Training Is Over

There was rain today, a nice strong storm.   My windows were open. The curtains blew in and papers flew.  The sound was amazing.  For an hour I was home again, lost in what could have been an afternoon Florida downpour.  There was more than nostalgia in those clouds.  All the water I use is collected off the back half of my house.  This is the dry season and my cistern has been getting dangerously low, as grateful as I was my neighbors find it to be a mixed blessing.  The rain makes it harder to prep the fields for planting.  Much of their tilling was undone today.  They still took what they could from it. I looked outside to find buckets lined up along the front half of my roof, collecting the run off.  There is no such thing as private property in the village.  If you are not using a resource on your land someone will.  My neighbor’s animals graze in my grass; they collect fallen branches from my trees, and wander through my yard.  Not that I mind, but if I did I couldn’t do anything about it.

Things are different here. People take their time. No one is in a hurry in Uganda.  In my village I have become known as the mzungu in the hat who walks fast.  There are animals everywhere.  Last night a rat the size of a large cat snuck into my house.  No lie; it was at least 10 pounds.  This morning a small goat wandered into my kitchen.  The goat was only slightly bigger than the rat. The rat was really easy to get rid of, but the goat kept coming back. I have had to hunt down rats a few times since I have been here.   As creepy as the giant one was, I’ll take it over a normal one.  A little rat can hide all over the place and runs really fast.  A 10 pound rat has considerably fewer places to go and is much slower, they kind of waddle when they walk.  It’s pretty amusing.

Training, what do I have to say about training?  I learned a lot. For example Uganda is really hard on things like computers. My keyboard broke almost upon arrival. That’s why I have not been posting.  It took a while to find a replacement.  Training was intense.  There were sessions on everything, and they just kept coming.  Stress and frustration were mounting among all of us.  It forces you to depend on the other volunteers, which is exactly what you need. It’s not something you can understand from the outside.  Living in this culture, learning how to communicate in the local languages, how to handle the food and navigate the country.  Along the way you will stumble into situations that defy your ability to comprehend.  All you can do is think on it and laugh.  This place is nothing like I imagined.  Of all things it is the similarities that amaze me.  I learned much in training.  More than I thought I could have in two months.  Now I find myself sitting in my house in my village being contented by things I didn’t know of just a short time ago.  Sometimes I stop and realize just how different my life is and how much is similar. Neither of those is what I imagined.

I started applying for the Peace Corps a year before I left.  Now 14 months later my first day as a teacher in Uganda is 2 nights away.  I still don’t know what level I will be teaching, just the subjects, Chemistry and Biology.  I am not nervous or scared.  Training prepared me very well.  Beyond that, I feel that almost every job and experience in my life have been setting me up for this.  There is so much potential here.  I am ready for it to begin.