Hello everyone! I hope this message finds you all happy and well! I cannot believe we are already half way through August. I have heard that it is hot; I hope you are all staying nice and cool in your air conditioned homes. As for me, I often find myself rather chilly. Fancy that.

Carol and Kennedy are home from school and I could not be happier! If you do not remember, Carol is the girl that was asked to babysit me when I first arrived here in Kiyumba. Both her and Kennedy attend the teachers college for whom I work and have been at school for the past two few month, but now they are on holiday. Not only are they hilarious, they are a huge help. After talking with many students about the lack of school fees and their fears about not being able to attend another year of school I realized that I really need to focus on doing both an income generating project, specifically for women, as well as a village savings and loans. I have been procrastinating a bit on both for a couple of reasons. The first being that I feel that it is important for my village to know and trust me before I am able to initiate these projects. However, I know feel that I am at this point. My second reason is that I have failed to find someone that would work with me. Because I am not anywhere close to being fluent in Luganda it is important for me to work with someone in the village who is fluent in both Luganda and English. While there are about a handful of people that know some amount, it is not nearly enough. However, eighteen year old Carol is fluent in both. I brought up the idea of starting the village savings and loans and I did not even have to ask her to help me. Immediately she said, “Nalubega that is great! We will contact the LC and he will call everyone to a meeting for us to explain the program to everyone.” I am so happy to have Miss Carol back in Kiyumba!

Over the years I have met several people that have thought their birthday was a national holiday. Others who not only had a birthday, but more of a celebrating not only a day, but for a full week opening a present each day. The other day my friend Lisandro celebrated his birthday and had made a comment about starting the year off right. I found it funny that unlike everyone else who considers New Year's Day to be the beginning of a new year, he considers his birthday to mark the new year. Things are different here in Uganda. The other day I asked my friend Kennedy when his birthday was and he told me, “It is soon approaching. It is June 26th.” I said, “Kennedy, it is August. June was two months ago.” He started laughing and said, “I guess I forgot my birthday.” Today I asked my friend Carol when her birthday was and she started laughing. She got her phone out and started looking at the calender and said, “Ummm, I don’t remember. I think it was in May. Yes, May 26.” Now, I know there are times when I get confused about if I am twenty-three or twenty-four, but I do not think I would ever forget my birthday. It’s your birthday for crying out loud! Perhaps all the celebrating we do for our birthdays in America makes up for the lack there of here in Uganda.

When I first arrived in Uganda the country director for Peace Corps Uganda was warning us about the amount of frustration we will endure as volunteers. He said, “If Uganda didn’t have these problems that frustrated us we wouldn’t be here.” This week I have been trying to remind myself of this. The education system here is a complete disaster and living at a primary school I see this first hand. The Ministry of Education, teachers, head teachers, parents, they are all setting their children up for failure. The Ministry never pays the teachers which requires children to pay outrageous fees that they are unable to pay. The teachers fail to assess children, use teaching methods other than lecture, teach in English when students will be tested in English, they beat the children for things such as wrong answers, and they have no relationship with the children nor do they communicate with the parents. The head teacher never shows up to school to supervise nor do they have anymore education than a regular teacher, which may be no more than a secondary education. Lastly, the parents are not involved in their child’s education; they never visit the school, contact teachers, or ask questions about their child’s education. For the past two to three weeks the children have done absolutely nothing. I mentioned that some were practicing the past couple of weeks for the open day ceremony, but not all of them. I assumed that this week they would get back to work, but it is not the case. The children arrive at school at eight and play until five when it is time to go home. The cook has not been here for the past week so children cook lunch for the teachers and their children, but they, themselves, go hungry. The upper classes have had exams the past couple of days and one of the teachers delegated Carol to grade the papers for him. I intercepted them and was incredibly disappointed to see their scores. Out of fifty marks, children were scoring twos and eights. As a teacher, if over half of my class was failing I would feel incredibly guilty for failing my students, but teachers here blame the children for not being bright.

There are about ten children that I know rather well and they can usually be found at my house when they are not in class. I think the teachers get annoyed by the fact that I would enjoy spending time with the children and that I am so well liked by the children. The teachers teach their classes, make the students fetch water for them, wash their clothes and dishes, and take care of their children. However, I do these things for myself and enjoy spending time with the children. Today I had a teacher who I really like come up to me while I was playing a game with some kids including Bonny and Martin. She looked at me and said, “These two are your best friends?” Teachers always do this when they have a problem with a child. They cannot take care of the problem themselves so they make it out to sound like it is my problem because they are my “friends.” Anyway, she reminded them that they were not to be seen with one another any longer. I was baffled they are best friends and both incredibly great kids. I have never had a problem with either one of them and while Bonny is rather bright naturally, Martin tries to learn and always reminds me of how much he wants to learn. This teacher informed me that Martin is “destroying” Bonny. That Martin has very bad manners and never does as his teachers ask. Apparently during the exams he had Bonny do his for him. She was also mad because during school Bonny and Martin always go to his house instead of staying at school. I was incredibly shocked to hear about Martin having bad manners because he always does as I ask and always offers to do things for me. I am not surprised about them going to his house during school because the students are never in class. Why would you stay at school where you have no food and you are not learning anything? As for Bonny doing the exam for him I guess I understand that as well. Martin wants to succeed, but under the circumstances unless you are incredibly bright you cannot succeed in this school system. I was asking the teacher if she has talked with Martin about these issues to find out if something else has been going on and she said no that they have think that he doesn’t want to learn. I said, “He told you that?” She said, “No, I just know.” I asked if she had contacted his parents and she said that she had talked with his father awhile back. I told her that I thought she should follow up and she does not see the point. Now let me tell you something else about Martin and his life. Martin’s mother runs a small shop in town that sells alcohol. I have never walked past that store and not seen at least five drunk men sitting there all day long. On top of that, Martin is usually left to run the store when he is not at school. Martin a) probably realizes that if he doesn’t preform well in school this will be his life and b) he’s a sixteen year old boy who spends most of his free time with drunks; how do you think he is going to behave? Tell me how keeping his best friends, who is a good influence, away from him is going to help anyone. If they insist on this I guarantee Martin will not be back in school next term. What is most frustrating is that she kept mentioning what a good student Martin was last year and how well he was doing, but at the same time she doesn’t believe that there could be something else going on to make him behave in this way. I try to remind myself that America didn’t always have a great educational system. It still is far from perfect, but we are coming. Uganda, in a way, is like America sixty years ago. America has come a long way in the past sixty years and I pray that one day Uganda’s educational system will be where we are today. Things take time. I just hate waiting when I am so invested in these children and want so many great things for them. Sometimes I wish I could run a school here with American teachers to show them how things could be, even without money.

