’t doing well-they just lied there, refusing to eat, stand, only sometimes they cried out for their mom, who was almost ignoring them and completely refusing to let the babies get milk. By late afternoon one of the babies had died and the other one was following suite. I felt like such a failure and an awful caretaker. Even though the odds were against me because according to my teachers the babies were premature and being born in the rain made it so they immediately became sick, I still wanted to nurse them back to health.

The next morning I found the other baby goat had passed away. The only good thing up to this point was my baby rabbit was still alive. I don’t now how it had survived up to this point because I had repeatedly (literally 10 times that day) tried to feed it goats milk, almost drowning it many times, but it wouldn’t drink it and other wise stayed in a shoebox with an old shirt I gave it. Then, like the other babies, Wednesday morning I found it dead in the shoebox.

So now I only have my goat. The silver lining to this story is that I will be able to get my goat pregnant again soon and I will be able to know what to do with the babies once they are born because I have already gone through it once. The rabbits are a sad story, but again, if I decide to breed rabbits again I will have a better understanding of what to do. I take this all as a chance to learn and it’s apart of my Peace Corps experience.

Smell of Rain

Growing up, I had always thought the smell after a rain storm was gross because it smelled of worms. I have come into the city of Jinja where it just stopped raining and I immediately went back to 10 years old playing in my driveway after a rainstorm. Granted the cool breeze was amazing after spending 45 minutes in a ripe, stuffy, musty, body-odor filled matatu (15 passenger van stuffed with at least 20). I realize now the smell of fresh post-rain air is not of worms, well maybe a little, but more of fresh, wet, clear air with a mix of water and drenched soil. I love it- no matter where I am.

Super Cute

When I first arrived, many current volunteers who had been working for over a year in Uganda tried to tell me about the type of work you accomplish and the amount of influence you have on people. They told me it's not about the material good that you produce, nor is it the qualitative work that you concentrate on, but it's the community interaction, qualitative work that you look for-I thought they were making excuses for not getting anything done and that I wouldn't ever feel that way. Ha, sometimes I do eat my words (er....thoughts). I have been at my site for almost a year now and there is little physical evidence of my presence here yet I definitely feel busy and I do work. When the older PCVs told me that most of my work will be in the form of influencing people around me and getting integrated into my community I never thought I would feel that I have a large influence on anyone-even in America I have rarely seen any positive affects caused by me on other people. This past week I had two instances that proved to me that I am having an effect on the people around me.

The first instance happened while I was in my house finishing typing one of my schools grant for a tree nursery. I usually sit at the table in my sitting room while working (I only have two rooms, a sitting room/kitchen and a bedroom/washroom). Since it was a school day and I live next door to a primary school, during the kids’ recess and lunch break the kids like to walk around the teachers’ houses, including mine. In order to have any light or air flow in my house I have to keep the front and back doors open with a piece of material hanging in the doorway. Well since I’m a white person and especially because I was working on my laptop some of the kids still like to be rude and stand in my doorway or peek in from the yard. I have gotten to the point of being able to ignore them usually. Well that day I had two of my favorite little teacher kids in my house because they like to come over and color or play with the 4 happy meal toys I brought back with me. These two boys are around 3 years old and they are currently developing their speaking skills. When they saw the kids peeking in or standing near my veranda they shouted in Luganda that the kids have to leave or go away from my house. They stormed to the front door, put their little hands on their hips and yelled at these school age kids to go away, like they were my and my house’s little protectors. I was so touched. It was possibly one of the cutest things I have ever seen.

The second instance occurred after I had finished the grant for one of my schools and had gone to deliver a copy of it the school. I have been working on this grant with the deputy headteacher of the school, like a vice principle, and I really like him-he’s a hardworking, honest family man that has been a joy to work with. Well, I had found out that the money for this grant won’t be available until at least October because it is through the US government and well, we all know how quickly they like to process money matters. So I had to adjust the timeline and overlap some activities to complete the project by April 2008. I explained this to the deputy headteacher and when he made a comment about it not mattering if it goes over a little bit I reminded him that I am leaving in May 2008. When he heard this he looked at me with this awed, slightly distressed look on his face and said ‘no, I am going to write a letter to your supervisors to request you stay here, I will help you so that you can stay.’ He was visibly upset when it sunk in that I was only there for a short time (2 years only seems long in the beginning) and would be going back home. Other times when people say thank you for teaching them workshops or coming to visit them or whatever, even when they start blabbering thanks, I don’t really believe them or feel like they are truly appreciating what I have done with or for them. But when this deputy headteacher realized I was going right after we complete the tree nursery, it made me think about those PCVs who kept telling me about how you will influence certain people at your site and that’s what you concentrate on. Even though I haven’t actually completed the project or obtained any money for the school, he still showed appreciation of my efforts. That was awesome.

Rwanda

…IS AWESOME (-: Well maybe because I came from Uganda and everything is relative. Also, I only visited the capital, Kigale, but even so, I thought Rwanda was wonderful. I had a great time. We had a bit of a rocky start after an adventurous night at a dance club in Mbarara that lasted until we left for the bus to Kigale at 6:00am. Then after a few tortuous hours on a bus and spent at the border, we arrived in Kigale about 1pm. Side note: there was an obvious visual difference at the border between Rwanda and Uganda: like in Uganda the immigration office was on this awkward hill, there were a bunch of dirty shops with garbage all around the ground, and all vehicles trying to find space on the side of a typical road-full of potholes, bumpy, narrow, partly dirt, and covered in garbage; while the Rwandan side had a well organized and convenient immigration office on a spacious, level, and cleaned paved area that served as a space for a few well maintained shops, toilets, and immigration office as well as designated areas for trucks, buses, and cars to park in while dealing with border control. There is about a 50 yard walk between borders that the people have named ‘no man’s land’ that have tons of men trying to be walking forex bureaus. Again, Uganda had these obnoxious men but Rwanda regulated them. These differences were just a preview of the disparities between the two neighboring countries. The cleanliness factor was huge for me because I can’t stand how much Ugandans litter and in Rwanda plastic bags are illegal, they even check bags and vehicles at the border. Even the taxi/bus park in Kigale was cleaner, more organized, less crowded and the men, although aggressive, not nearly as much as in the Kampala taxi and bus parks. After dropping our luggage at our hotel we went right to the genocide museum that is not far from the downtown area. I know that it was built in the past decade so it’s more modern and was well funded by foreign and Rwandan governments, but it was really nice-as in similar to museums in America. There was a well maintained and beautiful garden with a veranda for the café that sells snacks and drinks. After the museum we went to a mall in the center of the city that has a great and huge grocery store and an amazing coffee shop (I don’t like coffee but everyone else really liked it, but the ambiance was similar to coffee houses in America and it even had wireless internet connection that was free as long as you are a customer-free internet is unheard of in Uganda, let alone wireless internet). Then we went to the hotel to quickly shower then headed to the New Cactus Restaurant and had amazing pizzas and lasagnas. Then the cheesecake I bought at the grocery store was brought out with candles and we sung happy birthday to one of our volunteers (actually we originally decided to go to Rwanda because of the PCV’s 50^th birthday). The next day was a little lighter because we were tired and it was raining. So we went to the coffee shop a while, walked around the city and went to eat at a few different restaurants. While walking around the city we visited the Millennium Colline Hotel (I think that was the name…) which is not only very nice but apparently was the hotel that the movie Hotel Rwanda was based upon. For dinner we went to a tandoori Indian restaurant-delicious. Early the next morning we grudgingly got on a bus to Uganda at 6:00am. It’s amazing what a less corrupt, strict, and organized government can do for an East African country…apparently a lot.