A Peace Corps What? Education Volunteer.

Kris and I with our invitation to serve in Peace Corps Uganda, almost two years ago. (On a related note, that was the same day we heard about Oscar and Stacie getting engaged!)

Kris and I are in the 0, in the front right.

To explain my official position as Education Volunteer, I have to first talk about one of Peace Corps Uganda’s current priorities - the Primary Literacy Project. This new model aims to be more effective and sustainable than other past education models which mostly involved PCVs working as classroom teachers in local schools. PC Uganda hopes to improve on this program by expanding the responsibilities of Education PCVs, focusing on literacy at different levels in the school system, and placing volunteers at a school for six consecutive years. These volunteers are known as starters, carriers, and finishers.

Kris and I are starters – that means we are the first at our schools, and our job is to work with our Ugandan counterparts to lay the foundation for permanent change for the carriers and finishers. It also means that we won’t some of the results of our work for six years! But we know that true change takes a long time, and so does PC Uganda. The Primary Literacy Project is somewhat of a revolutionary model and, thanks to its success so far, it will be adopted by other Peace Corps countries across Africa. I am excited to say that I am currently a part of the writing team that is working to roll out our program’s curriculum for some of the other Peace Corps Africa nations!

The Education Primary Teacher Training Project Framework, 2012 – 2017, places paired volunteers at a site. One volunteer works at a Primary Teacher’s College (PTC) while the other works at an associated Primary School. The goals for all Education volunteers are to:

• Improve teaching
• Increase pupils’ success
• Improve the school community

The volunteer at the PTC, Kris in our case, is known as a Teacher Trainer. The Teacher Trainer teaches classes at the PTC and works with the student teachers in various ways, including focusing on literacy instructional practices and expanding the use of ICT resources. The volunteer at the primary school, me, is known as a Literacy Specialist. The Literacy Specialist has some of the following responsibilities:

Conducting Reading Intervention Groups

Using a modified version of the Early Grade Reading Assessment, we identify pupils in Primary 4 who need targeted reading interventions. We focus on Primary 4 because it is the transition year from local language to English in Uganda and thus a crucial time in these children’s schooling. The Literacy Specialist creates Reading Intervention Groups which are taught several times a week with the aim of bringing the identified pupils to the necessary reading levels for success.

One of my reading intervention groups being their silly selves.

Teacher Observation and Feedback

Building the capacity of in-service teachers is also a large part of our program. One of the ways Literacy Specialists work towards this objective is to observe the teachers at our schools and offer them feedback aimed towards improving literacy instruction, including gender-equitable classroom practices, and cultivating critical thinking skills.

Teacher Hope in her Primary 2 classroom.

My counterpart, Rebecca, teaching the letter "i" in local language.

The pupils were learning opposites (tall, short, thin, fat), and the question here was, in true blunt Ugandan fashion, "Which teacher at our school is short and fat?" 

Professional Development Workshops

Another way Literacy Specialists work to build the capacity of in-service teachers is through professional development. Workshops are geared towards a variety of topics including student-centered teaching techniques and activities, library skills, and HIV/AIDS or malaria education.

Expanding the Use of Libraries

Building or expanding a library is a big part of a Literacy Specialist’s job. This often involves digging out books buried in dusty locked cabinets, cleaning spaces filled with gecko poop, dead bats, and insects, and creating an organizational and lending system. It’s also one of the most rewarding parts for me personally. It provides the kind of tangible result that is often rare in volunteer work, and the smile on the children’s faces as they eagerly grab books off the shelves during library time is one of my favorite things in the world.

Improving the School Environment/Community

Ugandan PCVs also work towards trying to create a safe school culture. Part of this involves trying to implement a Positive Behavior System (PBS). The idea behind PBS is that it provides teachers with tools to manage classrooms and motivate pupils without resorting to caning or other forms of corporal punishment. I have started to introduce this idea to my school, but unfortunately, they are not quite ready for it yet.

My pupils playing games as a reward for good behavior.

