My walk to school

This morning was my last walk to school. I have generally enjoyed my walk to school in the mornings. Emily and I wake up around 6:30 and then get ready and have tea so we can leave our house at around 7. It's about a 45-50 minute walk to school and in the mornings, especially when we walk through the neighborhood, is fairly quiet and peaceful. It's also been cloudy for the whole 2 weeks, which is really nice. Walking home, it's much busier, with boda-bodas, taxi vans, and big cargo trucks driving right by us as we walk alongside the road. In the evenings, there are also many more people out at roadside stands selling food or other products. I don't enjoy our walk home as much.

Tonight, Honours College is going on a retreat to Jinja. The IMME (Missions emphasis; living off-camps with a family all semester) did their trip last weekend and I heard from Michelle that the resort is nice, with running water and a pool. We also take a boat trip out to the source of the Nile. I'm pretty excited.

I bought a UCU shirt yesterday. It's really comfortable. It's really loose, which is kind of nice because I don't really have any loose, casual t-shirts here.

Last night was my last night on my homestay. It was...good. I'm not heartbroken to be leaving my family and I'm glad to be back on campus and able to sleep in my dorm room and do homework at night, but I'll definitely miss my brothers and the kids from our neighborhood. I will definitely not miss the insistence that I eat more or that "I haven't eaten." Last night, my host mom insisted that I hadn't eaten one meal in the whole 2 weeks there. I did eat. Or at least I tried to. True, Emily tried more on many nights, but I tried to fill my stomach every night.

2 nights ago, I was not feeling well at all and my stomach had not agreed with anything I'd eaten that day. We had fish for dinner, so the only thing I ate was a forkful of rice. They couldn't understand that I wasn't hungry. They offered my coffee and tea and were wondering that I was going to bed "with an empty stomach." I told them that I had a lot of water if I wanted anything and they didn't accept that as a reasonable source of food. It's just a very different thought process. They generally eat dinner at around 9 or 10, bathe, and then go to bed. It's weird because at home we're always told to eat small portions and don't eat right before bed because the focus is on not gaining weight, but here it's good to fill your stomach because there are a lot of people living in poverty and obesity isn't really an issue.

I finished my first essay yesterday. It's 6 pages long, about 1.5 spacing, about 12 point font. However, the pages here are an inch longer, so I did have to adjust the paper size on my document, which was weird. It's for my East African History class, about stateless societies in pre-colonial Africa. I don't know if it's very good. I really only had a couple points, but I elaborated on them a lot to fill the space. And then I put in some quotes that said basically the same thing as other quotes and then explained/rephrased my quotes. I hope I do well. We only have 2 essays in the class, so each is worth about 20% of our grade. There just wasn't really a lot of information available or a lot to say on the topic.

The academic system and teaching style is also a lot different style. Uganda was colonized by the British, so a lot of things ae very similar. People have English-type accents, they use British English, a lot of students go to boarding school, they drive on the other side of the road and whatnot. Their school is set up with 7 years of primary school (P1-P7), which goes through about 6th grade. Then the students take this horrifically intense exam for admittance into secondary school. The test is basically rote memorization of everything they're learned in a bunch of different subjects over the past 7 years. Secondary school in 6 years (Senior 1-Senior 6). In the middle of this, when students are about 16, they take O-levels - to find out if they're even eligible/qualified for university. After secondary school, they take A-levels (I think), to graduate. University is generally only 3 years, but they have 3 terms each year. I'm here for the January semester, which started about 3 weeks ago and goes through April. A Master's is also 3 years (I think). Studentsin University don't have majors, they have courses. It was confusing when UCU students would ask "what course are you in?" or "what course do you offer?" because I think of a class as a course, so I'm in multiple courses. I've got it down now and I totally understand most things. Most of the time at least.

Well, I'm going to go and shower before lunch, after which I'm getting smoothies from the canteen with Emily! Then I don't know what I'm doing. I stil need to pack and then we leave at 5 tonight (it's 12:30 now). I hope you all are doing well and if you have Yahoo, I'll be on Sunday night, US time. My username is dolphinfrk2002. I also finally got 13 random pictures us on photobucket. They're not captioned or anything, but they're there. Vaya con Dios!