What Fresh Hell Is This?

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 old) I’d had the night … Read more

Texas Longhorns in Gulu???

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 the world where Mother Tongue … Read more

And Saturday it rained

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 that dry season is NOT … Read more

Straddling the great divide

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.  And as happens when life … Read more

I say tomatoes – they say tomaaaahtoes…

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 plenty of vegetables here actually, … Read more

And then there was fire…

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 just nod off.  Friends came … Read more

Eating dust and other pleasures

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 was once there in recent … Read more

Getting what you asked for…

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 struck by how my work … Read more

Of lizards and Christmas packages

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 lips are not bleeding thanks … Read more