Images of Wakiso and swearing in

A collection of photos from Wakiso before I moved to Mityana and swearing in where we became official Peace Corps Volunteers:

Right before I left, I let the kids in my neighborhood try out my bike. Bikes are a huge deal here as very few kids have them and very few girls know how to ride them. I wanted to try to teach the girls that I talk to daily, or at least give them a ride on them. This girl is Enid. She was one of the most enthusiastic kids I have ever talked to. Everything she said sounded like you just gave her the biggest news ever. Here she is with my helmet on. They didn’t quite pick up riding my oversized bike, but we sure had fun trying…

These are my homestay brothers. I have never had brothers, but these boys are definitely the type of brothers I would want to have. Odegaard wanted a picture of him talking on my phone. He is another kid that just appreciates everything in life. If Odegaard says it was just an ok day, you know it had to be bad as every day is great in this kids mind. Geir just laughs at him. He is a good kid as well.

This is my training class. From l to r: Me, Bruce, Kristen, Herbert and Greg. Many hours have been spent with these people and I was lucky to have such a fun class.

Saw this on my last night in Wakiso… kids playing in the cab of a truck. It reminded me of my nephew Quinn and his obsession with trucks. Kids really are the same no matter where they are born….

As I can rarely sleep late in this country due to 1) the call to prayer 2) the roosters 3) the sun or 4) people getting up early, I was happy to see the sun rise in Kampala from our hotel. This was taken in one of the 3 days we spent in Kampala before going off to our site.

My training class! Imagine trying to get 23 trainees together with about 15 people taking pictures with our cameras. Also imagine a swimming pool right in front of us so that there is not a good angle to take the picture and what you get is many mediocre photos. However, this one shows us all. My closest friends in training were the 3 girls to me left, Kristen, Tess and Amy. Kristen is my closest neighbor so I am sure we will be spending lots of time together. Amy is about 5 hours away and is not a kid-person but is working with over 300 kids at an orphanage/school. Tess is about 2 hours away and is hilarious. During training she arranged a human pyramid (did not work) as well as ugly mumu day where all the girls found the ugliest dress they could find in the market and wore it to training. Funniest part about that day is that everyone thought we looked “smart” I had on a leopard print dress and was nicknamed “hot mama”

Because there is a lot of us in the central part of Uganda, we had 2 classes learning Luganda. This is all of the Luganda group with our teachers. We rearranged classes midway through so I had both Ven and Herbert (in the middle). We all get along famously well and have a lot of fun together which is good as we are all closest to each other. We will have a week of language training in 3 months and it will be a great reunion!