Monday July 26- Ddegeya

Oli Otya from Ddegeya! Well technically Angela and I are currently in Masaka, the largest town nearby. We came to Ddegeya yesterday with John by taxi- a slightly more cramped trip than I am used to. Taxi's here are not like taxi's in the US- they act more like buses, except on these buses they put 3 people in 2 seats. The trip took somewhere around 3 hours. The beginning and end were smooth but in the middle of the trip there was a lot of construction. Angela and I alternated reading Harry Potter, and Angela actually managed to sleep. I personally can't sleep when I'm being thrown forward every minute or so, but she was impressive. Apparently here instead of telling you to slow down when there's construction, they just put huge speed bumps on the road. Or maybe those are always there, I'm actually not sure. I personally found big speed bumps on a highway odd, but it definitely worked to slow us down. The Engeye Health Clinic is right on the highway from Masaka to Mbara, so as soon as we got off the taxi we were at the clinic.

This week, Angela and I are staying at the clinic because there is room for us. Next week when the rest of the team arrives, we will stay with families. It sounds like there will be 2 families with 3 people from our team each. These next couple of days though, Angela and I both have beds and misquito nets provided, and there is a clean shower area for us. The food is quite good (we will be eating at the clinic the whole time, so that's a very good thing). I tried matoke for the first time here, which is a staple of many villager's diets. It has the same consistency as squash or sweet potato, but (and this took me a while to place) it tastes almost exactly like artichokes. Luckily, I like artichokes, but sadly Angela does not. There are plenty of other things to eat though, so she can just skip the matoke.

After dinner we played cards with the volunteers at the clinic. There are so many Americans! And 2 or 3 of them are from Boston. It's a small world. By so many I mean like 7 or 8, but I think in 2 weeks they have a medical mission coming, and then there will be about 20 Americans there. It's kind of disconcerting after a week of only seeing Ugandans. Then we brushed our teeth outside, used the latrine (I was not ready for the latrine. All of the latrines I have used in the past have had seats), and then went to bed. We had to use flashlights and headlamps because the power from their small solar panels was used up during the day. Hopefully, with the solar panels we will install, that will change.

Today we got up at 7:30 after a very good sleep. Breakfast was at 8, and was hardboiled eggs, bread (and peanut butter!!) and small sweet bananas. Then Angela and I took pictures of various aspects of the building and the roof that the solar panels will be on. We then walked along the village's main road and passed houses and farmland. We didn't see any wells because those are down the hill, but we have heard that they are about 1 mile apart. We had thought we would pass a school because we had seen many children in uniform getting water that morning from the well near the clinic, but apparently we didn't walk far enough. The school is about a half an hour walk down the road, and we probably only went 15 minutes. Angela and I had fun speculating about which house we would live in, since John hasn't had time to show us yet.

After about 15 minutes of walking we turned back to the clinic. We then walked down into the valley behind the clinic to look at the well that Michael repaired last time he was here. We saw someone using it, and it looked like it was in good condition- the handle moved smoothly, the water came out steadily, and the water was clear. So that was encouraging. We hope to find the other wells tomorrow and see how they are working at this point.

Then it was about 11 or so, and Angela and I wanted to go into Masaka to buy misquito nets for our team and scout out where to buy various items. We have done those things, so our last stop was here, at the internet cafe. Still no word on the crates, but I am optimistic that they'll be ready to go when we come back to Kampala with the whole team this coming weekend.

I'll probably post next when we get back to Kampala. Which will be either tomorrow or Wednesday. Talk to you then!