"But, money is the most important thing"

I beg to differ.
...quoted from my boda driver this afternoon in response to me telling him that having a big house was not the most important thing. sigh.

My homesickness here doesn’t come in fits as I remember it from childhood. It accompanies me as a slow undercurrent, a subtle sort of white noise I’m disengaged from most of the time. Speaking with Dr. Judith yesterday, a pretty & petite 24-yr-old from southwest Uganda, I encountered a loss for words when posed, “what sorts of differences do you observe between your country and ours?” I struggled with this one. How about, are there any similarities? I think it’s easy to avoid stumbling into a pit of yearning for home when there are so few stimuli to pique my memory of the place. Sometimes there’ll be an onslaught of reminiscence; the dinner party in Rwanda…the salad, the wine, familiar music, that particular incidence was really overwhelming, but we mustn’t dwell, must we?
Bbbuuuuttttt……


I miss my home.
I miss ice cream, my family. I miss good beer, I miss my queen bed with the tableside denim lamp, I miss electricity. I miss good roads, comfortable drives, having a sweetheart, dancing. I miss my favorite kind of ethereal trippy flow music, walking through the property, privacy and my long hair. There. Done.
I had a hot shower this weekend. My first in a month or so, I couldn’t believe how consumed I was by it. I never wanted to leave. Granted it was a rusted metal spigot in the confines of a dark cement room, granted there were cockroaches on the floor and hoards of lake flies… but it was a hot shower, and I felt clean, and warm and sexy and it was great.

This past weekend, the other FSD mzungus and myself fled eastwards towards Sipi Falls for our mid-term retreat. Mid-term…yup, week 6 of 12… that shit trips me out. The place was beautiful, a common theme in this part of the world I’ve found. Rich soulful plateaus freckled with ancient caves that were inhabited by the local tribes worlds ago. The falls itself comes teeming over the edge of one of these cliffs, all white watered and roaring, plundering into a damp valley. Eucalyptus groves, banana plantations, burbling creeks and tributaries flanked by delicate purple-white flowers and kawa plants. Everything: GREEN. Everything: GREEN. We each paid 50,000 Ush to repel down the side of the beast; edging fearful and exhilarated 25 feet to the left of her, at the same time being spat away and seduced towards her violent coursing artery. That was fun, that was really fun.


I'm the little red spot to the left, and that big gushing thing is the waterfall.

Monday night I facilitated my HIV education seminar for the secondary school teachers. I had assumed that we would start at about 7:30, after all, I’d told them to show up at 6:30, its called African Time. When I got to the hotel at 5:30 I’d set out to practice, set up, calm my nerves and my newly arrived bout of nausea…what do you know? All the teachers were there, sitting, waiting patiently. That blew my mind. I was really impressed, impressed by the honoring of their commitment to come, their timeliness, their motivation…it was really inspiring, it made me feel like perhaps I’d gotten this one right, perhaps I’d tapped into something that they really wanted, that they felt could help them make a difference. I’d asked the hotel to provide refreshments on my bill… you know, coffee, tea, sodas… so when I saw all the teachers kickin’ back with cold beers I knew the communication barrier had once again gotten the upper hand. I paid nearly three times more than I’d budgeted for, but the heated post-seminar roundtable discussion on teaching techniques was a lot more fiery thanks to the happy glowing buzz the teachers were feeling. Everything happens for a reason?


I spent that night throwing up (beers were not involved in this I assure you) and wasn’t able to go to work on Tuesday thanks to a number of GI issues. All I wanted was sleep, the temperature in my solar oven house to drop below 90 and my host-mom to please stop offering me fried macaroni… and then down the path to my house comes trotting a whole band of cohorts. My clinic was worried about ‘the sickness’ and so they all decided to abandon their health profession posts for the afternoon and come visit me; needless to say it was the first sick-in-bed day I’ve ever spent surrounded by a doctor, two nurses, a lab tech and a cook…just in case.

Feeling tip-top now though, will go to Kampala (nation’s capital) on Friday and partake in gluttonous carousing theatrics… determined to catch Ugandan premier of “Superbad”…we’re a little behind the times. Its better than Jinja though, our local theatre here is playing Anaconda (circa 1996- feat. J-Lo {before she was J-Lo} and Ice Cube), mmmm mmmm quality film.