Africa Literacy Conference: Part One!

So in mid-September I had the opportunity to attend Peace Corps' Africa Literacy Conference! It was the first regional literacy conference in Africa, so yay! Uganda hosted because we've had pretty good successes with our 'Teacher Boot Camp' model and other ways of integrating literacy into our teaching practices.

I left on a Saturday and my bus broke down (you can read about that in a different post...) but eventually made it to Kampala around 8pm. It takes generally a two days for me to get anywhere which is not in the North, because it takes all the daylight in one day to get to the capitol. I don't travel at night. Split a room with another volunteer going to the conference. Our rooms at this particular hotel are 20k Ush per night, which works out to about $8, which is almost the lowest you can get (and friendly for our Peace Corps budget!).

We got a ride out to the conference center in a Peace Corps vehicle, which is always preferable to taking public. On the way, we picked up some PC Washington folks, and some PC people from different countries. Also, my program manager (my direct supervisor) and our country director! So we headed out of Kampala to Jinja. They're doing some construction on that road (gasp!) so it took a little longer than we thought. Luckily (or if you have a small wallet, unluckily) being stuck in traffic means food and other items to buy just come to you. People walk up and down traffic jams in the middle of the road, between cars, right up to your window to try to sell you groundnuts, bananas, toilet paper, eggs, newspapers, you name it. If you sit long enough, someone will come by.

The first night was pretty relaxed - met a few people from the other countries and worked with the rest of the PC Uganda team on getting things ready for the conference in the morning. It helped to have a peaceful and beautiful place to be at; it just felt relaxing all the time. Stay tuned for more! Haven't figure out how many parts there will be yet...

Some 'action' shots from the first days of the conference.

View from the balcony!

Views of the Nile from my hotel room (bungalow?).

Books and books and books, oh my! - Books for Africa

Books have been a large part of my life since I can remember. From reading dinosaur books in kindergarden, to Goosebumps in middle school, to the Harry Potter craze which took over everyone I knew. Animorphs, Sideways Stories From Wayside School, Amelia Bedelia The Indian in the Cupboard; I’m sure I could list so many more series and authors given time to reminisce. There were book fairs, and reading competitions, and excited children's librarians, and well stocked libraries. There was Reading Rainbow. There were spelling bees and writing competitions and poetry slams.

As an adult it continues to amaze me how much I can enjoy from the new fiction books coming out, and how much I can learn from all the non-fiction: biographies, histories of conflict, histories of countries, and more, as well as poetry, essays, and well written news articles.

My parents passed on to me a tradition of reading, and in doing so opened up infinite worlds and information.

None of that exists in Uganda.

There are no favorite Ugandan authors, Ugandan book series which everyone talks about, or children who grow up reading books which are written for them. There are no reading clubs or national literacy drives (though we are working on that!) or well known organizations who go out to rural areas to improve literacy. There are no book clubs or newsletter clubs, and there is a general lack of printed material at all in rural areas.

The literacy rate in Uganda is around 70%, but that doesn’t really tell you the scope of the problem.

There are barely any libraries at schools. English class is more focused on grammar and repetition than hands on activities or helping kids learn to read. Phonics is pretty much non-existent.

Part of Peace Corps Uganda’s Education program is to help create or expand libraries and ICT centers.

Myself and nineteen other volunteers are trying to do that for our schools. We are working with an organization called Books for Africa which sends new books to needy places. The books are free, but we need to raise money for the shipping costs. Each dollar we raise means a book put in a primary school or teacher’s college library. 20,000 books! Each school gets 1000 for their library.

When the books arrive, we’re going to have trainings with our staff and students. Trainings on how to handle books, for example, such a "simple" skill that most Western kids would wonder why we are bothering. But kids here do not grow up with people around them reading. Many of their parents are illiterate. We teach how to open and close the books, how to use the table of contents and index, how to store the book, and how to treat the books so they will last a long time. Trainings on how to improve library storage and maintenance, and most importantly, how to set up systems of reading which will continue long after we the volunteers have left.

We are trying to impart the reading culture all of us loved as children to the children here in our villages. We all heard growing up that education and reading are gateways to better lives, and because most of us knew how to read and had decent education, we took it for granted. But here, we see it in action. Children like to learn. You just have to let them.

Here are some current pictures of my library.

