Are We There Yet?

Well, I finally made it back.  After about a month and a half of rest, good food, music, and friends, I left the US on January 7^th for another eleven months in Uganda.  I expected to get back to Kalisizo by the 9^th.  Almost a week later, I’ve finally reached my destination.  Obviously, a few things happened along the way to slow me down, but, for the most part, it actually turned into a pretty comfortable several days.  At a few points during that time, some interesting things happened that made me think, “Huh, this might make a good story for a blog post.”  So, I’m starting the whole blog-writing thing up again.  Hopefully, it lasts…

January 7^th: It’s the last morning at my family’s house in Pennsylvania, and I slowly, somewhat reluctantly, pull myself out of bed.  I have to wake up early (8:00 am, ouch), so that we can make it to the airport in time for my flight later that day.  In a partial daze, and shivering from the outrageously cold temperatures, I get myself together, pack the last few things into my backpack, and cocoon myself into my family’s van as we pull out of the driveway.  About twenty minutes later, my hand shoots into my pocket and I confirm that, yep, I left the ATM card I need for Uganda at the house.  After a few frustrated grunts, I inform the family, and we speed back home to grab the card.  We still end up making it to the airport in plenty of time, where I say goodbye to Mom and Dad and head into the airport, which is not busy at all.  I wait for about a minute before checking in and checking my two bags, mostly full of research supplies and presents, and then I wait for about another 5 seconds before getting through security.  I’m at the gate for the first leg of airborne section of my trip with time to spare, and it turns out that, according to the people at the gate, our flight from Baltimore to Detroit would be full.  Although, this is actually not the case, as the seat right next to mine ends up being empty.  It might be the only empty seat on the plane.

This first flight goes off without a hitch, and I land in Detroit with some time to find my next gate and to play around on the internet for a bit.  Actually I end up having several hours to do this, since this flight, from Detroit to Amsterdam, is delayed.  At first, it’s delayed by about 2 hours, which makes me a bit concerned, because my layover in Amsterdam was only supposed to be about 2 hours.  I’m thinking I may need to sprint through the huge airport in Amsterdam, but then the two hour mark comes and goes, and we’re still sitting in the airport.  Finally, after almost three hours, we board the plane.  It turns out that the weather outside was so cold that the catering company was having trouble loading food and drinks onto the planes.  The trucks use hydraulic lifts, which were not working, or were working very slowly, which caused all of the flights in the airport to be delayed.  Once on the plane, we wait for another half an hour before getting clearance to take off, and then the ocean-crossing flight finally begins.  As I sit in my window seat, trying to get comfortable, one of the flight attendants notices my Bucknell sweatshirt, and it turns out that her family is from Williamsport and that her son is a freshman at Bucknell.  We talk for a bit, and I tell her that I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer heading back to Uganda.  This statement causes a couple people nearby to become interested.  The young man next to me seems pretty interested in what I’m doing, and the young lady across the aisle says that she also served as a volunteer.  Amazingly enough, she was in Nicaragua, a country that was a pretty big part of my life while I was at Bucknell.  We talk for a while, and then settle in to watch our little movie screens.

January 8^th: I’m not great at sleeping on planes, especially when I have a vast assortment of movies at my disposal, so I am awake for almost the entire flight.  We land in Amsterdam around 11:00 am local time, which is an hour after my flight to Uganda was supposed to leave.  It did leave, and only one flight goes from Amsterdam to Uganda every day, so I am stuck for a day.  This actually turns out to be quite nice.  The airline seems to run into this sort of thing all the time, and they get me set up at a nearby hotel, with my room and all my meals paid for.  In not too long, I am on a shuttle bus heading to the hotel.  I’m kind of excited to see a bit of Amsterdam, but it turns out that the hotel is not in the city.  It’s about fifteen minutes from the airport, and the city is also about fifteen minutes from the airport, but they’re in different directions.  So, we drive down a fairly rural highway, and I get excited again, because I see wind turbines up ahead.  “Oh cool, they have wind turbines!” I think to myself.  Renewable energy has been an interest of mine for many years…

