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<p>Hi.</p>
<p>Okay, so I've had a fantastic week last week and now I'm in the middle of a s***ty week. Fair enough.</p>
<p>I'll start with the good one; Thea and I headed for K'la (Kampala) last tuesday (17.03) to spend a couple of days at the MS-guesthouse with the other MTVs (volunteers) before going to the annual meeting. On wednesday 10 of us went river rafting on the Nile, a crazy, fantastic experience. But also rather painful for some because most of us hadn't put on enough sunscreen, so we came home as red shrimps. There are pictures. From thursday the annual meeting og MS Uganda began. It was held at a very fancy hotel in a town between K'la and Jinja, Mukono. It was so nice to hang out with all the other MTVs in a place where you could actually take a shower and have food that wasn't matooke.</p>
<p>But now I'm sick. Not dying, but still annoyingly sick. "Eat a lot a dairyproducts" the doctor said, but it's not that easy without a refridgerator!! Thea and I have been running around Masindi trying to find some cold milk. Luckily almost every shop has a small freezer filled with small bags of yoghurt, so i've been walking around town with a small plasticbag with yoghurt in it and a straw for drinking it. nice! The doctor also told me to stop eating matooke, fruits and stop drinking tea and coffee. So there's really not any interesting food I can eat. And it still hurts like hell every time I have to eat anything. I have to take tiny bites, so Thea has to wait for ages for me. Besides that it seems that the teachers at Masindi Junior have decided to beat the children ALL the time, while we were away. Now it's not just while we are marking the childrens exercises that we can hear the canes swinging in the classroom next to us, they have started interrupting our lessons to punish the children. It is so frustrating. We know that it takes place and we know that there's nothing we can do about it, but it is so damn hard to have to witness it constantly. All we can do is turn the other way and cover our ears. It's absolutely terrible!! So that's the week from hell.</p>
<p>Monday we are going for a safari at Murchisons Falls National Park, so hopefully that can cheer us up a bit.</p>
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Right now I'm sitting with half a litre of whole milk with a straw in it and a piece of freshly baked chocolate cake. We have yet again sought refugy at the DW's place on the hill behind Masindi. And as I'm just sitting here relaxing Im thought I could answer some of the questions from the message board....
I think they speak about 60 different languages in Uganda and there is about the same number of different tribes. So, yes, everything is very confusing. Even for Ugandans. In K'la they speak Luganda, in Jinja where we stayed a bit they speak Lussoga and here in Masindi most people are from the Bunyoro-tribe and they speak Runyoro. But it's rather difficult for us mzungues to learn the local languages, because everybody insists on speaking English with us. It was easier in Zanzibar, where most people didn't speak English so we were forced to try to communicate i Kiswahili.
The thing about the many languages is also very confusing because every language pronounces the cities in different ways so you end up being oh so confused when you travel around Uganda.
People are very sweet and interested in us, but on the street we mostly get attention from children and men. Everywhere we go we can hear a light voice screaming "Bye bajungu, bye bajungu, howareyou? I'm fini". For some reason children call us Bajungu or Kajungu instead of Mzungu. It's quite funny, sometimes when we are walkning past people on the street the just say "I'm fine thank you" as if we had already asked them "How are you?". When we tell people that we are from Denmark, most people ask if we think it's possible for them to come to Denmark to work and over and over again we have to say, no we don't think so.
Whenever we meet pupils from Masindi jr. around in Masindi, they stop and wave and yell "Hello teacher, hello". They are so sweet and they seem so happy to meet us and to show the rest of the inhabitants in town that they know us... haha!
The last couple of days Shakillah (20 yrs), our 'maid', has brought her son. We are not completely sure that he is actually her son, because she's very bad at English and one day she said to us "I have brought my daughter, come meet her" and we were all excited and went out to find a girl around 15 years... We started laughing and assumed that she meant her sister. But this boy is 2 and a half years old, so he is probably her son, alright. Shakillah talks all the time. No actually she yells all the time. She has a voice that reminds me som much of the voices in cartoons (topo gigio).
okay, that's it for now. See you soon (5 weeks for some)
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