One Year Wonder

I have been at site for over a year now.

Wait. No. That's not quite right.

I have been at site for over a year now!!!

That's better.

Seriously though. I can't quite believe it. I'm not sure where the last year (or 15 months, really, since we got here in August) has gone. Sometimes I feel like I haven't done anything important, haven't made a significant impact for the last 15 months, but sometimes I think I'm just too harsh on myself: living in rural Africa for a year by myself is kind of an accomplishment of its own, I guess, and if I'm honest, I know I've done some good work, even if it's still a little fewer and farther between that I want. But I'm working on that. At the very, very least, I've done a few things –

1: Made some of the best friends I've ever had, people that I'll know for the rest of my life.

2: Done and seen things that will make great stories to impress girls everyone with when I come home.

3: Not died.

– so really, all in all, even at the very, very least: success.

Here are some other things from a year in Ngora.

Favourite Thing I've Done in Ngora (Work Category): This is obviously the training of the HIV/AIDS counsellors. It was the first, so far only, really big project that I've pulled off on my own, and at least the training part went as well as I could've hoped. They're starting now to bring in their notebooks they've been documenting client visits in so that we can review them, and I'll write more about that later, but some of them really seem to be making an impact and that is awesome. I'm proud of this one, proud of the volunteers and the community for coming together on it. The runner-up is my life-skills club, which is also obvious.

Favourite Thing I've Done / Do in Ngora (Non-Work Category): Narrowing it down to a short list– Climbing rocks outside of town with monkeys and finding a place to sit by myself and watch the town for a while. Being made Chairman of a set of Peace Talks, a code name for getting together to eat delicious and illegal roast pork. Playing football with neighbour kids. Sunset bike rides.

The Most Frustrating Thing (Work Category): Still struggling with my organisation to figure out why they wanted me and what work they think I should be doing vis-a-vis the work they have for me or don't have for me; the fact that they simply seem to want me to be a secretary and type things because I'm a faster typer than anyone else.

The Most Frustrating Thing (Non-Work Category): My housing situation still is a bit of a source of frustration. The house itself is great, you've seen pictures. The issue is that, well, I don't have anywhere to be at home where I can just sit and relax by myself and not be surrounded by people other than inside. If I had a place to sit outside, a bit of a view maybe, and just relax, it would do wonders for my general contentment at site. Instead, I have neighbours immediately connected to my place who are always outside –I know I can't begrudge them that– and even if I were able to just sit out there, the view is of an empty lot across the street and a drinking circle a few hundred feet away. A small issue in the whole scheme of things, but still, I would die for just like a semi-secluded patio with just a view of a grass and trees.

The Funniest Thing That's Happened to Me: I can think of three– The cow that was eating my laundry. The small boy who attacked me with nun-chucks. Busting the crotch of my pants open at the market.

Weirdest Things I've Eaten: Termites. White ants. Offals.

Number of Haircuts I've Had: 3– count 'em, including the one I just got right before mid-service, the first one I'd had since early May; I could put my hair in a ponytail and that's a sign.

Number of Books I've Read: 68– count 'em (that's 1.2 books/week, just, ya know, FYI).

Number of Parasites I've Had in my Body: 2– I think malaria is technically a parasite, and schistosomiasis, aka bilharzia.

Number of Times I've Had Diarrhoea: 0– my immune system is awesome (and even the Peace Corps nurse during my mid-service medical exam was impressed).

Number of Times I've Been Called 'Amusugut': What's a number bigger than a bajillion but slightly smaller than infinity?

Number of Dead Mice I've Had in my House: 3– two dead in traps, one of mysterious circumstances.

Number of Goals I've Scored in Football Games: 3– two headers off of corner-kicks, one beaut that I arced perfectly over the head of the goalkeeper and just under the crossbar and I'm still proud of it.

Number of Tomatoes I've Eaten: 963, approximately– I eat a lot of tomatoes: on average, five every two days x 55 weeks = 963 tomatoes.

Number of Packages I've Gotten: 14– and thank you, everyone!

Best Item in a Package: Velveeta cheese. New music. Trader Joe's trail mix with Craisins and wasabi peas, mmmmmm. A 38 ounce bag of peanut butter M&Ms. Starbucks Via Instant Iced Coffee, which is delicious even when you can't get cold water, let alone ice. Books.

