There have been many times on this trip that I have felt like I would never be clean again. They have usually involved a lot of sweat from humidity and at times dirt and dust. Uganda is one of those places in the best way possible. In fact, we’ve been going out of our way to get as dirty as possible.
Service
Mud! So much mud!
For three days of service work, we would walk to the village over from our base where we worked to help fix the walls on a family’s mud home.
It’s a strange process. Most construction projects I’ve done in foreign countries are. It makes it that much more fun.
First, we walk down the road to the water pump. Sometimes we have contests to see who can fill up the five gallon jug the fastest. The record is 1:07 (10 sec faster than the next person), and mine is 1:37, which doesn’t feel too bad when you’re competing against the guys. Some of the other days, we just switch around to keep any one person from getting too tired, and we socialize and share stories.
While some of us draw water, others prepare the dirt pile. Water and dirt come together, and shoes come off. We mix the mud with our feet. The red dirt forms socks and becomes a protective layer on our calloused soles for the remainder of our barefoot service. By the last day, shoes lay abandoned before we even walked down the road to get water. They’re just unnecessary.
The last step is actually putting the mud on the house to reinforce the walls. The whole process is fun, but throwing mud balls at the wall might be the best part. The mud is sticky and holds fast to the wall, and then is smoothed out when we splash water on it and run our hands across it.
It took half of our team three wonderful afternoons in that village to finish the house. Children flocked to the common yard area outside of the home each day when we got there, and the number only grew each day. A few team members spent the whole afternoon wrestling, running around, or playing ball with the kids. By the end the evening, all of us were playing with the kids, spinning them in circles and running around.
The Bug in my Ear
So always being muddy is one level of gross, but I had another experience that was on a higher level of gross. If I think about it too much, I might consider it to be one of the most disgusting things that’s ever happened to me. I was laying down on one of the couches outside on the porch when my ear started to hurt. I sat up and turned to Natalie as I freaked out, because my ear stung like the ant bite that I had gotten on my foot a couple of days before. Jonah ran inside to get Laura, one of our grad assistants who is in nursing, and she looked at my ear as I went in and out of a vibrating sort of pain that I told them felt like a bug in my ear. She didn’t see anything, so we put some ear drops in and the pain stopped. We decided that maybe I just had an ear infection. I did not have any of the other symptoms, but I had thrown up that morning so we wondered if they were connected and if my body was just being weird.
I went about the rest of the evening with out weekly Shout worship service, reading for class, and hanging out with my friends. I finally went to bed at about 2am which was 6 hours after my ear had began hurting (I promise that isn’t normal and that I usually get more sleep than that. We were just having good conversations). When I lay down my ear began to bubble a bit from the ear drops and then a sound like radio static took over. It lasted about 10 seconds before I reached into my ear to try to wipe away the excess drops and maybe unclog it. Out came a little black bug about an eighth of an inch long and still alive. As it was two in the morning and everyone was asleep, I couldn’t freak out, so I sat up paranoid for a short period and then just went back to sleep.
I am totally okay now, and I think it has become one of my favorite stories from the trip to freak people out with, so sorry if I’ve caused any stress or worry.
The point is that life is a bit gross. My time in Africa showed me that in many ways with orange stained feet and cracked heels, the bugs, squatty potties, and the rats that lived in our house–more specifically in my room. It’s all okay though. It’s actually good. Without the gross things in life, I wouldn’t appreciate things like warm showers and all the other beautiful things life has to offer quite as much. Also, I can’t lie, there’s something kind of fun and adventurous in gross things.
The gross things are not the main memory I’m going to take away from these two weeks. Rather I’m going to focus on the lessons I’ve learned and the love I saw. I have one more post for Uganda that should be up in a few days and will focus on the people and awesome experiences I had with them. And finally, below is a little bit about our fun adventurous exploit for the country.
The Nile River
Have you ever gone rafting? If not, you should go. It’s a ton of fun and about half of you who are reading this live in Colorado where it is accessible–and honestly, all you Californians would have no trouble going as well. I went rafting once for my high school senior trip and had a blast, so when the opportunity to raft came again, I was ready and excited.
Rafting in mountain streams is one thing, but did you know that the Nile River starts in Uganda, and it’s raftable (is that a word)? I really don’t have a whole lot to say about our free day spent rafting in the Nile, because all you need to understand is how fun rafting is and that rafting in the Nile just makes it sound even cooler. We hiked down to the river through mud, went through rapids ranging from class 3 to class 5, and ate the best pineapple I’ve ever had on the banks of the river.
