Picture Me Walkin'

I am still alive and kicking around. I have been in Arusha, Tanzania for the last week visiting a friend and shedding the last vestiges of semi-employment. Life is great. It's warm and sunny, I have no worldly responsibilities anymore, and I'm meeting a ton of great new people. I couldn't really be any happier right now. Out of nowhere, I kind of fell into the opportunity to go on a safari in the Serengetti and Ngorogoro Crater, two of the absolute best spots on the planet to see amazing animals. I came to Arusha to see Mary and Shannon, two friends of Caitlin who came to Mbale for Thanksgiving. I found out when I arrived that they were about to leave for a Safari with Shannon's stepmom that they'd been planning for months and months. In the kind of stroke of luck that seems to characterize my life these days, they had one extra spot. Hells Ya! In a further stroke of luck, apparently mid January is like the best time to see lots of animals in the Serengeti bec...

(View from my bed, no elephants for us this time unfortunately) After a night in Fort Portal we set off for Kibale . This one is really not a popular route, so the matatus in this case were normal sedans rather than vans. In typical fashion they crammed as many people in as humanly possible, so we were flying around on dirt roads in the mountains with 9 people in a Corola- including 2 in the driver's seat. We got to Kibale and checked into our guesthouse. We had reserved the"the tree house," sight unseen so we didn't really have any clue what to expect. As we were checking in, the woman explained that "you might want to eat and shower before we show you to your room, because it's a kilometer away in the forest." Wow. The tree house was quite possibly the coolest place I have ever slept. It was nothing more than a simple hut perched on top of a tree, in the middle of the national park. No electricity, no water, no window panes, no problem. Did I mention...

I'm back in Mbale from my initial stretch of traveling, it has been a great week or so. I went to Kampala to ring in the New Year in style with my roommates. We made some fresh off the tree sangria and pregamed in the hotel before going out to an outdoor concert at the Sheraton hotel. We had a great time, we saw all the usual Ugandan pop stars, including one His Excellency the Ghetto President Bobi Wine who was the one musician I really wanted to see before I left Uganda. (I gotta plug this video every chance I get, for some reason Pat and I absolutely love it.) We showed up to the concert fashionably late of course, and by the time we arrived the line at the door stretched for easily a quarter mile around the block- probably thousands of people. For your average crew this may have derailed the night, but luckily we had my roommate, the resourceful Young Caitlin in our midst. She strolls right up to the front of line line- sporting towering heels and a saucy party dress of course- ...

But I'm down to my last few weeks here. It really seems like just yesterday that we were sitting in a hostel, discussing how utterly charmless Kampala was and wondering how in the hell we would (a) survive being here for six months and (b) create an NGO out of six phone numbers (of which, probably half were disconnected) and a general interest in microfinance. And now here we are. Luke has officially signed on for another four months. I'm trying to find a way to continue doing this stuff for real (i.e., get paid) back in the Land of the Morbidly Obese. As for MAPLE, the group has a house/office, clients and a product to offer, not to mention a pretty solid niche to work within, focusing on a real need that people here have and that we as a group can reasonably expect to address. All in all, not a bad use of the last six months. Not bad at all. (Personalized Business Skills Training Seminar? Yeah, why not) It's really gonna be tough to leave. People always talk about how we ...

Ok. Does anyone remember the story of the mysterious land crab that terrorized us one night in Lira? I think we may have cracked the case. We have a minor cockroach problem in our house. Actually, to be accurate, we have a minor cockroach problem only in the back bedrooms of our house. There are a bunch of tiny, transparent cockroach babies crawling on the walls most nights. Gross, I know. On the other hand, though, we have a major, swine-flu pandemic, the communists have landed in Philadelphia, red-alert cockroach problem in our kitchen. In fact, Luke and I had a long, serous conversation the other day about just how big the monsters really are. I said, and still believe, that they are the size of milano cookies. Luke says I'm being a melodramatic little princess, but sadly we can't find any milano to test my theory with (sad on a number of levels, you can be sure). He says they are the size of a nutter butter, which could be true for all I know, but is about as helpful as say...

I think it's kind of against the rules to be a mzungu in Africa and not go on safari. So, because we're good anthropologists and all, we went on a little safari. Because they're awesome, our friends at MUBS (the Ugandan business school we work with) hooked us up with a basically free trip. They do a trip every year with Drake University in Iowa, and somehow get all the park fees waived. Plus they do it in a bus, so we didn't have to pay any transport fees. All told we got a major hookup that allowed us to do something we otherwise probably wouldn't have because its so expensive. Thanks everyone. It was a fun trip, it was interesting to spend time with American college kids again after such a long time away. Even though they were from the Midwest and as bizarre to me as anyone on this planet. What is this Midwest-Nice, why are you so friendly? It was a weird experience after explaining the basics of my country to so many people over the last couple months, I had to e...

We're back in action after another too long pause, we did not in fact get eaten by lions. We're trying our hardest to post on some sort of regular-ish basis, but have had a few difficulties. For one thing our computer is struggling. We learned the hard way that indiscriminately sticking your flash drive in any old computer gives you the sickness. Duh. It could be that. More likely though, it could be related to the fact that we opened the cd drive to watch a movie and found it full of... you guessed it- ANTS! I don't know why they thought that would be a good place to set up shop, maybe it looked like home? Either way, the old girl's not doing so hot. (I don't use your house to type term papers, jerk) We're getting reestablished in our new home Mbale, and I couldn't be happier. I grew to be very fond of Lira, but it was just a hard-livin kind of place. Mbale is to Lira as San Francisco is to Bakersfield- not a bad place by any stretch, just kind of harder an...

OK, time for a confession. When I was a kid, I used to watch Unsolved Mysteries, a true crime type show about real live criminals who had done heinous things and were out running around. I think the show especially focused on bad dudes who did bad things to good little kids. Clearly, I wasn't supposed to watch it, because it was not kid-friendly tv. And I didn't even really want to watch it, because it scared the hell out of me. But every time I flipped past it, I'd stop to watch a bit (and we only had maybe five channels, so it's not like I had a lot of other options). Anyway, I used to get so freaked out by this show. Just the music would probably give me cold sweats even today. Because I used to wake up in the middle of the night, hearing something. And living out in the country, there was always something. Probably just an animal, but something out rustling around. So I'd wake up, hear these sounds and just be convinced that my time was up. I'd try to convin...

So here we are, another day down. I can't speak for the big man Pat, but I'm having an absolute blast in Kampala. We have the best hosts a person could possibly ask for. Actually this whole trip (Boston and Italy included) has really been amazing in that I've had locals showing me the real scene. I have never really felt sketched out since I've been here, and I know that if anything were to go wrong we have one of the best problem solvers in the game in our corner from the business school. So we're having lunch the other day with like a who's who of the business school in East Africa. It comes up that there's an event on Friday night, do we want to come? Ofcoursewedo, what is it? It was a beauty pageant. We went to an African beauty pageant. I can honestly say it was in the top few most coolest cultural experiences of my life. But it wasn't just any beauty pageant, it was to crown miss MUBS (that the name of the business school). I cannot even begin to ...