A cast of characters.

I write this entry with a puppy half on top of my computer. Alejandro, Emily's puppy, has decided that he loves me, and he spends a lot of time these days biting my fingers and licking my face. Lucky me. He is an adorable little imp, and even though he poops and pees all over the apartment, I find that I really like having him in the apartment.

But enough about Alejandro. It occurred to me this evening that it might be interesting for me to describe the people I spend my time with on a daily basis here. This is somewhat difficult at this very moment, because Alejandro has my right thumb in his mouth and he is chewing away. However, I remain determined.

The concept for this entry started with my boda driver, so I'll talk about him first. His name is Sam. Boda bodas have "stages," which are sort of like home bases for where certain boda drivers go when they're not on a job somewhere. Sam's stage is right outside the driveway that leads into my work building's complex. I took him randomly the first time, but he knows my bosses and everyone in my office, and he used that to get me to take his number. I didn't use him for a long time, but I pass him at the stage almost every morning, where I say "good morning" to all the drivers who hang out there. There are a few others at the stage who I recognize and have chatted with -- mostly while I was waiting at the stage for Sam to come pick me up. Until this week, Sam was the friendly boda driver with the nice smile who gave me rides for free sometimes when he found me nearby the office. This week though, he's become "my" boda driver. He called me on Monday to ask if I wanted him to take me home after work. I decided sure, okay. I waited for him at the stage to come back to drive me home. It's easy with him, because he already knows where I live, so we can just chat on the drive home instead of me giving him directions of where to go. He drove me home yesterday too, when I discovered the perils of liking one's boda driver. He usually drops me off at the bypass that's about a 5 minute walk from my flat -- sometimes boda drivers add an extra thousand if I make them drive too far beyond Kabira Country Club, so I try to head it off by getting dropped off a little bit earlier. It was cold and rainy yesterday, so I asked Sam to drive me all the way to my flat -- and I felt obligated to pay him 7,000 shillings (instead of the 5,000 I should pay, and do pay every other boda driver) because he drove me the extra little bit. He didn't ask for it or anything, but I felt like it was the fair thing to do because I like him so much.

I was planning to take a taxi today, but he was right outside the office, and he smiled his stupid charming smile at me, so I decided to let him take me home instead. I really like him; he's a very sweet guy, even if I don't know him that well because conversation is difficult on a boda. It's made even more difficult by the fact that he's relatively soft-spoken, and he wears a helmet. In fact, he wasn't wearing his helmet today and I fretted until he put it on to make me feel better. I know people who have really close friendships with their boda drivers, which I'd like to have with Sam, but I don't know if we can get over the helmet barrier. He actually offered to let me wear the helmet today, but we were already driving, so that didn't happen. Sorry, Mom and Dad. But he's a really good, careful driver, and I trust him to get me places safely.

So let's see, who else can I talk about for the sake of posterity? I am getting to know both of my supervisors, who I really like. There's one mzungu co-director and one Ugandan co-director of the organization -- I won't use their names for the sake of anonymity, but I can tell you about them.

The mzungu co-director is a lawyer, but she's also very academic-minded -- she thinks about concepts like identity and citizenship in the way a professor would (in fact, I think she might teach sometimes at the local university), but she approaches the topics with a very sharp legal mind at the same time. I feel really comfortable telling her what I actually think about the work I'm doing, and I feel like I can communicate with her pretty candidly. I think it comes from being two lawyers (or an almost-lawyer, in my case) in an office of non-lawyers. She also really encourages me to take days off and explore Uganda, which I'm hoping to take advantage of more during July than I did in June. She is personally involved in so many different projects that my organization works on, I don't know if she ever stops working.