Working to involve the entire community in participating in student learning is also another important aspect of this responsibility. It's an area where I am optimistic about making a difference as one of the National Directors of the My Language Spelling Bee (MLSB). The MLSB aims to increase first-language literacy rates among pupils across Uganda and improve teachers’ literacy instructional techniques. As an academic competition, we also hope that it will promote pride in indigenous languages as well as stoke excitement among parents, leading to a feeling of ownership in their children’s educations.

My school!

Last year's winners from seven different language regions.

All of the above falls under Goal 1 of the Peace Corps: To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women. But there are two more goals! These are what makes being a PCV a 24/7 job.

Goal 2: To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.

This goal can involve anything from a formal training on cross-cultural interactions, to making Easter eggs with the neighborhood kids, to chatting with your neighbor at the market. Many of the people we encounter have never met a foreigner in person before. As the first person someone has ever known from another country, much less America, the pressure is on to represent ourselves well.

Eating with our friend and neighbor, Maude.

One of my pupils, Anitah, coming over to make friendship bracelets.

Cooking our host family tacos during language training.

Our host brother, Emma, very politely eating the meal we made for him.

Goal 3: To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

While living in-country, writing a blog, having visits from loved ones, and even changing the banner photo on your Facebook page can help meet this goal, PCVs do most of the work towards Goal 3 once they return home. This makes being a PCV not only a 24/7 job but a lifelong one as well!

Going to Ugandan events can count as work towards Goal 3 for me! Our neighbor's giveaway ceremony for his daughter - this traditional event occurs before the more modern church wedding and is where the groom pays the bride price.

Part of the ceremony involved "tricking" the groom by presenting different women. There was a lot of banter and good-natured bargaining.

Learning how to make chapati with our awesome host family.

Hopefully this gives a better, if more polished and less messy, understanding of what Kris and I are trying and hoping to do with our time in Uganda. On bad days, we tend to despair when thinking of all the things we could and should be doing to meet these goals. But on most days, we realize that we’ve already met them all in some way – and we’re not even done yet.

“Progress, not perfection.”

A Preface

“So, what are you doing over there?”

An often-asked, and for PCVs, an extremely loaded question that unknowingly preys on our worries and insecurities.* What are we doing over here? Depending on the day, we can answer our friends and family with pride, joy, anger, tears, or a vague, evasive statement.

I began writing a couple of entries about what it’s like to be a Peace Corps Uganda Education Volunteer and then decided that I need to preface them with this: I’m going to focus on the good things, but I don’t want to pretend the bad parts don’t exist.

Every PCV’s experience is different, vastly different, even within the same country. In describing my official position, I don’t want to seem dishonest. A lot of what PCVs do and experience is hard, and painful, and full of heartache. While we’re in it we don’t know how to process it ourselves. We also don’t know how to talk about it with others. We’re reluctant to explain the things that are happening in our host country which we really disagree with because we worry those are the only impressions you will take away. We can’t give you all of the context, have you meet all of the people involved to make you understand how we can disagree so strongly with something but still live with it. We don’t want to talk about how we’ve spent days in bed trying to understand it ourselves. We can, however, give you pictures of cute kids and tell funny stories about how we discovered that the word for “vegetables” here sounds just like the word for “buffalo.” Those are real things, true things, but sometimes not mentioning the other side of our experiences can make what we say feel like a lie.

Being in the Peace Corps also makes you question life, yourself, and your choices constantly. And you know what? Most people don’t do that enough. At my year mark in Uganda, I battled with depression, criticizing myself for not having done enough, grown enough. But then I realized that I haven’t questioned my life like that in years. 365 days would go by and the only thing that would really mark the passage of time was the ending of a lease. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my life – but I never really looked at it. I wasn’t worried about self-acceptance or my personal growth. There were parts of myself I didn’t like, and it was so easy to not think about them, to distract myself. But here, you can’t do that. Here, life is so much more immediate and there is so much more time on your hands, time that you can’t fill except for with your thoughts. This job, this place, forces you to examine your actions, your thoughts, your heart. And it doesn’t allow you to close your eyes.

