Raftin the Nile!

SO.. this weekend we also decided to travel down to jinja to do white water rafting down the nile! yeah, i have swam in the NILE!!!!  it was so much fun! our guide's name was Duncan. He was originally from england but had lived in New Zealand for the last 5 years and he does rafting as a job just because he thinks its fun!! after rafting and experiencing the excitement myself i think i could take that life on.  except it only pays 60 dollars a trip... which is livable here in uganda so that works...

i think me and kelsey (the girl to the right of me) have the best faces on!!!

when we hit this i was in the very back left and eventually every fell on top of me... IT WAS AWESOME!!!!

This was the the funnest rafting trip, it will always be remembered.

Also, sadly i dont' have a picture of this but when we got back to our hostel there was a kayak that was tipped upsidedown on the roof of the restaurant and there is a rope tied around it and i grabbed the rope and lifted myeslf into the kayak and hung upside down for a bit. it was so much fun! and i did it all by myself... yeah i felt pretty strong, but it was late at night and no one had their camera so we weren't able to take a pic of it. sad day, cause it was really fun!!!

True African life

So there is so much to blog about and so I will attempt to explain in as much detail as possible why my heart has been sold to Mbale Uganda.

On Monday of last week we prepared early in the morning to go to the Bunabuyoka Village. I’m pretty sure I have mentioned this place. It is where we are going to be building a health clinic and finishing a school and doing some Entrepreneurship classes. So we are preparing to take all of the gear that we will need to survive 3 days living in an African village. We talked about how we were going to be True Africans by the time of this trip. So we decided to test out how we were going to take our mattresses on our Boda Boda... This is our practice round....

And then we decided we would let the locals figure it out!! our ideas weren't the best...

When we got to the village i loved every minute of it!!!  When we got there we had so much fun. We hauled rocks down from this hill so that they could make the foundation for the health clinic and the floor of the school. We were so tired and the kids during recess wanted to help us so they picked up rocks that were often times bigger than themselves... But they were so excited to help!!!!

Also I am loving the local food here... we get to eat with our hands and i am really liking the posho( which is the white stuff) and matoke (which is smushed bananas).... can you tell?











Then there is a boy named joseph, at first we thought his name was yusef... but upon further investigation im pretty sure it is joseph.

He was the most excited and happy boy! I would squeeze him till his eye pop out. He became my best buddy. My favorite thing was when we would be walking up the hill to go and get more rocks i would feel this hand slip into mine and i would look down and see him staring back at me with his inquisitive eyes. my heart melts every time!
He is also a huge dancer! Every time music is on he cant stop moving his body and he doesn't move the way an african usually does. He goes crazy and moves all of his body parts. i love it! we had so much fun together. It got to the point that i would wait to feel that sweet little hand to reach for mine and then i knew i could climb that treacherous mountain again to bring more rocks down ( i realized at that point that i was getting a glimpse of what it was like to build the Salt Lake Temple)
He started to be my guide and out walk in front of me and hold my hand so that i wouldn't fall... He is only 4 years old! how do these kids get to be so old at such a young age. they are so incredible and sweet i don't think i will ever find kids like this anywhere else! I love them!!!!

This is vikki and Brenda, their english is great and they loved to teach us all of their games.. one was like tug-o-war and i couldn't stop laughing. i

The pile of rocks that we carried down from the mountain

i think they were trying to do the Shaka but couldn't quite get their fingers to cooperate  :) 

My man Jospeh! i love him!!!!

Bunabuyoka... THE pearl of Africa

So... i finally got to skype my mom today and one of the first things she informed me of is how bad i am at updating my blog. So i am going to try and recap all of the incredible things that have happened to me in the last few days. so... here it goes.

last week we met with an organization called Christian Faith in Action. They are a non profit organization that works with people in really small villages. Help worked with them last year in a village called Bunabuyoka. We had decided to work with them again. They are in need of a Health Clinic and a roof on the school that they built. The village sounded so great and the people sounded incredible. but i don't think i was prepared for just how amazing they are!

We had met with CFA and decided to go to the village on monday to talk with the village leaders so that we were all on the same page about what we can do and what we expect the village to do. 

So on monday we woke up at 6:30 AM and got in taxi that would take us an hour out of Mbale to another district ( county) called Manafa. In the taxi which could be renamed a Volkswagen bus with 22 people all scrammed inside. 