The Ugandan co-director is a journalist by training, and he is sassy. I don't know how else to describe him. He's very vocal about controversial topics, very frank, and very intense. For example, at a conference I attended a few weeks go where he was speaking about the role of the media, he said to a room full of people that Mouseveni is stupid. It wouldn't be a big deal to announce that the President is stupid in the United States (something I did many times during the Bush presidency), but it's gutsy to do it here. At the same time as being very uninterested in displaying tact in some ways, he's also very gregarious and personable, and he has great working relationships with a lot of people involved in Darfur in a lot of different ways, including Darfuri rebels and movement leaders. I was really intimidated by him at first, but after spending a few days working with him on research and interviews, I discovered that we actually get along pretty well.

Other people at my office include the guy I share my office with, who works specifically on refugee policy in the Great Lakes region, and the woman who cleans the office and makes us lunch every day. Debbie, the woman who makes us lunch, is a darling and always brings me coffee and water in the mornings. Her food is also excellent -- although I personally suspect that I got Giardia from something that wasn't properly washed in one of her meals, the food is always high-quality. She even makes matoke in a way that I like it, which is rare indeed. My co-worker who I share the office space with is a really nice guy as well. He's Ugandan, but I think (from piecing together disparate information) he spent some time as a refugee, possibly during the Amin years. He has lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi, so he speaks French in addition to Luganda and English. I don't know his whole story (sort of hard to ask, "So, when were you a refugee?"), but I think he's only been at my organization for about a year.

I don't think I've properly talked about my flatmate, Emily -- also known as Alejandro's mommy. I emailed with Emily quite a bit before I got to Uganda, because she interned to my organization in its New York office a few years ago. I got the impression from the emails we exchanged (her answers were always prompt, detailed, and incredibly helpful) that she was the nicest person basically ever. I have not been disappointed in person. From my first day here, she has taken me around Kampala, given me insider tips (she's lived here for a year), and introduced me to her circle of friends to help me feel at home. I honestly don't know what I would have done here without her. Our organizations work really closely together, so I spend a lot of time all day emailing her, badgering her about information that I need to do my own work, and bugging her on Skype with random questions. And she takes it all in stride! She is incredibly generous too -- when I first moved in (and still to this day, if I'm honest), she let me eat all her food and use her shampoo and toothpaste. As a case in point: she's sick right now, and when I offered to make us both dinner last night, I somehow got talked into letting her make me grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. Which were delicious, by the way. She is a very good mommy to Alejandro, and deals with the smell of her room much better than I would if I had a puppy.

Oh, randomly there is a woman at a water and snacks kiosk who I see pretty much every day. I promised my mother I would start drinking more water, and this stand is on the way from where the taxi drops me off in the morning on the way to my office. I started going every day because they always have changed for 20,000 //= (shillings/UGX), which makes it easy for me to stay hydrated, eat breakfast (usually a chapati or a little bag of groundnuts), and get small bills so I can continue to take taxis and boda bodas. It's a win-win situation. One of the girls who works there is always really happy to see me, and we have a sort of anonymous, business-y friendship blooming.

There are various other people I'm friendly with and spend time with on the weekends -- Abhi, Sonakshi, Ben, and Sharifa, for example, and of course Bruno and Diane (who I haven't properly discussed!) -- but these are the people I encounter on a daily basis. Maybe I'll do another entry like this for everyone else later.

This will probably be my last blog post until after I get back from Rwanda. I leave on Sunday for 4 days in Rwanda, during which time I will go to Musanze to see the mountain gorillas, tour Kigali, and visit the genocide memorial museum there. I will have LOTS of pictures and things to talk about when I get back, I'm sure. Happy Independence Day (the day I'll actually be with the gorillas)!

To end this post, Alejandro is licking the bottoms of my feet. Appropriate, given how we started the entry.

A public holiday.

Today was a public holiday -- Heroes' Day, although no one has been able to tell me who the heroes are. I had made plans to go to Qaddafi Mosque with a few students from another law school who are in Kampala, but I realized last night that I didn't have any small bills to pay for a boda, so I canceled. But then this morning my phone rang, and it was Ben who wanted to go to the mosque -- so we ended up going after all. While I was waiting for him to come by with the boda, I watched some local kids playing soccer on the field near my flat -- I like to watch people from a distance, because it means I can take pictures; and with the incredible zoom on my new camera (thanks, Mom and Dad), it looks like I'm taking the photos from way closer than I really am. I am a creep.

