One Bottle Down

I just finished the first bottle of my daily malaria pills, making today a pretty significant day if you ask me. Before swallowing the last pill, I spent some time staring at the almost empty bottle and reminiscing about my time in Uganda so far. I couldn’t help but focus on the last two or so weeks, especially this past week. When we initially arrived, us three interns floated around while Kelsey and Eric, the summer volunteers, showed us the ways. During this time, we made note of how things at SWB work and what we wanted to implement/fine-tune. Kelsey left Uganda a little over two weeks ago, leaving the three of us long-term interns to take over the reins. It’s been a pretty chaotic time, especially because August is a holiday month for schools so we have more kids than usual, but it’s been nice to jump into things and implement/adjust the various things we have discussed and observed since our arrival.

One of the biggest adjustments so far has been to our youth English class. A majority of our participants are refugees who cannot afford to go to school. As a result, many do not speak English. Well, all the kids do know at least two words. No matter what you say in English, you are guaranteed a response of I’m fine. I can’t even count how many times I hear that phrase a day. Anyways, SWB offers a two hour English class every morning, which has proven to be rather difficult to run because of the age range (about 4-13 years) and level of fluency of our participants (some don’t know what the letter A looks like and others are able to hold a basic conversation). So for a while we were confused on what to do – Do we teach verbs and lose the younger/less fluent kids, do we teach the alphabet and lose the kids who are fluent, or do we attempt to teach the middle of the class?

We decided to split up the class, which sounds a lot simpler than it actually is. The reality is that there are more participants than our center can handle. There are days where people are standing outside the door trying to listen to what we are teaching because there is simply no room for them to sit or stand in the classroom. Our center only contains one classroom, so we transformed the small equipment room into another classroom that can barely fit 12 students. At first it was a difficult transition because of the tight squeeze and lack of a chalkboard. But last week we interns bought chalkboard paint and made the wall of the main classroom into a chalkboard. The ‘classroom’ in the equipment room now contains the chalkboard from the main classroom and I no longer have to use a poster board as a chalkboard. This has allowed us to teach the two groups simultaneously – one of us is now able to teach the older, fluent kids about adjectives and science, while the other teaches the younger kids about the ABCs in another room. I am excited for the progress of these two separate English classes over the next few months.

In addition to refining English class, we are also in the process of fine-tuning our programming and ensuring that it consistently contains the five elements of SWB: soccer, team building, off-field workshops/lessons, cultural exchange and civic engagement. We started the process this past week and took our Under 17 girls team on a team building trip to KK Beach of Lake Victoria. After their Saturday training session, we all ate some rice and beans a player cooked and all 16 of us squeezed into a matatu, or Ugandan taxi (not a little yellow car like America, but rather one of those white vans that parents warn their children about). Right when we arrived to the beach, the girls stripped down and dove into the cold water without hesitation. I can’t put into words how happy they were to be there for that hour and a half. As two girls told me at separate times, “It will be a day they never forget.”

The girls playing in the water

Group shot at KK Beach

A few days later, the team packed into a matatu once again and headed to play another local team. Although we tied 0-0, we played extremely well and had plenty of chances. I’m convinced that if we played with full size goals, the score would have been around 3-0. Of all our SWB teams, the only team that plays in a league is our Under 17 boys team. The other teams train about four times a week and only play scrimmages/tournaments with other teams when able (not even once a month), so this scrimmage was a big event for our program.

Team shot before the game

I’m excited to continue working with SWB and solidifying the great work that the program does here. This week has been pretty hectic, but I truly enjoy every minute of it. Tomorrow morning Katy and I are taking off to Murchison Falls and Fort Portal for our first safari. We were just warned to not have bananas in our tent because of the baboons and to buy pepper spray so the elephants won’t come near our tent. I’m excited to see more of this beautiful country and will post about it next week. That is, if I survive the Ugandan bush...