Don't be fooled by the number of books you see!!! Many of these books are outdated curriculums, outdated sets of science books, outdated math books (sensing a theme here?). They rarely, if ever, get used, but they stay here because there is a culture of having things, but not using them. This is why we want NEW books in the libraries. Because then they will actually get checked out!

What you don't see on these shelves especially is children's books! I work at a teacher's college, and it's important for my students to get practice reading and planning lessons with children's books before they get in the classroom. Also lacking: any sort of appropriate fiction for my students, who are around my age (a little longer), but have reading levels around junior high or middle school level.

Also, when you donate, you are helping the volunteers who work at primary schools, many of which do not have a building for a library or books at all. When they receive books at these schools, the volunteers are working with their counterparts to create space for a library and a reading culture!

The link for our project, called "One-To-One Literacy Project (Peace Corps Volunteers) - Uganda"   is at this link

https://www.booksforafrica.org/donate/to-project.html?projectId=158

Stay tuned for videos of my staff and students, telling you exactly why they want new books.

Please share this with your friends, your teachers, your parents, your family, whoever you think loves reading and wants to help share that love across the world.
Try to let me know if you're thinking of donating - I want to know everyone who has helped and thank them personally if possible!

Love,

Emily

Hip Hooray, It's All Vol Day!!! (Or rather it was... in August)

So recently (as in like last month?? gosh how time flies) I spent a week hanging out with basically ALL of PC Uganda. We had our annual All Volunteer Conference, and it’s pretty much the best conference/training I’ve been to yet in country. We call it All Vol for short.

Save people who were on vacation, and our GHSB (Global Health ??), all volunteers in Uganda were required to attend. This meant there were about 150 volunteers, all in the same place, from all the different sectors – Health, Economic Development, Education, and newly formed/separated Agriculture. I know my group, which is around 40 people. I know a good portion of the Ed group before me, which is maybe another 20 people. And I know a few random non-Ed volunteers, which maybe puts me up to 80-90 people, still leaving a good portion of the volunteers unknown to me. This is especially true because many of the volunteers I knew have just left, or COS-ed. So many of the volunteers I didn’t know were from our newest group, sworn in for duty around August 7^th.

The conference began with an SNL Weekend Update type opening, with a good mix of silliness and needed information. After that, we began the best scheduling decision I’ve ever seen at one of our conferences – a technique called Open Space.

So volunteers got up and said which sessions they were going to facilitate, whether it was about travel in Uganda, working with Books for Africa to get books in your schools, literacy activities, all the way to things like yoga and American football, hairbraiding, and then back around to serious policy discussions with Peace Corps staff. I think it worked out beautifully, only having hitches if we had to move people around to different rooms and such, but even that didn’t ruffle many feathers.

The conference was technically only two days, with one day on either end relegated for travel. So we really had about two days worth of material, but it was really cool. A lot of people took notes on all the sessions, so that in the coming weeks that information can be disseminated as well as uploaded on PC UG’s private wiki for everyone to access.

It felt like the volunteers owned the conference, and it was a new feeling for a lot of us.

We also had Peace Corps Prom the last night! In which many of us bought ridiculous dresses/suit coats/outfits from our local clothes market. Some choice pictures which I stole blatantly from others’ Facebooks.

Will continuously add pictures as I get better internet.

This is the Bus Ride That Never Ends: Why I’m Avoiding Gaa Gaa Buses For the Forseeable Future

Hey cats and kittens, lemme tell you about the two longest bus rides I’ve ever been on and how they were within two weeks of each other, and how I’m not going to take that bus anymore.

The first was on my return to site after going to our All Volunteer Conference (more on that later). Imagine you are me, because I will be telling this story in the second person. Deal with it.

You specifically take buses which leave early in the morning because it takes 9-10 hours to get up north. You leave the hotel at 6AM in order to walk to bus park in order to get a seat on a bus leaving at 7AM. Good so far. The bus leaves relatively on time. Also good. Less than two hours outside of Kampala, the bus breaks down.

 This is how you know your bus is broken:

Instead of stopping momentarily (with the bus running) to drop someone off at their stop, the bus is turned off.

