Some More Catching Up

Morphine

A few weeks ago a young boy, maybe four, came into the clinic with absolutely terrible second degree burns all over the top of his feet. He had run past a kettle of boiling water and knocked it over onto his feet. He was in incredible amounts of pain. You could hear his screams from across the road. The morning program kids were here and they all got really quite and you could tell they were really scared. In they end they had to first remove a large amount of brunt dead tissue and then use rubbing alcohol to clean the wounds. While they were able to inject some lidocane by they were done removing the dead skin it had worn off and they cleaned the burns without using any form of anesthetic.

For the next week the boy came in every day to have his bandages changed and burns cleaned without any pain killers. I was able to watch the second day they changed the bandages and after watching Richard and the boy’s teary eyed mother hold the screaming kid down for Joseph to take off the bandages I couldn’t watch the rest. It was unbelievable. It was a good reminder of what luxuries we have in the first world. No mother in America is asked to hold down her screaming child while his second degree burns are cleaned with rubbing alcohol.

Sometimes you forget the hardships that these people face. They are always so friendly and always seem so happy. No Uganda will every tell you that he or she is sick or uncomfortable or unhappy. People are always telling you that their life is good and are always smiling. But then something like this happens and I remember that these people lack so very much that should be available to them, everything from the obvious things like books and proper medical care to the not so obvious like balloons and pipe cleaners to play with in and make art project to bring

Peanut Patch

Our garden is doing relatively (~) well. A couple weeks ago we spent the week weeding the peanut patch. There are two ways to weed, the mzungu way and the Ugandan way. The mzungu way is pulling the individual weeds by hand. While this way is much more through it takes a lot longer. The Ugandan way is to use a hoe to dig up all the dirt and weeds around the peanut plant and then pick out all the weeds from the loose dirt around the plants. We started out weeding the mzungu way assuming that we could do a really through job once and then we wouldn’t have to weed again. People would stop and watch us weed. Many would even bring us a hoe and try to get us to weed the Ugandan way (including six year old children). But we held true to our roots and continued to weed the American way. However, half way through the peanut patch all the weeds from where we started had already grown back. We switched techniques. What is interesting is that Dean McEvoy was just here visiting and he instantly assumed that the hoe technique would work better. Without any instruction he just picked up the hoe and started weeding the Ugandan way. In addition, he was really good at it. I was very impressed.

The rest of our garden is doing pretty well. We transplanted our cabbage too early so it all died. However, someone heard our story from John (that we are trying to grow for the community and felt bad for us black thumbed mzungus) and donated some of his healthy cabbages. So we have transplanted all about 70 of his cabbages two weeks ago and they are looking great. We have also transplanted some of our onions. I was really skeptical because they were so little, but so far they are all standing upright. The carrots on the other hand are not doing well. They are supposed to be planted once and not in a nursery bed, so any that we tried to transplant died, I think that we are just going to have to thin the carrot plants in the nursery bed and hope for the best.

The beans are now being harvested. YAY! This is so cool because we get to eat the fresh beans that we grew for lunch and dinner every other night. Fresh beans taste amazing, although they still have the same effect on your digestive system ;). Hopefully the corn will be ready to harvest when my parents come in a week and a half.

Last Few Weeks of School

School has just let out for summer holiday (December 4, 2008 to February 2, 2009). Toward s the end of school I started to expand my teaching horizons and teach math duhnananaaa. At first I thought that this was going to be really hard. The p.5 math teacher gave me a list of topics like LCM, Finite Systems, Prime and Composite numbers, improper and proper fractions, and square numbers. Some of these topics I understood, but I definitely could not explain any of these concepts in words. However, after going through the pupils book, which I purchased in Kampala months ago and promptly put on my self and did not touch, I realized that most of it I knew and could figure out how to explain. The first topic I ended up teaching was Lowest Common Multiple (LCM). This was actually relatively easy, except for one thing, the students are not required to memorize their multiplication tables, instead they just look on the back of their blue books where a copy of the tables up to 12 is printed. Now I am the first social science major to raise her hand and argue against stringent math Gen. Ed. requirements and talk about how I never use that trigonometry I learned in tenth grade, but knowing your multiplication tables is key.

In the end I actually enjoyed teach math more than English. Math ended up being easier to teach than English for a couple of reasons. First, you can explain using examples and their aren’t very many if any at this level of math exceptions to rules. Second, I have no formal training in teaching English as a second language and there are so many irregulars. For example, I went over plurals and this was really hard because the plural of mouse is mice, but the plural of house is houses. Third, since the students aren’t taught grammar and are expected to memorize everything through repetition, it is really hard to explain new concepts.

Steve and I also got a chance to grade P.5 and P.6’s math and English exams. I take back what I said about red pen making you feel powerful. It is extremely frustrating to watch your students get something wrong that you taught, more than once. The average P.5 English exam was 30% and the average P.6 math exam wasn’t much better. There were several really funny wordos and mistakes. The best was the one asking the students to change the word wolf to plural. One student wrote “wife – domestic animal”.

End of Morning Program

With the end of school also came the end of the morning program. We decided to give the students the same summer break that the public school was getting. I think that both the kids and Steve, Hagar, and I needed the time away from each other. They were getting bored of the activities we planed for them and we were becoming a little to comfortable yelling at them and joking about corporal punishment. For example, we have to put Joan on the windowsill when she is bad (we would put her in the corner and make her stare at the wall like everyone else, but she is too young and doesn’t get that its punishment) and one day we forgot about her for about half an hour until we heard her yelling from around the corner asking to get down. Also our jokes about shutting them all in the chicken coops and letting them roast under the afternoon sun were just seeming a little to tempting.

Our last week was really fun and went really well. Steve and I made them chapattis (a local snack food steve and I have just learned to make) for snack time. They loved this because we made them extra large ones. This was the first snack time where kids weren’t crying and begging for food. We also made popsicle stick picture frames and printed picture of each of the kids. This was by far the most popular activity we have done. For many of these kids this was their first picture.

I want to thank everyone who has sent school supplies, children’s books, and arts and crafts supplies. As your packages came in we were able to make drastic improvements to the morning program. Without what you sent we never could have given these kids such a rewarding experience.

Now that I have had a week away from the children I can’t wait to start up the morning program again. The other day I was walking by the road and saw a bunch of the kids. I just wanted to sit and play with them. Separation definitely makes the heart grow fonder. It is going to be really hard to leave these kids.