12 September, 2010
So I am here in Gulu – my new home for the next 8 months. We have been here for 3 days and already it feels much longer, and I say this in a good way. I have never felt so welcomed with open arms into an entire community and town of people.
Gulu is a large town in the northern part of Uganda, and is soon becoming a small city. For the past four years they have been getting a great deal of international aid to help in the war recovery, and there are many munus working for local NGOs in the area (“munu” is the Luo word for white person… in Swahili it is Mzungu, for those of you that heard from me from Kenya last year). We have yet to meet any of these other munus in person, but we will soon I’m sure.
The bus ride to Gulu was surprisingly quick and easy – it took about 5 hours on very decent roads. The roads here in town and in the villages, however, are a different matter, which I will explain in a moment. Florence, who is the director of Comboni Samaritans of Gulu and will lovingly become our “mother” during our stay here, picks us up with her friend, Santer, at the bus stop and take us for lunch. I immediately feel at home in their welcoming presence. We eat sweet potato, chapatti (a flat fried bread-type food), and beans at a local restaurant with two other friends of Florence’s, and begin to know our new family. Then, we head to our new home.
We arrive in Gulu during the rainy season, which lasts from September through November and brings the area rain and lightening storms on a daily basis. When it’s not raining, it’s hot under the intense sun and things dry quickly. This rain is a blessing to the environment, but not to the roads, which I am told (and soon see for myself) that the local government is poorly neglecting. The dirt roads in town itself are fair enough; however as soon as you leave the bustling center of town and head off the main roads into the nearby villages, you quickly find yourself dodging potholes the size of small Volkswagens. Each day the rain comes, these potholes become bigger and the road less and less usable. Our host, Florence, has her own car which she expertly navigates, at around 5 MPH, through these small disintegrating paths that wind up and down as much as back and forth, even though the general landscape in this area is flat.
After a distance of about 5K, we arrive at our new home in the village of Layibi, one of the four villages on the outskirts of Gulu town. We pass through compounds of semi-permanent mud and grass huts that our Acholi neighbors have built after moving out of the IDP camps these past few years. They remain temporary structures in part because the general hope is that eventually they can move further into the countryside as peace continues and the area remains safe.
Our house, which is Florence’s home, is a concrete building, which are fewer in number than the mud huts. It is a large one-story rectangular house, divided into two mirroring apartments, one of which Neil and I are now to occupy. It is beautiful. We have a living room with a curtain separating off a dining room; a kitchen; a bathroom with a faucet for showering; and two sunny bedrooms. Our front porch overlooks a beautiful yard and garden, and through the back door we find ourselves in a central compound where Florence keeps her pigs and chickens, and we can see the backs of our neighbors huts. We have running water powered by Florence’s own well, and solar-powered electricity. Florence’s half of the house next door is equally beautiful and filled with pictures of her family.
The landscape in Gulu is flat and lush, and I find myself gaping on a regular basis at the beauty of the area. The colors are so vibrant that the deep blue sky, the thousands of vivid colors of green, the red of the mud roads, and the yellows and oranges of the flowers create a magnificent organic painting. After less than an hour of “moving in,” Neil turns to me and says, “Sarah, we’re living in a village.” After the hectic clamor of Kampala and even the busy and dusty atmosphere of Gulu town, this mecca of countryside and quiet amidst Layibi village is a welcome and unexpected reprieve. It will take 30-40 minutes to walk to town, and about 20 minutes to walk to Comboni Samaritans where we will be working 4 days a week; it takes less than 10 minutes to reach local shops in the village center. We are still close to everything and surrounded by a community of friendly and welcoming neighbors, yet far enough removed to be living in a paradise.
As I finish up this letter it is now Friday, 17 Sept, and we have completed our first week of our internship. Obviously there is much more to write about, but I will have to save that for a later time. However I will end by saying that I feel amazingly at home, and while at times I feel tired and uncomfortable with the constant socializing and lack of privacy that is part of the communal way of life here, I am grateful for the fact that it’s next to impossible to feel lonely. I miss people at home (Neil and I had a moment early on of thinking “We should have other Smithies over for dinner one of these nights!” before realizing that, of course, this is pretty impossible…), and I am sure to get homesick as time goes on, but overall it hasn’t taken me long to feel settled here and turn this new beautiful house into my own.
More to come soon,
Scout
p.s. Send me mail!!!
Comboni Samaritans of Gulu
c/o Sarah Coughtry
P.O. Box 963
Gulu, Uganda
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