18-Sep-08

18-Sep-08
 Q: Eee-chee-oh!
 A: Aaa-chee-oh, ma bear!
That means Good Morning in Acholi. Or, really, it means: “So you have woken up?” “Yes, I woke up well!” I said it to everybody on my walk to work this morning. Most people laughed at me. Or, as I prefer to think, laughed WITH me. Either way, it’s fun to make people laugh. It was so misty this morning that it was almost raining.

We have power back! Kristen says that if we have power, water can’t be far behind! Last night I went out with Kristen (Bostonian housemate) and Oscar (Kenyan housemate) and ate Acholi bread with sugar and avocado (no, that’s not normal here, either). It was delicious. We met two Ugandan friends, Bill and Jeff, and had fun running around Kitgum Town Council at night! And then Jeff started hitting on me, which I hate. Because I don’t need a boyfriend, I need friends. As of last night, I had been in Uganda exactly one week. As of tonight, I will have been in Kitgum for one week. It is friends that I need to be cultivating now, not make-out partners. Stupid sexist men. So after Jeff started hitting on me, I had Oscar call one of his buddies who is a Buda-Buda driver (a bike or motorcycle taxi driver). I took the Buda-Buda home, balancing side-saddle on the back of the motorcycle, bouncing down the bumpy dirt roads, beneath a huge orange moon.

Now I am thinking about writing a series of individual case studies on at-risk children for my thesis? One of my colleagues, P, says she thinks that would be valuable to the children. But what I really want to do is, I really want to write about military industrialism. But.