Hi everyone! We made it safely to Uganda and have successfully completed our first week of pre-service training (PST). 9 more weeks to go before swearing in as a volunteer! Until then, my cohort of 46 will maintain the title- Peace Corps Trainees. Up until now, I’ve had a hard time finding two seconds to sit down and organize my thoughts long enough to write an update for back home. We have had a very busy schedule from the moment our plane landed in country. I’ll try to best summarize what all we have crammed into the past week without rambling!

 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with how Peace Corps service is organized, I’ll briefly describe what our timeline looks like right now. So exactly a week ago, I left home to meet my fellow trainees at our Staging event in Philadelphia, PA. Following that event, we took (what felt like) a short nap at our hotel and loaded onto charter busses early the next morning (around 2am) to head to JFK International Airport in New York. We flew for a total of nearly 19 hours, with a connecting flight in Qatar and not nearly enough time to stretch our legs in between. We landed in Entebbe, Uganda on June 2nd!! I think each of us felt extremely worn out and disoriented by the many time zones we skipped over. Nonetheless, we were all equally as excited to finally be in our new home! We were met by a handful of our training staff at the airport, and we were then bussed to our training site where we will spend the first three weeks of PST. After these three weeks, each of us are placed in homes with a “homestay/host family” during the phase of training meant to help us integrate and learn our local languages. After 10 total weeks, we will hopefully all meet the requirements to be sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers.

 

So here we are, exactly one week of training down and 9 to go. I feel like the past week has been such a blur! We have been given so many reading materials, notebooks, binders, etc. We’ve spent every single day, besides today (Sunday), in training sessions from 8-5. Each session is about an hour long and we have covered everything from medical information/health safety, safety and security, brief Ugandan history/demographic lessons, lessons on gender roles, and so on. So far, we have been trained as one group of 46, but we’ll break down into two sub-groups as our learning becomes more sector-specific. Our two groups represent the agribusiness sector and the health sector. We have only had a handful of sessions in our respective sector groups, but those have been the most exciting and inspirational in my opinion! We have gotten to meet the heads of our program and learn what our overall project framework will look like once we finally become volunteers. I’ll explain more about the type of projects we’ll be focusing on after I’ve learned a little more about it myself. At the most basic level, we will be putting a lot of our focus into HIV/AIDS education and prevention methods amongst specific populations. 

 

A couple days ago, we had a session on women’s education and why we need to advocate to keep young girls in school and encourage them to see the value in their educations. The statistics we were presented were absolutely mind blowing. For example, there is approximately a 14% difference in the literacy rates between young boys and girls in Uganda, with boys having the advantage. This type of disparity is not just here in Uganda, but common across the world. We talked about the Let Girls Learn program and how that created a good foundation for the continued efforts of us and other organizations. We talked about child marriage rates and teenage pregnancy rates. We discussed how increases in women’s education rates relate to and reflect decreases in the under-five child mortality rate. I left this session feeling both so inspired by the work that still needs to be done and determined to continue learning about the barriers women face not only in Uganda, but globally. 

 

In addition to the information overload we get during the day, we’re given plenty of time after sessions to get to know the other trainees in our cohort and to explore the surrounding area. Here are a few things I have taken note of over the past week:

> Ugandans drive on the left-hand side of the road!! I guess I didn’t know this ahead of time, so it caught me off guard when we first arrived.

> We all sleep under mosquito nets. I’ve never used one before, so it has taken some getting used to. Particularly when I have tried to get out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom… I almost pulled the whole net down the first night because I forgot it was there (oops!).

> We learned how to prick our own fingers and test ourselves for malaria!

> We’re currently staying in a dorm-style setting where we have access to western toilets and regular showers, but we recently had a lesson on how to use a pit latrine. I’m honestly a little nervous about falling over, but we don’t have to talk about that.

> The beds are pretty comfortable, but the birds start chirping at ungodly early hours of the morning here and the roosters have no respect– they crow all the time.

> The food is really good! It’s all grown on our compound so it’s both fresh and organic. So far, we have eaten a lot of beans and rice. We’ve also had green beans, pasta, potatoes, various fruits (mangos, avocados, and watermelon), and so on! Yesterday the kitchen staff made French fries and they were SO good! In addition to the three regular meals a day, we have two tea times– one between breakfast and lunch and one between lunch and dinner. The tea is great, and it’s always served with some kind of snack (bananas, muffins, cookies, and some kind of empanada type food).

> We have recently had a lesson on how to hand wash our clothes in buckets, and we’ll have a lesson next week on how to take bucket baths and how to cook with local ingredients!

> One of the coolest things we’ve received yet has been a PCV Uganda-specific cookbook that we can use once we get to our sites! It has everything from appetizers and vegetarian-specific meals (!!!) to fun mixed drinks and desserts! 

At the risk of making this the lengthiest blog post yet, I wanted to end with a quick thank you for everyone back home that has been so supportive and encouraging! Once I was finally got phone service again, I was able to read all of the sweet comments and texts I’ve gotten over the past week, and my heart is so full! Thank you so much for following along with me!

Until next time,

Cowan

 

*The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or the Peace Corps.