African Rainstorms

I need to go to town. We need bananas for breakfast and some plastic chairs for the veranda of our new home and I need to meet up with some partners… but it's pouring rain and thundering so it means I'l have to wait.

Housing in Uganda = the worst. BUT Taylor the new Uganda Fall CD and I just secured the HELP house for the next year. (We're changing the Uganda program to year round!) Poor guy - this is his third house in three weeks. We kept getting bad information about what houses were available and contracts were dodgy and we got kicked out of one house after two weeks until we finally landed in this beautiful two story 6 bedroom home. It's actually right by the first home I rented in Uganda back in 2011. It's been weird to walk by my old home everyday these last few weeks and remember coming to Africa for the first time and all of the wonderful people I shared that house with. Can you have too many memories in one wonderful place? I feel like I can't even add more there are so amazing experiences I've had the time I've spent in Uganda.

I'm bad at blogs. I always want to write, but feel I deal with a lot of sensitive information that wouldn't necessarily be appropriate for a public blog. It's been a year since I wrote, but today as I sit alone in our house working on some projects and waiting for the rain to stop so I can convince a boda-boda motorcycle to give me a ride into town (everything shuts down when it rains and you can't even bribe people to go out in it here) I just want to share my most recent thoughts.

On Sunday a young powerful Ugandan woman gave a talk that hit my heart hard. She spoke of sacrifice. Sacrifice for God, for each other, for giving of yourself to a greater good. I feel like I haven't done very good at that recently. I think the point of sacrifice is stretching and growth, but if you aren't sacrificing in new ways you're not really changing, right? I get set in ways and don't look for ways to do better in this I worry. Listening to this woman was so humbling. I know she has sacrificed more recently than I have in listening to her. She was powerful as she spoke of dedicating more time to God. People here are already stretched for time in ways I can't relate to. People here spend hours preparing meals on charcoal stoves, hours fetching water for bathing/cooking/drinking, hours doing daily life things that I don't even think about spending time on, and she is telling me to give more time for God and sacrifice? I've never met a people more dedicated to helping one another. Everyone here wants to help their neighbor and community - I feel other countries with more resources could take a lesson from them. When life is more fragile, you take care of each other more maybe? I just was talking to a woman the other day who talked about how her biggest worry is just making it so women in her community can get their babies to age 5 since if they reach that age their chance of survival is so much higher.  I've never worried about helping my friends' children get to age 5. I never have had to go hungry so my neighbor can have a meal that day. Everyone here is so giving. Everyone welcomes us into their homes and feeds us and treats us like family. The sacrifice here is daily and it's written on their hearts.

I want to be better in these areas. I want to have more faith.

Suzaaaaaaaaanne

We did an outreach in an Akha Village yesterday! The volunteers covered various topics in health and I loved getting to spend some time seeing the Akha village - one of the hill tribe people in the north of Thailand.





The hill tribe people are among some of the poorest of Thailand, and I feel privileged that we get to work with them and they so lovingly and readily bring us into their village family.  One of the groups of volunteers had been down building a pavilion school and digging some holes for a couple of community latrines we are putting in next week, so the rest of our group had some downtime before we began teaching. I literally walked around for over an hour with a hoard of Thai babies fighting over who got to hold my hands and pointing out things and saying them in English and then having them say them in Thai. I wish more than anything I could speak Thai and communicate exactly how I want to with all of the wonderful people here, but in all honesty it actually hasn't been as rough as I anticipated it being. Our country directors are great and translate a lot, but there are just so many ways to communicate and show that you love and care about someone with out necessarily saying the words.  I think of all the people in my life that love me and serve me and go out of their way to show me that they care instead of only telling me and they are a wonderful example to me. I have loved having the time to reflect on how I show love and how I can do it more fully for the specific people I come into contact with in life. As these Akha children and I walked around pointing out trees and chickens and passing motorcycles, we also learned each others names. Once they learned mine I would point to me and everyone would say mine and then point to one of the kids and everyone would say theirs and then laugh for 5 mins :) Here is a short clip of them working on my name :) Bless them for being a country that can actually say my name. Being Susan abroad is the wooooorst.
             
                                                            I'm falling hard for Thailand.

