So right now I’m sitting in the teachers’ lounge…again….listening to the cheesy 80s music playing…again :) “I’m all out of love. I’m so lost without you...” and this woman named Ester, who claims to be my Ugandan mother is asking me when I will move to Uganda to get married. How do you say “never” in a nice way? :) Anyway, that’s besides the intent of this post.
So, this past weekend, I had the best and the worst experiences of my time here. We’ll start with the best part. Saturday, our teacher group went on Safari in a park called Murchison Falls…so cool. Sitting on the roof of a mutatu, I got to experience an early morning, 5 hour game drive where we saw FAMILIES (so cute!) of elephants, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, hartbeasts,
and…dah dah DDDAAAAHHHHH….lions, which is very rare to see on safari, but I guess we were lucky because we saw SIX lionesses.
My favorite thing we saw though were the families of warthogs…mommy, daddy and 3 babies with these little butts you just want to pinch and these cute little tails that stick straight up when the walk. They are the ugliest animals…so ugly they’re cute 
(kind of like those Chinese Chiuauas). Anyway, throughout the entire safari I had “Hakuna Matata” stuck in my head…I felt like I was living Lion King…the scenery was incredible. Pictures wouldn’t even do it justice…good thing because of course my camera died…again…so I’ll have to get pics from other people after the game drive, we had a river tour up the Victoria Nile to the Merchison Falls (so beautiful!)
…if you have ever been to Disney World, the river tour is almost exactly like the Jungle Tour ride…it was so neat. Anyway, when we left the park, we were faced with a 3 hour mutatu ride…which became a 5 hour mutatu ride Around 8pm, we were driving down this “short cut” road, and…BOOM! Our tire blew out! So we stopped, the driver replaced the tire with the spare (which had a nail stuck in it), and we continued on our way. About 30 minutes later…BOOM! The SPARE blew! So there we were, in the pitch black, in the middle of the bush, having to pee, monsoon pouring down…frogs croaking…random bugs biting at people in the mutatu…no tire and no what? No RECEPTION!!! Those who did have reception had no minutes…so we decided to drive for an hour on 3 wheels and a rim….I’ve said before that mutates are a bumpy ride…no comparison to a mutatu with 3 wheels and a rim…did I mention I also had a migraine…and a fever…and what I can only assume is Ebola (maybe a slight exaggeration). You just had to laugh at the situation. The experience was, however, such a metaphor of the African people for me…in the face of adversity, you just keep on going with whatever it is you have!Anyway, we finally were able to call for help and eventually got home…to about 30 extra people living in our home (students who won a trip to Uganda for earning money for the Schools 4 Schools program through IC). So I will admit, yes…I was a bit on edge…tired, headache, fever, had to pee and no quiet space to talk on the phone…but I calmed down and went to bed. You might thing this was the part that was my worse experience here…but no…our Apocalyptic adventure was about to get worse. The next morning, still having a fever and the Ebola, I went to school, but I had to dash home so as not to reveal all of my insides to the entire Awere SS student population. After a very nice 2 hour nap, I woke up feeling refreshed…and then the news broke…a few of the girls in the house had lice. Yes LICE! Bugs…in the hair…sucking blood and laying babies. My head immediately started itching (it’s even itching now just thinking about it. Even though I was pretty confident the itching was just my imagination, I completely broke down…wept…literally wept. Any one of the things that had occurred in the last weekend I probably could have handled individually…even the lice, but everything together, and not having the resources or the comforts of home to deal with them, I just couldn’t take anymore. All of my “strength” had been depleted.
This experience has totally switched my impression of Africa. You look at Africa and you see it’s poverty, and with poverty you think weakness, but I have come to find that the people here are among the strongest people to be able to live, survive and rebuild under these conditions, especially after experiencing an incredibly brutal war. Side note, just the other day I was walking home from school and I saw a woman who had a very large chin and 2 scars that ran from the corners of each side of her mouth down past her chin. It was explained to me later that her chin was actually reconstructed after her entire jaw was cut off by LRA rebels. We also have 2 students at Awere who are missing a leg that was cut off by the rebels. And yet all of these people are fully functional, and here I am breaking down over a few bugs in the hair…which I don’t even have…yet. I guess that put things in perspective for me. But I will say…this trip has definitely challenged me mentally, emotionally and physically and has taken me to my limit…yet at the same time I have never felt more blessed, nor have I ever been more inspired or impressed by a group of people in my life. Today, I’m doing much better after allowing myself to have the little meltdown. My focus now is on the good parts of being here instead of the challenges…because the incredible things I am learning and living here in Uganda really do far outweigh the challenges!
I miss you all and I look forward to seeing you in 2 weeks!!!!! Hope you had a fabulous 30th Mel Bel!!!!!
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