Okay so these are a few things that happened between language immersion and future site visit. Not much happened in between out of the ordinary. Our group is ridiculous in general and I would have to write a novel about all the little crazy things we say and do. We had a mock LPI (language proficiency interview) which I bombed due to me being so nervous. Judith my language trainer stopped the tape after and just looked at me with these eyes that said "WHAT HAPPENED YOU KNOW THIS!" Honestly I always get text anxiety when it comes to oral exams and I could have used a shot or two to calm my nerves in which case I probably would have done better. We also had the 50th anniversary which I have pictures posted of on facebook. We went to a Juvira Primary School and did activities with the kids from painting murals and building rocket stoves to reading books to the younger kids and doing life skills activities. I was involved in doing life skills, which included one game called the "best response" activity. We would outline scenarios that involved peer pressuring youth into having sex. They split into groups and would have to come up with the "best response" to the line. For example, "If you don't have sex you will get a rash" Things like this were actually believed to be true. It is amazing and somewhat disheartening, the misconceptions young people have here about sex and HIV, which is probably why we are required to do HIV awareness and life skills work in addition to our teaching schedules. I didn't bring a camera to the event after, a dinner and cocktail party with a lot of volunteers already in country and the peace corps staff. Dinner was good and the night consisted of a lot of dancing and drinking. PC people are crazy in their own right so it was good to let loose and some got a little sillier then others. One of the crazies, who is of course my friend, fell asleep on the grass outside the hotel under some trees and was thankfully brought back by a guard to us sitting outside before the guard dogs got to him haha. Thankfully one of us was learning luganda and could understand him saying "your friend, your friend" and he promptly put him in a bed.
The next morning we dragged ourselves out of bed hungover to go cook lunch with our language groups. We went to Jacque's family house who were really sweet and whether they liked the lunch or not they seemed pleased and were very helpful. We walked from the hotel to meet Judith and Lanyero (the secondary tech trainer who is acholi and is always involved in helping our group because our languages are SO similar) at the market. We bought supplies including a live chicken which rachel cradled like a child the rest of the trip to make its last moments on earth comfortable before we slaughtered it for lunch (side note... blood goes everywhere, the knives in this country are not sharp and cleaning a chicken and separating all it's insides is grose! I will not be eating much chicken once I live on my own haha) Rachel named it adit gweno (which means mister chicken in our language haha). We made spaghetti with meat sauce and marinated beef kabobs as our "american dishes" and we made chicken stew, rice and greens as the "african dishes" Everything turned out good accept that the kabobs were so tough we couldn't really eat them haha whoops! After doing this on only 2 hours of sleep the previous night I was thoroughly exhausted and promptly walked home in the blazing mid afternoon heat to rest for the remainder of the day... I needed the next 2 days to prepare for site visit!!!!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment