Fellows Blog: Day 13
Hello all!
Today is the last day you’ll be hearing from just the two of us- Kyrillos gets here late tonight/early morning, and we’re so excited to have another contributor to this blog.
In other news, Amber came thisssss close to killing a bug she found on the inside of her mosquito net, but she ultimately decided the net didn’t have enough tension for her to successfully deliver a lethal blow. As a result (surprise surprise) Haleigh killed the bug for her. Additionally, and perhaps even less surprising, our gecko friend was MIA.
We walked over to Mukono Access Clinic to continue assembling the first aid kits. Today, Haleigh and Amber spent the majority of their time cutting splints out of cardboard boxes and trying to fold towels small enough to fit in the bags Jacob insisted on us getting. During this process, Haleigh found a very large cockroach nesting in the bags, which Devir kindly killed for us. Amber was a little confused as to why Haleigh didn’t kill it herself since her claim to fame is “expertly whacking cockroaches with shoes” in her freshman year dorm, but…
The other day, we learned that Café Delish was about two miles away from the clinic. As much as we were craving some chicken and chips, we opted for the significantly closer Mukono Resort Hotel restaurant. We were ecstatic to peruse the nine page menu… until we learned they were out of many ingredients and could only make about seven dishes on the entire menu.
While we waited for food, we ordered donuts and lemon tea with ginger. The donuts were good; the lemon tea tasted identical to hot grapefruit juice, which was an interesting flavor but probably healthy for us! We also played the daily challenge on our sudoku app. You can tell our brains aren’t working because it took Amber 21 minutes and 41 seconds to complete it and took Haleigh 28 minutes and 47 seconds. We still did not have our food at this point.
About an hour and a half after ordering (2 hours after getting to the restaurant) we asked Devir to try and figure out where our food was. It turns out our waitress had disappeared- still unclear exactly what happened- but we had wait until she returned to get our food. Apparently, another server could not do this, but we got our food shortly thereafter.
Despite most of the menu being unavailable, the chicken and mashed potatoes we ordered were delicious and honestly very comforting. We had a special guest try and join us for lunch… see below :)
We finally returned to the clinic a solid three hours after we had left. We started and finished the process of actually putting the first aid kits together! We had help from multiple of our VTCA colleagues, and each took a different item to put in all 250 of the kits for maximum efficiency. Amber found out she couldn’t count pens properly and Haleigh had the same epiphany with gloves.
On a more serious note— When one of our colleagues showed up to help us late in the day, we all got to talking about our work for the day and he was surprised with everything we had gotten done. His tone, along with some other issues we’ve had, led Amber to ask the question, “Do you think men and women are equal?”
He responded, “In which way?”
Haleigh and Amber exchanged an incredulous albeit confused look, as we thought he may have been joking. He noticed and replied, “No, men are better than women.”
We tried to play it off as a joke for a while, but we realized he was serious when they continued to make comments that we found disrespectful. We tried to explain why it is important that we feel respected in our partnership. After getting home, he followed up with an apology text, and Amber said she appreciated the apology but also gently encouraged him to do some research on why gender equity is important. We feel confident that he understood our perspective and the matter has been resolved. This experience pushed us out of our comfort zone as we had to recognize cultural norms while still advocating for ourselves.
When we got home, we asked Sammy what restaurants she likes to eat from and she mentioned Cafe Delish, the place we’ve been to multiple times with good coffee and cake slices! We ordered the chicken alfredo, which was more some sort of spaghetti and fried chicken on the side with separate flavor profiles, but still tasty. This did, however, result in Amber breaking her plastic fork in the chicken and Haleigh almost dropping the entire chicken dish on floor while we were trying to cut it.
Anytime we say we had a peaceful rest of the night, something else happens so we’re just gonna end it here for now.
A snapshot of our route to VTCA #mukonointhemorning
“I’m trying to stab [the sugarcane] into your neck” -Haleigh
Unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to try it yet, but maybe soon!
Neither of us cut ourselves with the exacto knives! Talk about a win for today :)
While we were eating…
….and immediately after we had left
If anyone would like to see a 15 second live action video of us packing these bags, please click here. It’s a real thrilling suspense film, if we do say so ourselves.
This pile of bags looks more comfortable than the twin sized bed Haleigh is moving into tonight. Oh! We almost forget to mention—Haleigh and Amber are now becoming roommates, as we’ll soon havehave two bedrooms and with three fellows (but still three beds luckily)! Stay tuned to see how far our cordiality extends…