                                       
                                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkmokaCS3U4

Every kid should have some monkey bars

Team Thailand is amazing. They have worked so hard all summer and this week we got to see some of the pay off. Today we had the big unveiling of our community playground!  In first coming to Thailand this summer the team went to many villages and tried to find the greatest need that they could help with. They came up with some great projects including education and health outreaches and working with small business ideas for local families. But one project that everyone because passionate about quickly was the idea of a community playground. The team stopped by a community center/school where the children had drawn pictures of a playground. This is one of the pictures they had drawn and had up on the school wall:

Development is hard. It's hard to work with culture and figure out what is right and what is opinion and what needs to happen and what could happen and what must change and what could change and all the in between. What the first world thinks the third world needs and what the third world thinks they need is often at odds. Evaluation is so important in trying to figure it out and I for one do not have all the answers as to how to do perfect development. But today I did get to see what it looks like to make a child's dream come true, and that was pretty impactful. Children were coming from all over the surrounding villages so see the grand opening of their playground that they had hoped for long before we showed up this summer. Their parents gathered around and watched as their kids played on the swings, chased each other on the boardwalk and mastered the monkey bars. It was happy. It was joyous. And in my opinion, it was good development. It brought the community together as we built it with them over the last couple of months and all rejoiced together today at the finished project. I'm so grateful I got to be apart of HELPthailand today. I love the Thai people already who are so quick to smile and ready to give love to me even though I don't speak their language.  The land of smiles is better than I ever imagined. 

Belize is a literal dream

Dont judge me. I would have posted more to prove my immediate love for Belize, but the day after I posted last, our documentary team showed up with a bajillion and ten devices and sucked up all the wifi in the worst way ever. I could get on instagram and kind of facebook but only if I stood in a particular spot and it was late or early. Why do I not have immediate perfect internet pouring into my Iphone at all times?!?! Hashtag firstworldproblems.

Anyways. The HELP International Belize team is just incredible. I loved all of the projects they were working on and meeting and interviewing all of the partners with the documentary team.

One of the projects we did this week was an empowerment camp with local children in the community of San Ignacio, Cayo, Belize. We partnered with the local police and other NGOs to put it on, and so many people came together to make it such a fun time! The kids learned lessons on health and self esteem and other topics. It was wonderful.

                                         

The kids have the most hopeful faces here.

There are too many things to write about, and I am about to get on a plane so I need to go for now, but one last partner highlight. I loved visiting Octavia Waight. It is a physical therapy nursing home center. Caitlin is certified in Musical Therapy and we had quite the jam sesh this day. I loved it. Music can bring so much joy and ease so much pain. This man loves his guitar and loves to sing, and I loved him.

Chatting with the patients and seeing life so different from your own but with so many similarities at the same time can be so humbling.  I'm grateful already for the people I have met and been influenced by here in Belize.  One of my very favorite quotes is by Mother Teresa,

                           "The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved."

I 100% agree and I hope that no one I know or meet can say that they are not loved or cared about. No one deserves to feel like that, and I hope the people I meet know how much I genuinely care about them and love them. Even if I am only able to be in their life for a short time.

You better Belize it Im here.

Okay. Belize is unbelizeable. (You knew that pun was coming....)

But seriously. I think I expected just a simple Latin culture, but that is nothing like what Belize really is. This is the most random mixture of peoples, cultures, and everything I have ever experienced! It feels like Africa and Jamaica and Mexico all rolled into one.  It's amazing and SO unique.

I flew to Texas and couldn't wait to board my flight to Belize. Does anyone else immediately start figuring out who would make it in a crash when they get on a plane and picking out who they would make an alliance with? Hashtag survivors. Anyways, as I was boarding, this very wealthy looking couple approached me and started talking to me about why I was going to Belize. She was loaded in jewels and he was sporting some expensive European shoes, but their smiles were real and their excitement as they started talking to me about Belize was contagious. I explained HELP International and what I was doing and as we started to board the plane, the woman reached out and grabbed me in a huge hug and said, "You must love what you do, because you are so so happy." It kind of caught me off guard. I've been told I seem happy before and many a person has hushed my overly loud laugh, but I have never thought about all the people around me that meet me trying to dissect why it is that I am so happy. I thought the whole plane ride about how lucky I am and counted all of my blessings and thought long and hard about why I really am happy. That's a different post altogether, but it made me wish I had had some pass a long cards instead of just my business cards with me to explain why I really am this happy.  I'm so grateful for my life and my opportunities and how I was raised and what I know.

Annnnywaaaays. Back to Belize. I flew into Belize city, figured out a taxi to take me to Belmopan and on to Dangriga and then found a taxi guy to take me and our country director Kristina and randomly the local LDS mission president's daughter south to Hopkin's beach! Here's a little map for frame of reference.