There’s no doubt that being a Peace Corps volunteer is the hardest job you’ll ever love, and I’m only just starting to learn how to love it – and how to love myself. But I want to think positively. I want to focus on the growth, the self-discovery, the connections, those moments that will be the ones shining in my memory. I will keep those other moments too, the ones full of confusion and pain and grief, but for now, those are just for me. 

"I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind...At these times...I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure."

- Albus Dumbledore

*But don't stop asking!

To Market, To Market

Wednesdays are market days at our trading center. During the rest of the week, it’s hard to find most fruits or vegetables in town unless you are growing them in your own compound. But on Wednesday, the traveling market comes to us and sets up in a big field behind the dukas (small local stores). Vendors set up early, wheeling in their bicycles laden with pineapple or matooke. Women lay their tarps out on the ground and string more up above, piling their fruits and vegetables into perfect pyramids on the ground. The fish-mongers position their products, whole, dried fish which have spent hours strung on the front of a matatu to get there. Hawkers can be seen in the early morning trudging along the roads to the market, carrying immense wooden boards filled with sunglasses, watches, hair nets, toys, hats, and more. The smells of popcorn, fried banana cakes, and samosas fill the air, ready to be snatched up by children on break from school later in the day. Those selling clothing drive wooden poles into the ground, making racks with banana-fiber fastenings and carefully hanging their freshly-washed and pressed trousers, skirts, dresses, and shirts. Men sort hundreds of shoes in enormous piles and the iron-mongers carefully arrange pots, pans, and knives in an attractive display under their newly-erected tarpaulin covers. Tailors bring their old-school sewing machines onto the field and set up near the clothes, ready to alter that oversized H&M or Abercrombie dress or top someone just picked out of the piles for sale. Young boys similarly set up next to the home goods section with their jury-rigged stationary bicycles, the chain attached to a grinding stone, offering to use pedal power to sharpen your newly-purchased knife.

I generally head to the market to meet up with Kris after school on Wednesdays. I take the shortcut through the fields and behind the stores to emerge into the festivity that is market day. A constant stream of people can be seen on the roads all day, walking to our trading center to buy food, meet with friends, swap stories, drink beer, and make deals. Dodging low-hanging tarps, we walk around to see which village woman has brought the best produce that week. Fruits and vegetables are sold in pyramids five or ten deep that sell for 1,000 or 2,000 shillings (about 30 to 50 cents). The women pack each pyramid into a small clear bag, twisting the tiny amount of plastic left at the top into a knot with their deft hands. They offer to place the bag in your woven basket and your money immediately disappears somewhere in their aprons. Many times we will often also get “bonus,” an extra tomato or potato thrown in from a random pile apart from the pyramids, for greeting and thanking them in Runyankore – it almost never fails to make people laugh appreciatively, as it is usually the first time they’ve ever heard a foreigner speaking their language. We are also often parroted in well-meaning hilarity among people around us that we aren’t even talking to.

Kris: Wassibota, nyabo! Good afternoon, ma’am.

Men hawking shawls: Haha, wassibota nyabo! Naamanya! Haha, good afternoon ma’am! He knows!

Kris: Ninyenda emondi, enkumi ibiri. I want Irish potatoes, for two thousand shillings.

Men: Emondi! Naayenda! Naayenda emondi, hahaha. Potatoes! He wants! He wants potatoes, hahaha.

Kris and I grin good-naturedly (most of the time) and wave to the hawkers, moving on. Market day is very social and we often see people we know from surrounding villages. Running into Maude, she bargains with her friend selling pineapples to get us 100 shilling discount (about 3 cents). We go with her to price beans she is planning to use in the rows of her new banana plantation. She decides that the price per cup is too expensive and we walk with her back to her bicycle – she is one of the only women I have ever seen around here who rides. On our way out of the market, we browse through the clothing section and I find a pair of jeans with a broken zipper that I really like. I bring my purchase to the woman lying on the ground in front of the clothes and begin to haggle. While food has more standard prices, when it comes to other goods, haggling is expected – and enjoyed! She starts off by quoting me 7,000 shillings. After a lot of dramatic gesturing at the garment, “Eh!” noises, and other sounds of outrage and protest made by both of us, I get her down to 4,000, a little over a dollar. Knowing Runyankore comes in very handy when haggling for a fair price!

