Wednesday, June 22, 2011

I'm here and I like it. Good to know.

Its funny how if you get two things accomplished in a day here, it is a good day, yet when I think about all that has happened since my last blog there is too much to write about. I think this blog will be less a chronology and more about the things I don’t want to forget or that have made me laugh.

- I have adapted to, at any point, no matter how intently I am focused on something, to thrusting my arms out and clapping violently at the slightest hint of a mosquito. I also have worked past any hesitation at smacking any part of myself if a mosquito lands on me. The sound of me slapping my own ear is a new sound to my 28 years on this earth. It isn’t that there are that many of them. It’s that when they whiz by my ear at 3 in the morning I can’t sleep and I’m taking it personally. My kill ratio is not quite up to Karate Kid standards but what I lack in skill I make up for in gumption.

- Gerald, the day guard of our compound, is iconic. On our first day he forgot Ginger and Meagan’s names and said. “Sometimes we need to be reminded, because we are all human and forget things.” Last year when the water wouldn’t flow out of the cistern he said, “Let me do some small technology” and shoved a stick up the drain. Now, Gerald keeps throwing the loose vegetation and organic trash over our wall in our backyard. He has a rickety ladder he climbs and just dumps it. I have no idea what is on the other side of the fence, other than our trash. We have theorized there may be goats which eat the trash or a compost pile, but we don’t smell the trash nor do we see smoke from it being burned or hear goats bleating. My vote is Gerald has found a trash abyss, a full fledged crevasse, into which our leaves flutter down.

- We were at SAS and desperately needed caffeine before an 11 o’clock meeting, which was actually supposed to be a 10 o’clock meeting but we found out it got postponed when we arrived. So we go next door and ask if we can get coffee in the next 15 minutes, it being 9:40. The waitress says yes and I even change my order to coffee like Meagan and Ginger in order to save time. Ten minutes later three teas come out. None of us ordered tea, but we take it. We give her money immediately, saying we are in a rush, and have our tea. As Ginger and Meagan sip away and I gulp my chai burning my tongue, I get increasingly tense as my watch tells me we are late, more late, and then uber late. At 11:20 I ask how late are we comfortable being, probably with a little attitude. At this point we still don’t have change and I secretly want to hunt our waitress down for my shillings. Ginger and Meagan seem unworried.

We finally walk into the office at 11:35 only to find the meeting hasn’t started yet. When it does start at 11:45 it goes on for 30 minutes with us shut in another room. Apparently there was private business to discuss. So we wait in a closed office and just like when you wait in a doctor’s office I want to mess with things or dance for the rush from the risk of getting caught. Around 12:15 we are included to the meeting and it lasts much longer than it needed to. Conclusion, I am SO American and next time order more tea, I mean coffee.

- My wristwatch alarm goes off every night at 7:31 pm. It used to go off at 11:31, but then I figured out how to change the time. For the life of me I can’t figure out how to turn it off though. Meagan told me last year she had a wristwatch with an alarm she couldn’t turn off. Now it is lost somewhere in her car and she sometimes hears it and laughs. Turns out we bought the exact same watch and I envision smiling in my apartment back home when I hear it go off.

- Every other time Meagan steps in the bathroom at night the apartment is filled with her screams at the latest cockroach. This is the signal for us to take battle stations. Meagan keeps an eye on it, I grab a shoe or something and kill it then squeal and run away grossed out and Ginger picks up the dead cockroach with a patent-pending technique. We then yell at it as it is flushed. The weird thing is I’ve never seen a cockroach in there by myself. It can’t be that they hear me coming and don’t hear Meagan because 1) Meagan is loud and 2) I’m apparently so quiet that I keep on scaring Meagan. She says I’m a lurker. I feel like any day now I’ll turn around and see eight of them circling me. In related news, we bought some new toilet paper that said it was green. I interpreted this to mean it was from made from recycled materials. No, it’s green. Why isn’t there colored TP back home? Think of all the tacky pattern and seasonal colors we’re missing out on.

I’m making it sound like it is all fun and games here. Honestly, we are working a lot too. We finished processing the pre-tests which was really involved. First each test gets graded and tallies of correct, incorrect, unsure, or missing data are added. Then each test gets numbered and we record the student’s name and number in a book, then we record all 32 pieces of info from the test into an excel sheet. We were taking bets on how many we had and it was over 2300. Moses and the three of us have been working feverishly on two computers at once to finish them. Of course, when we proudly reported being finished with data entry the next question everyone asks is when the results will be available. That is what we are doing now and it is painstaking.

We also lost some hours of work because I accidentally coded several hundred tests wrong and had to work some magic with excel’s find and replace function. That was before we cut the files into smaller worksheets and our computers were bogging down too. I would make a correction and two minutes later it would happen. Meagan and Ginger were great about it though and when they had every right to push me in a ditch they hugged me, said it could have happened to anyone and suggested we grab a beer. Good friends. The beer wasn’t bad either ;)

After my confidence was shot from the rookie mistake, today was a good day because I was out making contacts for my own interests and had a great meeting with the HR guy at the Ugandan Human Rights Commission. Traveling around the city is really manageable for me and the city seems smaller every day. Tomorrow I head out again to more big name humanitarian organizations and because my emails aren’t being returned and I show up without an appointment it feels like speed dating. I show up, introduce myself, try to explain how great I am and why they should let me spend more time with them, then I try to get a number before I go.

I haven’t networked as much as I wanted to considering how exhausting the days are here and with not feeling my best due to the anti-malarial (got a new one at SAS clinic, yeah!) the days pass by quickly. We don’t have much time left. One month is nothing and we are traveling to Hoima, Gulu, conducting focus groups in Kampala, and also hope to make a trip to the southwest part of Uganda to Mary’s village. (Please watch the video of the amazing Mary give pre-tests on the photo link to the right). It is going by so quickly but before I came I set one goal for myself: get there to see if you like it. I’m here and I like it. Good to know.

1 comment:

  1. Very funny stuff Nicole. I want to know what is behind the fence as well. I am glad you like it there and are working hard but enjoying yourself. Stay safe,
    rose

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