Beth's Year in Uganda

On September 1st 2013 I started what I guess would be one of the best years of my life as a volunteer in Uganda. Yesterday I completed that year with the firm knowledge that I have finished the most challenging, educational and incredible journeys that any person my age could hope to have.

I spent the first four months in a Catholic Brotherhood where I saw the realities of living in the most corrupt country in East Africa. The initial challenges of adapting to culture and learning to do a job that I'm relatively untrained and completely inexperienced in where things I tried to take in my stride. Learning to live 24/7 with another person in the same situation is one of the things that made me feel like I was growing the most. The overwhelmingly welcoming nature of Ugandans blew me away and in the 4 short months I met people I knew I'd be friends with for life.

The overwhelming poverty left me in times of personal dilemma and is something that touched me the most. It led me to make the decision to use the school holidays in which I wouldn't be teaching to volunteer at a babies home in another district. There I found women and men dedicated to raising children as if they were their own. I grew to be patient and love those kids like nothing else.
Working side by side with the Aunties taught me everyday more about the Bunyoro culture and about real friendship and kindness; things I've never been shown so strongly.

When my project fell apart in September I learned to be resilient. A term I'd almost forgotten re-became my new motto: "bouncebackability". I made decisions together with my partner that we'd have to stand by and took responsibility for making the year work.

I learned to travel Uganda. I saw the most beautiful sights, such as Merchison Falls, and sights which were equally horrific, such as Idi Amin's torture chambers. I met with other volunteers and shared project stories and jokes about the never ending list of food we missed from the UK. The people I'd trained with but realistically spent limited time with became my best friends. We were a Uganda conquering team.

On Monday the 3rd September I made an official move from Dr. Archbishop Kiwanuka school in Mpigi to the Duhaga Boys Primary School in Hoima. Given a second chance at being a new teacher I got to grips with discipline and ultimately felt so much better about my work.
Secondarily I continued working at the babies home where I grew closer and closer to the women I was working alongside. We moved in with a new family where we learned to live comfortably with another culture through compromise and positivity. We cooked and played and laughed with the people who truly became our family.
I got more involved in the church, joined a fellowship club and made real friends where I independently felt that I'd really integrated into the community.

All of this was concluded into one night of tea and goodbyes. In the most beautiful way, which I feel completely portrays the heart of Uganda, the community who had kept and loved us for the majority of the year asked us to forgive them if they'd ever unknowingly wronged us. We thanked our hosts with bread and sugar, a gesture which will never be enough for the way we felt about them. Our friends made speeches and the true impact that they'd had on my life became clear as I looked around at all the people I was leaving behind. When I left he next morning it felt like it was just for a trip to Kampala and I'd be back in no time.

After landing in Heathrow yesterday morning and a day of being reunited with family and friends all I could comment is that everything felt too normal. As if I'd never gone, everyone's the same and everything's the same. And while my fear before leaving was that everything would be too different now I'm wishing that it was because maybe it would feel more real that I'd just got back from a year away. Instead I'm worrying that any minute I'm going to forget I was ever there because everything is so normal and I'm going to go back to the way I was. And consequently I'm feel like I'm acting weird in order to avoid acting the previous normal and forgetting everything that's just happened. And overall it's just overwhelming and as ever I just want to be honest about how the whole thing is making me feel. And it's my birthday tomorrow so maybe I'm having a 19 year crisis because I think this mix could definitely trigger such a thing.
Good enough I know it'll get better because I've only been back 24 hours and I'm probably crazy tired and I think I have every reason to feel a bit overwhelmed. And feeling these things is always part of this journey and once I start the next journey things will change.

I am incredibly proud of the year I've had and even more incredibly grateful for the people met and absolutely equally grateful for the people I've come home to, who I've missed and love.
I'm so grateful for the experience had, which I know so many people wish they'd been able to have.
I'm grateful to everyone who supported me in any way; letters, parcels for the kids, parcels for me, phone calls, messages, prayers, sponsorship, EVERYTHING. You have no idea how something so small can brighten a bad day in the village.

