Sorry I haven't updated in a while, our internet ran out and then this past weekend i went to Uganda so I was too busy. Life is still incredible over here. Last Thursday four other volunteers and I took a 17 hour bus ride to Kampala, Uganda, which I thought was the most atrocious bus ride ever until we rode the bus back to Nairobi. That turned out to be wayyy worse. Uganda is so beautiful. Everything is the purest, most luscious green you can imagine. The roads are lined with sugar cane fields, tea fields, mud huts in little village clusters and huge forests. I immediately fell in love. The roads are a deep red that after about 2 minutes walking around, you're covered in. There are police and security guards everywhere who carry huge guns, and sometimes they hopped on our bus. At first they were a little intimidating because of the guns but then I got used to them and they made me feel safer because I knew they were only there to help. Kampala sucked. I don't advise anyone to go there ever because its probably the scariest city I've ever been in. As a mzungu, you can't walk 10 metres without being approached in some sort of negative way. People were not that comfortable there. So we left pretty quickly and went out to Jinja for an extra night. That city I highly suggest people visit. Instead of taking taxis and matatus everywhere there, you take boda-bodas which are motorcycles. They're so much fun and may look really unsafe (and maybe in reality they are) but when you ride them, you feel so secure. It's fabulous. Saturday we went to Ghandi's temple and rode a boat out to the source of the Nile, which is this one part of water where Lake Victoria and the Nile meet. Water bubbles up from the bottom of the river/lake area and then flows down the Nile for 3 months until it reaches Egypt. After the boat ride, Atazia and I went bungee jumping!! WOOOOO HOOOOOO!!! That was so much fun. I jumped first, and while I was standing on the edge of the platform my adrenaline was rushing so hard that my entire body was shaking as was the entire platform. Such a great feeling. We met this woman who's a painter down in one of the villages. She was so nice! We're basically best friends now. Sunday three of us walked around the painter's village (not with her though, she was busy painting) and met some kids who took us around to meet all their parents, see all their houses, and just show us everything. We got to see avocado trees, orange trees, passionfruit trees, jackfruit trees (which are super bizarre), coffee trees, and a bunch of other cool things. The kids were great. I didn't want to leave, and the bus ride home was completely awful but that's ok because the whole trip was incredible overall.

Yesterday I went to my school to hang with the kids and teacher Violet basically told me her entire life story. I was about to cry in class while she was talking to me because it's so unfair. She works from 5:30am-7pm every day at the school and gets paid the equivalent of $100/month. She still has to live with her guardians because that's not enough money to sustain her, and she pays her guardians $50/month to help with all the bills. It's customary for grandchildren to help support their grandparents so she sends her grandparents money every other month, and she's the oldest of all her siblings so she has to help pay for their high school and uni as well. Since the extra $50 isn't enough to cover all that she took on some private tutoring jobs from 7-9pm every night to get her about $20 extra every month. So every night she collapses from exhaustion at about midnight after doing her lesson plans for the following day. She's the most approachable teacher in the school, so all the girls go to her to ask for pads when it's their time of the month, so every time she buys some for herself she buys extras for the girls. She was telling me that most people are excited for pay day but she's in tears every single time because it's so stressful to think of all the money she owes everyone. She never has enough money to pay for her hair to get done, or a new dress or new shoes but she perseveres every day because she loves those kids and some of them are worse off than she is. She doesn't want to show them her frustration or her exhaustion because she wants them to know that they too can persevere. She's an amazing woman.