Tag Archive: Arua

Welcome Back! You are most Welcome.

Author: September 2, 2017

My home town for the next year. Idi Amin came from Arua, and I saw a street named for him, which is quite exceptional because street signs are rare..

When you return from any sort of trip, people will always say “Welcome Back.” Matthews used to say it every time we dismounted from a trip to a village. When you arrive in a new environment such as a village or a store or even a meeting, people say “You are most welcome.”

Casper was very accommodating for the eclipse tourists with a town square full of booths selling t-shirts, caps etc. It was like a county fair. People stuck pins showing where they came from into a world map. Since I am considered a resident by the Ugandan government (and a shorter line through immigration), I felt justified in sticking the first pin into Uganda, second pin in Africa. Denver didn’t need another pin. Quite a few pins in Europe..

I certainly enjoyed many activities during my month leave, and visiting friends and family, culminating the last few days with all five siblings in Casper, WYO to see the total eclipse.

However, the complexities of my Western life also intruded. A pile of mail from the last year took me two days to deal with. Heh- the IRS gets pretty threatening if they think you are ignoring them (My CPA is fixing it now, I should not owe what they claim). My HOA is replacing my building’s HVAC system, including asbestos remediation (it was the first ‘high rise’ in Denver, built in the late 50’s). My assessed share will wipe out a significant chunk of my investment income the last two years, without adding value. Ugh.

I got my overdue colonoscopy, and some minor dental work. I tuned up my hearing aids. I don’t think I had mentioned, I bought them two years ago, the week before I left. This was probably due to a combination of age, and 45 years of amplified rock concerts. FYI Costco has free exams and it’s aids are waay cheaper than anywhere else. Only the VA distributes more than Costco. I also brought back about 150 new batteries for them too.

After being stymied by a May blizzard two years ago, we finally could take Jan’s ashes to mountain meadow called the Valley of Flowers, just west of the Eisenhower tunnel. Clark came home for a long weekend. He has a new accounting job in New York, working for the Education Alliance, a 127 y.o. charity to boost the underprivileged on the lower East Side of Manhattan.

I bought a new laptop and smartphone. Blair teased that my Ugandan smartphone (brand name “iDroid”-although it is a U.S. company) was worse than the cheap phones her homeless clients utilize for job searches!

During the month,some of the gloom I left behind for the Peace Corps had returned. So many reminders…. Could I have a bit of mild PTSD? Perhaps if I had stayed in Denver it would have dissipated, but it seemed like it was just arrested for two years.

There certainly was no nostalgia about my earlier profession, after listening to my ‘old’ lawyer friends talk shop. The turmoil and direction of my country continues to distress me. My conversations in ‘mixed’ company were like walking on egg shells, because no one changes their mind, no matter the evidence. I found myself watching too much cable news (like… “How will FOX excuse this?”). I don’t watch much TV in Uganda, but when I do, Al Jazeera’s depth and variety of coverage puts American news outlets to shame. I salute Qatar’s courage to stand up to the rest of the Middle East, which is demanding Al Jazaeera be shut down.

Finally, Blair had an “ambiguous” CT scan soon after I arrived. It cast a pall over my stay, but a subsequent PET scan last week was more reassuring.

Kuchala offers effective cure for digestive tract diseases, circulatory system disorders levitra sales visit now and lung disease. You must remember that you must not employ a pill type of erectile dysfunction are Tadalafil or purchase cheap viagra browse around over here and Vardenafil or viagra.purchase cheap viagra : How Does it works.cute-n-tiny.com is used for treating erectile dysfunction or ED. It is aimed to defend PDE-5 enzyme, a kind of proteins that damage the muscles of blood vessels and result in improper performance of penile organ. viagra without prescription Physical Causes The physical causes of impotence are many and of varied origins, such as impaired blood flow due to atherosclerosis (hardening, clogging and narrowing of arteries.) An erection is pills viagra canada when blood enters and is then retained in the sponge like smooth muscles (corpus cavernosum) in the penis making a flaccid penis would want to. So, all in all, it wasn’t hard to get excited about returning to Uganda to consume another year of my life. I’m not ready for the couch and binging Netflix quite yet. (BTW, the founder and CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer).

The Nile is quite active here (lots of connected lakes and tributaries) and my region is called the West Nile Region.

After spending a full day in Kampala, CARE flew me in a little plane (23 passenger seats) to Arua. If I have to commute to Kampala by bus on non-CARE business, it will take 8-10 hours. It’s maybe 7 hours in a CARE vehicle. So, after 11 hours in traffic returning to Denver from Casper, and then flying to Entebbe for another 26 hours, this one hour flight was most welcome. We landed on a muddy, red clay runway, something new for me. My bag which Brussels Air had lost was delivered a few days later.

I have settled into my new home, finally overcome my jet lag, and started to acclimate to Arua town. I need to learn the greetings, and other phrases in a new local language.

The CARE office is a bustling place compared to ATEFO. One year ago, there were three CARE workers in Arua. It has now reached 34 and by next month it will be 56. Unlike me, new hires arriving in Arua are given a stipend and they must fend for themselves to find a place to board. 30% of hires must come from the local communities. Most staff spend all day at the refugee settlements of course, not at the office. I anticipate going to the field a few days a week myself.
Uganda recently took in its One Millionth refugee from South Sudan. She was symbolically identified by name, but I don’t think she received a special prize.

 

Interior view of my CARE office. I just grab a spot along the wall on the left.

