Week ?

- Chantell thinks it is week five. I think time passes differently in her world. Pretty sure it is week 3. But who knows. It feels like I just got here.

- The catchphrase bird continues to haunt me. New goal in life is to figure out exactly which bird is making that noise... so I can kill it. haha kidding... I feel like I am always surrounded by strange new noises. Rain on a big tin roof was the most frightening... Anything hitting our metal door still makes me jump. I feel like I am in an episode of Lost. I often have no idea what I am looking at or hearing. My family uses flashlights for light. We have one oil lantern but we only use it during dinner. And even still it doesn't really illuminate the room. We don't have ceilings in our house so light isn't really contained... Anyway my point is that things look very different in the dark.

- I woke up this morning with like 35 new bug bites and a huge new bruise on my leg. What did I do last night?

- This past weekend I went to Luweero with the other Americans who are in the Missions Emphasis program. We visited different locals in ministry. An Anglican bishop, Catholic priest and the Compassion program. Every place we went we all had to stand up and introduce ourselves to the crowd. The Compassion kids were a riot. I have a compassion kid in Thailand so I kind of knew the program but it was amazing to see it locally. One of the women who runs it was formerly a sponsored child. She seemed to LOVE her job. The place Luweero wasn't hugely exciting... it is where Museveni started his gorilla war in the 1980s. It also has a higher percentage of people who are HIV+. I didn't bring my phone with me this weekend and when I got back to campus I had a text from my host sis telling me that the house was too quiet and I needed to come home. So sweet. :)

- My classes are SO good. I have a class called Faith and Action and it is basically a continuation of a class I took last year called Intercultural Ministry Studies. It is lots of discussion and questioning. We are reading a book called The Primal Vision. I am loving it.

- Yesterday my youngest sister, Kevin, had a meltdown. She is 14 and I have never seen her get upset over anything. I guess she was missing a coin and she thought that maybe Sam had taken it or she was just upset that it was lost... she came out to the side of the house where we were cutting cassava and she was all worked up. She had her bottom lip stuck out and her voice was high and whiny. She went back inside and our sister Sarah came out and said that Kevin was crying because she couldn't find her coin. I was like how much was this coin worth??? 500 shillings. That is a quarter in US money. She cried for like ten minutes and then got over it. I was a bad big sis and couldn't help thinking how cute she was all worked up.

Host Family

It is a little bit strange how normal it feels to live with a family that is not my own, as if they were my own. In my program we had multiple days of orientation. We were told things like don't ride the dangerous boda-bodas, don't walk by yourself in the dark, there was even a little squatty potty talk. There wasn't really any talk about the whole host family aspect. I have had friends go on study abroads before and heard them refer to their "mom" or "dad" and I have always thought it sounded a little bit contrived to call these people mom and dad... like I always thought it seemed like they were pretending or playing a little bit. But now I live with a family and I have two brothers and two sisters, a papa and a toto (the word for mom). It doesn't feel like I am pretending or like they are. They are my Ugandan family. I know it will probably take all semester before I really get to know them well. But they feel like family now.

Right now toto and papa have malaria. Which sucks, but not as bad as it sounds like it does. I asked toto how many times she has had malaria and she answered "this year?" I said "No, ever, in your whole life." She kind of laughed and said, "Kelsey an African can not count how many times they have had malaria!" I do not know the reason but malaria is worse for foreigners. Maybe because Africans have like thousands of years of resistance built up towards it... maybe because we are babies...

Speaking of being a baby. I need to get used to cockroaches. That is one of my goals for this semester. I no longer yell or scream when one crawls towards me... there is just a sharp intake of breath hahaha. Last night I went outside to take a bucket bath. We bathe in this little room in between the house and the road (so awkward to bathe with people like talking right outside the wall. There is no roof on the room so you feel like you are bathing outside. I was pouring water from a jerrycan into a bucket and there was a cockroach crawling on the wall right next to my face. I stood up and watched it for 2 minutes thinking about how badly I did not want to get undressed and bathe in a room with cockroaches in it and I quietly whined for Kevin to come kill it. Kevin is my 14 year old little sister... She picks up these giant cockroaches with her hands and throws them away from me. Heart her. But she was not in ear shot. I ended up kicking it and it fell and scurried away. This is like a daily occurrence and it would make me feel much more like a 24 year old if I could man up and not be so grossed out by these little giant bugs.

I am sitting with other Americans and everyone is discussing their strategies for going to the latrine during the least cockroach infested times of the day. I think I will save that for another blog post. Someone just passed around a cold pancake and we like devoured it. American food! hahaha I love it here.

I am on the internet!

Praise the Lord for internet in Uganda. I have many first impressions but the strangest one is definitely the catchphrase bird. You know the beeping noise that the catchphrase game makes? It like slowly speeds up as you pass it around. you know? Everywhere I go I hear that beeping noise in the same pitch as the catchphrase game. It is so strange. I thought maybe it was people's cell phones or something. Last night I finally figured out that it is a freaking bird. It drives me crazy and I am the only person who even notices it. How American am I that a bird hooting reminds me of an electronic game!

UGANDA!

I am officially Uganda bound. I leave in one hour for the airport to go to D.C. I am spending the night there with my amazing friend Juli who I met in Mexico a couple summers ago and who I wish would accompany me everywhere I go. I have been putting off blogging about Uganda for a few reasons... I sort of still can't believe I am going. It was like craptons of paperwork to make this happen. Also much finagling classes and being flexible occured by my awesome professors. Thank you tons Budd, Krispin, and Sanders!!! It also required many shots to make this happen. I got 5 shots yesterday immunizing me from like 7 diseases. Joy! I have my skirts packed and my flashlight and watterbottle, my textbooks and like 9 nice pens. I really like nice pens. The big question now is, do I have enough stuff or do I have too much? Or maybe the bigger question is should I bring more deoderant?

I will be staying in a town near Kampala called mukono and I will for sure post my address where you can send me lots of letters and care packages...hint hint. I can pick up mail either at my school or in the nearby town. I will be living with a host family who I know nothing about yet. Yikes. Right now I am just excited and tired. Mostly tired because they shot me full of typhoid and yellow fever and all that good stuff yesterday.

My address:

‘Kelsey Little’ Uganda Studies Programme
Uganda Christian University
P.O. Box 4
Mukono, UGANDA