It's been so long! Sorry, the internet has been down at the inn. But I
have kept a record of my life in my journal, so I will transcribe it
for all you lovely followers of my blog:
Sunday:
TOday was the best day of my life. This morning the internet still
wasn't working, which is unfortunate, but it meant that I got to sleep
in because I didn'[t have to wake up early to read and write emails. I
got ready, ate delicious breakfast, and we took a taxi to church.
Church was wonderful, as usual. There were 2 muzungu (white) senior
missionaries there who are from provo, so it was fun to see and talk
to them. But the best part of church was that Karen invited Ben who
works at the inn to some with us. I'm pretty sure I've talked about
him before. He's the one who is young and is taking care of several
young kids who are the orphans of his brother. So Ben and the 5
children came to church. He is planning on meeting with the
missionaries on Wednesday. Hopefully that works out for him. He would
make an excellent member of the church. He already has a good
relationship with Heavenly Father and is obviously very charitable.
Plus, hopefully if he joins he will be able to take advantage of the
perpetual education fund. He is one of those people who would really
benefit from it.
After church we were invited over to Sister Victoria's house for
dinner. I was a little worried because she is the crazy lady from
Relief society who yelled at everyone for not making her family feel
welcome. As we were walking ot her house, my trepidation increased,
for our path was surrounded on either side by huts constructed
entirely of mud bricks and obviously lacking in electricity, running
water, or anything resembling sanitation. Now, I try to be strong and
charitable, but the food here freaks me out, especially when there is
a high probability that it was prepared in less than sanitary
conditions. However, fear not my friends! As we rounded the corner, lo
and behold, a fantastic gated community!! Talk about income disparity.
As we walked through the gates and into the house, it was like a slice
of heaven on earth. Sure the furniture was dated and there was not air
conditioning, but you are missing the point. The point is that there
WAS furniture and that she had several high powered fans and, most
importantly, obviously sanitary facilities. She also had a really nice
TV (much nicer than mine at my apartment-not hard) and she put on "the
Testaments" for us to watch while dinner was getting ready. I forgot
how awesome (read: cheesy) that movie is. Then we had dinner and OH!
Oh, dinner! My earlier fears were completely unfounded. It was, hands
down, the best meal I have had since coming to Africa. Though, in all
honestly, the competition is not that fierce.
Sister Victoria had SO MUCH FOOD! It was seriously wonderful. I’m
pretty sure she had it catered too, because it was in those little tub
things with the heaters under them that BYU catering uses. Plus, there
was so much that wasn’t meat, so there was plenty to satisfy a hungry
little pseudo vegetarian. After dinner we watched Rio, which is a
fabulous movie. Highly recommended. It was strangely comforting to
watch an American movie. It’s like, you may be in a third world
country deprived of any pop culture that doesn’t involve Tony Horton,
but hey! American movies still exist. It was an especially appropriate
reminder considering the unfortunate events of Saturday when we tried
to watch The Dark Knight. The market that we go to on Saturdays has a
huge assortment of pirated DVDs for sale, but the selection is very
random and half of it is porn. But the group had really been wanting
to watch The Dark Knight, so I decided to try to call on my Ross power
to help us out. This is the same power that brought me, among other
things, my vampire shirt, my gold and pink dress, sparkly Steve
Maddens, etc. The way the power works is that I picture the thing I
want in my mind, I picture myself finding that thing, and I picture
myself using that thing. The power has a 93% success rate. After about
5 mins of sifting through terrible movies and porn, we found it!
Success! Unfortunately, the story has a sad ending. The flaw in my
power is that I don’t think in sound. The entire movie was horribly
dubbed in Luganda! http://www.nooooooooooooooo.
watch the action scenes in peace because the man was still babbling
even though there was no dialogue. What could he possibly have been
saying? We will never know. Our solution: we watched the entire movie
on mute, filling in the lines ourselves whenever we could remember
them and summarizing when we couldn’t remember word for word. Let me
tell you, it was a whole lot less intense. I challenge every one of
you to watch the movie without sound, then you will get a taste of the
trials I go through.
Anyway, Rio was a great movie, especially because I could understand
the language. After Sister Victoria’s I went home and talked to my
wonderful parents on the phone.
I don’t think I mentioned the fact that today is/was Tyler’s
birthday. But it is, so later on, we went to Ben’s house to have a
little birthday party. There were some neighborhood kids around and
we all had a mini dance party to the terrible reggae music they play
on the radio here. Those kids could really move it! They are like 6
years old and their body rolls totally put me to shame. 2 of Ben’s
kids are little twin girls and they absolutely break my heart. It’s a
good thing they have a guardian and aren’t straight up orphans or they
would totally be coming home with me. All of the kids are wonderful,
but there is a soft spot in my heart for twin girls. I would totally
adopt them, but I can’t just take one, I would have to have them all!
And then all of a sudden I would be a mother of 5 with two years left
of law school, without a job or husband. That would be….bad…right?