I had called one of the law students and told her we'd meet her there, but she thought I meant somewhere else (the old taxi park), so when we got to the mosque, they weren't there. Oops... But the mosque was so huge and beautiful and I actually forgot we were even meeting anyone there at first. This mosque was begun by Idi Amin over 30 years ago, who had a dream to build the biggest mosque in Africa. When funds for construction ran out, Col. Qaddafi supplied the rest -- he and Idi Amin were buddies, and he and Mouseveni are still good friends. So the mosque is named after Qaddafi, and it's on Col. Muammar Qaddafi Road, which runs through a Somali neighborhood in Kampala. I was reading an article before we went about how the mosque revitalized Old Kampala, which is a very run-down neighborhood in the city, and completely changed the skyline of the eastern part of the city.

The mosque is beautiful. It's up the hill in Old Kampala, so it's a little bit removed from traffic and the rest of city life, and it feels very quiet there. I got yelled at by the guard for being dressed inappropriately as soon as we got there: we were so busy gawking at the size of the building that I had forgotten to take out/put on my head covering. Apparently, my (knee-length) skirt was also too racy, because the guard made me rent a piece of fabric and tie it around my waist to make an ankle-length skirt. Once I was properly dressed, though, the guard was very friendly and pointed us to the entrance and a guide who would take us inside. There was no one inside the HUGE prayer room -- this mosque holds 15,000 people.

The inside was also beautiful, with big chandelier-type light fixtures and Arabic passages written on the walls. I was mildly surprised that I was allowed into the men's prayer room, even with all my head coverings and other modest accoutrement. But the guide didn't seem to think twice about it, and he even let Ben go up into the women's prayer balcony as well. As it turned out, the guide was the muezzin, the guy responsible for chanting the calls for prayer five times a day. He showed us this giant version of the Q'uran and chanted a full page of it for us, which was beautiful. Then he translated the text, and it was all about how if you follow Islam, you go to heaven, and if you reject Islam, you go to hell. It sounded better in Arabic.

 

He checked the time and realized it was time for a call to prayer, and he asked us if we wanted to stay inside and watch him do it. Which -- duh, of course we did. He stood at a microphone in a niche in the wall and chanted the call to prayer, which (I imagine, though I couldn't hear it) was broadcast out into Kampala through speakers in the minaret. His voice echoed rather magnificently inside the mosque itself... it felt really cool to be able to watch him.

After that, he had to leave to attend and/or lead prayers, so we walked around for a bit. We were still trying to meet up with the Georgetown law students, who were on their way to the mosque. Ben had spied a cathedral on the next hill over, so we decided to go check it out and then come back to the mosque to meet the others.

The cathedral was St. Paul's, a protestant cathedral (which I didn't even know existed). It seemed a bit dull after the grandeur of the mosque, but its location was fantastic. It was even higher up and away from the city than the mosque, and it felt like a completely different universe. It reminded me forcibly of the Cloisters in New York -- there were students sitting around on the grounds doing work of some kind (art, maybe?), and people seemed like they were just lounging among all the greenery as a break from the noise and pollution of the city. And there were butterflies everywhere.

After we were done at St. Paul's, we decided it was time for lunch. So, instead of going back and meeting the other students at the mosque (we kept missing them all day... never did meet up with them), we took a boda into town to Centenary Park Gardens to get some food. We ended up trying a place called Kyoto, which does a combination of Japanese food and American food. Strange fusion, but Ben and I both got Asian-style dishes, and I think they were both good. I can say with certainty that my noodles were pretty yummy. It took a while though, and by the time we were finished it was already 4pm. We had toyed with the idea of going to the Kisubi tombs, where the Baganda kings are buried, but instead we went back to Etana Motel to hang out with Diane and Bruno.

