My first Blog Entry!

Hello everyone. I hope this finds you healthy and happy, just like me. First let me apologize for not having communicated very much since I arrived, but our training schedule has us very busy and the town where I am living has only 1 small internet café and it is painfully slow, when it works at all. So I have not been spending either of my most precious resources, money and free-time, at the internet café. Ok, so now on to an update of the last 2 months.
I flew to Philadelphia on August 4th for our staging event. We had about 4 hours of ice-breaker exercises, some information sessions on Peace Corps and Uganda and since it is a government program we filled out piles of paperwork. We woke up on the 5th and quickly boarded charter buses and drove to JFK airport in New York for our 5:50 flight to Brussels, Belgium. We arrived in Brussels at about 8am local time, 3am our time, and proceeded to have a few half-liters of good Belgian beer before boarding our flight to Kigali, Rwanda proceeding to Entebbe, Uganda. We arrived in Uganda around 10pm August 6th, local time, or 2pm central time. After spending 22 hours traveling we gathered our significant amounts of luggage and boarded busses to be taken to Lweza, Uganda, a village about 30 km from Kampala, where we would spend the next few days recovering from jet lag, learning the basics of Peace Corps service, Ugandan culture, and some basic phrases in Lugwere(the primary language for south central Uganda). And for anyone who is counting there are about 54 languages spoken in Uganda even though English is the official language of the country. So while many people in the cities speak English the people in the rural areas, and those who have not had much education which sadly is a fairly large number, speak only their local language. Our time at the Lweza training facility was failry uneventful, but we did get to spend a fun afternoon in Kampala on our first Sunday in the country.
On Monday August 10th we piled our things back onto the busses, vans and trucks and headed for our official training site in Wakiso town. When we arrived at the Raco Training site, actually it is a hotel with a conference center, we received our mosquito nets, matresses, kerosene lamps, blankets and wash buckets. Later that day we met the families that would host us for the next 10 weeks. My host family is composed if a husband, wife, 3-year old daughter and a maid. Now before you get all worked up about me having a maid you need to understand that I live in a home with no running water or electricity. Dalton, my host, works in Kampala all day and then runs a small shop near our house until 10 or later every night. Harriet, his wife, works in far western Uganda in the town of Mbarara. She is a nurse and due to her schedule, and how far away she works, she has not been able to come home since I have been here and so I have not even met her yet. So Rekemah, the maid, has to take care of the house and the daughter. With no electricity or running water the tasks required to maintain a home, and child, require an incredible amount of time, therefore we have a maid. The daughter, Blessing, is very sweet and seems to like me, as do the neighbor children. Dalton and I get along fine and have spent many an evening outside his shop drinking beers, or the local Gin called Uganda Waragi and talking with each other, as well as many people from the community. This time has been really good for learning about how people here live, what they feel the issues are with their country and ours, and mostly just learning how to make friends and live here in Uganda for the next 2 years.
For the last 3.5 weeks or so I have been spending 9 hours 6 days a week learning to speak Lugwere, the language that is spoken in Budaka district where I will be working while I am here, learning about HIV/Aids, Uganda culture, history and politics, Malaria, agriculture and many other interesting topics, as well as a few not so interesting ones.
That is all I have for now, but please keep checking back for more updates to be coming soon.
Steve

And so it begins..

My name is Steve Wright and I am about to leave for Uganda to serve in the Peace Corps for 27 months. I will use this site to update friends, family and others about what it is like to live in rural Uganda for 2 years.

Stay tuned for more information.....