Most-Played Songs on my iTunes: Top five, not including the new Fleet Foxes album, which I listened to pretty much non-stop for a month or two and now takes up six of the top ten spots– 1: 'Summertime Clothes' by Animal Collective. 2: 'Knotty Pine' by Dirty Projectors & David Byrne. 3: 'This Must Be the Place [Naïve Melody]' by Talking Heads. 4: 'Daisy' by Fang Island. 5: 'Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)' by the Morning Benders.

Most Embarrassing Song on the Most Played List on my iTunes: 'Bad Romance' by Lady Gaga.

The Best Thing I've Done Outside of Ngora: Sipi Falls on Christmas Day. Rafting the Nile. Hiking in the Impenetrable Forest. Horseback riding in Lake Mburo National Park.

Longest I've Been in Ngora Without Leaving: Seven weeks– that's basically 49 days by myself within a few kilometre radius in rural Africa. I feel pretty good about that one. (And it's a funny thing, what that does to you, the way you completely forget –most of the time, until you're reminded by an amusugut-screaming child– that you don't resemble anyone else here.)

Longest I've Gone Without Speaking to Another White Person (except text messages): Eleven days– which is either pretty cool or means I have no friends, depending on how you look at it.

Favourite Thing About Site: It's my home. When I'm away for a while, it's always nice to be back in my own town and my own place.

Ugandan Quirks I've Picked Up in the Last Year: The quick raise-and-lower of both eyebrows to signal yes, and also instead of saying 'yes,' saying 'ehh' (like a long 'a'). Instead of saying 'uh-huh' like to show you're listening when someone's talking to you, saying 'mmm.' The two-handed wave in greeting – both hands held in front of you, chest level, like you're holding a grapefruit, kind of. Crossing my legs like a girl and/or British man, because the other way is kind of rude, I guess.

Things I'd Never Done Before This Last Year (since that last six-months update): Had a cow try to eat –or at least suck on– my laundry. Bought avocados / made guacamole. Torn up newspaper to use when I've run out of TP, routinely. Dislocated my shoulder playing cricket (cricket!). Commandeered two different boats, one on Lake Victoria, one on the Nile. Been to a burial ceremony. Debated the fact that Obama is not Muslim and was not born in Kenya. Chased rats around my house with a machete and a can of insecticide. Had to clean up a decomposing animal inside my house. Crossed the equator overland. Been a part of (or at least witness to) a cattle-sale. Been running on horseback alongside darting tophi ten metres off to the right and twenty galloping zebra ten metres off to the left. Gotten malaria. Spent a full year out of the States. Spent a full year in Africa and still had another year here.

Six Months Update

As of last week, I've been in Uganda for six months.

Does that sound insane to anyone else?

And, I know what you're thinking, because I'm thinking it too: Just what, exactly, have I been doing this whole time? So here's just a little update with a bunch of random things from the last half-year. Which might, somehow, answer that question (although I can tell you now that the answer is either Not a whole lot, you lazy jerk, or, That's a lot of cool stuff, you lazy jerk, depending on how much you like me).

Places in Uganda I've been: Wakiso. Kampala. Gulu. Pader. Entebbe. Ngora. Kumi. Soroti. Ngai. Mbale. Masindi. Lira. Budadiri. Jinja. Iganga.

Books that I've read: 21 (and a half) -- but I won't list them all. My favorites though: 1 Let the Great World Spin. 2 White Teeth. 3 A Fraction of the Whole. 4 The Satanic Verses. 5a Interpreter of Maladies. 5b A Fine Balance. 5c The Lizard Cage. And I reread You Shall Know Our Velocity! before giving it as a birthday present, but that's in a category of its own.

Most played songs (of the last six months) on my iTunes: 1 "Knotty Pine" by Dirty Projectors & David Byrne. 2 "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" by Talking Heads. 3 "Fools" by The Dodos. 4 "Romance is Boring" by Los Campesinos!. 5 "Surprise Hotel" by Fools Gold.

