Serere

One of the coolest things that USP does is that they allow students to spend a week in a rural area with a host family just focusing on learning the culture. I really appreciated this chance to see what life was like in rural Uganda, because prior to that we'd just been in the urban areas. Yes, we did see the traditional kind of houses that are round with grass roofs. I was afraid that this was just my stereotypical idea of what an African house was, but it was super cool to see them all over the place, standing alongside the more western "permanent" houses. My own host home was made from cement with a tin roof, but we had a couple grass houses out in the yard for guests. It was so cool to sit on the floor and look up at the round grass roof above me.

This picture is the view out of the kitchen window. The corner of the roof there is the main house. We had solar power and my family had a TV. The kitchen has a fireplace/stovetop built into the wall out of the same material as the kitchen. They make bricks out of clay during rainy season, then keep them until dry season to fire.

 I love the sunshine here. It really is brighter on the equator. While I was in Soroti, I got to go to the garden to dig with my host mom. I helped her weed the cassava. Good hard work outside is fun when you're doing it in small doses, and you don't have a family depending on how well you can grow cassava.

Also we had five sheep, three goats, between two and seven cows, and many chickens.

This bike is a representation of how much water I could carry on the back of a bike. While my host sister could carry four big jerrycans, I could carry one small baby mzungu sized jerrycan. But at least I could pump water. So I'll be satisfied with that for now.

So that's just a little bit of what life was like in Soroti. I enjoyed both working hard and taking plenty of time to drink tea. Because, as Eddie says, "Anytime is teatime".