One of our market day hauls, complete with new pants!

Now it’s time to walk about the trading center to get our daily supplies. First we go visit Donna to get our milk. She greets us happily and ladles milk into a small plastic bag for us which we carefully place on top of our other purchases. 

No refrigeration here - just a vat of milk straight from the cow. Before drinking it, we have to make sure to boil it.

Across the street we buy our bananas from the women we have affectionately dubbed “The Banana Ladies,” who are always ready to chat and quiz us in local language. 

The Banana Ladies meeting my mom!

I bought my skirt in the U.S., Constance bought hers here, and we two people who live halfway across the world from each other randomly wore them the same day in the same tiny village.

Finally we head back up the road and make Robert’s duka our last stop. Robert and his family run a small general store and have made us feel welcome since we first moved here. There we purchase our bread, flour, sugar, and eggs. Looking into my purse, I realize I don’t have quite enough money and Robert waves me off, telling me to just pay the difference to whoever is there the next time we stop by. 

Robert! This is a fairly-typical looking duka, packed full of everyday needs with a little bit of randomness thrown in.

Entrance to a duka in the trading center where we bought our charcoal stove. Yes, we are the Pied Pipers of Uganda.

Kris and I greet the gatekeeper as we reenter the college grounds and lug our bags up the path to our house, eagerly anticipating the fresh marinara sauce we will make that night on our gas stovetop.

Our path home. Food may be limited in variety here but what they have is plentiful! Like falling-on-your-head plentiful. (This almost happened to me with an avocado once.)

If we want bread that isn’t sweet (unfortunately the only kind found in most places here) to go with that pasta, however, we need to plan ahead. When we need food and market day is too far away, or if we need something particularly “exotic,” we make the three-hour round trip into Mbarara, the closest town. We ask to be dropped off at the Post Office – the great thing about public transportation here is that it will stop anywhere you want – and walk to the daily market, a permanent setup in the heart of the town. At its entrance are two heavy metal gates, open during the day. Wheelbarrow men sit resting by the entrance, perched on top of their overturned wooden vehicles, waiting to be hired. As you enter, the light turns faintly blue from the overhanging tarps and a wave of sound rolls over you of people greeting, bargaining, shelling, butchering. The arrangement at the daily market is more permanent. There are long rows of wooden stalls with small doors built in below the counters that the vendors duck back and forth under, alternating between sitting in their tri-legged wooden stools and fetching items in the back for their customers. Areas have loose designations – a large section for vegetables and traditional products in the front, a long, narrow, aisle along the back for heaping bags of fruit, a wide shelter containing carcasses of cows and goats hanging from the ceiling with shiny brass scales in front of each, and a winding maze of smaller stalls with farming tools, foreign clothes, and vibrant kitenge fabric. In the main section, the produce is polished and piled in perfect formations. Towering heaps of tomatoes, Irish potatoes, and beans are balanced perfectly in their woven baskets and the selection threatens to overflow into the aisles. 

 We head to our favorite vendor for our regular vegetables - tomatoes, Irish peppers, carrots, onions, and green peppers. Deus has a small section in the middle of the aisle, his neighbors’ produce almost pinning him in as he relaxes in front of the counter listening to the radio. We are always greeted with a big smile, a warm welcome, and usually “bonus.” We then hit up the “exotic food” stall for things like cauliflower, zucchini, fresh cilantro, and, if we’re lucky, a head of lettuce. If there are any household items we need, we’ll head to the craft section and bargain for a new basket or woven rug before continuing our errands.

Haggling for another vegetable basket - after we are quizzed to make sure we know its use.

