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| 120 volunteers gearing up for the event |
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| Some primary school students painting the mural |
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| Students posing in front of the mural |
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| Me, Christy, and Jenny |
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| The finished project! |
In other news...
Why I’m lucky to have great neighbors
For a few weeks there had been a large spider making my bedroom his home. This spider was huge, particularly ugly, and on one occasion even crawled over my foot. However, I let the spider be for a while because I only saw him at night, and it’s too difficult to chase and eliminate a spider in the dark. One day, the spider made an appearance in the afternoon, and I stared him down. I decided that this was it: the spider was going down. I wanted to simply sweep him outside, quick and easy. I took my broom and aimed carefully…and the spider ran off. He was much faster than I anticipated, and I swept the broom around the room frantically trying to get him. In my eagerness, I hadn’t realized that I was making quite a racket until my neighbor came to the door to ask if I was all right. I told her, breathlessly, that I was trying to get rid of a spider. She calmly walked past me (while I was looking disheveled and still clutching my broom), grabbed the spider by one of his legs, and tossed him outside. She walked back to her house laughing at the commotion I had made over a spider.
A few weeks later, I was held hostage under my mosquito net by a small bat. I was innocently reading a book one evening when I saw my mosquito net make an odd flutter. I turned my head to see a bat clutching to the side of the net, inches from my face. I poked him to see what would happen (it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time), and he flew off spastically. He refused to settle down, and I spent the night listening to the bat fluttering around my room and crawling over my stuff. Worst of all, every ten minutes or so he would fly, torpedo-like, into my mosquito net, forcing me to grab a light and make sure he hadn’t infiltrated the net. I decided the darkness and the ferocious energy of the bat made it unlikely that I would catch him that night, so I patiently waited (curled up under the safety of my mosquito net) until morning. The first thing I did when I woke up was, of course, tell my neighbor about the bat. Her reaction: why don’t you just fight it? I tried to explain that I have no experience fighting a bat, and I was afraid I would lose. Once again, she calmly walked into my house, grabbed the bat in a scarf, and took him outside to beat him to death with a stone.
The moral of these stories: I am a wimp and my neighbor is an awesome pest remover. I’m lucky to have her around J
When it rains, it pours
Also when it rains, life in Uganda seems to pause. Things you can’t do when it rains:
- Drink milk – my neighbors don’t milk the cows in the rain
- Travel – taxis get stuck in the mud
- Charge electronics – the power usually goes out
- Charge a solar light – too cloudy!
- Call someone – phone networks go out in the rain
- Use the internet – same networks as above
- Use the latrine without getting your clothes and toilet paper soaked
- Sleep in peace – rain makes quite a racket on a tin roof
- Walk down the street without falling in the mud (this may just be me and my clumsiness…)
- Bathe – it seems like the rain would only help the process, but my feet always get very muddy on the way back, making the bath useless. Also, I’m more likely to fall, making the bath even more useless.
ttfn - ta ta for now! :)
I don't have any horror stories about spiders, but I do have one about ticks. Try finding two of these suckers on my pillow, room pitch-black, only seen by my headlight, inches from attaching themselves to my head. I did not sleep the rest of the night.
ReplyDeleteI've also not had any bat horror stories, but I have become specialized at killing mosquitoes that like to attach themsleves to my bednet. Granted, I don't have any neighbors to help me kill them, hence my daily practice at ridding my room of these blood-sucking pests.