Brain Tree School

As many of you know, my high school, Shipley, partnered with a primary school in Uganda called Brain Tree. When I got into my study abroad program I googled where Brain Tree was on a whim, thinking that I was being naive in hoping that in the entire country, the school may be close to where my program was located. But, somehow, it turned out that Brain Tree is 5 kilometers from where I am staying! So I contacted Shipley and told them I would be able to visit the school to see if there was anything they would like me to bring from them. I brought a whole carryon of donations from Shipley and spent my first two weeks anxiously waiting for some free time so I could go visit the school.
 My visit to Brain Tree last Friday was truly incredible. My friends must have gotten tired of it because I met up with them afterwards and gushed about the visit for an hour straight. Just driving through the gates was a surreal experience. I had heard about this school since I was 11 and had never imagined that I would actually see it one day. At Shipley, I could barely wrap my head around the idea that it was a concrete place, and that the people there were more than abstract cut-outs of people with a painted background. Remembering my misconceptions of Brain Tree throughout my middle and high school years made the experience that much more powerful for me.
Upon my arrival, I was greeted by a song the school had prepared to preform for me! I posted the video on facebook because blogger was having trouble processing it.

I then got to tour the grounds and see the places Shipley had helped to fundraise for over the years. I saw the library, with pictures of my class at Shipley pinned on the wall, along with the kitchen and dormitory construction. All of which were aided in funding by Shipley.  I also got to see the beautiful culture center donated to Brain Tree by the Buganda King's wife! Brain Tree also had an outdoor auditorium, chicken coops, a playground, a cafeteria, an outdoor volleyball court, and the most colorful classrooms I had ever seen. The Brain Tree School was started to education the orphans living on the street in the community. Now, the school has grown from one woman teaching under a tree outside, and is able to provide free education and boarding for a quarter of the students to help them receive the primary education they deserve but cannot afford.

After my tour I was able to meet the student who received the scholarship Shipley's 5th grade had sponsored for a student to go to secondary school. His name is Ivan and I could not be more happy with Martha's choice for the recipient of the scholarship. He has led a very hard life, and despite that scored well enough to continue to secondary school. Without the money from Shipley, he would have had to stop school at 14 and find a job. I got to interview him with some questions the Shipley fifth graders asked so they could get to know him better.

After meeting Ivan I decided to hang out at the school a little longer. There was a game of volleyball going on and I joined in for a couple hours. Many of the teachers are young and had joined the game as well. Despite me having played all through high school, my team still lost!
Finally, as it got dark, I decided to head out. The Brain Tree School's van driver was kind enough to take me back into the city.
I would have liked to go back this week but my class ended too late for me to go. Once my Independent Study Project starts and I have six weeks without classes, I will hopefully go at least once a week. I was so happy when I was at the school. It is a really wonderful place and I truly cannot wait to go back.

Tomorrow I head to Rwanda for two weeks and may not be able to blog for a while. But I will post if I can!

Finally Uploaded my Orientation Video! Link is below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwgoohPKMwA

New Homestay, My Weekend, and a Ugandan Wedding!

I am now two weeks old in Uganda and learning so much I cannot seem to write it all down. The biggest change this week is that I had to move my homestay on Thursday. I am allergic to bananas and my old homestay was next to a banana chip smoking and packaging factory. It got too difficult to stay so my director suggested I leave the home.
I am now about fifteen minutes further from Kampala in a village called Kasangati. There are about twelve people who are consistently at this house, and many more family members who stop by to visit for a meal. I have two grandmothers that live here. We call them both Jaja. One of whom is 102, blind, and bed-bound. When she met me she danced in her bed and sang a welcome song for me in Luganda! My other Jaja loves to sit outside on her mat and enjoy the sun. Here is a picture of her with her friend peeling some corn. She is on the left.

I also have seven siblings between 15 and 32 all with names beginning with J. It kind of feels like I live with the Duggars. Only my sister Juliet (23) and brother John (31) live at home right now because the others are either away at boarding school (a very common way for kids to get educated here) or living away. I also have three younger cousins named Jemima (3),  George (5), and Maria (14) who live here.  My mother is a primary school principle, and my dad is a property evaluation officer. I do miss my other family and was sad to leave but this house is very kind as well and I am happy.