Diane and Bruno (especially Bruno) were glad to see me; going to the motel feels kind of like going "home," as silly as that sounds. Diane made us her amazing ginger tea, and we got maize from a stall on the street, and Bruno came down to play cards with me. I always beat him when it's just the two of us, but then Ben and Diane joined in, and things went downhill from there. Bruno got desperate to win and started cheating horribly, which was actually pretty entertaining. After a few hours, I suggested that I should get back to my flat, but Diane insisted she was cooking for me. And what was she cooking, you ask? Well, she was cooking goat meat. I felt a little bit pressured to stay since she was making me food, and... well. Goat meat was interesting. It smelled amazing while she was cooking it, but the meat itself was really chewy, which put me off it. Add in the fact that Ben was making comments about muscles and joints and other anatomical features of goats, and I really didn't manage to eat very much. I felt terrible about it, and I hope I didn't offend Diane in particular, but I just couldn't do it. I got a ride home from Bruno, and that was that.

An apartment and a puppy.

So, it's been a few days, and a lot has happened. I'm now in my permanent apartment, and no longer at the motel. This is both a good and a bad thing -- but more on that in a bit.

My last day at the motel was actually rather dramatic. Things were fine when I left in the morning. I rushed back after work so I could pack everything up and be ready to leave, and Bruno (the owner) came up to my room to tell me that this weird guy who had been a guest... had left in the middle of the night, without paying, and taking one of the motel's laptops with him. Brian, who had been on duty when it happened, had been fired. I thought Bruno was joking at first about Brian, to be honest, but apparently he had a habit of letting people leave without paying. So... that was really strange. They called in an armed guard (armed with a baton, not a gun) to stand at the entrance to the motel; they were worried that Brian might try to come back, and/or they didn't want to take a chance on the same thing to happening again. Still, we all (Diane, Bruno, some of Bruno's friends, and myself) hung out at the reception desk for a while like usual after I finished packing. Bruno and his friend went to a "chidula" (I think that's the word?), which sounds like it's a bar with loud music and dancing and drinks. They invited me, but I decided to stick around the motel.

Diane, Samuel (one of the employees) and I ended up drinking ginger tea, eating Rolexes, and watching soap operas. We watched a Ugandan soap opera called "The Hostel," with acting so atrocious I thought it was a joke at first. But it was still good... I love African soap operas like nothing else in this world. I don't know why, but there's something charming about them. After it was over, there was a Mexican soap opera with really terrible English dubbing over the Spanish. Emily showed up in the middle of that, ready to take me to the flat in Kisaasi. I stalled a bit by offering her ginger tea; Diane makes really lovely ginger tea, with fresh ginger root. We hung out a bit longer, and Diane finally let me pay her (she had been putting it off because she was in denial and said she would miss me too much to let me leave), and we put all my stuff in her car. She had offered to drive me to the flat instead of making me get a taxi.

So, we set off. It's really not very far, although the roads off Kiira Road into Kisaasi are terrible and pot hole-y, so it took a while for Diane to carefully drive around them. Only part of the road is paved, and once you turn off even that road, it gets very dark. But we made it, and I said goodbye to Diane and promised to visit. After she left, one of the neighbors helped Emily and me up the stairs with my huge suitcase to the second floor. And then I met Alejandro.

Alejandro is Emily's very naughty puppy, who she saved from the street a little over a month ago. He has the most energy of any puppy I've ever seen, and it's hard to believe that when she first took him in, he was so weak she didn't think he'd survive. He has sharp little claws that need trimming, and he bites a lot -- not in a mean way, he just chews on hands and fingers. He's not house-trained terribly well, and the first thing I saw him do was poop on the living room floor. Charming. But really, he's a cute little guy -- despite being an undeniable pain in the butt. He looks like every African dog ever: they all interbreed and end up looking exactly the same, and he is no exception.