I get to the hotel, which is humongous, around 1:30 pm, and my room is ready.  The room is, of course, very nice, and I take a few minutes to get on the internet and let people know what’s happening to me.  Then, I realize that I only have a few more minutes to capitalize on the free lunch, which lasts until 2:00 pm, so I hurry down to the restaurant.  After lunch, I send some more emails, take a shower, and then it hits me.  I feel incredibly tired, and I decide to take a short nap.  It’s about 4:00 pm by this point, so I set an alarm to go off in an hour and climb into bed.  The next time I open my eyes, it’s 10:00 pm, and I’m still feeling pretty tired, so I just allow myself to fall back to sleep, which is not hard at all…

January 9^th: I finally get out of bed around 5:00 am, which would normally be unbelievably early for me, but, having gone to sleep at 4:00 pm the day before, it doesn’t seem quite so early this time.  I take my time getting breakfast, and then pack up and take the shuttle back to the airport a little after 7:00 am.  At the airport, I ask no less than five different airline employees about my checked luggage, since I’m not sure if there’s anything I need to do to make sure that the bags are on today’s flight.  It turns out that I don’t need to do anything, and I continue on to the gate, which seems to be at the very end of the airport, pretty far removed from all the other flights.  This flight hops from Amsterdam to Rwanda and then to Uganda, and as I sit on the floor reading my book, I realize, through a bit of eavesdropping, that I’m sitting next to a group of Peace Corps Volunteers who work in Rwanda.  A little later, I get up and walk around, and someone else recognizes my Bucknell sweatshirt.  It turns out that he lives in State College…  Crazy, right?

This flight ends up being delayed by about half an hour, but we eventually get moving.  I really luck out with my seat assignment this time around.  I’m at the very front of one of the Coach sections, and I’m in the aisle, meaning that I have a ton of leg room.  The weird thing is that the movie screen and tray table set up is completely different, and this takes all of us in the row a little while to figure out.  The screen comes up from under the seat, while the table folds out of the arm.  After making sure I understand the setup, I settle into the movie world once again.

We land in Uganda around 10:30 pm, and, after getting through immigration, I wait for my two bags, still wondering if they actually did make it onto the flight.  The big camping backpack comes relatively quickly, which makes me hopeful.  After another half an hour or so, that hope is dashed as it becomes clear that no new bags have been added to the conveyor belt for several minutes.  It turns out that a number of people were missing things, so there is quite a line at the baggage office.

January 10^th: After a long wait, I get to the desk and am told that the bag should be arriving on the next flight.  I let them know where they can deliver it once it arrives, and I finally leave the airport around 1:00 am.  After being swarmed by the taxi drivers who hang around the exit doors, I find the Peace Corps driver, Rashid, who by now has been waiting for me for at least two and a half hours.  Of course he is very nice about it, and we drive off toward Kampala.  I find out that I’m going to be staying at Ann’s house.  Ann is an American working in the Peace Corps office, and she oversees Peace Corps Uganda’s administrative and financial stuff (that’s the technical description of her job).  As expected the house is very nice.  Her husband, Lou, lets me in and shows me to the bedroom downstairs, where I will be staying.

After sleeping for several hours, I wake up and have breakfast with Lou, since Ann has already gone into the office.  Ann has been working in the country since July, but Lou only came about three weeks ago.  We talk about some of the things to do in the country, some of the national parks, and about some of the stuff he did when he was a volunteer in Fiji.  In the afternoon, we go out for a bike ride.  First, we stop at a wood-working shop, where Lou is having a table made, and then we stop at a market.  We lug back heavy bags of potatoes, eggplant, greens, and avocados, and Lou is also carrying a little pumpkin.  The way back is really steep, and I am going really slowly.  At one point, I lose sight of Lou, and this is, of course, when he turns onto another street.  I miss the turn and end up searching for several minutes to find the right street.  Finally, after going back and forth across roads that all look pretty similar, I get back to where I need to be, I see Lou, and we go back to the house.  I’m pretty tired after this extended ride, so I relax for the rest of the day, expecting to get a call the next morning about my bag.

January 11^th: The call doesn’t come.  I end up calling the airline myself, and I find out that now it’s expected to come on today’s flight.  I make sure that they know to deliver it to the Peace Corps office when it does arrive, and I proceed to spend almost the whole day relaxing.  We go out to dinner with Paul, Peace Corps Uganda’s director of programming and training, and his wife, at a restaurant with Ethiopian and Italian food (kind of an interesting combination).  We’re all pretty tired when we get back to the house, so we call it a night.

