Q: How difficult is it to learn Lusoga?
As an international intern,
language is one of the greatest barriers we face, so we have quickly begun
learning some useful phrases. On our team, Nabirere A, we have a “phrase of the
day” that is especially relevant to upcoming activities. The fact that our
first phrase of the day was “bana nga kitano” or “I am sorry for your loss” for
a funeral we attended on our first Monday in Nabirere A is telling of the dire
health situation of our village. Happily, our next phrase was a short welcoming
song for our community meeting, “tusangaire leero, tusangaire olwa leero luuna!
Tusangaire leero, bonaeiwange bweri
sangaire!”
Lusoga is phonetic, although some
of the letters are pronounced differently than in English, for example “L”
sounds “r”, which makes it much easier to learn than the Danish birthday song
we tried to learn for Stine’s birthday! Learning common greeting and thanking
phrases is also important because it is a good way to immediately show our
respect and commitment to the community and our job. I am hoping and expecting
to learn a lot more Lusoga in the coming weeks as we begin conducting the
household surveys!
-Simone,
Switzerland
Q: Have you made any
friends in the village so far?
Our attempts to interact with the
children have been more or less successful. One of the less successful moments
was when our VHT Moses’s four month-old child peed on me. I don’t know if the
baby boy Steve was really terrified or really confident, but one thing is for
sure; making the children become our friends is a long process.
-Stine, Denmark
Q: How interesting
was it to set up the sanitary facilities?
I for one had never gotten involved
in setting up a sanitary facility so it was such an interesting experience for
me. The sanitary facilities we needed to set up included the trash pit, tippy
tap and the plate stand.
Materials needed;
-Hoes and a shovel (for the trash pit)
-A string, pieces of wood, a jerrycan and a nail for (the
tippy tap)
We are still looking forward to setting up the
plate stand (we need more pieces of wood and nails for this)
The trash pit; we had to find the best site for the trash
pit, more preferably a softer ground that would make excavation easier. The
standard size of the trash pit had to be 4ftx4ftx4ft. It was so interesting how
one of us had to do the excavation and have someone else using the shovel to
scoop out the accumulated soil. This made me realize how energetic our team was.
However, we weren’t able to meet the standard depth of the trash pit because
there was a more complicated, though interesting layer of rocks that we had to
dig through to make the pit 4ft deep.
The tippy tap; this required us to apply some physics to
make the facility a functional one. Terms like ‘fulcrum’ and ‘pivot joints’ had
to be applied. I found this interesting too. The soap on the side of the tippy
was placed in a more interesting way that I find a bit hard to describe. I was
so glad that our tippy was functional at the end of it.
-Solome,
Uganda
Q: What has been your
favorite chore in the village?
Water Fetching! Our house typically fetches water two times
a day with our three 20 liter jerrycans. Not only is water fetching a great arm
work out, but also a chore that involves interaction with the community. It
takes us around 20-30 minutes to collect water, depending on how long the lines
is at the borehole. Thankfully, we have two boreholes that are fairly close to
our house, but for some families they travel a significant distance to get
water. During most of my trips to the borehole, children are the typical crowd
hanging around waiting to fill up multiple jerrycans for their family. Whenever
I go fetch water, I look forward to the infectious amount of giggles from the
kids.
-
Tali, United States
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