Site Assignments

We received our permanent site assignments last Friday. The Peace Corps staff and a few current volunteers made quite a show of the announcements. All of the trainees in my cohort seemed very pleased with their future locations. I will be working out of clinic that serves a community of tea farmers in the west. I’m told the area is beautiful, but very rural. We’ll see how I am able to cope living among the tea fields! I suspect there will be no running water and no electricity at my home and I will need to rely on the clinic to charge my laptop. We still have about two months of training until we move to our permanent sites so I can only speculate for now.  

After our site announcements we were treated to a show by some local musicians and dancers, which was amazing. Lovely afternoon. What I really wanted to highlight in this picture, besides the cool drummers, is how the gardeners turned a bougainvillea vine into a shade tree. They built a hexagon shaped support system around the trunk and trained the vines to grow up then outward to form the tree shape. There are a few of these on the property. I just love the idea and want to try to duplicate it when I get back to the states.  

Ugandan drummers under a bougainvillea "shade tree".

Ugandan clothes line.
It is a little strange to see clothes draped all over the trees and shrubs, and even laid out on the lawn, but I guess it does the trick if you don't have a line. We are washing our cloths by hand too, in a bucket, but our dorms have proper clothes lines out back. Hopefully my future site will as well. This building houses some of the workers here at the training center.