Who gets to decide what is beautiful and what is not? In America we hear a lot about body image and there has been a push to try to influence the entertainment business into displaying a diverse group of people. The other day I was talking to Martin and somehow he started talking about how my skin was beautiful because it was white. When I told him his skin was beautiful he told me I was lying and that only white skin is beautiful. Even after I told him all the disadvantages of having white skin such as sun burns, skin caner, and the fact that I am always visibly dirty in this country he still insisted that mine was much more beautiful. I was heartbroken. Martin is a sixteen year old boy that lives deep in the village. Who told him that white skin was beautiful? To my knowledge, he doesn’t have access to entertainment as we do in the western world, but perhaps it goes way back to colonialism. Martin is not the only person I have had this conversation with it happens often and each time I wish they would truly believe me when I tell them that they are beautiful. I always try to explain to them how much I love to photograph them because of the way the sun always reflects off of their skin, but they do not believe me.

The other day a girl in secondary school brought be a book of poems to explain an English word she did not know. She said, “My teacher is an expert in English, but even she has failed to know this word.” The word was “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

A student of mine, Paol, is leaving Kiyumba for the holiday to earn some money fishing with his father in Entebbe. Paol has been worried that the other children will know more English than him because they will have me to practice with during holiday. I gave Paol my English/Luganda dictionary and told him to write down important words and their meanings to study while he is gone. He started doing so, but then got called away and I had to leave for town. I brought the paper to him and he got this worried look on his face and said, “But Madam Nalubega, I am missing a word.” The word he was worried about not having was “wizard.” WIZARD! Seriously? WIZARD! How often in everyday conversation does one use the world “wizard”? I would say that for Americans not too many people would complain if we decided to remove it from the dictionary. Who knows though, this is a rather superstitious culture perhaps it is an important word.

Uganda is a rather conservative culture when concerning dress. I cannot even imagine what would happen if I ever wore something short enough to see my knees in the village. I have a picture in an album where some friends from home and I went camping and we are all wearing shorts and the kids are absolutely shocked. At first I didn’t think anything of it, but now I am starting to get self conscious about the fact that these kids have seen my knees. A friend donated a Cosmo Girl magazine for me to cut up to make beads. I had torn the pages out and the wind had blown them all over my house. I picked most of them up, but there were some I had forgotten about. The worst picture was a page where they had six celebraties wearing two different things and readers were asked to choose which one they preferred. In each picture the girl was either wearing a thong swimsuit or a skimpy swimsuit. I almost died. It was as if I just introduced these fifteen year old boys to porn. I can only imagine what Ugandans have to think of Americans after all the movies and magazines they see of us.

I am not fat. I know that. Most people know that. I am not self conscious about being fat (because I am not), but come on people, give me a break! They love calling me fat here. It’s actually more that they like to tell me that I have become fat since I have moved here which is not true; or maybe it is and I just haven’t realized it because my clothes are all stretching out. Could this be a situation like my freshman year of college where me and my entire dorm got fat and blamed our clothes not fitting on how hot the dyers in the basement got? Not noticing how much we “porked out,” as Jess’ mom later informed us, until we saw pictures of ourselves? Anyway, back to the point. The other day it got brought up with thirteen year old Frank, him calling me fat that is. I told him that it makes me sad to hear that and that if I am fat no one in America will like me. Of course I was joking, but he didn’t know this. Frank, with the most serious face I have ever seen on him, says, “But Nalubega, for you, you are fat. You enjoy Uganda’s food.” I get it, it’s a cultural thing, but what about this little thing known as tact. You know I don’t enjoy being called fat and that while we both understand that it is a compliment in Uganda I have told you a thousand times that it is a negative thing for Americas so lay off; I am not fat. Bless the American who ever comes to my village and is a bit sensitive about their weight.

Again, I hope all is well with you! Thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to take an interest in my life here in Kiyumba!

Peace and love,

Autumn

P.S. Mandy, Jacob, and Michelle thank you so much for the wonderful things you sent! You are all wonderful and I appreciate the time and effort it took you to do so!