new chapter

First of all, congrats to the Wisniews on having a healthy baby. Happy day of birth, Ronan.

Well, a whole new chapter of this trip has started since the team here moved to focus. Focus is a Ugandan Christian retreat center and sometimes has groups of Christians staying here. We get a dorm with 2 rooms, the round conference room, and access to all facilities. I was going to stay in the dorm with the guys, but since our cook Maureen is also a girl, they decided to put our beds in the kitchen room of our dorm. So we sleep in the kitchen. The guys got the hint after being kicked out several times and me asking for a curtain; they are building us girls a screen divider for the room. The guys all sleep in the other room. We each have our own bunk bed so we sleep on one level and store our stuff on the other. Yay for living out of a suitcase again.

Maureen is an awesome cook. She cooks good Ugandan food and is learning American food. We tell her every day we love her for cooking for us. Its quite the difference from what the house guys fed us in ntinda. This food has more than one kind of seasoning. Also, I don’t think any of us know how to cook for 12 people 3 times a day, and definitely not over coal stoves.

Maureen also prays out loud in lugandan every morning, starting at 5:30 or 6. I have slept in a room with no one else for several years now. Someone’s voice in my room wakes me up. But im slowly getting used to it. Other than both being females, we don’t have much in common. We speak mostly the same language in English. But I had never heard of “source pans” as she put on the list of needed kitchen utensils.

We are far out from town. If we are lucky, we can catch a boda or taxi to the main road. The locals in the villages have begun to recognize us crazy mzungus. This is basically the jungle; bob has seen monkeys. I see amazing birds every day in every color of the rainbow. Look up pictures of great blue turacos, that’s what I see playing around in our trees, those and hornbills. also we think the African fish eagle lives in one of our trees. You get used to the ants crawling on you – just brush them off. Same with the green and brown spiders, but I brush those off faster. If I turn on my computer at night, I get a swarm of tiny insects trying to get to the light even if its within my mosquito net. Kinda annoying.

We can watch the sun rise over lake Victoria in the morning, and the moon at night. During the day we watch the thunderstorms move across the bay and sometimes even come toward us. One recent night we had a terrific thunderstorm, terrific in the old sense of the word. The kind where each thunder shakes the walls, where the rain runs off the roof in literal sheets of water. Several times the thunder and lightning struck simultaneously, shaking everything. But other nights we can see both the southern cross and the big dipper. Orion is directly above us. The stars are spectacular.

We have internet …sorta. You have to fight for the signal constantly and it might just disappear for several hours. Oh, and if it is there, you can only receive it outside. It takes a lot of patience. Im not even going to try uploading pictures on that bandwidth. Fun times.

We hire some locals during the day to help with moving pieces of the boat. We have had to dredge up our knowledge of levers and basic wheels which we learned in gradeschool. Cuz that’s basically what we use to do work here. We actually moved the several ton hulls using levers – pretty cool actually.

The other day we received several Ugandan university students as workers. We had to figure out where to put them in the already cramped guys room. I didn’t know Uganda had nerds, but here they are. We will see if any of them can do any actual work.
The idea is to have Sunday in town and work the rest of the days. We will see how that works out since we don’t have a car dedicated to us presently. We have to borrow someone’s car from kampala (an hour and half away) or take public transportation.

Oh, and the “facilities” are pit toilets which were built 10 years ago. Not fun times. It gets better with the showers which are a row of cement rooms with a metal roof. You have to bring your own water if you want that. The guys decided to shower in their swim trunks using the hose.

Don’t get the wrong impression, this place might be a natural paradise with lots of insects, but living here is hard. Working is even harder. And the team here has none of the “familiar” to make it that much easier. Welcome to Africa. We all seem to be showing a little more barbarian as time goes on here. America, do you really want us back?