all that glitters....

the last couple of days have been eventful, to say the least. i have been feeling absolutely awful, but thats not really relevant. yesterday and the day before there has been a large intake of new people, and all of the volunteers who went to rwanda returned yesterday, so the lodge is fit to burst. It is technically supposed to accommodate 20 guests, but there are currently 34 volunteers staying there. Its quite nice having lots of people around though, and they all fit without too much trouble.

Yesterday four of the new people (two mothers and a daughter each) and I took 5 children from each of  the baby classes, and made glitter pictures with them. They thought it was great fun, and just like Tanzania, they couldn’t quite understand why we would waste glitter by putting it on paper, and they were really just interested in putting it all over themselves. We are planning to repeat that activity every day for a few days  until all of the children in the baby classes have done it.

Yesterday some very sad rumours were confirmed for us by the parents of affected children. On Thursday through the village gossip line, Anne heard that some of the children who had done badly in their exams had been beaten by their teachers, and some had been hospitalized. This was really horrible to hear about but we just hoped it wasn’t true. Jameel, the head, who works closely with the volunteers seemed appalled and promised to investigate. It turns out that it was actually jameel who did it, so it’s difficult to know who to trust. Beating children in school is illegal in Uganda and if he was reported (particularly by a mzungu) he would be in serious trouble. I also witnessed one of the baby class teachers smacking another teachers child. The child isn’t actually a student, but all of the teachers babies are brought to school and allowed to roam around. We have been told to reprimand teachers of we see anything, but when I asked her not to do tha, she just laughed in my face. This is one part of volunteering here that I’m not loving.

I haven’t been into school today because I was feeling ill, but I needed to come into town to top up on painkillers, so I thought I’d post while I was here. I’m sure I was charged the white price for the ibuprofen I bought, but it still only cost 75p for 30 tablets.

I should be able to post again tomorrow because we are coming to see the market. (I might see about buying a pig!)

Love, lucy xx

Classes and Clubbing...

hey all, sorry about the extremely short post yesterday that i just re read and was a bit of a nonsense post really.

yesterday after i took little brian to hospital we came ino town and i bought a few things and used the internet at the internet cafe. i also bought some gin, whihc seems to be the drink of choice around here, and is ludicrously cheap. it comes in sachets, rather than bottles, and each one is 100ml. you can buy a pack of 12 sachets for 5500 shillings, which is less than 1.50 in england! we came back from town on a boda boda, which is basically a motorbike that you can hire as a taxi. i was bricking it but it was actually ok, i'd had to ride one earlier in the day anway to take brian home from hospital. we had races and we came second, and the people who were in the lead broke down and had to be collected by anther one of the drivers!

when we got back the goat was being barbequed african style on sticks which were shoved into a log on the fire.it was really yummy and nice to have some meat! after the goat we had a few drinks and the headed out to the sal geusthouse, which is a local club.  it was a good laugh though some of the african mens dance moves were questionable! the africn women were very keen to dance with us because they arent alowed to refuse a man if he wantes to dance with her or even if he wants to tae her off for a quickie, so they like to dance with us because we can get rid of the men, or turn it into a group dancing experience rather than a sexual couples dancing thing. one girl i was talking to was only 14 and she was absolutely terrified that a man would drag her off at any moment. i spent the night pointing at my ring (which i wear on my wedding finger but on the wrong hand) and telling people i was married!! it worked well...

a big group of volunteers went off to rwanda fr a couple of days thismorning, so the lodge is a lot quieter, but we did have 2 new people arrive, who have moved into my room, so i wont be alone as molly and sarah have gone on the rwanda trip.

as tomorrow is sunday and there is no school, i think some of us are going to church with the kids in the morning to see the singing, and then we are all going to 'the beach' which is actually the shore of nikaboko lake, so that should be interesting!!