Jemima and George playing

I also had a very eventful weekend. On Friday, the other four students and I were able to go out to bars in Kampala. I will be honest and say that I was a little afraid to go out in a city where I stick out so much, but I am happy to say my hesitations were not supported. We danced a lot, by ourselves, and with other Ugandans. The only uncomfortable situation we encountered was the amount of men asking us where our husbands were. It was interesting to be assumed to be married at just 21. While many Ugandans are not married at this age, there are definitely a greater portion here who are compared to the number in the US. I think that the younger generation is slowly changing the standards and getting married later and later so there is a big diversity of the age at which women currently marry. Thankfully, there is one boy in our program who had to act as our protector. Our program director had warned us of this, saying that most men are regarded as the keepers of women and must guard them. Even though we are in a city there are still strongly ingrained gender roles in Kampala. 

In general there is a big culture of hierarchy here. Children kneel to their parents to show respect, women kneel to men, and men kneel to the kind. My younger siblings even kneel to me when greeting me! At first I was disturbed by this, but it has begun to appear more normal to me. Respect for elders is very important here and it is very nice to see. It is also very important to respect the person who cooked the meal. A man can go to court for not thanking his wife for the dinner she cooked him. It is strange to me that these things disturbed me so much at first and in two weeks have become easy to understand. It just goes to show how important it is to have cultural sensitivity in situations that are so foreign. 

I was able to go to a Ugandan Introduction ceremony on Saturday. This is the ceremony that comes before a wedding in Ugandan culture. It is where the bridewealth is presented and where the parents officially meet their in-laws. It is seen as a bigger deal that the traditional Western-influenced wedding. All the attendees wear traditional clothing to the Introduction. Women wear either Gomesis or Busuutis, and men wear Kanzus.

Kanzus

Krissy and me in Busuutis

The bride (in orange and green) wearing a Gomesi

The biggest struggle I am having now is communicating in Luganda. My younger cousins and my Jajas do not speak English, so I have a very hard time communicating with them. Gemima went up to John yesterday and started crying because she could not speak english and talk to me. It was so sweet to hear and motivating for me to improve my Luganda.

That's it for now! My next post will detail my first trip to The Brain Tree School!

My List of Firsts

This post is dedicated to the plethora of "firsts" I have had so far while living in my homestay. I have only been here five days and have had to re-learn how to wash my hands, take a shower, go to the bathroom, do laundry, greet people... etc, in the way Ugandan's do it.

For the first time, I:

1. Woke up to a rooster crowing
1. My homestay family lives on a farm with a billion chickens, goats, pigs (with cute piglets!), and a cow. I haven't gotten to milk the cow yet, but I've been promised that I will learn!
2. Went to the bathroom in a pit latrine. 
• My homestay does not have a toilet, only a communal pit latrine outside. It is actually not bad at all. At first I was afraid, but now it is just part of my routine and does not bother me at all. 
3. Wore a skirt for seven days straight
4. Washed my laundry by hand
• It is a rare luxury to have a washing machine here so everyone washes their clothes in a bucket and dries on a clothes line. I plan on posting a video of washing laundry because it is really cool and definitely a learned skill here.
5. Ate a jackfruit
• They're massive and delicious. I'm pretty upset they're impossible to find in the US because I've quickly become addicted.

6. Navigated Ugandan public transportation on my own.
• We take the public vans (called taxis) to and from school every day. 
7. Took a shower from a bucket
• There is not enough running water here to have a shower so we boil some water and mix it with cold water in a bucket to make warm water for a shower. I use a cup to pour the water over myself.
8. Watched a Phillipino TV show with both English and Lugandan voice-overs playing together. 
1. Literally the most confusing thing the first time I watched it. Not only did the actor's mouths not match the words because they were speaking Phillipino, and the original voiceover was in english, but the show was on the Lugandan channel so the english dubbing kept getting cut into with Lugandan dubbing to rush the Lugandan words in before the scene changed. It's pretty hilarious. It sounds awful and I wondered at first why they did not just put English or Lugandan subtitles instead. But then I remembered the low literacy levels Uganda unfortunately deals with.
9. Had a shot of vodka from a plastic pouch (sorry adults reading this).
• They serve shots of alcohol in little plastic pouches. It's great because you pay for one shot and get the equivalent of like three.

10. Met a presidential candidate!!!
• My program is incredibly well connected. Our directer is friends with one of Uganda's leading political figures (the president of their Democratic Party) and we went to his house for three hours today and he lectured us about the ethnic conflict Uganda has with the north and the south and the war the north experienced earlier this decade.
11. Had a clan and a Lugandan name. 
• My name in Luganda is Nachimoli, given to me by my host mother. Our family belongs to the Ffumbe clan. There are 52 Lugandan clans and each has an animal totem. Ours is something called a civet cat that I think is sort of like a badger.

That's it for now! Please email me or facebook me if you have any questions about my experience or would like me to write a blog post about anything in particular. My courses here are very comprehensive, from politics, to healthcare, to gender issues, and I would love to share what I have learned with you all!