We then weave in and out of bodas, taxis, minibuses and private vehicles to cross the street to the tailors’ section. Multiple alleyways are filled with men and women working on push-pedal Singer sewing machines outside their shops. Every surface is strewn with beautiful, colorful kitenge. Tables for ironing are set up in the alleys as well; people carefully press the cleanest clothes I’ve ever seen with their charcoal irons, occasionally wetting the fabric with water from a cleaned-out plastic soda bottle with a hole in its cap. We get measured or pick up our new clothes from Nick, our favorite tailor, and sometimes get to enjoy watching women try on their glittering bridesmaid or giveaway dresses. Here, getting clothes custom-made is extremely cheap compared to the U.S., but tailors are having a harder time getting business because of the influx of clothes donated from abroad that are being sold at a much cheaper price. But being a tailor is still a good profession here, and I am constantly impressed by the incredible quality of clothes I see being made under an umbrella in the sweltering heat of an alleyway.

Our last stop is usually Nakumatt, an actual grocery store in Mbarara that is extremely popular with foreigners. We step into the air-conditioned entrance and wander around to pick up the items we can’t find anywhere else – real butter, baguettes, brown bread (which they call “salty bread” here), cheese, certain kinds of beer (yeah, OK, that’s just for me), and herbs and spices. Then it’s back to the Post Office to catch a matatu back to our trading center. Sitting six to a row, my big backpack on my lap, my right side smushed up against a strange man and my left arm cradling a baby being nursed by her mother, I wiggle my right hand free and snack on my street popcorn T-Rex style. Like so many things in Uganda, shopping is time-consuming, loud, noisy, hectic, and oftentimes frustrating, but it’s always an adventure and in the end, completing it is a triumph in and of itself.

When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, "Oh yes - I already have everything that I really need."

- Dalai Lama

HIV/AIDS in Uganda

Last week I gave an HIV/AIDS Education Workshop at the primary school for the staff. It was something they had requested as they felt the need to educate their pupils more in this area. In fact, it’s actually an area I needed more education about before Peace Corps too. I watched Philadelphia in school, I knew some of the history of it in the U.S. (mostly thanks to Rent), I knew that HIV/AIDS was "bad in Africa" (and that’s probably one of the world’s most general statements ever), but I didn’t know much more than that. It seemed like a far-off, ancient problem - in my fairly sheltered American life, I had never even met anyone who had HIV or AIDS. Coming to Uganda, that all changed. Peace Corps provided me with the most thorough education on this subject that I had ever received, an education that seemed much more relevant and needed as I began to get to know more co-workers, students, and friends for whom HIV/AIDS had intimately, awfully, impacted their lives.

Uganda actually was considered a success story in sub-Saharan Africa when it came to HIV/AIDS, reducing the rate from up to 30% in the 1990s to 6.4% in 2006. Much of this has been credited to an extensive education program in the 90’s using the ABC approach: Abstinence, Be Faithful, Use Condoms. However, HIV prevalence has been on the rise again since 2006. Approximately one in 10 women now become HIV positive by their late 30s and for men, about one in 10 are infected by their early 40s. This is in part due to the government’s shift, somewhat under pressure from foreign countries like the U.S., towards abstinence-only programs during the 2000’s. Some health experts also blame the increasing rate of infection on “AIDS-fatigue,” a general complacency and reduction in safe sex that began once Uganda started to be lauded as a victor in the battle against HIV/AIDS.

Right now, 1.4 million people in Uganda are living with HIV, and, despite the nation’s early success in combating HIV/AIDS, there are 1.1 million children that have been orphaned by this epidemic. Many of my own pupils are part of this statistic. They live with extended family, adults who find it difficult to pay for their own children’s school fees, uniforms, and meals, not to mention doing the same for other young relatives, but nevertheless take them in.

Working to educate youth about HIV/AIDS is extremely important in Uganda, not only because HIV/AIDS is more prevalent here, but also because the median age is 15 (15!). With so many youth and so few adults, accurate facts and means of prevention can slip through the cracks and be replaced by rumors and misconceptions. HIV/AIDS and sex education are clearly urgently needed right now; only 39 percent of young people aged 15 to 24 know all the necessary facts about how HIV can be prevented. National prevention and treatment efforts also need to be supported, requiring a de-stigmatization of those living with HIV. Stigma and discrimination against people with HIV is still common in many rural areas, so even those who know their or their children’s positive status are reluctant to seek help for fear of “outing” themselves or their family members. The passage of the HIV and AIDS Prevention and Control Act in Uganda, which sanctions forced disclosure and criminalizes transmission, attempted transmission, and “behavior that might result in transmission,” is only continuing to add to this problem.

