My Ugandan Name is Nantume

My goal is to get two pictures up today while I’m online, so we’ll see how this goes. This first picture is of our very first soccer game and public health lesson with some of the street children of Lugazi. The street children are all of the kids who don’t get to go to school because they don’t have the money to pay the school fees. Andrew, the guy in the picture with the dreads, got his hometown to donate soccer equipment and uniforms to the cause. We plan to make these soccer games a weekly event and are coupled with a brief lesson on health. I give the lesson and Andrew and some of the other guys from the team take care of the soccer part. Our first game went really well and thanks to our translator, I think they got the jist of my lesson on how germs are spread and the importance of proper hand washing in infectious disease prevention.
I began making a prototype of the hand washing stations we are going to build for the local market place, but unfortunately ran into a little problem. We haven’t been able to locate one of the materials we need locally to build the hand washing stations. Part of the sustainability of the project relies on the supplies being inexpensive and accessible so that the members of The Youth Outreach Mission, along with others I train, can continue to build them in Lugazi after we leave this summer. Luckily, just days after I encountered this issue one of our country directors found out that one of the senior missionary couples in Kampala have built hand washing stations using a different model and have had a lot of success. I have an appointment to meet up with them in Jinja on Wednesday to see the hand washing stations and learn how they build them. Jinja is also one of the very few places in this country with American food, so Wednesday will be an absolutely splendid day.
This upcoming week some of the other interns will be pulling out some teachers from their classes to do some teacher training while I get to entertain their classes with a public health lesson. So part of this week I’ll spend creating lesson plans and visuals. This upcoming weekend is the countrywide distribution of polio and measles vaccines and I’m excited to spend three days with some of the senior couples in assisting with the vaccinations.
The other picture that I hopefully get loaded is of Becca, Wilson, and me at Szebwa Falls. Becca is one of the other interns and Wilson is the president of The Youth Outreach Mission, which we have done a lot of work with. About twelve of us interns and seven Ugandans from the Youth Outreach Mission hiked around Szebwa Falls Saturday morning and then we went and spent the day in the capital, Kampala. We went to a mall there called Garden City and for six hours I felt like I was no longer in Uganda. We ate at this fabulous Indian restaurant while sitting cross-legged on couches. We don’t have couches at our house and it a nice change from sitting on the floor or in plastic chairs. The food was amazing and the restaurant sits at the top of the mall and is completely open. It was a beautiful sunny day with a slight breeze and we got to enjoy it all as we ate Indian food. We then went and saw Angels and Demons and for two and half hours I felt like I was at home in the U.S. We then got ice cream in the mall, which was okay. The ice cream they have here isn’t as creamy and sweet as it is in the US and they haven’t quite gotten their chocolate flavoring down. After ice cream we went to an American super market at the mall where they have a lot of American brand food that’s way overpriced. I bought a few Ugandan brand things that you can’t find in Lugazi and avoided the American cereal that cost ten US dollars.
Today I taught Young Womens at church and it was way fun. It rained so hard that one of the walls that surround our house fell down, but it is currently being fixed. I’m off to go locate the phone my family will call on in approximately twenty-five minutes. I love you all and I love Uganda!