Homestay has been interesting.
When we all got back from Future Site
Visit, we met our families at our training centre in the afternoon.
We talked for a little while. Then we went home with them to start
our homestay living. One of my brothers and one of my sisters met me
at the centre and walked me home.
My family, excluding me, is 13 people.
Six boys, five girls, and mom and dad. They aren't all brothers and
sisters; some are cousins but in Africa, that basically means brother
or sister after a while. The boys are Johnson, 2, Junior, 10?,
Freddy, 12, Godfrey, 19?, Brian, 19?, Adema (who goes by Robin),
22?. The girls are Daisy, 8, Joy, Sanyu, Gertrude, and Barbara, 20.
Mom is Lenia and Dad is Roy. Going from living with just my Mom at
home to living with a very large family is to say at the very least,
overwhelming. I've also never had brothers and grew up most of my
life with my Dad kind of being in and out, so figuring out those
relationships has been somewhat difficult.
The family keeps two dogs, but not
really in the American sense of pets. In Uganda dogs are more for
security than anything else, and not pampered like in the US.
Children may hit them with sticks or shoo them away from food (since
kitchens are outside). They eat what they can find or sometimes the
family will give them scraps from meals. During the day they are
usually chained up in the “backyard” (behind my building) and let
out at night so they can protect the compound.
Their house consists of three
buildings, a main building where my parents and the girls and small
children stay, another one which they just finished where the older
boys stay, and my building, which has my room and a separate room
(separate locking doors to the outside) where a few sisters and the
smallest boy stay. The grouping of buildings are commonly referred to
as compounds, just because it's typically not one large house, but
smaller buildings where more buildings can be added on when there is
more money.
I wake up at 6:30 or 6:45 every day. I
sleep with earplugs in because there are a multitude of noises which
happen during the night, including dogs from various compounds
barking at each other or at noises their hear, goats crying out in
the night, and loud music pumping from various sources around the
community. Usually even with the earplugs, I'll wake up in the middle
of the night to the dogs or to the music or to a radio in my
compound, because one of my earplugs has fallen out. I can usually
get back to sleep pretty easily.
When I wake up sometimes, it's to the
radio that my building-mate/sister is playing outside. Everyone here
listens to the radio, and I mean everyone. They listen to it at crazy
volumes, and sometimes they'll have two radio stations going at once.
To me it sounds like noise, but I've learned they have become
accustomed to it and have extremely good selective hearing. Sometimes
my mom will call one of my sisters from inside the building while
we're outside and the radio is blaring, and my sister will respond.
Mostly I don't even hear it when she calls.
After waking up I run to the latrine,
because for some reason as soon I wake up I have to pee like I have
never had to pee before. I am not alone in this after talking to a
couple of my fellow Volunteers. We have a few theories, one being
that there is more water in the food, since everything is cooked in a
sauce/paste. Another is that we just drink more water here than we do
at home. One of my theories is that it just takes longer to go to the
bathroom here. At home you open and close a door, and then sit down.
Here you grab your toilet paper, if it's dark you grab the
flashlight, unlock your door, and walk maybe 50 ft. All that takes
time that my bladder is not used to. One of my friends said that he
gets up in the middle of the night to go, which I generally just
avoid doing because of the abundance of mosquitoes.
The latrines consist of two stalls in a
small tin roof building where the doors don't lock. When you go in,
there's a small rectangular hole about six inches by four inches. Aim
well! There's a wooden rectangular piece on the end of what resembles
a long two-by-four that you use to cover the hole when you leave the
latrine. This keeps the flies down, but my family seems to do it off
and on and not really on any regular routine.
When I'm done at the latrine I grab
some soap from my room and then pour water over my hands from one of
the large jerrycans outside to wash my hands. Sometimes there is
“running” water from an outside faucet, but depending on how many
people are using it, it runs out by the end of the day. At that
point, my sisters go to fetch water from the borehole (well with a
large pump attached to it).
After this I go back to my room to try
to prepare my bag and the clothes I'm going to wear for the day,
while my sisters get water for my bath. I've tried to tell them that
I want to do it on my own, but they spoil visitors here and so far
I've only been able to fetch water for myself once. Sometimes they do
it even before I'm even awake so I can't really say no. Then it's
time for a bucket bath! Exactly what it sounds like. I've bought a
small plastic cup that's usually used for drinking, but I use it to
rinse my back because I can't get the whole cupping water in your
hands thing down.
Then I rush to eat breakfast in about
fifteen minutes and walk over to another volunteer's (Jamie's)
homestay so that we can walk to school together. We used to walk with
a third volunteer, Joseph, but we ended up being on different time
schedules in the morning so now it's just Jamie and I, and we all get
to our training center around the same time. Now we end up walking
with a different volunteer, JJ, who lives a little farther from us
but meets us on the main road.
