Sunday July 11th

Here in Gulu things are really picking up. I have taken the last of my Cipro, so I am finally feeling better. It makes such a difference between feeling bad and feeling good, for some reason it’s just sucks so much more to be sick in a foreign country. But enough about that…
Since I’ve been feeling better, I have spent more time at school near the end of the week. We were able to see a small school assembly of sorts. Some girls did a debate on “military means being the most sustainable way to bring peace to northern Uganda”. Their points were fascinating and most of the time it was nice, but other times it was a little hilarious with the things they came up with as valid points. Other girls did some native dancing. I had never seen a dance like the one they did. It was called Dikki dikki, which apparently is just a dance for peace time. There were a few more speeches in true Ugandan style, and then the afternoon assembly was over.
On Thursday night was one of the World Cup Semifinal games. I went over to a local restaurant and watched part of it, but left at half time to go to bed. The only bad thing about the World Cup over here is that the games do not come on until 9:30pm which means you are up till midnight watching the game. This is especially annoying for the final game. It is on tonight which means I will of course be watching the Netherlands beat Spain, but I have to be at school at 7am on Monday morning. This requires me to be ready and on the road by 6:30am!!! Feels like a school day in America.
I take back what I said about there only being one bad thing about the World Cup in Gulu. Really, the worst part is that the power is always on now when the games are on, but after tonight I have a bad feeling that we will not have power as often. I guess we’ll see.
This weekend we had our annual Teaching & Learning Conference for two days here in Gulu. All of the Teacher Exchange Participants and some others from the schools are invited. I thought it was a pretty good experience, considering some of the other conferences I have sat through.
Now that the conference is over the teachers split into their two groups; one went on Safari and the other went to a Rhino Sanctuary (my group). Since I have been to the Rhinos before, and it was not included in the price of the trip, I decided to stay back in Gulu. Danielle and I were the only two to stay here, so we made plans to see an old teacher. Dolly was an English teacher at Pabo, and is probably one of the coolest female teachers I have met. We had dinner with her last night and it was SO good to catch up with her. She is now living in Gulu and attending Gulu University getting a degree in Development. There are so many NGO’s here in Gulu that having a Development degree is very popular because you can work for one of the many, and I mean hundreds, of NGO’s.
We then came home and watched a movie from a laptop. No surprise there, but I fell asleep and saw about 30 minutes of the movie. The only eventful thing that happened was our adventures with a mouse in our house. But I’m going to leave you all hanging, and tell you about it in the next post. If I don’t create some suspense then you wouldn’t come back to read my blog!