This is Carly, from Australia, the temporary team leader in Arua and my local supervisor. She has worked most of her career for Oxfam, all over the world. All other staff are Ugandan,with a few Sudanese and Kenyans.

I live in this annex, as viewed from the kitchen of the CARE Guest House. The door on the left goes to my toilet and shower. The shower is not heated so I continue to heat water and bucket bathe. It gets real hot here, so there will definitely be cold showers in my future. It is too stimulating to unlock my door and go next door in the middle of the night, so I still use a bucket next to my bed (TMI?). Door on the right is a storage room. We have 24 hour guard who flips on a generator for the compound when the power goes out. Posh Corps!

My bedroom

My living room. It’s nice to have a sofa to watch movies on my computer. Eddie Bauer kindly replaced my lifetime guaranteed backpack, which had broken zippers, with the new one you see on the couch. Yes I played my Peace Corps card to get it approved.

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I had a dream..

Author: June 15, 2017

The game of Mosquito Tag is also on the cover of the Malaria Think Tank annual report, thanks to fellow fossil David, who was in charge of the graphics.

As of today, an article over my byline about the Blue House Camp is linked from the home page of the Peace Corps. See it here. There were better projects by other volunteers, but this is a combination of my bother-in-law and sister’s great photography and the compelling backstory of the Blue House.
A couple of weeks ago, about 50 PCVs had a big social gathering. These kids love to party. It was called “Burning Sebo”, a take-off on the annual Burning Man fest in Nevada. It was at a camp in Jinja next to the Nile River. David had never been to Jinja or the Nile, so he came east. We rented a tent with cots, on a bluff over-looking the river. I am sick of staying in dorm bunk beds. However, while the tent zipped up pretty tight, there were no nets over the cots (unlike the bunk beds), and I got slaughtered by mosquito bites.

Our Burning Sebo was a little bit smaller than Burning Man

Another volunteer making her first visit to Jinja that weekend was Judith Fleming, who started subscribing to my blog in 2015 after asking D.C. headquarters if there was a blog from an elder Ugandan volunteer. She arrived a year after I did, and after occasional email correspondence, this was our first meeting. Judith was a 21 year-old volunteer 50 years ago as part of the first cohort in Tonga in the South Pacific. Yes, she is north of 70! Judith, David and I went out for dinner and we enjoyed her stories about the early days of the Peace Corps. In 1967, Peace Corps Pacific trainees did their training on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. They hiked once to the site of the Leper colony of Father Damien. Another time they learned how to camp on the beach, and how to catch, gut and clean fish. Back then, the number of trainees selected exceeded the number going to site. About 20% were told they had been “deselected” and sent home. This must have been tough after you thought you said good bye for two years. Of course there was no internet then, so the contact back home was with tissue thin letters that took weeks. Judith was deposited on a Tonga island with a family in a grass hut with no electricity of course, and basically was told to figure out how to help the people. She was called to help with a child birth once, purely on the basis of being an American. She practically acted as a mid-wife and was given the privilege of naming the baby!

David, Judith and I pose in front of the Nile. Judith is very popular with her cohort, and they look after her.

All you need to do is just take one kamagra 100mg oral jelly sachet just cialis cheapest before 20 minutes to your sexual session. They work in the body by improving blood circulation to the male sex organ. cialis low price It offers cialis india pharmacy effective treatment for fatigue and erectile dysfunction. There could be another physical cialis online price issue that abates your sexual reaction may cause tension about keeping up an Erection. She named him after her Peace Corps boyfriend from her cohort. Judith said this fall there will be a 50th anniversary celebration  of the Peace Corps in Tonga. Our Country Director Sean is friends of the Country Director in Tonga. They are trying to figure out if there is way she could go back for the ceremonies. It would be so interesting to find the 50 year old man she helped deliver and named. Seems like it would make a cool little documentary, not to mention it would show how she is doing a lot of work in Uganda. Neither she nor David have needed medical assistance since arriving in Uganda. I’ve only had to fix a bad ingrown toenail and had some dizziness issues that were probably solved by changing my malaria meds.
I will use this post to tell a sort of funny story. Way back at training two years ago, my cohort formed a big circle. Each of us was asked to step to the middle and state a “dream” goal during our service, even if it was likely unattainable. So I decided to announce that I hoped to find the next Dikembe Mutombo or Akeem Olajuwon in one of my villages, so he could build hospitals like Mutombo did in Kenya. Mutombo played for the Denver Nuggets many years ago. As I was about to enter the circle, I realized David was the only volunteer who would even know these names, and I couldn’t think of any current African NBA players. So instead, I clumsily tried to explain it as “I want to find a 14 year.old boy with mad basketball skills who I could bring back to America to eventually make the NBA and get rich so he could help his village.” I was told later, at first I sounded like a perv who wanted to bring home a 14 year old boy, although eventually they understood the gist of it. I have been teased about this ever since.

A future NBA star?

Sure enough, Ryan, who is currently a PCV in Arua, recently sent me a photo on WhatsApp of a 14 year old playing basketball in Arua. He said “Something to look forward to, Charlie, your 6 ft 14 year old, South Sudanese talent.” Andrei chimed in “And now with the refugee crisis They’re practically giving them away”. The good part about this is that now I know there is this basketball court, and I would like to play some pick-up basketball for exercise. It beats soccer drills, which I have been neglecting. And my “dream” is alive.

My distinctive helmet and jacket have held up well.

There was a little two room school house in one of the villages I was in last week. Each room was jammed with kids. I peeked in, and they all stood up and said “Good Afternoon”. I hope the teacher wasn’t too annoyed.

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