Holliday on the way

7/13/11
Today was recommendation day. It went surprisingly well, and all of our suggestions were well received. We also spent a lot of time talking about how things have changed over the past three years. I think they were impressed that we have learned to like matoke and use public menas to get around. Most whites are tucked away in their cars with their spaghetti. We will have a few loose ends to tie up when we get back from our trip, but by and large we are finished working. It is nice, and I’m really looking forward to the trip out west.

We uploaded all of the pictures from this week. Some of them are of letters that we received from students. Most of them are what you would expect, but some are extremely sad. Some of them asked us for help. It is hard to know what to do, but I think we will at least leave a letter for the class.

7/12/11
I’ve spent the entire day transcribing a focus group and there’s still 25 minutes to go out of an hour and 15 minutes. It is so slow and tedious. The fact that it was held under a mango tree doesn’t help either.

Moses helped though, and I’m really starting to enjoy his company. Things are moving forward in arranging his studies in Germany, and he is asking us a lot of questions about traveling and living in a Western country. We told him to try the moving sidewalks. I think he’ll be impressed by them.

7/11/11
We had two focus groups today, and I got asked hard questions again. One that keeps coming up is “Where does HIV come from?” Sometimes I wonder how children fit these types of diseases into their world view and what it would be like to grow up in a world where disease and premature death was common.

7/10/11
Eritrean day! We went over to Rose’s house and had lunch and coffee. For roughly three hours we had lunch and coffee. It was delicious though, and I didn’t even mind watching the wedding video of the wedding that we ourselves attended. Then Rose was nice enough to take us to a shop where we could buy the spices necessary to cook Eritrean food. I need someone to volunteer to taste it for me in the U.S. including the njarra. We’ll see how it goes. I was so tired by the end of the day. I’m feeling better, but I still have a lot of sleep to catch up on it seems like.

7/9/11
Feeling better but still not well. We spent the whole morning at home writing and entering tests. At least the power is holding out for us today. We made a plan to go out with Rose tomorrow. I’m excited about our Eritrean day. We decided against going to Jinja which makes me sad, but I’m just not feeling well enough. Plus I find myself wanting to spend time with people rather than see places. Our trip out west is going to be enough scenery.

7/8/11
Still have a cold. Nicole has been really great in helping me get along. I feel bad that she can hear my sniffling in the night since it is my week to move back into the room with the king size bed. At least she is so far away from me that I can stretch my arms all the way out and still nto touch her.

7/7/11
What a frustrating day, and so much time lost. We met with Seith, who is going to be our guide, but we had to make a deposit on our trip. The only issue is the city wide protest that is going on. Everyone has closed down their shops and I couldn’t draw out any money. I had a really American moment getting frustrated that I couldn’t pull money out of the ATM when I wanted to. I tried three different ones. Two of them had errors messages when I left them (I think I might of broken them), until the third one finally worked.

Other than that we’ve been going to the Foundation everyday this week. I think it has been extremely helpful in showing them what we have been doing.