bugs.
On Wednesday one of our rooster friends was sadly eaten. Casey and I came home to find him boiling in a pot. Though I was slightly heartbroken, it did smell delicious. Now I am eyeing a cockroach on our wall (too high for me to reach) to make sure that it doesn’t fall onto my clothes. Don’t picture New York style cockroaches. These Ugandan ones that seem to have infested our compound are much smaller. Still. It’s a cockroach. Whenever I use the toilet I have to make sure there aren’t any around the toilet bowl that could potentially crawl on my butt when I am indisposed.
There are also spiders. Big ones. Normally any type of insect or arachnid fails to phase me, but for some reason cockroaches in the toilet and spiders with legs longer than my fingers give me the creeps. I prefer to fall asleep before these creatures of the night come out.
Complaints aside, I am having a fantastic time here in Uganda and I can say that Casey is too. Last night Casey and I went out to meet some TASO friends for trivia night at BJZ (a local bar/club). The winning team wins two crates of Nile Beer. We came in third out of 10 teams. Next week Casey is determined to win. He’ll probably spend endless hours this coming week scouring over Wikipedia trying to fit even more useless information into his head. If it gets us 48 free beers, then I don’t mind.
The past two days haven’t really been any different than others. Thursday was another outreach day. The entire TASO team travelled to a site about 45 minutes outside of Gulu, apparently we were less than 100km from the Sudan-Uganda border. Casey and I decided to help the pharmacist with labelling. The rest of the time was spent eating chapati and chatting with the TASO team. By the time we were finished I was exhausted, not from the hard work I was forced to complete but because I stupidly forgot to apply sunscreen and got a seriously gross sunburn on my back and arms.
Today was a more productive day for me. It was a clinic day so Casey and I helped Dr. Rebecca again with prescribing medications. For not having a single clue how to do anything a few days ago, I believe I’ve learned quite a lot this week. The TASO team is really fantastic. I am so happy to get to work with this tireless group of individuals.
This weekend Casey and I are travelling to Kampala with TASO for a meeting. The next post might not be until next week.
-Sarah