January 12^th: Again, no call, but I check online, which tells me that the bag should have come on the flight the day before.  So, I spend another relaxing day waiting.  In the afternoon, I get a call from Paul, who had gone into the office, letting me know that the bag was delivered.  Tomorrow, I’ll be able to go in and get it, and then I can finally travel back to Kalisizo.  I have to say, though, that this very gradual re-introduction back into Uganda has been quite nice.  In the market, when you buy a bunch of stuff, they might give you a few extra tomatoes or something, and they’ll call it a “bonus”.  I feel like the past several days have been kind of a vacation bonus.

January 13^th: I wake up pretty early, pack up everything, and go into the office with Ann.  My bag is right where it’s supposed to be, and I take a quick look inside to make sure that things are still in there.  We seem to be in good shape.  I send Max a text message, letting him know that I have the bag and that I will be heading back to Kalisizo later today.  Max’s response: “Thanks be to God.”  I spend the morning hanging out in the volunteer lounge, talking with some other volunteers, saying hi to some staff members, and writing most of this thing.  A group of us walk to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and I’m starting to feel like I’m almost back to being a normal Peace Corps Volunteer, and I realize that I’m very glad to be back.  (Of course, it helps one’s mindset when one is eating really good food at the time.)  After lunch, we head back to the office, and a few of us get a car to head back into town.  The car drops the other two volunteers off at the hotel, and I continue on to the taxi park.

Now, I’ve been thinking about the best way to travel back, with my three bags.  A bus would be the most comfortable, but it’s hard to find one that would go the whole way to my site.  I want something that will get me the whole way there, because otherwise at some point I would need to shove myself into a little car, which I’d prefer to avoid.  So, I take a look at the coasters (mini-buses that seat twenty-some people), but none of them are more than half full, and it takes them a while to fill up.  So, I continue on to the matatus (big vans that seat 14 people), thinking that they could put at least one, hopefully two, of my bags in the back.  Nope, they are putting other stuff back there.  I’m pretty much committed at this point, so I climb in, and one guy does take my big camping backpack to put in the back.  But, he doesn’t actually put it in the back.  He slides it up under the seats, until it’s right beneath me, giving me very little room to position my feet.  The other two backpacks are sitting with me, one shoved down as far as it will go between my seat and the back of the seat in front of me.  It gets stuck about halfway down.  The other backpack sits on top, and I pull out a book so that I can read on top of this mound of backpacks.  Now, admittedly, sometimes I use sarcasm or exaggeration to provide some comic relief in these posts, but I am completely serious when I say that I am in pain the entire way home (3 hours).  With the backpacks piled up in front of me in my seat, my legs are basically pinned into two specific spots, and once someone sits next to me, moving my legs is not really an option.  My knees are pressing into the corners of the seat in front of me, even though I’m sitting as far back as I can in my seat.  There is not much cushioning covering the metal frame of these seats, especially on these corners, so my knees are basically shoved into metal the whole way home.  Maybe the matatu was not the best choice…

As we near Kalisizo, the lady sitting next to me makes sure that the conductor knows exactly where I want to stop, which is very nice of her.  I like to think that I can do all of this stuff myself, but I have to admit that it’s a nice feeling to know that others are looking out for me as well.  After disassembling my backpack mountain and stumbling out of the vehicle, a guy comes up on a motorcycle and immediately recognizes me.  “Brick by Brick!  How are you?”  A few people in Kalisizo identify me so much with our little organization that they sometimes call me “Brick by Brick”.  Our office is much closer than my house, so I walk there first, so that I can drop off the two bags I don’t need right away.  On my way there, someone else recognizes me, and this guy, who spends his days making boxes from scrap metal, actually calls me by name, and we talk for a bit.  He seems happy to see me.  It’s evening now, so no one is at the office.  I open it up, drop off the bags, and walk home.  On the way, I pick up some bread at my favorite shop in town, and I talk to the owner’s daughter for a minute, who is home from school and is watching the shop.  Finally, I make it to my compound, and as soon as I step inside, I hear kids starting to shout my name.  They seem fairly excited to see me…

So, here I am, several days later than expected, but here safely and soundly with all of my stuff.  It was a very gradual process of moving from Pennsylvania back to Kalisizo, with some unexpected, yet nice, stops along the way.  I wasn’t completely sure if I was ready to come back, but, now that I’m here, I’m happy to be, and I am ready to get back to work tomorrow.