As we were walking home from Ben’s I saw a firefly! If I didn’t think
bucket lists were totally stupid, seeing a firefly would have been on
my bucket list. And now I did it!
As I was getting ready for be just now, I found an entire box of
sweet and saltygranola bars that I had forgotten about! It was like
Christmas! I almost cried.
So, see? This truly was the best day of my entire life ever. The
greatest day in the whole history of Stefanie. Though, I suspect that
after three weeks in a third world country, my standards have shifted
a lot.
Tuesday May 24
Living in a rain forrest is fun. I love the sound of rain, especially
on the tin roofs. Every night I am woken up by the sound of violent
rain and it is the most beautiful sound in the world.
The clinic work is going well. It’s actually going really well, which
is kind of a double egded sword (I hope. I’m a little shady on that
metaphor). The point of this program is not just to write wills for
people, but to train those who live here about will writing so that
when we leave it still continues. The good news is that the interns
are becoming really good at writing wills and hardly need our help at
all anymore except with the more complex issues. They are really
becoming self sufficient. The bad news is that this makes me less
useful and so sometimes I don't feel like I have a lot to do. It’s all
good though. I’m really glad the program is going so well, and next
week we get a whole new batch of interns, so I will have to train them
all again.
The intern I usually work with is named Sharon. She is really nice
and adorable. She is a first year social work student, but she really
wants to be either a singer or a writer. Having read one of her short
stories, I think she could be a really good singer. She joins us every
morning in our rendition of “Lean on Me” that we sing for the clients.
I also really like her because she calls me Stef, which is a vast
improvement over Stephen.
Today as I got off the cab, the driver totally tried to swindle me. I
despise the cabs here. They are so annoying driving around honking at
people, they smell terrible, and when you ride them they are so
inefficient because they stop every ten feet to try and get people on
even if all the seats are full. Not my favorite. From our inn to
downtown costs 500 shillings, but every cab driver tried to make us
pay more. They usually gove up when we show them that we know what
we’re doing. However, as I paid this one cab driver today, he was
supposed to give me 500 in change, but only handed me 300. I was like,
“Um, you own me 200 more” and he was like “no 700” meaning that the
ride cost 700. Ooooooo I was really mad. I got all up in his face and
was like “FIVE HUNDRED. Give me my change!” and he laughed and said
“700.” So I ripped the 1000 that I had given him out of his hand and
said “five. Hundred.” That stopped his laughing because now not only
had he not swindled me, he was down 300. He stared at my obviously
furious face and said weakly “700?” “No,” I said in a deadly voice,
“500.” With that, I reached over to his hand that hokld the coins and
pried a 500 piece out of his fingers. Then I calmly handed him my 1000
note along with the 300 he gave me. “500,” I said, “have a nice day.”
He quickly got in his taxi and drove off. I like to think I did some
good this day. Not only will that driver likely think twice before
ripping people off, I probably gave him his first taste of a
non-submissive female ever. Three cheers for feminism!
Thursday May 26, 2011
Yesterday we didn’t have work. Wednesdays are usually outreach, but
there wasn’t one yesterday. Because it’s TASO and their communication
is terrible, I have no idea why there was no outreach, but I consider
it a victory that they told us what to do at all. So we stayed at the
inn and worked on our externship requirement crap. That night we went
to Ben’s house to meet with him and the missionaries, but
unfortunately the missionaries didn’t show up. I wish the missionaries
would be flakes, but we took the opportunity to talk to him about our
testimonies of the book of mormon, and it was really awesome.
On the walk home from Ben’s the power went out and it was completely
black. We were in the poor part of town, so no one had any generators
or anything, so the only light around was the stars and our cell
phones. The walk home was an interesting experience. At one point I
stepped in a huge mud puddle that I can only hope was wet with water
and not sewage.
2 of our interns left today, so last night we decided to make them
American cookies as a going away present. The desserts here are, on
the whole, exceedingly crap or completely non existent, which is a
shame. The inn has no oven (not that one would have worked without
electricity) so we decided to make no bake cookies. After a call to my
wonderful mother for the recipe, we ventured into powerless downtown
Entebbe for the ingredients. It was good that the recipe is simple
because Uganda has nothing like marshmallows or chocolate chips or
anything. But they did have all of our ingredients with the exception
of baking cocoa. We decided instead to use something called “drinking
chocolate” which I think is like Nesquick. Let me tell you, those
cookies were SWEET. And delicious. Also, they were awesome because we
made them practically over a campfire. The Ugandan students (not as
accustomed to sugar overload as I am) could barely handle a portion of
the cookie. Pansies. We had a few left over, so our P90X session had
refreshments. Awesome.
I am burning through all the books I brought. I finished the Count Of
Monte Cristo today. I am really scared that I will run out and have
nothing. Luckily Mark is a reader, so I will have to raid his stash.
I’m glad the internet is finally back! Thank you guys so much for
emailing me! Love you all!
Stefanie
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