Fellows Blog: Day 32

Our fun fact of the day is that Uganda is called the “pearl of Africa” because Winston Churchill once said that. Also, Haleigh thinks she’s becoming desensitized to bug spray, she’s gotten like five bug bites in the last two days.

We had another boda boda training today - we’re at 225 trained now! At first, we thought there were only going to be 15 people there today when we started the pre test but then 10 more people showed up at the same time which was very exciting. While waiting to start, we researched for our excursion. We were originally planning on going to Queen Elizabeth National Park, but it’s like 12 hours away with traffic. We found another National park called Murchison Falls that’s closer and has better reviews (we can see giraffes there, which is Haleigh’s favorite animal so she’s happy about that). They also have the most powerful waterfall in the world, a boat tour, and a safari with lots of animals, so we’re very excited for that. We’re also going to Jinja on Saturday to see the source of the Nile!

Trainings went smoothly today, nothing noteworthy. We saw a dragonfly, that might have been the most exciting part. We also found out that Yasin, one of our TOTs, loves high school musical (although he calls it high school movie). We also met someone who was very good at pool and Kyrillos, the previous reigning champion, ended up losing to him, although it was a close game.

A reporter from a Ugandan news outlet contacted Hannington, who contacted Haleigh about providing an interview. She was occupied with the trainings, but after he texted four separate times within an hour and a half, she wrote a brief statement on LFR and our goals in Mukono. He quickly incorporated it into an article, which you can find here.

The reporter also came to interview the three of us later at the restaurant to discuss our work further and plans to write a bigger story on us.

Also at the restaurant we were incredibly excited because they had beans today. Like truly ecstatic. Amber and Haleigh decided to branch out and get matoke (mashed and cooked unripe bananas), rice, beans and avocado (we saw someone else have avocado which inspired us). Kyrillos stuck with rice and beans, but even the addition of beans made the rice infinitely better. The avocados needed a lot of salt or any other flavor but, as Amber pointed out, if you count avocados as a vegetable then we had four food groups on our plate.

Devir had been telling us all day that he had a surprise for us and would finally give it to us at the restaurant when we were all together. He made us close our eyes before presenting us with matching friendship bracelets. Amber’s is just Amber, Haleigh’s says Pine, Kyrillos’ says Ayob and Devir had one for himself too. While Amber and Haleigh almost started crying from the sweet gesture, Kyrillos and Devir exchanged bracelets so Kyrillos has Devir’s and Devir has Kyrillos’. We love our gifts so very much :)))

Unfortunately, we somehow ran out of 6 GB of wifi overnight (and then when we were actually on our laptops and phones all day only used 0.2 GB), so Kyrillos bought more for us at the Airtel station outside the restaurant. Kyrillos has been dying to see the new minions movie “The Rise of Gru”, and had a heated conversation with the movie theater attendant about whether they had the movie. We were still confused after the conversation but hopeful and headed to the theater, only to find that they had Jurassic World: the third dominion, which sounds a lot like “minion”. They also did not have “Top Gun Maverick” today. After they tried to convince us to watch a bunch of other movies, we decided to just eat dinner at the movie theater restaurant. Haleigh and Amber wanted to try the chicken and cheese sandwich and in an effort to make sure there weren’t any raw vegetables on the sandwich, Amber said she was allergic to tomatoes. Fast forward 30 seconds and we order a margarita pizza, but nobody said anything. We also ordered some ice cream, but it was a bit lackluster. There was a comedy show on the roof of the restaurant that everyone wanted to check out. Turns out it wasn’t in English, but from the translations they told us, it didn’t seem very funny anyways. The interesting part was like every five minutes, there was a dance performance to break up the sets. They were also interested in us, asking us questions like if we had boyfriends and how old we were, but also quizzing us on who is the President of Uganda, what is the capital of Uganda (we knew this one - Kampala!) and what is the capital of Mukono (Kiko, like the name of the market). Amber asked them a question back - “what is the capital of the United States?” The comedian didn’t know the answer, but someone in the audience eventually got it. We also requested they play the song “Peru” and “Che Che Che” and had a small dance party.

We got back late tonight but have a packed day tomorrow with a shopping trip to Kampala and watching the minions movie!

Kyrillos deep in concentration while trying to beat Devir at pool

Amber took the opportunity to sunbathe during the training, in Haleigh’s words, “if you close your eyes, it almost feels tropical”

The fancy poster Jacob made (ignore the dates we told him to correct and the piece of blank paper covering the Red Cross logo because we don’t have an official partnership with them yet)

This matoke, rice and beans made us so happy

Haleigh trying on Yasin’s boda helmet

Our friendship bracelets :))))

We were so excited for this ice cream. Unfortunately, the first bite tasted like yogurt, which Amber soon realized was actually an artificial banana undertone. We had ordered vanilla.