The turn man (like mechanic/loader/person who assists with turns in the city) is underneath the bus

The conductor and driver are out at front pointing at the bus

Angry Ugandans are yelling at the bus staff

Some passengers immediately seek alternate transport (taxis, bodas, etc)

So the bus breaks, it’s like that for maybe an hour, then you start moving again. Hurray! You think that maybe it was a minor problem and you’ll just be slightly delayed. You are wrong.

After two hours the bus breaks down again, and this time it stretches into three hours waiting by the side of the road. You take your things off the bus, thinking a replacement bus is coming. It is not. There are other buses from the same company your bus is from, but they are going other places, meaning it would only be a matter of time before you’d have to get off and pay more for a taxi (or probably two or three taxis) to get where you’re going.

You sit and drink a pop and eat some hardboiled eggs, because there is of course no real food in the village/trading center where you have broken down. Every time a bus comes by you think it is this fake replacement bus, but really there are just a hell of a lot of bus companies in Uganda, going every which way.

Then they ask you to reboard this bus, the one which has broken down, which you are convinced is not a good idea. But you get back on, and eventually you reach your destination, 15 hours after leaving the capital city. You cannot possibly get back to your site (another two hours from the city you’ve just arrived in) so you stay with another volunteer and head back in the morning, still pretty exhausted.

Guess what? Now you’re going to a neat literacy conference in the East of the country, so you have to take a bus back to the capital. Stupidly, you take the same bus company thinking maybe the other time was an anomaly. You are again, wrong.

The bus this time makes it almost halfway through the trip before they pull over and stop. You think maybe, just maybe, if you remain calm, they will fix it quickly and you will keep going, like your positive thoughts will flow out into the world and fix everything – WRONG. They give up on fixing it because it requires a part they don’t have and don’t carry with them regularly. You are now waiting for the later bus which is coming behind you. You wait for three hours, during which a drunk/mentally disturbed (or both) man tries to tell you that you’re Korean/Chinese and that he is a Korean trained commando who will protect you from other men, because you are his madam.

On the plus side, you do end up having a pleasant conversation with a University professor who is from Uganda, but spent some time in Canada and the last 30 years teaching in Lesotho. He’s pretty cool, and pretty chill, and so keeps you good company for a while. You also have made two friendship bracelets so far in the trip, and given one of them to the bus’s conductor.

The other bus finally comes; there are only a few seats, and you get one of them! It’s a tight fit, but you at least left behind the broken bus and are now on your way. Also, when you were leaving the other on the side of the road, the bus coming the other way (from the capital) stopped to give the broken bus a new part so they could fix it. You didn’t really think they’d be able to fix it, which is why you boarded this new bus.

The new bus goes for half an hour, then stops momentarily at a gas station for food and people to go to the bathroom. Then your old bus pulls up beside, apparently having fixed itself. Maybe. You’re told to get back on the old bus and you respond that you’d rather ride a bus which has not broken once. Then the conductor of the new bus says if you are in a hurry, you should get on the old bus. Why you might ask? Because now this new bus has a mechanical problem. You heard correctly. You have a choice between a broken bus, or a broken bus. These are your choices. You have not enough money and certainly not enough language skills to take any other form of transportation.

So you get back on the old bus, certain you have made a mistake, you have lost your coveted window seat and are now sitting next to a mother and her five-year-old who only stops crying when asleep. And she doesn’t sleep the whole time. And she’s sick. And sneezing/coughing everywhere.

The bus, surprisingly, does not break down again, and you make it to the capitol about 4 hours behind schedule. Huzzah!

Congratulations, you have just lived my last two bus rides. Isn’t it fun to travel?  : )

Stay tuned for more entries about our All Volunteer Conference, and the Literacy Conference I'm currently attending!

What's the Happity Haps

Hello all! I’ve been absent for a while, mainly because things are happening at my school! This is exciting, and my plan is basically to throw bunch of balls in the air so that I can focus on many things at the same time. Those who know me know I love to multitask, and I’m forcing myself to do it so that I don’t go crazy.

I’m part of a 20 volunteer grant involved in getting new books donated to our schools as part of a program called Books for Africa. This in turn is helping me motivate the librarians at my school to move old, outdated books out of the library and into a storage room. Why not use the books for raw material or burn them, you may ask? (We burn a lot of trash here.) One of the librarians told me that the Ministry of Education recycles a lot of old books, so they go to the school and pick them up to take them to the recycling place somewhere in Kampala (or Entebbe?). So I’m planning to meet with my principal to work out a storage place where they can go. This isn’t even thinking about the larger plan, which is moving the library to a larger building (right now it’s cramped and dark and not cleaned very well). But that’s for the future.

