A Little Q & A

So, like I said in my last post, Mom has passed along a few questions about certain aspects of life in Uganda so far…so I thought I would dedicate a lot of this entry to answering a few of those questions.  If you have others that I don’t answer here, feel free to put them in a comment, send them to me through email or facebook, or just ask Mom, and I’m sure she’ll get them to me somehow…

Okay, we’ll start with one that’s fairly relevant, if you remember what most of the last post was about…

When squatting in the pit latrine, how do you clean yourself?

Well, toilet paper is pretty readily available just about everywhere that I’ve been so far.  There are several different brands, and they’re all pretty cheap.  All you need to do is stick a nail in the wall of the latrine, and you’ve got yourself a place to stick a roll of toilet paper.  The thing to be careful about is that, when you’re traveling, it’s kind of a toss up whether or not a latrine or toilet you visit will have a roll inside.  Even in a fairly high end mall-type place in Kampala called Garden City (which seems to be mzungu central), the toilets (yes, actual porcelain toilets) often do not have a roll nearby.  So, it’s advisable to always carry a bit of toilet paper with you, especially when you’re traveling a decent distance.  I have heard some stories about school students using old pieces of note paper, or of newspaper, to take care of things…and I’ve actually done that once already, when no toilet paper was near at hand…not quite as comfortable as a roll of Charmin Ultra.  I think, in the more rural areas, some people might use banana leaves.  If you think about it, this is probably one of the most sustainable methods out there, since the banana leaves are a waste product that is already being produced by the massive consumption of bananas in this country.  No trees need to be cut down to make toilet paper…so, what do you think, should we all switch to leaves?  By the way, in case you’re wondering, it’s fine to just toss the used paper down the latrine hole.  Actually, you want to toss a bit of dry, carbon-rich organic material down there after each session anyway.  Stuff like wood shavings or charcoal ash work really well.  These materials absorb any moisture that collects in the pit, which helps to minimize the smell and makes the pit less bug-infested, since those critters generally like moist environments.  Although toilet paper probably doesn’t work quite as well as those other materials, I would think that it helps to absorb a bit of the moisture.  (Of course, I cannot verify this through any sort of first-hand observation…)

What do you sleep on?  Do you have to use a mosquito net?

I sleep on a bed…nothing too crazy here.  At my homestay right now, I’ve got two 3 to 4 inch mattresses stacked on a little wooden bed frame, and that’s working pretty well.  Usually, when I go to sleep, I’m pretty warm and don’t need any covers, but it doesn’t get a bit cool at night, so I have a blanket that I can just pull up when I get a little chilly.  When I eventually go to my site, I’ll have the same kind of set-up there.  Jon, the volunteer I’m replacing, sold me his bed frame and mattress, along with most of his other stuff, and I’ll buy a second mattress to put on top once I get there.  And yes, mosquito nets are very important here.  The leading cause of morbidity and mortality (public health terms…as an oversimplification, morbidity = suffering caused by illness, and mortality = death) in Uganda is malaria (yep, it’s higher than HIV/AIDS).  People get malaria so often here that, if a child makes it to age 5, he or she has probably built up significant immunity to the disease, since he/she has probably already had it at least a few times.  Actually, in many of the local languages, the word people use for malaria really just means fever.  So, any time someone has a fever, it might automatically be assumed that this person has malaria.  The disease is transmitted by a certain type of mosquito (the anopheles moquito, if you’re interested, and only the females bite humans), and this mosquito feeds at night.  So, one of the most effective ways to prevent malaria is to sleep under a mosquito net (preferably, an insecticide-treated net, so that the bugs can’t even land on it, and, ideally, a long-lasting insecticide-treated net, which have a lifetime of about five years before the insecticide wears off).  We are issued long-lasting insecticide-treated nets by Peace Corps, and this thing is currently hanging above my bed, held up by a very haphazard combination of string, bailing rope, dental floss, and faith.  Admittedly, I put it up quickly the first day I got there, before I went to bed, so I wasn’t all that worried about perfect engineering.  Hopefully, I’ll come up with a slightly better, more planned-out system at my house…Here’s a picture.

My bed at homestay in Wakiso, with an impressively installed mosquito net

Are you learning to prepare food?