Then there was a hike that was suppose to last 30 minutes, but that was only the case if you grew up in the jungles of Africa and were use to running in the hills every day! so it took us an hour and a half. It was very treacherous, it was almost straight up hill the whole time. so by the time we got the top i was EXHAUSTED!!!!! and we still had another 20 minutes hike, which thankfully was a stroll to the place where the school was and where our meeting was set to happen. 

When we first got to the top of the hill there was a group of men that had drums and they were going to accompany us to the part of the village we needed to go to. Which was fun. it was like a welcoming committee. Children from all over the place came running to the path to see what all the commotion was about and i think they were even more astonished to find a huge group of Muzungu's walking in their village. They were so cute. A lot of the village had never seen a white person before and if they had it was from last years Help team so it was still very new to them. They were either excited and wanted to come hold our hands. Or they were curiously terrified. 

As we got closer to the school we started to hear children's voices singing. It was the cutest, most sweet voices i had ever heard. They were welcoming us to their village. It was a very special experience. They sang for about 15 minutes and i honestly don't think i could describe to you the happiness and light that i felt at that moment. The spirit was so strong! just listen to their voices! 

My heart melted at this point and I felt like  I had come home. It was interesting. Everyone in the village kept saying that they wanted us to feel at home and I already did! Once we got into the building the kids put on a little more of a performance for us...

Then the meeting began and we talked about all of the different things that we wanted to do, and every time we said something everyone would clap. Didn't really know how to respond to that. So we negotiated for about 2 hours to figure out the logistics of getting the school finished, which needed a roof and floor. Also how to construct the Health clinic. We concluded that they would build the walls and then we would provide the roof and the floor for the clinic as well.... we are also going to be helping them to build the health clinic so i will be knowing how to brick lay. Im excited about that. we spent the entire day there and i loved every minute of it! i cant wait to go back, we will be going there on sunday night and staying there until tuesday!!!

This is a picture of a sweet girl that couldn't stop dancing even when she was sitting on the bench. SO CUTE!

Another project that we are doing, which i am actually a team lead for is putting in place and training the Namatala community Water filters. I am really excited about this project! They actually had a blog post from the Organization that donated the filters for us last year and what they actually did was copy and paste the email that i sent them asking for more filters and put a few of the pictures that i sent them with it. Its a great cause. Im really excited about it! The village is also great in maintaining it and managing the water filters which i think is the best part of it! i was so terrified that i was going to come to Africa and do one of those feel good projects that when i leave have no impact on the village or leave the people worse than they were before, but the projects that we are working with is working with the communities in making sure that they are sustained and continue to be effective when we leave ( which at this point i don't want to ever leave....) 

 This is the link to the blog.... RainCathcer provides clean water filters to Namatala slums in Uganda | RainCatcher
www.raincatcher.org

So that is a brief snap shot of what i will be working on this summer, i promise to be better at posting and being more detailed. I love every minute of what i am doing and have really started to feel like i have found where i belong!!!!! 

Boda Boda

There are only a few ways of getting around in Mbale. One is walking, which is nice when it is not blisteringly hot... the other is a taxi which  an often used mode of transportation but it is a little more expensive. So the most common form of transportation is a Boda Boda. I would say a boda boda is a mix between a scooter and a motorcycle. It has one guy that is the driver and you can fit a good amount of people. I have seen two grown woman with a baby on the back, and the woman sit side saddle. which makes sense because you are in a skirt. but i haven't ventured to try the boda boda side saddle. But i did document one of our boda adventures and let me tell you, it was fun. 

We were going to the Namatala village but we didn't know exactly where we were going go we were going to meet with a man named Moses that was going to meet us at the shell gas station and then we were going to go from there. 

We flagged down a Boda driver whose name is John and we told him we needed him to take us to the Shell station near the Namatala Slum. He had a little bit of a glazed over eye look and then said, ok 2,000 schillings for both. this was pretty reasonable because we were going outside of town. So we jumped on, fulling trusting that they knew where we were going. Once we got to the first shell station it didn't look like it was where we were suppose to be so we told them the next Shell station. When we got there we couldn't find Moses. We couldn't find him, and had to wait for 20 minutes while our country director Rebecca tried to phone him and let him know where we were. 