I sign off this blog permanently with a reassurance to everyone that I truly believe this is just the beginning. In whatever I go on to do next I'll hold this experience and I'm so happy it happened. While it might take some time for me to recover and portray that belief, just trust me that it's there.

oh Ugaaaaaanda we love youuuuuu.

The End

In the 33 minutes of internet cafe time I currently have ticking down in front of me I've planned to attempt to summarize the year I've just spent in Uganda, and the realities of only having 3 weeks of it left. And since I've just spent another 4 minutes of that ticking time just staring at the screen, I don't think it's going to be an easy feat.
Lets get deep.
I don't even know where to begin.

And I've typed and I've deleted and I have 21 minutes left and I think the truth is that I'll never be able to explain what's happened this year. Especially while I'm still in it.
The best thing about Uganda is the people. Who are so warm and welcoming and tell you everything exactly how it is and will generally do anything in their power to help you. And leaving them is making me want to cry because even the ones I don't know are nice to me and no one in Dogsthorpe will ask me how I am when I'm just walking to the shops.
In fact the facebook newsfeed is telling me that everyone in Dogsthorpe just wants to kill one another.

And I thought I was ready to go home but everything I've already done doesn't matter anymore and I feel like my journey is only just beginning because I've had the period of loving Uganda and the period of hating it and what I'm left with is a very clear view of the fact that it's one of the most beautiful places I've ever lived with the most beautiful people and the change that is coming for me might just make me tired because I'd just like to live in the routine I'm living in for a little bit longer.

The worst thing about Uganda are the things that people want to tell you about it: - People only want you for money, people only like you because you're white, people want visas - and they're not true. If your insecure you can let that eat you, the fact is that people are realistic, and people are suffering, and people want to help one another where ever they can. And people will help you where ever they can.

15 minutes left

The kids at the babies home annoy me like nothing else but I've learned to be patient and my partner won't mind me saying she annoys me like nothing else but I've learned to live with her and the family we live with have the potential to annoy me like nothing else but I've learned to compromise and I feel like I've learned to be warm and welcoming and love people when I've just met them and even if that sounds weird I've found it's one of the most powerful tools EVER because it's not what you know it's who you know.

And at this point I don't know what I'm moving on to because my entire life seems to be a constant dilemma on what I should spend it doing, so instead of actually doing anything I spend time worrying about what I'm doing.
A perfect example being the fact that on the second night of Project Trust Training I was almost certain that I wasn't going to come to Uganda because it wasn't what I should be doing. But then I suppose what I should learn from that is just to choose a path and focus on it - in general make the most of it and it becomes the thing you 'should' be doing.

Like I've said, I'm still in it and there's no way now I can tell you how this has shaped me because maybe the thing that shapes you most is leaving. What I do know is that I've had the most incredible year of my life and I feel blessed because generally that's something that I say after every year and now I just need to focus on making the next year even better because whether I like it or not, I'm moving on.

This blog post isn't just in saying goodbye to the best year of my life but it'll have to do because I only have 6 minutes left and this is all I can manage. Thanks for reading.

Goodbye Uganda.

"The Foundation of Success is Character."

- Pastor Gary

The Third and Final Term

After the best holiday ever we've found ourselves back at school for our third and final term as teachers in Uganda. As I'm writing this we have exactly 10 weeks and 4 days left and I say it all the time but it absolutely doesn't feel real. ALL of that stupid homesickness or tiredness has vanished and I'm enjoying being back so much! All I needed was the best holiday ever to refresh me and I'm back and seriously enjoying working harder to make these last months count.

