So trying to give any sort of synopsis on the rural home stays I decided would be futile. Basically I chilled with an awesome family for a week, went to a funeral where half the people blamed the guy's death on his addiction to alcohol and the other half accused the wife of murdering him. Interesting time. Got to see a bull being hacked up, which was kinda cool(fulfilled one of my 12 year old boy wishes). My host dad was a coffee farmer and I got to pick coffee beans in the shade of banana leaves, as well as go through the whole process of preparing the beans all the way to the cup. On the day of my b-day (which I didn't realize until 8pm)I was able to roast the coffee beans and pound them into powder while they were still too hot to touch. I'm not a big coffee fan, but nothing can quite compare to the aroma of crushing freshly roasted, organically grown, Kapchorwan coffee that you've processed from start to finish with the farmer himself. Not too bad of I b-day I decided.
At the end of the week we stayed at a local resort for two days. There were a couple of hiking trips we went on to see the three local falls in which we were allowed to stand under two of them. There was a hilltop close by that overlooked the entire world (pretty neat), and a few trees and cliffs that hung over really big drops which I couldn't help but climb out over (I love you mom). I've got a number of pics of these adventures but am too impatient to wait several hours for them to load, only to have the internet go down in the last five minutes.
Last Saturday I went to Kampala to get take out some more money (BOO!) to buy stuff for the American dinner Angela and I made for my family on Sunday. On our way there an accident took us on a crazy safari detour in which we got stuck in a muddy ditch. All 15 of us in a van two inches longer than the average mini-van got out and the men helped push the van up and out. I was lucky enough to be in the pack where mud from the spinning tires flung all over my legs and shorts. Thankfully I’d taken a shower before leaving for Kampala.
Sunday dinner went well, even though at noon Noreen asked when I was going to start cooking lunch, and the family mostly enjoyed what we’d prepared (I guess by eating a salad they felt too much like goats to really enjoy it). We had fresh veggies and hummus dip, fresh pineapple chunks, spinach salad, pasta with homemade red tomato sauce, and sloppy Joes on whole wheat bread. Hummus is non existent in Uganda, so I cooked dry cow peas (similar enough to chick peas), roasted raw g-nuts and pounded them into pb, and squeezed lemons to get the ingredients I needed; a bit different from home, eh? For everything cooked we had one charcoal stove (which doesn’t have low or high settings, just grab the hot coals out when its too hot and add more when it’s too cool).
The night was a success all around; except a little mishap at the end. Because Ugandans eat so late we were not finished till around 10:30pm, and Angela needed to get back to campus by 11pm. My host mother really likes Angela, and decided that it was too unsafe for her to walk home… and locked all the doors in the house and sat in her room with the keys. Angela had to explain that it was not an option for her to stay over at the house, but to no avail. We ended up convincing her that she could leave if she called a private hire (similar to a taxi) to come pick her up and drive her three blocks to school. Of course the van we got picked up in didn’t have a working side door so we had to climb in over the seats from the back door.
That’s about it for now. Hope you all are wonderfully blessed and please don’t hesitate to comment or send me emails or Facebook posts. Love you!