Random Stuff

Nsua ne Nsenene

So I don’t know if I should make this public knowledge, but I ate live bugs. Just joking I ate cooked bugs. Late in October there is a season called nsua season. nsua are large white ants. They are everywhere, sort of like locusts attacking for about two weeks and then disappear again. Many of the kids eat them raw with the wings still attached. It was nsua season while the morning program was still going on and I was often completely grossed out when a kid would come up to me with wings sticking out of their mouth from eating the ants they found on the ground. Adults and older kids have the sense to wait until the ants are cooked. Their legs, wings, and antenna are pulled off then they are fried in a little bit of oil and salted once they cool.
Nsenene are a type of grasshopper. While nsenene do not swarm like nsua they only come for about a month every year. For about half of November and half of December every major town has large lights surrounded by iron sheets set up to catch the grasshoppers. The grasshoppers are attacked to the light and then fly into the iron sheet and then slide down the iron sheet into a large mettle basin. The nsenene have enough natural fats that they are just fried dry and then served plain. I really liked the nsenene and I would recommend that anyone who comes should try some.

Laying Bricks Construction

Engeye is currently expanding rapidly. The most recent addition is a building that has been under construction for quite some time, the laboratory. Since John has come back two men have been hard at work building this brick and concrete structure by hand. They don’t use any machines, not even to mix the concrete. The other day they let me try laying bricks. I was terrible, well actually not as bad as I thought I would be, it is just really hard to tell when the bricks are level even when using a plumb line. It is also really tiring. Concrete is really heavy. After about a ten foot section I was feeling it in my muscles, I can’t imagine being the person to mix the concrete.

Making American Food

A few weeks before Steve and I left for vacation we tried cooking pasta and tomato sauce for the clinic staff. First of all I thought it would go over really well. Considering most of the food eaten here consists of a large portion of a heavy starch with some sort of sauce poured on top I thought pasta would go over well. Steve, Hagar!, and I got together around 3 o’clock and started preparing. By eight o’clock we had a massive pot of pasta and tomato sauce that no one liked. I think the biggest problem with it was that it did not have any salt in it. Ugandans cook with tons of salt, I think it is because they have been told that the iodine in the salt is good for you because it stops goiters (which did used to be extremely prevalent). However, you only need a very small amount of iodine combat goiters. But once used to the taste of tons of salt, you like it. Susan we put the salt on the table just in case, I think they liked the salt more than the dish itself.

Learning to Ride a Piki Piki

After my parents left, I had a little trouble adjusting back to life alone in the village (steve was not back yet). So smart girl that I am, I decided to distract myself by having Francis teach me how to ride a Piki Piki (motor cycle). I have actually ridden a motorbike(a less powerful automatic version of motorcycles) before and therefore sort of knew what I was doing. I was doing pretty well until he started taking me up hills. And even after the hills I wasn’t doing to badly until I broke the gear changing peddle and we had to go putt putt all the way home in first gear. Woops. Luckily the Piki Piki was really easy to fix and the Piki Piki is not traumatized. I think Francis was a little embarrassed traveling by crowds of people at ten miles per hour with a while girl on the back of the bike.

Chicken Coops

Thanks to the money that the Union Campus has raised, we have started a chicken distribution program. So far we have given 10 chickens to 10 different children. We are giving the chickens to children for two reasons. First the goal of giving out the chickens is to increase the amount of protein in the child’s diet and second to teach the child ways they can generate income. Giving the chickens to the children and not the parent ensure that the parent won’t just kill the chicken and eat it for dinner, because the child will be upset and come tell us if their parent killed “their chicken”. In addition to receiving the chicken and being required to eat its eggs, each child must raise at least one chick to give to another child (maybe a friend or sibling) thus expanding the program. We also helped build the ten chicken coops the chickens will be living in (or so we thought). People are too scared that someone will come by and steel the chicken at night, so the chicken sleeps inside the house, and because they let the chickens’ free range during the day so there is really no point in having the coops. Some of the children have shown real interest in the program. I am hoping these children will not only be interested in raising the chicken so that they can eat the eggs, but use the chicken as an opportunity to learn how to generate income and increase assets (by not only choosing to raise one chicken to give away, but increase the number of chickens they have and thus increase the number of eggs they get). In the end we hope to double the number of chickens we have given out so far.

We have not checked on the chickens yet, this is something I plan to do this week. I am a little worried that some of them might have “disappeared” over the Christmas holiday. Here in Uganda the Christmas tradition is to cook a huge feast including whatever meat (beef, pork, chicken) you have for Christmas. I am a little worried some of our chickens have fallen victim.