Trip Highlight & Wk3 for the Intervention

This time I’m going to start out with the personal side – because this morning will definitely be a highlight of the trip. This morning I ate a granola bar, cut my hair (by myself!), and went for a run. It was a nice cool night with a little rain (of course) and the clouds have hung around all morning – so it was humid, but not too hot or sunny. I ran out of town and took a new road. At a certain point the road split into three paths – one double track and two 2-feet-wide paths, one of which followed old, abandoned railroad tracks. At the intersection there were three older people talking - one of the men on a bike asked if I was lost. Grateful to come across someone who spoke English after trying some roads that led nowhere, I asked him which of these roads went the farthest. He told me to follow the railroad tracks and how to loop back to Gulu.

Similar path

So – 2-feet-wide path that is half dry and half bright red, slippery mud; sometimes the path is open or on a hill and the extremely green and lush marshes, farm fields, and trees are visable; other times the bush around the path is so tall that it is like a green tunnel; it is humid, cloudy, and a mild temperature; and I only come across a couple people each minute, mostly walking – got the picture? Well as if running in the bush in Acholi land with little idea where I'm going isn't great enough, about 10k into my run I came to a village. The very first building I saw was a double-wide hut and I could hear drums, rattles, dancing, and the occasional traditional scream/cry/shout (I don’t know how to describe it) that the women here do.

I stopped to listen for a minute. Not long after I stopped an older woman who was travelling through and spoke a little English stopped next to me and said, “This is a church, God is there, do you want to go in?” Well heck yes I want to go in. So I spent the next hour clapping and dancing with the 3 men, 7 woman and 5 kids in the hut as one woman beat on the drum and others rattled beans in containers. I was offered a seat right by the drum and could feel the thump as her sticks bounced off the stretched goat skin. After about 15 minutes of someone saying something about a chapter in Acts I said I should be on my way back to Gulu town. I thanked them for their kindness and letting me join – one of them was able to translate for me. I shook everyone’s hand and ran back to Gulu. On my run back I tried to find the loop the guy told me about earlier but had to ask people which path to take a few times. A few kids ran with me a couple times and raced me through the mud as the sky got darker the thunder started to grow. Yeah - what a morning. (Here is the latitude and longitude for the church 2.720923, 32.355187.)

Alright – the intervention… it is actually going really well. There are some behaviors they aren’t really getting but they are making a lot of changes and report that this has made huge changes in their lives. We will have to see if these changes last but they often make comments like, “I didn’t know I should speak kindly and calmly to my children and they are listening so much better now,” or, “I introduced the incentive chart to my daughter and told her if she did well I’d buy her fruit and she told me she didn’t know I loved her that much, and it makes me happy that she knows now.” Powerful stuff. We will still have things to adapt, change, trim, etc… but it is definitely looking like it's worth coming back. This next week is a big one as far as skills being introduced so we'll see how it goes. I’m also getting some good ideas for dissertation research I could do here. So all in all, things are going pretty well. 

Oh, and I planned a 3 day safari before I leave. Uff-da. The only thing better would be to have Em here - I do miss that girl - we'll have to change that next time.