Love, 

Maddie 

First Week and Homestay

I made a video with a lot of information about the city, the food, and the transportation here, but I have not had enough internet access to upload it. So I will supplement with a blog post for now. 

My first full week here has now passed and the best adjectives I can are are that it has been fun, confusing, difficult, delicious, and HOT. We spent Sunday through Friday in the hotel Bativa, a block from Makerere University and three blocks from SIT recourse center. The hotel was a kind of halfway point between the way we live in the US and how we live in our homestays. There was running hot water and a delicious breakfast prepared every morning, but no AC. We spent the week driving and walking around the city to get oriented, eating at delicious restaurants (some of which were fancier than any I've been to in the US), and learning key cultural differences and some Luganda so that we could get by in our homestays. Kampala is a modern, growing city that globalization has heavily effected. There are adds for cell phones and internet providers everywhere and skyscrapers scattered throughout the city. It is much more familiar for me than I imagined, and I mean that both physically and in regards to the spirit and mood of the city. 

I have been in my home stay for two days now and have messed up enough times I've lost count. I knelt down and they assumed I was praying, I ate meat with a fork instead of my hands and they laughed and called me a Muzungu (white person), I needed thirty minutes to take my first bucket shower because shampoo is a lot harder to get out of your hair without running water. The list goes on...Even so, I understand that they do not laugh to mock me. I just do things very differently from them. I am trying to see it as funny every time I mess up but I have to be honest and say that it is challenging to not know how to do anything and to not know why people are doing things. 

Like this morning I went to church with my host mom and 6 year old brother, and the pastor was talking about me for two minutes before I understood. And that was only because every head in the room had turned to me. Then she asked me to stand up at the alter and address the congregation. Not only did she have to ask me 5 times because it was in Luganda and I only know 30 words, but she also gave me no direction on what to say so I just kept thanking them and saying I loved it there until I got enough nods and claps that I was allowed to step down. It was mucho embarrassing but everyone laughed with me and were very nice about how confused I was so I didn't completely mind.

My host family is very kind and welcoming. My mother is 60 and has 6 grown kids. There are 4 others living in the main house with me and countless others who pass through and say hi. I haven't yet figured out who is my family and who are just friends. Next week I have to do an assignment on my family tree so hopefully I will be forced to figure it out from that. The most difficult cultural difference to overcome is alone time. I am constantly surrounded by people and being touched.  My 6 year old brother follows me everywhere. I love them but it is a huge adjustment from spending so much time in solitude over my extended winter break. He goes off to boarding school this week though so I will definitely miss him. 

I am not certain but I think I would call the family lower- middle class. They live on a farm with pigs and goats and chickens and a cow. The house is small but very well kept. There is a communal shower and pit latrine (which is actually not as scary as I thought it would be), and a kitchen outside. We live right next to a hospital and across the street from a grocery store so it is a very convenient location.

Our group outside the Bativa hotel

The homes of the local police that are across the street from SIT resource center

A pretty view of the city

We finished orientation week by going to a traditional dance show that was definitely a tourist trap but also honestly impressive. This is from one of the dances at the show; it featured costume dance from Rwanda.

Orientation Lessons

I will post a video with my pictures and videos either tomorrow or Friday, but for now, here are some facts I have learned in my four days here (they call us four days old).

1. Ugandan Pizza is gross
2. Kampala should steal NYC's title as the city that never sleeps. Seriously, shops close around 1 and there is still music playing at 4:30 am on weekdays.
3. You can buy a full season of any TV show here for only a dollar (any requests??)
4. Uganda doesn't have crows, instead they have gigantic creatures called Storks that we call Pterodactyls because they're terrifying and huge. They are like crows though that they aren't actually all that dangerous, but they are so ubiquitous in the sky that people are annoyed by them. Here is a picture to show how creepy-looking they are.
   
5. Ugandans say the letter "r" like "l". So my last name is pronounced Nollis.
6. It is rude to make eye contact with someone when you are speaking to them here. You are supposed to look around at other things. This will be hard for me because usually when I'm doing that in conversation it means I'm not paying attention. 
7. There is a very minute difference between the Luganda pronunciation of water and shit (which is considered a very rude curse word.) Water is amazzi, and shit is amazii. Really afraid I might accidentally order a bottle of poop at a restaurant. 

That's it for now. Good afternoon to everyone in the states! It's midnight here so I'm going to sleep. I hope to post again soon!

Here is my first video from Uganda! I will some photos and videos of kampala and the place I'm staying once I have time. Just wanted to post one thing to let everyone know that I am safe and having an amazing time.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9UphocWTFUFWVFoSERSUWt0LUE/view?usp=sharing