Daily Life

We've now had about 2 "normal" days in the office which, surprisingly, makes me feel like I'm settling into a regular pace of life. Every morning we walk about 30 feet from the girls' apartment:

to the office (the other half of our duplex):

We have morning prayer and devotions at 8:30am in our awesome gazebo.

Then we get to work on whatever the day brings.  So far, I've mostly just been trying to teach myself AutoCAD.  At 1pm, we all have a Ugandan lunch in the "garage" that serves as our dining room.

Each night we've been making homemade meals for 6 (all of us interns) from whatever we are able to find at the markets here.  We've had some pretty great meals so far, but we may need to cut back on the amount of money we're spending.  Cheese isn't too common here, but we splurged last night and had grilled cheese sandwiches and made-from-scratch tomato soup (YUM).  Unfortunately we hadn't bought much groceries for the house, so we first had to walk 45 minutes each way to the nearest grocery store, getting back when it was pitch black at 7:30pm, which meant we didn't end up having dinner until 9pm.  I'm sure we'll figure out the cooking and purchasing routine soon enough.  For now, at least, we decided the same people can't go shopping AND cook in the same night.  Tonight we had taco/fajita-type things along with homemade guacamole, salsa, and chapati chips.  In the evenings we all hang out for a bit at the girls' place, sometimes also with Laura, the girls' 4th roommate, although it seems like cooking takes so long that there's not much time left to relax afterward.  I guess that's what the weekends are for.  We got out our laptop and projector on Sunday and watched "Clue."  =)

Other interesting things about daily life here is that at any time, you can expect the electricity, water, and/or internet to go out, sometimes for hours on end.  Although this happens almost every day, it hasn't been too disruptive so far, other than being a little less productive at work.  Our fridge is currently warmer than our kitchen, and has been so for the last couple of days (I think they're trying to get someone out to fix it), but fortunately we also have a little mini fridge, into which we cram all our essentials.  Fortunately, things like eggs and unopened milk don't need to be refrigerated here.  We also keep our windows open all the time (all windows and doors here have bars on them, and we lock our front door with a padlock at night even though there's a 24-hour guard outside), which means we hear everything going on outside very easily.  We've all been woken up by roosters, dogs, rain, and people talking nearby, but I think we're slowly getting used to it all.  It's always hot during the day (the mild, early morning right after taking a cool shower is a glorious thing), and I'm almost always sweating, but we have fans, and fortunately it really only gets up into the mid 80s, and this is apparently the hottest month of the year.  We have to keep our knees covered for modesty reasons, but we're happily discovering that we can wear shorter skirts than we thought we could, and I pretty much always wear sandals and roll my pants up to just below my knees in order to stay cool.  =)