Tender Mercies

Hello! Today marks the one week anniversary of my beginnings in Africa! 12 more weeks to go! There is not as much to say today, but I still want to write. I love my team. They are awesome. My grandpa passed away and I just found out yesterday. I was having a really hard time because I have to be so far away from my family right now. But I asked a few boys for a priesthood blessing and they were more than willing. Today I feel so much better! I am so happy! And I know my grandpa is happy too and that my family will be comforted!
We have been working on projects and will start jumping in with full forces on Monday. We're going to be doing everything from teacher training, to AIDS prevention to adobe stoves building to farming to music dance theater and everything inbetween! I am Project Lead over the Teacher Training and tehre are so many awesome people who are really excited to start on it. I'm so glad there are so many passionate teachers .....and just passionate people here. We're all really here for the rigth reasons trying to do good things. We're all here to teach these people what we know and to learn from them and what they know! I love my team!
Today, Andrew, Ivan and I went on a boda ride around the entire city of lugazi for about an hour. We got to see the most beautiful sights i have ever seen. I'm sad that my camera battery was dead, but Andrew got some awesome pictures. We got to drive right through the middle of the sugar cane fields and go all the way up to the golf course and all aroudn the town. We went to some places where none of us "muzungu"s have been yet and people were jumping out of their pants to yell "muzungu" at us and to see us. Word travels fast here. In one area, there were kids lining the streets yelling at us becuase they had heard "muzungu's" were coming. It was hillarious. I thougth this girl's lungs were going to jump out of her throat because she was so enthusiastic about screaming at us.
Oh this is a good story. So yesterday afternoon, Andrew, Ryan and I start washing our clothes okay? So we get these buckets and we like soak them in soap and stuff and swish em around and then wash em off and Ivan and our cook/mom Mary come running over "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO WASH YOUR CLOTHING HERE. WE ARE NOT LAZY LIKE YOU AND WE CLEAN OUR CLOTHES. I WILL SHOW YOU NOW." So they start scrubbing our cltohes like I have never seen anyone scrub before. It was insane. So we spend like hours cleaning our clothes with Ivan doing the large majority of it ("these are clean ivan, freak!" "no they are not! give them to me, you are lazy! I will show you"). So we hang them up on all of the lines outside and I was a little self concious to just hang my undrewear out in the open but that's about all you can do here. So, after all this work, we eat dindin, go to beddie bye......Its dark outside when I wake up and it is POURING RAIN. It is pouring harder than I think it eve rhas here. I think to myself...crap, all my laundry is outside. I have two options. Option one. Get out of bed, go try to save mine, andrews, ryan's clothes. Option Two. Leave my clothes out there probably to fly off of the thing and either get lost or really dirty again and go back to bed. Definitely took option two. Yeah, my clothes rae soaked. But it's really warm today so they should be fine. That's how we do here in lugazi.
Tomorrow we are heading up to Jinja (where I go to church and a bit bigger city than this) to do some shopping, hopefully tour a jungle, and eat some goo damerican food...milkshakes, burgers, the like. It will probably not be real american food, but good enough. I can deal.
I haven't had any proposals today. So...you know...It's all good. Haha. Um...yeah so I'm leaving now. I hope all things are going well in the U.S. and I hope you have a wooooooooooonderful day! Webale! Or waraba! I don't relaly know...okay bye.