 Anyway, after a bit of puppy-related excitement, I made it to my room. It was set up like a hotel room, with a queen-sized bed and little bedside tables on each side. It also wasn't terribly clean -- Emily's old roommate only moved out the night before, and I guess there wasn't time to sweep the floor. The rest of the apartment is nice, although it was a bit messy. The kitchen is big and basic, and the bathroom is HUGE. There are two bathrooms -- Emily's room has its own en suite bathroom, but the shower doesn't work. So technically the other roommate, a British girl named Ula, and I share the big bathroom -- but everyone showers in there. The shower's not great, as I discovered this morning, but there's hot water at least.

Emily was going out to meet Ula at a bar somewhere, but I didn't feel like going (the Rolex was sitting in my stomach... those things are heavy!), so I just turned in for the night. The bed is surprisingly comfortable, as is the pillow. My sheets are pink, which... anyone who knows me will know that that's a little strange for me.

I got up in the morning at around 10:30 and spun my wheels until Emily woke up about an hour later. I don't have my own key yet, and I have no food in the kitchen and no real sense of what's nearby, so I couldn't do much without Emily. I did rearrange my room though, so it feels more like a bedroom and less like a hotel room.

Emily decided to make pasta for lunch (breakfast?), which ended up taking forever. There's no strainer, so the pasta was kind of soggy, but it was sustenance. While she was making the food, I saw three kids at the house next-door playing, and the little boy saw me and started waving. It was so adorable that I had to go get my camera, at which point they all started waving and posing for me. This is one thing I love about African kids -- they really love having their picture taken. Unlike in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where the kids pose and then demand money, kids in Africa really just get a kick out of cameras.

In other news, I also met Ula's boyfriend this morning... who is in high school. She's a little bit younger than Emily and me, and he's in his last year of high school, but it's still kind of weird. They were hungover from the night before, so they joined us for the food and then went back to bed. He seems nice enough. He's British, but his family has lived in Kampala for 8 years, so he's also kind of a local.

By the time we were done eating and ready to do something with the day, it was already 2:30. Emily had mentioned wanting to go to the pool at Kabira Country Club, which sounded absolutely lovely. We walked -- I'm still trying to avoid bodas, and it wasn't nearly far enough to justify taking a taxi. The area near the flat is so dark at night because it's wide open during the day: there's a makeshift soccer field, and grass and a stream, and there were about six cows hanging out by the bypass. It was really quite beautiful, and I would have taken a picture if I hadn't left my camera on my desk after the episode with the kids. I'll take pictures this week when I'm on my way to work.

The walk was... steep. Most of the walk is uphill, and the road isn't paved for most of the way, so it was very dusty and hot. We tried to buy Cokes along the way at a little shop, but they were out, so we tried again at the 24-hour little mart at the gas station. I prefer Coke in glass bottles, so we tried to buy them... but the woman at the cash register was like, "Do you have empties?" I told her no, and asked how much the Coke was, and she shook her head. What? Apparently, they won't sell you Coke in a glass bottle unless you have an empty glass bottle to trade in -- but at the same time, there was a sign saying that they would no longer be accepting empty bottle deposits. We had no idea what was going on, so we just bought them in plastic bottles instead. It was a strange moment though, and I couldn't help thinking about how any American would have just slapped a price on the glass bottles and made the sale. Capitalism at work, but not here apparently.

Emily had lost half of her bathing suit, so we went to a nearby all-purpose store called Nakumatt for her to buy a new one. I ended up buying some shower stuff and new hangers, and I also got matches and little incense-type things to make my room smell nice. (The apartment has a general smell of... puppy. I'd like to counteract that effect in my room.) We found Emily a bathing suit, and then headed to Kabira. It cost 25,000 UGX for a "day pass" to use the pool, which is a bit steep, but the country club is really nice so I guess it's worth it. I was really hot at that point, so I jumped right in the pool, and it felt lovely. I haven't been in a pool in so long, I forgot how relaxing it can be to just swim back and forth. I got out when Emily ordered spiced African tea (which is delicious), and we chatted and drank tea for about an hour before they started to close the pool. I knew from our email exchanges that Emily was really sweet, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how easy she is to talk to, as well.

