It was a day like any other – somehow, except that it started in Kampala. I awoke at 5:30 AM, not to the Call to Prayer this time or roosters, but courtesy of the hotel cleaning staff. This morning’s headache from the three sips of beer (it’s hell getting
Contrary to what you might be thinking, I have not fallen off the planet nor had all my teeth pulled out with pliers. Although, a bus ride to Kampala is close to being in another dimension, this one was pretty good as 5 hour bus rides go. It was a
Yes! Well not the beast itself – all we can boast here are Ancoli cattle but they are impressive. Longhorns? I’m getting to that – but the stage must be properly set. Tomorrow is International Mother Language Day. Never heard of it? Well you’re not alone, but in parts of
It seems light years away today, but the evidence is still there so I know I wasn’t smoking anything interesting or hallucinating. It rained! There are huge mud holes and I’ve never been so happy to walk around a pond in the middle of the road. I have been assured
After the burned foot and the fire in the yard and…. and…. and… it looks like there is a breather in the whirl-wind of mishaps if you don’t count the filling that fell out while eating popcorn for lunch necessitating several days in Kampala to go to the PC dentist.
So last week I needed something approximating a real vegetable with my noodles. Dinner around here – if it’s not Slurpy Yogurt (real name – which hasn’t been delivered in three weeks) is usually noodles or rice with some vegetable and maybe a little canned meat thrown in. There are
It’s been an interesting night – as evidence by the fact that it is 3:02 AM and I am doing what? as the Ugandans would say? I am blogging. It’s the new cure for insomnia. So it is the first night in about a week I’ve been able to
Rainy season cannot happen too soon. I left work at 1:00 for lunch, hiked the mile into town through the suffocating, ambient cloud of dust and began the search for yogurt. Yogurt is “not there” at four different places. This is different from ”yogurt is finished” because that implies it
When I thought about going to Peace Corps, I wanted the opportunity to do “my work” in a more organic way. Using my skills in creative context-driven ways is one way to look at it. A longtime believer and trainer in the process of “creating our own reality,” I am
I have become a lizard…. A few months ago, I was told by the only woman in my office “In February you will want to leave. Your heels will crack, your sky will flake, your hair will get dry and break and your lips will bleed.” She is psychic…. My
Following a late return from the workshop in Kampala, I had just enough time to do hand laundry and pack for another few days at All Volunteer meetup (known as AllVol) in Kitgum at the Y.Y. Okot school for Girls, where both students and staff, families included, live. Therefore there
There’s an expression we heard over and over again in training, and it had little cultural significance then A few months at site and the the week described below brought the expression home to me in a way I could not have imagined earlier. “Are we together?” i.e. are we