Nze Rory and My First Days in Uganda

Christmas Eve! Actually it only hit me just now that most of my family, about 20 people probably, including kids, are at my mom’s house celebrating the holiday. Although I miss them and the celebration, I’m pretty darn happy here! Tomorrow we will celebrate Christmas, starting with going to church at 8:30 am. I don’t know what all the festivities will hold, but Lucy, the other Dutch volunteer have combined our gifts to present to the family and others living at the house.

The house I’m staying in in Kalisizo, Uganda.

Prossy invited Lucy and I to a celebration tomorrow afternoon at her friend’s house, which we are also bringing a gift.

Anyways, enough about Christmas, because I’m more interested in the whole Uganda thing! Today was interesting and good, although I’m still jetlagged so my energy level was lower than I wished.

After breakfast, Lucy took me on a walk to the nearest town, Kalisizo, from our village called Kisunku. It is 3 km away (a little over a mile). It is a gorgeous walk, homes scattered here at there, lots of farms, mostly banana trees and corn and potatoes. Also lots of mango and jackfruit trees. The roads are mostly red dirt, just like in Liberia. The plants are quite different than in Liberia, no coconuts for example. 🙁 But still the trees and vegetation are gorgeous, even conifer (pine like) trees. When we got to Kalisizo, we went to the hotel. It looks like a beautiful, nice hotel with what seems to be a very nice restaurant also. It has very nice wifi in the lobby, so we sat there for over an hour drinking coffee and doing our work. The power died at one point so we worked off line and then packed up and went further into town so that I could by a couple drug store items.

A flat palm tree? that we pass on the way to the hotel.

When we were at the drug store, which had hydrogen peroxide but not rubbing alcohol, Lucy noticed the power was on. The clerk at the store told us that it was that the hydro was back on so we headed back to the hotel. We sat and worked for several more hours. I was able to get some stuff done for my website as well as Godfrey’s and some documents that I’m working on for Godfrey but also for the other organizations I will be at. It felt like a very productive day.

We headed home around 2:30 pm. There are lots of motor bikes, called boda bodas, on the roads closer to town. All the roads around here are dirt but they are WAY better than the roads in Liberia. These roads are very smooth and manageable, where as the Liberian dirt roads were chaotic, full of rocks and pits and grooves and bumps and you name it. I am in shock of how close the motor bikes and cars get to us walkers. It felt like some motor bikes went by 2 inches or less from my body. Yikes. There are also a lot of bicycles which, I’m pretty sure I didn’t see a single bike in Liberia. In Uganda, they drive in the UK way, on the left side of road and the steering wheel on the right side of the car.

This is the view from the nearby hill.

Passion fruit! These are very common around here, and man are they good.

For dinner we had sweet potatoes, matoke (which is smashed, cooked, unsweet bananas) and a peanut soup. It seems to me that these unsweet bananas are not the same as plantains. The people here don’t know the word plantain and the shape of the unsweet banana is much smaller. The peanut soup seemed like a light purplish brown puree but it was SO good. I think it will be one of my new favorites.

I am feeling very good about things. Over the past several weeks, every once in awhile I’m just shocked and awed by the fact that I’m finally in Africa, somewhere where I’ve wanted to be for so very long. Yesterday when I woke up from my nap, which was the first time waking up in my new bed, for a few seconds I thought “Where am I?” but I had a feeling of it being totally normal and acceptable and not uncomfortable to not know where I am. Then I was like “Oh yeah. I’m at Godfrey’s in Uganda.”