Kampala and Kigali!!

Hello everyone!!

I can't believe I've been here now for almost a week! After my two ten hour plane rides, an 8 hour layover in amsterdam (with some snow-filled exploring!), an hour long plane ride, a lost bag, and about 7 hours in the ugandan airport, I arrived in Kampala! there is so much to say and so little time to write, but i will try to summarize as best as possible!

We stayed in a hotel in Kampala for 4 nights for the first part of orientation with everyone in the program (there are 27 of us). We did various orientation-type sessions (like talking about fears, expectations, ground rules, academic components, culture shock, etc), had some time to explore Kampala, went to the tombs of the Bagandan kings, saw the university, and had various other adventures! Kampala is a very crowded city with CRAZYY traffic (you literally just run across the street and hope to not get hit... there are no traffic light or crosswalks, or many rules when it comes to driving. i learned very quickly that pedestrians do not have the right of way!!) One night when we were free to have dinner wherever we wanted, i ended up having dinner at the house of a ugandan family. one of the girls in my program had met a ugandan girl our age the week before (she got here early) and when we went to visit her at the shop she works at, she invited us over for dinner! she lives with her two older sisters (one is 24 and one is 27) and her younger brother (the rest of their family still lives in the village that they are from) and they live in a part of the city that i had never been to before. it was so wonderful! when we first got to their house the electricity was out, so we sat in their living room lit by candlelight and they taught us how to eat jackfruit,it was like nothing i had ever had before! (Gwen, the texture would have been a huuuuge issue for you, haha). then the power went on and we all sat around the living room and made dinner (chopped up all different types of veggies and then put them over boiled potatoes) talking about our love lives, the ugandan economy, the war, school, and making fun of the soap opera that was playing on the tv. It was so nice to have such a wonderful and genuine interaction with ugandans around our age that we had just met, they were so warm and welcoming!!

yesterday our group of 27 split into two groups, and one went to gulu in northern uganda and one went to kigali, to capital of rwanda, and we will switch in a month. my group had a 12 hr bus ride from kampala to kigali, it was such a beautiful drive! we arrived at about 6pm and two of the other people on the program and i went on a walk to explore kigali. we ended up walking really far and getting sort of lost, but we eventually found our way back in time for dinner! we had our first kinyerwanda class today! they speak mostly kinyerwanda and french here which is definitely something to get used to after kampala, where nearly everyone knew english. i move in with my host family on tues, but up until then we are staying in a hotel and there is a balcony right outside my door that looks out over kigali, soooo beautiful!!

Ok, I need to run- we're about to go to an Ethiopian restaurant for dinner, but I love you all and hope that everything is going well with you! New York people, i hear it is snowing there! So hard to imagine in the heat here! Please write to me and tell me how you are doing, i miss you guys!

love love love,
frees