After we left Kabira, I suggested that we go to a coffee place Emily had mentioned earlier. We got in a taxi, but we ended up going in the wrong direction. That's not as catastrophic as it sounds, because the main roads in Kampala run in a loop, and you can end up right back where you started going in either direction. But it would have been much quicker and cheaper to go clockwise rather than counterclockwise, which is what we did. I got to see parts of the city I'd never seen before, though... but we also got ripped off. When we got in the taxi, the conductor/fare collector told us it would be 1,500 UGX each, but when the time came, he demanded 4,000 UGX. It wasn't worth arguing over, but it always stings a little bit to get ripped off. The place we went is called Good African Coffee, and they also had food, so we decided to get coffee and dinner. We both got a drink called an Affocato (I think?), which was one or two shots of espresso mixed with ice cream and milk foam. It was seriously delicious. We also got and ate dinner, which was pretty good as well. I got a burger with fries (I had wanted something else, but they were out of it), and the fries were surprisingly good. It was way too much food though, and I felt sort of gross after eating it all in addition to the coffee/ice cream concoction.

We took a boda back to the flat, where we found that the power was out. It was really, really dark. It sounds stupid to say -- of course it was dark! But there aren't even lights out on the streets, so it was almost pitch black. Luckily, Emily's phone and mine both have "flashlights" built in, so we went in and found Ula and shone some light around the flat. Emily had a couple candles, and we had bought matches at Nakumatt, so she and I each put a candle in our rooms. Mood lighting, or something. Emily and I decided to watch TV on her computer, which died after about 20 minutes. But the power came back on shortly, so the day was saved. I think the power was out for about a little less than an hour.

Emily and Ula started making moves to go out for the night, but I was getting tired and decided not to go again. I'll have to be more fun next weekend. They left at around 10:30, and now here I am. Ready for night 2 in my Kampala apartment.

Day 3

So, today I switched hostels. The first hostel was, all told, pretty horrible. It wasn't any one big thing, but a bunch of small things that cumulatively made it un-liveable, and made the prospect of staying there for a week dim. I looked up Kampala on hostelworld.com and found a place called Etana Motel which looked like it was near where the flat is that I'll ultimately move into. I called last night, booked it for 12 nights, and crossed my fingers. When I got up this morning, I ate breakfast and then had the hostel-that-shall-not-be-named call me a special hire (what we think of as a taxi), and we set off on an adventure. The driver knew the general area where we were going, but I made a grave miscalculation. There's a minibus taxi stage right near the hostel, with a name. I assumed that, since it shows up on Google maps, it must be well-known to locals, right? Wrong. It turns out, I have learned, there are taxi stages every few blocks all over the city, and it was completely unreasonable for me to expect it to serve as a useful landmark. However, by stopping and asking boda-boda drivers for directions about five times and driving back and forth along Kira Road a few times, we finally found it.


I knew this place was an improvement based on the simple fact that someone was there to welcome me, and that there is a reception desk. Three friendly staff people came and insisted on each taking one of my bags, telling me, "You are most welcome," and showing me to my room. Which, by the way, is beautiful. The bed is clean, the floor is clean, there's a desk with a mirror, there's a closet, and the shower works and has hot water. I must literally be in heaven.

The young man at the front desk actually introduced himself to me (his name is Brian): another improvement over the last place. We chatted for a bit and he explained the taxi system in Kampala and how the major roads work. It turns out the main arteries in the city are named for the place they lead you -- e.g. Jinja Road will take you to the town of Jinja, Kira Road will take you to the sub-county of Kira, etc. After I picked his brain for a while, he made me lunch. He said it would take 30-40 minutes, but it took almost 2 hours. I am learning quickly that Ugandans do things very s-l-o-o-o-o-w-l-y. That said, lunch -- which was a delicious beef and vegetable stew with white rice -- was exactly the right size and very good. The beef wasn't exactly of kobe quality, but that's not exactly a shocker. I ate most of it in all its chewy glory, because the sauce was so damn good. Even the white rice tasted better than normal.