Things that I'd never done before these last six months: 1 --------. 2 --------. (Censored. You'll just have to ask me in person if you want to know what these ones are. Gotta get you guys to talk to me somehow.) 3 Seen a pineapple plant. 4 Danced until 4am. 5 Eaten offals (surprisingly good!).
6 Eaten chicken gizzards (unsurprisingly terrible!). 7 Eaten jackfruit, passionfruit, liver, matooke, and drank ajon (all surprisingly or unsurprisingly mediocre!). 8 --------. (Again: ask if you need to know.) 9 Waited out a thunderstorm inside a mud hut. 10 Been in one country abroad for this long. 11 Been out of the States for this long at one time. 12 Hand-washed a whole load of laundry (and then started paying someone to do it for me). 13 Seen the heads of cows, recently removed from their bodies, lying in the dirt on the street, and the head of a goat, recently removed from its body, nailed to a tree by the ear. 14 Seen birds the size of the maribou storks. 15 Scored goals in a soccer game (and yeah, ok, sure it was against tiny orphan children, but I still feel good about it, ok?). 16 Seen so many guns so often and so casually. 17 Thought brownies could taste so good.
18 Killed so many cockroaches. 19 Heard the footsteps of thousands of termites. 20 Seen over a dozen cockroaches crawl out of the hole of the pit latrine to crawl around the floor at my feet and up the walls by my head. 21 Seen, up close, the effects of a recent war. 22 Used a machete, for any reason, or, more specifically, to chop up bricks into smaller bricks. 23 Thought insects could taste as good as fried termites. 24 Stood ankle-deep in the Nile River and watched the sunrise.
25 Celebrated Christmas and rang in the New Year in Africa. 26 Had a baby named after me.
27 Had to chase away goats so they didn't eat the laundry. 28 Seen mob-justice in action (though, fortunately, not with fatal results; which is a story to come soon). 29 Had a crowd of forty-ish kids in the village come just to look at me and mistake me for Wayne Rooney. 30 Gotten water from a borehole (which is another story to come soon).  31 Seen so many boobs much breastfeeding.
32 Ridden twelve hours in six taxis across almost an entire country in one day to see the people I like the most.

In the manuals the Peace Corps gave us for our Phase II assignments (that we completed the first three months at site), one suggestion was that, since the first few weeks at site can be stressful, we should make a list of all the things here that make us happy. I read that, laughed at how cheesy it sounded, and then did it anyway, not out of stress but out of just the fact that it was something to do one afternoon when there was nothing else to do. Here are some of those things: 1 Walking home with the sun setting in my eyes and the acrid smell of the smoke from cooking fires in my nose and kids running along by my side. 2 Cheese, brownies, real coffee, pizza (all at the same time even, I don't even care!). 3 Two dicks, vertical (--that one's just for you, Dan). 4 Pineapple trees. 5 The sound of heavy rain on my tin roof. 6 Lightning in the distance at night when it's not raining and it colors the clouds purple-black. 7 Open-back lorries packed with cows with curving, pointed, three-foot long horns. 8 Traveling: the hours of stories when I'm sitting next to a friend on the bus, or spacing out while staring out the window, buying meat on a stick when the bus or the taxi stops, and knowing that I'm on my way to see people I like or on my way home feeling refreshed and ready to work after spending time with those same people. 9 Telling people my name and having them understand me. 10 When a new person in town, who I haven't introduced myself to, somehow, one random day, knows my name. 11 The guy with the upside-down bicycle who pedals backwards to sharpen knives and machetes on the wheel, sending sparks flying, orange and bright. 12 Old women riding bicycles in traditional dresses, garishly and synthetically colored, with conical shoulder-pads. 13 The goats that, for some reason, love standing on top of four foot high anthills. 14 Falling asleep crammed into the backseat of a taxi with three other adults and three little kids and having it be the best nap I've gotten in months (because when you wake up and realize your head was resting on a stranger's head, you've taken napping to a whole 'nother level). 15 Cows, five feet from my door, cutting the grass. 16 Free mangoes. 17 Lying in bed, early morning, while monkeys climb the walls (outside, un?fortunately) and jump on the roof. 18 Sitting outside, early morning, with samosas and coffee for breakfast. 19 Packages from home. 20 Finding good, fulfilling, challenging work, which, really, just means feeling useful, or, at least, good, fulfilled, and challenged.

So there ya go. Six months. All right there in just a couple paragraphs.

I guess that answers that question.

Sipi Christmas

A few of my best friends here and I spent Christmas day hiking up to Sipi Falls. It was not the way any of us had spent Christmas before, but it was a really awesome way to spend our first Christmas in Africa.