While waiting, all of these children started coming out of their homes to see the muzungu's and we took tons of pictures with the children, then we were on our way again to find the Namatala slum. We had to make one more pit stop and then we finally arrived. it was a great adventure and i have decided that i love travel by Boda and it will be my preferred mode of transportation this summer.

We are so excited to Boda!!!

When we stopped at the first Shell gas station and were a bit confused...

I tried to learn their names so from the left to the right is boyee,( boy' e), Sophie, naumateria (Her name was the hardest to pronounce, but it sounded beautiful, she would smile every time i attempted to say her name), and Dauphine she was very sharp and had a great memory.

Video of one of the rides. 

Successful Boda ride!

Remember when...

Kimani

Remember when you were a little child and you were sitting down at the dinner table being cranky and ornery because your mom was making you eat your green beans and you didn't want to finish the green beans on your plate!  Either because you weren't hungry or you wanted to be stubborn and frustrate your mom, so you didn't eat all of your food. Then your mom seeing the stubbornness in your face says out of frustration, "There are starving children in Africa!"

I met those starving children in Africa today. They are the most loving, caring, happy, humble children i have ever met!!! We walked around their village/ slum today called Namatala. And all they wanted to do was hold the Muzungo's (whit persons) hand or touch their skin and follow us around. They wanted us to take pictures of them so that they could look at it on the screen and find the face that matches theirs. We walked for 2 hours in the village and met with the people there and saw what the previous Help volunteers had done. They put in water filters that helped many people in the village not get effected by the cholera outbreak that happened in February. We are looking to find more donors for water filters.

We also talked with a few of the woman that had been given small grants to start their own business's. It was great to hear their success stories.

But the thing that hit the most was the children... running around in rags, playing with the smallest pieces of trash as toys, and getting the biggest joy of watching the flash go off on a camera. It was overwhelming to see people living in such humble circumstances. But empowering at the same time because no matter what their circumstances are, just getting a wave from a muzungu brings a smile to their face. And when you see their incredibly beautiful dark faces matched with their pearly white teeth grin. i think.... Ah, there is no where in the world i would rather be, then walking through this filthy dirt road with the greatest people i have ever met.

So i remember when my mom use to tell me about the children in Africa and how they are starving, and now i think, yep, there are a lot of starving children in Africa, and I love them and i hope to be able to make a difference in the lives of a few of them, because they have already made a difference in mine!!!!

                           

                          Kimani was learning the eskimo kiss  :) 

They love to smile

The one being held would not let her put her down.

This is a normal thing for them to have cows just walking down the road...

My dream!

This is ME!!! all excited to begin the new adventure!!!!

I tried to write a blog about the fact that i was going to uganda but i kept starting it and not being able to get longer than a sentence. I now understand why i couldn't talk about it. Because this beautiful incredible Africa has only been a dream to me for as long as i can remember. How do you talk about something that you feel is only a part of your dreams. Well, my dream has come true! I now live for the next 4 months in the most tropical, beautiful, simple, place on earth. And it is even better than any dream i could have possibly imagined!!!!! there are smells that i have never smelt before, there are precautions i would have never thought to take before and I am LOVING every minute of it. I have only met a few of the locals and they have been great! We have a night guard named David that lives in our compound, (ha i still live at the compound!) And he guards our house at night while we are sleeping, and guess what he guards our house with? a Bow and Arrow! He is really proud of his skills and has been working with Help for 5 years and a good source tells me i could trust him with my life! which i guess i technically do every night!  Im am SO excited for the next 4 months! stay tuned for the greatest adventures that i will hopefully help you to get a grasp of!!!!

This is the view from my back porch! i think the little house is where David sleeps

 Another view from the back porch which i sat on and read my scriptures and took in the best view!!!

 This is the toilet..... im so glad its a flushable toilet!

 Our beds with their mosquito nets on them, i sleep on the left bunk!

What do you do?

...when you are a million miles away and missing your family








and you find out that some idiot made your sister feel fat,











your nieces and nephews are growing up to be so big your afraid they aren't going to remember you,
















AND..... one of your best friends is getting married and leaving you?!












the way i see it i got two options:

CRY


or SCREAM!




i haven't decided which one yet.....