It's about a 30 minute walk every
morning to school, through multiple villages, across one bridge and
crossing next to one bar. At some point in our morning walk, a crowd
of small children will appear, usually chanting something like “Mundu
how are you?” where Mundu is white person. We've told them our
Lugbara names – Jamie is Ayikoru and I'm Letaru, both meaning happy
or happiness – and sometimes they use those, but not the same kids
show up every morning. They follow us for a while and grab our hands
and try to feel if our skin is different from theirs because the
color difference is so drastic. They usually run back home when some
adult yells at them in Lugbara or when we reach some invisible line
that they don't cross. Jamie and I keep walking in what seems like
people's front yards, but there's an obvious well worn trail.
We cross down a slope that has banana
trees and rice paddies at the bottom and cross the bridge over a
stream and start the long climb up the hill out of our village area.
That feels like the longest part of my day (unless I walk into town
that day). At the top of the hill we cross a road where there's a bar
on our left and we keep walking through some fields and reach another
road, where we cross behind our training center and take sort of a
back route to get to the front gate. We used to take a more
roundabout way before we discovered the back route.
I'll talk more about language training
in my next post but it's been pretty challenging and fun.
For the majority of language training
we've been getting out anywhere between 3pm and 5pm. So then we walk
back home and hang out and talk with our families. Part of the
homestay experience is having them teach us language and work with us
on language outside of class. I think most of the families then ask
us to bathe before dinner (because at this point we are covered in
dust), then we eat dinner and can usually hang out with the family
after dinner or go in your room and do your own thing. We've got both
extremes in our group where some people spend a lot of time with our
family, and some people hardly any. It has a lot to do with
personality.
I've tried to talk to my family a lot
about where I come from. They tell me that it's so cold that if they
went there, they would die. I haven't told them about how people live
in Minnesota, if they can't even handle Michigan. We talk about what
crops are available here that aren't at home and how the cooking is
different. Most Ugandans cook outside with charcoal on small wire
baskets called sigiris, or they have holes made in a slab of concrete
where they put charcoal and place pots over them. Baking is done
using a dutch oven, which is basically like placing smaller pots
inside larger ones that have sand so that the heat is more
consistent. Then you place something on top of both pots and put
coals on top so there's heat from both sides.
A lot of the kids in my family love
American pop and rap music, a lot of which I don't have on my iPod,
so I just play them other music. A few of the kids really liked
Flogging Molly, an Irish (Scottish?) punk band. They thought it was
hilarious and could not understand a word.
We've also talked about some American
politics, taxes and culture in general, mostly with the older kids.
For them, it's strange to meet someone my age who doesn't have kids
or isn't married. A lot of the kids go to school in Kampala (the
capital city, about 8 hours away by bus), so they are introduced to
different ideas of family and culture. The culture in the cities is
much different than in the villages, much like the culture in
American cities is different than farm culture.
These are the pictures and videos I
have of my family (and random neighborhood children who like to
dance). A lot of my family I didn't manage to capture on camera. The
kids always want to be on camera, but my older host siblings are
always doing something (the girls, cooking, cleaning, washing and the
boys off playing at another family's house or in town somewhere).
Plus I don't take a lot of pictures naturally, so I was trying to
force myself to take pictures so that I would remember this
experience. Here's what I've got!
Passionfruit juice which my mom makes. I wish I could take jugs of it home with me to America.
My homestay mom, Ilenia. She's awesome.
An example of what I might get for tea: rice, bread and butter, cucumbers, eggs, tea.
Fish and chips. Literally.
Close up on the fish.
Another tea meal: watermelon, avocado, bananas, carrots, passionfruit juice.
I probably should have asked, but I think this is savory bananas cooked in a sort of meat sauce. I didn't like this one that much.
Bananas, carrots, bread and butter.
Jackfruit! This stuff is pretty good. If it's not quite ripe it smells weird, but it's delicious. It was the original flavor for Juicyfruit gum.
Chapati, chips, sausage, beef.
My youngest sister, Daisy.
The main compound from the back as you come in from the path.
The kitchen!
The main building from the front.
The building where I stay, across from the main building. My room is the window on the right.
The building next to mine where the older boys stay.
Another sister, Barbara.
Isaac, who works in the family's field (unsure if he's related?). They all call him Lago.
Compound as a whole.
Toilets.
Clothesline.
My homestay Dad, Roy.
A shirt my mom got me because I said I liked hers. It's short sleeve and pretty comfy.