To get to the falls, we started off on a small path, red Ugandan dirt, and the mob of children that had met us on the road fell away as we declined offers of guides and told the older kids who started to explain how to get there that we weren't going to pay them to tell us. The path led us away from the road and over green rolling hills covered in banana groves and overgrowth and dotted with huts, we were in the middle of a sharp valley, almost more of a large ravine, maybe a mile across, with the walls rising up quickly on either side and the banana trees in the distance making green Xs and patterns on the sides of the hills, and we greeted people as we walked right through their gardens and we declined to pay more people who insisted that there was an entrance fee and, look, they even have receipt books, so you know it's official (but it's not, and there is no entrance fee, but clever, with the receipt books.) And after twenty or thirty minutes of walking, we could see the falls coming off of a cliff face, just one white streak against the brown rocks and green trees, and just a little farther after that and we could hear the white noise of the water on the rocks below, and just a little farther after that and we could feel the mist swirling around and making us shiver against the wind that would make the waterfall sway to one side, and it was all very Jurassic Park as we passed among taller trees that had raking scratches on the bark, maybe from lions or velociraptors or just because that's how the bark looked, and then we were right at the falls. We still stood up on a smaller hill, some ninety meters below the top of the falls and ten meters above the pool at the bottom (if Martin, a local kid, sporting a Barack Obama shirt, who somehow became our guide despite us telling everyone we didn't need one, was right in his confident statement of the fact that the falls are 100 meters high). So we stood and watched the water falling and shifting in the wind and I said the mist reminded me of Seattle and someone said that makes Seattle sound terrible and I disagreed and then shivered. And we made our way down to the pool where the mist was thicker and we shivered more and walked around and talked about whether we'd rather be a bird living in a nest in a tree or on the side of a cliff, and agreed, cliff, definitely, and if we'd rather have a house where we could hear the ocean all the time or hear a waterfall, and agreed, ocean, definitely, and then we were too cold and made our slippery way back up to the hill where we sat and watched the water fall. And when we'd had enough of being cold and damp and watching water fall off of a cliff, we headed up one side of the valley, along another narrow red dirt path, past more huts, declining more receipt books, picking up a chameleon and watching its perfectly round eyes roll around its head and its mitten hands gripping a stick, and with Martin asking, repeatedly, if we were tired, and with us insisting, repeatedly, that we weren't, we made it to the top, to a guesthouse (called the Crow's Nest, a fact we had to repeat, loudly, many times on the phone with the driver who was coming to pick us up -- "We are waiting at the CROW'S NEST... Yes, it is called the CROW'S NEST... CR-- ... CROW'S ... NEST.") with a small restaurant where we could sit again and watch the water fall, but this time we could do it from a distance and with a beer in hand. And we waited until dark for the driver with heavy rain clouds threatening and drove down the winding road in the dark, with lightning striking where we had just been, back to our guesthouse where more beer and a fantastic spread of Ugandan food was waiting for us. Merry Christmas.

(Side note: I ended up not climbing Mount Elgon. One of my friends had to fly back to the States for a couple weeks, and so I decided to entertain her by traveling to Kampala and Entebbe with her instead, and whether or not she was entertained, I still had fun, and by fun I mean we ate pizza and brownies and got real coffee. But the mountain will still be there, I assume, for the next two years, and I'll definitely do it at some point, and I'm looking forward to it already.)

We had a few more days of relaxing too, just bumming around, sleeping in late, trying to think of names for someone's new kittens (and settling on Susan Sarandon and The Bejazzler, after getting rid of my favorite idea, which was to call them both The Mighty Ducks, though, sadly, a few days later when they got home, they found out, as they put in their text to me: TERRIBLE NEWS. ALL THE KITTENS WERE EATEN BY A PTERODACTYL BIRD. WORST. DAY. EVER.), and at one point I even ate a legit quesadilla and a mocha milkshake, and all of that was really nice too. Really solid Christmas, despite the fact that I think we were all missing our families and traditions from home just a little bit, but how could you not? No Totino's Pizza Rolls on Christmas Eve is a crime.

But, by far, the best story from Christmas:

The whole time we were around the town we stayed at and going up to the falls and even once or twice on the hike to the falls, we kept seeing young Ugandan men, maybe in their late teens or early twenties, wearing women's skirts. Like, there was no mistaking that these were not kilts, or wraps, or something that could, with a certain perspective, appear manly. These were cut for a woman's hips, patterned in bright flowers or colorful paisley. We could not figure it out. We could also not help laughing at them behind their backs, joking to oursleves, "Hey, dude. Nice skirt."

And then we found out why they were wearing skirts. And then it got even better.

All of these young Ugandan men were wearing women's skirts because they had just been circumcised.

Nothing to keep you in your place after enduring an extremely painful (I assume, confidently) rite of passage into manhood like having to put on ladies' clothes.

The best, however, were the guys who'd be shuffling along slowly, one hand gingerly placed in front of their freshly chopped manhood, walking along with a limp and a grimace.

