WASSUP everybody I'm in Africa

Mari and I, and our friend Natalie who met us in Amsterdam, arrived safely in Uganda last night. The flight went pretty smoothly EXCEPT that there was a medical emergency in the air so we had to make an emergency landing in Rome. Kind of cool, since I’ve never been to Italy, so we got a cool aerial view of the Italian shore. (Though not so cool for the person getting medically evacuated I guess.) We ended up getting to Kampala two hours late and pretty exhausted, but we finally found our bags and got through the airport to find Divinity, the director of the youth center we’re working at, waiting for us with a VERY excited group of Ugandan youth leaders from the center. They were all super psyched that we were finally here, and shook all our hands and took a million pictures. We all squeezed into the van they had rented (SO typically African… we were practically piled in there) and drove back to the house.

The house that accommodates the youth center is in a little village outside the city, up a hill in a little neighborhood. The buildings are all stucco and the roads are a rusty colored dirt. There are clothesline hanging across the road and tons of kids running around playing ball. Our house has a big wall around it with broken glass on top to keep out robbers. The house has a couple rooms and a washroom in back for the girls, and the boys are in separate building across the yard. The washroom has shower head, which is fortunate, but less fortunately the water is COLD. I sort of stood to the side a splashed myself this morning. There’s also “toilets” in the back, which are actually latrines, so going to the bathroom constitutes squatting over a tiny hole in the floor. If there’s one thing I will miss most on this trip, it will be modern plumbing.

I’m running out of time, so I got to wrap this up, but so far we haven’t seen TOO much of the area except on the walk over to the Internet cafe. Kind of hilarious, since the whole time we were walking, the little kids we passed would get really excited and yell “MUZUNGA! HI MUZUNGA!!!” which is what they call anyone foreign. Some of them even made it into a little song. It was definitely more adorable than offensive, since they were just so excited to see someone not Ugandan.

I’ll try to post another update as soon as I can! Love you all and hope everything is well in the States, New Zealand, etc.