January 28th

At Kris's party on the day before I left, Laura Goldhammer, musician and artist extraordinaire, gave me a small notebook, with the instruction to take it everywhere, to write down ideas for the blog. I have started doing that tonight I will mine some of those ideas mostly briefly and in the order in which I wrote them down.

Tea - I think it comes from the British and I think I have seen or heard of it before, but when they serve tea here, which is often, it is a lot of milk and a little tea. It is white. I like it and have become accustomed to having tea every day at about 6 PM, along with a little snack. Then I don't need dinner. In the morning I had to make a special request to have coffee which they don't drink as freely here.

People on the road - All of the roads, all of the time are full of people walking at the side of the road in both directions. So many don't have other modes of transportation, so they walk. Also many bicycles and motorcycles, most with someone on the back. Out here in Lira, you can't get a taxi in town, only between towns. Instead of taxis, they have "boda bodas" which are motorcycles for which you pay to ride on the back.

Carrying water - All along the road on the way to Lira one would see many, many people hauling water from community wells or pumps, hauling it miles in 5 gallon yellow containers. Often, people on bicycles would have 3 to 5 of those cans tied to the back of the bicycle.

DVDs of religious music - The family where I am staying is very religious and so often in the morning or evening they will play really well produced DVDs with African singers and dancers performing wonderful African rhythm music. When I asked if they were Ugandan, I was told no because they couldn't understand the language being sung. That doesn't mean they weren't Ugandan, because there are many, many Ugandan languages. Some of the pieces had English subtitles. Justine, the 7 year old who lives here knows many of the songs to sing along with, and has excellent singing skills.

That's all for now. More later.