At school I've planned and started a new topic of speaking and listening. The freedom to teach whatever I wanted that I previously found limiting through my inability to gauge that they needed to learn, had become a blessing as I decided to use my class time to do activities that involve the children exercising their free speech, improving their spoken English and raising their confidence - things that the typical Ugandan 'talk and chalk' teaching that I'd recently adapted to doesn't really do. They're gaining skills completely outside of the curriculum and the annoying reality of Ugandan exam system is that it won't help them to pass into the next year - a typical example of an English exam question might be: "'Bethany likes Uganda more than England.' Rewrite this sentence using: --- prefers -- to --." or "Complete the proverb: 'An early bird...". - HOWEVER, the most successful Ugandan's I've ever met have been the ones with the best spoken English skills and I feel like what I'm doing in that classroom, with time, can actually make a difference. And it's a lot more fun that reciting proverbs!
I did my first speaking and listening class on Monday 19th of this month to my Green Valley P5's. Any volunteer will tell you what a struggle it is to get a class to use their imagination after years of copying from a board and reciting definitions so it was a struggle to say the least. After asking them to tell the class about their holidays and talking them through the steps of making a presentation, I ended the lesson with 12 students giving a beautiful recital of the exact example I'd but on the board a long with a name change. haha! It went a lot better at Duhaga Boys Primary School - on of the perks of teaching at two schools is that you're always able to improve on your lesson plan when you run it a second time. The class really enjoyed and we got some seriously cute presentations. The next step was a clarification lesson for Green Valley and a session on 'Sales Presentations' for Duhaga Boys!
Second to that I was also assigned the job of teaching P6 about carpentry... so that's happening... hahaah

Mustard Seed, the babies home, is also keeping me busy. Everyday except for Wednesday I finish with classes and head that way. I try to go as early as possible because the kids are still at school and I don't have to deal with their over-excited-antics. When there in the mornings I help in the laundry section, mostly ironing the children's uniforms because the aunties don't believe that I can wash clothes without a machine. I also get to polish shoes and at break I make beds... I occasionally pitch in with baby feeding time too - which is the most difficult thing I've ever done. I've never asked why and am only assuming that it's a finance issue but they don't have bottles for the babies and feeding a new born milk out of a plastic mug isn't an easy feat. I don't think they like letting me do it because the baby is literally just covered in milk by the end. I wouldn't let me do it either. It doesn't sound like a lot of work when it's written but it keeps you on your toes.
On Monday I helped the nurse take three of the babies for immunization at the local health clinic. When I entered the mothers started asking the aunty that I was escorting how I, a mzungu, had produced such black children. hahaha. The needle was big and they all cried and everyone laughed at the fact that I wouldn't watch. After getting back to the home we then took another baby, Christopher, who was born with cerebral palsy and abandoned at the home, for therapy at the hospital. I'd never been there before and was shocked at how poorly equipped it was. We entered to find an assortment of shockingly-makeshift apparatus including metal poles with pillows attached to which babies were tied with bandages to correct their postures. The nurse let me take the mother role for Chris's therapy and the doctor narrated to me the ins and outs of the place and practice. He talked about the poor quality of the services for the disabled and discrimination in Africa; that the decision to keep a disabled child is a huge one mainly because the view is that they will never become independent. He was saying that the burden is too big for already poor families to support that child in health care or therapy or anything like that. As well as that the center we were in is the only one of this side of the country, meaning transport also amounts. It was hard to hear but so good to learn about and watch. It made me feel like I want to be an occupational therapist. And he taught me how to work with Chris at home to improve his muscle strength and it made me so happy when we got back and put him in his crib and he immediately rolled himself over (something we'd just watched him teach him to do.)

I don't know. I said I'd work hard and I really feel like I am and it feels good and for sure any unhappiness experienced before can definitely be put down to the fact that I wasn't working like this. I've had the best year ever and I can't believe it's almost over.
I'm about to start my community report which all volunteers have to complete for Project Trust as part of their OCN Qualification and basically an insight into an aspect of the community we've been living in... so that'll be keeping me busy too. For suuuuuuuure these 2 months are going to fly by.

In other news my bestfriend flew nine hours to see me for two weeks and we went on safari and it was great! In other other news, here's some pictures of my schools as promised. And of my safari because it was fabulous.