I’ve watched my host family cook several times on their charcoal stove, and, a few weekends ago, we split into groups and had a cooking day at a few homestays.  The idea was to use the traditional cooking methods (like charcoal stoves) to prepare a Ugandan dish and an American dish.  My group made breakfast, which consisted of “breakfast matooke” as the Ugandan dish (the same, green bananas used to make normal matooke, but you don’t mash them up, and you boil them with tomatoes, peppers, onions, etc…I think it’s really good) and French toast, scrambled eggs, and fruit salad as the American stuff.  I think it turned out really well, and I participated quite a bit, with all of the different foods.  The host family tried all of our weird American food, and they seemed to really like it!  Now, once I get to site, I’ll be using a propane stove that I bought from Jon, which is much easier and faster than the charcoal stove (and you need to use a heck of a lot of charcoal).  It’s got two burners (one which needs to be lit manually, which I can accomplish by getting the other burner going, setting the end of some cardboard on fire, and using that), and I just need to get the propane tank refilled when I run out, which I can do at a gas station in a nearby town.  I already used that stove a few times during the future site visit, and I think I produced some pretty good pasta sauces and rice concoctions.  It’s also really quick and easy to toast bread on a frying pan, for sandwiches or just to get my peanut butter fix for breakfast.

What do you drink?  Water?  Probably not…

Actually, yes, I drink a lot of water, just like I did back in the states.  (Here comes a long answer, seeing as this is kind of an area of interest for me…)  I think many Ugandan families boil their water, which kills anything that might be bad, to make it safe to drink.  Actually, boiling at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit) is overkill, because everything is killed if the water is kept at or above 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit) for 10 to 15 minutes.  The thing is, it’s just easier to tell when the water is at 100 degrees (because it’s boiling) than when it’s at 70 degrees.  But, regardless, heating up the water like this uses a lot of energy, whether you’re using charcoal, wood, gas, electricity, or whatever.  And, at least at my homestay, you get a very interesting, smoky taste from the charcoal, which I’m kind of used to now, but which was pretty weird at first.  Boiling is also the first option recommended by Peace Corps, because it definitely kills everything, but they do give another option, which involves filtering the water and then disinfecting with chlorine.  I’ll get a ceramic filter from Peace Corps if I want to do this, but, from what some volunteers have said, it sounds like these filters don’t work all that well (they’re really slow, you have to clean them all the time, etc.).  We’ll see.  Chlorine is readily available here, both as a liquid solution and in tablet form.  If the water doesn’t have too many particles in it (which interfere with the disinfection process), low doses of chlorine that are safe for human consumption can kill most bacteria and viruses.  However, these doses usually do NOT kill some of the bigger protozoa, such as giardia and cryptosporidium (I had a run-in with this little critter during my first trip to Suriname a couple years back).  The idea is to combine chlorination with filtration so that the particles and bigger organisms (like those pesky protozoa) are caught in the filter, and then the little bacteria and viruses that remain are taken down by the chlorine.  I have not yet had the chance to figure out where the water coming from the tap at my house in Kalisizo originates, but I would bet that it is either from a groundwater well or a rainwater tank.  In general, groundwater and rainwater usually don’t contain the big bugs like giardia…those are almost always found in surface water that is contaminated by human or animal waste (yeah, the kind of waste that would go into a latrine).  Rainwater is almost certainly free of this stuff, and, unless your groundwater well is located close to a latrine, groundwater should be good, too.  So, just treating it with chlorine would probably be okay.  The issue with chlorination in many places around the world is that people just hate the taste and the smell of chlorine in their water.  It’s quite the change from the taste and smell of charcoal water.

Once I get to site, I’m probably going to test out that ceramic filter to see how it works, I’ll almost certainly use chlorine, and I’m also thinking about doing something called solar disinfection.  This is really simple, and, under the right circumstances, can also kill just about everything.  As I already said, high temperatures kill bad stuff, but you can also kill bad stuff at lower temperatures, if you keep it at that temperature for a longer period of time.  So, keeping water at 70 degrees Celsius for 10 to 15 minutes would work, but keeping water at 50 degrees Celsius for 12 hours or so would also work.  The idea is to put water in clear bottles and stick them out in the sun for a while (really simple, like I said).  Especially when you’re this close to the equator (I cross it to go from Kampala to Kalisizo), the sun is pretty powerful.  It heats up the water, and the sunlight itself contains ultraviolet radiation that also helps to kill stuff.  The best way to do it is to leave a little space at the top of the bottle, so that you have some air up there.  Then, right before you stick the bottle in the sun, you shake it up, so that the amount of oxygen in the water increases.  The UV radiation from the sun causes the oxygen molecules to transform into these cool things called oxygen free radicals, which are really effective bacteria and virus killers.  So, you get the heat working together with the free radicals, and, under fairly sunny conditions, you can get complete disinfection within 6 hours.  Even on cloudy days, the process should still work if you leave the bottles out for a longer time (at least 2 days).  I kind of want to try this out, and I’m also thinking about doing a few simple water tests to see how well it works (Jon left some testing kits with me that are able to check for bacteria).