After lunch, Brian and I chatted a bit more about the political situation in Uganda right now. He is the second Ugandan I've talked politics with, and he's the second one to hate Mouseveni. He actually got caught up in the violence on Thursday; he said he hadn't gone to protest, but drove a taxi right into the middle of the confrontation, and when he got out to find out what was going on, he ended up getting beaten by a police officer. His elbow definitely looked freshly-wounded, although I can't say whether it was really an accident that he was there. He told me all about the tribal politics of Uganda, and how Mouseveni is from the western part of the country and favors those tribes over the Buganda, who form a majority, especially in Kampala. According to Brian, Mouseveni gives jobs to underqualified members of his own tribe, while passing over qualified Buganda and other central Ugandan tribe members. He also said that the political government of Uganda is supposed to pay money to the Buganda king, but Mouseveni stopped paying almost 10 years ago (I think?) and owes billions of shillings now.

Interestingly, Brian was very excited to find out that I'm American, and the first thing he said was, "President Obama!" He's read one of Obama's books (he couldn't remember the title, but I think it was probably The Audacity of Hope) and views the NATO mission in Libya as Obama following through on his promise to free Africa from its dictators. I've heard now from two sources that Mouseveni is good friends with Gaddafi -- there's even a road named "Col. Muammar Gaddafi Road" in the Somali neighborhood of Kampala, that Gaddafi funded and built with Mouseveni's permission/approval. The general consensus -- if there can be such a thing after four days in a new country -- is that Ugandans believe that anyone who rules for 20 or 30 years is bound to go bad. Like Gaddafi, like Mouseveni, and I imagine like Mugabe, although he hasn't come up. Brian and my taxi driver from Entebbe both agreed that Mouseveni was very good for the first 10 years, and then everything went to hell.

While Brian and I were talking, his boss and her three children showed up. Now, anyone who knows me know that I love nothing more than sassy African children, especially when they're dressed in patent leather shoes, jeans, white dress shirts, vests, and bow ties. So I went to introduce myself. The woman, whose name I embarrassingly didn't get or can't remember, and her husband own this motel, and she is lovely. We spent the next 4 hours talking about all sorts of things, from Paris Hilton and the Kardashian sisters to the difficulty of earning a good living in Uganda to the difficulties she's had with her sisters-in-law because she's from a different part of the country and had to convert to Catholicism to be allowed to marry her husband. The kids hung out, all of them calling me "auntie" to my great delight. The middle one, who is 4 years old, kept giving me and his mom flowers that he had picked from the decorative plants. So the afternoon flew by that way. She offered to take me to work tomorrow morning, and to show me where the taxis will stop so I can start to figure out how to get to/from the office on my own. This saves me about 25,000 UGX (around $10) in taxi fare and will hopefully enable me to get to the office completely on my own on Tuesday.

I finally had to leave her and the delicious South African wine we were drinking so that I could take a shower (allow me to say it again: hot water is a godsend) and put in my order for dinner. I am currently waiting for dinner, and am not hopeful that it will be ready anytime soon, given how long lunch took. But that's okay, I'm starting to adjust to things taking this long. It's not like I have anywhere to be at the moment.

Phew. Sorry for such a long entry. I guess I'm feeling verbose tonight. Tomorrow is my first day of work, and I'm very excited. But for now, I will leave you with a picture I took while I was waiting for lunch today, enjoying the smell of the coming rain. This woman looked so perfect standing in her doorway, watching her daughter do chores in the yard, that I couldn't help getting a little voyeuristic.

 

In case anyone wondered....

This is what packing for 4 months in Africa looks like.