Thumbs up for stickers!

Sarah sent a zillion stickers to us awhile back to spread around to kids, and we’ve been doing it. You wouldn’t think they’d be so exciting, but they are – the kids gather ‘round to get them. In fact, in Mbale outside a slum I gave some to a few kids, and suddenly there was a whole gang surrounding us, all with their hands out. When I ran out of stickers, we had to kind of pry them away from our car so we could leave.

The kids here are like that – they are the cutest, but they are there in swarms at the sign of anything exciting. Here are some pictures of some of the kids enjoying our stickers – they love not only the stickers themselves, but the background paper too – you can see it on a couple of them here. And they seem to like putting stickers all over their heads, for some reason.

Anyway, they have fun, and we have half a zillion still remaining so more fun is on the way.

Outside our window...

Of course there are the monkeys, one of which came into the living room one day while Theresa was working away at the computer (did we mention that?), and then another one just came in the bathroom window and was satisfied with admiring himself in the mirror before I shooed him out.

And of course also outside our window are the Hadada Ibises, which may have a nice-sounding name but their actual sounds, well, the demure bird book describes it as "very, very loud," and Anna, who slept the closest to their early morning hangout spot, will agree with that, since they were her jarring wakeup call ever day.

The latest wildlife outside our window, though, is much much cuter. This is (we're pretty sure) a Pearl-Spotted Owlet. Anna figures in this one, too, because she discovered it outside the guest bedroom window the night we took this photo. Since then there have been multiple sightings. One night an Owlet woke Theresa up in the middle of the night when it crashed against our window, and freaked her out slightly when she went over to investigate and found it pressed against the screen looking in at her. And we have now seen a whole family of them, four or five together. What good company! My New Vision driver said if you hear an owl cry, it means someone is dying, but other than the obvious (someone is ALWAYS dying), we choose not to believe that, since we have heard these critters crying quite a lot.

That, plus the turtle (and whole monkey family) at the pool, and many other much more attractive sorts of birds right here at Salama Springs -- who needs a game park!

A Visitor's Post

A visitor's post has been requested, since by now Bill and Theresa blend in and go about daily life as if they were Ugandan. (You might call them uh-oh Oreos because they are Mzungu on the outside and Ugandan inside, especially with Theresa's clothes and Bill's brave driving). They have kept me busy seeing and doing as much as possible in my short stay.

My cousin Eric sent me off to pave the way for us to save the world and this developing nation, but I must admit I ran out of time and barely made a dent. Now I leave it in his more capable hands.

It is a BIG job to affect change in the world and I note all of the BIG things for him to prepare for:
Town and street names, fruit, traffic jams, garbage piles, flowers and trees, termite mounds, women's rear-ends, distances between one place and another, long-drops (well, these have a small hole, but great depth), women's traditional dresses, potholes, speed bumps, people's hearts and faith, the amount of respect for authority, huge animals, the breadth of poverty, the amount of children, money amounts (1,000 shillings is nothing), vans for taxis crammed with passengers, and wide smiles.

The only things that are smaller than we are used to are the spaces between cars on the road, the ants, mosquitos, and Bill and Theresa. For those of you who are worried, they look very healthy and are beautiful despite the red dust on their shoes. I am grateful for their hospitality and to have an inside glimpse into a piece of life in Uganda.

Anna of Africa!

There have been many adventures for our niece Anna, who arrived on July 6. We promised her parents we would take care of her, but it's hard! First of all, her bag did not arrive with her. After many, many incantations of "NIE" (Nothing Is Easy), she finally got it on July 10. Adventure number 1.

Then, just after she got here I took her for a walk in the neighborhood. We walked up the road by fancy houses, then into a slum area, then I saw out of the corner of my eye something I thought she would find culturally interesting. I whispered to her to look in a small mud hut to see some men drinking this weird drink made of dried millet called marua (sp?) out of a pot with long straws made of weeds. The drink looks like mud, honestly. We were spotted, and some guys pulled us into the hut (literally - I thought my arm would come off). The lead guy then pulled a straw out of another guy's mouth and offered it to me. Uh, no thanks. I mean, the marua would have been interesting to drink, but not quite out of that straw! (I had just that day read how people contract TB from those straws.) We backed out of the hut, apologizing for our bad manners, and walked on back home. Hmm. Adventure number 2.

