rain rain... love my jacket

woah, two days in a row, aren't you impressed!
spent the morning 10-2.30 in a district health meeting. was very interesting. The Ugandan Gov is trying to put into place Village Health Teams (VHT) of volunteer, elected community members that will mobalize their villages to seek medical treatment, working with incoming NGO programs, check in with pregnant and new mothers to offer support, and basically streamline all health services through one group of village members. The problem: the district doesnt want to fund it and this morning basically put it to the NGOs to fund the training for the trainers who will go to each village to establish the VHTs. The VHTs are kind of in place now, but still very much so a work in progress.
Thankfully, the NGOs threw it back to the district to see what was budgeted, but the chairmen kept asking them to commit to pay without seeing the budget or the annual plans for the project and district allocations. I know from other conversations that the district has been slow at best to get involved in the NGO work and funding and this has been a big frustration from the NGOs. Then the conversation turned to about 1.5 hours of what the role of who is within the VHTs in terms of training, financing, supporting, etc. I had just finished reading the handbook and was confused as to why people were unsure as there was a handy chart in the back that spelled it allll out. thinking that people needed to have their copies or be given copies of the chart. so that was a bit frustrating as it could have easily been answered using that book.
all in all, it was interesting to see how a meeting, particularly run by the district health ministry went. we did get yummy mundaze and bananas for breakfast and rice and chicken and greens for lunch. that was a nice surprise and won out my broken backup granola bar that i keep with me! sidenote- went to the bathroom during the meeting, and saw the worst hole for a toilet i have ever seen. i wont describe it to you... but found it ironic that the ministry of health offices probably put me at the biggest health risk yet!
Ive been kinda concerned about what will fill my time with program pretty set and only actually running on the weekends. I still have some partnering to do and some commitments from community members to get and some kickballs to find and buy. Been thinking of asking around to see if anyone has any needs that I might be able to help with, and actually met another SW student who is doing community reintegration- what i thought i would be doing. So i might tag along with her and see whats up. shes doing a lot of program evaluation, so that will be cool to see. but also just realized this morning in this meeting, its good for me to just see how things run here, to get a better understanding of it all... so working on that perspective as well.
looking forward to saturday and teaching the kids to play kickball! really relieved that Eric Boda driver extraordinaire will be helping me. (a boda is a motorcycle for anyone who missed that like my mom!)
I also think my bike is ready! we took it yesterday across the street so the man could fix it. will be hard to ride compared to my road bike, but im very excited! and im glad i could give the guy a little business, its been slow over there. The nurse will ride it to do immunizations in the villages once i leave, so i count it 20 bucks well spent.
I think i mentioned that I bought a sweet apron the other day in the market. it had a sticker on it and they assured me it would iron off and i asked if it didnt if i could bring it back. I ironed it this morning and it came off, still a bit of residue but i think i can iron it onto paper. martha told me it was the fabric label and i got good fabric so thats good. some of you know how i love my east african fabrics!
All in all things are going well. feel really good about the program i put together, need to work on some funding stuff since im not a bank. but all in all think it will be successful!
Have a really hard time being home alone without power.... martha has been away all weekend and friday night i was not ok looking at my powerless weekend alone. luckily the power came back saturday evening just as i hunkered down for another 6 hours of reading by a small candle.
annnnd powers out, thank god for generators!
take luck my loves!