It was nice to start everything off with a fun weekend and the beach with amazing HELP leaders and volunteers. Our Belize team is incredible and I loved having them tell me all they have learned about Belize and the awesome projects they are working on. Hopkins has a lot of the Garifuna people who are Caribbean/West African decent. Seriously I felt like I was in so many places all at once. And the kids are so cute. Point in case:

 This bike babe killed me. She kept making the best faces of fear. But she WAS just riding on the handle bars of a bike holding on...
And the girl on the right and I bonded as I walked to the resort. Such a sweetie.

And we played on the beach with these kids too! The song I Love My Life keeps playing here and it's real. I love my Belizen life already. I  find out the name of all the taxi guys and whoever is closest to me and I just want to talk to everyone here and have them tell me everything about their country and where we could do the most good and what they love about Belize. 

 Such major culture and location crash in my head of what I thought Belize would be and what it is like. We stayed at the cutest cheapest hostel (run by a LATVIAN!!!!) and partied at a sweet resort just a mile down the beach.

We made our journey back to the location of the HELP team today - San Ignacio. It was a fun adventure of bargaining for taxis and bumpy bus rides and buying sliced mangos off the kids walking in and out of all of the people waiting in the bus depot. Maybe one of the buses was full and we convinced the conductor Edgar to squish us on anyways so we could make it home at a decent hour. Make friends with the conductor. Always. Even if it causes a slight scene. Edgar loved us :) 

We stopped by one of our partners when we changed buses in Belmopan. A place called King's Orphanage. It was fun to see the kids and their situation there and talk to the people and volunteers about that project. It was a ton of kids from all backgrounds and races, but they all pretty much get along I was told. I liked that. 

At one point a guy got on selling hot doughnuts.  Warm homemade doughnuts on a ghetto bus in Belize? So confusing, yet awesome. The guy came back to us and I watched the bus as the volunteers all bought them. One dollar Belize (50 cents converted to USD). "A steal!" say the Americans. And it's true when looking to our country and what we spend on food and things we really don't need everyday. There were tons of kids on the bus, but none of them fussed or reached out or begged for the doughnuts. It seemed like such a different scene than what would have happened in America if a doughnut man had walked onto an American bus full of kids. I wonder if many of them are aware of the family situation or if they are just very obedient and if they are trained not to ask for things. Granted, a couple more people bought a few I think, but it was humbling to think about everyone on that bus and wonder where they were coming from and where they were going and what their future held for them. It's days when I feel lucky like this that I really want to do the most good in the world. 

Changes

Exactly two years ago yesterday (as proven by the last post on this blog) I was standing in the backyard of my Ugandan home with my guard David burning trash and trying to figure out development, my life, and where I wanted to be in the world.  

Maybe some things never change. 

Two years later, I'm not sure how far I've come on figuring out conclusions to any of those ideas, but I sure have learned a lot. I guess sometimes learning only leads to more questions though, cuz boy do I sure have a bunch of those right now. One of the minor ones being: do I really want to blog? I started this blog to keep people updated on what I was doing abroad, but it ended quickly for a bunch of reasons. In the past Ive blogged about specific internships and experiences in a very private, few person audience, but after countless people telling me they cant keep track of me and no one ever able to figure out where I am or what I am doing, I've consented.  
I didn't want to start a new blog. Two years ago I liked the idea of trying to show people what the third world was really like, hence the title 'The Real Third World'. And of course 20 people living in the same house in Africa seemed like the next sequence in the TV show The Real World. So I've decided I'm keeping this one since 1) I'm actually leaving the country tomorrow to visit two development teams with HELP International. (They are who I was with in Uganda two years ago, and now I do a lot of their marketing) and 2) I really appreciate things that are real and will probably continue to do my best to blog about them after I return. Or at least present my life and thoughts as real as I can.  

You know what's real about thinking back to exactly two years ago?

I really miss Uganda. I miss the people that I love there and the huge bags of mangos you can buy and the way everything shuts down when it rains and the waterfall hikes and the Mbale LDS branch and boda rides and the African sun and children yelling mzungu and the shades of green so vibrant you cant capture them in crayons. But mostly the people. I've never met people so full of joy and love and laughter as a general whole. But the individual friends I made that impacted me and made me question how I viewed life and who taught me so much - that's who I'm grateful for and what I miss the most about Uganda. 

 I'm excited to go see a new place tomorrow full of new people to meet and learn from.  I know that if I pay attention and listen I will learn more than I ever imagined, but of course I guess that means I'll probably come back with even more questions. At least I know they will be questions that are worth asking and worth spending time figuring out. And I guess I'm okay with the more I learn the more questions I have. Who wants a boring life where they know everything anyways? Not me. People say adventure is dangerous, but routine is lethal. (thanks for that deep quote pinterest - that's real). But seriously. I hope my life is always full of adventure and questions and people who love me that will spend time with me both adventuring and questioning.    