In Peace Corps, and at my school, Ugandans and PCVs are continuing the fight from the ground up, working with people who can help affect some of the most change: teachers. In fact, a quarter of the people who are living with HIV in Uganda right now are a part of the school system - students or staff. At the workshop last week, we refreshed the basics, talked about incorporating literacy into HIV/AIDS education, discussed how gender roles can affect the spread of HIV/AIDs, detailed how to care for people with HIV, and played a lot of games and activities that the teachers can do with their pupils. During the games and activities, such as Jeopardy, foot races, Big Books, and play-acting, we also did some myth-busting. And man, are there some wildly inaccurate myths out there (and probably in the States too, unfortunately): condoms cause cancer; virgins can’t have HIV; having sex with a virgin will cure you; when an HIV+ mother breastfeeds, the baby dies; HIV can be transmitted by mosquitoes; washing out with Coca-Cola after sex will prevent you from being infected; HIV can be passed by kissing; America has a secret cure for HIV/AIDS; America invented HIV/AIDS (oh, conspiracy theories!). 

The teachers got extremely competitive during the final Jeopardy review!

One of the pre-assessments, where the average score was 70; everyone scored 100 or 95 on the post-assessments.

Doing a "Can Transmit" and "Cannot Transmit" activities sort - it's not every day that you get to explain to your coworkers the definition of pre-ejaculate in English...

Overall, I like to think the workshop was a success – the pre- and post-assessments on HIV/AIDS I gave out showed drastic improvement, and the teachers were excited (and very competitive!) while practicing a variety of ways to educate their pupils on HIV prevention, treatment, and care. I’m looking forward to seeing the teachers use their new skills to give the kids an opportunity to play and learn at the same time. It is just a start, and a small one at that, but it's one I was proud to be asked to be a part of.

There is a saying in Tibetan, "Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength." No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster.

- Dalai Lama

Happy Easter!

Kris and I stayed at home for our second Easter here in Uganda. We had some PCV friends over and had a great time dying eggs in the morning. As we ate some really old candy bars Kris found, we listened to the songs and drumming floating in through the windows from the religious gathering at the school. The majority of Ugandans practice Christianity, so Easter is celebrated widely, with church gatherings, parades, and crosses of all sizes being carried around on display. It makes explaining how many Americans celebrate the holiday – with eggs and dye and chocolate bunnies – sound a bit like we’re just trying to see how ridiculous we can be and still get our Ugandan friends to believe us. “No really! We tell kids that a giant bunny comes in the middle of the night and leaves them colorful chocolate eggs! Yes, I know that bunnies don’t lay eggs. Yes, eggs aren’t chocolate. No, you’re right, bunnies aren’t really that giant…”

Carmen had the coolest egg, by far!

The local eggs we get in the village are brown, which we all forgot was different than the white eggs we dye back in the States, so the colors came out a bit differently.

Disposing of the dye.

In the afternoon, after the five-hour church service we skipped out on and after Ravi forced us to hide eggs so he could have an Easter Egg hunt, the neighborhood kids came around to play matatu, the popular Ugandan card game. It’s also actually the only Ugandan card game; Kris and I drew some blank looks in the beginning of our time here when people asked us to play cards and we asked what game they wanted to play. “Cards.” “Yes, but what game?” “…cards.” Matatu is a bit like Uno with added flourishing, posturing, and outraged sounds encouraged – in short, a lot of fun. We also taught the oldest, Manzi, how to play Guillotine. He loved it, especially since he won! All in all, this Easter was the perfect mix of Uganda and America.  

Ravi's triumph.

Kris shuffling on people's heads - always good for a giggle.

The kids enjoyed playing with the guitar and rocking Kris' $1 bus park shades. 

Good people aren't hard to find,

they're right around the corner

at the end of the line, it's true.

Good people got peace of mind,

and I'd like to spend some time with you.

- Great Big Sea