Monday, June 18, 2012

You win some, you lose some, and some get rained out, but you have to dress for them all aka There and Back Again, a Peace Corps Extendee’s Tale

If I got to see you during my time in the Americas, let me just say, wow, you look amazing and I can’t believe how wonderful you are. If I didn’t see you, sorry, but time is not always an accommodating mistress and I have returned already to what my father terms as “the bush” in the hopes that I too one day can say “Dr. Livingston I presume?”

While home, I got to visit the bustling city of Bogota, Colombia, the patriotic city of Washington, DC, and the historical city of Williamsburg.


I was shocked and awed by the following things: electricity…all the time…and at times without even turning on a switch, the fact that restaurants almost always have what is listed on their menus (in Uganda, you usually just ignore the menu because 99.9% of the items listed there are not actually available), the diversity, the lack of potholes, the speed and availability of the internet, drinking water from the tap and not suffering later, customer service, and how little people interact when they don’t have to (i.e. walking past each other on the street, being on the same train etc).

The things that frightened me the most: highway entrance ramps (really not a good place for someone who is used to “African Time”) and the canned goods aisle in the grocery store….it just was not natural to have so many options in such little space…it took about 3 times as long and 300 times the level of concentration for me to find a can of green beans as it would take you.

The things that were the nicest were: blending in…relatively at least and, not to be overly corny, seeing and/or hearing about all of you.

On Friday, June 9th, a plane full of smart outfits, bright eyes, and well, me with more electronics in my carry-on than the energizer bunny landed in Uganda around 11pm. By Saturday night I was in Lira, my new home for the next year and on Monday morning, I started working at my new PC site, International Lifeline Fund. www.lifelinefund.org/


Very exciting things about my new home: electricity and running water, living in town (so it doesn’t take a full day to go shopping, I can actually go out after 7pm (so now I can go see the Euro Cup!)), I no longer fear that my clothes will get stolen off the laundry line, my home is no longer a warehouse for my projects or liquid soap factory, there is more than one room, and there is a front porch. It’s my version of a ex-convict’s half-way house, transitioning me from the village to America.

At my new site, I am helping revamp their Institutional Fuel-Efficient Stove project (large wood burning stoves for schools, orphanages etc.). It’s been basically dormant for the last year and a half because they were building up their smaller stove projects so they let me in like a breath of fresh air…or more likely like a passable rendition of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” to jump start it. While it’s strange for me not to have a million projects going on simultaneously and to no longer have to work before 830 am and after 530 pm, this new streamlined lifestyle may make my future blog entries less overwhelming/confusing to read.

My new mailing address is:

Heather Pasley
P.O. Box 1041
Lira, Uganda

My email is much more reliable here so let me know what’s shaking on that side of the ocean, specifically in your lives.
What I should have painted on my old house.

A happy mother in a nearby village with her ILF "rural stove."

Testing the newest model of the ILF "Institutional Stove"

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