Paul left last Friday for his away rotation with a group of his classmates. His group was focusing on several infections, sleeping sickness and Schistosomiasis being the two main ones that I remember. If you want to read about Schisto here is a wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis If you happen to read about how this is spread and understand that they were only given infected lake water to use for showering you will also understand why there was no showering at all on their parts. Thank you baby wipes is what I imagine they'd say. Or I did get one text from Paul saying they were 'showering' in the rain storms.
His group was traveling to different places for the first few nights and on the long 8 hour drive broke down and never made it to the spot they were supposed to go to. As I understand it they waited all day along the side of the road and ended up in a closer town for the night. They are now up at one of the National Parks that is supposed to be one of the more stunning of the Ugandan parks. He will return this weekend (I think tomorrow- when it's the eclipse) to Kampala and the remainder of his classes are there.
The boys and I went to Jinja for a few days. Jinja is a lovely town on 'the source of the Nile'. Where the Nile meets Lake Victoria. I put it in quotes because there are other so called sources too and we went on a beautiful boat ride to the 'source' and saw some birds we hadn't yet seen and sever Nile Monitors, which was quite exciting for us. I also placed some of my Grandma's ashes right at the tip of the Nile. I think that would have been her favorite place of all so far. We also ended up seeing the group of classmates who were doing their research week there and meet them for a fun dinner. The boys taught two of the Tanzanians how to play BS (card game). That was fun to watch.
The day Paul broke down was the day we went for two tours. This was a good day to remember to hold your expectations lightly for all of us. The tours I thought we were going on were a weaving co-op of women and a sugar cane tour.
The weaving tour ended up being a large, crumbing textile factory, the largest in East Africa. We went in through a non working metal detector and waited. The man who arranged these things with us called someone, then was taken somewhere then came back then taken somewhere then came back. He seemed equally as mystified as we did with the process. After some time a group of 50 or so school children arrived and we all exchanged looks. Before we started the tour our guide asked if we could take pictures. The factory guide said No, that come straight from Management. There are monitors and it would make a problem for my job. Then he said I can let you take one picture, I will tell you where.
We set off in our sea of children, all in blue uniforms and with heads shaved close. The factory was interesting, I won't go into the whole tour but it was noisy and very dusty. In nearly each area the factory guide would bring Levin up (he had the camera) to take a picture or make me take one of the boys posing with him, which I found funny after he was firm there were to be no pictures. I understand so much more now how a factory line can lose money on inefficiency and lackadaisical attitude of employees as well as employees feeling bored and unmotivated. The last phase of the tour was printing and the large room had a haze hanging in the air with a slight solvent smell. I wondered exactly how much toxin I was exposing my children to and then - have I educated my children well or brainwashed them? Oso sidled up to me and whispers 'How much toxin do you think we are breathing in?'. Three hours later we were off to our next tour.
We drove along all the sugar cane fields and finally came to the factory security gate. There was an amusing process of checking in through 3 different checkpoints even though we didn't have the right papers or IDs then we waited going through another screening and metal detector (that I saw people just walking around going in and out) and waited. The short of it was we were unable to go and the kids were actually relieved. That was when I said how about we just go to the river and we had our nice boat ride.
In the end it was not at all what I had expected and had I even known I might have not had them plan the things we did but I am glad it worked out that way since it was all rather interesting and entertaining with the right attitude. Also had we not gone on the factory tour I wouldn't have known that I was running by a work crew of prison inmates later that day on my run (they made the prison uniform fabric).
Since then the kids and I spent a day traveling back to Zanzibar. When we were flying into one of our transfer points I feel such a familiar comfort at being back in the landscape of Tanzania. We are now just enjoying ourselves on the beach.
Here is what some of the kid's schooling has been the last few days:
Finishing a book (I read it out loud and we've been talking about it) that is part of a set they read at school in Uganda about a Ugandan boy, Moses, and his adventures with his classmates at his boarding school. Next we will start a book by Chinua Achebe. He is supposed to be a very well known African writer.
We learned the Arabic words and the translation, to the call to prayer.
The boys have discovered how to make rock hard balls of sand that stay for longer than a day, make them elaborate tracts to roll on through tunnels (of sand), made them buried storage areas that have 'survived' the tides and been dug up.
We have looked in the sea grass bed (not where we spent time looking last time) and have found new things we didn't see last time. My feet are a bit worse off for it but it's worth it.
