It's Been A Long Time Coming

I know I've been away for quite a long time...almost a year, but a lot of things have incited my muse.
In two weeks I'll be returning to Uganda and this time for a month. I'll be going by myself this time, though I've got a great deal planned.
I'll be working on my master's thesis, so that I can finally graduate! (HOORAY!!!) I'll be volunteering at a youth development organization and orphanage. And I'll be spending time with all of the friends that I met during my first trip and having been longing to see for over a year.
I'm extremely excited to go back. I hope that everything is as good as I remember it being the first time. I am a bit apprehensive that because I stayed on Makerere's campus and we had a cook, driver, and guide, things may have been sugarcoated for me. Though I did make an effort to branch out on my own and try to experience native life, I am still sure that I was sheltered from or wasn't there long enough to experience everything. I just hope that whatever is to come in the month that I'm there will still leave me loving Kampala because I definitely still have an interest in moving there in the next year.
The director of the youth organization that I will be volunteering with seems very excited to have me visit and I also hope that is a great experience. I know that it will be challenging because thought I am very passionate about working with young people, I empathize with them quite a bit and am usually deeply and personally affected by their experiences. I appreciate having a vested interest in their livelihood, but this experience will definitely show me if I am able to have a hands on approach to their plight and still be effective on a larger, administrative scale.
I have decided to focus my research on corruption in the education system and more specifically the effects that the Public Expenditure Tracking System (PETS) has had on curbing corruption and ultimately increasing school resources and student access to education. Uganda has been heralded as becoming more transparent due to the PETS, but I wonder if this assertion is due to a series of reports generated by the government or if teachers and administrators of the PETS have felt that it was indeed effective and helpful.
This week I am also taking a one week course on Youth & Conflict. The instructor of the course, Randolph Carter, came in to speak to a class that I took last fall and he was amazing! Even though this course is being offered so close to the time that I leave for my trip, I just had to take it! I hope that I enjoy the course as much as I did his guest visit to my class. And hopefully it will incite some thoughts and generate ideas for me to share with everyone. It has surely been too long since I've done so!
However, though I have been MIA, I have been writing this spring, so I will post some excerpts from papers I've written and thoughts that I have been having in general in 2007.