On the food front, we're eliminating posho and matoki from our weekly meals! =D Posho is just maize flour and water, and although filling (and Ken LOVES it), it tastes of nothing, and is a massive effort to eat.Matoki is equally tasteless, but with the added disappointment of looking like mashed potato so you get all excited at first. The other night, though, Juliet (the cook) made up for it all with mashed potato and fish! =D Best meal so far, made even better by mashed potato again within the week, and lovely potatoes last night. I kid you not, we get very excited about mashed potato! And pilou rice,however you spell it, which always reminds me of our acappella warm up. :)
The playground's really looking good now, with everything apart from the slide and the steps cemented in. This, however, involved over a day of sanding. I'm not gonna lie, I would rather sweat and ache mixing concrete all day than sit sanding a pole. It takes forever, and never feels like you've got everywhere. And although the kids really try to help, there are so many of them and hey barely scratch the metal.It's just one of those irritating, time consuming things that has to be done though, and overall hasn't really taken that long. We got back to concreting on Wednesday, and I had never anticipated anyone loving concreting quite as much as Jo! She loves it, bless her, and it gets us all motivated too. She and Alex were not very well yesterday though, and Jo has been ill all night. :( Hope she feels better for a bit of sleep.
Mixing concrete goes so fast when we're all on it as a group. We make one or two 'pancakes' or 'pies', when we lay the aggregate on top of the sand and concrete that we mix before this stage. And then we pour water on a section of it, and it's time for 'hungry hippos',where we hoe it to the edge of the pancake and then push it back again, to mix it with the water. When it's mixed properly, we shovel in into wheelbarrows and we play the girl card, getting the lads to wheel them to the holes! The most I've managed to wheel is a half full wheelbarrow of aggregate.
The other day when Abe was burning the tyre for the see-saw, he managed to set his crotch alight! He was leaping around as all the kids laughed and pointed. Oh dear. We're all chipping in so that Abe and Godfrey (the welders), and Ken are can come with us to Sesse. :) Sesse Island is on Lake Victoria, and the sunset is meant to be incredible! Fingers crossed it doesn't rain then! Last night I was trying to get a picture of a beautiful sunset from the truck on our way to Masaka, but I was kneeling on two bags, leaning out as Mattias held onto my coat 'cause I was genuinely terrified of falling out as we went over some of the bumps!
I love riding in the truck at night. :) Even though we had a bit of a death ride to the school yesterday morning, I am going to miss it! It feels kind of magical, bumping along the road in the wind beneath a perfectly clear sky; you can see so many stars in every direction. The sky here is just amazing, and that's another thing I really will miss, as well as all the kids.
Talking of the kids, we had a bit of an upsetting experience a few days ago, when we heard children crying from the classroom as they were being hit across the stomach and the back. Hitting children is illegal n Uganda, but still happens. We could see it through the door, and it only stopped because Carla spoke to the teachers; before the playground was built she had asked them not to do it. The sad thing is it won't stop for long though.
Yesterday afternoon half of the group went to do the kids' club, and Jo, Kate, Markus and I were supposed to go along to the women's group meeting. However, Juliet said it was not possible that afternoon, and so we went on a bit of a wander around the village. We went into the library, which is a room with a few cupboards as book cases, and asked if we could have a look around. This ended up as us getting a full tour, with an explanation of their indexing system, which is more general than most libraries (general reading, language, early reading). He explained that there was some research going on in the community hall, and explained about the professor who'd set it up through UN grants. They are hoping to be able to set up a computer room in the future, and use the garden to hire out to people for functions, weddings etc.; he said the aim was to make it sustainable as it was a great thing for their community and they wanted to improve it, turn part of it into a car park, and plant some flowers.
We came to Masaka last night (Thursday) because we are just going to finish cementing next week, otherwise there would be a full set of equipment to play on and Tom thought by the time we got back after the weekend everything would have shifted out of place from kids playing on it before the concrete has set. We stayed in a lovely hotel for about seven quid each. We went to pick our clothes up this morning, but my dress isn't finished. I bought the material and had it made for a tenner, and have bought two more sets of material today to have trousers made. They're really colourful. Everything here is so colourful. :) Must go now as we are about to set off for Sesse! =D Having an amazing time.
Oh yeah, and I had a terrifying toilet experience, when a lizard ran over my foot mid wee! And on that note...
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