Mbale, Uganda 2011- The road I came home on every single day. 

Orange Trees

Although no one actually claims to get confused, after attempting to burn the trash that has built up in the back of our home and being unable to do it sufficiently due to the random pineapple tops and mango peels, I'm convinced none of the volunteers know the difference between compost, burnables, and other designations for trash. I gave up to watch it smolder and chat with David, our Ugandan guard and dear friend. No matter how they are labeled, the compost often finds its way into the burnable trash pile, making the duty of burning it virtually impossible.
*PS in Africa, plastic makes cuts for the burnable choice too. I know.

Everything here in Uganda is raw. There isn't a trash system. When you want to eat chicken, you have to butcher it yourself. There isn't a lumber yard to get supplies to build a house. You want bricks? Better start lugging water from the river in your jerry can to the adobe mud hill because it's a long process to mix it up, form it, dry it, burn it, and then use it. When our cook Mercy attempted to make Italian pasta at my direction, she bought whole tomatoes and was going to boil them and peel them and do everything herself from scratch. It never dawned on her that the lazy mzungus (aka us white folks here) would just buy a can of steamed tomatoes from the store. That cost a whole 4000 Ug shillings! (current exchange rate: 2700 shillings in one American dollar).
Life here is real. It's raw.

I'm still annoyed people cant keep compost from paper. Mostly though I'm frustrated that there is nothing you can do with the trash and I have to somehow figure it out for 30 people. The trash fills the streets and makes mounds on corners where goats and cows roam looking for something edible. It is a hard situation when you are out on the street and you have trash to throw away. Where do you put it? You know you're not going to be finding a trash can any time soon, but you cant just throw it down on the street. We came here to make things better, not worse... right? Guess Ill just wait and throw it in our backyard where I know it will get burned. Except for today. Blast those pineapple peels.

As I watch the trash smolder I watch David push little bits of wrappers and sacks into the barely there flames with a big stick. David always saves the day. When I splurged and bought a toaster for the team and it broke after a bajillion people used it every morning for a month, and three team members attempted to fix it and failed, David fixed it in a few minutes. When the fridge that had been in storage for 8 months was secretly infested with baby and mama cockroaches that poured out at me like a bad horror movie, David saved the day and got it out of our house and cleaned it ten times over until I was assured they were gone. When people attempted to break into our house he shot them with his trusty bow and arrow (ok... that last one hasn't exactly happened yet, but he is fully prepared to do so if someone makes it over the razor wire). Bottom line, David takes care of the mzungus here to take care of him.There is a small plant growing by our trash pile and as David and I chatted about what to do with the trash, where to put what, how to keep the puppy Simba out of it, he bent over and started telling me all about orange trees.

David: "Suzanne, this orange tree is doing bad. It's going to die."
Me: "What? That little plant is an orange tree?"
David with a confused look: "Yea, of course it is."
Me: "How do you know it's an orange tree?"
David with an even more confused look: "Look at the leaves."

What do I look at? I had fruit trees in my backyard when I was little and lived in Idaho. Cherries, pears, plums, whatever. But if you put a two foot fruit free in front of me, I would have no idea what it was until I read the label. We Americans are so busy we fail to learn about the world around us. The Africans I met in Uganda are brilliant. They can make anything from anything if given the opportunity to get the resources. I told David I was impressed that he could tell what kind of tree it was, and he just laughed. Of course he knows what tree it was. It amused him that I had no idea, leaves or no leaves. We started talking about what Mzungus know and don't know. I asked David if he thought it was odd to have mzungus come and tell Africans what to do. He replied no, there is lots for Africans to learn. I continued to ask David who he thought knew more, Mzungus or Africans. He thought about it for a while. He concluded by saying he thought both knew a lot, just about different things. That when Mzungus come to Africa, it is more of an exchange of ideas. Or at least it should be.

I wonder how many volunteers coming to Africa think, "I wonder what the Africans are going to teach me." We come with agendas, and plans, and what we think is best and what everyone should do. David is right, Ugandans know a ton. More than I do in a lot of areas. David has solved more problems for me this summer than I have for him. David is humble and therefore he is teachable and learns a lot as he goes about his life. Im grateful he is my friend. There is a slower pace here, a focus on relationships, an understanding of the land, and great attention given to detail. I came with lots to give, but Im leaving with lots received. True development should be an exchange of ideas. If both sides had all the answers, each country would be a perfect place. Slowly I'm figuring this all out.

Luckily, I can at least now pick out the orange trees.