I’ve started teaching ICT – Information Communication Technology, for those who were as confused as I was when I first heard it. Basically it means computers. Until this week, I was only teaching theory, as we hadn’t tested any of the computers or husks of computers which were hanging out in the lab. The second man in charge for ICT came back from his university studies this month, and he’s been crazy helpful. He actually knows a lot more about computer hardware, and especially power regulation in a country where power is not reliable or steady.

PICTURES

The parts which are working. 

 One of the working computers, set up so we can install some software.

 The parts which are not working. Looks like a lot of Googling for me. Is it worth it to fix keyboards and mouses?

 The other working tower which is not hooked up at the moment. We had to move a hard drive from a different tower into this one to get it to work.

 Our power setup. The extension cord is running to solar. We found out the limits of this, as the battery died after about 5 hours of desktop use/people charging their laptops/phones/etc.

Solar batteries. 

Solar controller - on/off switch and battery/load indicator lights.

I’m teaching ICT at night, because the current class schedule is insane and doesn’t allow for ICT during the day. Or rather they’re not willing to give up time during the day. I’m teaching 3 nights a week, in order to fit in all the Year 2’s, which is the only year I’m teaching right now. The students are split into three groups called streams, and so each night is supposed to be a stream. The largest attendance I had was on Night One, but after that it’s steadily dropped off.

Many students are studying for exams, but I suspect many of them have been waiting for the computers to start working before they start coming. The students call these practicals, and not a night goes by when someone doesn’t ask “Madam, when will we have  practicals?” However, in a Year 2 of almost 200 students, only about 62 total have come to two weeks of classes. So I figure I’ll give those students first dibs on the “practicals”, while the rest will wait and learn some sort of theory first before jumping in.

When I started teaching, I didn’t want to go too low, so I didn’t define some basic terms like ‘mouse’ or ‘keyboard.’ It became evident that while many of the students had heard of computers, they had no idea what anything was called or how to use any of it. So the next lesson I defined things, and still it takes them a while to remember the terms and how devices work together. It’s a bit unfair to them really, that the outside world of applying for jobs or moving up in their lives is becoming more based on computers, while they don’t really receive good computer instruction at all during their education.

I’ve also been teaching Maths, though the way that happens has changed 2 or 3 times since the term started. At the beginning of term, we were grading exams, and so classes were sort of a free-for-all. I hadn’t been assigned topics so I wasn’t really teaching, just grading exams and trying to keep my house in order (turns out I’m super bad at cleaning house every day). Then we organized a slot on the timetable (schedule) for me to teach, and  I was subsequently out of town for various reasons (not on purpose) on that day. The one day I came back and taught in my schedule was a good day. Then the Director of Studies announced we were combining all the streams to teach in mass classes because all the departments had too many subjects and not enough time really. So that week ended in me teaching Math for 2.5 hours, trying to cover as many subjects as possible.

Now the timetable has changed again, because the school is playing host to some British visitors, who have been giving high priority. They are now taking two hours in the morning to discuss instructional materials, theory, and early childhood development. It seems no one on the staff besides the principal knew that they were coming. Even they were confused at the timing, asking why they were teaching during exam prep. But they had already come and couldn’t really go back, so the schedule was shifted.

I’m also attempting to work on HIV/AIDS awareness at my school. We’re working with the Anti-AIDS club at my school to arrange some activities for close to the end of term. But it’s not finalized yet so I don’t want to spoil the fun!

That’s all school-wise I can think of at the moment, but I did want to mention that I white-water rafted the Nile for the 4^th of July weekend with a bunch of other volunteers, and it was definitely worth the obscene amount of money I spent over that weekend. It was loads of fun, and there’s a professional photographer that goes along the river, so there’s some pretty great pictures of me falling out of the raft. Class 5 rapids baby! I’ll be sure to upload them when I have the time/internet.

I don’t take a lot of pictures, but I’ll try to be better about it.

Until next time,

stay well.

