My First Class at UMU

Tonight I taught my first class at Uganda Martyrs University. It's an Intro to Sociology class. Ordinarily I could teach it with my eyes closed. Tonight was different. It's fun teaching in a different cultural context. Unfortunately, my accent makes it difficult for the students to understand me. That's frustrating. I put my lecture on power point so they could at least follow along. I think it helped. One of my students is a sister from a Ugandan community. I recognized the medallion she wears from some of the sisters in Nkozi.

There are 42 students in my class. It's mix of men and women, almost half and half. CSU tends to have way more women. The class is a little bigger than what I'm used to, but not that much. Students are a bit younger than the evening students at CSU, but still a few mature students. They seem a bit older than the students at Nkozi. They work during the day and attend class in the evening. I will have them again for Introduction to Social Work on Thursdays.

I might have mentioned that I'm teaching at the Rubaga campus of UMU. It's a neighborhood on the western edge of Kampala. I take the UMU bus in from Nkozi with the folks who live in Kampala. The University provides a coach bus to take faculty and staff who live in Kampala to and from work everyday. I ride the bus to Rubaga, teach an evening class from 6 to 10 PM, stay overnight at the guesthouse and ride the bus back to Nkozi at 7:30 AM, getting back about 9 AM.

While I'm out galavanting around Bry'Chell is at home. Carol, an older student from her school, stays overnight with Bry'Chell. Bry'Chell gets home after I leave, so I left her a note with instructions for heating up the left over spaghetti. She could do it without instructions, but I did leave her about 50 million reminders--all along the line of do this, don't do that. She may ignore them all, but I doubt it. She a pretty responsible kid.

Oh yeah, last night I mentioned this cool little gizmo that allows we to use the internet wherever I am. I plugged it in and now I'm laying on my bed in the guesthouse tapping away on my blog. It's a way better connection than the wireless connection at UMU. Thank God, I couldn't take it much longer. It took almost an hour to upload the SP web page. Now it just takes a few minutes. It's not as fast as my connection at home, but it's still pretty fast. I took a picture of it. I'm going to see if I can load.

It's late and tomorrow starts early. I'm off to bed.