Picture Me Walkin'

We are now back in Lira after a busy extended weekend. After a brief stint of homelessness, we are at the house where we will, god willing, be living for a while. I'm at the point where it takes faith in a higher power to believe that what works today will work tomorrow. It would be so nice if just this one time there were no hitch that meant taking two steps backward for every step forward. I can now say that I've been homeless in rural East Africa, which I guess is a notch on my belt. Not that it was much of a big deal, since accommodation for two runs from $6 a night at a sketchy place to $20 at the upperend place we actually stayed in. You'd think that given there were no dogs (NGO house), roosters (Sipi), boda accidents (Mbale downtown), ghosts (Mbale nicer place), or lizards, that I'd have slept like death. As it turned out, for some reason I couldn't sleep at all, so instead I fell asleep sitting in the dirt this afternoon. I'm not sure that I don't h...

[Luke, Monday afternoon] We have now arrived in Lira, just got some lunch. This is like first-first impression, seriously we've been here for less than an hour. We're waiting for a driver to take us to where we will be staying. Could be five minutes, more likely to be five hours. We have no way to know. It was a long hard drive, but we made it. So far nothing too shocking, very rural. Lots of jungle, lots of mudhuts, lots of monkeys. The landscape on the way here was very beautiful. We crossed the Nile, which was pretty cool. We would post pictures, but the word is if the soldiers on the bridge see a camera they stop you and you have to pay your way out. I guess, cameras must be pretty dangerous. After we crossed the Nile, things started getting progressively less and less beautiful. Now we're in Lira, and it hasn't bucked the trend. So anyway we go to our temporary home for the next couple days in the house of this NGO here in Lira. Hopefully we make a good enough impr...

The journey has officially begun. I'm in Boston and Pat is unemployed, so it's too late to back out even if we wanted to. Being that I'm going to Africa, I packed for Africa. Being that I'm in Boston in winter, its cold. Very cold. It's been a while since I've been someplace that gets cold like this when I haven't had a snowboard strapped to my feet. That's one thing you can say for Oregon. It's cool though that I'm going to go through such climate extremes within a month, and if you factor in the monsoon rains in Oregon the last week, that's another one. I imagine there will be nights where I'm too hot to sleep and surrounded by bugs wanting to eat my blood when I would give anything for a handful of this snow and ice. Thanks to everybody who came out to see me off or sent me their wishes the last few nights. You all mean the world to me, and it was the best sendoff I could ask for. My night in Portland particularly, was everything a per...