The Muzungu House

I have had several requests for a picture of our humble abode and here it is. I tried to get a shot so you can see it in its entirety. To the left of the photo you will see a cement wall that has glued broken bottles on the top. That wall surrounds the entire house to keep the Muzungus in and the Ugandans out. We then have a large gate in the front with two doors to get in and out. Behind the house are our guard’s quarters and where our married couple team members will move in tomorrow. The latrines are also in the back of the house, but I figured you probably didn’t want to see a picture of that.  My room is the room behind the balcony that’s covered in mosquito nets. Six boys are in the garages (with the green doors) and then two of the boys sleep on the balcony. There are five rooms upstairs which house twenty girls. I share a room with five other girls. We all sleep in bunk buds with mattresses made of three-inch foam. They’re actually more comfortable then you’d think because at night I sleep like a little lamb. In the right bottom corner of the picture is our well. This is where we shower, do our dishes, wash our clothes, and sometimes just hang out. The water isn’t clean enough to drink and whether or not it’s clean enough to bathe in or do our dishes in is debatable. Most of the time we use it when it’s dark outside and you can’t tell that the true color of the water is brown. The blue plastic chair in the picture is one of our few pieces of furniture. Besides the bunk beds in our house our only other furniture consists of plastic chairs and stools. The buckets sitting in front of the garage are our drinking water, which we get delivered from a plant. The bricks in the center were being used to rebuild part of the outer wall that fell down during a recent rainstorm, but the wall is completed and the bricks are still there.
The house is basically constructed of cement, which is great for fire retardation, but terrible for hanging anything on the walls. Most of our mosquito nets are held up in very creative ways since we can’t really use nails. The floor is mainly painted cement but a few of the rooms have linoleum. Upstairs there are two bathrooms. One of them has a normal toilet, which flushes when we have water, and we’ve had running water maybe 20% of the time we’ve been here. The other upstairs bathroom is the same as the only restroom downstairs and consists of what we most affectionately call a squatter. Enough said on that subject. If there’s no running water and you have to go number two then you have to use the outdoor latrines. Our house is pretty mosquito and bug proofed with mosquito nets on every outside door and window we can leave them open to keep the house cool (no A/C or fans). We still get our fair share of bugs in our little home and if we’re lucky we’ll get a rhino bug, that’s about the size of your hand. There are actually not as many bugs here as I thought there’d be.
The other picture is of me administering an oral polio vaccine at one of the vaccination clinics in Jinja. The government provided measles and polio vaccines to all children under five in Uganda during a three day period. Some of the vaccination posts were in hospitals, but most of them were just under some random tree. I got to wear one of the infamous Mormon helping hands vests! LDS members all around the world wear these vests while giving aid to those in need. It was such a good experience to be apart of the country-wide vaccinations.
Per my dear Tia Lisa’s request I’ll do my absolute best to describe how Uganda smells. The latrines and all surrounding areas smell terrible. The market where we buy all our produce smells like fish. One time we shared a taxi with thirty-three live chickens and that didn’t smell so good. I have also shared a taxi with a ton of dead fish, not such a good smell either. The taxis themselves smell damp and mildewy. They don’t have any means of disposing their garbage and they pile it in huge piles, and that smells like the dump. When they burn their trash it kind of smells a bit like weed, or so I’ve been told. We pass a lot of livestock just wondering around on our way in to town and so I always get a whiff of pure animal smell. Ugandans don’t have money for deodorant, so most of them smell like B.O. Their staple food item here is called matoke, and the women here are cooking outside over their fires all day everyday and it smells a lot like potatoes. Just minutes after it rains, Uganda smells fresh, alive, and cleansed. The rain lingers in the humidity and the smell of dew fills the air. The farther you get away from the center of the village and into the more rural parts of town the more you can smell the surrounding vegetation. Sometimes you can smell the jackfruit, pineapple, mango, or passion fruit growing in nearby fields topped off with faint scent of sugar cane. I wish I could bottle it up and take it with me wherever I go. I love you all! XOXO!