A Tale of Two Lives

Living as a Peace Corps Volunteer has many juxtapositions. Between your American education and their own disjointed, interrupted education. Between your “salary” and the money they live on. The way you are able to travel throughout their country and the way many people in your village have never left their district. The largest differences are obvious when you travel to the capitol.

For Peace Corps Uganda, Volunteers occasionally travel to the capitol to see Peace Corps doctors, for various meetings about projects, or to travel through the city to get to other parts of the country. I think this is similar for other PC countries as well. For me, I have to travel to Kampala to get anywhere in the country other than the North.

Usually you are not alone in Kampala. Others are there for their own reasons. So you end up eating with them, watching movies with them, going to the mall with them. You live almost like you were living at home. It’s a nice break from the village, but the more you go back and forth, the more you marvel at the differences.

A child born in Kampala may never travel to the village, though their parents will surely try to get them to see their ancestral land. They live in a world of consistent electricity, Western influence, plentiful food women in trousers, good roads, lots of cars, lots of foreigners, and lots of English. It remind s me of the difference between a city like New York or Chicago, and a small town in maybe Iowa or Nebraska. But the difference is even more striking. Around 15%-20% of Uganda is illiterate, and most likely a larger percentage have limited literacy skills. It’s difficult for them to save any money, have any say in their government, travel very far from their homes, or receive a good education.

I feel very guilty going to the capitol for long stretches of time, but it is sometimes unavoidable, both for official reasons and because for mental health, I need to leave my site sometimes. I think it’s difficult to compare your life at site and your life while traveling as well as your life back home. We are here to attempt to live like the people we are serving, but surely that can only go so far. Some volunteers “go village” and truly integrate, only emerging for trainings and few other things. But I would say the vast majority cannot change, at the core, who America has made them.

This is not to say that we cannot learn from our host country or cannot integrate. It’s just that there is a limit to those activities which has nothing to do with how much we try.

I Went to a Wedding!

So this Sunday, I went to my first Ugandan wedding! First, some background information.

Weddings here are notorious for being very long, starting in the morning with a long religious service and with the reception starting in the afternoon and going until the evening. There are three main types of weddings – traditional, church wedding, and the Muslim wedding (niqa). A traditional wedding includes the tradition of bride price, meaning that the male relatives of the groom and male relatives of the bride get together to decide what the bride is worth in terms of barter (mainly livestock but can also include money or houses). A traditional wedding also may not be recognized in the church or by the government, instead is just done by the villagers between themselves. There may not be a big ceremony and dress code is probably traditional African fabrics.

A bride price can even happen with more modern church weddings. This was the kind of wedding I attended, but I didn’t ask about the bride price. I believe the bride was Catholic and the groom was Anglican. This type of wedding more closely resembles the American idea of a wedding – some religious service to start, and then a reception for friends and family.

A Muslim wedding, called a niqa, is something I don’t know a whole lot about, never having been to one. But from what my friends tell me they are also long, with lots of people talking. It’s most common for Muslim men to take multiple wives here versus other religions, so you may be attending the wedding of the second or third wife while the first and second wives sit looking on. Dress code is more conservative at these events.

General picture of the wedding.

So the wedding started at church, and this part I did not attend. It was in the local language, Lugbara, and the neighbor I was attending with was also not going until the reception. This worked out well for me because I didn’t really like the idea of sitting in church for three hours listening to something I couldn’t understand.

The reception was held at the primary school next to my college, as the bride is a teacher at the school. They had sectioned off an entrance way with mesh over most of it except for a small part for people to enter through. They put down red carpet for people to walk on as well. The bride and groom arrived in a car with lots of ribbons and balloons tied to it, as well as a leading car (the college truck) honking and playing music.

The couple enters solemnly, making their way to their provided tent, while the rest of the wedding party, including women whose sole job it seemed to be to yip loudly and shake palm leaves, are dancing and shouting behind the couple. All the guests are either seated in their own tents, or up standing trying to get a view of the couple and take a picture or video. They are also dancing and singing.

Bride and groom enter the reception.

This is one thing I love about this culture. Music is a part of their daily life. It’s a part of the big and small occasions, for happiness and sadness. At funerals they don’t even wear black, but they wear nice dress up clothes and play loud dance music. I don’t think I’ve heard a Ugandan song without a booming bass line to shake your booty to. It’s simply accepted as a fact that you dance as a Ugandan, or that you sing as a Ugandan. For men it’s not seen as feminine or emasculating, and for women it’s not seen as trying to be a diva or show off your crazy dance moves. You’re all showing off together, as a big family.

