Aceba Kimara

I have finally arrived at my new community. The place I will call my home town for the next two years. After 10 weeks of gruelling training and endless anticipation, I am finally here in Lamwo District in Northern Uganda. I am in the extreme North, only a stone's throw from Sudan, so the weather here is HOT! This is the rainy season and I am still breaking a sweat just by getting out of bed. The only time I feel comfortable is when I'm standing in the rain.

Being in a new land, and on a new adventure, calls for a new name. My language instructor is pretty awesome in general and was really good about picking out a name for me. I decided that since David is Hebrew for "Beloved one", my Acholi name should be something along those lines. So that is where Kimara (Kee-mara) comes in. In Acholi it means "They love me." Pretty sweet. Then after being at site for just a few days, the local folks started calling me Aceba (Acheba) Kimara, or just Aceba for short. In Acholi, Aceba means strength and courage as it was the name of the rwot (chief) who founded that little community in which I now live. Because of this, the people also refer to themselves as the Aceba people, meaning their tribal group. So now my full name means "The Aceba people love me." Pretty sweet! "They like me, they really like me."

The past few weeks at site have been pretty uneventful because it is term break. The schools here have 3 terms per academic year starting in February. I have gotten to know the Head Teacher (my boss) pretty well. He is a very non-traditional guy with a lot of education. He was in the seminary where he got his degree in divinity, then after the war in the North broke out, he left the seminary and became a teacher. Then he went to Cairo to study Arabic for a bit then onto Islamabad University for Islamic studies. He speaks 7 languages, of them are German, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. He is married and has 3 kids, between 5 and 15 I think. All in all he is a pretty awesome guy and has been pretty interested in some of my plans.

My plans: Let me tell you. I am teaching math and physics, and what better way to get kids interested about such feared subjects than to build stuff, especially if it ends in fire, explosions, or slip-n-slides. So my first project will be to find a busted satellite dish, one of the 10' diameter ones, and line it with aluminum flashing. Then light stuff on fire :). After we get done burning everything insight, we can use it to do some sweet math on how much energy we are focusing on a single point. Then we can move on to actually using such an impressive instrument of death to cook the school lunch of beans and posho. The school spends over $50USD a week on firewood to cook the lunch. My sweet dish might help reduce the cost... or I might create a bean-posho explosion that rains fragments into southern Sudan starting WWIII. In either case, it will be epic.

My other project is to build a windmill to pump water for the school. Right now the students are getting by just fine using the hand pump at the well, but they aren't using very much water. I want to use a windmill with 8' blades to pump 10L/s into a 10,000L tank 30' in the air so that we can irrigate 4 acres of beans during the dry season. This will have some significant start up cost, but will pay dividends when the school is no longer paying for 3000kg of beans during the dry season. It may fail miserably and just waste a lot of time and money, but even if it does, one or two students might just get hooked on this whole math and science kick. In which case: mission accomplished.  Mission extra-accomplished if I make an awesome slip-n-slid down the hill infront of the school.

Other than that, I have been training for a marathon (bare foot mind you, cause that is how the Acholi do it), and I've been reading 3rd grade level novels in Acholi to work on my fluency. I figure once I can read the paper, spend a whole day speaking Acholi, and listen to the radio all without having to look up a word or resort to English, then I will be fluent.

Also, my mind numbing free time has hit. Of the books I have read in the past three weeks, I would recommend strongly:
"Lies my Teacher Taught me"
"The Last King of Scotland"
"Tall Grass"
"Heretics" or anything by G. K. Chesterton, he's a hoot.

I still don't have a house yet nor an address, but when I get some form of residence I will let you all know my coordinates.

In life, love, and libation
Dave