Week 5

So I'm super lame and it's been soooooooo long since I posted.  I feel bad, but I've been super busy and internet and electricity has been kinda unreliable.  So week five was FOREVER ago, but good thing I take notes!  I'll try to keep these next few weeks short as it'll mostly be catch up.  However, weeks five and six were particularly awesome.  Week 5 started out with some meetings with Eddie in Najjembe.  Since we got there early, Olivia and I decided to hike up to The Rainforest Lodge, where he was supposed to drive us after we met at the taxi stop.  It was a beautiful, mile and a quarter (2 kilometer), super steep, uphill hike.  There were monkeys crashing through the trees, cicadas singing, and bright, beautiful birds cawing throughout the forest.  It was beautiful and amazing and I'll post a picture on facebook soon of Olivia just staring up into the trees like Jane.  Eddie met us up there and we decided to have a huge health day in Najjembe in a week!  Olivia was leaving at the end of week six so we had to do it soon.  No time at all, but wait there's more...
Then...drum roll please...literally!  We went on a safari!!!  Tons of animals-elephants, crocodiles, giraffes, hippos, lion (yes, just one), birds, termite mounds as tall as me, monkeys, gazelles, plains deer, water buffalo, etc.  It was awesome!  Our last night, we went to Masindi and watched cultural dancing.  There were drummers and stringed instruments and dancers!  It was awesome.  They came and got people out of the crowd to dance with them.  I was chosen so instead of shy away like I usually would have, what did I do? I said, heck, I'm in the middle of Africa, who cares?!  I went all out and shook my big ol' booty all over the place learning from the locals and getting quite a reaction from the crowd.  It was hilarious.  All the mzungus didn't know what to say.  I'm not usually one to get up and dance when we're having a dance party and I just let it all loose.  Eventually everyone was dancing together and it was a great night. I bought a grass skirt from one of them to remember an occasion that probably won't replicate itself ever again.

Week 6

Najjembe Health Day is just around the corner!!! We left ourselves two days to work!! It's OK though, because we're awesome!  The plan was to teach sanitation classes and build a handwashing station called a tippy tap with a jerry can to go along with it, teach about malaria and sell mosquito nets at a very discounted price to pregnant mothers to show that they really wanted them and that they were willing to listen and use them properly, teach about dental hygiene because there are some practices here that are not so good (I'll talk about that later), and deworm hopefully 500-700 children.  This included writing curriculums for all of these, making posters so that it was easier to understand the lessons, buying everything for the tippy tap and making sure we knew how to build one with local supplies, going to Kampala to buy mosquito nets, going to Jinja to buy de-worming pills, asking Solomon if he would come teach (because he's a dental student and having a local discuss the sensitive local topics in their own language is probably a good idea even though we could do it if he was too busy), and a lot of chocolate because two days for two girls to organize all this is NUTS!!!  So Olivia went to Kampala and got the mosquito nets with Karli (who got her necklace stolen off her neck and was scratched hard in the process) and with the rest of the cougarette crew the next day to get de-worming pills in Jinja.  Meanwhile, back at the house, I went three days with three hours of sleep each trying to recruit people to help me with posters and curriculums and everything else.  Holly and Lane did a bomb job with everything to do with the tippy tap and other than showing them some examples of some on the internet and sending them to go get the stuff and telling them kinda how we envisioned it going, I didn't do much.  For the posters, Sarah did the outlines in pencil and Jessica and I did most of the marker work.  Jessica did a lot of the writing for the posters and I did all the design.  As for curriculum, Marissa helped me with the malaria curriculum and Taylor, Maren, and Elise helped with the sanitation and hand-washing one.  All-together, it all got done.  We were up until 3:30 am and up at 6 am, but it all got done and everything got transported to the Najjembe Health Center in time.  That day, we de-wormed not 500, not 600, not even 700, but 880 children!!!  (Thank goodness Olivia bought extra!  She said she just had a feeling-you go girl!) We taught all the classes, sold all the mosquito nets, built a permanent tippy tap for the Health Center and let locals watch and help and then demonstrate and teach others as they came.  It was all so fantastic!  It made me super happy! = )
 Pictures will hit facebook soon.  I'll also do a cultural update and some more weeks update, but for now, I must go to a meeting, welaba!