You were warned…that was a long answer.  So, those are some of the bigger questions that Mom has passed along.  Like I said, if you’re interested about anything else, or if you have any questions or comments about my answers, go ahead and send them to me somehow.  Now, to finish off the post, I’m going to do a little Luganda practice.  The next paragraph is going to talk about a typical day at training.  I’ll also put some pictures in to give you an idea of what the place looks like, and then I’ll have the English translation at the end…

Part of the shortcut to Raco, right before the big hill

"Bwe nzuukuka buli kumakya, nnaaba enviiri yange, era awo ndya ekyenkya.  Ntera ndya obuugi, omugaati, eggi, ne eryenvu, era nnywa amazzi olujjo.  Oluvannyuma ntambula okugenda Raco ku ssaawa nga emu, era ntera okutuuka mu Raco ku ssaawa emu n’eddakiika ataano.  Tutandika ku ssaawa bbiri, era tusoma Luganda okutuuka ssaawa ya caayi, ku ssaawa nnya.  Oluusi tulya ebinyeebwa, oluusi tulya omugaati, era oluusi tulya amagi.  Abantu abalala banywa caayi oba kaawa, naye nnywa amazzi.  Bwe tumala okulya ne okynywa, tutera okusoma eby’obulamu ne eby’enkulakulana okuva ssaawa nnya n’ekitundu okutuuka ssaawa mukaaga n’ekitundu.  Awo tulya ekyemisana.  Ntera okulya amatooke, omuceere, ebijanjaalo, doodo, biringanya, ovacedo, ne ennaanansi.  Oluvannyuma nzikuse.  Olweggulo tutera okuyiga ku empisa za abantu bannayuganda, ate tutera okumala ku ssaawa nga kkumi n’emu.  Awo oluusi ntambula okugenda mu Wakiso okukyalira ne bannakyewa abalala, ate oluusi ntambula okugenda eka.  Bwe ntuuka eka, nnaaba omubiri wange.  Awo ndya ekyeggulo ne bakadde bange, ate ntera okulya amatooke, lumonde, ebinyeebwa, biringanya, emboga, ne eryenvu.  Oluvannyuma nzikuse nnyo.  Awo ngamba, “Sula bulungi,” ate ngenda mu ekisenge kyange.  Nsoma Luganda, era oluusi nsoma ekitabo.  Awo nkooye, era ngenda okwebaka ku ssaawa nga nnya."

The hotel at Raco, where I spent a couple of unpleasant nights a few weeks back

The main conference room at Raco, where we have our big sessions

Translation

"When I wake up every morning, I wash my hair, and then I eat breakfast.  I usually eat maize porridge, bread, an egg, and a banana, and I drink water always.  Afterwards, I walk to Raco (our training site) at about 1 o’clock (Luganda time starts the day at 6:00 am, so 1 o’clock = 7:00 am), and I usually arrive at Raco at 1:50 (7:50 am).  We begin at 2:00 (8:00 am), and we study Luganda until tea time, at 4:00 (10:00 am).  Sometimes we eat peanuts, sometimes we eat bread, and sometimes we eat eggs.  Other people drink tea or coffee, but I drink water.  When we finish eating and drinking, we usually study health and development from 4:30 (10:30 am) until 6:30 (12:30 pm).  Then we eat lunch.  I usually eat matooke, rice, beans, greens, eggplant, avocado, and pineapple.  Afterwards, I am full (no kidding).  In the afternoon, we usually learn about the culture of the Ugandan people, and we usually finish at about 11:00 (5:00 pm).  Then sometimes I walk into Wakiso to visit with the other volunteers, and sometimes I walk home.  When I arrive at home, I wash my body (it seems that Ugandans like to bathe twice daily, so in the morning, I wash my hair, and in the evening, I take care of everything else).  Then I eat supper with my (host) parents, and I usually eat matooke, sweet potatoes, peanuts, eggplant, cabbage, and a banana.  Afterwards, I am very full.  Then I say, “Good night,” and I go to my room.  I study Luganda, and sometimes I read a book (yeah, you may have just realized that “study” and “read” are the same word).  Then I am tired, and I go to sleep at about 4:00 (10:00 pm)."

A very threatening raincloud coming toward training...massive downpour 5 minutes later

All right, great, so I just finished my weekend Luganda homework.  I think that will be all for now.  Next week, we split up into small groups and go on a “tech immersion.”  I get to be very unoriginal and go back to my site in Kalisizo for the water and sanitation tech immersion.  But, we’ll get to visit some other places, too, so I might get to see a little bit more, at least.  That will last from Monday until Thursday.  And after getting back from that, we’ll only have two more weeks until training is over and we swear in!

Have a great weekend everyone!