What's Up

Here are some quick updates about what’s going on with me.

Home/Life

Peace Corps Volunteers gave the 4^th of July a proper celebration here in Uganda.  I went to 2 parties on different weekends.  One was big and crazy – full of barbeque, alcohol, and shenanigans.  The other was a nice potluck lunch with good friends and good conversations.  It was a great holiday.  :)

Big news:  my water has come back!  After living for 6 months without running water, it’s back!  I still prefer bucket baths (my shower is just a trickle of water), but it makes a big difference with washing dishes and flushing the toilet.  Hooray.

My electricity has been stable since May.  This has enabled me to watch countless movies and TV show marathons during my free time.  (Game of Thrones is my new favorite.)  I have a 500GB hard drive that’s full but I am quickly going through all of those movies.  I will reload it when I come home.  I’m also going to pick up a Kindle – the Peace Corps book exchange doesn’t really work for me since I’m so far from Kampala.

Last week I suffered through another bout of diarrhea.  I was miserable but it passed after a few days.  And of course, I have no idea what caused it.  But I’m pretty lucky – I still have not had any serious illnesses that require a trip to the medical office.

Spider update:  Last weekend I caught a big, fat-ass, hairy tarantula that was crawling across the floor in my sitting room.  Yeah, this one creeped me out a bit.  I couldn’t kill it (I didn’t want to clean up the mess), so I caught it and let it go outside (away from the house!).

The weather here is cooler (65-75) cloudy, windy, and rainy about half of the time.  Other days it’s sunny but not too hot.  Bike rides to town are much more pleasant now.  Unfortunately, I think the crappy weather affects my internet connection and I only have internet a couple days per week now, and it’s very slooooooow.   I’ve waited 34 minutes just to check my email.  Ugh.

Work

The grant I wrote back in June has not been reviewed yet.  (It's for database software to create a student records database, and to set up internet connection at the school's computer lab.)  The Peace Corps changed the review schedule, so I have to wait until mid-August to find out if it gets approved.

In the meantime, I’m teaching computing to the nursing students.  The lessons are very basic – how to open a document; how to save; bold/underline/italic; etc.  It’s going alright – I’m still having difficulty getting used to the non-planning way of life here.  For instance, there are not enough classrooms for the 4 classes of students (poor planning).  So on any given day, an entire class will be sent home for ‘study’ . . . and it might be the day that I was scheduled to teach.  (???)  So I’m trying to think of other things I could work on at Kuluva (since I still have a lot of down-time), but new projects will have to wait until October – I’m pretty busy until then.

Oh yeah.  And Kuluva Hospital has not paid for their PO Box in over 2 years.  The post office has locked the box and we are no longer receiving mail until it’s paid for.  I gave the notice to the hospital administration about a month ago and they still haven’t paid.  If it’s not paid when I come back in October, I’ll find another PO Box to have my mail sent to.

That's all for now.