Safari

I am getting nasty e-mails from family telling me to post, so I will. These past few weeks have been quite busy. I don't think that I have ever slept so well in my life. Each night, I am exhausted after working 10 plus hour days. I don't even notice the metal bars poking through my thin foam pad at night anymore. I have grown to love the cold showers and lack of running water and electricity. I don't even notice the heat anymore. I love uganda and everything about it. Although, I do miss sweets.
This last weekend, I had the opportunity to go up to Murchison Falls and go on a safari. It was so amazing. The first day we were out at 6:30 in the morning riding a ferry across the nile. It was a beautiful sunrise over the river. I have some amazing pictures of it. Half the day, we road in safari vehicles with the tops up. We saw elephants, giraffes, antelope type creatures, baboons, warthogs, meer cats, and one car saw lions. The second half of the day was a boat ride. We saw a bunch of crocodiles, hundreds of hippos, and more elephants. I found out that hippos are actually quite aggressive. We had one coming straight for our boat. Apparently, if they ram your boat you can easily tip over even though it was a pretty good sized boat. Our driver quickly sped off. The next day, we went to the rhino reserve and saw some white rhinos. We saw a mother feeding her baby. The baby's name is Obama because his mother is from America and his father is from Kenya. The safari was super fun and we camped out at murchison falls for two nights. At our campsite, there were warthogs everywhere. Our guide warned us that they pretended to be domestic but they were not. Trixy warthogs. They were so cute and I couldn't help myself. I had to find out for myself. Yup, they are not domestic. It's a good thing that they were too lazy to chase me for a long distance. In the middle of the night, we had to be careful when leaving our tents. If the warthogs didn't get you, then the hippos might. Luckily, the hippos weren't around that weekend. The drive there was nearly 5 hours so I was glad to be back home after the long weekend.
The HIV/AIDS research is going well. We have hit a rough spot with getting all the sample sizes so I e-mailed my statistics professor at BYU for some help. So far, we have interviewed people who are infected and health care workers. We have learned so much from these people. On friday, we also had Becky and Travis come out to film some of the people that we interviewed. We also have had several HIV/AIDS sensitizations at local secondary schools. Even though I have taught at many schools already, I still get nervous speaking to 500 students at a time. A couple weeks ago, we made an adove stove at a rural secondary school in najja. It was quite fun to stomp the clay and help out with the project. I think that the students learned quite a bit too. We really wanted the students to be involved so that they can gain a practical skill and duplicate the stove in the future. Afterwards, I played volleyball with a bunch of the students. It was very interesting because they really didn't have any rules except to keep it from hitting the ground, but it was a lot of fun. Since I have been here, I have become a huge fan of soccer. We watch as many world cup games as we can. We go to local bars or the local restaurants to watch games. I am very sad that the US is out, but we had a good run.
This week at the hospital I spent a whole day in radiology. I got to help with giving x-rays and doing ultrasounds. The ultrasounds were pretty cool. We performed them on pregnant women and people with abdominal pain. We found many cysts, gallstones, kidney stones, etc. One lady came in 4 months pregnant. We did the ultrasound and all we could see were the legs and arms of the baby. I told the nurse what I saw and she immediately got a look of concern on her face. It was because the baby was on its way out. Oh, that would explain why the woman was screaming in pain. She was in the middle of a miscarriage. That is good to know for the future. I became a pro at recognizing the abdominal organs and finding medical problems. I could also tell the sex of the baby and measure the head, abdomen, and femur for the age of the fetus.
At our house, we have been having quite a few security threats. Our guard was fired because he threatened one of our cooks that if she didn't sleep with him he would shoot her. He was previously in the Ugandan army and then recruited to the LRA. Thankfully, he was able to escape from the LRA. He is a rough character though. He wanted to kill our first cook, that we fired for stealing from us, because she stole 1000 shillings from him. That is the equivalent of 50 cents. In the end, he was getting a bit too friendly with the girls on the team and he had to go. We can't be out front of the house when it gets dark because people throw rocks and bricks at us. Our new guard finally caught these two hooligans and locked them in his guard house over the night. The next morning he tied them together, placed them under arrest and took them to their mothers. Their mothers were furious. These mothers have been having trouble with these boys stealing from them. Here, the mothers either had to cane them 15 times or a mob would stone them to death. The mother's were more than happy to cane them. The other day, we saw a mob go running by to kill someone for stealing a blanket. The police are corrupt here so the people take law into their own hands. Since our guard made a public scene of the boys being caned, hopefully people will leave our house alone now. I have learned to be very firm with men here. Daily, I get asked for my hand in marriage or if a man can date me. I have to be very straightforward with them and tell them no. If you give a man a vague answer, he will take it as a yes. At this point, they become very creepy and stalkerish. Thankfully, I have become pretty streetsmart, but I am always on the lookout. Despite the normal third world problems, I love Uganda. I now know that I want to focus my career and education towards international development. I want to come back to Uganda after I have my degree(s) and serve the people here further.