The bride was wearing a Western style wedding dress, large and white with a veil and a large white necklace. All the bridesmaids, though their dresses were handmade, no doubt were fashioned after Western style as well. The groomsmen were also in tuxes and matching ties. It makes me wonder what they wore 100 years ago to weddings. Most likely the traditional dresses and kitenge (kah-TENG-gay or kih-TENG-gay).

You can sort of see the bridesmaids dresses here.

As everyone gets seated, the MC made some announcements which I didn’t understand because they were in Lugbara, but I did catch the part about “men’s bathrooms over here, women’s over there”. The best man and a few other people made speeches, and there were a few rituals put on by the bride and groom. They set out a chair and a woven mat on the ground in front of it. The groom sat in the chair while the bride sat on the mat. She poured water over his hands for washing and fed him food, then wiped his mouth. This is to signify the women serving her husband. After this the groom also fed his bride, but she remained seated on the ground with him in the chair. This is common here. I noticed it with my host family as well. Whenever my dad was not home, my mom would sit in a chair and the kids would sit on mats. When he came home, my mom would sit on the mats with the kids.

 Then it was time to eat!

Just realized I didn’t take pictures of the food because I have gotten used to it, but I will try to update this post with pics from daily life - since they eat it every day!

Enyasa, the staple of the West Nile region, is made of dried cassava pound into a flour, mixed with water, and then stirred and cooked for a long time. It doesn’t really have a taste other than starch, and the texture is not really comparable to anything in the States. The closest thing I can think of is if you took bread and made it the consistency of bread dough, but much stickier and able to hold together more. Most people fill up half their plate with this, much like Westerners do with rice or pasta.

There’s always some sort of meat at large events, usually beef, but sometimes they’ll have fish. The beef comes in two pots, one for what I would consider “regular chunks” like you’d make stew out of, and the other pot has parts of the animal that I didn’t know were eaten. Intestines, mainly, and I know because of the little bumps sticking up from the meat. Then there’s beans, sometimes rice, and this time they had cabbage! They also usually have pop (Pepsi, Fanta, Stoney – ginger ale, Sprite, Mountain Dew).

There’s no table service, in fact there’s no tables as we are all seated in chairs squished together under tents. So each tent takes its turn getting food, buffet style. We eat, and then a woman comes around to collect the plates. I hear later from my neighbor Felista that the cooks were supposed to bring out the bull’s head, and whichever woman dances with it on her head is the next one to get married.

Then there’s the presentation of gifts! Unlike a wedding in the States with a gift table,  the gifts are brought in the same way the wedding party is – with much pomp and circumstance and of course, dancing!!! People bring money, goats, chickens, tables, chairs, and at this wedding I saw them carry in a queen bed complete with four posts, mattress, and mosquito net! Don’t forget the yipping ladies and the shouting and the music. And the conga line of people bringing gifts.

Afore mentioned bed that was carried into the reception.

Entrance to the reception, including African conga line!

Felista was presenting a cash gift from the local women’s savings group and asked me to go up with her and two other women from the college. So we walked around to the entrance way and danced in – didn’t take a video, sorry! One of my fellow teachers did take a video so I’ll try to get it from him.

After this we left the wedding as it had started to rain a little bit. The tent we were sitting under partially blew off the frame and the wind kicked up like crazy. They were trying to wrap it up quickly actually because they had predicted it was going to rain.

Overall I like the communal feel of events here, much like daily life here. It’s like admitting that everyone is connected, and everyone is welcome. The wedding was fun even if I didn’t understand most of it, because I understood what was important – we are a large family, and we’re happy and celebrating with you for the creation of your new family. Joyous day. Here's some more pictures.

Mainly I was trying to get a picture of all the cakes, but also got a picture of the woman who was dancing around with some animal part stuck on a stick. Or it's possibly enyasa. Who knows. Lots of the cakes were given as gifts to the groom's family and bride's family. Not many people bake here (wheat flour is expensive) so cake is kind of a big deal.

Children dressed as navy officers?? Super cute anyhow.

I just loved this woman's dress.