Hello friends! It has been quite the weekend for me! Seriously only minutes after i was writing my blog entry on friday, i started to feel lightheaded and nauseated. this happens fairly often in the mornings after i take my malaria medication so i didn't think much of it. wellll it wasn't from the medication. i proceeded to have a headache, fever, nausea, throwing up and body aches for the rest of the day until about 9 pm. it was pretty miserable and i haven't felt that sick in.... a long time if ever. at one point i was sure i had malaria and was dying a slow and painful death! another volunteer, alex, was violently ill as well that night. it was a rough day for our team! well no worries,i don't have malaria and as of yesterday i am back to normal! i am pretty sure i had some sort of heat exhaustion/dehydration because i had all the symptoms and had spent all of the previous few days in the intense sun. so yep, i've been guzzling the water like a camel the last few days and will make sure that never happens again! my team went out to jinja on saturday but i wasn't able to go. i spent a lot of time sleeping on a little dirty foam mattress in the corner of our kitchen. oh i am so grateful for my health after that!! and the comforts of america when you are sick! it made me sympathize a lot more with all the sick patients in the hospitals, were comforts are few and far between.

So! yesterday i went and did my first teacher training! i missed the actual first one on friday, but heard it went fantastically! yesterday we went to Seya primary school to teach and it was so great. we taught about the different learning styles students have and how teachers can adapt lesson plans to be more creative and teach in a variety of ways. for instance, we can teach to the musical, verbal, logical, visual, interpersonal and intrapersonal learning styles all in one lesson! they had great feedback for us and it was very successful.

This morning i went to do an HIV screening at Lugazi University. I finally got to meet Emmanuel, who i have been hearing about forever! And he is THE BEST! Seriously the funniest, coolest guy. He is 24 years old and a clinition at the university. He wants to get his masters degree at a school in america. He's So smart. So me, Molly, Becca, Alex, and Cecilly took boda bodas over to the university early this morning. can i just say how much i love bodas?? yes, its true that often i think i might die from a head on collision, but mostly they are just so fun! we were laughing the other day about how normal it is for us to just walk up to a group of africans on motorcycles and ask them to take us somewhere. only in africa! anyways, we got there and he showed us how to do the testing, and told us how to give the pre and post interviews with the people being tested. At first we helped with sanitizing peoples fingers, giving Emmanuel the needles, recording names and such. Then, I went in and listened to him give a few of the results. He called the person into a little room and had him sit on a chair in front of us. He proceeded to essentially grill the person about their sexual behaviors, when they were last tested, if they knew the status of their partner, how many partners they have, etc. It was very intense. He asked what they would do with their life if they found out if they were negative and what they'd do if they were positive as well. Emmanuel told us that when it was our turn to interview, we have to be very careful to gage the person and if they give any answers that seem suicidal, to not tell them their status yet. The point of all the intense questioning is to really make people aware of how their unsafe behaviors could affect the rest of their life. Everyone in the clinic today tested negative, and i can tell that many people are going to change their behavior after seeing how scared and nervous they were before finding out they were negative. It was a very interesting experience to say the least.

Well then! We were done testing people for a bit and Emmanuel asked if we knew our status. So we all decided to get tested! I am proud to say that I am HIV negative! Whoooo! Haha oh man. *Don't worry dad, we used a new needle for each of us and it was all very safe. I promise :)Emmanuel even conducted an interview with each of us about any risky behaviors and what we will do now that we know we are HIV negative. It was pretty great. He is seriously my favorite. We had a lot of fun with him today, too much probably!

So ya thats a little update on my weekend! It wasn't the most eventful one but I'm just grateful to be up and able to work! Bye!