Spaghetti and Garlic Bread

Before I get into my activities of the past couple days, I keep forgetting to share one of my favorite moments since I’ve been here. I believe it was about a week ago. My girls and I were at dinner with a couple of our Honors College friends. We happened to start talking about pie, pumpkin pie, to be more specific. We tried to describe to our Ugandan friends what it was, and realized they don’t even have pie here. Anyhow, we asked them what they eat for dessert and Jones responded, “I’m a Ugandan! I eat rice, beans and mtoke.” It was absolutely priceless!

Onto the week’s events. Tuesday I had my Ugandan Politics class at 9:30 am, followed by Faith & Action at 11:00 am. After classes, I came back to my room to finish up my Creative Writing assignment. I went to lunch around 1:30 pm and went to Creative Writing from 2:00-5:00 pm. Even though Tuesdays are my busiest days, they might be my favorite because Ugandan Politics and Creative Writing are my two favorite classes. They’re laid back, and yet, I think I’m learning the most in both of them. I went for a run right after I got out, and then came back to the room to do some hardcore paper-writing for my East African Politics paper that was due today.

Yesterday was quite a bit more interesting. I actually slept in until almost 10:30 am because I didn’t have my African religions class until 11:00 am. Once I got out of lunch, I went back to my room to continue writing my East African politics paper because my night was jam-packed. At 4:00 we had our rural homestay orientation, which was just two hours of lots of do’s and don’ts and attempting to make us aware of cultural idiosyncrasies. As soon as we got out I hit the track again, and gave myself a pretty tough workout, and I’m glad I did.

At 7:00 pm, our Ugandan Politics professor had us up to her house for a spaghetti dinner. There are only nine of us altogether, so we have class at her house on a regular basis and she always makes us tea and coffee, so we obviously adore her. There was spaghetti, meatballs, salad and my personal favorite- garlic bread! I ate 4 pieces! It was the highlight of everyone’s week.

With our bellies full of pasta, we watched the movie The Last King of Scotland. I’d never seen it before, but I knew it made a huge difference actually watching it in Uganda. For those of you who may not know, the movie is fiction, but based on all the events that occurred during Idi Amin’s reign as President of Uganda. I consider myself to have a pretty strong stomach, and have never felt ill watching blood and gore, but the movie literally made me sick to my stomach. I think a lot of it stemmed from the fact that I knew I wasn’t watching a low-budget horror film, but something that actually happened in Uganda. I mean, my host parents were alive when Amin was in control. They were alive as thousands of Ugandans were tortured, massacred, beaten and left for dead. It got to a point where Amin’s troops didn’t even bury the bodies of the victims they killed. People would walk through the streets of Kampala, stepping over corpses. All of this really happened!

P/c

Anyway, we didn’t end up leaving our professor's house until sometime after 11:00 pm and we had to walk back to our dorms in the dark, with everything we’d just witnessed in the back of our minds. I’m scared enough of the dark at is, but it took everything I had not to ask one of the girls in my class to hold my hand, because I was scared witless. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well at all last night. I was just left with this awful, uneasy feeling and slept for maybe three or four hours. It ended up being good though because I got up this morning for breakfast for the first time since I’ve been here. I’m so proud! It was a roll, boiled egg and a cup of African tea. Mmm!

Now that my East African politics paper is done I have the day pretty much free. I’m going to set up my schedule at the Children’s Library on campus where I'm assigned for service learning at around 4:00 pm, and that’s about it. I might clean my pig sty of a room, I might walk into Mukono, or I may just waste my life away on the internet when it decides to start working since I’ve been unable to the past few days. The latter is looking pretty good right about now!

Love and miss you all! Keep sending me the virtual love, it makes my day!