Then on Sunday we went to the Kampala Pentecostal Church. This church is famous for 45 minutes of singing before a fire and brimstone sermon, so we thought it would be another cultural experience, which it was. She held hands with some other women and they all prayed for each other, and the minister talked, complete with big-screen graphics copyrighted by Encarta and Microsoft, about "standing your ground" against Satan. All well and good. And then he talked about the dangers that homosexuals pose for Kampala when the Commonwealth Heads of Government meet here in November. We aren't sure how the two are related, but whatever. After two hours we felt very ready to stand our ground with our shield of faith and sword of truth, etc. Adventure number 3. Good thing she was still jet-lagged.

I had scheduled Anna to coach some basketball with a friend's group, Sports Outreach Ministry. So on Monday evening we went to a boarding school called "Never Again," where some high school-aged former street kids were awaiting her. They were big - but she just dove in and started them doing drills. She was great, and they listened. Soon she had them waving their hands in unison and moving in lines. Until they decided it was just more fun to shoot baskets, and then it was sort of chaotic, but they loved having her. And afterwards I asked one of them how the coaching was, and he thought for a few minutes and said very seriously, "She is good." They didn't want her to leave, though it was dark and no one could even see the basket. We had a little trouble getting out of there.

I'm not sure if it's part of Adventure number 4 or a new adventure, but it took us an hour to get to the other side of town where we live because of the usual Kampala traffic. At one point, I think I heard Anna yelp, but otherwise she was brave in the midst of boda-bodas, taxis and crazy drivers. Even Bill, the driver, looked kind of nervous in that jam!

There have been more adventures, like having Goretti the tailor make Anna an outfit (I mean, she didn't have any clothes except mine and her travel ones for four days!). The women at the tailor shop worked hard on a head cloth for her, and her new outfit looks great. And then the Murchison Falls van breakdown - but she can tell that story for herself, we've already had a similar one in the blog. And at the BeadforLife village she was "blessed" by the women with blue beads.

It's so much fun to have Anna, and we are TRYING to take care of her, but this is Africa, after all.

Under the mango tree

So last week we (mainly Bill) were training reporters in Jinja. At a break, one of them pulled us to the side of the building to show us a loaded mango tree. They were knocking at the hanging mangoes with a long stick - the mangoes would fall to the ground and they'd scoop them up, bite into them and pull the sticky mango meat off the skin, then spit out the peel. And ... ah ... they were in heaven. And they handed us fresh mangoes off the tree, we peeled them a bit with our fingernails, and ate, cutting big bites with our teeth up against the pit. Our faces were smeared with orange mango, our fingers dripping, and it was wonderful! For the rest of the day our hands smelled of wonderful mango. And now all our Ugandan friends say, "You ate mango off the tree?" and they get all mushy because that's how they grew up in the villages.

Later, Bill answered questions under yet another mango tree, surrounded by reporters and editors. One of the reporters asked about whether he should have asked to have his name withheld from a story during the war in the north. He said he wrote about dogs eating the remains of the 300 villagers massacred and was afraid the rebels or the army would come after him. Bill said, it depends, but it's best to use your name, everyone knew it was you anyway. He agreed. Another editor told a recent story of two reporters who went to a town in the Karamajong area, where they were reporting on something unpopular with the locals. The people saw their notebooks and threatened to lynch them (a serious threat, since lynchings are common, as are stonings). So one reporter took his notes into the latrine and photographed them with a small camera, then hid the camera. He figured maybe the notes would be recovered somehow. They didn't lynch the reporters - but they took their notes, and he later wrote a story from the photographed notes.

So we looked at each other. We don't have this kind of journalistic experience - at all! Who are we to tell them to be accurate, write interesting leads, organize their stories so they are readable? We feel like mangoes hanging on the tree - a little sweet, inadvertent, and mainly innocent.