erin.

To start where I left off…Here’s some more about last month’s vacationing!

The day after climbing Mount Longonot, we went to nearby Hell’s Gate National Park, where visitors are permitted to walk or bike through the park (instead of needing the usual safari vehicle). The park is home to many animals- including some predators! We pedaled our way through the stunning landscape of red rock cliffs and open grasslands, dotted with zebras, baboons, buffaloes, ostriches, hartebeasts, and warthogs.

At the far end of the park, we took a break from biking in order to hike through an impressive gorge with sculpture-like walls. Along the way, we found hot springs and scattered chunks of glassy black obsidian.

The highlight came when, after setting out again on our bikes, we encountered a beautiful family of giraffes.

We made a “predator plan” after passing several animal carcasses and seeing a suspiciously cat-like set of footprints in one isolated corner of the park.  However, we never met any cheetahs or leopards.  Instead, we amused ourselves with the fascinating habits of dung bettles: (video to come, once I get a decent connection!)

(in a village on the Kenyan coast)

A letter to the editor written to a major Ugandan newspaper (click to read):

Mt. Longonot is a dormant volcano in Kenya’s Rift Valley.  A climb of Mt. Longonot’s slopes provided close encounters with herds of zebras and thorny acacia trees as well as spectacular views of the valley’s geological scars: ridges, craters, rifts, mountains, and lakes.  On top, a 2km-wide crater is surrounded by a jagged rim with a 2777m summit.  The trek was dusty, windy, steep, challenging, and spectacular.

In the middle of a particularly long stretch of vacation travel in Kenya, extremely tired, dusty, sweaty, and a bit sick, we decided to pay the equivalent of about $1.50 to take showers in an extremely seedy hotel in Mombasa before boarding another long bus ride.  Luckily, we didn’t sleep there– the place gave me the creeps.  The New People’s Hotel did have an amusing notice pasted to the wall (see below, particularly item 10).

Lamu is a stunningly beautiful place off the Kenyan coast where I was lucky to spend several days of vacation, drinking fresh fruit juices and eating Swahili spiced seafood and coconut rice. The town is quiet and peaceful, at once ancient and alive. Intricately carved wooden doors dot Lamu’s maze of winding narrow alleyways that can only be navigated on foot or by donkey. Most women wear headscarves or full burkas. Calls to prayer from mosques on all sides overlap in accidental harmony. On the town’s waterfront, children play and swim amongst the anchored wooden dhows in the evenings. Elsewhere, the island’s shoreline is a tangle of mangrove trees along the blue-green water’s edge, except where it opens into wide stretches of white sand.

In March of 2007, I met 49 strangers in a hotel in Philadelphia. Nervous and excited, we played name games, went out for our last Mexican food, unpacked and repacked our bags, and attempted to prepare ourselves for what we could not possibly prepare for.

Twenty-seven months later, the members of the group that arrived with me are beginning to close their service, leaving Uganda one by one. Moving on to other places, new ventures. We have achieved both the big and the small. Building schools, planting gardens, challenging unquestioned attitudes, learning obscure languages, teaching children and adults, coping with harassment, caring for the sick, making friends, enduring stares and unwanted attention, disproving stereotypes. For most of us, perhaps the biggest achievement is that we have stayed.

In this time, I have learned that my fellow Peace Corps volunteers are extraordinary human beings. Fun, supportive, hard-working, funny, unique, tolerant, inspiring, exemplary. They continually amaze me with their talents, their perspective, and their commitment. They have made this experience, my life here, phenomenal. I think that all of us have been changed, not least by one another.

It has been a privilege to serve with this exceptional group of Americans, and I will miss them very much in the coming months.

To any members of my Peace Corps friend-family who may read this, safe journeys and nice time. I hope we meet again– probably when I crash on your couch in six months!

Thank you for the work and much love.

Helmeted Peace Corps volunteers are expected to use bicycles as their primary mode of transport at site. Due to the amount of time we will spend pedaling in these two years, many of us passed up a chance at owning a “quirky” local Hero, pictured here:

Instead I and others opted to buy a used mountain bike. I’m not sure why, but in Uganda, mountain bikes are called “sports bikes.”  They also usually come labeled with absurd names:

These trusty steeds get us from point A to B in style.

This is a photo of me standing with a marabou stork. These birds are really huge, with a wingspan of about 3 meters, and gross.

I have been told that marabout storks first became common in Uganda during the days of Idi Amin, when they would eat dead bodies. I am not sure if this is true, but I am certain the birds’ population has increased as Uganda’s population (and its ability to generate trash) has increased.

Marabou storks scavenge from trash heaps in Kampala. There are periodic debates about what to do with them. They make a mess of sidewalks and occasionally surprise the unsuspecting person walking beneath their nest. But perhaps the real question is what to do with Kampala’s trash– the city generates about 1,500 tons of garbage daily, and only 40 percent of it is removed. Yuck.

This is a sampling of anonymous questions from the secondary school students I have been training on HIV/AIDS. Note the different slang kids use here!

(click on the photo to enlarge and read).

When I teach, I am always amazed at how much the average Ugandan kid knows about HIV/AIDS.  Though they generally do not receive comprehensive sex education or extensive information on reproductive health, this generation has been inundated with messages about HIV/AIDS ever since they can remember. And yet, inevitably, lots of talk about the virus has opened the way for the spread of myths and rumors and misinformation. It’s normal for me to get questions about HIV being passed by mosquitoes or through sharing toothbrushes. For most groups that I train, I try to present the information in the most straightforward way I know how, so that trainees can go on to respond to any rumor with reasoned knowledge.