“My Names Are Flush Toilet”

Potty Contract

This is the only place I’ve ever had to enter into a contract with the toilet before using it. Really, though, it wasn’t asking for anything unreasonable. Plus, it was either this or the pit latrine outside.

The Global Mason-Dixon Line

On Sunday I took a minibus to the equator!  (I don’t get to say sentences like that very often!)  It was my first time in the Southern Hemisphere, so I wandered a whole hundred meters to a cafe for an avocado wrap and to a shop benefiting local disadvantaged women to buy some paper mache flower vases.  Here I am half in the Northern and half in the Southern Hemispheres, assuming of course that the Uganda Department of Transportation (and Equatorial Line Painting) got their coordinates right.

Equator!

Kampala Dreamin’

I took a “short little trip” to Kampala last weekend, not realizing that it would be a miserable almost-6 hours each way.  Since Kampala is the only Ugandan city I’d ever heard of before coming here, it was a must-see.  Also, I appreciate it’s orderly mix of consonants and vowels — other towns here have consonants stacked upon consonants, like Mbarara and Mbale, which results in people sounding very unsure of themselves. 

“Where is your hometown?”

“Mmmm…Barara?”

On the way down, the organization I was working with was kind enough to let me hitch a ride in their Landcruiser pickup, since it was heading south anyway.  I crawled into the back of the extended cab, and two hefty Uganda ladies piled in after me.  Who needs a radio when you’ve got a very disgruntled and dramatic NGO worker talking nonstop in English and Luganda for the entire trip about her children’s school fees and which co-workers should be fired, punctuating every emotional sentence with a painful-sounding knee-slap. 

We stopped in every little trading center along the way so my travel buddies could pick up the best cassava, the best pineapples, the best charcoal…(how do you judge the relative merits of charcoal?).  At one stop, a teenage boy thrust three live chickens through the window at us.  What I considered assault by fowl, the Ugandan ladies called a bargain.  The chickens were paid for and tossed, feet tied together and eyes wild, into the back of the pickup with everything else (except the pineapples, which were rolling around at my feet).  A couple of hours down the road, as twilight was settling, I got out and inspected the pickup bed.  There were no chickens to be seen or heard. 

I asked the driver, “So, are the chickens dead yet?”

“Dead?! No, they’re not dead!”  He laughed.  “They’re back there under the charcoal, keeping warm!  They enjoy the ride, just like you!  When we stop, they’ll be happy!  They’ll say, Cluck, Cluck!”

Yeah, I’ll bet.

 We finally arrived in Kampala around 9 p.m., with chickens and charcoal presumably intact, though I had been squashed by my seatmates into a space the size of one lady’s purse.  I know, because she made room for it on the seat to her right while making sure her thighs were taking up the space of about 2 of me. 

The hostel, Kampala backpackers, had lost my reservation, but put me in the lovely (no, really, it was nice) “Nature’s Dorm,” with one wall open to the outdoors.  I was lucky to get a bed at all, since the hostel was hosting a tribal king from a neighboring district who’d come to see visit his subjects living in Kampala.  Nothing but the best, I tell you.  I felt around in the darkness for my flashlight, gave up, and spread the mosquito net around the top bunk, after removing the last tenant’s lace bra (which had gotten tangled in the net) from my face. 

The next morning was much brighter, though, as I was awoken by a monkey alarm – a couple members of the hostel’s resident troop chasing each other onto the roof.  The Hilton couldn’t have done any better. 

More to come – with photos!

Faith-gelina

Some people collect tiny state-themed silver spoons on their vacations. Other, like Angelina Jolie, collect multi-ethnic toddlers.

Now I see why.

There was no water or power at my hotel on Saturday. After an hour or so of getting repeatedly dressed and undressed, staring at the sputtering tap trying to will water to come out, and weighing the cost in shillings of a bottled-water bath, I decided to give up and go with my friend Donna to an orphanage, St. Jude’s, just outside of Gulu.

We couldn’t play with the older children, since they were doing their Saturday chores, pumping water and laying laundry out to dry. More importantly, they didn’t seem terribly interested in us. The house mothers sat us down near where some screaming two-year-olds were getting their baths and being dressed for the afternoon in hand-me-downs that didn’t always match their gender, as I discovered when I found a little boy in a pink satin Sunday dress.

Soon a tinier-than-most girl crawled out of the nursery onto the front porch, and I decided that perhaps babies might like being picked up better than my childhood cats enjoyed it. Turns out I was right!

Her name is Sophia, and here is what must have been going through her mind:

Yikes! Her eyes! They’re the color of my snot!

Hmm. She hasn’t dropped me yet. Maybe she’s alright.

Okay, since we’re here and I can’t get down, I have a proposition for you.

Yep…that’s more like it…Snzzzzzzzz…

African Fashion, with goat accessory

The Gulu office had a huge send-off for me today, and I actually enjoyed the food!  This is the first lunch I’ve had in a week that I didn’t just wolf down, thankful it wasn’t fried chicken or a piece of meat in a greasy bowl of stew.  Here I am wrestling with a goat kebab.  The dress was tailored in the market by a very talented woman who works with intermittent electricity and an old Singer sewing machine with a pedal. 

Goat on a stick, and me.

Do you know the feeling of freedom when you are about to quit a job?  You can have it again and again, if you stick to month-long unpaid internships!