Books

The Wrights (Bob, Martha, and Rachel anyway) introduced me to many great books. I'm not usually very shy when it comes to books, and quickly felt comfortable enough to sit in their living room reading anything from Artemis Fowl to Seamus Heaney. Some of my best memories, though, are of me and various Wrights hanging out reading National Geographic, which they had almost a whole shelf of.

Here are just a few books I read in K'moja or as a result of being there.

Kids books (enjoyable for adults, too):

Artemis Fowl and Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident. I've read two more in the series since then.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett

Boy and Going Solo, funny and interesting autobiographical stories by Roald Dahl.

Other:

The Innocent Anthropologist by Nigel Barley, bought at Aristoc's in Kampala and finished on the Tube in London. One of the funniest books I've ever read. (Not a Hazardous Sport by Barley is also quite good.)

There were others, but those are the main ones.

And now I'm finally getting around to "It's a Jungle Out There!", which I bought a couple years ago. It's the often-hilarious adventures of life as a missionary kid in the jungles of Peru, living a lot like the Indian kids. I admire people who live in the jungle, because I have a great aversion to bugs crawling on me. Most of the nights when I couldn't sleep in Uganda were due to bugs crawling on me - or at least thinking they were. One ant crawling on my leg for 30 seconds would multiply to about 10 for the next half hour, at least in the signals my brain was getting. I don't think it was ever really that bad.

Chrissie also got me into some new books, like The Shakespeare Stealer series, when I was there last summer.

Good Times

(and bad.)

I've been thinking more about Africa in general lately (as well as people suffering from AIDS worldwide), but that doesn't mean I've been forgetting about Karamoja! There's just not anything new I want to report. But after making some muffins with a recipe of Chrissie's tonight, I got out my 2005 journal and will post a couple excerpts...

May 1, 2005
Well, I arrived safe and sound in Entebbe (though sans luggage) to be picked up by Craig and Kris and Albert & Laurie Tricarico. We went shopping, got stuck in traffic in Kampala - it was the beginning of a school holiday, so tons of kids going home - and made it to Karamoja around suppertime. There's been lots of development in Nakaale, but it's still the same ol' Karamoja I know and love.

The schoolboys are all home on vacation, and today Emmy became a member of the congregation at Nakaale and we all celebrated by having communion together. It was very cool!

The kids seem to get a kick out of repeating my name, and Segal's daughter Chippa asks me at least once every time she sees me what my name is...

May 8
Yesterday morning Emily brought me a guava in bed. :) [I was sharing a room with the three Tricarico girls for the first couple weeks.] There's a guava tree out in the courtyard between the main house and the Eldeens'. Guavas, like passion fruit, are smaller than apples - I'm thinking apples here, which are little green ones from South Africa - so it must take a ton of them to make juice. But they're very good!

May 9
Kris just stopped in tp see Laurie and ended up talking to me. It's not been an easy day at the clinic. A man brought in his little kid - Kris said he was about 4 - who was sick from getting drunk on nagwai, the local beer. How did he get drunk? He was complaining of hunger so the family gave him enough beer to shut up. Apparently the father is very thankful the kid is alive, though; I think it's a good sign that he took him in at all. [It doesn't always happen.]

May 13
Tonight Josephine and her family are coming over to Amy's for tacos. I'm looking forward to it since I haven't really seen much of J. yet. On Tuesday when I went to the clinic for a malaria smear I got to see her daughter Munyes; she looks about the same, but a little taller and a little more hair, plus she's talking now. She took my hand and led me around the yard a couple of times.

Chocolate

I read an article about chocolate in The Economist the other day. One company, Divine Chocolate, actually has shares owned by cocoa growers in Ghana, and has helped them succeed economically. Divine sounds like an effective model for companies who want to help make trade more fair for farmers in places like Africa.

And, having tried out some of their chocolate, I think they've been quite successful there, too!