My first weekend!!!

Friday evening I went out for dinner with the other girls who live in the doingooodhouse. Inge the local coordinator who represents Doingoood arranged the place and the time. It was nice to have a good and normal dinner with a nice Malibu and coke

. Obviously we talked a lot about our projects and Kampala but it was also nice to talk about Holland and share pictures from boy friends and for me off course Puk. I am the only mom in the house.

Saturday was a day of doing nothing for me. 2 of the girls went out rafting and two of the other girls went to their project and I decided to stay home to get some work done on the computer and to get some alone time. Because since I am here I have been surrounded with other people 24/7 and sometimes that is a bit too much, so I loved to be alone for a while.

Sunday was a great day (see pictures). First Marloes and me went to my project the Agape home and together with the boys and girls from the home we went to church. It was amazing to be a part of and the kids were so happy that we came along. It took a bit to long for our concern (3 hours!!!) but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. After church we walked back to the home and got on our boda bodas again to go the National Theater. We had lunch there in that neighborhood (also took an hour to prepare, my patience is definitely being tested here) and went to the market to get some souvenirs. After that we sat outside the National Theater and had a drink and we were enjoying some life African music&dance, which was really amazing. At around 18 we had to find ourselves some transport back home to make sure we were back in time before it got dark. It was an amazing Sunday, I enjoyed some free time and Marloes and I share the same (insulting) humor so we laughed a lot!

I will share with you more about my work in another blog. The last two days (Monday and Tuesday) were very interesting, amazing, fierce, heavy and tiring and I first wanted to finish my story about the weekend and now I am going to bed. Hope to hear from you on my blog.

The weather in Uganda.

Let me tell you something about the weather in Uganda and how the Ugandans respond to it. I thought the weather here would be great, but apparently the seasons are changing here and the Ugandans don’t really know when it is rainy season anymore. But since I am here there has been a lot of rain. Before I left to go to Uganda I read that it does rain in Uganda but very hard and short. Well up till now this is not the truth. It almost feels like home. It drizzles, then it storms, then it drizzles again and it goes on and on for hours, just like in Holland, except that the temperature is still good, it stays quite warm. But in Holland we don’t know any better then that it rains a lot and life goes on as normal. We hoist ourselves in a rain suit or we get out our umbrellas and proceed with normal life. But here in Uganda life just stops, hardly anybody is doing anything. Normally there are boda boda’s everywhere, as soon as you walk on the street with a helmet in your hand, boda boda drivers come to you right away to bring you wherever you need to be, but not when it rains. A lot of people just don’t work. At least that is what the other volunteers in my house told me when I wanted to go to work. I should just stay home and wait till the rain stopped. So there I was, on Friday morning ready to go to work but apparently I couldn’t. (the outreach fell through because of the weather and will hopefully happen on Monday) So I waited and waited, while reading a book, but got annoyed after a while and when it only drizzled again I decided to go outside to see if the boda boda’s were driving already, there were not as much as normal but a few, so I decided to go to work. At the end of the day the weather was great again. But I as well as my colleague volunteers spoke to a few Ugandans about the weather and they are all saying something else. It is rainy season, it isn’t rainy season, the weather will stay like this for another month (great just as long as I am here), after this weekend it will be a lot better, it stays rainy season up till December….. Well we will see, there is nothing I can do about it anyway, but hope for the best.

My first day at the project.

My first day started at the Agape drop-in center. At the drop-in center they offer kids from the streets a place where they will get a warm meal, are able to wash themselves and where they offer some education. Not only kids who live in the streets are welcome in the drop-in center but also kids from the neighborhood who live under poor conditions and don’t go to school are welcome here. Today they had a crafts lesson and they were making jewelry. I got a really nice pair of earrings

from one of the kids.

