On the Road Again

July 25, 2019

Today, all four of us are leaving for various work-related trips. Mariam and Aayush are heading to Jinja along with fellow interns Erin and Karis and some other members of the office. Lily and Rashmi are finally heading off to Yumbe along with Ibrah, Helen and Victor and meeting Peace in Arua along the way. 

We spent the morning in the office finalizing some logistical things and wrapping up small projects before we left. Lily and Rashmi finished their communications presentation and sent it off to Doreen for approval. The presentation will be given to the peer educators on the last day of training and will focus on how to create and use email, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. It will also touch on appropriate things to put on social media, and how to craft a professional email. We will also be giving a brief overview of what communication is, what is considered healthy and productive communication, and how to communicate well with others in a professional setting. The presentation will be given over the course of 2 hours, so we also included some games as well. The first game we will be playing is “telephone”, one that most of us are familiar with from our middle and high school days. We will have the peer educators sit in a circle and give the first person a short phrase to pass along. By the last person, the phrase is usually drastically different and typically much funnier as well. Once we have compared the original phrase to the product, we will ask the peer educators why they think the phrase changed and what they could do differently to ensure effective and clear communication between them in the future. Another activity we will be running is a game where everyone stands in a circle and two people stand in the middle back-to-back. One person will be holding an object unknown to their partner and will be responsible for describing what the object is without using words that will reveal it. Their partner will be using their description to draw a picture of this object, and at the end, the two will turn around and reveal what they have to each other. This is another way to identify clear, effective communication between two people, especially because they have to help each other come up with a similar final product. We also all wrote and submitted activity reports about our school visit from the previous afternoon to Bashir for review. 

After lunch, Lily, Rashmi, Helen and Victor hit the road for Yumbe. We ended up stopping at a gas station right at the Kampala city border and met Ibrah there as he was wrapping up some errands before leaving. We had anticipated leaving the office much earlier in the morning (it was about 4pm once we finally headed out), so the majority of our 9-hour drive was done in the dark. Unfortunately, that meant that we missed seeing any animals when we drove through the 2 game parks, BUT we will be able to see all the same sights on the way back this coming Friday! The drive was a super long one and Rashmi ended up getting really motion sick on the way up, but luckily, Helen and Victor offered her some medicine and we all slept the majority of the ride after that. We arrived safely in Arua around 1am and immediately all crashed in our hotel rooms. We had to be up at 7am the following morning to leave for the first day of interviews in Yumbe, so sleep was a necessity! 

While Rashmi and Lily left for Yumbe, Mariam and Aayush left for Jinja. Jinja was about 2 hours away from Kampala, but the traffic ended up making the trip 5 hours!! Luckily, we didn’t have much planned for that night. We found a hotel after arriving, and prepared for the early morning the next day.