Happy belated Independence Day
Confusing? Well, too bad. Uganda celebrated its 49th year apart from the British this weekend. Congrats!
Sarah and I headed to the Golden Peace Hotel with Callie & Tristan (check them out at www.bongamedia.org) and Anna (a music therapist from Spain) for a traditional acholi and west african (unexpected) dance show. Amaaaazing hip gyrations.
Getting Indian food afterwards was an ordeal. After being in Gulu for more than a month, you become accustomed to having to ask what is exactly available on the menu at restaurants. This makes a lot of sense given that refrigeration can be spotty here considering all the power outages. Callie, who’s keeping up with her vegetarianism in this omnivorous society, had to go through about three order revisions to finally get something that didn’t have meat in it considering that the restaurant was out of paneer and mutter. Oh well; c’est la vie.
Today was the general staff meeting day at TASO which meant long-winded conversations about height/weight recording. It boiled down to the fact that some counsellors and some medical officers weren’t doing their jobs and everyone wanted to blame another department. Le sigh. At least we got free samosas and chapatis. Thank you Indian cultural exchanges! We also got to hang out more with the new cohort of TEACH attachés. This group comes from Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Namibia and Swaziland. They’re all either regional coordinators of entire regions/provinces or medical staff in their respective Ministry of Healths. Intimidating, yes. But they’re all tremendously down-to-earth individuals and are excited to hit up some Ethiopian food with us on Wednesday.
After work, Sarah and I decided to kick our habit of eating mainly carbs (posho sucks) and being sedentary and go right back into our High Intensity Interval Training regimens from home. This involves sprinting as fast as you can for twenty seconds, taking a break for ten and then repeating this seven more times. Needless to say, our quads are going to kill tomorrow. Ellie fared much better considering she’s an ultimate frisbee pro. A few village kids saw us running, thought, “HEY! MZUNGUS WITH FANCY WORKOUT CLOTHES!” and started harassing us. Ellie, having worked with scores of children before, brilliantly made them run with us. They couldn’t survive two reps. I blame the dust.
Finally, we met the manager of our favourite chicken roasting joint while waiting for our change. His name is Opiro, he’s fluent in five languages (English, Russian, Swahili, Luganda and Acholi), studied Computer Science in the Ukraine for seven years and makes the best goddamned chicken in Uganda. Dos Equis Man: You’ve met your match.
Casey
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