Merry Christmas? Ouch.

Blah Blah Blahg

You guys. I know. You're all like, "Danny, you need to blog more. Why are you even in Africa, if you're not going to blog about it. I mean, come on."

I hear you. I hear your italics. Oh, and I'm gonna feed you, baby birds.

So here's a wormy regurgitation of random stories and things out of my journal from the past couple months, from my mouth to yours. Merry Christmas!


(Note: I'm probably going to refer to "the other day" as when most of these stories took place, which could literally mean the other day, or could mean, like, October. Just don't want anyone to think this is all typical of one day here in Ngora.)


Out with my counterpart the other day when an old woman comes up to me asking for money. My counterpart turns to her, says something to her in Ateso. The old woman looks at me, looks back at my counterpart, looks confused, looks skeptical. But then she walks away. My counterpart turns to me, says, "I told her you don't have any money because you're not actually white, you're a Ugandan who lost all the color from his skin and was shunned by his family, and so we have taken you in because we felt sorry for you."


The other day, we were out in one of the villages, parked in the shade of a mango tree. In our maroon Toyota Hilux pickup truck, I was sitting sideways in the passenger seat, idly kicking my feet out the open door, sweating, staring out at nothing but green and tawny colored grasses and mud huts and goats standing on top of anthills. We were waiting for, what?, something, or we were just waiting, sometimes in Africa you just wait, and you don't talk, you all just sit and stare out at nothing, and sometimes I like to chew on grass while staring, but that's beside the point. We had the radio on. A reggae version of a familiar song came on as I was sweating and squinting against the equatorial sun.
"I'm dreaming... of a white Christmas..."
Reggae Jingle Bells came on next.
I squinted a little harder into the sun, felt sweat droplets roll down my spine, tried to process all of those things at once, and my brain exploded a little bit.


"I met a man who bicycled across the country twelve times. His legs are ruined now, but the maps on his wall are dark with Magic Marker lines showing the places he's been."


Oh, so we had a pool party in Mbale the other day. We went to a grocery store for a few things first, and there was a guard outside the door, armed with an old bolt-action rifle. One of the other volunteers I was with asked the guard if he could have his gun. The guard said no. We asked if it actually worked. The guard said yes. And to prove it, he pointed at the pockmarks of two bullet holes, one on the ceiling of the awning, the other ten feet up on the concrete wall, both just a few feet from the store he was guarding. His sheepish grin said those were just for fun, or an accident, or he's a terrible aim, or all three of those.


I got a phone call from Fred, our Safety and Security guy the other day, letting me know that he was sending someone out to inspect my new house. But so the phone rang, and I answered, not recognizing the number.
"Hello?" "Hello, this is Fred with the Peace Corps. You sound weak, are you ok?"
I told Fred I was fine. I didn't think I sounded weak.
Then I hung up with Fred and went for water and had to carry a full 20L jerrycan about 100 yards and I realized he was right.


I ate offals. Offals are the intestines of a cow and/or goat. They weren't bad. I also ate fried termites. They weren't bad either, because they were delicious.


The other night, I waited out a thunderstorm in a hut. We were sitting around outside as the sun dipped to the west and black clouds built up in the east. Then those black clouds rushed overhead and expedited the sunset and fat droplets of rain began to splatter in the dirt and he hurried into the hut. I sat opposite the door way and watched the rain come down in fat droplets and then sheets at a forty-five degree angle and then currents and rivulets across the dirt courtyard, and the wind blew jerrycans away and threw unripe mangoes into the mud, and the lightning flashed so close and lit everything, for just a second, in pale, purple-white light, and then the thunder sounded like someone was cracking the sky in half.
And it was perfect.
But it was so perfect that I couldn't help myself, and I simultaneously felt like I was in an exhibit in a natural history museum -- and I immediately hated every elementary school field trip I'd ever been on -- and like I was listening to one of those white noise machines from Sharper Image -- and I hated every time we'd ever stopped there in the mall. Damn those massage chairs they always had out front.
But, tried to forget those things, and it was still pretty perfect, and I still do love all those elementary school field trips.
Afterward, I walked home in the dark, except when lightning lit everything in white and purple, dodging new ponds and rivers of rainwater, except when I didn't and went ankle-deep in it, and I got back into town and the power was out and it was totally post-apocalyptic with the lightning and the half-constructed buildings and the flickering lanterns and boda boda headlights and people shouting and laughing and running across the street, and they're just silhouettes after sunset if you can even see them at all, and I bought chicken and chapatti from a cardboard box, and made it back, muddy-footed, to the bar, or home, where surly youths sat inside huddled around a lantern, plotting ways to kill Kevin Costner in Waterworld.
It was awesome.


