New Apartment

My mom and I arrived in Uganda on Friday Feb. 25.  We've spent the last week setting up my new apartment.  We went shopping pretty much every day, to grocery stores, hardware stores, and home supply stores.  We also spent a few hours in the furniture section of town walking up and down the road and ordering a guest bed, dining table and chairs, a couch and chair set, bookshelves, and a dresser.  The furniture pick-ups required at least 6 trips down to "furniture row," since things weren't always quite ready when we thought they would be.  We installed light bulbs the first day (light bulbs don't necessarily come with an apartment, but I was lucky to have been left with 3).  We hung mosquito nets over our beds...a couple times.  The first net I had was treated with a bug-killing chemical, and I woke up every morning with burning eyes.  It was also a little small.  So we went back to the store to get a larger one, and when we opened the package found out that it wasn't as big as advertised.  But my mom used some of the first net to fashion a doorway into the new net, so now it works great!  We've had a couple handy men over to drill holes in the ceiling for hanging the nets, and to install wood poles for clotheslines on my back veranda.  The plumber was also here at least 4 times to try to stop the leaking and giant puddles in my bathroom.  The leaking has finally stopped, but now I'm also hoping to find a way to have a hot shower.  (I can get hot water in the tub, and a cold shower, but I currently don't get enough water pressure for a hot shower.)  I also spent hours just unpacking all my stuff and figuring out where to put it all.  It was an exhausting week, but we made it through and I now have a fully-furnished, set-up apartment!

Now that I can rest in my new place on my new couches (just completed this evening), I'm leaving for a week and a half on an EMI project trip!  Tonight I'm going to the airport to pick up 4 of our volunteers and drop off my mom for her flight home.  Tomorrow morning I leave for Gulu, a city about 5 hours north of Kampala.  We will be designing an agricultural vocational training college and farm, which will benefit a community that was devastated by rebel fighting.  We are working with Watoto Children's Ministries, which also runs the Childrens' Village that I wrote about before (remember the wastewater sampling?)  I'll write more about the project when I return.  It's supposed to be in the 90s in Gulu, so I hope I survive!  (I have a hard enough time with the 80s in Kampala, although today it's been cool in the 70s!)

I'm glad to be back in Uganda and feel like I'm already back into the swing of things here.  I'm looking forward to getting settled into a normal pace of life once I get back, and figuring out what it looks like to be here as a long-term staff and not as a short-term intern.