Around 12:30 we left the drop-in center and went to the Agape home. A few of the kids at the Agape home are orphans but most of them are kids from the street. Agape wants kids to leave the streets and eventually go back home again. I will write another blog later, when I have been here a bit longer and have a better idea, about the four stages at Agape and their mission and vision.

I gave my first lesson today together with another volunteer, Sanne. We didn’t prepare anything (because it was my first day and I thought I would only observe today) and decided to play hangman and to do a spelling quiz, it was nice to see that the kids were very eager to learn and some of them were really competitive. After the lesson kids could do whatever they want and a few of them wanted to color and I was amazed by their skills! In the meanwhile I took pictures of every single kid in the home and wrote down their names, so I could practice back home in the hope I will use the right name for every kid at the home tomorrow.

Around 4pm we went back home on the boda boda again. It was a really nice, but also heavy day. I am tired from all the first impressions but motivated to go tomorrow. An outreach is planned for tomorrow morning at the drop-in center and this is supposed to be quite impressive and I will probably see some terrible stuff, so I will go to bed in time after a tiring but satisfying first day in the hope I will be ready for this outreach.

I am in Uganda!!!!

It is weird to actually be here right now. The last couple of weeks have been weeks of preparing and packing and now I am already here, unbelievable.

My flight went well, no problems occurred and I watched 3 movies

. Arriving at Entebbe was, as expected off course, completely different then the airport I departure from, Schiphol. First I had to fill in a health form, to make sure I do not bring Ebola into the country (this is for all the people back home who thought I was nuts for going to Africa right now, they do have precautions here) and then there was just one exit and there was Charli the cabdriver waiting for me to bring me to the Doingoood house. It was almost midnight so unfortunately I couldn’t see a thing on my way there. Luckily one of the other volunteers was waiting for me and helped me get all my stuff into the house. I was only there for about 5 minutes and the electricity went off, hello Africa. So in the dark, with the light of my phone I brushed my teeth, covered myself in ‘deet’ mosquito spray and went to bed. I heard barking dogs, mosquitos, people yelling but I was tired and happy to be in Africa and finally fell asleep.

This morning I had to be ready at 9:30 am for the tour. Together with Marloes, who arrived yesterday afternoon, and Inge the coordinator here we went into town on a boda boda, which was a real adverture. Men, people drive like maniacs here (I already saw this last night when I witnessed a really nasty accident and I saw a man covered in blood and unconscious being carried in the back of a truck, not a nice sight I can tell you). But as I said a real adventure these boda boda’s, apparently it’s the easiest, fastest and cheapest way to travel around here and I really liked it. (see pictures)

Inge showed us the main supermarkets, the bank and while drinking a coffee she explained when we will start at our projects and how and everything. I already start tomorrow and I am really excited, this is why I am here off course, so I can’t wait to start. After our coffee we went back on the boda boda to our house and we went exploring the surroundings and taking our first pictures, which I will put on here as soon as I am finished writing. As I am writing this I am sitting with Marloes and Sanne in a guesthouse, having a drink and free WIFI

.

Welcome at my blog.

Hello,

I want to welcome everyone who will follow my adventure here in Kampala by reading this blog. I have decided to write this blog in English for several reasons, the main reason being that there might be a few people who will follow me who are not able to understand Dutch and the next one is that the main language here in Uganda is English and it is a good excercise for me to! So if you see any grammatical and/or spelling mistakes or just the wrong way of using English feel free to comment

I hope you will enjoy my stories and my photos and I will try to write on a regular basis, but this will also depend on available internet off course.

Jennita

Welkom op mijn Reislog!

Hallo en welkom op mijn reislog!

Dé plaats om op de hoogte te blijven van alle avonturen en ervaringen tijdens deze reis. Vanaf nu zul je hier dan ook regelmatig nieuwe verhalen en foto's vinden, en via de kaart weet je altijd precies waar ik me bevind en waar ik ben geweest! Meer informatie over mijzelf en de reis die ik ga maken vind je in het profiel.

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Groetjes,

Jennita