Here's something: I've spent three weeks straight at site now without hanging out with another American. And, as of this month, I've spent a full year total of my life abroad, so I feel good about that. Now, I'm no math doctor, but if I've spent one year abroad out of twenty-five, then that's like 25% of my life that I've spent around. That's pretty cool.


Walking out to my pit latrine the other night, I turn the corner and get hit in the face by a moth with a six-inch wingspan. I freak out a little bit, naturally, and run to the latrine, turn on the light, and unlock the padlock on the door. The moth, being a moth, sees the light and beats me into the latrine. It flaps around insanely for a minute or two, while I stand with the door open hoping it will fly out. Instead it lands on the wall. This gives a chance for an eight-inch lizard to dark out from the shadows and attempt to chomp down on the moth's head which leads the moth to batter the lizard with its dusty moth wings until it escapes and flies out. Godzilla vs Mothra, in my pit latrine.
Two nights later, coming back from the latrine, I walk into my house and get hit in the face by a moth with a six-inch wingspan. This time, when it lands on the wall, I kill it with a flipflop. Thrown tomahawk-style twenty feet across the entire length of both rooms of my house.


The other night, I was sitting around a pot of ajon (the local Teso beer, made from fermented millet flour, basically, I think, which is usually drank out of a clay pot, but this time when I say pot, I mean jerrycan with the top cut off) with my friend Martin (or "Martino" as they pronounce it here, because they Italianize names, which is why I am known as "Danielli") and his brothers and a few dudes from town, when a couple kids come up to watch me drinking from one of the communal four-foot straws.
Dude to my right: "They are curious to see how you suck."
Me: "Oh, burn."


There is a village outside of town called Osigiria. In Ateso, this means donkey. It's called Osigiria because there was a white man who lived there around the beginning of the 1900s. He owned one donkey. One night the villagers stole, killed, and ate his donkey. Then they named the village after it. The white man never knew what happened to his donkey.


The other night, under the pale light of a nearly-full moon, around a pot of ajon (I swear, I've only drank at site four times, literally) with twenty (I counted) long straws sticking out, in a clearing of mud huts, with a small white calf with protruding ribs standing off to the side and lowing loudly, bats flitting overhead, the orange glow of a cooking fire radiating from behind one of the huts, with bits of termites stuck between my teeth, without an electric light in site, the faces of the other men becoming indistinguishable in the dark, the older man to my and Martino's right -- the teacher from Ngora High, with the beard flecked with gray, the one who had advised me to take a Ugandan wife, then asked if I was married, then advised me to take a Ugandan wife, again, and had wondered if it were true, as he had heard, that white men fear death but don't fear HIV, but it's not true, because I fear it, and had wondered if it were true, as he had heard, that in America you can't see the moon or the stars and in those Scandinavian countries some days the sun never comes up, and who said that after September 11th, at night, you could see the American fighters flying overhead on their way to Iraq but you couldn't see them during the day because the sun was too bright, and whose eyes seemed clear but whose speech began to drag a little bit but not so much that he couldn't quiet the crowd around the pot -- gave a speech welcoming me to Africa, to Uganda, to Teso, to Ngora, and explained that they drank this way, communally, from one part, because they were communal, a community, and now I was part of the community and I needed an Iteso name and he gave me one. He said that Martino and I were twins, and we had to be called by the names that twins are called by, and he said that Martino was to be Opio, which meant that I was to be Odongo.
We'll see if it sticks.


"Whatever insights I have are fragmentary and fleeting. I am not so much seeking anything as I am allowing the world to come to me, allowing the days to unfold, the dramas of weather and wild creatures, the many different ways the world appears to the human eye -- the colors and shapes constantly shifting."


Ok. That's all for now.

For Christmas, I'm off to meet up with my favorite people here and see Sipi Falls and maybe check out one of the traditional circumcision ceremonies of the local tribes and climb the Rainier-sized Mount Elgon, which definitely sounds like something from Lord of the Rings, and so I'm going to throw something into the fires of it. But a trip like that means pictures, so you can all look forward to seeing those.

Merry Christmas! And happy New Year! I hope it's wonderful for all of you, and for those of you who actually are enjoying a white Christmas, enjoy it.