DAY 2 | Church should never be complete without breastfeeding and chicken auctions

Sunday morning I woke up, bathed and put on my Church clothes. My Toto wanted to show me how to roast ground nuts (also referred to as ‘g nuts’) and Erina wanted to teach me how to make passion fruit juice. After conquering both tasks I took breakfast (yes, Ugandans don’t ‘eat’ meals, they ‘take’ them) with Erina, which was millet porridge. Better than the porridge I had at my Mukono homestay, but how good can porridge be? Since it was pretty much the consistency of snot, it took me a little longer than Erina to finish and I ended up making my Papa wait for me, which made us late for Church.

It was just Papa and I that walked to church. It was a fairly short walk up the same hill that Margaret’s house was on. I’m not sure how late we were. These are the things I do know, however:

1. The service was about two and a half hours long
2. The entire service was in the local language of Eteso (which made those two and a half hours seem even longer!)
3. Women were unbuttoning their blouses left and right to breastfeed their babies as soon as they heard a cry
4. The offering consisted not only of Ugandan shillings, but also included a bag of millet, an egg, and a live chicken
5. Immediately following the offering the bag of millet, the egg, and the live chicken were auctioned for money (and if my Papa hadn’t explained it to me, I don’t know that I ever would’ve figured out why there was a man walking up and down the pews waving a live chicken around)

When we got back from Church I took lunch and laid down for a nap. Dave (the USE student) and his host brother Eric eventually stopped over for a visit and the four of us (Erina included) walked the 3 or 4 miles down the road to the trade center where we actually ran into Bea (yay!) and Erina bought us biscuits (which are just the Ugandan term for ‘cookies’). It was while we were in the Center that I made my first Ugandan child cry at the mere sight of me. She would end up being the first of many who ran crying to their mothers having never seen a white person before. It was a blow to my self-esteem to say the least.

We ended up staying in the Center longer than we should have, when we’d already left our homes fairly late in the evening anyway. We walked back down the road in pitch darkness which was pretty scary, and when Erina and I had to head in a different direction than the guys to our home, we definitely held hands the whole way back to the compound. I’m already scared of the dark as it is, but the evening is when all the drunks start stumbling and riding their wobbly bicycles down the road, plus Eric freaked me out by making us walk faster so we wouldn’t get caught by thieves. Oh, not to mention I’d be an easy target since I pretty much glow in the dark.

When we arrived back to our compound Toto had been a little worried, but welcomed us back with lots of love. While Erina joined her in preparing dinner, I sat outside and talked to my Papa for awhile about lots of things. Most interestingly, he talked about when Kony had led the LRA into Soroti only about 20 miles from where my family lived. At the time, he had stayed behind to watch over his land, while my Toto and the kids when across the lake to stay with her sister until they knew everything was safe. It was just another one of those surreal moments in which I was confronted with the reality that the atrocities committed by the LRA affect real people.